March 6, 2001 - Art Bell
01:12:27
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| easy to see so go take a look because we're going to be discussing it and the other photographs that are there as well now Richard C. Hoagland has been an advisor to NASA and to Walter Cronkite during those years he's an Angstrom Science Award winner the medal science medal and he's been a friend for you know I was starting to consider that like fine wine | ||
| Richard, how long has it been that we've known each other? | ||
|
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Forever. | |
| Probably forever. | ||
|
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It's probably 10 years. | |
| Yeah, at least a decade, maybe over a decade. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Long, long time. | ||
| Anyway, did you get what I was doing there at the top of the hour with fine wine and Frankie and all the rest of it? | ||
| You know, as you get older, it's true. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| 55. | ||
| Oh, you're 55. | ||
| We're both 55. | ||
| So then we can share this experience. | ||
| By how much? | ||
| April. | ||
| April? | ||
| I'm June. | ||
| Junior. | ||
| I'm June 17th. | ||
| No, but your attitudes do begin to change. | ||
| And after a while, you get to the point where you would have exercised caution before you say, oh, what the hell? | ||
| Well, I'm kind of like the wrong person to talk to about this because I've never, ever been cautious. | ||
| Yeah, you've got a point there. | ||
| I guess I was talking about normal people. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| You know, but you do have a point. | ||
| There is a trend curve where people who, you know, get out of the system, you know, the Senate, the military, the Marines, the Navy, whatever, retire, have an independent means. | ||
| They become more independent and they look back and they kind of think about their life and the long view of history. | ||
| And, you know, that's all a very normal thing. | ||
| And I think it has nothing to do with what's going on tonight. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| And the reason I say that is because if it were one day to point, if suddenly Fraser popped up and John Glenn was on it and he did this old thing in the studio like he will describe in a few minutes, it would be one thing. | ||
| But this follows, within a week, a set of stunning statements by my old friend, Sir Arthur Clark. | ||
| You're a keyword old. | ||
| Sir Arthur is. | ||
| I've done him 30 some years. | ||
| Sir Arthur is definitely getting there. | ||
| Well, but he's. | ||
| And he's off in Sri Lanka contemplating his life like. | ||
| a fine wine I know this is going to be the model of the evening but I I'm afraid I think it's a little more interesting than that. | ||
| I think that it's the fact that it's the year of 2001 that Arthur and Kubrick tried to tell us 33 years ago that this was the year. | ||
| I mean, you've had conversations with Steve Bassett. | ||
| I've had conversations. | ||
| We've talked about disclosure, when it would happen, how it would happen. | ||
| What you don't know, and this is going to be a little out of left field, but I'm going to share it with you because I shared it with a couple other people after Clark's statement of a week ago, Sunday. | ||
| And we'll get to Clark's statement, which is extremely powerful, very powerful. | ||
| I had a dream. | ||
| You've never heard me say anything like this on the air before, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I had a dream. | ||
| And I don't have dreams. | ||
| I mean, I do not have prophetic dreams. | ||
| I don't, you know, pretend to be able to see the future. | ||
| I do things the hard way, although Grease, left-brain stuff, science, trying to be rational, all that. | ||
| But I had a dream, and it was very vivid. | ||
| And then the dream, you know, I went to bed that night thinking about what Clark had said, because it is so stunning, given how well I know him and how conservative, I mean, for a visionary, Arthur Clark is one of the most conservative, stick-in-the-mud people about this kind of stuff you can imagine. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| So for him to say what he has finally now said with Aldrin sitting there in Sri Lanka, we could go Sunday, was pretty mind-blowing to me, and obviously it definitely rang your bells too. | ||
| So I went to bed that night, and I had this bizarre dream, which was that I was someplace, either at headquarters or at JPL. | ||
| And two very senior NASA people, one of whom I knew and one whom I didn't, came out and essentially affirmed what Arthur had said. | ||
| Why don't you tell everybody what Sir Arthur Clark said? | ||
| Well, let me go read it, and then we'll go back and we'll look at the actual chronology of how this all happened, because this follows a pattern. | ||
| There has been a series of events that our friend Arthur Clark has been doing since September of last year, beginning with a piece in the London Times, an op-ed piece. | ||
| But what he did a week ago Sunday, which was on the 25th, he said, and I'm going to quote accurately now, he says, I'm fairly convinced that we have discovered life on Mars. | ||
| I am fairly convinced we've discovered life on Mars. | ||
| This was quoted by Space.com by a gentleman named Andrew Chaikin, who was the editor of their hard copy Space.com Illustrated magazine that people may have seen on the newsstands. | ||
| He went on in this meeting with Buzz Aldrin because Aldrin had apparently flown halfway around the world for some festivities there in Sri Lanka where Arthur, of course, lives. | ||
| Arthur went on. | ||
| There are some incredible photographs from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which to me are pretty convincing proof of the existence of large forms of life on Mars. | ||
| Large forms of life on Mars. | ||
| Life on Mars. | ||
| Have a look at them, he said. | ||
| I don't see any other interpretation. | ||
| That's pretty damn strong stuff. | ||
| It's astonishing given what I know of Arthur C. Clarke. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Now, of course, everybody, Arthur C. Clarke, writes fiction. | ||
| Now, he's also very revered for, you know, the Clark belt that's above us. | ||
| A lot of people don't know about Clark Clark. | ||
| Well, in 1945, in a magazine called Wireless World, the year you and I were born, Art. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Arthur wrote this prophetic piece, nonfiction, projecting that someday huge, super-tall communications towers would be built, towers in quotes, that they would be satellites orbiting 22,300 miles above the Earth. | ||
| That at that altitude, they would orbit the Earth in the same period of time, 24 hours, that the Earth would rotate underneath them. | ||
| Meaning that they would be, relative to Earth, stationary. | ||
| Stationary. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And three such satellites, he envisioned space stations, like the Von Braun space station, not little electronic doodads that are up there now. | ||
| But three could cover the globe. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And it was revolutionary. | ||
| And of course, he lamented years later that he never patented the idea. | ||
| So ComSat and Intelsat made trillions. | ||
| Yes, and we now have all those satellites that allow all this cable, TV, telephone communications, international communications. | ||
| They do it all for us. | ||
| And what is it called? | ||
| It's called the Clark Belt. | ||
| Yeah, the orbit at 22,300 is called the Clark Belt after Arthur C. And you're right, he's been very conservative. | ||
| So a statement of this magnitude, large life on Mars, is not to be ignored. | ||
| He's referring to photographs, maybe like the ones that you've got on the website, right? | ||
| Well, it's not maybe. | ||
| This is where you have to go back in history, Tad, because if you go to his previous statements, let's go to the one in September of 2000. | ||
| On September 16th, in the London Times, which is not your average rag, Arthur was doing a piece called How I Helped Save Star Trek. | ||
| It turned out to forecast the future. | ||
| And he goes on about how, you know, science fiction and things have pointed to a probable future, and there's a lot of seeming fantasy which has become fact. | ||
| And science fiction is probably best known for the general prediction of space travel, even if most of the details were wrong. | ||
