Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 13, 2000 - Art Bell

02:39:25

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

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Welcome to Art Bell Somewhere In Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 13,
	2000 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, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S.
	Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the pole, and of course worldwide on the internet.
	This is Coast to Coast AM and I'm Art Bell.
	Hour number one, Peter Davenport.
	Two great reports directly ahead.
	Our number two, James Oberg, who worked at NASA's Mission Control in Houston for 20 years.
	20 years.
	And we're going to talk about NASA and what's going on with Mars and a lot of things with James.
	And he has 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 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.
	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 I'm a 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 often times come in, 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.
	Well, you know what I'd like to see, Peter?
	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.
	Due to what we did to the MiG-25.
	Disassemble it, inspect it, reassemble it, and hand it back.
	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 twenty-fifth of august nineteen ninety five the same day that windows ninety five was being released out here in seattle here we go this is what happened over pennsylvania four and a half years ago
	My car and we were getting ready to pull out of the driveway and all of a sudden I heard my mom say look at that and I looked up in the sky and the entire sky was like a light blue like daytime.
	Yeah.
	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 sound to it it kind of like Now that was the first call we got on this incident, the first of many.
	Had it been east to west, I'd said maybe that was a late delivery of 95 to Gates.
	what time did this occur to you? It just happened like five minutes ago. It was like 1240 our
	time. About, mom said about ten seconds. It was going from north to south. Now that was
	the first call we got on this incident, the first of many.
	Had it been east to west I'd said maybe that was a late delivery of 95 to Gates. Yeah.
	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.
	It had stopped?
	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.
	Oh.
	And with that, why don't we go to our guest, and I'll let you introduce her.
	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.
	Hi, Art.
	Hi, Peter.
	Hi, Amy.
	And thanks for coming on tonight.
	This is going to be an interesting story for our listeners.
	All right.
	What did you see just before that report came in to Peter?
	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.
	Wait a minute, going up to the fireball?
	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 called 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 4 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?
	Yes, I agree with you.
	Why would anybody fire a missile at a meteor?
	Right.
	On the other hand, meteors don't stop dead cold either.
	Well.
	So maybe they weren't firing at a meteor.
	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.
	No, this is just video footage, that's all.
	I live in Texas, remember?
	I live in Canada.
	So this is only on video footage, but no, you can't really see it.
	Unless somebody wants to analyze the footage, maybe they could see it.
	Well, I would say they ought to.
	Mm-hmm.
	Well, hopefully somebody will someday.
	How long have you been an investigator of things of this sort?
	Officially since I was 12, but really since 1992.
	I started studying UFOs and I worked with Dr. Turner.
	Dr. Carla Turner?
	Yes, oh yes.
	And we were associates and we were working on abductions and stuff like that.
	And now I'm sort of more into the nuts and bolts aspect.
	More UFOs.
	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?
	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.
	Good for you.
	So I sent a copy to, or a copy of the information, I just said I had the footage, to Peter, and Peter said, huh!
	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.
	Well listen, you've got this, where is this on the internet?
	Can I get a link to it?
	Yeah, I sent it to your webmaster.
	Webmaster, he's rolling.
	Okay, well it's posted at The Vanguard, with a capital T, capital V, all one word, dot tripod dot com slash fball, f-b-a-l-l dot h-t-m.
	And if it makes it crash, I don't care.
	Well, let's see.
	I don't have a very big website.
	Oh, that's alright.
	I'm going to.
	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 or object, right object that's heading up towards the alleged fireball.
	Alright, I am now on a webpage entitled The Windsor Incident.
	Okay, if you go down to 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 article?
	Well, I'm working on getting to the photos here.
	Oh, yes.
	Yes, indeed.
	Here it comes.
	The animation is stunning, Art.
	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.
	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!
	And I hope Keith can get that to your website.
	He's got it.
	He's already got it.
	He does.
	Okay.
	Well, he doesn't have the actual animation.
	With Amy's permission, though, we might be able to grab the animation and get it on the website.
	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.
	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?
	Yes, that was shot...
	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.
	Yes.
	And the spectators and people around there, the people they were interviewing, started pointing.
	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.
	Oh, this is very clear.
	And they said nothing about the bright object going up towards it.
	How could they not?
	How could they miss that?
	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.
	Folks, you can see a portion of the city of Toronto very clearly.
	No, that's Windsor.
	I'm sorry, Windsor.
	But is it there down in Toronto?
	It's T-O-R-O, whatever that is.
	It says T-O-R-O-4.
	Oh, that's the City TV.
	City TV is out of Toronto.
	Out of Toronto.
	They were the ones shooting footage.
	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.
	Well, I didn't do it.
	I just put it out there.
	We'll send you a copy if you'd like.
	Well, I've got a copy now.
	No, not the actual thing.
	Oh, I'd love that.
	It's just, what, three or four seconds, Peter?
	About that long.
	Oh, that's incredible.
	I had talked about this case as it had occurred over Pennsylvania for about four years at this point.
	I mean, it's rare enough to catch a fireball, but to catch this is astounding.
	And then I go to Amy's website about December of last year and saw this perfectly round fireball.
	If it were a still on the internet, one would think it is the full moon.
	Right, that's right.
	And the camera is looking generally to the south, I believe.
	The object is coursing away from the photographer to the south-southeast, headed across Lake Erie, and therefore headed For Pennsylvania.
	I was going to say, can I see reflection of water at one point in that animation in the background?
	Right.
	I believe you can.
	Okay.
	Indeed.
	I do see the water then.
	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.
	Actually, actually, it is chasing the object.
	Since the object is disappearing from the camera point, you can virtually see this thing taking off after it.
	Yes.
	Going up and taking off after it.
	That's right.
	And that's no jet plane.
	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.
	Whew!
	And this is on the original footage.
	Right.
	My, my, Amy.
	You've got one of the better pieces of evidence that I've ever seen.
	Big time nuts and bolts.
	Well, it's not really mine.
	It was out there.
	People just didn't catch it.
	Yeah.
	And there's more to it, Art.
	Oh?
	You want some more?
	More, more, more.
	Okay.
	The Reuters, I don't know how to pronounce it.
	Reuters, Reuters.
	Reuters 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 a meteor, but he says We have police and firefighters out there now trying to recover something.
	Trying to recover something?
	Meaning out about where?
	Supposedly where this trailer park is.
	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 see.
	But you know what?
	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.
	That's a good question.
	Yeah, it is.
	That came down at Trail Park.
	Amy, can you hold on a few more moments?
	Sure.
	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.
	You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
	tonight featuring a replay of coast to coast am from april 13th 2000
	without your love don't leave me this way
	my heart is full of love not cool down and
	She doesn't give you time for questions As she locks up your love and hers And you follow to your sense Of which direction completely disappears By the blue-tiled walls near the market stalls There's a hidden girl she leads you to These days, she says, I feel my life just like a river
	running through the air of the cabin I feel my life just like a river running through the air of
	the cabin I feel my life just like a river running through the air of
	the cabin Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell's Somewhere in
	Time.
