Art Bell hosts Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and UFO researcher, and Dr. H. Paul Shuch of the SETI League to debate extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Friedman argues UFO evidence—like Roswell (1947) and Zeta Reticuli’s proximity—proves alien visitation, calling it a "cosmic watergate," while Shuch defends SETI’s radio-based approach, citing its $12.5M NASA funding before cancellation in 1993. They clash over government suppression, with Friedman citing black budgets and Friedman’s Top Secret Magic, while Shuch trusts global amateur networks. Both agree ETI confirmation would reshape humanity’s cosmic role, whether as a galactic community or isolated "type zero" civilization—though Shuch doubts Earth’s fragility aligns with Michio Kaku’s grim predictions. [Automatically generated summary]
Israel suffers another bombing, a bus bombing, and now it's moving and will hold Palestinian lands, by the way, now they say, until the terror attacks against civilians there end.
You know, President Bush was on the verge of talking about a Palestinian state, and he's been sort of talking about it, and the Palestinians are likely to change his mind.
I think he's maybe on the verge of that.
So the Middle East news is really lousy.
President Vicente Fox...
Ha, ha, ha.
Somebody sent me an email saying there is no real word for Fox in Spanish, the name Fox.
But Fox in Spanish means Zorro.
Therefore, the president of Mexico is Zorro.
Anyway, Vincenti Vox opened to public scrutiny nearly 80 million once-secret files that could expose a government legacy of dirty tricks and the torture and murder of opponents.
So he says, you know, it shows that Mexico is now beginning to come clean.
Now, here's some big shaky news for you.
You may recall Gordon Michaels Gallion on the program, and he warned to watch of an earthquake on the New Madrid Fault.
Do you remember that?
Well, the New Madrid's been really quiet, except today it wasn't.
There has been an earthquake which shook a wide area around southern Indiana on Tuesday afternoon.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, no immediate reports of damage, though it was felt widely, the earthquake was centered in a rural area.
Thank goodness.
Its potential for damage was low.
Johnson said the quake was on the north arm of the New Matt Fault Zone.
The New Mattred system caused four catastrophic quakes, estimated at magnitude seven or greater in the Midwest in the years 1811 and 1812, quakes of over six in 1843 and 1895.
Seven other tremors of five or better have happened in the fault system since then.
It is said when the big one hit, the little one ran backward.
Now, this is a five-magnitude earthquake on the New Madrid.
And they just don't happen.
The last ones were in the 1800s.
And again, I remind you, lest people forget this kind of thing, Gordon Michael Scallion said, watch for earthquake or a shake on the New Madrid fault.
If that occurs, look out.
And so I'm just reminding you of what he said.
Earlier, I got an email from a young lady, Stephanie, I won't give her last name right now, in New York that reads, I'm 36 years old.
I'm the mother of two children, ages 14 and 7.
Two nights ago, my seven-year-old daughter awoke horrified.
She told me she had seen three aliens, small, like children, flying around the room.
They were green, had several eyes, and winged-like with big heads.
Our cat, Boo, was in the room going nuts.
He was jumping up and down from the bunk bed to the floor.
She said that he was scratching one of these aliens.
The cat was.
Then when he scratched it, they all disappeared.
There wasn't any blood stains on the bedroom walls.
There is, though, a brownish-like something or another that feels slimy.
And it just goes on and on.
And she gives her phone number.
And so this is pretty weird stuff.
And I thought that I would bring Stephanie on the line tonight and get the rest of the story, as Paul would say.
Stephanie, welcome to the program.
unidentified
Oh, hi, Art.
Thank you so much for allowing me to tell my story.
And then I ran into my mother's bedroom, which was next door, and I woke her up screaming, and then I opened the light in her room, and then the writing transferred from my hand to her wall.
And I just felt there was like an evil spirit in the statue.
And then on a few other occasions, I was scared to death, so we just threw it out, not in front of our building, but we walked a few blocks down, you know.
See, I'm already sitting here at this point listening to your story, you know, thinking this girl opened a door back when she was 15, and some sort of evil spirit came through.
unidentified
Yeah, I became a Horn Again Christian at 19.
But so I got rid of that Ouija boy.
I mean, I would never play with something like that again.
Normally, you see, normally I would beg you for photographs, of course.
But you mentioned in your email that your computer is launched, I guess, huh?
unidentified
I was surprised I even got through to you today.
You know, I was praying that I'd get through here because if someone else is going to think I'm crazy here, but I know, you know, I listened to you for the past almost three years.
I've got your phone number, your personal phone number.
So if any investigator out there feels like pursuing this with cameras or a team, they're going to need more details.
And I'll sort of screen them.
And if they, you know, I'll put you in touch.
unidentified
How's that?
I appreciate it because I would like to, you know, I mean, if there's something here, there's someone, you know, some evil spirit here, I definitely wanted to get out of this house.