| And then he says, the solar system has failed to live up to expectations. | ||
| Although the moon was written off a long time ago, there were still hopes for Mars until our space probe showed that it was a frozen desert with an atmosphere far too thin to breathe, even if it contained oxygen, which it doesn't. | ||
| No canals, no princesses, probably no life of any kind. | ||
| Then he said, at the beginning of his escalation, well, I don't believe it. | ||
| The still busy Mars surveyor has sent back some of the most extraordinary images ever received from space. | ||
| One shows what any unbiased observer would say are clumps of bushes in a frozen landscape. | ||
| Even more spectacular are gigantic glass worms, hundreds of feet long. | ||
| They are probably frozen lava tubes, but I can't help hoping. | ||
| And he ended his piece, which was pretty provocative to you and me, Art, with: stay tuned. | ||
| All right, I stick with my original premise, and I bolster my original premise by actually going to some things that you have said in the past about Dr. Carl Sagan before he passed, Richard. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Sorry, but I'm sticking to it. | ||
| As Dr. Sagan was coming to the end of his life, and he fully well knew he was coming to the end of his life, he began to say some things that were very, very different than his professional life. | ||
| Well, all right, let's not get hung up on the why. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm just saying that that in fact occurred. | ||
| We can theorize as to why these two men, as of tonight, have made extraordinary statements. | ||
| Let me go to the second one because we kind of jumped out of sequence. | ||
| That's all right. | ||
| He started this. | ||
| Actually, where this all started was last June while you were on vacation. | ||
| You like that? | ||
| It was not a vacation, but go ahead. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| A few things happened in your absence. | ||
| One of which was in May of last year, prompted by an event we had in Phoenix, Arizona, and a call upon John McCain to get behind open disclosure vis-a-vis NASA. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Dr. Malin suddenly dumped something like 60,000 of these Mars Global Surveyor images that he'd been sitting on for two to three to four to five years. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| Suddenly, out of nowhere, we suddenly get all these images, and the most extraordinary thing is they came without any explanation or any captions at all. | ||
| Look, Ma, just pictures. | ||
| We looked through them. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot to look through. | ||
| Oh, 50,000, 60,000, sure is. | ||
| So we went on the show, you know, with Mike holding court, and we asked for people to help. | ||
| Well, they started sending in various, you know, images. | ||
| Take a look at this, take a look at that. | ||
| I went through hundreds myself for a couple, three weeks until I had to basically move Enterprise. | ||
| And one of the images I found was this damn thing that looks like a glass tunnel, the thing that Arthur calls the glass worm. | ||
| And we published it on June 7th of last year on Enterprise. | ||
| The next data point is that Arthur, in his op-ed piece, makes mention of this glass worm. | ||
| Then comes December. | ||
| And in December, he was doing an event at the Pasadena City College for the Planetary Society. | ||
| And Lou Friedman, who runs the place at the end, asked Sir Arthur by satellite from Sri Lanka to make a few comments. | ||
| Well, here's how Arthur surprised Friedman. | ||
| Quote, I'm still waiting for an explanation of that extraordinary glass worm on Mars. | ||
| How big is it? | ||
| It's one of the most incredible images that have ever come from space, and there has been no official comments on it whatsoever. | ||
| So this is getting more interesting because he's ratcheting up the ante. | ||
| So finally, as of last Sunday, when he's sitting there with Aldrin, he basically comes right out and says there's life on Mars, and he says there are incredible photographs. | ||
| Have a look at them. | ||
| I don't see any other interpretation. | ||
| He has a large forms of life on Mars. | ||
| Large forms. | ||
| That's the key. | ||
| Large forms of life. | ||
| Now, I thought originally, well, he's referring to the microbial life that they claim to have discovered in the meteorite and the crystalline formations, all the rest of it that would be common to life here on Earth. | ||
| But obviously not. | ||
| Large form of life. | ||
| Large form of life is very, very different. | ||
| Now, when we come back, we're going to get into, we're going to kind of parse what he said because Arthur is a very sharp guy. | ||
| He's also a wordsmith. | ||
| Like you and I, he knows how to use the English language. | ||
| So he's saying exactly what he means, but what he means is extraordinary at several different levels. | ||
| It's not just a simple statement. | ||
| I mean, imagine this. | ||
| If he is saying there are large forms of life on Mars, does he mean large forms of life there now? | ||
| Well, he didn't say fossils. | ||
| He didn't quantify that. | ||
| Former. | ||
| He doesn't say former. | ||
| No, he doesn't. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| I will. | ||
| And by the way, when you first heard of the John Glenn statement, what did you think? | ||
| Well, I was watching it. | ||
| My. | ||
| Well, I was thinking about it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You had seen it live. | ||
| So what did you think? | ||
| My mouth was wide open. | ||
| It's like it's time has come. | ||
| It's 2001. | ||
| We're on the avalanche of disclosure. | ||
| Got you, Richard. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| From the high deserts, the soggy deserts. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast, A.M. Oh, why do people say the things they say anyway? | ||
| People like Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who has been a very conservative person, as Richard, pointed out, is right. | ||
| Why did Carl Sagan say what he said toward the end? | ||
| Why did Senator John Glenn say what he said last night on Fraser in the context of comedy? | ||
| Question mark. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You might want to take a look at the photograph we've got up on the website. | ||
| It's actually a series of photographs, but the one up there of the glass worm or the tunnel, depending on what you want to call it, is awesome. | ||
| The End The night, from the damp deserts, it's back to the mountains of New Mexico and Richard C. Ogland. | ||
| Richard, here you are again. | ||
| Much better sounds, much better. | ||
| Yeah, I like them too. | ||
| They fit. | ||
| Well, you know, this is just extraordinary. | ||
| This night marks a real watershed, I think. | ||
| A real watershed. | ||
| This whole last week. | ||
| You know, bookended between Arthur's statement and John Glenn's statement. | ||
| And if we're right, all right, if this isn't just, you know, people getting up there looking back and thinking about Frank Sinatra, There will be more art. | ||
| A model is only as good as its prediction. | ||
| So let me make a prediction tonight. | ||
| I keep coming back to that weird dream I had, which really, you know, stuck in my mind. | ||
| If this is part of the official disclosure, I mean, what better way for NASA to get out from under this 40 years of deception than to put out a whole bunch of photographs, tens of thousands, and have someone like Arthur find things in the public literature? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Even though, of course, we found this thing first, and, you know, we're not going to argue about that. | ||
| But what you have then is a politically plausible individual who's ostensibly not part of the organization, basically calling attention to extraordinary things to which the agency can then, at some point in the next week or two weeks or months or six months, respond by looking and say, you know, Arthur called our attention to all these amazing things. | ||
| Damn it if there's not some bizarre stuff down there. | ||
| We've got to go to Mars. | ||
| And a lot of people are in this society will buy it. | ||
| Not everybody, but they don't want everybody. | ||
| I'll buy it. | ||
| I'll buy it. | ||
| What, that we didn't all find this stuff before? | ||
|
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No, no, no, no, no, no, no. | |
| I'll buy when they say we've got to go to Mars. | ||
