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July 27, 1999 - Art Bell
02:34:58
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Robert Bigelow - Space Travel. James Napier - Madalyn Murray O'Hare
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Time Text
Father Malachi Martin has passed away.
I did so at 6.15 Eastern Standard Time.
Father Malachi Martin has passed away.
We were expecting this event and have been for some days.
He had had a very serious stroke and what I would say is he died peacefully number one and number two the stroke that he had had had produced a pretty severe brain stem damage so I think under those circumstances the father would not have wished to survive but then again I really can't know about that all I do know is that the Bell family
And I know many of you out there who through the years have listened to Malachi on my program.
I wish him the very best in his new endeavor.
And you can be sure he's at his new endeavor now.
We thought of a very great deal of each other.
We became closer friends than you know.
And so his passing is of great sadness to me.
However, again, under the circumstances, it's a journey that was appropriate to make at this point with what had happened to him.
And you can be sure of one thing.
He's on the up escalator.
There's no question about that.
He was a great event in my life, and I'm sure a great event in many of yours.
I'll be sure of this.
I will arrange the replay of a traditional Malachi Martin, Father Malachi Martin program this coming weekend.
We'll do it, I don't know, Sunday night to Monday morning, perhaps.
Is there another like Father Malachi Martin?
I suspect not.
He was advisor to two popes.
Father Malachi Martin was the real McCoy.
he was an exorcist. And so I mourn his passing, but I am joyful in knowing that he is in the
place he wished to be.
Thank you.
Now, this is going to be a very unusual show tonight in many, in many ways.
Coming up in a few moments, James, and you know I'm going to slaughter his last name, it's N-A-P-I-E-R.
Napier?
Napier?
I don't know, we'll ask.
He has information, this is going to be a breaking story.
He has information about Madeline Murray O'Hare, That you have never heard before that will shake you to the core.
It'll shake you to the core.
Madeline Murray O'Hare, who was responsible for taking prayer from schools in America, she is missing mysteriously with her family, some of her family, and presumed dead by many.
James is going to tell us something about Madeline that you have never heard before.
It will be heard first on this program tonight.
In addition, in the next hour, you're going to hear a radio first.
He is Robert Bigelow.
He is in Las Vegas and for years and years behind the scenes, Mr. Bigelow, who is a billionaire, that's with a B, Has been financing and aiding just about everybody you can think of in the alternative fields with funding.
Mr. Iglo will tell you his story tonight, and oh god, there is so much to tell.
And he's going to make an amazing announcement.
An amazing announcement.
Do you see the movie Contact out there, folks?
Do you remember Mr. Haddon of Haddon Industries?
The man who was on the Russian space station and in that movie was also a billionaire.
And remember when Mr. Haddon asked Jodie Foster over that monitor, want to take a ride?
Well, I'll never forget that line, as you know, and to me, though there are a lot of dissimilar things about these two men.
When I see Mr. Hatton, I think of Robert Bigelow.
That's just sort of a personal observation, certainly not with respect to his age or present physical condition, but in terms of a patron Of the open minds, the person who is willing to step out and do what others have not done in that way.
I think of Mr. Bigelow and Mr. Haddon.
Haddon Industries of want-to-take-a-ride fame.
All of that coming up directly.
One of the things he told me was when his show first started in Dayton, Ohio.
At a very small station, the first guest he booked was Madeleine Murray O'Hair.
He realized that this was his opportunity, just as I felt it was mine at the time, to book a guest who, if you have a strong start... In other words, you're going to knock the audience on their socks.
You're going to knock them on their socks.
Of course, as you know, when you first start in this business, every day, You're not sure when the program is over whether they're going to allow you to go out there tomorrow and do it again.
By the way, with all your years in broadcasting, television, which is not exactly my favorite medium in all the world, I love radio, an abiding love for radio, but what would you advise young people who want to do what you have done?
I always like to ask long-time media people that question.
For those who love the business, I would say Find out exactly what you're suited to do.
In my own case, I didn't feel that I was really suited to do the daily hard news.
You were an anchor and you felt like you wanted to do talk shows.
I love doing talk shows.
I love the flow of ideas.
If someone said to me, how would you like to spend a week skiing in Colorado, I would Why don't you put me together with some interesting people?
I'd just rather have great conversations.
I got my opportunity.
You are my kind of guy.
That's how many of us get positions.
People move and decline offers and pass away and opportunities arise.
Get sick, here boy, it's your turn.
Yeah, I sat there day after day.
I would go out and report, but I would come back to the station day after day and watch
the show and go, why won't they talk to me?
And finally they had to go through everyone there, only to realize it just wasn't working.
And the news director who finally was doing the program was scheduled to do the 12 o'clock show in about three minutes until 12.
He came into the newsroom and he said, I don't know what it is, but I just really feel dizzy that I don't think I can do the show today.
See, there you are folks.
That's how it happens.
That's how it happens.
You can plan, and it's amazing how these serendipitous things happen.
So with three minutes and no preparation, it was as if, I'm going to get to do this.
So I went out totally unprepared, I didn't know who the guests would be, it was just Fly with whatever is happening.
When the show was over, the news director came back to me and said, I don't think I want to do this anymore.
How would you like to take it over?
I guess it really is a matter of luck and opportunity.
Sometimes you can prepare for this business as much as you want, but someone has to really love your talent and give you the chance.
And you ask about my temperament for doing news.
I just didn't feel comfortable with the ain't it awful that they look for to lead the stories at six and ten.
Well, it usually is awful, actually.
Yeah, and I don't want to think that way.
I want to think in terms of the universe that I live in as a more magical place.
By the way, having said that, let me transgress and just read you a story I just got.
Experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have joined the investigation into what killed a microbiologist who worked with infectious bacteria at the state public health lab.
Lisa Colson, 34, died at a hospital Friday, two weeks after falling ill.
The CDC is involved, trying to find out whether it's related to her work.
They may or may not ever find out.
Nobody would discuss her symptoms.
And one of these days, somebody is going to do some work that isn't going to work out well, and it is not going to be just the investigator.
I mean, this kind of thing is a little worrisome in the modern world.
You know, you have this picture of somebody holding a little vial of some foul thing that we as humans have concocted to kill other humans, and oops!
I agree with you, and it seems that just as you've been given Hundreds of things to worry about through watching some of the television shows.
There's always something new they come along with and they say, give your attention to this.
Worry about this for a while.
One of the lines that I like to live with as a philosophy is a statement I remember reading as a child from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
When he said, the universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
I really believe it works that way.
If you give your attention to this is awful and this is my cause and these kinds of things, all of a sudden the universe or something out there says, well, I'll just create that movie for you.
And you can step into the scene and live it for the rest of your life.
Yup, and that's exactly what happens too.
Alright, look.
We're at the bottom of the hour, so what I want to do is tell everybody, hold on, because we really do want to talk to you about Madeline Murray O'Hare.
And I think that you've got a real shock ahead of you if you'll stay tuned.
Malachi this is for you.
I see trees of green, red roses too.
I see the blue from in here.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white.
The bright precedent.
who passed peacefully to his next adventure at 615 Eastern Time tonight.
Father Malachi Martin will be missed.
That's terrible.
Oh But, you just know he's there.
If there is such a place, he's there.
And what you hear about here, with regard to Madeline Morioh here, I think is a radio, probably a world first.
So, that coming up in a moment.
You hear me talk regular?
🎵🎵🎵 And now, back to the best of our film.
All right.
Now, James, welcome back.
Thank you, Art.
So, it's obvious how you got your career started.
You were doing a talk show.
Here came your first big shot at a talk show.
And you chose to go the same route.
How close to Ms.
O'Hara were you?
I believe her Atheist Center was about a mile from the NBC affiliate in Austin, where I worked at that time.
So you called her up?
I called her.
Interestingly, she answered the telephone herself, no one on her staff.
We chatted for a little while and I explained to her that I was just starting this talk
show and that I was young.
I told her the Phil Donahue story about the research paper and she agreed to come on.
So she showed up.
So you've got yourself a first class controversial first guest.
Well not only that but an inexperienced interviewer with someone who is a heavy hitter.
I felt a certain anxiety because Mrs. O'Hare was an imposing presence.
And so just before the show she looked at me and she said, would you like for me to
be mean and irritable and make people angry or would you like for me to be lovable and
charming?
And I said considering where I'm currently at in my career I would like for you to be
lovable and charming.
And she said I will do it.
Madeline Murray O'Hare had an enormous sense of theatrics.
And I think that no matter what she did, that she always thought of it as theater.
Well, you know, it's interesting because, of course, now I'm down the line a little ways.
And by the way, I was going to interview her.
I had been working on that.
But had I had that opportunity to answer the same question, I would have said, mean and nasty.
Go get them.
But I understand exactly why you said what you said.
And so she came on the air and she was charming.
She was charming with a bite to what she said.
For example, if I could run through perhaps two or three questions that come to mind.
Sure.
Because this ties in, interestingly, we wondered about the transition from Father Malachi to this topic.
And Job, in the Old Testament, asks the question, if a man lives, if he dies, shall he live again?
And it's one of those questions that so many of us ask ourselves because we want some sense that our lives here were not futile, that what we've gone through and suffered through and our joys and everything, that there is some reason for it.
Of course.
And I asked Mrs. O'Hare, what do you believe is the purpose of life?
And she said, I don't see that there needs to be any purpose, and she shot me this That was her charm.
Why do you think we're here?
at her and said, now Mrs. O'Hare you did promise to be charming.
And I said, alright.
That was her charm.
That was her charm.
So I said, well alright, why do you think we are here?
Is there a meaning, a purpose, a reason for the fact that as you and I were talking before
the show and I mentioned the fact that to her that somehow we have been thrown into
a life script written by who knows whom and someone went to central casting and all these
people showed up in our lives.
Some we wish weren't there, and others have been a great source of joy for us.
So I said, here we are looking for meaning in our lives.
I said, we seem to need that.
We need more than the immediate presence.
She looked at me and said, only fools need meaning.
Only fools need meaning.
So that was the direction we were going.
That's entirely consistent with somebody that you would imagine to be an atheist.
Yes.
Now, there's an interesting little story that happened at the H-E-B grocery store in Austin.
and H-E-B being a major chain here, we were leaving, my partner and I, Kate,
were leaving H-E-B and her son, John, was in his Mercedes and just nearly creamed us
on the way out of the parking lot.
This is Madeline's son?
Yes, the one who is also missing.
And we came so close to colliding because he just tore like a madman out of the parking lot.
And Kate's immediate response, she looked at him as he peeled out of the parking lot.
And she immediately looked at me and said, Is that any way for a godless man to act?
So, in interviewing Mrs. O'Hare, the question came up about the existence of God.
And she began to just tear to shreds her belief that organized religion was one of the reasons for the major pain and suffering in this world.
Wars, you name it.
Go back to witch hunts, saints who were persecuted, and one of the things that she said that she really objected to regarding organized religion is that once you accept a religion, no matter what label you put to that religion, her belief was that you immediately stop thinking.
And she loved the idea of shaking things up.
Art, I think she would say anything as long as she could scramble your brain.
She was willing to say it.
She could do it with charm.
She could do it with anger.
But whatever it took to shake up those little cells in your head and get them dancing, she would do it.
And so we went through the normal course of I don't know.
her anger about organized religion.
This is what we are leading to.
After I asked her, I said, how are you able to live your life without having some larger
meaning or purpose that goes beyond the immediate?