	Tonight's program originally aired April 13, 2000.
	We've got it linked right from the front page.
	Click on the Windsor incident and look at the moving video, the moving GIF, and it'll blow your mind.
	There's clearly what people call the 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 call the meteor being shot at.
	Going north to south, and once again, here's Amy Bearer, 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 the 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-48, 50, 80 video.
	Exactly.
	Amazing stuff, and this is right in that class.
	Right.
	There's also a witness who claims he saw something launched, a missile launch or a missile test, he thought it was, at the same time in an area near Detroit.
	Wow, what a coincidence.
	It was right over the bay from Windsor.
	I have two eternal complaints about all of this.
	One, that they automatically call it a meteor.
	And I'm not willing to accept that until somebody says, look, here's the meteor.
	When they nail it down.
	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 them.
	You agree with that?
	Right.
	Amy, do you agree with that, Peter?
	Yeah, I sure do.
	This is fascinating footage, Hart, 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.
	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 side holds up.
	Okay.
	Thank you.
	I'll miss you.
	Oh, thank you, Amy.
	Okay.
	And good night.
	Okay, there's Amy.
	Now, Peter, why don't you go ahead very quickly.
	We'll fit it all in.
	Go ahead.
	Play the cut.
	58-second cut.
	This is 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.
	Here we go.
	He describes the thing when it stopped over Pennsylvania.
	Here we are.
	Coming down a mountain path and suddenly just the valley was 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.
	The object was pulsing with a very pronounced blue light.
	It pulsed probably to be stationary and it pulsed about eight times with a blue light and then switched to a green light.
	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.
	That's right.
	Not all of them stop.
	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 from seattle washington the u of national ufo reporting
	center here is peter davenport
	Peter, welcome back.
	Thank you, Art.
	I know we're running short of time.
	We have a couple of 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?
	Okay, they're on one phone, Peter.
	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.
	Hi.
	So this was a couple of nights ago, huh?
	Yeah, it was the 11th.
	The 11th.
	Tuesday night.
	Okay.
	You have a pretty good technical background in physics, astronomy.
	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 and multiple background about it.
	Not a professor yet?
	No, not quite yet.
	You're working on it, alright.
	Anyway, so at least you're grounded in the sciences, and you should know what you're looking at.
	Yeah.
	So, what did you see, and under what conditions?
	Well, it was almost 10 o'clock, so it was perfectly dark out.
	It was completely cloudy that night.
	We were traveling down the 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.
	Alright.
	We traveled about three or four blocks.
	At this point it was closer.
	I'm sorry, let me stop you.
	Three or four blocks?
	Yeah.
	How low was this thing?
	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 too fast.
	It had plenty of time.
	Right.
	What I mean is, in altitude, how low do you think it was?
	It had to be below the clouds.
	So, I'd say good within 2,000 feet.
	Okay.
	We traveled about four blocks.
	Now it was about 75 degrees above the horizon.
	That's when we pulled into 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 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 sun whatsoever.
	At that point it kind of made a V-shape, started to return back from the way it came, only... Oh, really?
	Only, yeah, only back towards the northern direction of the east.
	Alright, well, I would immediately say the only thing I could imagine that might do that would be a helicopter, maybe.
	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, ten o'clock, it was late enough where I could hear fairly well.
	No sound at all.
	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?
	Yes.
	Usually after something like this, Ramon and myself saw a triangle, and for a long time we just sat down and talked about it after the shock wore off.
	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.
	So then if I were to pin you up against the wall and say, what did you see?
	What do you say?
	I don't know.
	I have no clue.
	I'm not going to make any assumptions.
	I know it was a light, some object.
	I mean, a light.
	I wouldn't say it was a... It was too long to be anything shooting through the sky.
	So it had to be some kind of aircraft.
	In what way did you lose it?
	Did it simply disappear as it continued?
	Or did... What happened?
	Well, it started traveling... Well, it started traveling back towards the way it came.
	Right.
	That's when we... I 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, uh, 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.
	Wow.
	So, at least you can say what you didn't see.
	It wasn't an airliner, was it?
	No, no.
	Couldn't have been a meteor, right?
	Well, no.
	No, it switched directions and it was there for at least, the whole thing took at least three minutes.
	And you believe it not to have been a helicopter because you heard no sound?
	And it would have been close enough to hear the sound.
	Oh yeah, it was almost above me at one point.
	Right above you?
	Yeah, 75 degrees on the horizon.
	So, you saw a UFO.
	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.
	You saw an unidentified flying object.
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	Unidentified, I don't know if it was I don't know why you would say military or something new of that sort, or extraterrestrial, but yeah, it was definitely one of the two.
	One of the two, yeah.
	That's what it always boils down to.
	Yes, certainly.
	How did the experience leave you?
	In other words, with a more open mind than you had before I took it?
	You haven't seen anything previously?
	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, a lot of curiosity.
	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.
	Yeah.
	It certainly helps the credibility when you see it yourself.
	Oh, it certainly does.
	Do you have a computer?
	Yeah, I do.
	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?
	Oh, Ann?
	Ann?
	Yeah.
	I'm sorry, Ann.
	Does she want to say anything?
	Well, 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.
	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?
	Initially, when I first saw it, we were traveling east and it was coming towards us almost from the southern east.
	How did it change its direction?
	Yeah, and then when we were in the parking lot, it would float and almost seem to kind of make a V and travel back towards the east, almost, towards the northern east this time.
	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.
	I would say faster than you would expect.
	It would certainly... I couldn't see it.
	It went out fairly quickly.
	Yeah.
	There's no reason to believe it would come close to contacting the ground or something like that.
	Yeah.
	It might have been shot down or propelled down by the object that emitted it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It definitely came down from the object, not the other way around.
	Well, ask Ann if she wants to come on and say, yeah, I saw that.
	Oh, okay.
	Here she is.
	Hold on.
	OK.
	Excellent.
	Hi, Anne.
	Hi.
	We're just having you kind of come on to say, yeah, I was there and I saw that.
	OK.
	So say it.
	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 north, northern east and we saw it emit a little ball or the same color of light from it and then it disappeared.
	What do you think you saw, Anne?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I have no idea.
	I mean, like, saw a nice... Did the incident bother you?
	No, I mean, it didn't bother me at all.
	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.
	Well, it definitely does something to the mind after you've seen it.
	You've seen it, and there's nothing you can do about it.
	Exactly.
	All right, Anne.
	Thank you.
	And for me, please thank Sean, too.
	Wonderful report.
	Keep your eyes upward.
	We will.
	Take care.
	Good night.
	All right.
	Well, wow.
	What a wonderful night, Peter.
	Two really hot things here.
	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.
	Either that or opens it wide open again.
	Exactly.
	Thanks to Amy Hebert, 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 bright 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.
	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, They say, meteor, and they never leave the newsroom.
	They just read the copy.
	And so that's how that happens, Peter.
	Yep, I know it.
	And we're trying to break them of 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.