| I mean, I don't care. | ||
| I don't care what the point is. | ||
| Get them there. | ||
| Were they keeping it secret before, and it's all a lie? | ||
| It's all a clever propaganda to get out from the sitting on it for all these years. | ||
| I know, but I don't care. | ||
| I want to go to Mars. | ||
| Well, I do care because that's part of the constitutional problem we have. | ||
| Unless government is accountable to its citizens, if they can get away with everything and look what they're heaping on the former president. | ||
| I know, but they always lie. | ||
| I mean, that's what government politicians do. | ||
| They lie. | ||
| But shouldn't we try to correct that? | ||
| Should we keep letting them get away with it? | ||
| Sure, but short of an earthquake is like trying to get the Mississippi going the other way. | ||
| But sure, yeah, we should try. | ||
| The first step is to have an accounting for honesty. | ||
| And I think this little ploy, having people like Arthur and now John Glenn come out and say these things, I mean, Glenn's is frankly much more damning than Arthur because he basically said the bosses told us to shut up. | ||
| Yeah, they lied. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Now. | ||
| Bearing in mind, again, in the context of comedy, but he did say it. | ||
| But let me get into the context of the show in a minute because I don't think you can dismiss it because it was done in a way within the show parameters that was not comedy. | ||
| Richard, if I had dismissed it, I would not have sat there and copied it down word for word. | ||
| Some people hearing you might think it's just comedy, and there is a very good way to analyze why it wasn't. | ||
| Normally on a comedy show, might as well get to this right now, if things are done for comedy, they're done so the studio audience can react, so that the characters interact among each other. | ||
| The way this was set up, you had Glenn in the studio with an open mic going to a tape recorder. | ||
| You had behind the glass in the control room, you had Roz and Fraser arguing about some inane, stupid nonsense that was funny. | ||
| And not listening to Gwen. | ||
| And not listening to Gwen. | ||
| So Glenn is doing his whole soliloquy, dumping his heart out on this tape that he doesn't know is running, by the way, only to the camera and to the nation. | ||
| It has no connection to the plot of the show. | ||
| Actually, I think it was not live, Richard. | ||
| It was only on tape. | ||
| Because you remember afterwards he came in and said, I'm afraid I'll have to take that tape. | ||
| No, but I'm saying it was to the nation through Fraser tonight. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And it was so apart from the plot line. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| It was a radical left-hand turn from the plot, which was basically Fraser being jealous of John Glenn being picked to narrate this base documentary. | ||
| You know, I'd put it maybe a different way. | ||
| I'd say that the entire plot seemed to support Glenn's being able to sit in there and say what he said. | ||
| Oh, yeah, without that plot, you wouldn't have had him there, but what he was saying had nothing to do with why he was supposed to be here. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| He was just free associating in kind of frustration that his life had come down to this. | ||
| And it was, you know, in other words, they didn't even give him a fictitious name. | ||
| It was Senator John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth. | ||
| So to me, I looked at this and I said it had disclosure, official disclosure, all over it. | ||
| Now, what do you do? | ||
| Remember back when Nixon was president and we had the first surfacings of a serious drug problem? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the White House brought in a whole bunch of producers, brought them to the White House and sat them down and said, look, can you write and produce a series of programs in your various sitcoms and drama shows and all that with the common theme that drugs are a no-no? | ||
| And they acquiesced. | ||
| They actually did this. | ||
| So there is precedent for commercial mainstream television to listen to a political heads up on a certain subject and follow a party line. | ||
| The idea that the writers brought in John Glenn and created a comedy scenario around his gem, which was his telling the truth to the American people tonight, is no more fictitious than the Nixon era bringing in the same folks to do the anti-drug. | ||
| One other thing to consider, Richard. | ||
| John Glenn, Senator Glenn, would have had script approval. | ||
| Well, we're going to find out. | ||
| Oh, he would have had script approval. | ||
| Well, I guarantee if he didn't want to say that, there's no way in hell. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| It may have been say it this way or say it that way, but if he didn't want to do it, they couldn't have made him do it. | ||
| Of course, right. | ||
| Now, we have asked, I've asked Steve Bassett tonight, who slept through this whole thing. | ||
| He was taking a nap. | ||
| He didn't see Fraser. | ||
| Oh, well. | ||
| He is going to talk to the show producers tomorrow and is going to try to get the script and a tape and some background on how this all came about. | ||
| Well, the background would be interesting. | ||
| I've got a tape and I've got the script, but as to how it came about, that's going to be a good idea. | ||
| Well, but he's going to make contact with the producers to find out more, and he's going to represent who he is, you know, the only lobbyist we've got there in Washington. | ||
| And I bet they're really going to tell him, well, you know, we're trying to get a secret message out to the American people. | ||
| Well, we'll see what they say, because no matter what they say, it'll be more context for what Glenn said, won't it? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| So it'll be interesting. | ||
| All right, now look. | ||
| I want to turn for a second to this major, the glass tunnel of Mars, revisited. | ||
| Talk to me about what I'm seeing here. | ||
| Folks, go to the website and take a look along with me here, because this is an astounding picture. | ||
| This is not rocks. | ||
| There's no way this is rocks. | ||
| Richard, how long is this thing? | ||
| Okay, this is one of the questions that Arthur asked because, you know, Malin doesn't do a very good job of tabulating his data. | ||
| But we put on the web, and if you go to, you know, the program area of Art site tonight and go over to the glass image line and click on that, you'll see a whole series of images that I uploaded to Keith earlier this evening while Fraser was in the background. | ||
| That's why I was watching Fraser. | ||
| I wanted something in the background while I was doing this grunt work. | ||
| Well, it was odd that I saw it due to all the emails and then called you and you said, I saw it. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| Well, I've got to tell you something here. | ||
| I actually do watch Fraser and I watch a few other things to keep track of what's going on in the country. | ||
| You can't talk to people unless you know what people are interested in. | ||
| I just wish I had had a heads up that Glenn was going to be on. | ||
| Anyway, if you go to this image, we call it the Glass Tunnels of Mars Revisited because we published this on the 7th of June last year. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Revisited. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It turns out, have you got the image up? | ||
| How long is it, Richard? | ||
| Okay, it is about a mile long. | ||
| Really? | ||
| If you look at the left-hand side, that's the full MGS image. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which is about three miles wide and maybe 12 miles long. | ||
| So just take a ruler and measure it and you can get the width. | ||
| The tunnel, the feature we're focusing in on in the close-up on the right, is about 600 feet wide. | ||
| And it's around 4,500 to 5,000 feet long. | ||
| All right, at an image scale of 3 meters per pixel. | ||
| So we're looking at a very large structure. | ||
| Now, what made it stand out in my mind, as soon as I saw it, and I was going through this 60,000 images that Melan had dumped, and I didn't pick this image at random. | ||
| I was actually beginning to do a survey around Sidonia. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because in the model that Sidonia is a city, and that it's on a planet that's pretty desolate and dry and not habitable, and that anybody living or going around would have to do so in a protected environment. | ||