Because it seems like everyday life is a form of stuckness and we need optimistic forward
drive to keep ourselves going.
She said, well I don't need it.
I just think it's sufficient to be here.
That's all I need.
And I said, Mrs. O'Hare, life is fired at us point blank.
We ask these questions all our lives and we need to know if there's more to our existence than just the usual things we go through in order to survive.
Well, we had the discussion and she was a witty and charming guest and the phones rang off the hook afterwards.
But one of the things that I like to do when I had a guest on the show was afterwards I like to take a little time with them because sometimes the most interesting things that they finally began to say were just about the time you had to say goodbye everybody.
So we were talking and I said, Mrs. O'Hare, I get a sense in listening to you that you believe that the God of traditional religion is too small and this God does not neatly fit into any kind of package for you.
But when you look out at the universe at night and you see the stars and the planets and the fact that we are part of something mysterious, we don't quite know why we're here But in a sense, something just intuitively tells us that we are part of some invisible web that's been vibrating from the beginning, and we're all part of it.
I said, don't you feel that same sense of awe and wonder when you look out at the sky?
I said, I know as an atheist that when you look out and see the planets and the stars, you don't see the face of God.
The heavens are empty.
But your God, to me, seems to be like the small postage stamp on a large envelope.
And I said, I really suspect, being an intelligent woman, that there's more to this.
And in a larger sense, and this is what I said to her, because I wrote it down, I wanted to get it correctly, that you believe, you have to believe, that there is something more than God.
Something perhaps beyond God.
An energy source, a power we can connect to.
You may not call it God.
I know you won't call it God.
Something external though.
Something external.
And she stopped and looked at me and she said, you've got me.
So this woman... So, then Madeline Marie O'Hare was not an atheist.
I think she was an atheist as A totally committed atheist as far as traditional... No, no, no.
She was opposed to traditional religion.
I'm reading from what you sent me.
Yes.
Quote, and that she was sure that an organizing intelligence beyond the scope of our knowing exists and is our source.
That is not an atheist.
And she would not, she would never think of that source as a person.
But it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
So this woman who made a career... Why was this story never told publicly before?
I think because like you, news rushes by us and we do one talk show after another.
Yeah, but that's not small news.
The woman who, as you pointed out, with every question you could toss at her, came back with the correct answer you would expect from an atheist, a woman who removed prayer from American schools, a very controversial woman, but she was not an atheist, and you got her.
I mean, if that's true, and you warranty this is what she said, right?
This is what she said to me.
I don't mean to anger other atheists, and I don't mean to anger Christians.
Well, you probably will tick them all off, but who cares?
But this was our conversation.
But it's what she really said.
Yes.
She looked at me and said, you've got me.
You've got me.
You've got me.
All right.
Then that's it.
I mean, I'll read it again.
Quote, and that she was sure that an organizing intelligence beyond the scope of our knowing exists and is our source.
It was in the 1920s, I believe, that physicist Sir James Jeans said the universe begins to look more like a living thought than just a thing.
And I believe that this might capsulize what she was saying to me that day.
And you ask, why has this story never been told?
That's right.
I was young at the time, and I didn't realize the implications of what she was saying.
Last week I was watching the ABC special that Diane Sawyer hosted called Vanished.
The hour was spent on Madeleine Marie O'Hare, her son John and Mrs. O'Hare's adopted daughter Robin.
As I watched that program unfold, all of a sudden it was as if memories came back and I suddenly realized I had had this encounter with this incredible woman.
Agree with her or not, when she finished with you, you felt you had been in the presence of someone who could knife you apart and relish every moment of it.
As I watched this program last week, I looked at my partner Kate and I said, you know, I had forgotten this.
I remembered the exact words as they came back to me, that this discussion about an organizing intelligence, I know that she would just throw a fit if anyone suggested that this was a larger God.
Well, yes, but maybe nobody but you ever asks her the right question.
I think you know, and I notice this as you do your program, you don't give everything up front.
You pace the show so that it reaches a certain point where the information that you want your guest to give comes out in a timely fashion.
I've been doing this so many years now, it runs on automatic.
I just do what I do.
And people assume that it's easy, but our initial impulse for an inexperienced person
might be to say, well I need to get the most important information out at the beginning.
The problem with that approach is that you don't achieve credibility.
I remember the first impulses when I was given the show.
credibility by understanding exactly the context of something big you are about to say.
Otherwise people will go, oh come on.
But once you have built the context, it is a natural thing to build it in that fashion.
I was so thrilled, Art.
I remember the first impulses when I was given the show.
I would go home in the afternoon after finishing the show and booking the next day's show and
thinking I can't believe I get paid I get paid to do this I get to live in a sea of ideas to meet people who fly into Austin to actually be on this program.
And Mrs. O'Hare, as you know, sometimes you can go through a cycle where every show is a dud.
And you find yourself asking, why am I doing this?
I'm really not enjoying this.
The guests were more interesting when I pre-interviewed them.
And so when your show needed a jump start, who would you go to?
Well, the woman that agitated, I guess, an entire nation.
Interestingly enough, one of her sons, I believe at age 33, William, accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior and is now a minister.
Even living with that influence, I believe he now has his own ministry and once he accepted Christ into his life, years went by and Mrs. O'Hare would not speak to him.
I have heard that, yes.
And from what you've told me, that actually makes all the sense in the world and does not for one second take away from the remarks she made.
Which reveals that she was not precisely what she said she was, or what people thought she was, might be a better way to put it.
So you've made big news here now.
She knew how to market herself.
Yeah, I understand.
And her ideas.
You also mentioned something else to me on the phone that we should be doing in the near future.
You want to just say a word or two about that real quickly?
I believe it was in 1993, February 28, that the raid on the Branch Davidian compound took place.
Yes, that's correct.
And I've just faxed you a little information and a phone number.
Of a cameraman.
Of a cameraman who was quite involved.
You know the background situation.
Everybody does.
But this man has information nobody has ever heard, doesn't he?
Yes, he does.
And he has been holding this to the detriment of his own health since the Branch Davidian tragedy.
And I know him.
He was my daily photographer as we traveled around Texas.
And you're saying he's ready to tell his story, right?
I talked to him this afternoon.
And I said, would you be willing to talk to Art Bell if he called you?
And he said, have him call me.
He says, I've held this inside for too long.
All right, then that's a hit.
James, we're out of time.
I can't thank you enough.
It's given everybody a lot to think about.
Art, it's been a pleasure talking with you.
And I just wish you all the best in the future.
Good night, James.
So there you have it.
Madeline Murray O'Hare was not an atheist.
♪♪ I still think inside that they mean so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an oak would be used deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing.
To have all these things in our memories.
All these things in our memories are amusers.
It's about to start.
Video first.
Good morning, everybody.
I think it has never been done before.
There is somebody you probably don't know about.
But here's what I'll tell you as a little teaser, and then I'll tell you more in a moment.
I'm sure most of you by now have seen the movie Contact with Jodie Foster.
A movie that I can watch again and again and again.
And have, by the way.
and again, and have, by the way. You may recall that after the explosion of the first machine
in contact, the revelation of the second machine was made by Mr. Hatton of Hatton Industries.
streams. Yeah.
As a matter of fact, he actually disclosed that fact to Jody Foster, who was in the SETI... Oh, by the way, we're going to have somebody from SETI later on in the week, Seth Shostak, who is head of SETI.
But you may recall that there was a computer in Jodie Foster's apartment when she got back, and Mr. Haddon of Haddon Industries disclosed to her at that point that there was a second machine that had been built.
And his comment at the end was, of course, an offer to her when he said, want to take a ride?
That was Mr. Haddon, a multi-billionaire.
That's with a B. A lot of people don't understand how much a billion dollars is.
So my guest tonight, although having very little in common with Mr. Haddon age-wise, my guest tonight, Robert T. Bigelow, has been, much like Mr. Haddon, behind the scenes for a long time.
A long, long time.
Sponsoring very important work that well some of you know about some of it some of you Most of you probably don't know about the majority of it, but he has sponsored this work He is a billionaire That's a thousand million dollars for anybody who wants to know so a billion plus I don't even know a good zillionaire something you know has a lot of money a lot a lot of money, but he's doing a He's doing work with it that I guess a lot of us wish we could do, and I was originally a beneficiary of that work.
And that frankly launched me on the program that I now have.
There was an original program in Las Vegas, Nevada called Area 2000, which Mr. Bigelow sponsored.
That eventually became Dreamland, which Then became coast in its present form and so Mr. Bigelow and I go back a ways.
I'll tell you more about Mr. Bigelow and we'll get him on the air here in a few minutes and when you hear what he has to say tonight, it's gonna put a big smile on your face.
And what?
Mr. Haddon, I mean... My daughter lives two flights up.
I mean Robert T. Bigelow.
Actually, check this out, folks.
Just one year older than I am, so he's not Mr. Haddon.
Let me tell you a little bit about his business background.
It all began in 1968 for him when he borrowed $20,000, which began his first company with the no-money-down purchase of small apartment complexes.
His principal companies are Bigelow Development Corporation, a general contractor.
And I can tell you, he sort of built a lot of Las Vegas.
He built a lot of Las Vegas.
Did you hear me?
Bigelow Management Inc., management contractor.
Budget Suites of America, you've heard of those.
A regional hotel chain started in 1990, now going national.
There'll be a funny story about that later.
He's got About 800 employees right now.
He's built, I don't know, 12,000 hotel rooms in three states, about 7,000 apartments in four states.
He has about, let me see, 6,800 apartments, actually, apartment units in five states.
65 to 70 parcels for development, and so forth and so on.
Has actually managed to survive the persnickety whims of the Nevada Gaming Control Board and the Nevada Gaming Commission by acquiring five gaming licenses over the last 20 years, and they don't just pass those out.
He has a banking background, owned a major interest in savings and loan, was director of that for five years, sold the bank.
Owned the largest interest in a commercial bank, was a director for five years and sold his stock when his offers to buy the bank were not accepted, owned two mortgage companies, has invented all sorts of things, architectural designs, business systems and adaptive techniques, new types of products, new types of business services, and has a science background.
I'll tell you, he has sponsored just all kinds of people in their research with big dollars.
He donated, I think, just under $7 million to various colleges within the University of Las Vegas.
The Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies, for example.
The Robert L. Bigelow Physics Building.
He has He's just done so much that I could spend the whole program talking about what he's done.
And, you know, he has acquired a billion plus dollars in this pursuit of his.
He has not, to my knowledge, done a radio interview of this sort previously, so it's going to be very interesting.
And when you hear what he's going to do, you're really going to want to take a ride, believe me.
Here is Robert Bigelow.
Bob, welcome.
Hi, Art.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, as.
I've been waiting years.
Actually, Bob, I've been waiting years to have you on the radio.
So I'm very proud to have you on.
Well, you've given me no choice but to shave my head now.
I can see that.
And I'm sure that my wife is out in the backyard with a shovel looking for tin cans and whatnot.
But I'm prepared to have a good time tonight and have fun doing the show.
I'm always impressed with your program.
I've listened to it many times and I think you're a tremendous asset to the radio community.
Thank you.
Can I ask a question on behalf of the common person out there?
Just as sort of a dumb question.
What is it like to have a billion dollars?
Our focus is so much on trying to plan for the future, establish a good environment for
our business family, our family of corporate employees, and try to maintain a successful
operation that you don't...
There just isn't time to dwell on that.