	Well, we'll try and make a Mitch.
	All right.
	The National UFO Reporting Center.
	It 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 4-5-6-2-3, 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.
	three thousand that's uh... only that's going on right now to all six
	seven two two three thousand here
	Thank you.
	What a wonderful report.
	That's going to keep the web page busy all night long.
	I hope so, and thank you, Art.
	It's been a pleasure to be here tonight.
	Good night, Peter.
	Good night.
	All right.
	Go take a look.
	You won't leave your eyes.
	You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
	Tonight an encore presentation of coast to coast am from April 13th 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 got to stay out with your fancy friends
	I'm telling you it's gonna be the end Don't bring me down
	No, no, no, no, no 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 band 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.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi.
	First of all, an honor to have you here, of course.
	Same here.
	You're definitely a legend, and happy to talk to the people who listen to you.
	You were actually right there in Mission Control, the one we see on TV?
	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 and gals these days are watching the hardware.
	We're actually steering the ship.
	Steering the ship?
	What kind of missions did you steer the ship on in all those years that are memorable for you?
	Memorable one, of course, was the first.
	And that was the one that, in fact, just the 19th anniversary was just a few days ago.
	1981, April 12th.
	I may have missed the anniversary.
	Which one?
	No one had ever tested it before, never had unmanned flights, and wasn't altogether sure
	it was going to hold together.
	And off it went, and I was there in front of the launch team, the silver team.
	I may have missed the anniversary.
	Which one?
	April 12th, 1981 was the first flight of Columbia, the shuttle.
	Oh, Columbia, okay.
	And also happened to have been the 20th anniversary of the first manned flight in space, Yuri
	Gagarin.
	So last week, a couple of days ago, was the 39th anniversary of manned flight in space.
	And...
	That was definitely an event, too.
	You remember that?
	I was a kid at the time.
	I was a space nut even before the space age.
	Well, I remember that Sputnik and then Yuri Gagarin scared the hell out of us.
	They sure did, and that was a bizarre thing.
	No one really knew what was going to happen with space flight or how countries were going to spend the money on it.
	It turned out that us and the Russians got into this.
	Is that why we're not doing it so much anymore?
	record immense amounts of funding into space exploration and boost each other basically off the pole planet and that's
	how we've done it.
	Is that why we're not doing it so much anymore?
	Yeah, I'm probably going to do a book on that because we do have a real dysfunctional kind of partnership here
	and 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.
	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.
	James, I saw the right stuff.
	And I kind of imagine that NASA in those early years really was kind of like that movie.
	Was it?
	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.
	Is today's NASA, does it have a lot of relationship to the NASA of those days?
	That's a curious thing, because first, the people coming to work for you are just as bright and just as dedicated as ever.
	Sure.
	In fact, that's something that NASA, the management that 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 space flight.
	It's just like radio, James.
	People love the job so much, they'll come work for pennies.
	Well, a lot of folks in the space business catch on 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 that are losing.
	I do remember the spirit of NASA, and what you're saying is that's kind of Wayne, with a hemorrhaging of talent.
	Art, the spirit was very special, especially during Apollo, because they put together a team of people from all over the aviation 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 a mass, not just layoffs, but an exodus of 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 the 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 we haven't met a whole lot of new projects.
	And when we 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.
	Were you there during any of the Apollo missions?
	I got here just at the end of the Apollo Soyuz, like literally the week that it was ending.
	I was sent down here to pick up, to learn about mission control work.
	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 cost 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.
	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 that work down here.
	They like to do new things, not do the same thing over and over and over again.
	We've had, 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're just as happy to go and do something else.
	We'll get back to the moon.
	They thought we'd get back sooner, so did I. Is there a reason to go back to the moon?
	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 as 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.
	Did you build rockets when you were young?
	I watched the rockets.
	I blew up a few things.
	Yeah, that's what I mostly did too.
	I blew up things.
	A lot of smoke in the basement.
	Yeah, I did 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.
	Well, you're doing something just historical.
	You're doing something and not taking 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.
	I guess the big question is, thirty years plus now, later, why haven't we gone back?
	years 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.
	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?
	It was very difficult and expensive to do it, and the feeling was that you have to 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.
	We 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 space flight, but at great expense.
	And in many ways, it was like 100 years ago when the polar explorers were racing for the South Pole.
	To get there took a lot of effort.
	And after the first time people got there, and some people died on the way back, there were no more expeditions to the South Pole for 50 years, 40 years, until a new level of technology brought people there permanently.
	And that's been the hope.
	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 persnickety.
	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?
	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.
	The Russians tried to copy the shuttle.
	In fact, actually, they did copy the shuttle, and it never flew.
	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 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 a 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 spend all that money just to launch satellites, because they knew that the economics that NASA was promising was charade.
	And they were therefore convinced there was a Pentagon behind it.
	Pentagon plans.
	Well, to be fair now, there were some rather secret shuttle missions.
	Yes, yes, there were.
	And they were carried.
	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 on one autopilot, unmanned, with an autopilot, and it was a terrific, it was the pinnacle of their program, it was the greatest space feat that ever made.
	It bankrupted their program, and turned out to be utterly useless.
	Why?
	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.
	I know they were big on big boosters.
	Lots of power.
	Well, that was way back in the beginning of the space age.
	Then they tried to build other bigger boosters.
	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 their moon rockets that blew 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 his 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.
	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.
	Sometimes, with these kinds of projects, you need to have a short-term goal, exactly like you say, 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 kinds 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 planet 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.
	James, hold tight a moment.
	We're going to break here, and we'll be right back.
	You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
	Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 13th, 2000.
	So you've been here a long ago, playing a part in the picture show.
	Been a long, long way home.
	Take the long way home, take the long way home To the joke of the neighborhood, should you care if you're
	being moved Take the long way home, take the long way home
	Where are those happy days when you were young?
	Where are those happy days when you were young?
	They seem so hard to find.
	I tried to wait for you, but you have lost your mind.
	Whatever happened to our love?
	I wish I understood.
	It used to be so nice, it used to be so good So when you near me darling, can't you hear me SOS?
	The love you gave me, nothing else can save me SOS When you're gone, how can I even try to go on?
	When you're gone, no I try, how can I carry on?
	You seem so far away, though you are sending me You make me feel alive, but sometimes I feel like dying
	I really tried to make it out, I wish I understood What happened to our love, it just defaced the blue
	Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell's Somewhere in Time
	Tonight's program originally aired April 13th, 2000 Well, 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, but this is cooler.
	He's James Oberg, 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.
	Some pretty strange stuff has been going on.
	That's what's happening tonight.
	stay right where you are james the thing that brought you to my attention
	was you write for united press international and you wrote a story here
	just uh... what a couple of weeks ago That's right, on the Mars probe failure.
	It got me called a wacko by NASA.
	They did come back and call you a wacko, didn't they?
	Yeah.
	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?
	Well, we're facing a case here where these Mars pros are all failing.
	And the question was, why?
	And NASA is basically copying a plea that it was just gross incompetence.