Yeah, you know, after hearing all of that, and obviously there was more we didn't hear, that's a case I think of I can only consider two possibilities, but, you know, who the hell am I?
I can only consider that she has allowed something in that is still with her and may always be with her.
She's echoes of last night's program about the bell witch, huh?
Or it's coming from her, you know, young teenage girls, boy again and again and again.
You hear about these stories, but here it is still with her.
Here's something that I would like to have you all follow up on for me.
It comes from a listener in Toledo, Ohio, Maggie.
Maggie.
All right, I heard a news story this morning at 8.30 or 9 o'clock on Clear Channel WSPD in Toledo, Ohio about a bottomless pothole in the middle of the street.
Firefighters put a 1,000-foot line down that hole and didn't hit bottom.
I only heard part of the story and think they said it was in a place called Washington or Washington Township anyway.
Think this may be another of the bottomless holes like Mel's.
Let's do a real quick break.
Well, I almost did it again.
I get so involved in what I'm doing that I blow right through breaks.
I do it all the time.
Things on my mind.
My back is, by the way, threatening to ruin my vacation.
My back is really giving me fits right now, and it may steal my vacation from me.
I hope not.
So I'm doing little back-it-better knocks on the wood.
All right, listen, we're going to take the regular network break now, and we'll be back shortly with a couple of more items.
Boy, there's an awful lot going on out there.
Can you believe an earthquake on the New Madrid Falls?
Gordon Michaels said, watch for it.
I'm Art Bell, and this, from the left coast, is coast.
unidentified
All right, and it's coming on.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
Love is good.
Love will be strong.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
Come on.
Do you remember that day?
It's sunny, yeah.
When you first came up, the little spill I gave you up, I bought the weed and made it to the top.
I gave you all I had to give I didn't have to stop.
You blow the sky I fare to be alive without a reason why you blow the sky I love having to fly.
To recharge Bell in the Kingdom of Nye.
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East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may recharge at 1-775-727-1222.
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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.
Yeah, I heard about it on the radio today, but I guess the firefighters or the street people went to go try to fix just what they thought was a hole, and that's when they dropped the rope down, and then it just never ended or never stopped.
What is it about the state of Washington and these holes anyway?
In the middle of the street?
Boy, I'll tell you, we live in a time of weird news, don't we?
Again, the story I have, talking about this fault line, the Evansville earthquake, actually the Midwest earthquake, you ought to call it really, it says Johnston from the U.S. Geological Survey said it was an arm of the New Madrid Fault Zone.
And then it goes on here to talk about the New Madrid Fault.
You know, you've got to follow your gut on this stuff.
As it is with a lot of life, you know, you've got to be true to yourself, honest with yourself, and if you're not, then you're going to make a hell of a lot of mistakes.
If you're not true to yourself, if you don't follow what you believe in and pursue that, then you're going to make mistakes.
And maybe there's a lot of people who don't listen to things and they make the ultimate mistake, you know, and they're immediately sent to the other side.
Of course, we never hear any complaints about those mistakes because they were the last mistakes made of that sort.
Yeah, the other issue is that I wanted to ask if you could ever get those four Army Intel guys that went AWOL from Germany, what was it, eight to ten years ago?
Yeah, I interviewed them.
Yeah, I just, I know that you had interviewed them years ago.
You know, people trying these things by themselves is a really good idea.
Usually.
Usually.
Expert NAID.
There are some things that you should not try at home that are dangerous.
But when one comes along that you can try and verify yourself, by all means.
Canada's number two privately owned national television network, according to Sammy from Ottawa, said in its 6.30 newscast, the weather is Canada's number one story today.
According to Canada's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the weather is only number six in the news, but this one, the privately owned one, is where it's listed.
He says, I can't blame him because in Ottawa, we've already had, listen to this, folks, three times the normal level of rainfall.
Farmers near Montreal would have had more success growing rice in water paddies than the more traditional crops up here.
Now, water that might well be in Colorado right now is instead to the north where it ought not be, in Ottawa.
Three times the normal rainfall in Ottawa, up in Canada.
Now, isn't that exactly what we said would occur, that weather conditions would begin moving north?
That appears to be a process well underway right now.
If my back will permit me to walk straight, I'm sort of bowed a little bit right now.
My back knows when I'm about to, you know, want to do something important, whether it's work or vacation.
It doesn't matter.
My back knows, and it goes, gotcha.
Yeah.
unidentified
It's sort of like when with your vehicles, my mom always told me, don't talk about when you have extra money in front of your vehicles or your portfolio.
This is going to be very interesting and engrossing, and it's a good thing because it will keep my mind off other things.
You know, you would imagine, I kind of imagine that the SETI group and Dr. Sten Friedman, who really is the father of what was discovered about Roswell, would have a whole lot in common, but not necessarily.
They're both looking for life, but they really don't have a lot in common because one believes that life is here now and or has visited Earth, and the other thinks that we've got to be looking for it light years away.
So they do have something in common, and yet they don't.