There are always various problems that come along on a daily basis and you're too busy fighting the battles to dwell on the dollar figures and there's always a lot of problems that are challenging and successes that you celebrate, so it's a mixed bag.
Yeah, mixed bag.
You know, it's funny.
That's exactly what Ted Turner said when he was asked about that.
He said kind of a mixed bag.
Actually, he said kind of an empty bag.
But yours is not so empty because you've really done things with your money.
Very serious things with your money in areas that I am fascinated with and I know you are.
And I remember sitting in your office with George Knapp.
I remember that day very well.
to know who George is. And we were discussing the possibility of the Area 2000 program and
we talked of so many interesting things that day. And that began what I'm doing now. So
really that keeps this whole thing that I'm doing, Bob. So for me, you got me started.
I remember that day very well. That was a lot of fun, that show.
It was a lot of fun, but boy, what you're about to do... Your construction background, just before we launched and all of it, you sort of built a lot of Las Vegas, didn't you, your company?
Well, we're not... We're owner-builders.
We're general contractors and licensed in several states, but we don't build for the... How can I put it?
We don't hire ourselves out.
to contract for other people.
So we build for our own portfolio.
Understood.
So you construct for your own projects?
Correct.
Okay.
So, you know, you're about a year older than I am, that's all.
I didn't realize we were that close in age.
You know, when you think of somebody who has achieved what you have achieved, you think
of them being quite elderly.
And maybe some of my listeners think of us as quite elderly, I don't know.
But you've achieved this at a relatively young age.
Well, I have old bones, though.
You have old bones?
I have old bones.
Yeah, so do I.
When did your interest in more esoteric sorts of subjects begin?
When I was a kid.
In fact, in the UFO subject specifically, it happened when I was about eight or nine years old because I was told about two sightings that members of my family had.
I think for a lot of people that really get I'm intrigued with the subject.
It's either because of something that personally happens to them or something that happens
to someone that they trust, maybe a good friend or some family member.
And that's the way it happened for me.
So you were told stories.
That's right.
About sightings in your family.
Right.
Eight is pretty young to begin thinking about these kinds of things.
Well, I was helped along by my father.
He also was intrigued with the subject.
Back in the early 50s, I was born in 1944, so by 1952 or 1953 there wasn't a lot of material on hand in the bookstores that you could get a hold of.
He had purchased a few books and he was very intrigued in the subject and I think maybe some of that was spawned by the stories that my grandparents and my aunt had told of their sightings.
So your father encouraged you?
Oh, I think he did, yes.
That's really interesting.
Usually it's the other way around, particularly when it comes to this sort of subject.
But instead, he nourished the interest.
That's nice.
Anyway, in 1988, I guess you began conducting some investigations.
What were your early interests?
What did you want to know about?
Well, I had decided that I wasn't going to let that subject go from the time I was a kid.
I thought it was a terribly profound subject.
I can remember hoping that, gee, it doesn't just pack up its tent and fly away.
I thought, my gosh, this is something that is just beyond belief and totally fantastic.
Decided at that time that I had some money and I had some time to start to devote to this topic in a serious way.
But I want to know what you wanted to know.
In other words, there has to be a pretty strong driving force, whether you've got money or not, to begin to look into these areas.
Did you want to know whether there were others?
If you heard my last hour whether there's some constant driving force in the universe or in other words what specific areas did you want to explore?
It's hard to limit that to give you an answer that is only just focused on one aspect because it's such a mixture of such profound things.
So you wanted to know about all of it?
I was driven by a mixture of curiosity and something that I knew would profoundly change mankind if it were real, if it were confirmed, and if it interacted with human society it would be just incredible the impact of that.
In latter years, George Knapp, who we just talked about, and Bob Lazar and other people that you met with, were saying some pretty fantastic things.
George had done a lot of very serious media coverage, for which he was punished dearly for a while in these areas, but he did some wonderful work, and I would suppose that that affected you to some degree, didn't it?
Well, I think George is terrific.
a newsman and one tremendously courageous individual to take on what he did with the
high profile that he has.
His work has always been very, very good.
I enjoyed initially, I was very pleased to be able to get with George and compare notes
and listen to discourses on this subject with him and learn about how much information he
had.
He is a walking encyclopedia on this subject.
I remember sitting in your office that day with George and you were discussing the subject
of remote viewing, I believe had come up.
i'm gonna be honest with you at that point i didn't have the slightest idea
Well, it's part of the consciousness category, and there are other affiliate subjects that are within the realm of consciousness studies, and so gathering information by esoteric and unique and unusual means fits within the profile of the consciousness studies
and that's an area that I've been interested in for a long time.
It's more than just remote viewing.
It's a whole basket of accessing information and even the power of prayer and other kinds
of topics qualify for that category.
Do you think that remote viewing, did you come to any conclusions personally?
Do you think it is a valid discipline?
Oh, I really do.
Yes.
I've performed a couple of trial experiments myself, which is not enough data.
to prove whether or not I can perform.
But other people have had decades of experience with this.
As we know, the CIA finally divulged, or was forced to divulge, that they had sponsored
a program for 20 years at an average of a million dollars a year to explore that.
I know a couple of remote viewers that have very high batting averages of accuracy of
performance.
I have engaged those people experimentally from time to time.
In one case, one gentleman's performance is about 30 or 35 percent accuracy.
In describing specific things, right?
Yes.
That's way out of the ballpark of any random possibility.
Way out, isn't it?
Absolutely, because you're listening to somebody and watching them draw pictures and listening to them describe what it is that they see at those coordinates, and it is something absolutely fantastic.
All right.
Bob, hold it right there.
Fantastic is right.
Robert T. Bigelow, Bob Bigelow is my guest.
We'll be right back.
Robert Bigelow has funded nids.
I could just, you know, as we go through the night, I could continue to tell you things that he has funded behind the scenes.
The Roper surveys that caused so much public comment.
And the most recent one, of course, which was sort of a repeat of the Brookings report or actually went out beyond the Brookings report with some very interesting results.
I mean, he's done all, that's just some more of what he's done.
I'll keep throwing it in, Bob.
Welcome back to the show.
So, you were sitting there discussing remote viewing.
This was a long time before it came out publicly that there was U.S.
government research into remote viewing, and I sat there in your office not knowing what remote viewing was, and I've learned so much in the intervening years that it really does, I guess, Bob, Once you believe that, you are then compelled to believe that there is much more than just our physical selves, aren't you?
That's right.
If you can find significant confidence in credibility, if you can establish significant credibility in any one particular unique way of obtaining information that is outside the domain of what today's physics understands, you have stepped into A whole other world that then suggests that maybe there is a lot we don't know about many different ways of accessing information and different or other kinds of topics, of course, as we said, involve the power of prayer, the power of psychometry, which police agencies, departments around the country have used from time to time.
I've seen it happen.
things in a laboratory context are inexplicable.
There's just no way to connect how holding an object that belonged to somebody who was
a victim of something is able to produce information that leads to their arrest.
I've seen it happen.
I've seen it happen.
I've seen people do that.
It's kind of creepy if you've never experienced it before for somebody to hold an object and
be able to then describe, for example, their home, their car, what's happening with them
I've seen that done, Bob, and it was accurate.
It scared me.
It scared me, but it's true.
So here you are in the middle of an investigation of all this sort of thing, and then, of course, the possibility that there are Others.
In other words, you have funded research.
For example, Linda Moulton Howe, who's been on this program and was on the original Area 2000, who's done all this mutilation research and all the rest of that.
You looked into all that, didn't you?
Yes.
And did you personally reach any conclusions from that kind of research?
Yes sir, because I know it feeds into a story about the ranch.
But did you ever reach any conclusions in your own mind about what might be going on?
Well, I definitely have personally because you get to where there are no other explanations and you begin to have to trust the testimonies of countless numbers of people and you quickly get beyond the predation as the cause of a mutilation.
That's very easy to get beyond.
Anybody who ever does any fieldwork in that topic understands that immediately.
That's very easy to get through.
Then once you're past that point, then your alternatives start to narrow and the justification
for mutilations becomes more and more bizarre if you're trying to ascribe traditional explanations
to that kind of activity.
Well, I had Dr. Corn Keller on my show from NIDS, which is fun.
And he told us about the ranch at an undisclosed location.
And things were happening at that ranch that nobody could account for.
And I guess you bought that ranch.
You just bought the ranch and set up a research facility within the ranch.
Is that fair to say?
That's correct.
Now there was a specific incident that occurred with a cow on that ranch.
Can you tell that story?
Well, there are several different incidences.
You're staying with a cow.
Are you thinking of a particular...
Yes, you told me one on the phone.
Which one?
Because there are a number of them.
Which one was it?
This was, as a matter of fact, some researchers who almost had this cow in sight at one moment.
And in the next moment, as they approached it, it was mutilated.
You might be referring to a daytime event that actually involved a calf and a cow.
That's right.
The victim was the calf.
It was a newborn calf.
It had been born only about 12 hours before.
and it weighed roughly 87 pounds at the time that it was measured.
And two of our staff, of our employees were there tending to this animal.
It was calving season.
They left this animal for a period of about 45 minutes in order to tend to some other calves.
When they came back, this was in an open field where there was a clear line of sight, a 360 degree sight for hundreds of yards.
And when they came back the first thing they noticed was that the cow, the calf's mother was dragging one of her hind legs as though she were crippled and she was completely exhausted.
They said that they described her that her tongue was hanging down and she was looking as though she was ready to fall any second.
And she had been put through obviously some sort of ordeal and she had Given her all to whatever it was that she was involved with.
This was a healthy animal.
Forty-five minutes earlier.
Right?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
There was nothing wrong with that cow before.
And when they approached, they walked a distance to get to the locale of where the calf was.
They saw that the calf was spread out on the ground.
Spread eagle type in fashion.
Basically all that was left of the animal was the hide and hooves and head and some backbone and ribcage.
Altogether about 22 or 23 pounds.
So 60 some pounds of flesh and bone had been excised in maybe a half an hour to 45 minutes.
In plain view, had these people come back any earlier, had they turned around perhaps when they were 100 yards away, they may have caught whoever was doing this at the time that they were actively engaged.
Now this, what was unique was, of course, predation was immediately considered.
That was dispatched because there was clear evidence that sharp instruments had been used on the ear and other places on the animal.
There was a femur that was about 15 feet away that had impact points on it and we later through analysis discovered that those impact points had been caused by some sharp Not a tooth.
They definitely were not teeth marks.
One of the bizarre interesting things about this case was really a paradox here.
It wasn't just that the bones were picked so clean and that rib cage material was broken,
the ear had been sliced.
We obviously had a very brutally mutilated animal with no blood on the ground whatsoever.
There were no tracks.
The grass was very brittle.
There was no blood in evidence.
And yet...
Well, that's impossible.
Well, yes.
Seemingly, in our technology right now, that does seem like it's impossible.
But the one bizarre thing here, in addition, was the fact that there definitely was indications of gnawing and chewing on the hind and the carcass and the ribcage, at the same time that sharp implements had been used on this animal.
Now that was very interesting to us.
Troubling, too, to me, as I think about it.
What does that imply to you?
That there was something that had to almost be occurring simultaneously that seemed like predation, and then something that was not?
Well, it gets very tricky when you start to go down that trail as to doing various scenarios as to how that might have been caused.
I mean, if you were to theorize that three or four people were involved in perpetrating a fraud, I mean, it's of course amusing to think who's the person identified that's going to be doing the gnawing and chewing, and of course you quickly would not raise your hand to be that guy.
No, no, no.