	In fact, there'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.
	They had sort of fudged these tests.
	Well, were they expecting to blow up?
	I don't think so, but they were expecting something good to happen, but 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.
	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.
	They now believe, and I believe this is 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.
	So the difference that we're having in this dispute is over which design flaw killed it.
	Not that it was killed by a design flaw, NASA concedes that, but the question is which design flaw and what led to it.
	But your article went even further.
	Your article really said that NASA knew it was going to fail.
	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.
	I've seen that happen.
	I saw it happen before my eyes when I was working there.
	I saw it.
	It was the phrase you use.
	You've heard the phrase about plausible deniability.
	I've heard the phrase about killing the messenger, too.
	And that's what happened.
	That's one of the other reasons people have been leaving and are the reason that I have been leaving several years ago is that there wasn't a 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.
	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 at 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 are 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.
	uh... so up but i've got the top i think that uh... the nationalistic think it was
	going to work and they were deluded and i think that's far worse uh... in
	lying to the public and one thing what what what the phrase about
	it's more to review that that the person simply a liar who lies other people's
	as has hidden away the truth but a person who lied to himself
	it's forgotten where you put it allowed culture of that kind to develop in such what what
	had been such a No, that's a...
	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.
	I don't, that doesn't, that tells me they still don't get it because Management is supposed to push hard, 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.
	There's nothing wrong.
	In fact, it's just admirable the way he's been doing that.
	The problem comes in when you get feedback from people in the real world who say, You're asking too much.
	We've got to back off on that.
	Well, experienced engineers will say that.
	I 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 the Pathfinder, that probe that landed and bounced on the surface, and a little rover came out?
	Oh, yes.
	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.
	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 pathfinder success because you're asking me to make four missions at less than the price of one.
	And there's too many corners that have to be cut.
	I don't want to be here for the train wreck.
	Thank you very much.
	Nobody told us about that.
	I never heard that from Donna Shirley.
	Well, she's not talking about it now.
	People have been saying those kinds 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, They do if you don't have enough judgment real-world
	judgment and just experience in the world The bruises and the black guys and the broken bones of that
	life gives you You think you can do more than you can?
	Especially when when some people in there to get the feeling that they're the smartest people in the world
	They say that think we get the smartest people in the world working for us. Well, duh
	Why were you so stupid a lot of people right now are talking about a division between NASA and
	JPL almost Almost an open warfare between the two
	Do you believe there to be anything to that?
	I don't know if that's the boundary, where the lines are.
	There's certainly recriminations going on, and there are people at JPL who know how to do things right.
	That's a good 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, you know, from these mistakes.
	And Miles was famous and said, wait a minute now.
	Oh, 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, you know, 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.
	Well, you mean like converting meters to feet?
	Well, in many ways I think that's a distraction.
	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 that may have used that story to take the heat off.
	Well, it was just this mistake.
	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.
	Navigation is what I did at Mission Control, so I knew the navigators here and at JPL 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.
	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.
	As they get closer to Mars, they start 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 so anything to the public.
	We all thought they were on a good course.
	Well, James, this is rocket science, though, and shouldn't it have been provable?
	I mean, it is science.
	Well, it's provable.
	It's provable, Art, and 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.
	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 won't 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.
	Well, no, but we should be a little cautious and swing wide when we pass the planet, just to be cautious.
	This is 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.
	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 the people who once knew.
	Not that I'm really in favor of finding some skid coat to 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.
	In other words, it was nobody's fault.
	They're saying that, and you put your finger on it, boy, you cut right to the quick on this part.
	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 used to call that running for re-election on a reform ticket.
	This attitude of killing the messenger, of not accepting bad news, is something that current NASA leadership has created.
	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.
	Yeah, and I saw that around me too, and that I think is the root of it.
	Not a problem of conversion of metric to English, not a problem of rocket tests and so forth, but a culture, an engineering culture, where we have this very... First, you're always running scared.
	I'll tell you, Art, when there was a mission going on, walking into the door to Mission
	Control was like walking into an arena, a sports arena.
	And there was a knot in my stomach every time.
	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, your mind just goes into overdrive.
	My whole culture of working in a control center is just something terrific.
	There are so many 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.
	Bye.
	Well, it's probably a little like being an air traffic controller in some ways.
	Oh yeah.
	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.
	One of the things that we did well that helped us work, and it's still helping us 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 university graduate degrees and then do training.
	They train hard.
	There's some mottos from the past where some Chinese general once said, 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 8 to 10 hours for every actual hour of a mission.
	And they are trained by a special team of people who develop these 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.
	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.
	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.
	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 probably could do more than they then turned out to be the case.
	And so there are positive results of a shock, and the positive result is just them 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 have seen this.
	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, and it's got to be fixed from the top.
	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?
	Well, I'd always be nervous.
	It's not to say that I'm more nervous now.
	Knowing of the culture the way it is now.
	Still knowing the people who are doing it.
	It's like a religious order of monks.
	There's some knights of Rhodes or something out there in the frontier.
	I hear that, James.
	Hold on.
	We're at the top of the hour.
	We'll be right back with James Oberg.
	You're listening to Art Bells Somewhere in Time.
	tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 13th, 2000.
	Coast to Coast is a new project that was launched in 2013.
	It is a new project that was launched in 2013.
	Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 13, 2000.
	Probably a refrain heard in NASA lately.
	Lots of heartaches, lots of teardrops, but no action.
	Not yet.
	My guest is James Oberg, down at Mission Control for 22 years, who guided American spacecraft on their missions.
	22 years at Mission Control.
	He recently wrote a UPI article critical of NASA and got a return big blast right away from NASA.
	That's our guest.
	We'll get back to him 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 supervisory says, I was responsible for the training of all evaluators, instructors, and line EWOs, I guess this might have been in the 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?
	Philip?
	Oh, wait a minute.
	Push the button, Art.
	Philip, are you there?
	You've probably described me sufficiently enough.
	Well, at your point, I wanted to bring up... Do you wish to not give your last name?
	Yeah, I'd prefer not to.
	Alright, fine.
	Well, you are on the air with James Oberg.
	Yeah, hi, Philip.
	Hi, how are you doing?
	I think we're warriors in the traditional sense and badly outnumbered.
	Major point 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 200, 300, 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 and politics.
	The lawyers have taken over.
	They have basically taken science and made it an issue of deniability or culpability.
	Because of that, you have a lot of people that basically lack broad knowledge in their subject areas.
	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 the stuff, understand the stuff, live the stuff, breathe the stuff.
	They go to Tahoe for the weekend.
	Work is a 40 hour job at best, sometimes 35 hours.
	You'll have the 15% that really hump it and really work.
	Worse yet, code is not reviewed, computer code.
	I've done red team reviews.
	They don't, nobody reads the code.
	Nobody reads the code.
	Our data point that there 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.
	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, you know, like in a 7-bit unique language.
	You know, they're very odd.
	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, you know, All the fluff and there's no number crunching behind it that really is showing what the models are really doing.