So coming up in a moment, we will have a debate of sorts between Dr. Paul Schuck, also known as Dr. SETI, has been described as a cross between Tom Lear and Carl Sagan.
Armed with a laptop computer and a classical guitar, he travels the world, making the search for life in space accessible to audiences as diverse as humanity itself.
Since the formation of the nonprofit membership-supported SETI League in 1994, the good doctor has served as its executive director, coordinating its science mission and delivering hundreds of SETI presentations to thousands of enthusiasts in dozens of countries on five continents in more than half the U.S. at college campuses, science centers, public lecture halls, and on TV and radio.
Dr. SETI's unique mix of science and song seeks to educate as well as entertaining and compels the listener to contemplate a fundamental question which has haunted humankind since we first realized that the points of light in the night, you know, those big points of light are actually suns.
Are we alone?
That is a big question, isn't it?
And then comes Stanton Friedman, who I'm sure is convinced we are not alone.
He received his B.S. and M.S. degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 1955 and 1956, where Carl Sagan also was a classmate.
See, they may have commonality there.
He worked for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for such companies as GE, General Motors, Westinghouse, TRW, Aerojet General Nucleonics, and McDonnell Douglas on such advanced, highly classified, eventually canceled projects as nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and nuclear power plants for space.
Stan is the original civilian investigator on the Roswell incident.
He co-authored Crash at Corona and instigated the Unsolved Mysteries Roswell program.
He was heavily involved in both the 1979 documentary, UFOs Are Real, and the 1993 and 96 videos, Flying Saucers Are Real.
Stan has provided testimony to congressional hearings, appeared twice at the United Nations, pioneered many aspects of ufology, including Betty Hill's star map work, crashed saucers, analysis of the Adolphos physical trace case, and challenges to the SUTI.
So, coming up in just a moment, these two gentlemen, head to head.
All right, first, from way the heck up north and east comes Stanton Friedman.
Well, did I say incorrectly that you would probably state that, in your view, we need not be looking out, you know, many, many light years waiting for a signal because they're right here right now.
I mean, that's basically your position, or have been here.
Some are, and I'm further convinced that we're dealing with a cosmic watergate.
An important aspect of this problem is the fact that the best sensors, the best means for detecting strange bodies flying around in the sky are military, and the data is born classified.
So we've got a cosmic watergate to deal with.
I'm convinced also that none of the arguments against these two positions, and this is where Paul and I would disagree, of course, stand up under careful scrutiny.
They all sound splendid until you look at the evidence and then they collapse.
I'm further convinced we're dealing with the biggest story of the millennium, visiting planet Earth and cover up with the best data for more than 55 years.
Okay, well, here comes Dr. Paul Shuck, who I doubt shares those views because, of course, he's vested in SETI.
He's part of SETI, and SETI is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
And I've had you on, I think, before, Doctor, and, of course, others from SETI as well.
And you believe that the way to find alien life, and you don't disagree there might be alien life, you just think the way to find it is to search for a signal of some sort, whether it be radio or light or whatever, from a long, long way away.
Well, it's certainly true, Art, that one tool in our arsenal in the search for extraterrestrial companions is the electromagnetic spectrum.
And the SETI science is the science involved in looking for this evidence.
This, of course, does not preclude the possibility of other forms of evidence.
And we certainly do not discourage other forms of research, such as Stan Friedman does.
But the best tools in my personal arsenal are radio telescopes and optical telescopes and infrared telescopes and various other forms of detection of electromagnetic radiation from beyond.
Well, if there was a report that could not be disputed of alien life on Earth or alien presence on Earth, and it really got to the point where it could not be disputed, there wouldn't be any more SETI, would there?
First of all, I would be absolutely delighted if such indisputable proof were presented to me because this is what SETI is all about, of course, searching for our cosmic companions.
And if Stan can do it, more power to him.
I'd be delighted to see undisputable proof.
Much of the evidence which Stan has presented is compelling, but for me, not entirely convincing.
But maybe that's because I'm a hard sell.
Nevertheless, such a discovery, I think, would only benefit SETI because once one extraterrestrial manifestation has been verified, then, of course, there will be tremendous interest in pursuing others.
Well, there's no question if aliens dropped down in the middle of the World Cup soccer match, it would change things a great deal.
But the kicker here is we're assuming that the tools for interstellar communication are observable with our systems.
Now, I should stress that Paul has a much broader view about this than the typical SETI Institute people who seem to be stuck at the level of looking for radio signals.
Look, within 50 years from now, we probably won't be emitting any radio signals ourselves.
We will have direct-to-satellite communications and backdown, and much more important, we will have developed new techniques about which we presently know nothing.
One of my real difficulties with the SETI Institute types, if you will, is they neglect the fact that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way.
And that's two important areas here.
One is method of communication.
Yes, now people are beginning to talk about optical SETI.
For one thing, my friends at the SETI Institute are, for the most part, professional radio astronomers.