But it does get really troublesome as to As to why, and of course a lot of these things that we've bumped into appear almost to be sort of demonstrations.
Demonstrations.
When Dr. Killer was on the program, he also told us the story of the two polls which you told me Here at the house once, about these two wolves with their television cameras virtually pointed at each other.
Another absolutely impossible thing to have occurred with videotape rolling in the whole ball of wax.
My audience, I think, I hope, knows that story.
But on this ranch, do you have any theories, any thoughts, Bob, on why this ranch that you ultimately acquired because so many weird things were going on, why that ranch?
Why that place?
Well, I don't have a straightforward answer for that question, Art.
I can tell you that that ranch is part of a large geographical area that has had a history of sightings and encounters, close encounters, with people for going on 50 years that we know of.
And there have been hundreds and hundreds of cases that have been documented for decades and decades in that entire geographical area.
For some reason, the ranch in question here does seem to have among, in addition to
some immediate joining properties, does seem to have some sort of focus over periods of time.
But then it's hard to say that that property is necessarily more singled out than
some other property because the fact is we really haven't investigated in depth.
We don't have a current knowledge and database pertaining to the events on other people's properties like we do on our own.
Oh sure, where you have all the proper instrumentation to study it.
And then there was one other story he told about the ranch that absolutely is never going to leave me, ever.
He talked about a night vision camera which caught And maybe you can verify this, or add to it, what seemed to be a kind of a circle, an opening, perhaps one might imagine, or I imagined when I heard it, a portal of some kind, perhaps into another dimension, who knows, but something that was actually caught on camera, and something that seemed to come through it, through this portal, which then disappeared.
Is that roughly accurate?
That seems to have occurred according to testimony from different people on that property.
But that is not an uncommon account.
I have talked to numerous people over the years.
that have been witness to day time and night time events of that type where they see a
light or they see some sort of fracture or split that maybe it doesn't start out as a
light, maybe it starts out just as some other type of appearance in the sky and they claim
that they see a different sky than the surrounding area.
Right.
And we've also had reports of objects flying in and out of the center of that object.
There are a number of people in that particular area around that ranch that have testified
to seeing those kinds of events.
Those aren't...
It's a...
It goes beyond just one or two people giving these kinds of reports just even within that small locale.
We have a number of people In a number of different geographic areas that report those same kinds of events.
Doesn't this fit in with the general reports coming in across the nation of UFOs that seem to materialize and then either morph in shape or dematerialize in and out.
In other words, in and out.
Yes.
Yes.
So we're basically talking about the possibility at least of The same thing.
You know, Michio Kaku, Dr. Kaku, who I have on this program frequently, is one of the nation's greatest theoretical physicists.
And he's suggesting there are as many as ten dimensions.
And he's a real mainstream kind of guy.
So one can imagine if there are multiple dimensions, that there are conditions under which I guess rips or tears or openings appear between them or are caused to appear between them.
Is that a fair presumption?
Well, even if we're only at the cusp and the fringes of theory on such things as wormholes and multiple dimensions and multiple universes, I think there are We do know, though, we are at the early stages of stealth technology, so we probably have an awful lot to learn over the next hundred years or whatever about perfecting and improving that kind of subject.
And so whether or not an object is still there or has actually disappeared may be a matter of choice by the operator.
So we still have a lot to learn about stealth technology.
We also know that there are multiple ways, as we said earlier in Consciousness Studies, to acquire information through totally unexplainable means.
So we have evidence that we are chewing around the perimeter of of this kind of science and that we have one heck of a long
way to go to try to understand.
We have testimonies of people, Art, who I have talked to, several people independent
of each other in different states who have had multiple witness events where they saw
a craft going into solid rock into a mountain.
And so that suggests then that something isn't just operating in a stealth mode, it is somehow
reconfiguring itself physically to harmonize with another solid object of some kind.
It may well be that rock under the proper conditions is no different than moving through
the air for us.
Could that be?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm a student of listening to people's testimonies and gathering data that way and through forensic analysis.
I think there are physicists, a couple of them are on our science board, who probably could give some fair discussion on the fringes of the conversation of physics as it's known today as to how perhaps you might explain something like that occurring, such as other kinds of
things that are less difficult, such as coherent light that you can modulate as to a distance so
that if you don't want it to reach the ground you can adjust that.
Maybe it has properties of levitation and other kinds of things that are suggested because
of personal testimonies.
So we get a lot of that kind of thing.
You live not far from Area 51.
I live not far from Area 51.
I know you've looked at that over the years.
Do you have any comments on Area 51, Bob?
What do you think might be going on out there?
I've done a lot of interviews of people in the small communities.
In fact, that's one of the things I did a lot of in the early years for me as a researcher in 88, 89, 90, 91.
I did a lot of personal interviews.
I spent a fair amount of time, perhaps a dozen different trips, to park myself out there under the stars on the fringes of that.
Oh, you went up there yourself?
Oh yeah.
Daytime and nighttime.
You take your sandwiches and hot chocolate along and you can have a good old time.
Looking at the stars and the whole sky just opens up to you there.
Oh, it's an amazing place.
Hold on, Bob.
We're at the top of the hour.
We'll be right back and we'll pick up on Area 51 and soon we're going to tell you what plans Bob has.
The first guest I ever had on the original program that was the genesis of all this, Area 2000, was Colonel John Alexander, and that's an employee of Bob's.
Okay Bob, so Area 51, we both are somewhat adjacent to it.
You made some visits up there.
I've actually never made the trek up there.
But I have seen some certainly strange things.
In your time at Area 51, were you ever treated to something that was inexplicable?
I'd have to say no, because in order to say yes, I would have to have the proximity to me and my own style of measuring the authenticity of something.
I have to have something very close in proximity in order for me to make a statement that I have definitely seen an object that would fit this category of topic.
I have seen movement of lights and beams and other kinds of things over there that were different, but they were at a distance to where you couldn't really say for sure what it was you were seeing.
I had a triangular object float over my head directly along with my wife one night years ago and it changed my life forever.
It wasn't flying, it was floating.
It was defying gravity and it was big and it was close and I will never be the same because I know this now exists and I know one of two things is true.
Either our military has achieved a technology that we're only dreaming about right now or It was from elsewhere.
One of those two things is true, and absolutely true, and I know that from my own personal experience.
I'm just curious which it is.
Do you have any thoughts?
I mean, as you've thought about this whole UFO phenomenon, everything connected with it, do you look to our government and experimentation and think it may be sourced here on Earth, or do you think it may be others?
No, I'm convinced it's nothing connected to our government's work.
There are just too many reasons for that in my own personal mind.
I did a lot of interviews of people up in that area and I was given reports of phenomenally large craft outside the test site range, outside the Air Force gunnery range in low altitude.
Positions that had no business flying over populated areas, demonstrating itself and exposing itself that way is unthinkable for something that is a black project.
That is just not done.
We're dealing with something that is on a worldwide scale that has been prevalent for going on 60 years in a dramatic way here in the modern era since the Foo Fighter age of World War II.
I've talked personally to tail gunners.
that flew in World War II and they have recounted to me the same kinds of stories that you've
read in books. I've listened to these guys and they said, yeah, a lot of us tail gunners saw those things. So we've
had a history of this phenomena that has consistently displayed itself and exhibited itself
deliberately and has evolved on a worldwide basis and has involved its performances and has evolved
from causing sightings at a distance to sightings that are in your face.
You know, that are very, very close.
Is it your view, Bob, that these craft that exhibit themselves, and I think I agree with you, they exhibit themselves, precisely so.
If it was a government, they could easily prevent us from seeing what you want us to see.
Do you think that our government knows of this presence?
I have my answer to that.
My own personal opinion and purely speculation here is a combination of yes and no.
I have talked with people very high up who have a couple of problems.
One is they don't know and they should be in a position to know because we as citizens count on that kind of thing.
Right.
And the second is they have a very difficult time accessing the information.
They are scared to death.
of embarrassment and ridicule for their own careers, understandably.
Understandably, yes.
And yet this is a black paper sack bag kind of topic where it's very difficult for them
to engage their staff or even go into bookstores, much less attend conferences or to outreach
into the researcher community.
But if you have accrued this much proof, and with what I've seen and so many other millions
of Americans, these things we've seen, our government, of course, after Blue Book said
these things, whatever they are, are not a threat to national security.
Well, I've always found that very difficult to digest.
If they're flying in our skies over defense installations and ICBMs and all the rest of that, and they're not a threat to national security, then what is a threat to national security?
Probably the psychosocial effects of confirmation.
Exactly right.
It would be very interesting now that we're going to tell them what you're about to do.
The two topics are going to kind of feed into each other.
You told me on the phone That it said one of the quickest ways to turn a billionaire into a millionaire is to go into aerospace.
Is that true?
That seems to be kind of the consensus in the aerospace community.
In other words, one of the greatest, quickest ways to lose it all is to launch a project, an aerospace project.
But we also briefly talked about money.
I've got a little bit, you've got a lot.
And at some point in your life, I guess you say to yourself, you know, I should be doing something with this.
It seems like you've reached that stage in your life where you are ready to really do something significant.
Do you want to tell everybody what it is?
Sure.
I'd be glad to because we're all pumped up about it.
We're excited.
Diverge for a slight moment talking about the aerospace community.
I can say that going back to the UFO topic, that happens to be a topic that is prevalent among the aerospace community.
You may think maybe that it isn't, but I... Really?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
There are so many people in the closet, it's unbelievable.
Bob, a key phrase in the closet, they're not talking about it publicly, are they?
That's correct.
And this also applies to the science community.
But within the science community, within the national labs, within the aerospace community, there's a huge percentage of those people that are intrigued with the UFO subject.
They do not laugh about it.
I know.
They want to know more about it.
And it's not a joke to them.
No, but it is a career killer if they come public.
And most of the people that we've had come public about this, it seems like they've been retired.
Colonel Corso, for example, prime example.
Right.
Retired and out of it, and out of the way of possible harm as a result of what they would say.
So you're saying in the active aerospace community, there's a lot of talk.
There's a lot of interest, a lot of talk, and of course they have a huge passion for aerospace, which leads us into That's right.
why we're doing what we're doing.
Well, the only people that have really done any serious work in years previous have been NASA.
That's right.
NASA's been the big million pound gorilla.
They have a monopoly on American space.
As far as American citizens are concerned, they are the monopoly.
Precisely.
Just before we launch, which we're about to do, one more question.
You can tell me to get stuff, Bob, if you don't want to answer these questions.
I might not want to answer a lot of them.
If anybody would know about this whole question of craft that have been observed, I tell you, Bob, STS-80, I saw that video, 48, I've seen a lot of different videos taken from The shuttle that have things that are just completely inexplicable in them.
They can screech about ice crystals and all the rest of it, but I tell you, for example, in STS-80, there is no question there is something seen in that video that I have no explanation for whatsoever.
So, you know, I asked you, does the government know?
NASA is kind of a, it's government, but it's not.
It's both.
They would be the ones who would know, wouldn't they?
There have been a lot of interesting things seen by the astronaut and cosmonaut community.
Russia is a tremendous source since Glasnost and Prostroika occurred that has freed up a tremendous amount of information and data about what their cosmonaut community has seen and their military on the ground and so on.
And there's just a tremendous body of information there as well.
A lot of our astronauts have alluded, in sort of a vague, intriguing way, to these things.
Several of them have made statements, Neil Armstrong at the White House, intriguing statements that just leave you shaking your head, as if they want to say more, and they can't.