	In our job, Philip, nature won't let you get away with that.
	There's a famous bumper sticker we all should be wearing on our cars that says that God forgives and man forgives, nature never.
	You have that right.
	Mother Nature, you were talking about that earlier, I think she is married to Murphy.
	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 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 the field recognize this and they respect each other for their successes.
	Because nothing is promised, and you can't BS your way through it.
	So you, Philip, I'm sorry, James, you generally agree with what Philip is saying?
	We're speaking from the same sheet of music here.
	We're singing the same tune.
	Well, we, just to add one more point to this mess, this is not unique just to NASA, nor It's not cool to be a mathematician and to do number crunching.
	If you don't have the right look, you happen to be 280 pounds and have walked with a gimp, you're not going to be briefing.
	They're going to pick a guy that's 32 years old and looks like he's a model.
	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 have walked 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
	who 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.
	And when you stand there and you're stubborn and say, no, this is not going to work.
	Oh, that's ugly.
	Then you're not a team player.
	I'm seriously considering filing a fraud, waste, and abuse on a classified project.
	It's terrible.
	The whole thing doesn't work.
	Even if you show them the mathematics, you show them the numbers, it doesn't matter.
	Everything is debatable.
	I had to go to Congress to talk about dangers on the mirror.
	In 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 that when bad things would happen.
	Plausible deniability.
	Systems, you know, they use the technique of just pre-planning a PQ die to make up for the errors in the original program.
	Philip, thank you for I hope you can get to my home page and get in touch if you want.
	Absolutely.
	Alright, sounds indeed like the two of you are speaking the same language.
	James, it wasn't always that way though.
	No.
	When did it change?
	Well, it wasn't always that way and you can read when it wasn't in Gene Kranz'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.
	In the last ten years, a lot of things have changed.
	Everything is politicized.
	Everything is important for how we'll make the higher-ups look.
	It's very sad.
	There are a lot of bitter people out there.
	You've got yourself a good example of a man there with the credentials and the courage to come talk to you.
	Sure.
	As you are.
	And NASA does not react well to criticism, does it?
	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 that 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.
	Were you tempted and did you go see the movie Mission to Mars?
	Yes, I did.
	In fact, I thought it was a delightful movie.
	Were you at all surprised, James, that the place that they landed was Cydonia?
	Oh, no.
	If Sidonia didn't exist, it would have to be invented.
	In fact, I think it has mostly been invented because it's the kind of thing that people have looked for.
	It's so traditional, 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 Presto John and the hidden kingdoms of Central Asia.
	Whenever we go to a frontier, 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.
	We have things on the moon, bridges on the moon and flashes of light and even now ring
	makers out by Saturn, according to some books.
	No, I don't want to be surprised.
	Alright, well here's what surprised me about it.
	Alright, well here's And a long-time advocate of the Sedona region, as you well know.
	Yes.
	And NASA's reaction to that over the years has been, boulder dash, light, trickle light, shadows, what a bunch of baloney.
	But their also reaction has been to cooperate with all information flow and give them all pictures that these are requested.
	And he said that, so.
	Well, but here's the thing.
	They sort of gripped their teeth and they passed the stuff out, because after all, it does belong to us.
	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 Cydonia being a bunch of bunk, don't you think they winced a little when they figured out that it was going to be Cydonia that the mission was going to be to?
	I don't know what their requirements were.
	As long as you spell your name right, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
	In a case like this, the movie had a lot of very interesting features about space flight that were very well portrayed.
	A lot of other stuff was kind of flaky, where they just had to make some things up.
	I thought it was, again, a charming film.
	I'd say that other one, Rocket Man, a couple of years ago was a crazy guy who gets to go on a Mars flight.
	That also had a great charm.
	It just shows you my judgment when it comes to movies.
	I don't know what they would win at.
	I guess you have to talk to them.
	They win, I guess, when they keep providing information and they keep seeing what they misinterpreted.
	I can understand that.
	A lot of stuff that I do hand out isn't gone to people as enthusiastic and sincere as Richard is.
	I think it goes to other 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 have 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 them a more present explanation.
	A real science, though.
	If you were going to pick the location for the first mission to Mars, would it be Cydonia or... No, no, no.
	The first location... Well, you see, we're pretty well determined to get there, to look for things like life.
	And you look for life where there was water.
	And you'd look for water where there was outflow channels, and where there's erosion, and also where there's probably hot springs.
	Those are in the area called the Valles Marineris, and there's some outflow areas there that are... If you really want to take a geologist's 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 crack them open.
	So you're an advocate for sending men to Mars?
	People to Mars, yes.
	As soon as possible, and 10 to 15 years if we can get it, because not just to Mars, but actually there's a wonderful little side trip you can 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 they're Material composition.
	They'd be wonderful places to set up little mining colonies.
	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.
	you're listening to our bills somewhere in time tonight featuring a replay of coast to coast a m from april
	thirteenth two thousand
	he really is green eyes anywhere
	the i wish him well
	We're calling for the zoo.
	there for me to do the crime.
	Would you believe that yesterday this girl was in love?
	I'm not sure.
	I'm not sure.
	Take your passion and make it happen.
	It does come alive.
	You can dance right through your life.
	Now I hear the music close my eyes.
	I am real.
	In a flash it takes hold of my heart.
	I wanna feel alive.
	You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
	Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 13, 2000.
	James O'Berg is my guest.
	22 years in the thick of guiding 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, so we'll just move through what we can.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	All right, Dave in Minneapolis, Minnesota has sent the following fax, and I'm going to read it.
	It's very brief, and we'll see if 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 finally noted that the workers at Tharacol, the booster manufacturer, were scared to death to talk to him.
	The problem appears to be the usual one.
	Dumb managers.
	Too harsh?
	I can't say it can ever be too harsh on people that help set up the atmosphere where people die.
	Accurate?
	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.
	In 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 Beaujolais.
	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.
	In the end, he was overridden.
	Roger was a very sensitive person who took it upon himself that he didn't protest enough.
	Had he protested more, he could have saved their lives.
	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.
	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 then 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 the shock of the recent failures We'll go a long way toward resetting this culture, at least temporarily, until once again we get complacent.
	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.
	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.
	Well, once again, You just focused right in on the point.
	By saying it's no one's fault, or everyone's fault, you're saying no one's responsible.
	And people are responsible.
	Therefore nothing changes.
	Yeah, well, there's nothing that nothing changes, but you don't root out the fundamental cause for it.
	Right, and so you invited it to occur again.
	There you go.
	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 our horrible price to learn things that we once already knew.
	Listen, 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?
	What they should be interested in is how Ordinary spaceflight phenomena can be misinterpreted and misrepresented 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 occur on flight.
	We interpret things around us through our everyday experience.
	We see things with our brains, not our eyes so much.
	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.
	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.
	Yes.
	And a couple of scientists in Alabama noticed that they were watching a lot of lightning.
	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 are being noticed.
	They said, why don't you put the camera on the horizon when the crews asleep are not doing it.
