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April 13, 2000 - Art Bell

02:39:26

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - James Oberg - NASA Space Missions and Soviet Disasters

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37:43

james oberg

01:15:12

peter davenport

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		Welcome to Arch Bell Somewhere in Time.
unidentified		Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 13th, 2000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours, commercially heard from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands.
		Virgin Islands, I'll get to South America, north, all the way to the Poland, worldwide on the internet.
		Tower number one, two, report, directly ahead.
		Tower number two, over here.
		What's going on?
		We have a lot of things to do.
		We have a lot of things to say, actually.
		So it's going to be a very, very interesting night.
		All of that gets underway after a brief pause.
unidentified		All of that gets underway after a brief pause.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here comes my old friend Peter Davenport from the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, where it's always busy.
		And, you know, when something is really happening, when it's happening in the now, Peter Davenport is a guy who usually gets a call.
		He's got a hotline up there.
		He's got a website up for you to give reports.
		It's a kind of a place that concentrates the kind of reports that we want to hear about here, and he's done it once again.
		From Seattle, Washington, here is Peter Davenport.
		Hi, Peter.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Good evening, Art.
		I think we have a couple interesting programs for our listeners tonight.
		One during the first half hour, a case that happened actually about four and a half years ago that we're going to revisit tonight, I hope, because we have a very interesting guest who's done some wonderful, wonderful investigation, UFO investigator from Texas.
		And I think we have some neat, fresh, new information about a really dramatic case that happened about four and a half years ago.
		The second half hour, of course, some more recent information, a sighting that occurred over Oregon just about two nights ago.
		So I think we have some interesting material for our listeners.
		This first half hour, you know, one of the frustrating things of the programs we do is we touch on a case and then because of how fast these cases oftentimes come in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It gets on to the next thing.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we go skittering off to the next subject and we never get to fully resolve, nail down one of these cases, which is counter to my nature because my friends observe that on the rare occasions when I'm seen in a three-piece suit, they note that I'm wearing not only suspenders, but a belt as well.
		That's my nature.
		I like to nail things down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know what I'd like to see, Peter?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'd like to see a UFO land, a saucer maybe, I don't care where, and a whole team rush out with a big net and nail that bastard down to the ground, you know, and then just invite the press in and say, here you go, story over, here they are.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Do to it what we did to the MiG-25 on December 76.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Disassemble it, inspect it, reassemble it, and hand it back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		That's what I'd like to do, too.
		But to set the stage tonight, I know we have a guest standing by from Texas here.
		It's pretty late out there.
		What I'd like to do to set the stage is replay a short 40-second audio cut.
		This came in to us five minutes after the incident occurred over western Pennsylvania, Adamsville, Pennsylvania, up in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania.
		This is a report that came to us, one of many from Pennsylvania, from a young woman who just stepped out of her car and she saw this blue, flickering, perfectly circular ball of light go streaking across the sky.
		Let me play this and then we'll go to our guest out in the colony, Texas, and let her give us the rest of the story.
		Here we are, Adamsville.
		This is the early morning hours of the 25th of August, 1995, the same day that Windows 95 was being released out here in Seattle.
		Here we go.
unidentified		this is what happened over pennsylvania four and a half years ago but i have a little bit of a lot of job right and i don't know that i have a lot of people get back and i looked at the time the entire time with like a white blue like daytime And the entire sky turned really light colored blue.
		So all of a sudden this big white, oh, yeah, a big ball of white light and behind it was like this orange flame stuff.
		And it just shot across the sky like really fast.
		And then all of a sudden it disappeared.
		It even had a statue.
		It kind of like kind of went like boom like that here and then it just died out.
		It lit up the entire sky.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		What time did this occur?
unidentified		It just happened like five minutes ago.
		It was like 1240 our time.
		Mom says about 10 seconds.
		It was going from north to south.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Now that was the first call we got on this incident, the first of many.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Had it been east to west, I'd said maybe that was a late delivery of 95 to Gates.
unidentified		Yeah.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		They were just folding their tents out here in Redmond at about this time that this event occurred.
		But the object was a fireball.
		We got a report days later that it had stopped in an empty valley very close to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
		But that's not part of our story tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It had stopped?
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		It stopped and hovered.
		And if we have time later in the program, I might play a few seconds of that report from a professional race car driver.
		But what I would like to focus on tonight with our guest who is standing by is what happened earlier, just seconds before this report came to us, up over Ontario, Canada.
		And it made the news that night, and that's part of the reason we have a guest tonight.
		She captured it off CNN hours later.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		And with that, why don't we go to our guest and I'll let you introduce her.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, here she is from somewhere in Texas, I think.
		Her name is Amy Aber.
		That is a French Cajun name.
		What a wonderful combination.
		Amy, welcome to the program.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
unidentified		Hi, Peter.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Amy.
		And thanks for coming on tonight.
		This is going to be an interesting story for our listeners.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What did you see just before that report came in to Peter?
unidentified		Oh, I just saw the CNN report.
		I was just sitting there at my computer, and I caught it out of the corner of my eye, and I thought, well, you know, I'm interested in fireballs since 94, so I watched the report.
		And on the report, I noticed that there was this bright object that seemed to be streaking up to the fireball as it was coming down behind the clouds.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wait a minute, going up to the fireball?
unidentified		That's what caught my attention more than anything.
		I was watching the fireball.
		They showed the fireball coming down over what they said was Windsor in Canada.
		And they said, and you can see this bright object behind the clouds glowing, and as Peter calls it pulsing, I don't know, maybe it was exploding, and it was coming down behind the clouds.
		And what really caught my attention was there's this bright object that looks like a projectile going up from the ground towards the fireball or object as it comes down.
		And I said, well, did I see that?
		So I set my VCR to record it on the channel for News that night, KDFW Fox, out of Dallas.
		And so I videotaped it, and while I was watching the videotape, I saw that object again.
		I call it a projectile because that's what it looks like.
		It looked to me like someone was firing a missile at it.
		And so my thought was, why would anyone fire a missile at a meteor or a fireball?
		Why?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I agree with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why would anybody fire a missile at a meteor?
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		On the other hand, meteors don't stop dead cold either.
		Well, so maybe they weren't firing at a meteor.
		Was it when you see a missile, usually can you describe you saw the light of the thrust of the missile.
		Did you see anything behind it?
		A lot of times when we see missiles going up from Vandenberg, they leave a kind of a corkscrew affair behind them.
unidentified		No, this is just video footage.
		That's all.
		I live in Texas, remember.
		I live in Canada.
		So this is only on the video footage, but no, you can't really see it.
		Unless somebody wants to analyze the footage, maybe they could see it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say they ought to.
unidentified		Well, hopefully somebody will someday.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How long have you been an investigator of things of this sort?
unidentified		Officially since I was 12, but really since 1992, I started in studying UFOs, and I worked with Dr. Turner.
		Dr. Carly Turner?
		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, Dr. Turner.
unidentified		And we were associates, and we were working on abductions and stuff like that.
unidentified		And now I'm sort of more into the nuts and bolts aspect, more UFOs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good for you.
		That's me.
		I'd like to see one nailed down to the ground.
		So something fired at it.
		And what have you done with this footage?
		I take it you still have the footage, right?
unidentified		Right.
		Well, I tried to get some researchers interested in it, and I kept calling around and asking various people.
		And no one, you know, they just said, oh, that's mildly interesting.
		And to me, it seemed significant that this was coming down and something was firing at it.
		And then recently, I'm just cleaning out my files, and I thought, well, let's put this out on the Internet and see if anybody might need it for something, some other research.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good for you.
unidentified		So I said a copy of the information.
		I just said I had the footage to Peter and Peter said, oh.
		So he called me, and that's how Peter and I got together.
		And his investigation, together with mine, paints a much larger picture, and it's much more interesting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, listen, you've got this.
		Where is this on the Internet?
		Can I get a link to it?
unidentified		Yeah, I sent it to your webmaster.
		Okay, well, it's posted at The Vanguard.
		It's a capital T, capital V, all one word.
		.tripod.com slash FBall, F-B-A-L-L dot HTM.
		And if it makes it crash, I don't care.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's see.
unidentified		I don't have a very big website.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's all right.
unidentified		But it's got an animation of the video footage.
		I animated it, took the stills, and put them together as an animation to make it easier for downloading, for people to view it.
		And it shows the projectile object, right object that's heading up towards the alleged fireball.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I am now on a webpage entitled The Windsor Incidents.
unidentified		Okay, if you go down the bottom, it says click here for stills or footage.
		Oh, yeah, both of them have the Windsor Incident.
		Do you see the pictures or do you have the articles?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm working on getting to the photos here.
		Oh, yes.
		Yes, indeed.
		Here it comes.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		The animation is stunning.
		It leaves no doubt in the viewer of that animated video.
		The fact, you and I have talked about fireballs on many, many occasions.
		We've never talked about a fireball that apparently has something from ground level or close to it streak up away from the ground behind clouds in the distance and apparently merge with the fireball as it streaks to the south.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh my God.
		Oh, I'm seeing it now.
		I've got the animation of it now.
		And clearly, something is shot at this fireball.
		Oh, my God.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		And I hope Keith can get that to your website so you can see it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He's got it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He's already got it.
unidentified		He does.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, he doesn't have the actual animation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		With Amy's permission, though, we might be able to grab the animation and get it on the website.
unidentified		I sent it all to him.
		Peter asked me to send it to him a couple hours ago.
		I don't know if he got it in the email or not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because what's going to happen is your site is going to go down like a piece of Northern California timber.
		So, Keith, if you're out there, grab this animation.
		It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen.
		This is from Toronto, huh?
unidentified		Yes, that was shot.
unidentified		From what I gather, the original footage, what it was, was there was a TV crew Out shooting a segment for a music information segment they do.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And the spectators and people around there, the people they were interviewing, started pointing.
unidentified		And they said, oh, look, as the fireball was coming down, about to crash into the earth, and the cameraman swung his camera around and he got the footage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, this is very clear.
unidentified		But they said nothing about the bright object going up towards it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How could they not?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How could they miss that?
unidentified		I don't know.
		I don't know.
		But I got on the internet and I started asking people everywhere I could ask.
		Nobody seemed to have caught that.
		They saw the footage.
		And one person in Japan did, though.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Folks, you can see a portion of the city of Toronto very clearly.
unidentified		Oh, that's Windsor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry, Windsor, but it's aired on Toronto.
		It's T-O-R-O, whatever that is.
		It says T-O-R-O-4.
unidentified		Oh, that's the City TV?
		City TV is out of Toronto.
		Out of Toronto.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've got you.
		So Toronto did shoot it, but it occurred at Windsor.
		And what you can see is a portion of the city of Windsor, and you can see this fireball that's partially obscured by the clouds.
		And then you can see this obvious object, this light, headed straight at the fireball from ground level in animation.
		Wow.
		That's some shot you've got there, Amy.
unidentified		Well, I didn't do it.
		I just put it out there.
		I will send you a copy if you'd like.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've got a copy now.
unidentified		No, not the actual photo.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you mean?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'd love that.
unidentified		It's just, what, three or four seconds, Peter?
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Not that long.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's incredible.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		I had talked about this case as it had occurred over Pennsylvania for about four years at this point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's rare enough to catch a fireball.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But to catch this is astounding.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And then I go to Amy's website about December of last year and saw this perfectly round fireball.
		If it were still on the internet, one would think it is the full moon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, that's right.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		And the camera is looking generally to the south, I believe.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		The object is coursing away from the photographer to the south-southeast, headed across Lake Erie, and therefore headed for Pennsylvania.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was going to say, can I see reflection of water at one point in that animation in the background?
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		I believe you can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, indeed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I do see the water then.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		That may be Lake Erie in the background as the object courses across Lake Erie and down towards Pennsylvania.
		And then within seconds of this videotape, the hotline in Seattle started lighting up like a Christmas tree.
		People describing what they at first thought was a nuclear explosion over Pennsylvania.
		Combine that with the object shooting up to the fireball, and we have something for the first time, Art.
		We have not only a fireball, but a fireball with detail, and with objects apparently going up to it in the distance.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, actually, it is chasing the object.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Since the object is disappearing from the camera point, you can virtually see this thing taking off after it.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Going up and taking off after it.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that's no jet plane.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		That's what I see too.
		I played this at the UFO Congress in Laughlin.
		That's what everybody else sees.
		And it is truly bizarre.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And this is on the original footage.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My, my, Amy, you've got one of the better pieces of evidence that I've ever seen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Big time nuts and bolts.
unidentified		Well, it's not really mine.
		It was out there.
		People just didn't catch it.
		And there's more to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
unidentified		You want some more?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		More, more, more.
unidentified		Okay.
		The router, is it Rooters?
		I don't know how to pronounce it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Reiders, Routers.
unidentified		Routers News put out a statement talking about the fireball that came down, and it said that firefighters were sent there to extinguish a blaze at an abandoned trailer park that was supposedly caused by the meteor hitting the earth.
		What was most interesting is what they said.
		They didn't confirm that it was the meteor, but he says, we have police and firefighters out there now trying to recover something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Trying to recover something?
unidentified		Meaning about where?
		Supposedly where this trailer park, if you go down further, you'll start to see stills that they showed, I think it was out of Detroit.
		One of the Channel 4 news out there went to it to do the rest of the research.
		And they filmed people who claimed they saw the fireball come down over Windsor and they followed it into the trailer park in the footage you'll get.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you know what?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		With the footage you've got, we've got a question whether it was a part of the fireball or a part of the thing that they shot at the fireball.
unidentified		That's a good question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it is.
		That came down at the trailer park.
		Amy, can you hold on a few more moments?
unidentified		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This stuff is absolutely incredible.
		From the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, my guest is Peter Davenport.
		What a winner he's got this time.
		You have got to see this, folks.
		There simply is no way to explain what I'm seeing.
		Except that something, something from the ground shot up at this fireball.