At any rate, You are about to embark on an aerospace project, a really big one, and I hope it doesn't turn your billions into millions or less.
I hope that doesn't happen, but tell them what you're going to do, Bob.
A couple of years ago, I started to make some small investments in the aerospace community, and it was on the launch side of the coin.
What has been intriguing in the last few years has been all the publicity about people wanting
to initiate start-up companies because they have different approaches to launch designs.
And of course the key is to create an RLV that will be economically feasible and bring
the launch cost down per pound to where you can do a lot of interesting things.
What does RLV mean?
Reusable launch vehicle.
So nationally and internationally there are maybe three dozen different launch operating
systems and companies and in fact there probably are another eight or ten wannabes that actually
are hoping that their pet projects become a reality.
Well, I shifted from that to the destination side of the coin because there was an opportunity or a vacuum there that wasn't being satisfied.
Everybody was saying, well, gee, there's no market.
What's the incentive?
for anybody here to try to create systems that can launch people into space besides the NASA shuttle system.
What's the incentive?
And so it's important then that what we try to have is ongoing enterprise that can have some economic
justification and that will say to the launch community, we need you and
we need you in a large way.
We need you in a big way, which means lots of dollars into new systems, new configurations and maybe even new technology.
How much does it cost per pound to launch something by our space shuttle, which is the main transport right now we have?
The shuttle is a really sad, sorry story.
The quick answer to your question is roughly $10,000 a pound.
$10,000 a pound?
That's correct.
It was proposed to Congress initially as a launch facility that would fly 720 times, 72 launches a year, over a 10-year period.
And we are just passing, I guess, our 100th launch since its inception.
So the fact that it has flown so infrequently is a big item as to one of the reasons why the costs are as high as they are.
The other is that the entire infrastructure is bloated and way beyond scale.
There are other countries that have efficient systems where they don't require anywhere near the amount of infrastructure and staff per launch that we require.
Well as a matter of curiosity then, let's examine the country of your choice.
If you compare our $10,000 per pound, that's incredible, that's sickening.
And you look at other existing programs, What kind of price per pound are they able to achieve?
Well, apparently the most effective cost per pound is the Zenit Russian rocket, which is part of the sea launch system of Boeing today.
And they have had several, or at least two, I think, successful launches.
It's a brand new program.
And that is a sea-based facility.
It's a launch from a sea platform on the ocean.
kind of like an oil rig, you know, that you drag out there.
Right.
And the Russian Zenit rocket is a reliable vehicle and the launch cost per pound on that
are apparently in the neighborhood of $2,000 a pound.
Oh my.
So $2,000 for Zenit, $10,000 for the shuttle.
Yes.
Of course the shuttle is off limits to any commercial use.
Right.
They do put up some commercial satellites from time to time, television satellites,
that kind of thing, right?
Well, the mandate by after the Challenger disaster, prior to the Challenger disaster, the game plan was that we were going to phase out the various kinds of rockets that America had typically been using, and they were going to load everything on the shuttle.
With the advent of the Challenger disaster, almost nothing flew for two and a half years.
foreign countries began to consume the satellite industry and they were successful in moving
ahead with their launchers, conventional rockets. So a lot of our business in launching satellites
went overseas. Subsequent to, after that two and a half year period, the American rocket
industry was told to gear themselves back up and that they were not allowed to put commercial
payloads on the shuttle.
The military uses the shuttle and of course the shuttle is consumed for the next 10-15 years by the ISS and that whole system.
Between the ISS and the shuttle, about 60% of NASA's annual budget is consumed.
So either military or scientific, there was this x-ray satellite just launched, 1.5 billion dollars or something on the shuttle that just landed.
So that kind of stuff, but not commercial, huh?
The commercial, as far as I know, the commercial end of it is forbidden.
The shuttle is not to be used for commercial purposes.
So we went down a really wrong road, didn't we?
Well, there's a...
You know, the answer is yes and no.
I think, first of all, NASA hasn't been faithful to the mandate of Congress.
When it was formed in 1958, the mandate was you were to seek to promote privatization and commercialization of space and other agency.
That's correct.
And even to this day, and they were reminded of that again in the middle 80s by Congress, and even to this day, 98 cents of every dollar stays right in NASA to fund its payroll of 20,000 employees, to fund its centers, its 13 centers of operation in this country.
Wow.
And the patents stay within the domain legally, are owned by NASA, things that they invent.
So there is almost no, there's only 2% that is offloaded into the private sector.
So they're not living their mandate.
NASA is not living its mandate, is that correct?
That's exactly right.
Hold on Bob, we'll be right back.
Bob Bigelow is my guest and you're just about to hear what he's going to do about it.
Alright, well this is really big.
The shuttle, 10,000 pounds, $10,000 a pound to go to orbit.
Russia's Zenit program, $2,000 a pound.
And as the price comes down, certain things begin to become possible that were not previously possible.
Robert Bigelow has a plan to build something.
What do you want to build, Bob?
Well, our ultimate fantasy That would be to try to achieve a space cruise ship.
What do you mean?
A hotel?
A hotel cruise ship facility.
You mean like an ocean going cruise ship except in space?
That's right.
I guess the first thing you would have to have then is a...
Something that would take you to orbit reasonably.
Correct?
A vehicle.
In other words, you need a launch vehicle.
You need a number of things.
There are many people right now within... You know, the story part is actually quite huge.
And this is a very involved topic because there are many people within NASA, many people outside of NASA in the aerospace community that have an enormous burning desire to get into space, to have America be more than it's been for the last 30 years.
And there are many people who have seen their careers go by the wayside who are our age and were in their middle 20s 30 years ago and they thought for sure back then that we would have been other places by now.
So there is a tremendous amount of emotion in a lot of people in the aerospace community that are really hungry for some change and really hungry for somebody to stir the pot and to get us shifted off the present status that we're at because right now there is no way I would like to go to space, Bob, in my lifetime.
I'm sure you would like to go to space in your lifetime.
three decades that the average person who has a sizable amount of money, there's no
mistake about that, but nevertheless the average person who is not an astronaut is ever going
to see any kind of activity or opportunity connected to them in space.
I would like to go to space, Bob, in my lifetime.
I'm sure you would like to go to space in your lifetime.
Do you think that's possible?
Yes, I do.
How?
The how is this.
There is general agreement that by about 07 or 08 there will be about another 1700 satellites launched and at that point the launch community, the satellite launches will have reached some sort of saturation.
There is going, there is already A variety of changes occurring in launches.
Satellites are at the same time becoming larger, they're also becoming smaller, and they're being deployed in multiples.
So at some point, setting space debris aside for the moment, there's going to be some kind of absorption or saturation and not sufficient absorption to continue that volume forever.
At that point, The launch community is going to be very interested in other things to do.
Some of those conversations are already taking place today, which is very important because then the motivation is there to look around and say, well, is the private community anywhere able or interested in being involved here and how can they help us as the launch community?
If the private community were to start to undertake a philosophy of designing practical
systems that are user friendly for average people, that are driven by economics, that
are driven by the market competition side of things, not just the cost plus type of
contracts that agencies are used to having, but in trying to drive costs down because
you're multiplying the same modules and products a number of times to where you are reducing
those prices and you're doing it through competitive bidding and the kinds of usual principles
that general contracting engages, you're probably going to wind up with an order of magnitude
or more in a reduction of costs versus what NASA pays for anything.
Alright, so put simply, the Law of Supply and Demand, which you're very well familiar with, will drive the... Simply, the Law of Supply and Demand, which you're very well familiar with, will drive the price per pound down.
Is that fair?
Not necessarily.
In other words, as we launch more satellites?
Yes.
Again, there's a yes and no to that.
The features of what drives the cost down per pound are a combination of repetition and launches.
There's no question about that.
If you have a reusable launch vehicle, the key here is, one, come up with a reusable launch vehicle that isn't the space shuttle.
Whether you're a Lockheed or a Boeing or any other company, to come up with an RLV that doesn't waste itself.
You can't go to the grocery store and leave your tires there every time or pretty soon you'll stop taking that car out.
That's for sure.
So you start to have to reuse everything that you can.
And we're only at the very cusp of that potentiality.
But that's terribly important.
The other thing that drives it is to have a reason to have an RLV that is configured for passenger use.
The driver for that is to have a habitable station that, for justifiable reason, has a solid market of people who are willing to pay sizable dollars.
There's no question about that.
But who are willing to do that in a sizable number.
Well, I know the kind of numbers you're talking about in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, not millions.
That's right.
Right?
That's correct.
Per passenger?
That's correct.
And you're talking about building a hotel cruise ship that would be in Earth orbit, I guess, and you would be taken to it as a private citizen, just as you would a cruise ship.
You would board the ship.
You would go to this hotel, but then the hotel would begin to move, wouldn't it?
That's right.
Where would it go?
Well, the simplest thing, to move it to a location, the choices, the aerospace community up to this point has said, well, we know there's a market for parabolic flights.
We know there is a market for orbital flights.
All of our experience at this point in time are in zero-g environments, but those are not user-friendly environments.
There's a lot of unappetizing things that are connected with zero-g environments.
We're saying we want to create a gravity environment, perhaps 40% gravity environment, The person would go through an orientation program that's prior to the launch that may last 7 to 10 days.
It would be a lot of fun all by itself, by the way.
That would be a lot of fun, too.
Almost like space camp.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
In other words, you'd be in a facility on the ground that would be duplicating the facility that you were getting ready to go to.
That's right.
Exactly.
Gotcha.
Now, the cruise itself, what we feel is that there are going to be a lot more hands that go in the air.
That if you say to somebody, look, we're going to get you up and get you back safely.
And in the meantime, you're going to be in a safe environment.
And you're going to take a cruise around the moon and back.
Around the moon and back?
That's right.
You're talking about a cruise ship, if you will, which is almost a half mile across, accommodating 100 passengers, 50 crew.
That really is a cruise ship.
A half mile across, Bob?
In order to achieve a 40% G, And not have a rotation that's greater than one revolution a minute.
Right.
The geometry figures out to where the diameter of that vehicle on a rotational basis, the diameter of that vehicle has to be about a half a mile across.
Wow!
People would have staterooms, as I've been on many cruises myself, so it'd be like a stateroom in a cruise ship.
A couple of people per room, that sort of thing.
You would have a cubicle that would have a portal in it, a window.
Your door would access itself to a hallway.
You probably would have an adjoining cabin or two in your same module.
You would be sleeping horizontal instead of a bag hanging from a wall.
When you drop your slippers to the floor at night, they will fall to the floor.
They won't go to the ceiling.
And so you're going to have an environment that's very, very similar, including the food and all that sort of thing that you would have on a cruise ship.
Except you'd only weigh 40% of what you normally weigh, right?
That's right.
You'd have a window?
You would have a window.
There would be other places on board, Art, that would have massive systems, rooms that
There would be other places on board, Art, that would have massive systems that would
you would stand in that would have massive screens that are projecting a view from telescopes
and optical equipment outside the craft so that you would have an environment where you
are feeling that you are able to not just not just be limited to what you see out of a porthole out
of your little cabin, but there would be other facilities on board that would take you into
deep space telescopically.
Wow.
So the trip for the passenger would probably be what, about six days, and it would be like
There would be music, there'd be dancing, there'd be, as you just pointed out, the ability to look into deep space as you're on your way to the moon.
That's right.
The first day would probably be an orientation.