	And as you fly along through space, just watch the horizon for thunderstorms.
	We're looking for these 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've looked at the shuttle and the streamlining, they figure you're flying along 18,000 miles an hour, With space, or air, or string, stringing 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 dandruff pieces come off.
	Story Musketeers 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 the jets firing?
	I spent a lot of time looking at this famous STS-48 case.
	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.
	I think that NASA folks looked at it pretty superficially, and then they said, well, it looks pretty ordinary.
	And they left it at that.
	They didn't really go into it much further.
	I would like to see people in government, 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 by 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 I've done this research, and I've done the research privately, and satisfied myself that these are prosaic.
	These are ordinary features on spaceflight.
	Well, let me jump ahead.
	But it's not obvious that they are, because there's lots of information you have to dig out that would prove that.
	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, Occam's Razor and all that, is more likely.
	But if you jump ahead to STS-80... Yeah.
	I saw the camera, the outside camera from the shuttle bay, I think, intentionally go in and focus on one point, one land point near a city.
	You could see the lights.
	And then just 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, Jack.
	It almost seemed like a zigzag.
	I thought it was like a fast-moving fish.
	Yeah, how do you explain that one?
	What happens, and the reason that the STS-80s, and 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'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, Donald, as you do every night.
	As you're looking back down behind you, the shuttle's orbiting, and it's pointed 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.
	Right.
	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.
	Sure.
	Anything floating nearby becomes illuminated by the sun.
	And these little dots will appear.
	That 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's 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 STS-75, 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's 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.
	The SDS-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 land and there's a couple of tiles missing, or there's some insulation strips missing, and did you see anything looking like one of them come off during the flight?
	And you go back and you wonder, what 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 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.
	That's right.
	I think those are cases that they turn out to be prosaic, but they sure don't look it.
	You need to dig further into what goes on in these flights.
	So then you've never seen anything that you have reviewed that you find completely inexplicable.
	you the stuff uh... that they they don't want to bother because they they don't
	they don't want to be concerned about but people in the public uh... don't know all this and i think
	the public does deserve uh... fuller documentation of it
	i'm satisfied that the documentation there uh... and because i've seen
	everything that you can't wait so then you've never seen anything that you have reviewed
	that you find completely inexplicable you always find uh... more present uh... yeah
	Yeah, inexplicable 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 be pieces of insulation or leaking fuel or any number of things.
	There were deliberate studies looking at all anomalous visual things, dots, whatever was seen outside of windows in TV, video, still lately.
	They were so often that they appeared so often that the crew would even refer to them as moon pigeons when they had the 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 it.
	You don't want to ignore this stuff.
	You don't want to close your eyes to anything unusual out there, because if something is unusual, it's likely to be something that's likely to be bad news.
	And you want to know about it.
	Well, our entire space program really has a goal, ultimately, of trying to discover if there is life elsewhere, doesn't it?
	The space, our entire intellectual life, 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, and have been in the past, and 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.
	You have to keep looking with this kind of eye for anything strange.
	That's why you 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, maybe it is balderdash.
	But try again because eventually, in the long run, I think someone with a claim like that is going to be right.
	So it's a losing bet to say it's never going to happen.
	We recently acquired some new unexpected images of the Cydonia region, minus the face.
	The face, according to Professor Van Flanderen, seems to have a very, very strong case for being artificial.
	And we don't have new high-res images of the face yet.
	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?
	I had a hard time even seeing that, because I've seen so many pictures of structures on planets and flown over to Mexico so often, that 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 there was light and shadows.
	The better pictures still suggest that.
	I know there are arguments because of mathematical symmetries and arrangements of things that it would not be random, but those are the kind of arguments you can almost make to any pattern.
	It's just the old idea of shooting the arrow into the side of the barn and then painting a target around it.
	A good example of that was a guy down in New Zealand who was sure that the Earth was crisscrossed by grid lines of energy, and he plot out these crisscrossed grids very precisely, and he even had the Tunguska impact in 1908.
	In the center one was grid points.
	Well, that was the first edition of his book.
	Someone wrote to him and said that he had actually gotten the location of the Tunguska impact wrong by 2,000 miles.
	And he looked at it and said, by Archer Wright, and he put the new location in, he said that it would fit his grid pattern even better.
	But you do agree?
	What that means is that you basically can take random locations on Earth, as I think this guy was doing, and you can fit any pattern you want to.
	No, I'm sure aware of that.
	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.
	I think that there have to be, there's more positive steps that can be taken, that need to be taken by the various bureaucracies.
	Like Senator Moynihan's study on the secrecy culture.
	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 speculation, some reasonable, 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 Well, I know, but if you saw the news conference the Air Force held on that, the Roswell case closed, it's like they were inviting people to say, who are you kidding?
	lot of mockery and a lot of misrepresentation in the uh...
	well the uh... field number well i know but if you saw the uh...
	the news conference air force held on that ronald case closed
	it's like they were inviting people to say who you kidding i mean it's the way it was handled
	yeah i was a bit of a lot of new data that came out and that we could find
	earlier more to tell me a little bit It's true.
	Listen, we're going to open the phone lines.
	All right.
	Stay right there.
	We'll be right back from the high desert.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with James Oberg, 22 years with NASA.
	I'm Art Bell.
	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.
	Everybody's looking for something, some of them want to use you.
	Some of them want to get used by you.
	Some of them want to abuse you.
	Some of them want to be abused.
	Magic got away.
	In the morning with the night.
	night Hanging in the shadows
	I'll love you and I Till the morning light
	We're riding, oh Riding in the night
	So good girl, it's my turn You and me on the town
	Ooh, we let it all hang You was in a ring
	We were burning We were gonna go all the way
	And we never had a doubt And we never had a doubt
	Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight's program originally aired April 13, 2000.
	Ha ha ha ha.
	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 lines open.
	So it's question time.
	Tomorrow night, folks, Mike Siegel will be here, and with Mike Siegel tomorrow night, Zacharias Sitchin.
	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 slash 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.
	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?
	Is he on a review panel, or has he joined the staff?
	Because there's all kinds of review panels that they bring in.
	Yeah, you talk about the great help of Bobby Inman and so forth and so on.
	Yeah, I think more likely Mr. Goldman 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.
	Yes.
	We could tell from things that happened on Challenger that there wasn't any cut-offs.
	You can measure this yourself.
	In terms of delays, you can actually watch things happen, like when a shuttle docks at a space station.
	On the NASA TV, measure that time, time it, and compare it to the announced time later.
	It's usually within a couple of seconds.
	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 the mission control is not necessarily, that not everybody would hear.
	Well, there are standard channels, but when they do the medical discussions, or the co-private medical conferences, Our family coverage.
	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 discussions have been on it.
	Heck, if it wasn't an open channel, there wouldn't be all these quotations alleged to astronauts about seeing various things.
	And there have been.
	Oh, plenty of those.
	And that's part of the sea serpents and mermaids of the space age.
	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?
	Well, it's obviously hard because it's longer, it's farther out from the sun, it 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's that learning curve.