		Ask yourself, as I am, why would anybody shoot at a meteor?
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		You're listening to Artell Summer in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 13th, 2000.
		I can't stay alive without your love Oh baby, don't need me this way, no I can't expect I shall be.
		Don't leave me this way Baby, my heart is full of love and desire for you Now come down and...
		She doesn't give you time for questions As she locks up your arms And you follow to your sense Of which direction completely disappears On the blue-tied walls near the market that stalls There's
		a hint that she leads you to These days, she says, I feel my life Just like a river running through The air of the cat The air of the cat is full of love and desire for you And the air of the cat is full of love and desire for you And the air of the cat is full of love and desire for you And the air of the cat
		is full of love and desire for you And the air of the cat is full of love and desire for you And the air of the cat is full of love and desire for you And the air of the cat is full of love and desire for you And the air of the cat is full of love and
		desire for you Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
		Tonight's program originally aired April 13th, 2000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've got to see this.
		We've got the link right from the front page.
		Click on the Windsor incident and look at the moving video, the moving gift, and it'll blow your mind.
		There's clearly what people called a meteor being shot at by something.
		Obviously being shot at by something.
		It's not an interceptor that we're looking at.
		It's what they called a meteor being shot at.
		Going north to south.
		And once again, here's Amy Aber along with Peter Davenport.
		And Amy, I don't want to take up much more of your time here.
		We have something else to do.
		But it's so spectacular what you've captured, what they captured, and what you found in a way you captured it, that I think almost everybody who can crawl or make their way to a computer should take a look at this.
		So we've got the link right on the front page called The Windsor Incident.
		I've never seen anything like it except on shuttle footage.
		And I'm sure you've seen some of the STS-485080 video.
unidentified		Exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Amazing stuff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And this is right in that class.
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		There's also a witness who claims he saw something launched, a missile launch or missile test, he thought it was, at the same time in an area near Detroit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow, what a coincidence.
unidentified		It was right over the bay from Windsor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have two eternal complaints about all of this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		One, that they automatically call it a meteor, and I'm not willing to accept that until somebody says, look, here's the meteor.
unidentified		When they nail it down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's always bothered me.
		And the other is that it's impossible for me to imagine in my wildest dreams some missile launch officer sitting there waiting for a meteor to shoot at.
		You agree with that?
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Amy, you agree with that, Peter?
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I sure do.
		This is fascinating footage art, in my opinion.
		As you have stated tonight, when I saw this footage on Amy's website back, I think in December or so, and realized the date of it and thought back to the myriad of reports that came in from Pennsylvania, I almost fell off my stool.
		I called her immediately, explained that I would like to play this at the UFO Congress, and she consented.
		It is truly fascinating.
		We have a classic case where information from two separate locations, when put together, fills in the picture.
		It's like a jigsaw puzzle.
		And I have a cut here.
		I don't think we have time for it tonight.
		Perhaps another time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I'll tell you what.
		Let's say thank you, Amy, and rush along with what we're doing.
		Amy, bless your heart.
		And I hope your sight holds up.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, thank you.
		Oh, thank you, Amy.
		And good night.
		Okay, there's Amy.
		And now, Peter, why don't you go ahead very quickly?
		We'll fit it all in.
		Go ahead, play the video.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		58-second cut.
		This is a gentleman driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike the 25th of August, 1995.
		This is what happened right after that fireball went over Windsor or Ontario, Canada.
unidentified		Here we go.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		He describes the thing when it stopped over Pennsylvania.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Here we are.
unidentified		Coming down a mountain path, and suddenly just the valley was stuck by a very strong blue stroboscopic effect.
		This object was very difficult to say, but anywhere from just a couple hundred yards to my left off the highway, a quarter of a mile off the highway, and was probably 200 feet in the air.
		I guess it was circular shaped globe.
		It was blue with a dark band around the midsection and a dark concentric circle towards the bottom of it.
		So the top was pulsing with a very pronounced blue light.
		Pulse seemed to be stationary, and it pulsed about eight times with a blue light and then switched to a green light.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		So the object was stationary over southern Pennsylvania.
		This is an astonishing event.
		And of course, part of the reason I wanted to play this and describe this tonight and have Amy on, who is, by the way, publishing a book.
		She's sending it to the printers later this summer, The Pretender, she calls it, is not only to share it with our listeners tonight, it's a fascinating story, but if we have anybody in the press listening tonight, to alert them to the fact, as you have said many, many times, these fast, bright objects in the night sky, not all of them are meteors.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		All of them stop.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Peter, hold on.
		We're going to do the next segment.
		I'm glad you got that in.
		It ties it all together.
		Stay right there.
unidentified		Stay right there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From Seattle, Washington, the National UFO Reporting Center, here is Peter Davenport.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Peter, welcome back.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Art.
		I know we're running short of time.
		We have a couple university students from the University of Oregon who saw something very, very interesting two nights ago over Springfield, Oregon.
		And since we're short of time, why don't we just go to our guests?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, they're on one phone, Peter.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Oh, they are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So they may pass it back and forth.
		But let us begin with Sean.
		I think he wants to be known as Sean.
		Sean, welcome to the program.
		Hello.
		Hi there.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So this was a couple of nights ago, huh?
unidentified		Yeah, it was the 11th.
		The 11th.
		Tuesday night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, you have a pretty good technical background in physics, astronomy.
unidentified		Oh, well, I've taken a few classes.
		Okay.
		I wouldn't say a great deal of background, but yeah, I've got a wide knowledgeable background about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not a professor yet?
unidentified		No, no, not quite.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're working on it, all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, so at least you're grounded in the sciences, and you should know what you're looking at.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what did you see, and under what conditions?
unidentified		Well, it was almost 10 o'clock.
		It was perfectly dark out.
		It was completely cloudy that night.
		We were traveling down a street returning home from dinner, and I noticed an orange light on the horizon about 30 degrees up.
		And it was just kind of, it looked like it was hovering there, but it was slowly traveling towards us.
		So it was traveling towards the west.
		We traveled about three or four blocks.
		At this point, it was closer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry, let me just not be three or four blocks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How low was this thing?
unidentified		It was getting closer to us.
		So initially, I'd say it was about 30 degrees above the horizon, and it started to get closer and closer.
		It wasn't had plenty of time.
		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What I mean is, in altitude, how low do you think it was?
unidentified		It had to be below the clouds.
unidentified		So I'd say good within 2,000 feet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		We traveled about four blocks.
		Now it was about 75 degrees above the horizon.
		That's when we pulled in a parking lot, and I could get a clear view of it.
		My passenger, my girlfriend, stepped out of the car.
		I was careful to listen for a sound.
		There was no sound whatsoever.
		But it was clearly, it emitted a light, but it wasn't necessarily from a bulb.
		The whole thing kind of glowed.
		It was an orange light.
		The intensity level varied, flickered, kind of faded in and out.
		And the entire thing just glowed, no sound whatsoever.
		At that point, it kind of made a V-shape, started to return back from the way it came.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
unidentified		Only, yeah, only back towards the northern direction of the east.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And all right, well, I I would immediately say the only thing I could imagine that might do that would be a helicopter, maybe.
unidentified		Well, that's what I thought too, but I was careful to step out of the car.
		And like I said, it was about 75 degrees above the horizon, and there was not a sound I could hear.
		It was a fairly quiet night.
		I mean, 10 o'clock, it was late enough, but I could hear fairly well.
		No sound at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you saw this with a young lady, is that right?
		Yeah.
		Did she have pretty much the same take on it that you did?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, did you sit down after...
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
		We talked about it a great deal, actually.
		And comparing notes, but yeah, they match up pretty well.
		I mean, it was pretty clear.
		It wasn't a question of what we saw.
		We were just trying to figure out exactly what it was.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then if I were to pin you up against the wall and say, what did you see?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you say?
unidentified		I don't know.
		I have no clue.
		I'm not going to make any assumptions.
		I know it was a light, some object emitting a light.
		I wouldn't say it was too long to be anything shooting through the sky.
		So it had to be some kind of aircraft.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In what way did you lose it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did it simply disappear as it continued, or did what happened?
unidentified		Well, it started traveling, well, it started traveling back towards the way it came.
		That's when we was in the car.
		She jumped back in.
		We drove a couple blocks.
		That's when we were on 15th, and we were in clear view of it again.
		And that's when it, there was a couple other people actually in the street pointing, noticing the same thing.
		And that's when it emitted the ball of light.
		The ball of light.
		I would just say it was an orange ball of light about the same size of the craft.
		And it had a few tracers, kind of like sparks, not really flames, but kind of looked like a firework.
		And then it kind of either disappeared or faded away.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		So you can, at least you can say what you didn't see.
		It wasn't an airliner, was it?
unidentified		No, no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Couldn't have been a meteor, right?
unidentified		Well, no.
unidentified		No, it switched directions and it was there for at least the whole thing took at least three minutes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you believe it not to have been a helicopter because you heard no sound.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it would have been close enough to hear the sound.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		It was almost above me at one point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right above you?
unidentified		Yeah, 75 degrees on the horizon.
unidentified		So you saw a UFO.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I guess that's all you can say if you're not willing to go further and you really can't based on what you saw.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You saw an unidentified flying object.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
		Yeah.
		Unidentified.
		I don't know if it was, I don't know what you would say, military or something new of that sort, or extraterrestrial, but yeah, it was definitely unidentified.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		One of the two.
unidentified		One of the two, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's what it always boils down to.
unidentified		Yes, certainly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How did the experience leave you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, with a more open mind than you had before I take it, you haven't seen anything previously.
unidentified		Oh, no.
		No.
		I never thought I would.
		I mean, I expected it.
		Yeah, it just kind of just left me with a little bit of awe, with a lot of curiosity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, as I always say to people like you, welcome to the club.
		Yeah, there you go.
		Millions and millions of us who have seen these things now.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you?
unidentified		It certainly helps the credibility when you see it yourself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it certainly does.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have a computer?
unidentified		Yeah, I do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When you have a chance, get online and take a look at the motion GIF that we've got up there, linked up there now that we talked about in the first half hour.
		I presume you heard that.
		Yeah.
		That will amaze you, as I'm sure what you saw will amaze you.
		Does the young lady with you, Amy?
unidentified		Oh, Anne?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ann?
		Yeah.
		I'm sorry, Anne.
		Does she want to say anything?
unidentified		Well, I don't know.
		I don't know if she really has anything to contribute, but her story is basically the same.
		I don't know if I can get her over here.
		Hold on a second.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Could I break in here for just a second before you go away, Sean?
		I'm interested in two things.
		You've said that the object that you saw Tuesday night clearly changed directions.
		I'm curious to know whether you could describe briefly how it changed directions, and is there anything you can add about that light that apparently the main object emitted before it disappeared from your sight?
unidentified		Well, okay, it was initially when I first saw it, we were traveling east, and it was coming towards us almost from the southern east.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		How did it change its direction?
unidentified		Yeah, and then when we were in the parking lot, it slowed and almost seemed to kind of make a V and travel back towards the east, almost towards the northern east this time.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		And when it emitted that light, did it seem to fall as you would expect an ember, for example, to fall, or a firework to fall out of the sky, or did it travel down at a constant velocity, or did it appear to fall faster than you would expect something to fall accelerated by gravity?
unidentified		I would say faster than you would expect.
		Certainly, I couldn't see it.
		It went out fairly quickly.
		There's no reason to believe it would come close to the ground or something like that.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it might have been shot down or propelled down by the object that emitted it.
unidentified		Yeah.
		Yeah.
		It definitely came down from the object, not the other way around.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, ask Ann if she wants to come on and say, yeah, I saw all that.
unidentified		Oh, okay.
		Here she is.
		Hold on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, excellent.
		Hi, Ann.
		We're just having you kind of come on to say, yeah, I was there and I saw all that.
		Okay.
		So say it.
unidentified		Don pretty much summed it up.
		I mean, what he saw is exactly what I saw, and our stories are very similar.
		And, I mean, like you said, it came from the southeast and was almost directly above us, it appeared, and made a V and went back to the northern east.
		And we saw it emit a little ball or the same color of light from it, and then it disappeared.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you think you saw, Anne?
unidentified		I don't know.
		I mean, I have no idea.
		I mean, like, saw a nice.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did the incident bother you?
unidentified		No, I mean, it didn't bother me at all.
unidentified		Like, I was quite intrigued by it, and, you know, we talked about it and stuff, and we're both a little bit more curious about things, but I don't know what exactly it was.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it definitely does something to the mind.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		After you've seen it, you've seen it, and there's nothing you can do about it.
unidentified		Exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Ann.
		Thank you.
		And for me, please thank Sean, too.
unidentified		I will.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wonderful report.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Keep your eyes upward.
unidentified		We will.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
unidentified		Good night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, wow.
		What a wonderful night, Peter.
		Two really hot things here.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		I'm really pleased to bring these two reports to our listeners tonight.
		The first one, really dramatic.
		It sort of closes off an old case that I've been talking about now for four and a half years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Either that or opens it wide open again.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		Thanks to Amy A. Baer, we've now gotten really new, very gripping new data about this case.
		When you put the two together, it's really dynamite.
		It's very interesting stuff.
		And again, I invite anybody in the press to please not assume that everything that's right and fast in the night sky is a meteor.
		There are alternative explanations.
		That's what I'd really like to bring to the table tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I hate to say this, but most newsrooms, radio, even television, walk over to the teletype, they rip off what's there, they get a regional feed and a state and national feed, and if it's occurred in their region and it says meteor, they say meteor.
		And they never leave the newsroom.
		They just read the copy.
		And so that's how that happens, Peter.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Yep, I know it.
		And we're trying to break them up that habit.
		There's fascinating stuff that I think is going on right over our heads.
		And I hope this will help awaken them to the fact that if they just scratch the surface, on some of these occasions, they're going to find a very, very interesting story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we'll try and make a mitch.
		All right, the National UFO Reporting Center does not operate on swamp gas.
		It operates on donations.