Many of them are former employees of the late NASA SETI program.
You see, the U.S. government did fund SETI for an eye-blink of human history.
For a short moment, there was a NASA SETI office at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and that office was operating on a shoestring budget of 5 cents per U.S. citizen per year.
That's quite literally pocket change, but in its aggregate, it did amount to $12.5 million a year.
And in 1993, the budget balancers decided they could find better uses for that money.
So the NASA SETI program was canceled, whereupon many government employees regrouped under the private sponsorship of the nonprofit SETI.
Well, the big thing here, Art, is that neither the amateur nor the pro groups, and I think I hope we'll give out information so people can find out about the SETI league because several people I talked to never heard of it, and I said, wait a minute, you want to interested in SETI?
This is the way to go.
Don't worry, we'll get there.
Where both groups are in agreement is that no significant part of their resources are being devoted to the only data we have that clearly indicates that there is somebody out there that is the UFO data.
The presumption is that there's nobody coming here, because if there were, they'd be looking at that evidence, which is far better than the evidence they have, that there's anybody out there sending a signal.
Well, in that regard, Art, I've got to state that the SETI League with its meager budget has been just as successful as the professionals in finding nothing.
Right, absolutely.
On the other hand, it's true.
Stan is right.
We have not been devoting our resources to UFO research because that's not our area of specialization.
In fact, most accountants that I know have not been devoting their resources to UFO research either.
If one accepts the notion that there's a great concern, a desire to find extraterrestrial intelligence, one looks around and says, well, what can we do about it?
If we didn't have all the UFO evidence, sightings and landings and multiple witness radar visual cases, a whole host of evidence, if we didn't have that, then you're stuck with you better do something like SETI or you're going to do nothing.
But since we have all that evidence, I mean, the SETI people got very excited a couple years back when they had 37 signals that might be of interest out of several billion they picked up.
None of them panned out.
You look at the biggest UFO studies and you've got a much, much, much higher percentage, say 20% of the cases in Blue Book Special Report 14, that could not be identified after careful investigation.
So I'm saying, let's look at that evidence.
I'm not saying shut off all the radio telescopes.
That would be absurd because two things.
One, we can learn a lot about the universe.
Radio telescopes do provide a window on the universe that gives us useful information of many different kinds, and I'm all for that.
And secondly, who knows what more we'll find with radio telescopes.
But I think the assumption that aliens are stuck at the level of radio signals, and now it's being expanded to optical laser kind of signals, is missing the point that we are a young civilization, that there are stars out there that are, you know, what, five, seven billion years older than the sun, even in our local neighborhood.
I just got some new data on my favorite pair of sun-like stars, Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 reticuli.
And I think that if the SETI people were looking, and I've been trying to find if they've done any looking, it's not published yet any, if they have.
These two stars are not only just down the street, 39 light-years away, according to the latest data, but they're both sun-like stars, and they're an eighth of a light-year apart.
So they're 35 times closer to each other than our star, the sun, is to the nearest other star, Alpha Centauri.
And in fact, eclipsing binaries make very, very attractive SETI candidates for several reasons.
One of which, of course, is if there are planets around two nearby stars, members of a binary pair, if those planets are there, they know about the planets around their neighboring stars, there will be eventually travel between them.
Even before there is travel, and perhaps even after, there will be communications between them.
And whatever form that communication might take, if the alignment happens to be edge-on toward us, we have an opportunity to observe that communication.
But, Doctor, what about his point that in another 50 years, in all likelihood, you won't see any more electromagnetic emissions of the kinds we have right now?
In other words, basically, we'll go silent because technologies will eclipse the need for terrestrial transmission.
If you take any one civilization, the odds of it being at the electromagnetic communicative stage right now are slim.
On the other hand, if you take enough billions of civilizations, and I think Stan and I both agree that the opportunity is very great for there to be billions of technological civilizations.
If you take enough of them, all at different points along their developmental continuum, at any given moment, one of them will be at the electromagnetic leakage stage, and there is a chance of detecting it.
It certainly is my guests, nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman and Dr. Paul Schuck of the SETI League.
And it's a kind of a debate.
It's a discussion about how we best decide if we are either encountering or have encountered alien life or should just keep spending money, not taxpayer money, I would like to add, or even keep the amateurs pointing their dishes into space looking for life that way.
Now, there is one thing to add here, and we'll ask about that in a moment.
That is that if there's a big signal, you know, a big signal, a strong signal coming in, kind of like in astronomy.
You know, you ever notice that astronomers, professional astronomers, are often put into the dirt by the amateurs.
The amateurs discover a whole lot more of these comets, it seems like, than the pros do.
You ever wonder why that is?
Well, it's because the pros are looking at real deep space.
The amateurs are looking at pretty close space, and so they find these comets.
Now, an amateur with a smaller dish and a larger beam width is more likely to hear a big signal than the guys at Arecibo.
That's something to think about, I suppose.
Actually, that's really interesting to think about.