	Now with these faster missions, and flying one or two, 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.
	Well, it wasn't just NASA, it's the Russians, too.
	I mean, long... Well, the Russians, the Russians have their own problems, and most of it is just getting there, and also 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 were pretty much cut a lot of corners to build them.
	I remember saying at the time, this was back in 86, 87 when they were putting it together,
	it was clear that they were taking great risks and cutting corners for 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 for the whole trip.
	Finally, they just started tumbling.
	Were our astronauts relatively safe on Mir?
	There was always a way out.
	But the hazards were not so much high as unknown, and that was what I objected to at the time.
	But the guys 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 waist belt pack with him of a couple of days' food and flashlight and batteries and film and things that he basically told me that if he heard the depressurization or a 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.
	I see.
	Well, nominal.
	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?
	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 was what the White House wanted, in terms of being friends with the Russians.
	There we go again.
	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, Well, it's turning out to be a very expensive space station indeed.
	and none of them actually turned out to be practical, except that it looked good.
	And it was good for photo opportunities with the politicians.
	Well, it's turning out to be a very expensive space station indeed.
	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?
	Let me just quote you and say right back to you, because I think those are the exact words
	I would have used.
	Maybe you've read my stuff or maybe you're just great minds working 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 it's full of unpleasant surprises.
	And it's just inexcusable to keep adding new risks and new surprises, guaranteeing new surprises, by bad management back on Earth.
	All right.
	Here's somebody, I think, with a really relevant question.
	First time caller on the air with James Oberg.
	Hi.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi.
	This is Bert from Houston.
	Hi, Bert.
	Houston, huh?
	Yeah.
	Thanks so much for having such a fascinating program.
	Sure.
	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.
	I'm wondering why we as a society assume that space exploration must be publicly funded.
	What about privatizing NASA?
	What a very good point, Burt, and the assumption has to be that we have to pay more attention because actually in the past year or two the dominance of government and space expenditures has faded.
	There's more money being spent now.
	By private corporations and 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 it upon itself to spend the money to open frontiers For 200 years, we're going to have this Bicentennial 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.
	Well, Congress mandated, didn't it, James, that privatization begin to occur, and has it really occurred at the rate that Congress expected with that mandate?
	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 were seeing right now, one of the tragedies of privatization is the failure of the Iridium satellite program.
	Which got itself crosswise to inadequate marketing, perhaps market research.
	It hit some Asian recession that cut back on its customer base.
	You mean that's not supposed to be a big fireworks show?
	Well, we'll wait to see what's going to happen with it.
	It's a big show as it is.
	Those Iridium satellites are wonderful to watch because they flash reflections back down to Earth.
	Yes.
	What do you think the role of space tourism might play in assisting a privatization of space exploration?
	Bingo.
	I think tourism is a real sleeper industry because we see people already wanting to spend $100,000 in three months to climb Mount Everest, and a quarter of them die.
	And that space will be a little more expensive, but quite a bit safer in terms of making rocket flights.
	That will be happening, I think.
	Well, with maybe a little more risk?
	years and for that matter a tourism flight to Mir with this private Mir Corporation,
	MirCorp, I think is a very likely eventuality within the next 12 months.
	Well, with maybe a little more risk?
	Well, 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 space flight
	that's just as good as the U.S.
	and some would say better.
	So they are not careless with the lives of their cosmonauts.
	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 about that?
	Lots of folks 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.
	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.
	It just disintegrates on re-entry.
	There are problems in using the space as well.
	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.
	The more the merrier.
	NASA could use some new ideas and NASA could use some reminders.
	It doesn't monopolize innovation.
	So, in other words, they should be looking at some of this stuff?
	Well, if not them, then to 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, are mostly ideas that 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.
	That's why this topic and why your show is a culturally important thing.
	People have said, and there's a scientist there, Hal Dane, who said that the universe is probably not only queerer than we imagine, it's queerer than we can imagine.
	We need to stretch our imaginations.
	in space and elsewhere.
	Right now, rather than being judgmental, I'd like to be more encouraging to these ideas.
	All right.
	Good.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with James Oberg.
	Good morning.
	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.
	Go ahead.
	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 ejecta blanket of that same crater.
	Question number one, how do you naturally explain these phenomena?
	Alright, we'll stop.
	James?
	I don't.
	People look at those, you get people's opinions.
	I don't have an opinion on that.
	All right, two.
	Okay, question number two.
	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?
	All right, sir, certainly that first photograph of the face was terrible.
	That's true.
	James?
	I don't think people degrade photographs.
	I think people get this information.
	I don't... I don't... 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.
	Okay, third question.
	Richard Hoagland believes that Mars Polar Lander in fact landed at Cydonia and Mars Climate Orbiter is working as a relay for NPL downlink to Earth.
	What do you think of that?
	And, uh, the control center is, where is, where the control center is, where, Disney World?
	Colorado.
	Boulder, Colorado.
	Uh, I think that that's, uh, a good amusing, uh, amusing laughter would be the proper response to that.
	Mm-hmm.
	All right.
	Uh, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with James Oberg.
	Hi.
	Hi, good evening.
	Um, I just wanted to make a comment.
	I, uh, find your, uh, your show rather fascinating.
	I'm not very scientifically oriented, so I really don't understand a lot of the, 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.
	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 the 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, and he's only five years older than us, but he'd been around since Apollo.
	And he'd look at the drawing in about two seconds.
	He'd tap his finger over 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 identified it.
	How did he do that?
	Well, it's a matter of experience.
	And 20 years later, I was doing the same thing to other young people working with me.
	And you have to keep people like that, even though they're more expensive.
	Yeah, and now I was going to say, where are those guys now?
	Hold on, James.
	We're at the bottom of the hour once again.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	With a 22-year NASA veteran.
	Good morning.
	You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 13, 2000.
	I've got 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.
	to make it to the border of Mexico to Florida like the wind, ride like the wind
	I was born a son of a lawless man and I always put my mind with a gun
	Guess there's no use in hanging around Guess I'll get pressed into the town
	I'll find some crowded avenue Though it will be empty without you
	Oh Can't get used to losing you No matter what I try to do
	Gonna live my whole life through Loving you Called 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
	to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
	Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 13th, 2000.
	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.
	With regard to the Mars polar lander failure, James, this is an article from the BBC News dated March 29th of this
	year.
	And this quote here, Jet Propulsion Laboratory 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.
	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.
	That's all worrisome to me.
	I know it backtracks to where we were, but there is a quote.
	Well, I think that's a good point, Art, is that someone's responsible for setting the tone where they thought they could do the impossible.
	We talked earlier about how Mr. Golden was saying, perhaps, he pushed too hard.
	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.
	At NASA, where the culture was, we could do miracles and we're the smartest people in They marched off the cliff there.
	So the answer was always can do, never can't do, or can do but we've got to change this.
	That's it.
	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, Golden 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.
	How much do you know about Star Wars that you cannot talk about?
	There's nothing I can't talk about that I know about Star Wars, and I think most of it does come out now.