| You know, the city is not like New York. | ||
| It's basically the arcology concept I've talked about for years. | ||
| Huge contained structures where all the atmosphere and people live inside. | ||
| Richard, a quick question. | ||
| Where is this on Mars? | ||
| With reference to Sidonia, where is this? | ||
| It is to the northwest. | ||
| The northwest, long way? | ||
| No, I'd say maybe a couple hundred miles away. | ||
| Oh, that's not far. | ||
| And it's out under what used to be the ancient northern ocean of Mars. | ||
| Remember, Sidonia sits on a promontory of land that back when Mars had oceans and atmosphere and was warm and wet, as the geologists term it, it would have been like San Francisco, would have been sitting on a peninsula surrounded by water on two, if not three sides. | ||
| And so I started looking under this ocean, and the reason I did that is because the sediments under oceans are very soft. | ||
| And when they dry out, they blow away. | ||
| And my theory was that if there was interesting stuff that had been built under the ocean, if the ocean levels had risen and fallen, like they have in the Aegean Sea, for instance, here on Earth, that there might be better preserved archaeology ruins out under those sediments than on dry land, which has been exposed for a very long time. | ||
| So I'm looking at these images, and they're little tiny strips. | ||
| I mean, 12 miles by 2 miles is a very small area. | ||
| So I'm looking at this and popping them up and enlarging them, and suddenly my eye falls on this crack at the bottom of one of these images out to the northwest of Sidonia. | ||
| And I enlarged it, and there was this whomping, big, it looked like the Lincoln Tunnel. | ||
| Lincoln Tunnel. | ||
| It looked like a glass sheathed tube sinuously coming down the picture in a crevasse, in a declevity in the surface where the sediments had blown away. | ||
| And what made it really stunning was two features. | ||
| One was the glass. | ||
| You can clearly see there's a translucent substance in a tube-like geometry. | ||
| It does look that way, yes. | ||
| And there was a sparkling highlight in the middle of it. | ||
| Yeah, I wanted to ask you, what is that? | ||
| It's a kind of a bulge that looks like it was heated or something. | ||
| No, it looks like it's a sunglint off something inside the tube. | ||
| I'll give you that, too. | ||
| It does look like a sunglint, yes. | ||
| And I said to myself, uh-huh. | ||
| But it's a bulge, isn't it? | ||
| Oh, yeah, it's definitely. | ||
| Well, it's glinting so that you get this blooming effect. | ||
| Ah, so it's not really a bulge. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I see what you're saying. | ||
| Sorry, and around it, you see it's darker. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then there's this glint off the glass to the left. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It looked like it was the car, the transport system stuck in the tube, abandoned long, long ago. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I'm not sure I can make that big a leap. | ||
| It does. | ||
| There's certainly, you're right about the glint, but I couldn't make the leap to say it's probably some sort of transport stock. | ||
| Well, but if you're looking at this as a transportation network, and the reason I was... | ||
| You think you could imagine that, Richard? | ||
| When Malin took the close-ups of the fort, remember those back last May when he dumped all those new images out? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Of Sidonia, nine new images even sitting on for two years? | ||
| Yes, oh, yes. | ||
| There's a close-up image of the fort. | ||
| Now, on the old images, there was this black line, straight as an arrow, extending for a couple of fort widths out toward the face to the east. | ||
| On the new image that Malin released, in the bottom of that line, which was dark because of the sun angles on the old Viking data, the sun was high enough you could see to the bottom of that trench. | ||
| And the same kind of regular ribbing pattern that we see on this object is in the bottom of that trench. | ||
| With regard to the whole snake or tunnel and ribbing itself, I have to ask an obvious question. | ||
| Scientists say there was once much water on Mars, much water in this place, in fact, on Mars. | ||
| Why is a person not to imagine that, yes, it's highly unusual, yes, it doesn't look natural, but with erosion, as water was leaving Mars, some weird stuff happened, and somehow, somehow, this was made? | ||
| Well, but you have to come up with it. | ||
| By water, by erosion, by whatever. | ||
| Well, you have to come up with a mechanism for making it. | ||
| And Ron Nix, who is, as you know, is one of our geologists, he's been on the show, has done a whole paper on this thing, which we're going to post probably tomorrow. | ||
| And let me read you what he says. | ||
| All right, here's a geologist working for a major geotectonic firm there in Las Vegas now. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| What does he say? | ||
| He says, there is already a groundswell of evidence for engineered structures on the surface of Mars. | ||
| The Sidonia region alone has produced some convincing evidence of past construction, not to mention the many other images that show what would be bewildering geology, but sound engineering. | ||
| That seems to me to be the simplest, most rational explanation for the tunnel. | ||
| We're looking at the exhumed remains of the Lincoln Tunnel. | ||
| The only thing is, it just happens to be on another planet. | ||
| The Sidonia Tunnel, it might be called. | ||
| Yeah, well, this is off Sidonia. | ||
| It's about 100 or so miles away. | ||
| Well, but how do you know it doesn't go underground? | ||
| Get all the way there? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That was my whole point. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Was it really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No. | ||
| In other words, the reason I think we're seeing it, and the reason I think we're seeing the glass in well-preserved condition is because this thing used to be buried under these northern ocean sediments. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And as the erosion keeps going on Mars, and there's no construction now, there's no process on Mars which is building things, all right? | ||
| Everything going on on Mars now is destroying things. | ||
| Erosion, entropy is taking over. | ||
| There's no volcanic activity, there's no rain, there's no sedimentation, there's no plate tectonics, there's no building new mountains. | ||
| It's all being ground down. | ||
| So the reason this thing is well preserved and the glass still looks like glass is because up until recently, and that's maybe a few thousand years, it was buried. | ||
| It was buried like the Sphinx. | ||
| No, it does look like glass. | ||
| The whole damn thing looks like glass. | ||
| What about the serrations on top of it? | ||
| Ah, the serrations are the regular ribbing structure to hold it in place, to hold it up. | ||
| They're structural supports. | ||
| Now, if this thing is 600 feet wide, take a ruler and just measure on your image there how big the supports have to be. | ||
| And if you're building a big, massive engineering thing that's going to transport people, you know, goods, God knows what, around the planet, underneath the planet, then you'd have to build it big and massive so that it would last a long time. | ||
| And particularly if it was at the bottom of an ocean, depending upon how deep the ocean, it would have to be big and massive to support itself against the weight of the overlying water. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't argue that. | ||
| Anyway, this is not the only one we found. | ||
| We found a bunch of them, and people, you know. | ||
| You know, it seems to go clearly into the ground. | ||
| Doesn't it? | ||
| Yeah, clearly into the ground. | ||
| Like it forks. | ||
| Notice at the north there. | ||
| Like a tunnel within a tunnel. | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| And it appears to be a portion exhumed by a process of erosion of the softer sediments. | ||
| Now, in 10 million years, or however long it takes for New York to disappear, if aliens came to Earth and somehow the Earth had lost its atmosphere and its oceans and it was like Mars, and in the bottom of the Hudson River, as you know, there are two major man-made structures that go across the river. | ||