		And they can be sent, if you're so kind, to P.O. Box 45623.
		Make it out to the National UFO Reporting Center.
		Every dollar counts.
		P.O. Box 45623, University Station, Seattle, Washington, 98145.
		That's 98145.
		National UFO Reporting Center P.O. Box 45623 University Station, Seattle, Washington, 98145.
		And if you've got something going on right now, they have the magic hotline at area code 206-722-3000.
		That's only if it's going on right now.
		206-722-3000.
		Peter, thank you.
		What a wonderful report.
		That's going to keep the webpage busy all night long.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		I hope so, and thank you, Art.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		It's been a pleasure to be here tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good night, Peter.
peter davenport ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Go take a look.
		You won't believe your eyes.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
		Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 13, 2000.
		No, no, no, no, no.
		I'll tell you what's wrong before I get off the floor.
		Don't bring me down.
		You want to stay out with your fancy friends.
		I'm telling you it's got to be the end.
		Don't bring me down.
		No, no, no, no, no, no.
		No, no, no, no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know about you, but I have spent endless hours watching NASA's mission control on the NASA channel, C-Band satellite, and then finally KU-BAN satellite.
		And I never expected to have the opportunity to actually speak with somebody who worked there, not just worked there, but worked there for 22 years.
		That's a whole career.
		Or at least one career.
		James Oberg, welcome to the program.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First of all, an honor to have you here, of course.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Same here.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		You're definitely a legend and happy to talk to people who listen to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You were actually right there in Mission Control, the one we see on TV?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		That's right, Art.
		The front row, in fact.
		Right down there, front row, middle.
		That's where the people who handle the trajectory are.
		We call it the trench because it's a low angle there, but it's also where most of the action takes place.
		The rest of the guys, just gals these days, are watching the hardware.
		We're actually steering the ship.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Steering the ship.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What kind of missions did you steer the ship on in all those years that are memorable for you?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Memorable one, of course, was the first, and that was the one that back, in fact, just the 19th anniversary was just a few days ago, 1981, April 12th.
		And took off with that ship, and no one had ever tested it before, never had any unmanned flights, and wasn't altogether sure it was going to hold together.
		And off it went.
		And I was there from the launch team, the silver team.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I may have missed the anniversary.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Which one?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		April 12th, 81 was the first flight of Columbia, the shuttle.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Columbia, okay.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And it also happened to have been the time, the 20th anniversary of the first manned flight in space, Yuri Gagarin.
		So last week, a couple days ago, was the 39th anniversary of a manned flight in space.
		And that was definitely an event, too.
		We remember that.
		And I was a kid at the time.
		I was a space nut even before the space age.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I remember that Sputnik and then Yuri Gagarin scared the hell out of us.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		They sure did.
		And that was a bizarre thing.
		No one really knew what was going to happen with spaceflight or how countries were going to spend the money on it.
		It turned out that us and the Russians got into this mutual panic mode and poured immense amounts of funding into space exploration and goosed each other, basically, off the whole planet.
		And that's how we've done it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that why we're not doing it so much anymore?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm probably going to do a book on that because we do have a real dysfunctional kind of partnership here right now.
		And there's hours and hours worth of discussions there.
		But I think it's a case of just not understanding each other's programs and not reacting to each other's programs, but just to our misperceptions of them.
		And that's the issue that I really like to get into both professionally and privately, which is we've got to see things clearly, or else what we're doing in response are going to be wrong and useless at best and harmful at worst.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		James, I saw the right stuff.
		And I kind of imagined that NASA in those early years really was kind of like that movie.
		Was it?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think the movie caught the spirit of things, a lot of jokes and stereotypes and things, But a lot of the spirit was there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is today's NASA does it have a lot of relationship to the NASA of those days?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		That's a curious thing because first the people coming to work for it are just as bright and just as dedicated as ever.
		Sure.
		In fact, that's something that NASA and the management of NASA realizes that it can get the brightest and most dedicated people who will work for inadequate salaries and put up with poor management and bad leadership because they're all devoted to this idea of spaceflight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's just like radio, James.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		People love the job so much they'll come work for pennies.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, a lot of folks in the space business catch on, though, after a while and realize how much their friends are making outside in the real world.
		And so there's this hemorrhage of talent, especially the kind of talent of people who are realistic that you want to have around.
		That's why I think we're having these problems at Mars and elsewhere, is that after a while, enthusiasm can wear out, and the people you want to keep are the people they're losing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I do remember the spirit of NASA, and what you're saying is that's kind of waned, with a hemorrhaging of talent.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Art, the spirit was very special, especially during Apollo, because they put together a team of people from all over the aviation and space and rocket industry, and they joined together to land on the moon.
		And that was something that they were going to do, and most of them realized it was just an episode in their lives, not a career, but something they're going to do for five years and then go back to the real world.
		And most of them did.
		In fact, after the Apollo landings, there was mass, not just layoffs, but an exodus of the people who had come on board who brought outside experience with them and other projects, brought outside judgment with them.
		That's the key thing.
		It's not the knowledge of secret formulas, but your engineering judgment in safety and reliability and that sort of thing.
		These people, to a large degree, left.
		The people who stayed were, again, very experienced and very smart, and they kept going through shuttle.
		But we've been flying the shuttles now for darn near 20 years, and there haven't been a whole lot of new projects.
		And when you try new projects, we find out we don't have this depth of experience, this trained intuition that people just have to get by making mistakes and overcoming them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Were you there during any of the Apollo missions?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I got here just at the end of the Apollo Soyuz.
		Literally the week that was ending.
		I was sent down here to pick up, to learn about mission control work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that must have been a very difficult time because everybody was sort of saying, well, we've done it.
		We've been to the moon.
		We didn't glean a lot of information from it, they said.
		The race, I guess, is over for now, and it costs a lot of money, and we're not going to be going to the moon for a while.
		So that must have sort of demoralized.
		You must have come as the demoralizing effect was settling in.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		No, I wouldn't really call it demoralization, Art, because people were looking for new projects.
		To tell you the truth, these are builders and doers who work down here.
		They like to do new things, not do the same thing over and over and over again.
		We went to the moon, landed six different crews of astronauts up there, and flew some others around the moon.
		And by 1975, they were looking to do some new stuff, like build this space shuttle, which was a tremendous challenge.
		It's just a wonder this thing works when it does, because it is so complex.
		And it's a tribute every time to the really incredible genius of the people who designed it and operated it.
		But after doing the moon flight, they were just as happy to go and do something else.
		We'd get back to the moon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They thought we'd get back sooner, so did I. Is there a reason to go back to the moon?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think there's good reasons, and there's very compelling reasons to go back to the moon and get people out to Mars.
		I think the reason for the whole space program, and I'm one of these religious space nuts too, because I don't think it is idle curiosity or just something you do with spare change.
		I think things that we're going to find out about in space and things we're going to learn how to do in space are going to be critical to human survival on this planet in the coming centuries.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did you build rockets when you were young?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I watched the rockets.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I blew up a few things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's what I mostly did, too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I blew up things.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Put a lot of smoke in the basement.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I did it in my mother's living room, and I cost her a rug.
		Long, sad story.
		But yeah, it's something that gets in your blood, I guess, and once there, it never leaves.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're doing something just historical.
		You're doing something and not take anything away from people who do important work with keeping our society functioning and advancing knowledge and education and so forth.
		Those are all critical jobs.
		But there's only one time in human history, we think, that people have gotten off the planet and have broken through.
		It's the kind of thing that people, I think, a thousand years from now will remember this last century for.
		They won't remember the presidents or the politicians or the sports figures or the entertainment figures or even the names of the countries.
		But they'll know that people went into space for the first time, opened that doorway and stepped through it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess the big question is, 30 years plus now later, why haven't we gone back?
		Yes, we did the shuttle and we've done a lot of orbiting, but not back to the moon, not rushing ahead to Mars, as I'm sure you would have wished and many others.
		Yes.
		It didn't happen.
		Why not?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		It was very difficult and expensive to do it.
		And the feeling was that there'd be wait for technology to advance to the point where the next level of technology would make going out there easier.
		Now, don't forget that Apollo was such a quick program.
		It was within 12 years of Sputnik, which is 184 pounds of metal.
		There were people walking on the moon.
		And that was an incredibly fast span of time.
		It was fast because the technology was ready for it, that we'd built most of the equipment.
		There wasn't a whole lot that had to be developed or invented to do it.
		And so that technology was ripe for manned spaceflight, but at great expense.
		In many ways, it was like the 100 years ago when the polar explorers were racing for the South Pole.
		To get there, it took a lot of effort.
		And after the first few people got there, and some people died on the way back, there were no more expeditions to the South Pole for 40 years, until a new level of technology brought people there permanently.
		And that's been the hope.
		Now, so far, we're still looking for those tricks.
		We're still looking for those magic bullets that are going to make space travel a lot easier.
		The shuttle wasn't, it turned out.
		It was still expensive, took a lot of maintenance, and still does.
		And if you don't give it to it, it gets real per snickety.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Should we still, in your estimation, be flying the space shuttle now, or should we by this date have been on to the next generation or so?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Again, the shuttle was so far ahead of its time that it was bound to be good for 20 years, but here we are now, 20 years into it, and nobody would have figured 20 years ago that we wouldn't have built anything better.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The Russians tried to copy the shuttle.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In fact, actually, they did copy the shuttle, and it never flew.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		They had a program.
		They built their own space shuttle.
		And that really illustrates the point I was making, is that the problem we're having with this U.S. and Russian space arrangement is that we react not to each other's programs, but to our own misconceptions of each other's programs.
		The Russians were convinced that we were building the shuttle as a space weapon, and they had to have one, too.
		And it turns out it's not a space weapon.
		The Russians couldn't believe we'd spent all that money just to launch satellites because they knew that the economics that NASA was promising was a charade.
		And they were therefore convinced there was some Pentagon behind it.
		Pentagon plans behind the market.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, to be fair now, there were some rather secret shuttle missions.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yes, yes, there were.
		And we can talk on those because they were long ago.
		Most of the data has come out.
		But there were some scary things.
		Even before those missions took place, the idea that there were going to be missions like that was advertised.
		And the Russians were convinced they'd be testing laser guidance, pointing devices, and they had to build their own shuttle, too.
		So they built a shuttle, and they flew it, actually, flew it in space unmanned with an autopilot.
		And it was a terrific, it was the pinnacle of their program.
		It was the greatest space feat they've ever made.
		It bankrupted their program, and turned out to be utterly useless.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And they grounded it.
		Well, because it was so expensive.
		They had other rockets for carrying payloads into space and back, and they were using them as well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know they were big on big boosters, lots of power.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, that was way back in the beginning of the space age.
		Then they tried to build other bigger boosters.
		And to get to the moon, you needed rockets that were 50 times bigger than those.
		And they couldn't make theirs work.
		I've got a piece right here in front of me, a piece of aluminum slag from one of the moon rockets, one of their moon rockets that flew up.
		It was given to me by a museum director at their launch site at Baikonur several years ago when he gave me a big hug and said, he wanted to thank me, he said, for allowing him to put these exhibits out.
		And I said, how did I allow you to put your exhibits up in your museum?
		And he said, well, all the stuff we had was top secret, he said, until you wrote about it, and then I could show the articles to my boss and say, it can't be secret if Oberg's writing about it.
		So he dug all the stuff out of the archives and put it on display.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, I remember, James, that I remember the president's speech, President Kennedy's speech saying we were going to go to the moon.
		And America was electrified.
		America was behind it.
		We were going to do it by God, and we did.
		And we had this goal, we had this drive that we're missing now.
		The one thing that's missing in America today is a goal for everybody.
		And it seems to me that goal is in space.
		And we've not really stated it.
		Now, I've heard Mr. Golden say that he's contemplating a trip to Mars.
		But nobody's laid it down in stone.
		No president has said, we're going to Mars and we're going to be there in the next 10 years or whatever.
		It's missing, and it's having a negative effect, I think, on everybody, and they don't realize it.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Sometimes with these kind of projects, you need to have a short-term goal, exactly like you say, Art, because you look at projects that have worked like Apollo, like the Manhattan Project, like other kinds of crises.
		And if they have a well-defined technological challenge, they can often reach them within a short period of time because it is a dash.
		It is a race.
		On the other hand, some kind of goals, like conquering cancer or these sorts of things, don't have a real measurable finish line and you really can't get there.
		I think that there has to be more of a sense of urgency.
		I agree.
		Because without understanding our planet and the best view of the planets from the outside, without understanding which way it's going, and then without being able to interfere with it, to modify it, to do this terraforming, to actually do engineering on the planet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		James, hold time moment.
		We're going to break it.
		And we'll be right back.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premiere Radio Networks.
		Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 13, 2000.
		So you seem here to know me, yo.
		Playing a five-minute picture show.
		Take me along when you're home.
		Take me along when you're home.
		To the joke of the neighborhood.
		Should you care if you're feeling good?
		Take me along when you're home.
		Take me along when you're home.
		My mother's healthy face is a little hard to find.
		I tried to reach for you, but you have lost too much.
		Whatever happened to our love, I wish I had to.
		It used to be so nice, it used to be so cool.
		So when you hear me, darling, can't you hear me?
		S.O.S.
		The love you gave me, nothing else can save me.
		S.O.S.
		When you come, how can I even try to go home?
		S.O.S.
		When you come, how can I carry on?
		S.O.S.
		So far, when you were telling me, You make me feel like it's something I feel like.
		I really try to make it out.
		I wish I was what happened to my love that just me to Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
		Tonight's program originally aired April 13, 2000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, what an honor.
		A 22-year veteran of Mission Control, NASA's Mission Control.
		A couple of years ago, I had a couple of very nice gentlemen on who were NASA public relations people.
		And that was cool.
unidentified		But this is cool.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He's James Obert, and he's here to talk about our space program.
		Past, present, and I guess, future.
		Whatever future it has, and hopefully a good one.
		And he'll talk about some of the missions that we have all watched very carefully.