So, in other words, if we got a signal and it wasn't from very far away, you know, 30 or 40 light years, something like that.
30 or 40 light years, I mean, it means it would take a speed of like 30 or 40 years to get here.
So, it wouldn't be all that far away.
It would be generated by a civilization like ours or at about the stage of development that ours is at.
So, we could imagine then the little green guys running around with cell phones, right?
And one of my complaints, and I put together a paper, UFO's Challenge to CETI Specialism, which is on my website, incidentally, thanks to the efforts of my guys there.
Well, there's a whole bunch of them, but I'll keep them brief.
First is, why do the CETI specialists make proclamations about how much energy it would take for interstellar travel when this is an area of technology completely outside their knowledge, it would appear?
Well, certainly if we have teleportation technology, we don't need the kinds of space vehicles that Stan and his colleagues have been studying and looking for.
There's going to be a technological continuum, and we are just at the beginning of it.
I have no doubt that we are going to discover things we cannot now begin to imagine.
Well, let me emphasize, Dan, there are two different approaches to doing SETI research.
NASA SETI had a two-pronged program involving what's called a targeted search and also a sky survey technique.
Now, the targeted search looks specifically with very narrow beam, very high-gain antennas at particular candidate stars.
And our friends at the SETI Institute in California have been using the Arecibo Radio Telescope to do one of the world's most powerful targeted searches.
If I were doing a targeted search, it possibly would be on my list, but I'm not doing a targeted search.
I'm using the other technique.
I'm using the all-sky survey, and I'll tell you why.
I don't have an Arecibo in my backyard.
I have a 12-foot satellite dish as my radio telescope.
It's a broad bean antenna.
It's very good for sweeping out the whole sky methodically, systematically, looking not preferentially in one particular direction or at a single star, but at whole sections of the sky.
If the technology I'm seeking is advanced enough, its signals will be so strong that I don't need an Arecibo to detect it.
And if I'm very lucky, I'll find a signal that Arecibo could easily have missed.
It's a very apt analogy, Art, and I believe amateur radio astronomers have the opportunity to make tremendous serendipitous discoveries in the area of astrophysics and natural phenomenon, and maybe hippers.
The holy grail of SETI, of course, is finding confirmed artificial signals.
We're not there yet, but the chances are very good for the amateurs.
Now, I can't look at Zeta reticuli.
I'm in the northern hemisphere in the southern sky.
But my counterparts in Australia and New Zealand and South Africa, with their backyard SETI dishes, when they're scanning the skies, once a day Zeta reticuli swings through their beam.
So, of course, it's something that should be looked at.
The big searches of individual stars, and right now we're talking, I'm aligning this in a sense with the search for planets around other stars where they're using optical telescopes.
But still, the basic focus is on certain types of stars because Zeta Rate doesn't fall quite within the middle.
Now, I would object to the use of the term binary in the traditional sense.
The two stars are far enough apart, so there's no problem at all with having independent planetary orbits around either one without influencing the other one.
People, when they use the term binary, mean two stars that are revolving around each other, and it's conceivable.
Well, okay.
That's true.
But still, it's much more difficult to have stationary or planetary orbits around that kind of a system than when you've got two separate stars that are close.
Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 are close enough to be useful, but far enough apart to be sort of independent.
Yeah, let me give you a specific example because it gets back to something that would appeal to Paul's people.
I have twice heard completely independently, and I don't discuss this kind of thing in my other lecture when a situation arises, of military people being at a government facility where they've got a saucer on radar close by, sitting still, and where their radio antennas, and they don't have Arecibos all over the place either, are picking up signals.
And then the military people come in, take the reel of tape, these are old stories, leave and say it didn't happen, fellas.
Forget, even though all these people in this facility have a high-level security clearance or they wouldn't be there.
I've heard that story twice, and I'll bet there are people listening to us right now who have been in that situation and who have, on occasion, intercepted signals from alien craft within our atmosphere because it's not only the business of set up a beacon and hope somebody out there is listening, but how do you communicate between each other?
This incidentally is a strong argument for the sky survey technique.
If you're targeting stars, you may miss those extraterrestrial interstellar probes that are right here in our local neighborhood.
The sky survey, on the other hand, has a very good chance of picking up signals from probes, and we are very quick to admit the possibility that there could well be intelligent autonomous probes studying our local neighborhood.
With regards to government cover-ups, I'll state two things here.
One is that no one has ever stolen any of my data or confiscated any of my equipment, and I'm hoping they never do.
On the other hand, I will be the first to admit that governments lie.
That's what governments do.
That's what they're for.
That's why we elect them.
So certainly the possibility of cover-ups has occurred to us.
One of the advantages that the FETI League has, being an international membership-supported nonprofit with 1,350 members in 62 countries, is if we do have any detections, with the level of cooperation and coordination between our members around the world through the internet and through amateur radio, it would be awfully hard for any one government to stifle our progress.