| They might still be there. | ||
| The Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Preserved underneath the sediments. | ||
| And they might remain through those millions of years. | ||
| The sediments eroded as the wind blew them away. | ||
| Oh, no, it's obvious, Richard. | ||
| You would see the remains of the man-made structures eventually sticking up. | ||
| So, by the way, the picture just to the left of the main picture, it looks mildly pornographic. | ||
| Well, doesn't it? | ||
| Oh, that'll get 10 million hits. | ||
| We got a break right here. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| You tell me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A very old friend. | |
| Oh, he was dead. | ||
| Oh, that he could stop and breathe tonight. | ||
| of the greatest strength he talked and talked and i heard him say that she had the longest blackest hair the prettiest green eyes anywhere and reason of his latest flame Though I smile the tears inside of | ||
| What you're hearing this morning and seeing if you're on the website will take your breath away. | ||
| Those things those men said, senators, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, even going back to Carl Sagan, what those men said. | ||
| And oh my, these photographs, they'll definitely take your breath away. | ||
| It's apparently a glass tunnel. | ||
| There's an awful lot of evidence for it, and Sir Arthur C. Clarke said, evidence for large life on Mars. | ||
| Large life on Mars. | ||
| What do you think he meant by that? | ||
| The End I want to remind my audience that this Friday I thought we were going to do open lines and have a special segment. | ||
| And we will not, because I've been summoned to California to a Radio and Records talk radio seminar where I am told I will meet with Matt Drudge. | ||
| And Matt and I apparently are going to have an interchange in front of this group of radio executives. | ||
| Should be interesting. | ||
| Anyway, so we'll reschedule the open lines. | ||
| Not to worry, next week we'll have plenty of open lines. | ||
| But somebody just sent me a fast blast that I think relates. | ||
| Drudge, Matt has a story, apparently, on his website, according to this person, that says that President Bush has just called for a more Mars exploration. | ||
| Isn't that interesting? | ||
| I haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure it's there. | ||
| I was going to suggest that when you see him, I would have two cards prepared. | ||
| One with Arthur's quote and the other with Glenn's quote. | ||
| And just give them to him and say, you want a story? | ||
| You want a Pulitzer? | ||
| Go dig this one out. | ||
| Yeah, he'd put something up with a flashing police siren that says, Glenn says they're here. | ||
| We're there. | ||
| But it might flush out other people. | ||
| It might. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| But it is interesting that the President would suddenly be calling for more exploration of Mars. | ||
| Well, you know, I was looking at the, not the state of the union, but, you know, the president's address to the joint session last week. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And obviously, all of us who have been laboring in these vineyards for all these years, based on what we know is there and what we think is going to happen, we're looking for any little indication that this administration is going to take a more aggressive stance compared to the last eight years. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And the thing that struck me and has struck other observers is in his projected budget, the president has set aside something like a trillion dollars for contingencies. | ||
| Now, what would you think a manned mission to Mars would fall under? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I guess that might be a connection. | ||
| At a time when they're actually cutting funds for earthquake assistance. | ||
| Yes, you notice the Seattle, the OLFEMA program, which saved a lot of people's lives, are slashing a measly $25 million, but they want us to reserve a trillion for contingencies. | ||
| And he's been very vague about what he means by that. | ||
| If you were going to, as again, this time-release aspirin drip-drip model that I keep coming back to, if there is a game plan here, a la Brookings, let's go to good old Brookings, okay? | ||
| May I ask a question just before you go to Brookings? | ||
| Because we talked about that. | ||
| I want to talk about Brookings, but I have a question for you. | ||
| Richard, if we made a decision, a Kennedy-esque type decision today to go to Mars, what would we have to do? | ||
| How much would it cost? | ||
| How long would it take? | ||
| What would we have to do? | ||
| Well, when the president's father, George Bush Sr., proposed this in 1989, and I don't know whether you're aware, but the CNN tracked me down in the middle of Yosemite that night to come on and do, what's that show in the evening, Point Counterpoint? | ||
| Crossfire? | ||
| Crossfire. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They wanted me to do Crossfire to represent the reasons for going to Mars. | ||
| They didn't call NASA. | ||
| They didn't call somebody from the White House. | ||
| They called Dick Hoagland. | ||
| And Hoagland at that moment happened to be in the middle of Yosemite, about as far away from a television studio as you can possibly get, so I couldn't do the show. | ||
| But the president wanted to initiate a moon Mars program and to, within, you know, 10, 15 years, get to Mars. | ||
| But all our boosters are toast, our big boosters of Saturn's, they're all toast and rusty. | ||
| No, everything is toast. | ||
| Well, but see, you would do it in stages. | ||
| You would basically stage it in orbit. | ||
| You would put up a ship like the shuttle is putting the space station in place. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You would involve the Russians. | ||
| They have the big Energia boosters, which still work, by the way. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And you would modularize it. | ||
| You would use nuclear power. | ||
| And there is a whole brand new concept called MHD, which has been publicized over the last year or so, put out by one of the former astronauts, Chang Davis, I believe, where you basically run electric current through a plasma and generate a very high thrust. | ||
| And all you need is a very large amount of electricity to do this. | ||
| And you can be in Mars within a few months. | ||
| And of course, the way to do it is nuclear power. | ||
| You put nuclear reactors in orbit. | ||
| You hook them to these MHD rocket engines, which are not chemical. | ||
| They're plasma. | ||
| They're approaching fusion, but they're not fusion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you basically, I mean, all of this has been quietly being dripped out over the websites and MSNBC. | ||
| So we could do it. | ||
| We could do it. | ||
| So it's only money. | ||
| It's only money. | ||
| Well, it's only money. | ||
| How much money do you imagine? | ||
| Just a million. | ||
| Well, given that we have the surpluses we're projecting and given we have a trillion contingency, the NASA number 10 years ago was 500 billion. | ||
| Half a trillion. | ||
| Half a trillion. | ||
| But. | ||
| Half a contingency. | ||
| But, but, but, but, but that was the high side. | ||
| In fact, the NASA at that time didn't want to go to Mars. | ||
| They did everything they could to shoot the president down, and the core of this palace revolt inside NASA to basically get rid of the Mars option, the Mars idea, was headed by a group of people out of all places, the Johnson Space Center. | ||
| There's a very interesting thing which has happened in the last few days, which you probably haven't noticed because nobody would. | ||
| But the president directed and Golden followed with the removal of the head of the Johnson Space Center, George Abbey, who was one of the people who led the palace coup against George's father, you know, over 10 years ago. | ||
| And it looked to me, and it looked to some other observers, as if this was preparing the way for a Mars initiative if and when they decide to publicly decide we're going to go to Mars. | ||
| So we come back to the numbers. | ||
| If we use the new technology, the faster, cheaper methods, and we really went for it, what do you think? | ||
| Well, we probably could do it for a few hundred billion in $2001, okay? | ||