		There's some pretty strange stuff that's been going on.
		That's what's happening tonight.
		Stay right where you are.
unidentified		Stay right where you are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		James, the thing that brought you to my attention was you write for United Press International, and you wrote a story here just, what, a couple of weeks ago.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		That's right, on the Mars probe failure, that it got me called wacko, or series got called wacko by NASA.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they did come back and call you a wacko.
		Now, you worked for them for 22 years.
		Isn't it a little difficult for them to characterize you as a wacko after an employment record like that?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, the series.
		We're facing a case here where these Mars probes were all failing, and the question was why?
		And NASA is basically copying a plea that it was just gross incompetence.
		And in fact, it's a very persuasive case for that.
		And we can tell where the investigation has been going.
		But I had heard some stories from people who give me good stuff in the past that some of the early tests of one of the engines, one of the landing engines, had been very irregular.
		The tests hadn't taken place at the right temperatures, and they had sort of fudged these tests.
		Well, were they expecting it to blow up?
		I don't think so, but they were expecting something good to happen.
		They weren't being cautious enough.
		Space is a situation that is so risky, so dangerous on its own, that to be careless back on Earth, to bring extra hazards with you because of your own sloppiness, may make it impossible.
		In fact, in this case, it did make it impossible to land safely on Mars.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		James, I read a story in Science News earlier today that said that they thought it possible that when the legs extended on the craft as it was in descent, the legs of the craft actually produced some sort of spurious signal that prevented the rockets from firing as they should, you know, allowing the thing to fall down like Roadrunner.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		They now believe, and I believe this is a good, it's bad news, but I think it's an accurate conclusion, that if the probe got that far, then it was impossible for it to land safely because of a design flaw.
		And so the difference that we're having, this dispute, is over which design flaw killed it.
		Not that it was killed by a design flaw, and NASA concedes that.
		But the question is which design flaw and what led to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But your article went even further.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your article really said that NASA knew it was going to fail.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I've been told that there were officials who were aware that there were fatal flaws in this probe, and they just didn't say anything about it.
		It turns out that even the top NASA people were saying similar things before Congress.
		They were saying that they've created a culture in which bad news can't be passed up, in which workers have to withhold information, bad information, because they know management doesn't want to know some of these things.
		And I've seen that happen.
		I saw it happen before my eyes when I was working there.
		Well, it's the phrase, you've heard the phrase about plausible deniability.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've heard the phrase about killing the messenger, too.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And that's what happened.
		That's one of the reasons people have been leaving and are the reason that I have been leaving several years ago is that there wasn't a vigorous treatment of contrary opinions.
		There was, I thought, a movement toward a groupthink of happy talk where people could have to be enthusiastic and all wish very strongly together and, if necessary, paper over unpleasant realities.
		And information I had suggested this had happened with the Mars probe.
		Now, there's more information that's come out.
		I think we have a better understanding of what happened there, and I'm ready to modify some of the things that I had reported to his hearing.
		But it's still a very damning result, is that the information that should have gotten to the management didn't.
		People who were on these review panels and who have talked to me said that they personally thought there was a zero chance of it working after they discovered some of these design flaws, but that just to keep their managers happy, they said they agreed to say it was a 50% chance of working.
		They agreed, basically, to tell the managers that there was a higher chance of working than they believed.
		And so by the time it got to the top, I think that the NASA folks did think it was going to work, and they were deluded.
		And I think that's far worse.
		Lying to the public Is one thing.
		What's the phrase about Lawrence of Arabia that a person is simply a liar who lies to other people has hidden away the truth, but a person who lies to himself has forgotten where he put it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, what allowed a culture of that kind to develop in such what had been such an over?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Art, this is a serious problem.
		It's one that still has to be worked out because we're hearing testimony before Congress by top officials at NASA that maybe they push too hard and maybe they just force people, they push too hard from the top.
		That tells me they still don't get it because management is supposed to push hard.
		You know that, and they always demand things you don't think you can do.
		And there's this dynamic tension.
		Mr. Golden is a terrific inspirer, and he really talks the right talk and sets great challenges.
		And there's nothing wrong.
		In fact, it's just admirable the way he's been doing that.
		The problem comes in is when you get feedback from people in the real world who say, wait, that's too much.
		You're asking too much.
		We've got to back off on that.
		Well, experienced engineers will say that and know that.
		But younger people are hired who have enthusiasm and education but not the intuition will march off the cliff exactly as they did on these probes when the experienced people were saying, well, I'm going to retire.
		You remember that Pathfinder, that probe that landed and bounced on the surface and that little rover came out?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		It was a great success, and there were a lot of things done right.
		The program manager for that was Donna Shirley, and she led that team.
		She wrote a book called Managing Martians.
		It's a marvelous book.
		And she's now, well, she left NASA because they asked her to be in charge of the follow-on probes, the ones that turned out to fail.
		She looked at that and said, this can't be done.
		There's not enough resources.
		I can't redo this Half-Mind of Success because you're asking me to make four missions at less than the price of one.
		And there's too many corners have to be cut.
		I don't want to be here for the train wreck.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nobody told us about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I never heard that from Donna Shirley.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, she's talking about it now, and people have been saying those kind of things.
		But this culture, this NASA can-do culture, people who are used to doing miracles, who are used to doing things that no one on this planet has ever done before.
		And to some degree, if you don't have enough judgment, real-world judgment, and just experience in the world, the bruises and the black eyes and the broken bones that life gives you, you think you can do more than you can, especially when some people at NASA get the feeling that they're the smartest people in the world.
		They say that.
		They go, we get the smartest people in the world working for us.
		Well, duh.
		Why were you so stupid?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A lot of people right now are talking about a division between NASA and JPL, almost an open warfare between the two.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you believe there to be anything to that?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I don't know if that's the boundary where the division, where the lines are.
		There certainly is recriminations going on, and there are people at JPL who know how to do things right.
		That's a question that someone asked.
		In fact, Miles O'Brien from CNN asked that at the press conference a few weeks ago when the results were given out.
		People at NASA kept saying we've learned so much about these mistakes.
		And Miles was basically said, wait a minute now, these are stupid mistakes.
		Why did it take these kind of disasters to learn these things?
		And Dr. Young, who is the committee chairman, said he agreed.
		He said, yeah, we used to know how to do these right.
		This wasn't things that NASA didn't know.
		It was things they had known and forgotten.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you mean like converting meters to feet?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, in many ways, I think that's the distraction.
		It was not meters to feet.
		It was actually Newtons to pound force because that was a rocket thrust.
		When you design a system that humans are involved in, you're going to have hundreds of mistakes being made all the time.
		What you need to do is a system that catches mistakes.
		And that metric conversion example is one that has been widely interpreted.
		And I think in many ways, NASA may have used that story to take the heat off.
		Well, it was just this mistake.
		If we hadn't done the mistake, the probe would have worked.
		No, the mistake was there.
		It had been taking place.
		It wasn't caught.
		Even though for months it actually was causing the probe to be slightly off course.
		And the navigators, and navigation is what I did at Mission Control.
		So I knew the navigators here and at JPL.
		I knew them really well.
		And they were suspicious of something.
		They said, something's wrong here.
		We've got a little disturbing force.
		We're a little bit off course.
		And nah, well, they never filled out the proper forms.
		And the management kept saying, well, you can't prove we're off course, so let's just assume we're happy.
		And they got closer to Mars.
		They started to get worried.
		They said, we should make an extra course adjustment here because something is funny about this trajectory.
		But the management said, well, define funny.
		Prove it's funny.
		Prove we're off course.
		And if we're not, we're going to assume that everything's fine.
		And finally, in the final few hours, as they're getting closer to Mars, they realize they're going to hit the planet.
		And this is all happening.
		And no one said anything there to the public.
		We all thought they were on a good course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, James, this is rocket science, though.
		And shouldn't it have been provable?
		I mean, it is science.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And what's provable, Artin, is here's the key thing.
		Here's the mistake that lost these probes.
		It's the mistake that caused Challenger to blow up.
		It's the mistake that people keep making until they get embarrassed by it, until they get smarter and older, like us, right?
		And the mistake is that in spaceflight, you have to prove safety.
		You have to assume that the world's out to get you.
		That Mother Nature is a bitch, and she's going to find some way to blow up or put off course your spacecraft.
		And you have to fight to establish safety and reliability with every step of the way.
		You can't assume it.
		You have to fight to establish it against the presumption of non-safety.
		And yet when you get careless, when you get habitual, you get a case like with Challenger in the morning that they said it's a little too cold.
		We're afraid that these seals and these boosters won't hold because we haven't tested them at these temperatures.
		And the management said, well, can you prove the seals won't work?
		Well, no, we haven't done these tests.
		Well, in that case, you can't prove it will work.
		We're going to assume that since it has worked in the past, it'll work and it will work.
		And of course, we killed seven astronauts with the attitude.
		And same thing with, can you prove we're off course?
		Well, no, but we should be a little cautious and swing wide when we pass the planet just to be cautious.
		He says, no, that's too much trouble.
		We're just going to think good thoughts and be confident and go on in.
		Well, that kind of attitude of being afraid all the time, being paranoid, is the only proper approach towards space technology.
		And that's something that you've developed from experience.
		Well, as experienced people leave, as inexpensive and enthusiastic, can new younger people come in without appropriate guidance and mentoring from some of the more paranoid older guys and girls, you're going to make these mistakes.
		And the only horrible part is that NASA had no excuse not knowing these things and no excuse to spend half a billion dollars to relearn something that they laid off to people who once knew.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not that I'm really in favor of finding some scapegoat hang, but through all these failures, I have yet to hear NASA center the problem or announce the problem or announce where the problem was centered and even naming individuals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, it was nobody's fault.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		They're saying that, and that's that, you put your finger on it.
		Boy, you cut right quick on this art because they're saying, well, it's no one's fault.
		But the culture.
		Mr. Golden was saying that they do have a culture there where bad news doesn't come back up, where they shoot the messenger.
		Or worse yet, the messenger withholds information because he knows it's not wanted.
		And he says we've got to change that.
		Well, in Chicago where I used to go to college, we co-used to call that running for re-election on a reform ticket.
		Because this attitude of killing the messenger, of not accepting bad news, is something that current NASA leadership has created.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But if you demonstrate that the person who kept their mouth shut isn't going to have a problem because they're not going to lay any blame, they're not going to do a deep investigation and really find out what the hell happened, then the next time you're almost ensuring that the messenger isn't going to come forward.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and like I said, I saw that around me too.
		And that, I think, is what's going to be, That, I think, is the root of it.
		Not a problem with conversion of metric to English, not a problem of rocket tests and so forth.
		But in a culture, an engineering culture, where you have this very, first you're always running scared.
		I'll tell you, Art, when there's a mission going on, walking into the door into mission control was like walking into an arena, into a sports arena.
		And there's a knot in my stomach every time.
		And the only prayer you have is, dear God, today, don't let me screw up.
		Because once things start happening and you're in there, and your mind just goes into overdrive.
		The whole culture of working here in a control center is just something terrific.
		And I just, there's got to be ways we can share with the public just how exciting and challenging it is and what immense pride the people who work there have in doing their job right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's probably a little like being an air traffic controller in some ways.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The tension must be awful at times, just absolutely awful.
		And I'm sure a lot of people developed ulcers and decided this wasn't the kind of work they could handle.
		Too much pressure.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		One of the things that we did well that helped this work, and is still helping it work, because the people there in the control centers are just at the top of the agency.
		They're operational people.
		It's an island of meritocracy where you have to earn your way up and you earn these qualifications that are basically equivalent to graduate, university graduate degrees, and then do training.
		And they train hard.
		There's some mottos from the past where some Chinese general once said, this like 2,500 years ago, he said that the more you sweat in peace, the less you're going to have to bleed in war.
		And that's true about warfare.
		It's true about anything tough.
		And it's true about mission control and space work.
		People there train hard.
		They train eight to ten hours for every actual hour of a mission.
		And they are trained by a special team of people who develop these simulations and these scripts.
		And that's an unsung team of people.
		The people who do the training for the mission control people and the astronauts are the ones who are responsible for the fact that these folks do perform well on the actual missions because they are trained.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, then we haven't really fixed anything since this series of failures.
		I don't see how we have anyway, unless they're doing things internally that I'm completely unaware of.
		If the culture is the same, then the end result is likely to be the same.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, the culture is this is a shock.
		There's definitely been a psychological shock to people there, including a lot of younger people who thought they'd probably do more than turned out to be the case.
		And so there are positive results of the shock, and the positive result is just in thinking.
		But if the process of bad news doesn't get fixed, doesn't get changed, then we're just running, we're just exactly like you said.
		We have not put our finger on the cause of this or fixed the cause of it.
		I think most people are realizing what the cause of it is.
		People within NASA especially, they've seen this.
		Again, I saw it with my own eyes, and others have too.
		And I'm deeply in touch with old colleagues, old buddies of mine.
		So, you know, this is what's got to be fixed.
		It's got to be fixed from the top.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you were sitting atop a shuttle launch, or a shuttle about to be launched, would you be more nervous today than you were some years ago?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'd always be nervous.
		So, you know, it's not to say that I'm more nervous now because...
		Yeah, still knowing the people who are doing it.
		It's like a religious order of monks.
		These are some knights of Rhodes or something out there in the frontier.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I hear that, James.
		Hold on.
		We're at the top of the hour.
		We'll be right back with James Obert.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
		Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 13, 2000.
		Through the night, the light of your love.
		You are your heart.
		Through the night, the light of your love.
		Through our visions.
		Through the night, the light of your love.
		That I just can't win, yeah.
		He's like the old one.
		Can I get hit?
		I got a lot of those heartaches.
		I got a lot of those teardrums.
		Heartaches, teardrums.
		All the way.
		Nothing but a heartache.
		Everything but a heartache.
		The tears come all the way.
		Nothing but a tear, love and a tear.
		It's just too slam, yeah.