They have stifled the progress with regard to ufology.
And that's a key point here.
And it's another one of my problems with the general SETI, if you will, is that it ignores the national security aspects of the reality of flying saucers.
And there are very serious concerns.
I mean, people act as if what we're talking about is philosophical discussion.
Isn't it exciting?
There's other life out there.
If they're coming here, what about their technology?
How can we use it?
Will our enemies learn to use their technology, alien technology, against us?
Sam, if Dr. Such or his colleagues found something, I mean, really found something, do you think that they would be allowed to just go to the Washington Post or whatever with their story?
Or do you think that they would be met by some fellows in suits?
If they find from the all-sky survey that some star out there, out there meaning tens, dozens, hundreds of light-years away, is sending a signal, I don't think anybody would stop them from communicating that.
That's very different than saying if they picked up a saucer in an alien body and they want to go public, you know, on national television, I think that's where the trouble would come in.
And that's what the government is concerned about.
I mean, you know, you're eating your breakfast and you read about, hey, they picked up a radio signal that might be from an intelligently produced source, you know, past the butter.
But if it landed next door and abducted the daughter of the people next door, then we get a different kind of problem altogether.
One that has enormous impacts on the whole question of government.
You couldn't build that pile safely without darn good science as to how many neutrons you're going to have running around as you keep adding material to the pile.
Most of the scientific data required for that first sustained reaction was publicly known, and it's only the technology to achieve it that was kept very, very secret.
Yeah, I mean, clearly, there are good reasons for national secrecy when working with high levels of technology for military purposes.
I have no problem with that.
Where I draw the line is that when there is science to benefit all of humankind, let's face it, if you receive a piece of physical evidence of a visitor, that visitor didn't come to visit a particular government.
He came to visit our planet.
If I receive a confirmed, undeniable, conclusive signal, that wasn't a person-to-person call.
That was a call to our entire planet.
And for a government to try to stifle knowledge of it, of course, it probably will happen.
Of course, the governments are in the business of misinformation.
Well, I believe that governments will probably try.
I think long-term they will probably fail.
Because especially when you have an international effort at the level of cooperation going on within the FETI community, it would be very hard for any one government to pull the plug on a discovery issue.
Well, from where I sit, Stan, in the shadow of WABC 770, one of our network affiliates at the CETI League office, from where I sit, I see that an awful lot of misinformation has been presented by governance.
And that misinformation could very well be for the purposes of throwing us off the track.
Maybe Rosswell, it finally came out, and the government continues to lie about it.
But again, the distinction is between are you covering up a signal subject to interpretation and from somebody a long ways away?
In other words, we're not going there tomorrow and they're not coming here tomorrow.
Or are you covering up artifacts, technology, the here and the now, a real part of what's happening on this planet?
And those are two very different areas.
And remember, something that gets neglected, we've been talking about radio telescopes, but in terms of observing flying saucers, the best observing equipment produces data that's born classified, the radar networks, defense radar networks, the NRO satellites, the NSA listening posts.
I've talked to former NSA guys, National Security Agency, and they've told me there were signals, stories, things that they picked up discussions by foreign governments of UFOs all over the place.
Well, I think those of us in the SETI community have long accepted the theory of panspermia that was articulated by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and his colleague, our friend and member, Chandra Wigramasinge.
Panspermia says that life on Earth was seeded by microbes that fell on Earth from beyond.
And if that's the case, then we are, of course, the descendants of extraterrestrials.
This is important because Stan has raised the question, which has been discussed by SETI scientists for years, about how other beings from far beyond Earth could possibly be humanoid in appearance.
And, of course, my answer to that is if we have a common biological basis, then it's not at all surprising that.
This is interesting speculation, but I think we have the opportunity to do some hard scientific research here.
Certainly, if we do discover extraterrestrials in whatever form, artifacts, visitation, radio signals, robotic probes, any of these gives us an opportunity to learn a lot more about our origin, our history, and perhaps our future.
And that's what's both SETI and STANS research, which I like to call SET V, SETV, Research for Extraterrestrial Visitation.
Both of these forms of research are seeking the same goal using different tools.
If the government recovered a crash-flying saucer, two of them actually, in Roswell, and wreckage pieces as well as bodies, that puts a whole different look at things than, say, listening for signals.
Now, the reason I would say it's a weather balloon if I were trying to cover up my own exotic spacecraft is because then afterwards I can say, alien spacecraft?
There's a difference between saying we had things that the public can't imagine and saying we had a wreckage of an intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft with bodies.
A very big difference.
And of course, the cover-up, you know, Roswell has gone to be a big name in ufology, if you will, and I'll take credit for that to some extent.
They just became an all-American city, would you believe?
But only 10 were named, and they're one of them.
And I'll be there on the weekend, the anniversary weekend, and with thousands of other people, I guess, speaking on Saturday, the 6th of July at the Roswell Museum.