You've already been pre-orientated prior to this on the ground, but then there's going to be another orientation to the craft, to all the non-sensitive areas and to even the sick bay and parts of the bridge and that kind of thing.
The maritime technology is quite adaptable to space language.
I mean, the maritime language is transferable nicely.
And so we really have a society who's substantially, in very large numbers, used to taking cruises, used to the language, used to certain kinds of accommodations and that sort of thing.
And they like to be going someplace, not just traveling in a circle, not just on a treadmill.
You want to be going.
You want to be part of the first of mankind, out of six billion people that we have on the planet today, of being part of that You can come quite low to the moon.
to take a significant expedition someplace.
Oh my God.
And do it safely.
That's significant, all right, to the moon.
How close would this hotel come?
I'm not good at orbital mechanics.
How close would this hotel come to the moon at the closest point?
You can come quite low to the moon.
I think the Apollo craft came within about 10 or 15 miles or something of the surface.
I believe it was quite close.
Wow.
So you could shine lights.
You wouldn't have to.
You could be environmentally safe and not deploy flares and that sort of thing onto the surface and contaminate it.
You could light up the backside through powerful beams so people could see all of the thousands of craters on the backside of the moon.
And really enjoy what that looks like as you're coming around.
Oh my God.
Bob, $10,000 per pound for the shuttle, $2,000 the Russians are doing now.
When it approaches, what, about $500 and some odd dollars, it then becomes, what you're talking about right now, then becomes financially feasible?
Roughly $550 a pound for cargo and around $800 to $850 a pound Uh, for, for people is, is a flashpoint.
Those numbers are a flashpoint.
Don't forget.
You, you have, you have the launching of all the components of the cruise ship.
You have, uh, expense in EVA work or robotic, uh, uh, assembly that has to be done in orbit.
So you have huge costs initially in fabricating and assembling the craft in the first place.
Then it has to be torn down, broken apart and launched piece by piece.
Then it has to be reassembled in orbit again.
So you have launch costs connected to that.
Then you have the launch costs connected to a regular business operation where you are
moving people and supplies on a constant basis.
You also would have other facilities.
You might have other kinds of warehouse stations and supply facilities like that that would
probably be a precursor to this kind of spacecraft so that you would gain a lot of experience
in deploying those kinds of systems before you did the space cruise ship.
This is incredible.
How long have you been thinking about this?
Well, since, gee, I'm almost embarrassed to say I really just decided at the beginning
of this year to do it and once I realized what the vacuum was and how things dovetailed
and fit together and the fact that basically there are two business domains that make the
most sense to do this.
One is the cruise ship industry, the terrestrial cruise ship industry, because they are self-contained,
stand-alone systems that deal with large expenditures.
They contract for large amounts of things and they are used to marketing and they are
used to handling people.
The other is people who build large stuff, general contractors and builders, believe
it or not, is the other category of people who are used to abiding by legal constraints
and federal requirements, spending large sums of money, engaging lots of people for massive
projects that are reaching into the billions of dollars.
So you are used to having people who are self-contained and you are used to having people who are
Having to expeditiously judiciously spend money Organize people for a common goal and those are the two
industries that people in the aerospace field say Fit this kind of thing best. Well if we apply it to
industry and construction and all the things that you know It's still true. Isn't it that the way to get rich or the
way to become successful is to find a vacuum
Find a need and fill it. Yeah except for one thing Usually the first people out of the box doing that get killed financially.
I mean, history hasn't been kind to the first makers of whatever.
Then, I hope you don't mind, but the obvious question to you is, you're preparing to do this.
You're not just talking about this now.
You're preparing to do it.
You're preparing to put...
How much money into the beginning acorn planting the seed effort here to do this?
Well, I am prepared to commit $500 million over the next 15 years in this experiment as seed money in order to see if something can be accomplished.
We will be very willing to joint venture with other companies.
We are on a weekly basis establishing new friendships and relationships with other people
who have the same kind of passion.
It has been sort of that people are waiting for someone to kind of make the first move.
Well, you just finished saying to me that the guy who makes the first move in this kind
of arena usually gets clobbered.
Are you prepared to get clobbered?
I am.
I am financially willing to risk that kind of money over 15 years, and in seeing what we can accomplish, I think I would hate to look back and regret that I hadn't given it a real try.
Well, that's something to try, all right.
So, quietly, I guess, up until this moment that it's now public, you have been making Behind the scenes relationships with the people that you would have to make them with in the aerospace industry, people in that industry, right?
That's correct.
So you're already fairly far along in that arena?
I think we are for the short time that we have been hiring people and been involved in putting this together.
I think we're making some important strides, yes.
We have a link, actually a couple of links on my website, to a couple of your websites.
I've got a lot of details on this incredibly exciting hotel cruise ship that you're planning, and is there a place on either one of these links, or will there be shortly, where people can read about the kinds of things that we're talking about tonight?
What it would be like?
And you do really have quite a few specifics here.
I'm not familiar.
My vice president of spacecraft development handles our web page and I'm not able to advise you as to what to access on that.
I can tell you this, we've designed a building 90,000 square foot building.
60,000 square feet is shop floor space and 30,000 square feet of it is office space.
It will be located here in Las Vegas.
It will be our headquarters.
Really?
And this building is a really fun building.
We designed it to look like a spacecraft.
I mean, so what else is new?
But it's not your usual rectangular, boring aerospace building.
You know, with your aircraft hangar ceilings.
So it's going to be a really fun building, and part of our whole purpose in this is to engage the public.
We're going to be doing a lot of modeling work and crafting work.
We are a research and development company, general contracting company, but we hope to find ways to bring the general public Tour-wise, through that building, maybe on weekends or something, so... A little taste of what it might be like?
Sort of.
As we go along, we want to show people that what we're doing is for you.
Hold on, Bob.
We'll be right back.
I'm Bigelow, and he's a man who's prepared to put a half billion dollars toward putting this incredible, incredible thing in orbit that would carry us, a hotel, Do you understand what we're talking about here, folks?
Here's a doctor that I happen to know in Southern California who writes to Robert, Hey Art, remember that movie titled Spaceballs?
something like that how they advertise cruises really the nautical uh...
uh... parallel is a very very good one do you understand what we're talking about here folks uh...
here's a doctor that i happen to know in southern california who writes to
robert they aren't remember that movie titled spaceballs
bigelow's got em All I want is a room with a view.
Sign me up.
I'm getting a lot of faxes like that, Bob.
In other words, I don't think there'd be any lack of people moneyed enough to absolutely go on that trip.
Include me, by the way, in that right away.
I mean, I'm absolutely certain there's a market for this.
And apparently you are too.
Take me through it a little bit.
You'd spend a week on the ground getting used to what you were about to do, sort of in training as it were, and then you would get in some kind of craft and you would leave earth.
Yeah, well, let's go back to the ground experience first because this expense is going to be so sizable that it's a one in a lifetime thing for relatively few people.
Depending upon the size of the craft, whether it's maybe 1,000 or 2,000 tons, for example,
is going to cause a variation in what the overall expense can be.
Let's just say from a rough guess parameter standpoint, it's going to run somewhere between
$350,000 to maybe as much as $700,000 a ticket.
So let's land on maybe the half million dollar number that you said before happens to be
kind of in the middle.
And for the sake of conversation, let's just use that number in today's dollars.
We know this.
We know that it isn't going to work if it's in the millions of dollars.
We know that it isn't going to be practical for people to think that it's going to cost $30,000 or $40,000 in today's money.
So the half million dollar number has to be close and in the ballpark of feasibility.
All right.
It is.
It is, Bob.
It is.
This country has a great deal of wealth in it, as you well know, and there's a lot of medium wealth out there.
So it's really, to go to the moon, Bob, that's in the price range of a lot of people.
So you start out with going to a facility.
I feel that this is such an important step for anybody, that they'll want to have friends or family to be able to be partially involved in this experience with
them up to the point of launch.
So you would need a facility where they can go to as perhaps a standard type of hotel facility
for these guests of yours as you're a passenger to be at for the week to 10 day orientation period
that's going to be customized.
customized for that passenger.
So you could have some member of your family or members experience a portion of what you
are about to do?
Right.
You would be able to see them, visit with them each day, go over what has been going
on with that day.
They would be contagious.
They would see you dressed in certain kinds of clothing that would be, you see, this is
a situation where everybody's bags and luggage and clothing stays at the door.
You would be handed everything for safety reasons and a variety of other kinds of reasons.
You would be handled everything from hygienic products to clothing that you wear and so forth at the time that you begin this process.
But there would be ways to incorporate the telling of your orientation experience and so forth with your friends and family.
Now the orientation experience is going to involve a lot of instruction about what to expect.
You'll probably be staying in a facility that is an exact replica on the ground of the entire station, or at least a significant portion of the station, so that you're used to the room and accommodations.
You'll be eating the same kinds of foods.
You'd get a detailed orientation of the ship, how it was constructed, why it's safe, what the safety systems are, what the backup systems are, why this kind of thing is not a Titanic in the making, how you can evacuate in case of an emergency, and how you can get everybody off the ship.
So all these kinds of things would be crafted so that the passenger is comforted knowing that this is something that's user-friendly for him.
But it's yet going to be a very unique experience.
Again, Bob, that's just like a cruise ship.
When you get on a cruise ship, the first thing you do before they let you do nearly anything else is this drill where you put on your life jacket and you go out to the deck and you all line up and you answer to your name and you know what to do in case there's a problem.
So it's like that, isn't it?
That's right.
That's right.
The launch is important, both in the launch and the retrieval.
Launching industry has to have a craft that probably doesn't subject a person to much more than 3Gs.
Now, 3Gs is typical for aircraft carriers.
It's not that bad, and I'll tell you, I was at Knott's Berry Farm a few weeks ago, and I took a ride on the new Ghost Rider that they have there that's a roller coaster.
And that's a 3.14 G experience.
Really?
Yes.
And for how long would you imagine somebody would have to pull, say, 3 G's or a little less?
I don't know exactly.
The parameters for flight time, I think, are within 20 minutes, but that necessarily doesn't, because you get to a point of weightlessness after a certain point, and the The G-Impact is going to be for a time that's less than that because it's going to vary from the launch to your destination.
So it's not going to be that difficult.
But three G's is not that bad.
It's not something at all where a person passes out by any means.
Like a roller coaster?
There are all kinds of amusement rides in this country and other countries that subject people to those kinds of forces and even greater.
All right.
Then there would have to be at least some minimal I would assume that you would have your prospective passengers examined by a doctor so that we know that their heart isn't going to fail with a little extra... Well, there are at least two major things to answer the question as to who qualifies to go.
Right.
The first obvious one is, well, gee, somebody who has the money is the first biggie.
Sure.
Uh, they're going to have to, for their own protection and the protection of other people, they're going to have to satisfy psychological testing and profiles as well as biomedical physiological testing.
So, sort of a smaller astronaut.
You want to be able to be sure that you understand what they might be allergic to so that any
foods would not be served to them or you wouldn't want to give somebody an aspirin if they were
allergic to that.
So all of those kinds of things have to be known beforehand.
There would be an extensive survey that someone who were an applicant would fill out and then
that isn't taken out.
At face value, that is going to be completely redone again once the person checks into the orientation program.
Here's another thing.
I'm sure you've flown a lot.
I've flown a lot.
Every time I fly, Bob, I get sick because some damn fool gets on an airplane with the flu and they're sneezing and coughing and hacking all the way to Chicago or New York and by the, you know, a few days go by and there you are, down with the same thing.