		He's like me, oh, why could I get hit?
		I got a lot of those heartaches.
		I got a lot of those heartaches.
		You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
		Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 13th, 2000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Probably a remainder lately.
		But no one yet.
		I guess it games over.
		Mission control for 22 years American spacecraft on their mission.
		22 years of mission control.
		He originally wrote a UBI article critical of NASA and they returned big blast right away from NASA.
		That's our guest.
		We'll get back to him in a moment.
		Back to James Oberg in a moment, but I just got a resume from Philip in Dallas, Texas.
		I'll let him give his last name if he wants to.
		But after Air Force, after being in the Air Force, Philip, as an instructor, was selected to lead electronic warfare simulator training.
		As simulator supervisor, he says, I was responsible for the training of all evaluators, instructors, and line EWOs, I guess this might have been in service, as well as aerial gunners, sure, in the 42nd Bombardment Wing.
		In 1989, I earned the Best Electronic Warfare Officer of the Year Award in Strategic Air Command for my outstanding flight performance as evaluated by SAC Tactics Evaluation Teams and Electronic Countermeasures Scores during the year.
		Since leaving the Air Force in 1990, I joined McDonnell Douglas Aerospace in St. Louis, working as a flight qualified operations analyst.
		During my years with McDonnell Douglas, later Boeing Aerospace, I participated in and led several highly classified projects.
		These projects have been both long and short-term close-hold proprietary efforts, which have involved special access.
		I have expertise in various aspects of conventional warfare, as well as anti-submarine, anti-surface warfare, and cruise missile strike planning.
		In the course of these assignments, I have routinely interacted with all levels of McDonnell Douglas and customer management in both international and domestic meetings covering both technical and commercial issues.
		These briefings have been addressed to general officers and admiral ranks, as well as line crews covering the results of various studies and critical design reviews.
		And he would like to say a word or two to James Oberg.
		Philip, do you want to give your last name?
unidentified		Philip?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Push the button, Art.
unidentified		Philip, are you there?
		You've probably described me sufficiently enough.
		The major points I wanted to bring up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you wish to not give your last name?
unidentified		Yeah, I'd prefer not to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, fine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you are on air with James Oberg.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, hi, Philip.
unidentified		Hi, how are you doing?
		I think we're warriors in the traditional sense and badly outnumbered.
		The major points I wanted to bring up is Mr. Oberg is completely on point.
		Basically, all the technical sciences, at least I've worked with NASA on one red team review, but basically most of my work has been concerning the Air Force, Navy, and Boeing, and then previous to that, McDonnell Douglas.
		But everything is turned into view graph engineering.
		Basically, if it isn't in landscape format and bulletized, nobody's going to review it.
		And technical reports, which can be 20, 30, 400 pages long of very terse, tough mathematics, are rarely reviewed by anybody in charge.
		Chief scientists are more interested in trying to get more money for their projects, trying to brief people and a lot of showboating.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Politics.
unidentified		And politics.
		And the lawyers have taken over.
		And they have basically taken science and made it an issue of deniability or culpability.
		And because of that, you have a lot of people that basically lack broad knowledge in their subject areas.
		I mean, you have engineers who are not studying their subject.
		They don't pick up the periodicals in their subject area.
		They don't actually read this stuff, understand this stuff, live this stuff, breathe this stuff.
		They go to Tahoe for the weekend.
		And work is a 40-hour job at best, sometimes 35 hours.
		And you'll have the 15% that really hump it and really work.
		And worse yet, code is not reviewed, computer code.
		And I've done red team reviews.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Let's get me started on that, Philip.
unidentified		And nobody reads the code.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I already made a point that it was a software error that crashed, probably crashed the Pro, Mars Pro.
		We can get back to that because that's exactly what it was.
		It was a programming error that most likely did lead to the crash on Mars.
unidentified		And that's sad because I've done red team reviews on code, you know, hardware and software code, and many times the code is in a 7-bit unique language.
		They're very odd systems.
		It's not like everybody's using C ⁇ .
		And these are very tough to review, and people don't do the work.
		And people get far more bonus points by making sure that their simulation has great graphics, great presentation, all the fluff, and there's no number crunching behind it that really is showing what the models are really doing.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		It's our job, Philippa.
		Nature won't let you get away with that.
		There's a famous bumper sticker we all should be wearing on our cars.
		It says that God forgives and that man forgives.
		Nature never.
unidentified		You have that right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mother Nature, you were talking about that earlier.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think she is married to Murphy.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's it.
		And you can fake it.
		There are a lot of fields you can fake it in or make excuses in.
		People, I think, love aerospace for the reason is that when you succeed, you have faced the harshest judge in the universe.
		And if you've come out with your tail still intact, you have done something remarkable.
		And other people, other men and women in that field, recognize this and they respect each other for their successes because nothing is promised and you can't BS your way through it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're sorry, James, you generally agree with what Philip is saying?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		We're speaking from the same sheet of music here.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		We're singing the same tune.
unidentified		Well, we, just to add one more point to this mess, this is not unique just to NASA nor to Boeing or to the Air Force and the Navy.
		It's endemic in society, but it's worse in aerospace because aerospace by its very nature is unforgiving.
		It's not cool to be a mathematician and to do number crunching.
		And if you don't have the right look, you happen to be 280 pounds and walk with a gimp, you're not going to be briefing.
		They're going to pick a guy that's 32 years old, looks like he's a model.
		He doesn't know what he's talking about, but heck, he's going to be backed up by you and all the other brainiacs that are actually doing the hard work.
		And that type of stuff is really ugly because it goes into promotability.
		Smarter people leave and all that stuff.
		It's just really a sad situation and a sad state of affairs.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And when you stand there and you're stubborn and say, no, this is not going to work.
unidentified		Oh, that's ugly.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And then you're a team player.
unidentified		I'm seriously considering filing a fraud, waste, and abuse on a classified project.
		And, you know, it's terrible.
		I mean, you know, the whole thing doesn't work.
		Even if you show them the mathematics, you show them the numbers, it doesn't matter.
		Everything's debatable.
		Everything's arguable.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I had to go to Congress to talk about dangers on the mirror, on the fact the Russians were lying to us about the fire danger and the collision danger.
		And I looked at the documents.
		And it wasn't that they didn't want to hear it.
		They didn't want to know it.
		It was worse.
		They wanted not to know it so that they could later on say that no one had warned them when bad things would happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Plausible deniability.
unidentified		Some systems, you know, they use the technique of just pre-planning a PQ die to make up for the errors in the original program.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Philip, thank you for joining me.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I hope you can get through my homepage and get in touch if you want.
unidentified		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Sounds indeed like the two of you are speaking the same language.
		James, it wasn't always that way, though.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When did it change?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, it wasn't always that way.
		And you can read when it wasn't in Gene Krantz's new book, Failure is Not an Option.
		It just came out.
		It's got to be the Bible of the way to get things back for a cultural renaissance within the space program and space industry.
		I think it changed when politics got more involved with what you're saying.
		And I think the past, mostly 10 years, a lot of things have changed where everything is politicized.
		Everything is important for how it will make the higher-ups look.
		And it's very sad.
		And a lot of bitter people out there.
		And you've got yourself a good example of a man there with the credentials and the courage to come talk to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		As you are.
		And NASA does not react well to criticism, does it?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		No, it does not.
		But that's currently, that's an ego thing with some of the people there.
		In the past, criticism was not only welcomed, it was encouraged.
		The people had got to criticize and debate at every level.
		And certainly decisions have to be made.
		You weren't paralyzed by this, but you would document the criticisms and make sure that they would be around so that if things change, you could go back and find out why decisions were made.
		Nowadays, decisions have to be unanimous, and there's a sense of the meeting, and there's groupthink that has taken hold, that we're seeing the lamentable fruits of that failed leadership, in my personal opinion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Were you tempted, and did you go see the movie Mission to Mars?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I did.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And fine fact, I thought it was a delightful movie.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Were you at all surprised, James, that the place that they landed was Sidonia?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no.
		If Sidonia didn't exist, it would have to be invented.
		And in fact, I think it has mostly been invented because it's the kind of thing that people have looked for for exploration.
		It's so traditional.
		It's so in keeping with human culture of exploration that you'd be finding strange and wonderful artifacts and these things out there.
		It's the seven cities of gold.
		It's mermaids.
		It's Prester John and the Hidden Kingdoms of Central Asia.
		Whenever we go to a frontier, a physical or mental frontier, people see things on the edge of their vision and the edge of their perception, and they fill in the gaps with marvelous imaginations.
		And so we have things on the moon, bridges on the moon, and flashes of light, and even now Ringmakers out by Saturn, according to some books.
		And I don't be surprised if this stuff hadn't been imagined and written about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but here's, nevertheless, what surprised me about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As you know, I guess you were no great fan of Richard Hoagland for a long time.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Richard and I have gone back to 1981 to the Mars conference.
		I know all about his furry slippers and other items.
		He's a delightful storyteller.
		And we worked together on Star and Sky magazine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, but where I'm going here is he's been a longtime critic of NASA and a longtime advocate of the Sidoni region, as you well know.
		And NASA's reaction to that over the years has been boulder dash.
		Trick of light and shadows.
		What a bunch of baloney.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		But their reaction has been to cooperate with all information flow and give him all the pictures that he's requested.
		And he said that.
		They sort of grit their teeth and they pass the stuff out because, after all, it does belong to us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The thing is, here's what got me.
		Here's what I had a hard time grasping.
		For all the criticism that was fired at Richard, NASA consulted on the film.
		I mean, they were all over it.
		I mean, NASA was everywhere.
		They were a direct consultant on that film.
		And after so much criticism about Sidonia being a bunch of bunk, don't you think they winced a little when they figured out that it was going to be Sidonia that the mission was going to be to?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I don't know if they winced what their requirements were.
		As long as you spell your name right, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
		And in a case like this, the movie had a lot of very interesting features about spaceflight that were very well portrayed.
		A lot of other stuff was kind of flaky where they just had to make some things up.
		But I thought it was, again, a charming film.
		In fact, I went Rocket Man a couple years ago about the crazy guy who gets to go on a large flight.
		It also had great charm.
		It just shows you my judgment when it comes to movies.
		But I don't know what they would wince at.
		I guess you have to talk to them.
		They wince, I guess, when they keep providing information and they keep seeing what they misinterpreted.
		And I can understand that because a lot of stuff that I do hand out isn't gone to people as enthusiastic and as sincere, I think, as Richard is.
		I think it goes to the people who know they can use this material for movies and it's got great footage and they're going to show it in a show.
		They never had any intention of trying to explain it.
		They just want to portray it as a mystery.
		Even when there's information about some of this footage and these pictures that would tend to give a more prosaic explanation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about a real science, though?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		If you were going to pick the location for the first mission to Mars, would it be Cydonia or the first local determined to get there to look for things like life.
		And you look for life where there was water.
		And you look for water where there was outflow channels and where there was erosion and also where there's probably hot springs.
		And those are in the area called the Valles Barineras.
		And there's some outflow areas there that are if you really want to take a geologist hammer to Mars, there are some spots that the guys are just drooling to get to.
		Because for all the value of robots and all the value of these remote probes, after a certain point, you need to have the Mark I human eyeball brain on site, knocking rocks off the wall and cracking them open.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're an advocate for sending men to Mars?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		People to Mars, yes.
		As soon as possible, and 10, 15 years if you can get it.
		Not just to Mars, but actually there's a wonderful little side trip you could stop at the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, and they're just stepping stones, literally stepping stones, not just to Mars, but to the whole solar system because of their material composition.
		They'd be wonderful places to set up little mining colonies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would be so exciting to even know that it's really coming.
		Hold on for a moment, James.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		Relax.
		I'm Art Bell.
		James Oberg is my guest.
		He's a 22-year veteran of NASA.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 13, 2000.
		He just found and raised the name of his latest friend.
		He talked and talked, and I heard him say that she had the longest, flackiest hair.
		Brilliant green eyes anywhere.
		Thank you.
		I wished him luck and then he said goodbye He was gone but still his words kept returning What else was there for me to do the crime?
		Would you believe that yesterday this girl wasn't well?
		Take your passion and make it happen.
		It does come alive, you can dance right through your life.
		Night I hear you my eyes.
		She takes hold of my heart I wanna feel it You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
		Tonight's an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 13th, 2000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		James Oberg is my guest 22 years in the thick of diving our spacecraft at NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston.
		And we're very lucky to have him here tonight.
		We've got a whole lot of stuff we want to cover.
unidentified		So we'll just move through what we can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is Coast to Coast AM.
		Coast to Coast AM All right, Dave in Minneapolis, Minnesota has sent the following facts, and I'm going to read it.
		It's very brief, and we'll see if James feels this is too harsh.
		Art, when Dr. Richard Feynman helped investigate the Challenger explosion, he found back in 1986 that NASA managers had mentally converted an O-ring burned a third of the way through from grave problem, in quotes, into a, in quotes, 66% safety factor.
		And Feynman noted that the workers at ThoughtCol, the booster manufacturer, were scared to death to talk to him.
		The problem appears to be the usual one.
		Dumb managers.
		Too harsh?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I can't say it can never be too harsh on people that help set up the atmosphere where people die.
		You just forget that because of success, because of success after success, you often get the feeling that there's some kind of momentum going and that you have a lucky streak going when, in fact, it's not luck.
		It's running scared.
		You've got to run scared in this business, especially aerospace, anything, medicine, other areas where people's lives are at stake.
		And Simon, I think, had it right on target.
		Another person involved with Challenger that I'm still in touch with, he's still an engineering consultant, is Roger Beauchelet.
		Roger was the engineer in the movie about Challenger who said that the low temperature was away from goodness, and he just didn't think that they knew it was safe.
		And in the end, he was overridden, and Roger is a very sensitive person who took it upon himself that he didn't protest enough, that had he protested more, he could have saved their lives.
		But he was caught up in this whole process.
		A lot of people still feel that way.