| But compared to the trillion contingency fund, he wouldn't use it up. | ||
| He would use maybe a third. | ||
| Let's say it was a third, because we know a lot more now than we did then, and we can do a lot of things cheaper. | ||
| And let me remind you that in the heyday of the old Bush administration, when the NASA folks were saying, oh, it's going to be $500 billion, et cetera, to do it, Dan Quayle quietly headed up a study group. | ||
| He was head of the Space Council at that time. | ||
| He went around NASA to Los Alamos in California and got a guy named Dr. Lowell Wood, a brilliant nuclear physicist, to put together to breadboard another way to get to Mars. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| And Lowell's proposal would come in at around $10 billion in $1989 compared to $500 billion from NASA. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So that's a disparity. | ||
| If you really want to do it, and you put everybody on the same page, and it's a national priority, and at the end of the tunnel, that was a pun, at the end of the tunnel, there is life on Mars, says Sir Arthur C. Clarke. | ||
| This nation could do it in a heartbeat. | ||
| Well, you've got to have the public support to spend that kind of money. | ||
| And to get the public support, you would need a careful campaign of delicate leaks leading up to the ultimate NASA announcement, oh my God, Arthur, look at that down there that you found. | ||
| There might be life on Mars. | ||
| Now, Arthur did not quantify what he meant by large life in the sense that is it current large life or is it an old ancient civilization large life? | ||
| And thereby hangs the $64 billion tale. | ||
| Well? | ||
| Because when I read that, and I've had long arguments with Bassett over this in the last couple of days. | ||
| Have you now? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because politically, he's not exactly explicit in what he means. | ||
| And he is, as I said in the last couple of segments, he is a wordsmith. | ||
| Arthur has written for a living all his life. | ||
| He knows how to use the English language, the King's English. | ||
| So when he talks about life on Mars, and he talks about the fact that there is no doubt in these pictures, he doesn't see any other interpretation, and they are large forms of life, my first inclination was that he was echoing something that we again found and published on the web back last July, specifically on July 18th. | ||
| Because we were going through this huge hall, I mean, this is like, you know, candy store Christmas in July. | ||
| If you scan down to the second picture art, okay. | ||
| Okay, on my way. | ||
| And just click on that and let it load. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, which one? | ||
| Just the second one down. | ||
| The first one is the glass worm or glass tunnel. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Go to the second one. | ||
| The second one really is three photographs. | ||
| Well, no, there's a whole bunch on that page. | ||
| And I've had Keith put them in order. | ||
| All right, it may be the difference in our browsers. | ||
| Help me out. | ||
| Which one is it? | ||
| It says the title of it is Clark Confirms Enterprise July 18th Biological Discovery. | ||
| That's the one you want. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's a graphic we prepared with the images in it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| Find it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh no. | |
| No. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I see one that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| One says shell edges. | ||
| Yeah, that's the one below it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the one above that. | |
| Okay, the first one, the one on the left? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I have click. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| When you click on it, then you get Clark confirms. | ||
| All right, all right, I've got it. | ||
| Okay, we found this in a very large crater, very deep ancient crater, massive thing, you know, 100 miles across or more, and several miles deep, as part of our survey. | ||
| And if you look at the object on the left, at the bottom of the graphic, you see it looks like kind of a teardrop shape with structure. | ||
| And then on the right, we have a close-up of the front of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That teardrop shape is about two miles long. | ||
| And that structure is absolutely not geology. | ||
| There's no geological mechanism that Ron or anybody else has come up with to explain that. | ||
| The closest we could come were some kind of organic remains, like bone structures, or if you do thin sections of bow, and that's where the plasma is generated. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| White blood cells and all that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This damn thing looked like something that I would never have imagined I would ever see on Mars, certainly not on this scale, two miles long. | ||
| It looked biological. | ||
| So I'm looking at this, and Mike and I are discussing it, and, you know, Robin looked at it, and, you know, with her medical background, she instantly realized that it looked much more biological. | ||
| It does kind of look that way, but I'm not sure I can make that jump. | ||
| Well, here's my point. | ||
| We published a piece, and we published this, and we published a bunch of other images, which are further down on the page. | ||
| They're just close-ups of these things we found in this very large, very ancient crater, which obviously had been excavated by erosive processes. | ||
| In other words, the wind blowing out sediments again? | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| And I got to thinking, and this was, you know, just kind of free association, suppose on Mars, like on Earth, you had a dinosaur epoch. | ||
| Remember, there used to be very big guys walking around here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's... | |
| That's very probable, actually. | ||
| Oh, I see what you're saying. | ||
| So if Mars not only had a flourishing biosphere and intelligence producing artifacts, but suppose it had a long, complicated history like Earth, which, of course, we don't know about yet because we haven't landed, and part of that history had a paleontological record like the dinosaurs, except how would it look on Mars? | ||
| Remember, Mars is a diminutive planet. | ||
| All right, I might be willing to buy this. | ||
| It's smaller than. | ||
| But coming back to the main question, Richard, if Arthur C. Clarke is what Arthur's saying. | ||
| If Arthur C. Clarke said large life, then you could either speculate ancient or present. | ||
| And if it was present, it obviously could not be above ground. | ||
| In other words, our pictures are good enough. | ||
| We would see life. | ||
| Present, current, large life. | ||
| We would see it. | ||
| There's no question. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So then the only thing you can imagine is that if there is life remaining on Mars, large life, it would have to be under the surface, wouldn't it? | ||
| Yeah, unless it pokes through. | ||
| I mean, you know, worms, when you water your lawn, you get earthworms, right? | ||
| They have to come up for air. | ||
| But there's no air on Mars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's no anything on Mars. | ||
| Well, that would encourage beings like ourselves to go underground. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So we're looking at these things. | ||
| We put this on the web and we raise the suggestion that maybe we were looking at something biological a very long time in the past, ancient, a fossil or fossils. | ||
| And we have several examples. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| The problem with that is there's also parts of these things that look very geometric and technological. | ||
| So then, of course, I mean, as long as we're speculating, you know, we decided, okay, let's speculate that if you had an intelligent civilization, that civilization has control of a lot of different processes once it gets very sophisticated and very old, right? | ||
| Science engineering. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What are we now developing as a brand new skill that has not existed on this planet for a very long time, if ever? | ||
| Control of our biology. | ||
| And if you marry biology with engineering, you get biological engineering, a la genetic engineering, and you can create, for instance, life forms of any size you want to do many things that you want. | ||