	Do we have the ability to stop now an incoming ballistic missile?
	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's 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 wait for the missile to pop in launch.
	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 on the launch pad.
	Safely.
	Well, that's fine, finally said with regard to Korea.
	Then, move up the ladder a little bit, and let's talk about China.
	Yeah.
	As far as I know from the Chinese missiles, they are not kept on alert, and not even kept fueled.
	But, who knows, all 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 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.
	Sending it through space, maybe fast, but it's also probably the most vulnerable.
	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.
	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 you pointed out.
	They're 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 the fact that the world is not perfect.
	Look at their mirror station.
	It took a lot of criticism from me, among others, back in 1997 when I had a series of
	nearly fatal breakdowns.
	They had actually gone through that.
	That was not a terminal decay.
	They had actually gone through that.
	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 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 mere station has got to be, it's going to go down in history as 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 longer distance there.
	Yeah, I've got the long list of failures.
	Yeah, yeah, but those are failures that when their reach exceeded their grasp.
	And so there are limits, but within those limits they operated very efficiently and very reliably.
	Should we be examining long term the plausibility of terraforming Mars?
	I think that we have to examine short term the possibility of terraforming Earth.
	Not to put a plug in for your book, but happy to do it, but I think the climate on Earth has its own instabilities, it has its own human Disturbances and natural disturbances, which would put all ours to shame in terms of scale.
	I agree.
	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 that civilization is going to last on this planet.
	One of the things that 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.
	Oh, I wanted to ask you about that.
	They were going to turn night into day.
	Was that a good idea?
	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 the side that are the thickness of aluminum foil, even thinner.
	They'd weigh, they'd be not as heavy as you might think because you're in space and they're Floating in space.
	Sure.
	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.
	Warming a couple degrees could save a couple hundred million dollars in citrus crops during a frost.
	It could warm up areas of the ocean in the path of hurricanes that affect the course of hurricanes.
	We're talking about decades now in the future.
	Yeah, but you were talking about how Mother Nature was such a challenge for the space program.
	Now, there are a lot of people who think that warming various parts of Earth by a few degrees might have challenging results.
	Well, warming or even cooling, because these are all sort of parasols and as they pass in front of the Earth, they reflect light away from the Earth.
	That's true.
	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.
	A lot of geologic evidence for that.
	Yeah, and I think that something deserves a whole lot more worry.
	Mirrors are one thing to use.
	There are other applications of space technology toward climate control, world climate control.
	Maybe because it's so uncertain, because it is so risky, you might want to practice it on a planet first.
	Do you think that there are experiments going on now with regard to climate modification?
	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, well, 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 the entire climate, 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.
	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 weather.
	Yeah, that was a paper written, I think it was written by several students at a military college, so it wasn't as if it was a Air Force policy, but it's the sort of thing that we're moving toward.
	I'd like to, one of the terraforming things I'm most interested in is the issues, the hazards both from earthquakes and volcanoes.
	Because earthquakes are all very localized, they don't have a global impact, although they will certainly ruin your day locally.
	But volcanoes are the ones that with the 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.
	Those effects are global and persistent.
	You've got to find a way to keep that stuff from reaching the stratosphere.
	There are some technical ways that might do that.
	I leave it to the imagination of the listeners because there are some ways to vent or siphon
	safely vent these explosions without letting them get to 60,000 feet.
	Where they begin to change temperatures.
	Where they have global as opposed to regional effects.
	That means a lot more.
	But there's a philosophy of that.
	Our philosophy is one of intervention.
	People are saying, we shouldn't touch the earth.
	We only hurt the earth when we affect it.
	If we just stop messing up ourselves, it will heal itself.
	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.
	I couldn't agree more.
	The anti-environmentalists are famous for saying, 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.
	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 that We have eaten up all the resources, the easy resources near the surface, the easy oil, the easy metals.
	When we got here, when we started using them, we found they were still lying around.
	No one had eaten them before us.
	I think we are the first real serious technological civilization, at least in the last few million years.
	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.
	James, why aren't we using fuel cells like they have on the shuttle to generate power here on Earth?
	I think, well, fuel cells aren't magical either because it takes energy to create the raw materials for them.
	Fuel cells are useful in a shuttle.
	A rocket fuel is useful there because it's a concentration form of energy.
	It's storable energy that you can then release as needed.
	But in terms of efficient energy production, you have to look back to where the liquid hydrogen comes from, the production 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.
	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.
	That's been around for a while and it remains an attractive idea.
	It's one of these ideas that is so big that there's what they call a giggle factor involved.
	It's so big it couldn't possibly be feasible.
	Collecting energy in space or at a base on the south pole of the moon that's in perpetual sunlight?
	Yes.
	I think those are 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 and 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.
	That whole tether thing that we did was pretty weird.
	It was weird and unfortunately it seems to have, because there are problems, which is wonderful because it shows you didn't fully understand it.
	That's right.
	It seems to have intimidated NASA.
	Really?
	Yeah, they don't want to do it anymore.
	Well, I think it's a missed opportunity because there are all sorts of things to be checked out.
	Well, there was energy where there should not have been that much energy.
	Well, the energy was predictable.
	There was a spark where it shouldn't have been, because the insulation 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 and insulation.
	They just didn't realize that there would be a high potential.
	And sure enough, the spark leaked through this hole there, and the spark heated the wire and snapped the wire right there where the 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.
	Well, if it was a good experiment to try, and it had an unexpected result, you would think they'd really go after it.
	I sure would like them to.
	I think they were embarrassed by it, and there 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, They're badly earshot there.
	Boy.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with James Oberg.
	Good morning.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi.
	Good to get a chance to talk to you again.
	This is Marcel calling from Massachusetts.
	Yes, sir.
	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 Mission Control, have you ever been escorted by any of your superiors to witness, possibly under oath of secrecy, any tough Secret aircraft projects involving triangular shaped UFO military craft.
	There's plenty of stuff out there, plenty of reports.
	I was working, by the way, not directly.
	I was working as a contractor at NASA's Indian Control Center, but I had the full clearances, especially during the DoD years when there were some DoD payloads that were classified secret, the secret level, and I think 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 where they're 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 their reason they were secret was they didn't want the Russians using their satellites to track them during a launch.
	If they track 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 none new in aircraft.
	Clearly there are people seeing things, art 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, Peter.
	You bet we are.
	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?
	Well, people also have used these stories.
	And that's another case, the case of public trust, is that not only Have many, I think, government agencies tolerated the existence of this gap.
	They have exploited it.
	As an example, I can give you my own experience.
	All right, James.
	We're at the top of the last hour, and I always ask my guests, are you good for one more hour?
	Probably not.
	I've really got to get going and get the kids up in a little while and do some work.
	So I'd like to... I know that you're in for the end of your career here, but I've had a good time.
	But I really... That's it.
	You've got to go to bed.
	James, thank you.
	Thank you, my friend.
	Good night.
	For me, for Art Bell, that's it for tonight.
	See you next week.

▲