		They will stand up for it, but many others, as Philip was saying, will go along.
		Because going along, you can usually get away with it, and it's the fast track for recognition and promotion.
		And we're seeing a very horrible harvest of the results of that management on Mars and in exploding rockets and problems now with the shuttle fleet.
		They've got to be fixed.
		There's got to be a change again in the culture.
		And I think this shock, the shock of the past, the recent failures will go a long way toward resetting this culture, at least temporarily, until once again we get complacent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, I would be more comfortable going along with you on that if the source of the difficulties had already been, in effect, named by NASA.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nobody wants to really see a crucifixion, but for them to suggest that it's nobody's problem suggests to me the culture remains where it's been.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, once again, you just focused right in on the point is that by saying it's no one's fault or everyone's fault, you're saying no one's responsible, and people are responsible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Therefore, nothing changes.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, things can't nothing changes, but you don't root out the fundamental cause for it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, and so you invite it to occur again.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And you keep saying you've learned all these lessons, and yet the only lessons we seem to have learned is that we shouldn't have taken this horrible price to learn things that we once already knew.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Lutheran, they'd kill me if I didn't ask you this.
		22 years at Mission Control.
		Is there anything during all of those years, James, that the UFO community should really be interested in?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		What they should be interested in is how ordinary spaceflight phenomena can be misinterpreted and mispresented by people who should know more about spaceflight.
		Spaceflight is really unearthly, literally unearthly, and it's so new to our human consciousness that many things that occur on flights, you know, we interpret things around us through our everyday experience.
		We see things with our brains, not our eyes so much.
		And when some things show up on those videos from space or pictures from space, if you try and interpret them in earth-side forms, earth-side analogies, you're going to get misled.
		And the things I've seen in there on camera, we sit there in the control center, the cameras are on.
		The cameras are on almost all the time, or a lot of the time, because by accident, we discovered that some of these black and white cameras were very sensitive to low light.
		And a couple of scientists in Alabama noticed that they were watching a lot of lightning.
		And so they said, you know, we're trying to figure out how this vertical lightning, these sprites, blue sprites, and all these previously unknown lightning phenomena, which were being noticed.
		They said, why don't you put the camera on the horizon when the crew is asleep or not doing it?
		And as you fly along through space, just watch the horizon from thunderstorms.
		We're looking for these jets and sprites and things.
		And sure enough, they began seeing them.
		And it became a regular experiment that whenever the cameras weren't being used or the satellite relay wasn't being used, you'd point the camera back along the way you came toward the horizon to get a vertical cross-sectional view of lightning storms.
		Well, there's other stuff up there and stuff all around the shuttle.
		And people who look at the shuttle and the streamlining, they figure you're flying along at 18,000 miles an hour and with space or air streaming past you.
		You don't realize that once you're in space, you can point anyway and it's just your speed that's keeping you up there, not your jet engines, your rockets.
		Anything else near you gets let off and hangs around or drifts away and can fill the space around you with snowflakes and all sorts of other stuff.
		Shuttle bandroof pieces come off.
		Story Musgrave has seen several strips of insulation that come lazily swinging by.
		There are plenty of pictures of those.
		You have to look at the kind of video and say, well, what's the lighting conditions?
		Where's the sunlight?
		These are sunlit objects.
		Yeah, how close are they?
		Well, are they in focus?
		Do they move?
		Well, are there jets firing?
		I spent a lot of time looking at this famous STS-48 case.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		You know what, on 48, I agree with you.
		I really do.
		I think it could have been what they said and not what the UFO community said.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think that NASA folks looked at it pretty superficially and said, well, it looks pretty ordinary.
		And they left it at that.
		They didn't really go into it further.
		I would like to see people in government, and NASA especially, spend a little more effort into trying to bridge this very, very serious gap in terms of public trust.
		And it's a gap that's created both by government actions and also by people in the public and people in the publishing industry who know that it's a good sale to create these kinds of stories.
		And the government has set them up by feeding these kinds of stories.
		So I think that the secrecy culture needs to be eliminated largely by government people spending more time explaining some of these mysteries.
		And NASA has not adequately done its research.
		I've done the research privately and satisfied myself that these are prosaic, these are ordinary features on spaceflight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me jump ahead.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		But this is not obvious that they are because there's lots of information you have to dig out that would prove that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me jump ahead from 48.
		I think it's very 48 is controversial.
		I think that, as you point out, a more conventional explanation, Nockham's razor and all that is more likely.
		But if you jump ahead to SPS-80, there I saw the camera, the outside camera from the shuttle band, intentionally go in and focus on one point, one land point near the city.
		You can see the lights.
		And then sit there and wait.
		And by God, something looking like some sort of particle beam weapon, I wouldn't know how to describe it, appears to erupt from Earth towards space.
		And maybe it was lightning, but it sure didn't look like it.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And it almost seemed like a zigzag.
		I saw that one.
		It was like a fast-swimming fish.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, how do you explain that one?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		What happens, and the reason that STS-80 is, I'm glad you mentioned that, too, because it, like 48 and others, they all seem to be occurring at the same situation in the orbit of the shuttle.
		And I think that there's a cause and effect, not a coincidence.
		But this is not something that's been reported before, so you're about to get a scoop here, Doward, as you do every night.
		As you're looking back down behind you, as the shuttle is orbiting, and it's pointing its belly forward or its tail forward, and it's in a completely random orientation in orbit.
		And you look backward because that's where the lightning is.
		As you go around the Earth, you come up into sunlight, and the sun is now all around the shuttle.
		But you don't see it because there's no air, and occasionally you might see a slight glow in the corner of the camera because a piece of the shuttle is reflecting bright sunlight.
		Anything floating nearby becomes illuminated by the sun, and these little dots will appear, but there's other dots that are closer to you that are in the shadow of the shuttle itself.
		And they drift away, and they will then appear, they will drift out of the shuttle's shadow and suddenly appear on the screen.
		Now, they'll appear usually in the middle of the camera view because the camera is looking down toward the horizon.
		I've just got some video, which I've got to find a way to get better publicized, of a water dump at sunrise on SDS-75, in which you can actually see, because there's so many particles, you can see where the shuttle's own shadow is, and you see these things appearing at the edge of the shadow, and they appear right there in the middle of the screen, because they move out of the shadow, and if there's Earth behind, it looks like they suddenly appear from the Earth or the Earth horizon.
		If there's space behind, if you're looking off into space, they all appear in the middle of space.
		But these lights just pop up, and in this particular video, and in fact, we'll probably get the exact time of it so people can order it, it's just more of the shuttle debris, this stuff hanging around there, moves out of the shadow at sunrise, and that's the key.
		STS-80 also occurred at sunrise.
		Well, I don't think it was a coincidence.
		I think it's because of the lighting conditions that these things will show up.
		And you point the camera in any direction, and there's enough of them around that some will show up eventually.
		People also do point these cameras looking at things because there's curiosity as to what some of them could be, if pieces are coming off.
		We're always getting requests from the folks at the Cape who say that we lay in and there's a couple tiles missing or there's some insulation strips missing and did you see anything looking like when they come off during the flight?
		And you go back and you wonder, well, did we see something come off?
		If you separate a satellite, sometimes other pieces of metal and the retaining bolts come flying off.
		And you want to know what's, you know, they shouldn't come flying off because they're supposed to be tied down.
		But if something goes flying off when a satellite's deployed, you want to go and take a look at that to see what kind of piece it is so that it doesn't go flying off again and come through your window.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		So I think those are cases that turn out to be prosaic, but they just sure don't look it.
		And there's just a lot.
		You need to dig further into what goes on in these flights and publicize this information.
		And I think NASA has genuinely failed to adequately explain the stuff.
		They don't want to bother because they know it's nothing to be concerned about.
		But people in the public don't know all this, and I think the public does deserve a fuller documentation of it.
		I'm satisfied that the documentation is there because I've seen these things in flight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then you've never seen anything that you have reviewed that you find completely inexplicable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You always find more prosaic explanations.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, explicable or unusual.
		We're looking for unusual because unusual usually means something dangerous.
		So if you see something unusual, it's a feature of the shuttle that you'd rather know about rather than just ignore.
		Back in the Apollo days, there was enough pieces seen outside the windows that could they be pieces of insulation or leaking fuel or any number of things.
		They were deliberate studies looking at all anomalous visual things, dots and whatever was seen outside of windows and TV and video.
		Still, these things appeared so often that the crew would even refer to them as moon pigeons when they had their debriefings.
		And the studies were looking for what the sources of these things were, and they tracked them down to explosive bolts and fuel leaks and flaking insulation and things that engineers really want to know about.
		You don't want to ignore this stuff.
		You don't want to close your eyes to anything unusual out there because if something's unusual, it's likely to be something, it's likely to be bad news.
		And you want to know about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, our entire space program really has a goal ultimately of trying to discover if there is life elsewhere.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doesn't it?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		The space, you know, I think our entire intellectual life is devoted to are we alone in the universe?
		And what evidence do we have?
		What suppositions and imaginations do we have?
		It's been a theme of literature and philosophy for thousands of years.
		And space certainly can provide more information because if we are being visited, have been in the past, currently are being visited, you'd expect to find evidence or calling cards, accidental or deliberate evidence out there because it's preserved better out there.
		That's why you have to keep looking with this kind of eye for anything strange.
		That's why keep calling Richard because he's looking at things and interpreting them in various ways that you need people looking for things this way.
		Then you've got to also have people with judgment and experience who can come by and say, well, no, maybe it is balderdash, but try again because eventually, in the long run, I think someone will claim like that's going to be right.
		So it's a losing bet to say it's never going to happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We recently acquired some new unexpected images of the Sidonia region minus the face.
		The face, according to Professor Van Flandren, seems to have a very, very strong case for being artificial.
		And we don't have new high-res images of the face yet.
		And they may still be in Mr. Malin's drawer.
		Nobody knows.
		But do you agree or are you at least open to the possibility that the face itself is some ancient structure or just a trick of light and shadows?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I had a hard time even seeing that because originally, because I have seen so many pictures of structures on planets and have flown over New Mexico so often that you get your eye trained to see things in geological terms.
		It looked to me like a flat-top mesa with some bumps on it.
		That you could tell from the way the shadow was being cast that the chin was higher than the nose and that it wasn't that that was light and shadows.
		And better pictures still suggest it.
		I know there are arguments because of mathematical symmetries and arrangements of things that would not be random.
		But those are the kind of arguments you can almost make to any pattern.
		And it's the old idea of shooting the arrow into the side of the barn and then painting a target around it.
		An example of that was a guy down in New Zealand who was sure that the Earth is crisscrossed by grid lines of energy.
		And he plotted out these crisscross grids very precisely.
		And he even had the Tunguska impact 1908 in the center of one of his grid points.
		Well, that was the first edition of his book.
		Someone wrote to him and said that he actually gotten the location of the Tunguska impact wrong by 2,000 miles.
		And he looked at it and said, by Arsh, you're right.
		And he put the new location in.
		He said that it fit his grid pattern even better.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you do agree.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		What that means is that you can take random locations on Earth, as I think this guy was doing, and you can fit any pattern you want to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm sure aware of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You do agree, though, that on the occasion of public trust, NASA should engage some of this more reasonable speculation straight on, and that the public would be a lot more trusting and a lot more supportive of NASA if they were to do that.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think that there have to be, you know, there's more positive steps that can be taken, need to be taken by the various bureaucracies.
		Like Senator Moynihan's study on the secrecy culture, that the secrecy culture became self-sustaining and it served the bureaucracies and not the public.
		And it created this gap.
		The gap has certainly been exploited by people, and the gap has been filled by all sorts of speculations, some reasonable and some very unreasonable.
		But I think the government agencies do deserve or do have an obligation to go further.
		One of the examples, which I think they did a good job of that, was the much maligned study for the Roswell case where the Pentagon did dig into records and found a lot more stuff.
		I know that report has gotten a lot of mockery and a lot of misrepresentation in the Hofield.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know, but if you saw the news conference, the Air Force held on that, Roswell case closed, it's like they were inviting people to say, who are you kidding?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's the way it was handled.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's a lot of new data that came out, and we did find William Moore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's true.
		Listen, we're going to open the phone lines.
		Can you?
		All right.
		Stay right there.
		We'll be right back from the high desert.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with James Obert, 22 years with NASA.
		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premiere Radio Networks.
		Tonight's an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 13th, 2000.
		Everybody is looking for something.
		Some of them want to use you.
		Some of them want to be used by you.
		Some of them want to abuse you.
		Some of them want to be abused.
		Some of them want to be abused.
		Thank you.
		You and me are done.
		We live in.
		We were the whole world away.
		And we never had a Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
		Tonight's program originally aired April 13th, 2000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, everybody.
		James Oberg is here, and in a moment, I've got a question for him about the direction of the agency, and then we're about to get the lines open.
		So it's question time.
unidentified		Question time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tomorrow night, folks, Mike Siegel will be here, and with Mike Siegel tomorrow night, Zachariah Sidgeon.
		I know you've been waiting for that one.
		And that followed by Alex Collier.
		Should be a really good show.
		Tomorrow night, Mike Siegel right here.
		Now, back to James Oberg.
		James, just two items before we splash into the phones here.
		One is, and I find this a little worrisome.
		It was recently announced by Mr. Golden that an integral, important part of his staff right now is Bobby Inman.
		Now, while we're all hoping that NASA is more open and that there are fewer secrets and that we're all sort of made part of this again, I don't think the addition of Mr. Inman gives us a lot of hope.
		Care to comment on that?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Is he on a review panel or has he joined the staff?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Because there's all kinds of review panels that they bring in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you talk about the great help of Bobby Inman and so forth and so on.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think more likely Mr. Golden just wants Inman's reputation to help him out rather than vice versa.
		Don't see that he'd be affecting things.
		You know, people have wondered about some of these transmissions from space, and I've been writing about that, in fact, on another website called Space.com that got the Area 51 site.