| In other words, instead of building steam shovels, suppose you create giant organisms that eat dirt and make tunnels. | ||
| Doesn't sound a bit like an episode in Star Trek called The Horta? | ||
| It does, yes. | ||
| So when Arthur in September started beating the drum about glass worms, he didn't talk about tunnels. | ||
| He didn't talk about artificial things. | ||
| His comments are all focused on biology. | ||
| True. | ||
| I started thinking, now wait a minute, Arthur is a wordsmith. | ||
| He does not misuse the English language easily. | ||
| Is he trying to tell us between the lines that what we're looking at is in fact large life forms and maybe they're not as extinct as we have thought? | ||
| And that's why we've got to get directly to Sir Arthur Clark and have him clarify specifically what he means. | ||
| Well, you know, Richard, I'm in communication with Sir Arthur Clark, and he's indicated that at some point he may be willing to come on the program. | ||
| I haven't, I don't know if I've said that before, but I'm saying it now on the air. | ||
| And we're waiting. | ||
| It may be a while. | ||
| He's not doing any interviews at all right now. | ||
| But maybe. | ||
| Well, I have a channel separately, and I don't want to upstage anything you have in the works, but this is important enough, and I have a long enough relationship that I am in the process, the next few days, going to try to get some clarification of the most important ambiguity in his very strong statement, which is, are you talking current large life or past large life? | ||
| No, you go right. | ||
| I suggested this to you a few days ago on the phone. | ||
| I said, you go ahead and communicate directly with him or whatever channel you've got. | ||
| So I think that's a really good idea. | ||
| We'll let everyone know what we find out. | ||
| But, see, this raises a lot of other implications that I'm sure that most people listening to us tonight and thinking that we have both gone completely off the beam are going to think about because they don't have the background, the database. | ||
| And I'll put it very succinctly. | ||
| If Arthur C. Clarke, my dear friend of 30 plus years, is actually saying large forms of life on Mars tonight, that raises a profound problem for the environment of Mars that exists there tonight, that NASA has given us over the last 40 years with all these separate missions. | ||
| And unless we resolve that ambiguity, it's going to remain in the air. | ||
| And if you go to our website, if you go to EnterpriseMission.com, you will scan down, the second item on the main page is an item we call Sir Arthur Raises the Anti. | ||
| We have a very full article with lots of references and graphs and pictures and background tracking basically the history of Mars that we think we know, a la NASA, versus the Mars that would have to exist if Arthur's talking about big life forms there tonight. | ||
| All right, I'll hold it right there. | ||
| You're absolutely correct. | ||
| I mean, the only way you're going to get the American people to pony up the billions of dollars, however many hundreds of billions it would be to go to Mars, the only way you're going to get them to do that is to convince them that we have a real reason to go. | ||
| And what would that be? | ||
| Well, a living thing would do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
On the crest of a wave that's like magic All rolling and rotting and he's feeling slidding with magic And you and the pieces of ice I'm here to press | |
| things, I hold these things And I'm every song of the use of the cards Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye | ||
| Goodbye Wanna take a ride? | ||
| Well, call our bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033. | ||
| First-time callers may recharge at 1-775-727-1222. | ||
| The White Card line is open at 1-775-727-1295. | ||
| And to rechart on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Networks. | ||
| Now, that would be a ride, wouldn't it? | ||
| How about that? | ||
| You want to go to Mars in our lifetimes? | ||
| Hasn't seemed possible until recently, has it? | ||
| But maybe with the new discoveries and some of the things being said, well, maybe, just maybe, we're going to get to take that ride. | ||
| The End Back now to the mountains of New Mexico in the dark of night in Richard C. Hoagland. | ||
| Richard, here we are once again. | ||
| Sound effects are perfect. | ||
| Glad you like it. | ||
| It's actually raining here. | ||
| I'm getting sick of the rain, Richard. | ||
| The desert is turning into a soggy mess. | ||
| Well, be lucky you have rain because at 8,000 feet, what you get as rain, we get as snow. | ||
| Well, let me know. | ||
| I'll tell you what. | ||
| It's on the way, Richard. | ||
| It's on the way. | ||
| When it clears the Four Corners area, it's going to dump on you big time. | ||
| Yep, it has all winter. | ||
| We have been nice and toasty in front of our fireplace sitting here in the new Enterprise Digs. | ||
| But frankly, I'll be very glad when spring arrives. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| I want to see the sun again. | ||
| I mean, I'm not used to this. | ||
| We're near Death Valley. | ||
| Something is tragically wrong out here. | ||
| It's been clouds, clouds, rain, rain, clouds, clouds, and I'm sick of it. | ||
| Well, it's the whole global changing weather climate patterns, which you've obviously discussed many, many, many times. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And someday we'll do a show on the physics and how that impacts on that. | ||
| But I want to go back to these images because if people scan down on your site, they will see some even more astonishing things. | ||
| If you just go to the bottom of page one of these photos, we've kind of put them up in a line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The bottom two, the upper one of the bottom two is a wide angle, and you click on that and you can go to a very high-res image. | ||
| The bottom one, which just sits there, is a close-up. | ||
| And you can see that it looks like geometry overflown by all kinds of ropey things. | ||
| It does look like that, yes. | ||
| It looked like, and I'll tell you what it looked like to me, it looked like a ship that's been sitting at the bottom of the ocean for about 100 years with sea organisms crawling all over it and growing out of, you know, cabin hatches and portholes and things like that. | ||
| Maybe that's exactly what it is. | ||
| Well, again, it goes back to what Arthur meant by large forms of life. | ||
| Now, in the break, I had a call from Ron Nix. | ||
| Everybody is up tonight. | ||
| Nobody on the Enterprise staff is asleep. | ||
| And he said, remember that Arthur is British. | ||
| And the Brits have a little different take on English than we Americans do. | ||
| And what he believes Arthur means, and again, we will not know this until we resolve the ambiguity by going to the source, but he believes that he means large forms of life in the context of bigger than a red box. | ||
| Remember, the entire discussion of life on Mars in the mainstream, and Arthur is in the mainstream, even though he's a visionary and he wrote 2001 and he's written some astonishing science fiction and is known for that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He really is a kind of a stick-in-the-mud scientist hewing the NASA line very closely all these years. | ||
| So when you look at it from that perspective, what has been the major discussion, apart from on this show, about life on Mars for the last decade or so? | ||
| Certainly since 1996 when NASA had the so-called Mars Rock press conference? | ||
| Microbial life. | ||
| Little guys. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Tiny guys. | ||
| So in that context, when he says large forms of life, he means bigger than a microbe. | ||
| Now, in order to be seen from orbit, even with Malin's camera, you've got to be a lot bigger than a microbe. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And of course, it also could mean the artifacts, the large forms that life builds when it's intelligent and it does technological engineering type things. | ||
| The point is that you don't have to automatically go to the biological scenario, and I'm still struck by the fact that even if he's only talking about Martian giraffes, and I'm being slightly facetious, okay, that would be astonishing and impossible by current Martian standards. | ||