I'm going to be at Green Bank, West Virginia at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, where I have my one week a year of telescope time on the 40-foot dish.
I don't have either a laptop or a guitar, so I can't compete with him on that sort of project.
But the Roswell story is interesting because the government, I didn't see it.
There was a History Channel program the other night.
We don't, in Canada, get the American History Program, unfortunately.
And the other way around goes, too.
There's going to be a program about me tomorrow night.
Well, tonight now from where I am.
Stanton T. Friedman is real, but you can't see it in the U.S. Well, does that mean that you're not real in the U.S., Stan?
I'm a dual citizen.
I turn my face whichever way I feel like, but that's on the Space Channel, which you believe, in Canada, but not in the U.S. Tomorrow night, 8 o'clock Eastern, 7 o'clock Eastern, 8 in Atlantic.
And all over the U.S. If you'll indulge me just a second, Art, I have to take advantage of your wonderful transmitter here to say hi to my brother-in-law in Anchorage listening on KENI 650, and my daughter in San Francisco listening on 560 KSFO, and of course, my wife Muriel in Williamsport, Pennsylvania at 1400 WRAK, where she listens to you.
Now, that doesn't surprise me at all because I would imagine that the energy costs of time travel are on a par with or maybe even less than the energy requirements for interstellar travel.
Well, one of the things about energy requirements, and in my paper, which is on my website, which goes into this in considerable detail, is that the energy requirements depend on your mission profile, so to speak.
Well, Stan raises an interesting point about a possibility of time travel, and I will accept that the interstellar traveler hypothesis is an interesting one.
The time traveler hypothesis is also an interesting one.
And I don't believe we really know which or maybe some alternative hypothesis.
There are a lot of unexplained phenomena out there.
But the fact that we don't, it doesn't matter how they get here.
The question is whether they're here or not.
In other words, people come to me with that, well, how about time travel?
I say, look, I don't care whether they get here on the kind of fusion rockets that I worked on 40 years ago, God forbid, or any other system you can think of.
The question is, are we dealing with intelligent life that originates elsewhere in time and space than planet Earth?
My answer is yes.
Am I smart enough to know the latest in technology for zeta reticulins?
Of course not.
I haven't been around that long.
I don't know that much.
Our civilization, I mean, one of the things that's happened in the past century is a recognition of how deep our history is.
You know, you go back to Bishop Usher a few hundred years ago, and, you know, 6,000 years, that's it.
I think there may well be some form of what I would call super intelligence because I don't know what else to call it.
I think one of the things, we get sidetracked when we get into UFOs and radio telescopes about the physical world.
And I think aliens would know a great deal about the spiritual world.
Call it telepathy and reincarnation and the whole business of karma and all this kind of stuff.
I think when you study biology, you learn to live a long time, and you learn to live a long time and have super, super computers, you develop wisdom, and then you might find out that there's more to life than the physical hard stuff, the chairs we sit on, the people we see.
I was raised Jewish as well, sang in the choir, you know, the whole business.
And my notion, I think it's an insult to the concept of God to think of one little planet, and this is it, and that's all there is, and that's all he's managed to do, because then he's been a failure, if you look at us, a primitive society, major activity, tribal warfare.
My goodness, this is God.
But if you look at it as this is an aberrant place that has missed the way, when I said before, primitive society, then it takes on a different view.
And, You know, these are interesting times with what's happening in the Middle East and with everybody invoking God, most of the world's problems right now seem to be sort of religion-based, whether it's India, you know, or the Middle East and Ireland is simmered down a little bit.
But there are serious problems all over the world that have to do with is there a God and whose side is he on or he on.
So that's an area that I tend to stay away from only because what can I do about it?
Well, it might come back to the E.T. question because considering our present behavior, would any civilization that advanced consider contacting us or quarantining our city?
Well, if God created extraterrestrials, which I believe is a distinct possibility, then perhaps we can learn more about ourselves and our spiritual heritage from our cosmic neighbors.
I certainly don't expect that anybody's going to be beaming Encyclopedia Galactica our way, unless we just happen to be incredibly lucky.
The best we can hope for realistically is to intercept somebody else's interstellar communication.
If we are able to eavesdrop, at least if we can answer that fundamental question, whether they're here or not, if we know that they're out there, maybe we can look here and look into ourselves and learn something.
In other words, other than the ambient radiation that occurs from Earth, or even the microwave or military radar, other than that, and one attempt early on at aerosol.
And some people have suggested that one of the reasons for the cover-up is the government knows something absolutely terrible is going to happen, and there's nothing we can do about it.
So, you know, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die kind of thing.
I don't have to buy that viewpoint because I think.
Dr. Paul Schuck is my guest, also from the SETI League.
And by the way, if you'll go to my website under Interact, you'll find out the Team Art Bell, the SETI Team Art Bell, the SETI at Home Team Art Bell has been resurrected, and we're going to go rock them again.
Again, get to my website under Interact, and you will find under New Management an all-new Team Art Bell, SETI Team Art Bell.