		I've always been puzzled why people think there's some kind of half-hour delay or there's some kind of censorship button because the people involved in it don't usually catch on to the videos or watch them.
		I think in the old days they were thinking maybe if there were ever some shots of some fight or some naked astronauts or some bodies being sucked out through holes, they'd want to cut that off.
		But we could tell from things happen on Challenger that there wasn't any cutoffs.
		And you can measure this yourself.
		In terms of delays, you can actually watch things happen, like when the shuttle docks at a space station on the NASA TV, measure that time, time it, and then compare it to the announced time later.
		And it's usually within a couple seconds.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but a lot of us imagine that there certainly would be, and I would think there definitely would be, a secure channel from the shuttle to Houston or wherever, a secure channel that mission control is not necessarily, that not everybody would hear.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are standard channels, but when they do the medical discussions, or private medical conferences or family conferences, those go over the same channels, but they're just not piped into mission control.
		Outside of that, there's the open channel, and the discussion's been on it.
		Heck, if there wasn't an open channel, there wouldn't be all these quotations alleged to astronauts about seeing various things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And there have been.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Oh, plenty of those.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And that's part of the sea serpents and mermaids of the space age.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, with the success we have had, I have a list here dating back to 1960 of both Soviet and U.S. missions to Mars.
		And it's astounding.
		I mean, we have had combined so many failures in going to Mars one way or the other.
		A couple of successes, notable.
		But otherwise, failure after failure after failure of flybys, of missions that were due to land on Mars.
		Why do we have such a hard time getting to Mars?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, obviously it's hard because it's longer, it's farther out from the sun, takes longer to get there.
		And also, the missions, especially in the past, tended to be every five or ten years.
		And you often forget each time what you learned last time.
		And there is that learning curve.
		Now, with these faster missions and flying one or two every two and a half years, the odds are that the NASA guys will figure out how to do it right, and the next couple missions will work just fine.
		Because there were things forgotten, obviously forgotten, that used to be known, that NASA couldn't get right this time.
		And they're fessing up to that now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it wasn't just NASA, it's the Russians, too.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		The Russians have their own problems, and most of it is getting there, and also the lifetime of Russian equipment in space has always been a problem.
		Toward the end of their program, too, when they got really ambitious and sent those probes to land on Phobos, they were thrown together with the Western money, and even when they were launched, it was clear to observers that they pretty much had to cut a lot of corners to build them.
		I remember saying at the time, this is back in 86, 87, when they were putting this together, it was clear that they were taking great risks in cutting corners off of those probes.
		I think I wrote that I'd be surprised if both of them made it and wouldn't be surprised if none of them did.
		And that was based on the fact that you could see they were making these cost-cutting measures and cutting corners, and they were in a rush.
		And sure enough, they blew one probe with bad commanding, and the second probe had been breaking down piece by piece, so the whole trip finally just started tumbling.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Were our astronauts relatively safe on Mir?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		There was always a way out.
		But the hazards were not so much high as unknown, and that was what I'd objected to at the time.
		But the guys who were there, and Dr. Lucid was there, they were aware that they might have to run for their lives.
		Dave Wolf, for example, made a point of whenever he slept, he would have a belt pack with him of a couple of days' food and flashlight and batteries and film and things.
		he basically told me that if he heard the depressurization or fire alarm go, he said he knew how to get to the Soyuz in the dark and was not going to stop for anything on the way.
		He was equipped to run for his life at a second's notice, and he slept peacefully under that condition.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
		Well, nominal.
		All right, we're about to build this international space station, and the Russians are donating some hardware to that.
		How comfortable about that should we be?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's been a problem from the beginning because we were in love with some illusions about what they could do for us, and NASA appears to have felt that that was what the White House wanted in terms of being friends with the Russians.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here we go again.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So there's a whole other two-hour discussion on that.
		I do have a speech I gave up at Rice University back in November, which I cataloged all the promises that had been made for this partnership and how none of them had actually turned out to be impractical, except that it looked good.
		And it was good for photo opportunities with the politicians.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's turning out to be a very expensive space station indeed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it one of those projects that gathered forward momentum and really should have been done in a different way and is just sort of going on its own momentum now?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Let me just quote you and say you write back to you because I think those are the exact words I would have used.
		And maybe you've read my stuff or maybe you're just great minds work in parallel art because this project has been one that has always sought a justification.
		And the main justification appears to be to build it and they will come, to build something big, anything big.
		And there always are going to be payoffs to that kind of work.
		The question always is, are they enough?
		And could you have gotten the same payoffs for a whole lot less expenditures?
		The country decided to build a space station.
		That's national policy.
		And my concern is the way it's being done is both wasteful and also they're introducing new risks.
		Here you go again with spaceflight, which is inherently risky and dangerous and is full of unpleasant surprises.
		And it's just inexcusable to keep adding new risks and new surprises, guarantee new surprises, by bad management back on Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Here's somebody, I think, with a really relevant question.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with James Oberg.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		This is Bert from Houston.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Bert.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Houston, huh?
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Thanks so much for having such a fascinating program.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
unidentified		You keep radio alive, I think.
		Thank you.
		I've got a question for James.
		It seems like many of the problems that he describes, bureaucracy and politics and the waste and the lack of accountability, those are features of any nationalized industry.
		And I'm wondering why we as a society assume that space exploration must be publicly funded.
		What about privatizing NASA?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Very good point, Bert.
		And the assumption has to be that we have to pay more attention because actually in the past year or two the dominance of governments and space expenditures has faded, that there's more money being spent now by private corporations than by governments around the world on space.
		This is a shift that has been occurring in the past five or ten years and that has not been widely recognized.
		So there is private money going.
		There's even private money keeping the Mir space station going.
		I think there are roles though for government and I think that part of the prosperity of our country is that the government has taken upon itself to spend the money to open frontiers for 200 years.
		We're going to have this bicentennial, the Lewis and Clark expedition, one of the great exploratory missions.
		It was the Apollo program of its day.
		And other technology development was promoted by government subsidies and government spending.
		These generally have paid off in the long run.
		And the long-run payoffs are what private funding usually has a hard time accepting.
		It's not automatic, but it's a process that I think has proven effective in the past.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, Congress mandated, didn't it, James, that privatization begin to occur?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And has it really occurred at the rate that Congress expected with that mandate?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, privatization has its own risks.
		It's sloppy and wasteful as well.
		It's not like privatization is some kind of magic key.
		We're seeing right now one of the tragedies of privatization is the failure of the Iridium satellite program, which got itself cross-wise to inadequate marketing, perhaps market research.
		It hit the Asian recession that cut back on its customer base.
unidentified		You mean that's not supposed to be a big fireworks show?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, we'll wait to see what's going to happen with them.
		It's a big show as it is.
		Those iridium satellites are wonderful to watch because they flash reflections down to Earth.
unidentified		What do you think the role of space tourism might play in assisting a privatization of space exploration?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think tourism is a real sleep for industry because we see people already willing to spend $100,000 in three months to climb Mount Everest, and a quarter of them die, and space will be a little more expensive, but quite a bit safer in terms of making rocket flights.
		That will be happening, I think, in the coming months or years.
		And for that matter, a tourism flight to Mir with this private Mir corporation, MirCorp, I think is a very likely eventuality with the next 12 months.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, with maybe a little more risk?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		No, I think there's always ways out.
		It's a question of saving your skin versus making a successful mission.
		I think that the Russians, after all, have had a safety record of a manned spaceflight that's just as good as the U.S., and some would say better.
		So they are not careless of the lives of their cosmonauts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let me run this one by you.
		Gene Myers, I have interviewed a number of times.
		You may have heard them, perhaps not.
		He's in charge of something called the Space Island Project.
		And he contends that the boosters used with the shuttle now could be used to construct a gigantic space station at very little cost, that they could be converted with some changes on the ground and then joined in space to create an incredible tourist attraction.
		Have you heard of that?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		lots of folks that are trying to find some way to make use of this external fuel tank.
		This is a tank that goes up into orbit, almost into orbit.
		It's loaded with cryogenic liquid hydrogen and oxygen.
		We call it, in the space program, we call it the world's largest throwaway coal drink can.
		And it's 90,000 pounds of aluminum, and there should be some way of making use of it.
		You can't get it back because it's going so fast that it just disintegrates on re-entry.
		There are problems in using them in space as well, and it's not nearly as simple and easy to do as some of the promoters have, but I've seen very serious plans as well, and the more the merrier.
		NASA could use some new ideas, and NASA could use a reminder that it doesn't monopolize innovation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, in other words, they should be looking at some of this stuff.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, if not them, or North Korea, someone else should be looking at it to fund it on their own.
		Most of these ideas, as in any kind of groundbreaking area, most of these ideas are going to fail.
		A lot of them are really flaky.
		Some of them have within them, I think, the seeds of some extremely profitable and successful programs.
		You can't tell right now.
		It's going to shake out.
		All you can do right now is keep looking for new ideas.
		And that's why this topic, I think why your show is a culturally important thing, because people have said, there's a scientist named Haldane who said that the universe, he said, is probably not only queer than we imagined, it's queer than we can imagine.
		We need to stretch our imaginations in space and elsewhere.
		And right now, rather than being judgmental, I'd like to be more encouraging to these ideas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wild Hardline, you're on the air with James Oberg.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, Art.
		This is Bill from West Hartford, Connecticut.
		I have three important questions on Cydonia.
		I'm not going to ramble.
		I'm reading my questions right now.
		Let me read them.
		Question number one, east of the face is a crater with a five-sided pyramid on the rim of that crater and a long cliff or wall on the ejector blanket of that same crater.
		Question number one, how do you naturally explain these phenomena?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let me stop.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		James?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I don't.
		People look at those.
		You get people's opinion.
		I don't have an opinion on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, two?
unidentified		Okay, question number two.
unidentified		Don't you agree that Michael Malin apparently degraded the Mars Global Surveyor 1998 photo of the face so that it was not a true fair test?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, sir, certainly that first photograph of the face was terrible.
		That's true.
		James?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I don't think people degrade photographs.
		I think people get this information.
		I've seen too many accusations of cover-ups and distortions against people who these accusations are made to satisfy other people's agendas.
		And so I react very negatively to those kinds of accusations and that kind of tone of voice.
unidentified		Okay, third question.
		Richard Hoagland believes that Mars Polar Lander, in fact, landed at Sidonia and Mars Climate Orbiter is working as a relay for MPL downlink to Earth.
		What do you think of that?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And the control center is, where's the control center is where at Disney World?
unidentified		Colorado.
unidentified		Boulder, Colorado.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think that that's a good amusing laughter would be the proper response to that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with James Oberg.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, good evening.
		I just wanted to make a comment.
		I find your show rather fascinating.
		I'm not very scientifically oriented, but I really don't understand a lot of the technical stuff.
		But you made some comments earlier about NASA's management quality.
		And I want to congratulate you on exposing that because it's not just NASA.
		You find it in so many businesses, for-profit businesses, that have the same lousy, incompetent management.
		They treat their employees like garbage.
		They don't really give their employees the freedom to grow and blossom and to learn and to absorb as much as they can to make things better.
		They don't give the employees that ownership feeling that, yes, I have a part and a stake in this operation.
		And then I think the other problem that I see that as far as like you say they're getting these young people in here that really don't know what they're doing.
		Well, that goes back, I think, to a lack of maybe an education in this society today.
		Kids are coming out of school.
		They can't even balance a checkbook.
		They don't know how to count change at a cash register.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but there is a wider cultural issue here, and isolating NASA can be unfair.
		But also, NASA does attract a special kind of people who want to do this space stuff.
		So the enthusiasm and intelligence of these people has never been greater.
		It's a question simply of engineering judgment that you have to develop through experience, through making mistakes several times and being caught and hopefully not paying too badly and eventually catching on your own judgment.
		This happened to me when I was a young engineer at NASA.
		It was that we'd go to a review of some of our technical drawings and the old guy would come in there.
		He was only five years older than us, but he'd been around since Apollo.
		And he'd look at the drawing and in about two seconds he'd tap his finger over in this corner and say, we need to work on this some more.
		And would look back at it, and by golly, nine times out of ten, he'd identified it.
		How do you do that?
		Well, it's a matter of experience.
		And 20 years later, I was doing the same thing to the young people working with me.
		And you have to keep people like that, even though they're more expensive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and now I was going to say, where are those guys?
		Now, hold on, James.
		We're at the bottom of the arrow once again.
		I'm Art Bell.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with a 22-year NASA veteran.
		Good morning.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
		Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 13, 2000.
		I don't want to run, no time to sleep.
		I've got to ride, ride like the wind, to be free again.
		And I've got such a long way to go, such a long way to go.
		into the boat mixing goals.
		I run like the wind, fight like the wind.
		I will focus upon the longest man.
		I always broke my mind with a gun.
		I always broke my mind with a gun.
		Guess there's no use in hanging round.
		Guess I'll get pressed into the town.
		I'll find some crowded avenue.
		Though it will be empty without you, can't be used to losing you.
		No matter what I try to do, gonna live my whole life through loving you.
		Call up some girl I used to know.
		After I heard her say hello, couldn't think of anything to say.
		Since you're gone, it happens every day.
		Can't get used to losing you no matter what I try to do.
		You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premiere Radio Networks.
		Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 13th, 2000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Something about that instrument I love.
		Always have.
		Very infectious.
		Good morning, everybody.
		James Oberg is here, a 22-year NASA veteran.
		And that's pretty much what we're talking about.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		With regard to the Mars Polar Lander failure, James, this is an article from the BBC News dated March 29th of this year.
		And there's a quote here, Jet Proposal Operatory Director Ed Stone said better management procedures were already being implemented.
		He said, quote, no heads would roll at JPL because of the Mars failures.
		This is not about who's to blame.
		This is about how to ensure success.
		We have to put in place a system of checks and balances to ensure success, end quote.
		So I don't know if that makes sense to me.
		I mean, sure, it's good to say a system of checks and balances, but no heads rolling, no blame put.