That's right.
So imagine not only contagion for the other crew members, it's important to prevent that, but imagine somebody Uh, saving up and borrowing that kind of money for a once-in-a-lifetime effort only to be sick in their room for an entire experience.
Barfing all the way to the moon and back?
That would be terrible.
It'd be awful.
So you would not include the group with the flu?
And that's one of the major reasons that we haven't hesitated to disregard the zero G alternative because there are people that are susceptible to sickness in a weightless environment.
Sure.
15 or 20 percent at least.
And there are drugs that mitigate that, but who wants to be dopey during the entire experience?
So there would be some qualifying, but it wouldn't be as severe as the regimen that NASA puts its astronauts through.
For example, you, Bob.
You're a year older than I am.
Would you be eligible to go if it was today?
Physiologically, I think I would.
I don't know whether I'm crazy or not.
Maybe I would flunk my psychological profile.
We're talking about average people.
I would be, theoretically, we are talking about average people, not talking about putting
somebody through that has some sort of heart problems or other kinds of serious problems.
There is, however, a bright spot to this that really is unknown that may be very encouraging
for people medically.
And that is this, all of the biomedical information that we have data on today up to this point
time is on zero-g environments.
We really have no data as to the biomedical benefits on a partial G environment, such as a 40% G, where people are not ambulatory here under a full G environment, but they may be much more ambulatory in a 40% G environment.
So it may be that there are other kinds of things that we don't know about that could be of significant benefit.
So that is just out there as a potential hopeful saying that maybe you can find ways to aid
and help people in that kind of partial weightless environment that otherwise wouldn't be possible.
Could a healthy person, for example, in their mid-60s qualify and go?
Oh, well, gosh, you know, one of the great things about John Glenn's flight was that
First of all, that guy was 77 years old at the time.
He's probably had a birthday maybe since then.
Good point!
You know, he's 77 years old.
And I think that was one of the best things that has come along in a long time.
So we can say, oh my gosh, if he can do it, I can do it too.
And in many cases, Bob, after all, Those are the people that would have the kind of resources it would take to go buy a ticket, right?
That's right.
Probably, in terms of individuals, a great bulk of the potential applicants are going to be people who are a little older, because one, they have managed to save their money, and two, they're going to say to themselves, you know, I'd like to do something Maybe just wild and crazy once in my life.
Yes.
And this is it.
I've saved up all my life and I know I'm going to leave my heirs well enough off and so forth and so on.
And I'm going to do that.
You might also have a situation where a grandma or great grandma decides to do something for the granddaughter or grandson and have that kind of situation.
So it's going to be probably older people are the ones with the money.
They're going to be making some of these decisions.
And I must be getting older because I can't imagine.
I really can't imagine.
A fairly well-to-do person spending their money on anything better ever in their whole life.
Ever!
I mean, that would be to be able to go within 10 miles of the moon to watch the Earth disappear, to watch the moon approaching, to know you're going to be skimming 10 or 15 miles off the surface of the moon.
That's so exciting that It's hard for me to even talk about it without, you know, it's like I'm ready to write you a check.
Alright, so let's say we get up there.
What are their days on this hotel going to be like?
I mean, what is the environment going to be like?
Well, the first thing is to consider the comfort of the passengers.
You have to They would be, in the orientation process, they would be among some of the crew members because you'd be launching some of the crew for rotational purposes at the same time that you're rotating your passengers.
So if you have a six-day situation, for example, you're launching perhaps two vehicles that carry 60 people apiece in order to get, let's say, a theoretical 100-passenger number and maybe 15 crew.
And that 15 crew is only a fraction of the 50 crew that typically, let's say, is on board for full operations.
Ah, so there'd be a rotational crew thing?
Yeah, you want to do that for R&R purposes and so on and basically rotate everybody, say, over a period of a month.
The crew is completely rotated out.
And so the first day would probably be an orientation.
It'd be a launch and docking and orientation and kind of a resting and a
situation where you are trying to get acclimated and comfortable to a very new and strange
experience, but one where you have been told what to expect, you know where things are, you
know when you are going to eat and where you are going to eat and what the food is going to be
and now you are really excited because it is actually happening.
So excited Bob that I can't imagine where in that six days would you sleep.
I wouldn't fall asleep.
I'd want to find something that would keep me awake the whole time for fear of missing.
I mean, sleeping on an event of that sort is almost unimaginable, but I guess you would do it.
Probably.
Wouldn't you imagine that some of the videocassettes, like 2001 Space Odyssey, would be pretty popular on board?
Well, how about the real thing, as in calling home from halfway to the moon?
That's right.
Oh, my God.
Oh, that's important.
Absolutely.
Those kinds of things would be very important as part of the overall program for you to call back home and tell them where you are.
And that would have to be available throughout the whole trip.
The backside of the moon would be the only time it should be blocked from making those kind of calls.
And there's no extra technology that has to be discovered to allow that to occur, even right now, correct?
There really isn't.
That's exactly right.
There really isn't.
We have the technology through the Transhab inflatable systems.
And the hard modules of the International Space Station type configuration to make it happen today.
We are very close.
We're within sniffing distance of the kinds of engines without gimbals that reduce the kind of weight that like the Venture Star will have in order to make the repetitive kind of ROV, the reusable launch vehicles that we need.
Well, you're not leaving part of your craft behind and dropping it in the ocean.
That's terribly important for cost.
Oh, brother.
Bob, hold on.
The clock is just... We're never going to have enough time to get all this out, so we're going to try and press through information as quickly as we can coming up.
I'm Art Bell.
Mike, there we are.
We've spent our first day getting oriented, doing whatever you do, kind of like on a cruise ship.
But the second day, the second day, The real cruise begins, I guess.
And a trans-lunar injection.
Right.
A trans-lunar injection.
So, in other words, engines would fire that would take this craft, this cruise ship, this space cruise ship, from its orbit around Earth toward the moon.
What kind of burn would there be and what would people experience?
Well, you would experience an increase in gravity because you're pushing, so you're going to have some kind of an increase in force against yourself.
The duration of the burn depends on your amount of fuel consumption.
There's a dramatic I wouldn't think so.
occurs depending upon how fast you are trying to accelerate yourself.
If you are looking at a two day trip over and a two day trip back, that is not so bad.
But there is a disproportionate amount of consumption of fuel if, for example, you wanted
to cut it to one day.
And so it is not pro-rata.
I wouldn't think so.
In other words, two days to get there I would think would be too fast for me.
So you would have a burn that would probably cause you to, when you start to leave Earth
orbit, you would be in the grip of the moon's pull, close proximity to the moon, within
two days or maybe a day and three quarters, something of that sort.
Oh, Jesus.
So, during this time, during these two days, the Earth would be getting smaller, I guess, and smaller.
That's what all the astronauts experienced when they went to the moon, right?
And the moon would slowly grow larger and larger and larger.
That's right.
You know, the idea would be to have so many things for people to do that when you finish this experience, you'd want to find some way to try and do it again.
For example, I don't know about you, but I think music is a big part of everybody's life.
Of course it is.
Can you imagine the kinds of ways that you could incorporate music into that kind of experience?
Oh, I sure can.
Dancing is important to be able to have situations where you're going to have a lot of the same kinds of enjoyments that you would on a cruise ship.
I think also there would be a strong interest from people who would be interested in having crew give classes on astronomy and cosmology and really getting into detail as to what's going on around them and describing in detail the moon that they're about to see and expanding on that through different kinds of lectures that you might have during the day.
Of course, going through the craft itself, being told exactly how everything works and why this is the way it is and how it was built and going through all that again.
Well, when you go on a cruise ship, Bob, they'll allow you occasionally to go to the engine room.
They have tours to the engine room.
That's right.
Tours to the control deck, you know, where everything There are lots of things.
Right now we're just in a very, very embryonic stage of art, of even trying to craft what this overall experience is like.
And it also could be described, they might describe to you the next generation of ship
that is under construction or under design.
So there are lots of things.
Right now we are just in a very, very embryonic stage of art of even trying to craft what
this overall experience is like.
Our focus and concentration is on trying to make it affordable within some kind of reason,
certainly trying to make it safe and trying to make it user friendly so that a person
when they exit that experience they would love to do it again.
On the third day you'd be in lunar orbit now.
How long would you actually roughly be able to observe the moon or be close enough so that you'd be having the moon experience?
Well, presumably you could rotate multiple times.
I don't see why not.
I don't see why it would just be a one-shot of going around the backside of the moon necessarily.
I don't know.
That part of it probably needs to be fine-tuned.
I'm not able right now to tell you whether or not it ought to be a one-time rotation or a multiple rotation.
There is a certain amount of momentum you would have to break substantially before you
got to the moon, obviously, in order to maintain that close proximity.
So you have already braked for that and actually what you have done is just because you have
only powered your ship for a short duration, it is going to have to have some other braking
mechanism is going to have to occur on that ship to reverse that momentum, that inertia
that you have.
So you've done that breaking, and since you've spent that amount of fuel doing that, I would guess that you might want to say, well, gee, if it's possible, why not give people multiple rotations of the moon and maybe not just one, you know?
Right.
You know, a number of astronauts had what they described as a spiritual Yeah, absolutely.
And so there would have to be some provision, I suppose, for people to be alone for meditation.
You know, I think that's the case in space.
I really think that an experience like that, you might want to have a prayer ceremony.
You might want to hit so special at some point in that cruise, maybe in the time that you reach lunar orbit, that you You may probably go through something that's similar to what all the astronauts describe.
It becomes very spiritual, like you say.
It's something very special and very spiritual.
And you really are convinced this could happen in our lifetimes?
We can do this?
Oh, I am.
I am.
I've had other people tell me so.
I mean, I've talked to rocket scientists until they're coming out my ears.
Absolutely.
Do they encourage you?
Do they want to be on board?
I noticed, by the way, I went to one of your websites and I noticed that you have an employment area.
Right.
So what kind of people are you looking for now?
Are you hiring aerospace people who are unemployed?
Are you looking for development stage people?
What are you looking for?
Our short-term employment engagement right now is focused on two or three categories in general.
One is we are putting together two design teams, and these are populated by people with mixed backgrounds.
Usually they're from the aerospace community, of course.
There are people that are also from the extreme environmental architecture community, and there are people who are also industrial designers.
The industrial designer types make things user-friendly.
So that you don't have a 40 pound telephone.
Sure.
The other groups of people that populate the design teams have diverse backgrounds.
So you have somebody that's on a team that's really proficient in structures and somebody else in communication systems and life safety systems and all kinds of other parts of what you're concerned about.
The fun part of crafting the actual designs itself We're always going to be concerned about designing something that fits the launch capabilities and the configuration of spatially of the launchers of the moment.
So what we do tomorrow is going to be dictated by the kind of launch facilities that are out there today.
What we do five years will be dictated by what's available right then.
So that if it's possible at any one point in time that those launch costs per pound get down to those levels we discussed earlier, Then we have something that we're ready to go into production with.
And we're going to be willing to function a couple of different ways.
We're willing to be operators.
We're willing to be joint venture partners.
We're willing to lease or sell what it is we make.
So all of the above.
We're very flexible in what we're trying to do.
Hotel chains.
Cruise ship lines.
Companies of that sort would be intensely interested in a project of this sort.
And I would imagine these are probably the partners you're after, aren't they?
I think so.