| Richard, if there was a civilization on Mars at one time, either way. | ||
| Well, let's go with former for the purpose of this discussion. | ||
| Why is it not reasonable to assume that if they began to get control of biological processes, as in genetic modification and so forth and so on, or even if they particularly did not have control of that, but had control of space travel, that when Mars began to go to hell in a handbasket, that they would go to the next most logical place, and that would be us, Earth. | ||
| And, of course, we have this nice atmosphere and water and all the stuff that Mars at one time had. | ||
| Now, why is it a giant leap to suggest that we may be Martians? | ||
| It isn't. | ||
| On that scenario, I mean, that's basically what I started talking about a couple years ago when I did the Fox special. | ||
| Remember the Lost Tombs Live? | ||
| Yes, oh, yes. | ||
| Where I looked into the camera and said, we are the Martians? | ||
| Based on the 27 years I've been at this, God, it seems that long, gosh, that's my conclusion, that the reason there's a face on Mars is because we built it in memorialization of us. | ||
| And that we, you know, when I say we are the Martians, our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, multiply that by however many you want, grandfathers and grandmothers had to come here because, as you said, it went to hell in a handbasket. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If that's true, then there will be all kinds of interesting connections that we haven't yet found. | ||
| And we found a lot of them, and they're going to be in the new book. | ||
| Here's a really good place to talk about Brookings, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, because Brookings in 1959, which was this official NASA study commissioned of some of the most prestigious scientists and anthropologists and paleontologists and law experts and business people. | ||
| I mean, they brought in everybody but the kitchen sink to kind of sit down in a room once a month for a year and tell them how to design a space program. | ||
| And there was one section in this report, which we happen to have a copy of, called The Implications of Extraterrestrial Life. | ||
| And in that section, and I again was discussing this with Vassett over the weekend, there is a remarkable phrase. | ||
| It talks about how it is not possible that NASA will meet extraterrestrial life forms before 20 years. | ||
| And I looked at that, again, anew in the last few days after talking about it on your show and putting it on the web and publishing it in monuments over the last decade or so. | ||
| And I got to thinking, how did the authors of Brookings, NASA, the chief contractor, how did they know it would not be before 20 years that we would meet extraterrestrial life forms? | ||
| The only way I'm arguing that one could know that is if you knew where they were, i.e. | ||
| on Mars, and you were projecting the rate at which your technology, i.e. | ||
| rocket power and spaceships and all that, would evolve. | ||
| And if you go back to the early 60s, late 50s, they were projecting a man landing on Mars in the 1980s. | ||
| 20 years. | ||
| The basic central tenet of the Brookings report was basically put in a nutshell that if we had contact with extraterrestrials, we'd go crackers. | ||
| Oh, it's the classic James Nicholson law. | ||
| If you find it, you must hide it because they can't take it. | ||
| Because they can't take it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, let me tell you something. | ||
| Last night, I had a young lady on named Kathleen Keating. | ||
| Heard the show. | ||
| A very fundamentalist Catholic. | ||
| And she came right out and said it. | ||
| That, in fact, if that were proven to be the case, and she was all wrong about everything she believed and has faith in, she would go crackers. | ||
| And so... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm... | |
| She may be a minority. | ||
| Over the last decade or plus, I've talked to an awful lot of people about this. | ||
| She may be a minority, Richard, but listen to me. | ||
| Governments have been overthrown with real tiny minorities. | ||
| Well, in the Brookings document, there is a major section dealing with the religious reaction to a discovery such as we're talking about tonight. | ||
| And there was real concern. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But here's what also For good reason is what I'm saying. | ||
| Well, I would say that 30 years ago, too, but in the document, it strongly recommended additional studies to ferret out the details of how people would react. | ||
| And it also discussed programs of public education and conditioning, which of course is back to Hoagland and his conspiracy theory number one, that we have been prepared by friends of mine like Gene Roddenberry, Steven Spielberg, Arthur Clark, Stanley Kubrick, etc., over a generation. | ||
| That 20 years represented in the document, Art, a generation. | ||
| What was it Max Planck said, the famous physicist? | ||
| He said, new ideas in science don't take place because, you know, I'm paraphrasing, old folks basically get new ideas. | ||
| It's because the old folks simply die off. | ||
| So if they were anticipating 30 plus years ago that it would take a generation or more to change fear and xenophobia and loathing and all kinds of adverse reactions to the discovery that the human race is not alone, in fact, the human race may not even be intrinsic to this planet, but a transplant from someplace else, i.e. | ||
| Mars. | ||
| We are now at the end of that projected 20 plus years. | ||
| And that's where I come back to this idea that there is a timetable of disclosure. | ||
| And I come back to the fact that my dear friend, Arthur, and this genius that he hooked up with, Stanley Kubrick, who I've been researching feverishly for the new book, The Follow-On to Monuments, because we're looking at the saga of 2001. | ||
| Why did they pick 2001 for when we would make contact, when it would suddenly strike the human race? | ||
| Well, because they probably seemed far enough away to pick. | ||
| Or maybe that was part of the plan. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Awesome comments are part of the plan. | |
| Richard, Bill in Kauai, beautiful place, asks, the tubes that you're referring to really do look exceptionally cool. | ||
| However, couldn't they, you said glass, couldn't they as easily be ice with that kind of reflectivity? | ||
| Well, the problem with ice is you have to look at where they're located. | ||
| They're at about 40 degrees north latitude, just about the same latitude as Sidonia. | ||
| And in the summer, the temperatures on the ground get well above the freezing point, 50, 60, 70 degrees. | ||
| And the ice would melt, and there's no way you could get ice to reform on those spars. | ||
| In other words, if there's not something laterally that makes a coherent tube, you're not going to get ice once it melts. | ||
| It's a good idea, but no cigar. | ||
| No, the reason I pick glass, I mean, I didn't pick glass just out of thin air. | ||
| If you look at the pictures, you'll see that they're translucent. | ||
| What happens to glass in a desert art? | ||
| If you start out with nice, clear glass, what happens in a desert? | ||
| Well, with the wind and with the sand blowing, of course, it gets scoured up. | ||
| It gets silk blasted. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And when it gets scoured, it gets milky. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Okay, why did I pick glass as the substance that would get milky? | ||
| Because the Viking data, The one data point we have from the surface of Mars, actually we have two of them, two spacecraft, the soil chemistry analyses revealed a very high percentage of silicon and oxygen. | ||
| And that's glass. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, Kevin in Bakersfield says the glass worm suggests, to me, a real worm with irregular ring segments. | ||
| Rick in Oakland, Rhode Island, says, what would Richard think of the idea of the glass tube actually being virtually a snake with its skin shedding? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm very glad these guys brought this up because this is the major conundrum of the biology model, okay? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If you have organisms, what's the first thing an organism has to do to stay alive? | ||
| Well, it has to be... | ||
| First thing. | ||
| It has to eat, I guess. | ||
| Exactly. |
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