		It's not about who's to blame, he says.
		I don't know if that's all worrisome to me.
		I know it backtracks to where we were, but there is a quote.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that's a good point, Art, is that someone's responsible for setting a tone where they thought they could do the impossible.
		We talked earlier about how Mr. Golden was saying perhaps he pushed too hard.
		And I was going to actually surprise him by saying, I don't think he pushed too hard.
		I just don't think his employees pushed back hard enough.
		I think that there's a dynamic that goes on where leadership does challenge the workforce, but the workforce has to respond in a realistic manner and say, no, we can't do this.
		You're asking too much.
		And at NASA, where the culture was we could do miracles and we're the smartest people in the universe, they marched off the cliff there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So the answer was always can do, never can't do, or can do, but we've got to change this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's it.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		There wasn't enough skepticism, but realism saying, wait a second, you're asking the impossible.
		They didn't discover that until after they'd failed.
		Well, there's the gap.
		It's not the pushing too hard.
		It's the fact that the culture wouldn't talk back, wouldn't push back.
		And in fact, Goldman is the one himself who's created a culture where pushing back against him was severely career-limiting.
		So for him to say that we need now to create a different culture is, like they say, in Chicago, running for re-election on a reform ticket.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much do you know about Star Wars that you cannot talk about?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		There's nothing I can't talk about that I know about Star Wars, and I think most of the stuff's come out now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do we have the ability to stop now an incoming ballistic missile?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		No, once it's in flight, we don't.
		We have the ability to stop it by squashing it in the launch pad, and that's something that we should spend more time looking at, is that the Israelis have a policy that once a missile is in flight, maybe it's too late, but they'll go out there.
		If someone's aiming a missile at them, they're not going to waste the missile a bit long, they're going to go out and squash it.
		Or someone's building a nuclear reactor in a hostile Arab state, they go out and bomb it.
		Well, of course, that violates international law and all that, but people quietly are happy to do it.
		If there's a missile or two in North Korea that's aimed at Japan or aimed at us, I don't think we have any business leaving it sitting there in the launch pad safely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's fine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Finally said with regard to Korea, but then move up the ladder a little bit, and let's talk about China.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		As far as I know from the Chinese missiles, they are not kept on alert.
		I'm not even kept fueled.
		But who knows that may change.
		We don't know what's going to happen in the future.
		It would be nice to have a missile system that could knock down warheads, especially because people, a lot of these countries like to build missiles, even a handful of missiles, for just that threat.
		But it's been pointed out that there's all kinds of ways to get a nuclear warhead into a target country.
		And sending it through space may be fast, but it's also probably the most vulnerable.
		And one of the best ways to get an A-bomb into the U.S. would probably be to wrap it in a bale of marijuana.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And maybe FedEx it or something.
		Listen, You know a lot about the Russians.
		What is their hardware like?
		I know they've had a lot of shoddy work, but they've also done a lot of really incredible stuff as they're doing.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		It's good enough when it works.
		It works quite well.
		They build their systems to be operational, to be rugged.
		They build in extra margins for human error and for just for the fact the world is not perfect.
		Look at their mirror station.
		It took a lot of criticism from me, among others, back in 97 when I had a series of very nearly fatal breakdowns.
		They've actually gone through that.
		That was not a terminal decay.
		They've actually gone through that, and we helped them because we sent nine or ten shuttles up there carrying equipment and supplies to rebuild their station just to keep it safe for our own people.
		But, of course, after our people left, the Mir was still had all this equipment on board.
		And now the Russians talk about keeping it going another year or two or five or even ten more years, keeping it going in competition with the International Space Station.
		That Mir station has got to be, it's going to go down in history.
		It was one of the real pioneers, real rugged outposts on the frontier.
		So they build stuff that works okay.
		Now, there are limits beyond which they can't go.
		They couldn't build the big rockets that we did for Apollo.
		They couldn't get their Mars probes to really work very well at all because of the long distance there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I've got the long list of failures.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		But those are failures when their reach exceeded their grasp.
		And so there are limits, but within those limits, they've operated very efficiently and very reliably.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Should we be examining long-term the plausibility of terraforming Mars?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think that we have to examine short-term the possibility of terraforming Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're right about that.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, not to put a plug in for your book, but happy to do it.
		I think the climate on Earth has its own instabilities.
		It has its own human disturbances and natural disturbances, which put all ours to shame in terms of scale.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And there are ways to first understand this better from space.
		That's why I think space exploration and technology are critical to human survival.
		They're not some luxury that we can do with our spare change while funding the arts and things.
		It's something that without an active space program and knowledge from it, I don't think the civilization is going to last on this planet.
		And one of the things has to do with climate control, the things one can do with climate on Earth, whether you're going to start spreading things in the ocean to absorb extra carbon dioxide or whether you want to use these mirrors.
		The Russians were experimenting with small mirrors.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I wanted to ask you about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They were going to turn day into or night into day.
unidentified		Yeah, and good idea?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think we're going to have to, it's one of the technologies that's very attractive.
		It's certainly going to confuse the mating turtles, but there are other concerns.
		It can also be used if you have mirrors that are hundreds of miles on a side, that are the thickness of aluminum foil, even thinner.
		They'd be not as heavy as you might think because they're in space and they're floating in space.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And they could be used for illumination, for rescue, for search and rescue, for that sort of thing, but also eventually for even warming some areas.
		And warming a couple degrees could save a couple of million dollars in the citrus crops during a frost.
		It could warm up areas in the ocean in the path of hurricanes that affect the course of hurricanes.
		And we're talking about decades now in the future.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but you were talking about how Mother Nature was such a challenge for the space program.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, there are a lot of people who think that warming various parts of Earth by a few degrees might have challenging results.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Warming or even cooling, because they're all sort of parasols, and as they pass in front of the Earth, they reflect light away from the Earth.
		The sun varies by a couple percent up and down, and that variance seems to be driving a lot of the climate.
		But as you pointed out, I think quite accurately, that sometimes the climate doesn't just keep shifting in a linear fashion.
		It makes these very sudden and catastrophic changes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A lot of geologic evidence for that.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and I think that something deserves a whole lot more worry.
		And so mirrors are one thing to use.
		There are other applications of space technology toward climate control, world climate control.
		And then once, maybe because it's so uncertain, because it is so risky, you might want to practice it on some other planet first.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that there are experiments going on now with regard to climate modification?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		There certainly are weather control experiments in terms of looking at ways to increase or decrease rainfall.
		In terms of climate modification, I know there's discussions about HAARP and the other technologies, but you have to ask what are the approved missions and the approved doctrines that would back up these programs.
		There's still a lot of haziness about that.
		But in terms of controlling entire climates, military use of that is kind of strange.
		I think if, in fact, there is going to be climate modification on Earth, the Corps of Engineers, at least the Army Corps of Engineers, would be involved because they have in place the culture and the management for changing Earth around.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, on an Air Force website, I can't remember just which one at the moment, there was actually a statement made that we will own the weapon.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that was a paper written, and I think it was written by several students at a military college, so it wasn't as if it was an Air Force policy, but it's a sort of thing that we're moving toward.
		One of the terraforming things I'm most interested in is the issues of hazards both from earthquakes and volcanoes.
		Because earthquakes are very localized.
		They don't have a global impact, although they will certainly ruin your day locally.
		But volcanoes are the ones that with ejecting all this material into the upper atmosphere, stuff that makes an entire Human industry, just a footnote compared to the stuff that Mother Nature belches into the atmosphere occasionally.
		And those effects are global and global and persistent.
		And you've got to find a way to keep that stuff from reaching the stratosphere.
		well that there are some technical ways to might do that and uh...
		you with imagination of listeners because we need to Where they begin to change tension.
		Where they have global as opposed to regional effects, yeah.
		That needs a lot more.
		But there's a philosophy of that.
		The philosophy is one of intervention.
		People are saying, no, we shouldn't touch the earth.
		We only hurt the earth when we affect it.
		And if we just stop messing up ourselves, it'll heal itself and it'll continue on an even keel without human intervention.
		And I think that's not only a mistake, and I think it's a long range.
		It's fatal in the long range because Earth does have its own variations, Earth and the Sun.
		We're along for the ride.
		And we can't tolerate the kind of climatic disasters that have occurred in the past.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I couldn't agree more.
		The anti-environmentalists are famous for saying, well, it's egotistical to imagine that we could kill Earth.
		And they're right.
		We couldn't kill Earth, but we can kill the ability for humanity to continue to live upon it.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And especially in the area of technology, this is a wonderful topic in fringe sciences.
		Are we the first civilization on Earth?
		And were there other technical civilizations in the past?
		I don't think so for the very simple reason is that we have eaten up all the resources, the easy resources near the surface, the easy oil, the easy metals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, indeed.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		And when we got here, when we started using them, we found they were still lying around.
		No one had eaten them before us.
		And so I think we are the first real serious technological civilization, at least in the last few million years.
		And what that means is if we blow it now, if we now have the technology that we can extract the deep ores and the deep oil, but if we lose that technology and go back to medieval technology levels, we'll never again be able to go back up to get to the stuff that's left.
		So we have this one shot at creating an interplanetary culture and establishing our technology, our civilization safe beyond a single planet.
		And this is one shot.
		We don't get another one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		James, why aren't we using fuel cells like they have on the shuttle to generate power here on Earth?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I think, well, fuel cells aren't magical either because it takes energy to create the raw materials for them.
		Fuel cells are useful on a shuttle.
		A rocket fuel is useful there because it's a concentration form of energy.
		It's storable energy.
		They can then release it as needed.
		But in terms of efficient energy production, you have to look back to where the liquid hydrogen comes from, liquid oxygen comes from, and it takes energy to create them.
		It's like people who consider a California economy to be environmentally safe because it's mostly electrical because they just don't look at the Four Corners area in the Rockies where the sky is full of coal smoke, pumping the electricity into California.
		So fuel cells are good ways to create mechanical energy, but they may not be efficient because you have to create the fuel for them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, what about the concept of collecting solar energy in space, outside the atmosphere, where you can really collect a lot of it, converting it, and in essence microwaving it to Earth?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		That's been around for a while and it remains an attractive idea.
		It's one of these ideas that it's so big that there's what they call a giggle factor involved.
		It's so big it couldn't possibly be feasible.
		But collecting energy at space or at a base on the south pole of the moon, it's in perpetual sunlight.
		Yes.
		I think there's a serious proposals.
		And I think we should be doing more experiments in terms of prototype experiments in space doing that.
		I'm sorry that it's the Russians alone doing these space mirror tests.
		They're about to run a tether test on the mirror for a tether engine to actually propel the mirror using an electrical motor in space.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That whole tether thing that we did was pretty weird.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		It was weird, and unfortunately, it seems to have, because they're anti-problems, which is wonderful because it shows you didn't fully understand it.
		That's right.
		It seems to have intimidated NASA.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they don't want to do it anymore.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think there's a missed opportunity because there are things to be checking out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there was energy where there should not have been that.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Well, the energy was predictable.
		There was a spark where there shouldn't have been because the insulation was damaged, and they suggest it was damaged.
		They checked out the manufacturing process back at NASA where they built it, and they clearly didn't take enough precautions in protecting against chafing in the insulation.
		They just didn't realize that it would be high potential.
		And sure enough, the spark leaped through this hole there, and the spark heated the wire and snapped the wire right there at the tower, because that's where the spark was.
		The spark was from the wire to the tower.
		And no mystery about that now, but it's just that they clearly weren't careful enough when they were building this tether.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if it was a good experiment to try and it had an unexpected result, you would think they'd really go after it.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		I sure would like them to.
		I think they were embarrassed by it, and it was, again, a case there of the image.
		The image was embarrassing, and they just wanted to avoid embarrassing images.
		And I think that's, again, bad leadership there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy.
		Wild Cardline, you're on the air with James Oberg.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		It's good to get a chance to talk to you again.
unidentified		This is Marcel calling from Massachusetts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And I have a question for James, and then I'd like to say one thing real quick to you, Art.
		My question is for James.
		During the past 22 years working for NASA and mission control, have you ever been escorted by any of your superiors to witness, possibly under oath of secrecy, any top secret aircraft projects involving triangular-shaped UFO military craft?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		There was plenty of stuff out there and plenty of reports.
		I was working, by the way, not directly.
		I was working as a contractor in control center, but I had the full clearances.
		And especially during the DOD years when there were some DOD payloads that were classified secret, the secret level, and nothing beyond that.
		At the Johnson Space Center, they're not involved with aircraft like that, except training aircraft, and those are pretty standard stuff.
		So, no, not in those kind of aircraft or in any other kind of area was ever restricted in terms of material to discuss.
		Even on the Defense Department missions I worked on, it was a matter of configuration and flight profiles that were secret.
		And the reason they were secret was they didn't want the Russians using their satellites to track them during a launch.
		If they tracked them during launch, they could have detected characteristics of the satellites that would allow them to develop countermeasures.
		Once the satellites were safely in orbit, even that material was no longer secret, even that information was.
		So the secrecy there had very excellent operational reasons, but nothing to do with aircraft.
		Clearly, there are people seeing things that are among them that are very interesting and in many ways fairly new in terms of things that weren't seen 10, 20 years ago.
		And I think it's a very fascinating speculation that we're seeing some test vehicles of some sort either.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You bet we are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, look, the F-117 and the B-2, they're real old news now, and we've got to have been doing something between then and now, right?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		well people also use these stories that were case the case of a public trust with that uh...
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		not only have many i think a radio fees tolerated because of the cap they have they have a that exploited uh...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		example i did my own experience We're at the top of the last hour, and I always ask my guests, are you good for one more hour?
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Probably not.
		I've really got to go and get the kids up in a little while and do some work.
		So I'd like to, I know that you're running toward the end of your current career here, but I've had a good time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But I really, my friend.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
james oberg ▲ ● ▼		See you again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For me, for Art Bell, that's it for tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		See you next week.

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