I think at the appropriate time when they can explain to their shareholders why they
are taking the risk they are, and probably after somebody like us has already gone a
substantial distance down this risk road and we've already trial and errored it in terms
of designing and going back and forth with full mock-ups and actually mocking up with
real hardware, then I think at a certain point where our credibility can prove muster, then
we are entitled to probably get the interest of diverse companies that are publicly traded
who will be in the market for different aspects of this kind of thing.
Even companies as a status symbol, for example, if you did something on a smaller scale and
had a vehicle that would be kind of like a personalized yacht for a status symbol for
a major corporation, they could use that for experimental purposes if it were E.I.
Lilly or other companies for manufacturing, but also to have maybe as a status symbol
as well as something that is business practical.
There's multiple offshoots of this.
It's almost beyond imagination.
I mean, you just start down the road and you see opportunity everywhere.
It's amazing.
How do you suppose that the present aerospace establishment is going to greet what you want to do?
Well, so far it's been positive, Art.
I've been really pleased that so far I haven't stepped on many toes.
Space News did a good article on us and we've been interviewed by some other reporters for newspapers, but so far it's been very, very positive.
Buzz Aldrin was very positive and other astronauts that we've talked to and have said so publicly.
Now circling back for just one second to our first hour conversation, if There are things flitting about out there that are not necessarily ours.
And, as you pointed out, there's been almost no private effort in space.
I mean, our American dollars have gone to NASA, and it's been all NASA.
So, if there are things out there, I would think that a vacation, as you have described, an opportunity to go around the moon, to the moon and around and around and then back, Well, you never know what people might see out there, Bob.
Have you had any of that?
In other words, you told me that aerospace people are talking a lot about this.
So if it's out there, your passengers would see it.
Well, they certainly would have a good chance to.
Is that where you might begin to get some opposition?
In other words, at some point in your venture, you're going to find out Well, there's probably a more practical thing aside from all kinds of other potential challenges.
I think from an American standpoint, I think if America doesn't start to get itself together in a much more vigorous way, either through private means or some other means, I think there's a chance in the next decade or so that a foreign country or two could... You bet.
...could do what Russia did to us in 1957.
Yeah, and that country would be China.
And they almost... Russia came within a hair.
People don't realize how close Russia came to beating us to the moon.
They came within just months.
It was a very short period of time.
And then they didn't do it.
But they had already orbited people before we did, closer to the moon than we did, and they had a, you know, the Russian people can be
extremely proud of their programs because they've had a huge chain of successes and we were just nip
and tuck in getting there first.
But, you know, there's some really good scientists in a lot of other countries and
they're working on really good systems.
The Long March rocket that the Chinese are putting together, they're saying that they're going to put people in space in a couple years.
Bob, I went to China a couple of years ago, Hong Kong, then on up into Communist China, Canton and so forth, and it scared the hell out of me.
I had never seen so much commerce in my whole life.
It was like seeing America in the early industrial days.
I mean, it was scary.
Bob Crane, a good friend of mine, just went to China last week, and he said, if you thought it was scary then, you should see it now.
And, of course, China... If we don't get on the move, China... The only thing we're going to be able to do is join them, because they're going to go racing past us like we're standing still.
They're really moving.
Yeah.
And I'd rather see us do it.
I'd really rather see us do it.
I think...
Desire is probably the most powerful thing that anybody can have.
You don't want to have a situation where the desire in the heart isn't there by one group and yet it's facing another group who has tremendous heart and tremendous desire.
There are two questions.
One is, what can people do?
To help see to it that this happens.
Right now, we're just not making any private efforts, but here you are with one.
Is there anything politically that has to occur?
Absolutely.
What?
People should contact their senators and their congressmen and speak out for the privatization of the American Space Program.
Absolutely.
In other words, screeching that NASA live up to its mandate.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
NASA's budget has dropped enormously since the heady days of the Apollo program because they didn't have any vision in mind after 72.
And so as a result of that, they're down to about $14 billion.
Now, a lot of people think that the percentage of money that is spent on the nation's aerospace program is a huge percentage of our national It is not.
It's very tiny.
You know, it's only about two-thirds of one percent.
Wow.
Is all that it is.
But that's not the problem.
The problem is that it is not being even spent efficiently.
And so really what needs to happen is that Congress needs to be pushed by the public
for NASA to privatize itself.
The private community, there are so many good aerospace companies right now in America that
can do such a better, much more better job than NASA can on almost anything that is pathetic.
And that's really the sorry thing about it.
If government were doing things even half as efficiently right now as the private sector, our taxes would be almost, compared to what we pay now, non-existent.
They're just grossly inefficient.
Here's kind of a technical question for you, and it's an obvious one.
NASA had concern when we sent our astronauts to the moon about radiation.
And of course, our sun's been sort of jumpy lately with a lot of M and X class flares.
A number of people are faxing and asking how would people be protected?
Have you addressed that at all?
Well, yeah, that's a major concern.
You have background galactic radiation all the time.
You have solar flare, solar particle events periodically.
Now those solar particle events run in cycles and are somewhat predictable and they can be forecast between an hour or several hours in advance and they can be pretty dramatic.
The ideal situation would be to have a shield design that provided everybody with the kind of protection that
you get at sea level.
That means that you get 1.8 millisieverts per day and you can sustain an awful lot of
that during your lifetime.
In order to achieve that, 1.8 millisieverts per day at sea level takes about five meters
of water.
In theory, water is a good insulation medium.
There are others also, but water can do double duty.
You need water for a lot of different reasons.
Water is a good envelope to shield yourself with.
In a practical sense, that could work.
And that way, crews especially, we're most concerned about crew because they're going to be up there far longer than a passenger would, obviously.
Sure.
So, from the crew standpoint, you want to be able to have people have safe careers, not just do this.
The astronaut community would be a big source of potential human resources for crew members Because they've been there and done that to a degree and they also bring the kind of professionalism with them that you would want to see.
That's not to say that crews would be exclusively astronauts, not by any means.
No, but it would begin that way.
It would begin that way and be populated by some of those people.
So would be populated by other people from a lot of other domains of professionalism.
But you want to make sure that it's safe.
So you want to have plenty of protection so that people could do a lot of trips and not have any kind of radiation exposure.
And you're saying that is possible?
Yes, it is.
Absolutely.
We're already at the top of the hour.
So I always ask my guests, one more hour, Bob?
Well, I'll just throw, instead of drinking this bottle of water I've got here, I'm going to start pouring it on my head.
We'll see you in a moment.
Listen to me.
There's a headline in the program you're hearing this morning, and it is a private entrepreneur prepares to take regular people like you, like me, to the moon.
Maybe not initially everybody, and there'll be people who can't afford it, but it's going to be in a category where a lot of people can.
And where, I guess, you know, when you get to a certain age and there would be no better place you could place your money, would there?
Than getting an opportunity to leave Earth, go around the moon, perhaps several times, and return to Earth.
How else would you better spend your money?
Is there a market?
Oh, you bet there's a market.
So, once again, here's Bob Bigelow.
I do have one more question, and then I really would like to go to the phones and have people ask you questions.
You fund nids.
I interview a lot of people from nids from time to time, fortunately, and I'm kind of interested to ask you, Bob, what Well, about a year and a half ago we decided that it was time to outreach more and not be so private because we were trying to formulate the
The future path of what we're going to do.
Anyway, about a year and a half ago we decided to become more public so we started our web page and we started doing some direct contact on a fairly large scale basis to ranchers and groups of veterinarians and those kinds of people.
Possibly some other changes to occur that might be substantial even before this year is out.
And those changes are focused on getting more reports, expanding our investigations in volume, and expanding our forensic research.
Of course, we're We're always interested in cases that are more of the close encounter type.
They are more meaningful than things that are seen in a distance.
And for quite some time those kinds of cases, things that are kind of in your face type
of events are the kind that we appreciate the most.
Bob, you commissioned a survey recently, a very, very interesting survey that I just
talked and talked and talked about.
And one aspect of that survey was that, and I believe these were fairly intelligent, high
end, fairly fluent Americans that were surveyed.
And it was a big sample size too because the accuracy rate was extremely good.
So it must have been a good sample.
And you asked one question, for example, If the government was aware of extraterrestrial presence, do you think they would hide it?
And 8 out of 10, 80% of the American people surveyed, presumably a representative sample, said absolutely yes.
So, just for the sake of the conversation that we're having, with what you're planning to do, Bob, at some point during this project, as you push ahead, You're probably going to find out, aren't you, whether something is being hidden?
Well, my own personal opinion that it is.
But there's a difference between who's doing the hiding and what the perception is about our leadership and our elected officials' role in that.
My personal opinion is that our By and large, 99% of our elected officials' role in that is negligible.
They don't know.
They don't have access.
I'm sure you're correct.
Otherwise, we'd all know.
Because they're blabbermouths.
But if there is any group of people that is holding this information to themselves, at some point in your project, you're going to run right into them, aren't you?
Not necessarily, Art.
Not necessarily.
I think the psychosocial impact or potential impact is extremely serious and very, very important.
I think if our leadership in this country were to feel comfortable about really taking the initiative Then they would do so.
And I think part of the problem here is that we spoke earlier about the embarrassment that they feel as to why they remain in the closet.
They're interested, but they are very fearful of taking the initiative.
And the other aspect of it is the general public is probably more up to speed on this topic than a lot of our elected people are.
So it's almost a grassroots type of thing.
I think the more the phenomena exposes itself, Bob, are you prepared to start talking to other media about this?
Obviously, there are going to be inquiries.
People are going to want to do stories.
People are going to want to talk to you.
Bob, are you prepared to start talking to other media about this?
Obviously there are going to be inquiries.
People are going to want to do stories.
People are going to want to talk to you.
This is no small matter, no small endeavor.
They're going to want to talk to you.
Are you prepared or is your organization prepared to begin to deal with the public relations aspect of what you're planning?
It's a pretty big thing.
Well, we are.
I suspect that what's going to happen in the short run is that there is a high degree of interest in something like this that's so unique and then it will subside and die down to where we can get to work.
And not be consumed by a lot of reporters and that.
So there's good and bad.
The good part is that I think it's good news.
I think it's stimulative and that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to say, boy, we want to stir the pot and we want to try and make something happen.
And we want to make it happen within some reasonable period of time and not take lifetimes to do it.
On the other hand, there is a limit to how much energy and time you want to devote to
telling a story.
I think after a while the story gets repetitive.
And we want to get to the serious job of trying to make it happen.
Doing it.
That's right.
Of actually doing it.
That's right.
If you pressed ahead and you didn't encounter tremendous obstacles and you were able to get the aerospace people and the partnerships you'd require and so on and so on, what's realistic in terms of a timetable?
We have technology now that can make this happen.
I know.
We're missing a launch vehicle that unfortunately has never, the average citizen has never been given a thought.
So we don't have a launch vehicle in this country or in any other country at the moment that can handle ordinary people.
And of any volume especially because the space shuttle handles seven or eight people and that's it.
So the big thing right now that's so potentially explosive is if we can get a reusable launch vehicle that can drive that dollar cost per pound down to acceptable levels.
And at that point, then this is going to spawn an industry that you won't believe.
Because it isn't just going to be ourselves.
It'll be dancing.
So at that point, yeah, everything takes off on its own.
That's right.
Gotcha.
All right.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Robert Bigelow.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello there.
Hi.
I'm Bill from Spokane.
Hi, Bill.
You know, what you propose is very interesting, and I think that it's really the natural progression of going into space and all that.
But you've been talking a lot about aliens and UFOs and all that.
There are many in the ufology field that feel like
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