So, you know, I do support that.
We need to get out there and get units under our belts, because who knows, it may be one of you that does the big wow out there.
All right, it seems to me that these two guys don't really disagree with each other at all.
I mean, maybe I'll be proven wrong here, and we're going to try that here in a moment.
But it seems to me that I could have had probably a bigger debate between Dr. Paul Schuck and somebody from the SETI Institute.
Dr. Schuck, what do you think about that?
I mean, if I had Seth Shosak here, it seems to me you've got more disagreement with him than you do with Seth Friedman.
Well, Seth and I have respectfully disagreed for years about many of the specifics of our research, but the fundamentals, I think we are in agreement that we are in a universe that's teeming with life.
Well, and that we have at least one set of tools that has a fighting chance of detecting that life.
That's the key point in my article about UFOs' challenge to SETI specialists is that all the SETI people, the SETI Institute people, if you will, present company accepted, however you want to put that, ignore the facts about flying saucers.
They all mention flying saucers.
UFOs shows up in all the books, but never with any reference to the huge amount of data.
They're proclamations without a basis.
And as a scientist, I am personally affronted when scientists make proclamations without having done their homework.
It's easy to say there is no evidence or the evidence isn't convincing.
Without dealing with that evidence, what meaning do those claims have?
None, as far as I'm concerned.
In other words, if you look at the references given, I reference SETI stuff because I try to pay attention to it.
I'm interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
When they talk about UFOs, they don't reference any of the large-scale scientific studies.
That's one of my pet peeves.
If you're going to talk about, make a pronouncement from on high because you're Professor so-and-so, Dr. So-and-so, whatever, editor so-and-so, they're just as bad, then you should study the evidence first.
Personal opinions aren't the same as professional opinions, to my mind anyway.
That is why, and precisely why, I defer to experts in the field of ufology, people like Stanton Friedman, who have done their research.
Now, Stan has been one of the first to admit that there are in the UFO field charlatans, and of course there are in the SETI field as well, so we have to be very careful when we analyze data new data we're looking at.
And there are charlatans in the SETI field as well.
Certainly.
In all fields, there are people who would distort their facts.
We had proof of that three years ago, last time I was on this very show, with the EQ Pegasi hoax, a claimed detection that turned out to be totally bogus.
And I went back to try to find out, well, where does this come from?
And I found out that the problem is that excellent astronomers like Robert Harrington from the Naval Observatory, many years ago, looked at the calculations of the orbits of the planets and found that they weren't quite right.
The measurements didn't match what the calculations showed they should match.
And so they started looking, maybe there's another body out there.
I mean, Pluto, you know, it affects the orbits of two other planets nearby.
Uranus and Neptune, the same thing.
We inferred their existence and then looked, and, gee, look what's there.
And it turns out two things have happened.
One, we've discovered there's a whole bunch of stuff out there in the Kuiper belt.
Lots of little pieces of flatsum and jetsum, I don't know, planetary material if you want to call it that, are out there.
None of them are very large.
Well, no, we're not.
But we also found out, and here's the key thing, that those calculations were actually somewhat off.
There are no residuals, as they say, differences between observation and measurement.
The calculations weren't up to snuff, and we can do a much better job today.
So I am not at all convinced that there's a planet out there, and certainly not one that's going to bother us next year or the year after or any time.
All right, let me quickly read from ABCNewnews.com.
Astronomers may have found hints of a massive, distant, still unseen object at the edge of the solar system, perhaps a tenth planet, perhaps a failed companion star, that appears to be shoving comets toward the inner solar system from an orbit 3 trillion miles away.
This comes from two teams of scientists, one in England, one at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, independently report this conclusion based on the highly elliptical orbits of so-called long-period comets that originate from an icy cloud of debris far, far beyond Pluto.
We were driven to this by rejecting everything else we could think of, according to the University of Louisiana physicist Daniel Whitmer.
Well, that's interesting, Art, because that's consistent with the nemesis theory that's been articulated for the last 25 years or so by Muller at University of California at Berkeley.
And the nemesis, the unseen companion star, hypothesis suggests that there is a massive object that periodically dislodges comets and lobbies them at Earth, and that explains the periodic mass extinctions that we have seen.
It's a good hypothesis.
If it's true, then we have several billion years to go, or several million years to go, rather, until the next mass extinction on Earth.
So we better get working on our interstellar travel right now.
Well, Paul, would you say there is real evidence that such a massive object exists, or is this something that falls out of I can't find another explanation, so it must be it?
There is certainly good circumstantial evidence that something caused the mass extinctions, and that something most likely was dislodging of comets.
Now, what physically is causing that disruption of the Oort cloud, I think you've got to ticket hypotheses here, and this is a workable hypothesis, but it's not really being proven.
And my approach is that my background leads me, having worked on far-out advanced technology systems and worked under security, which Paul has too.
So he's not ignorant about security, and he doesn't make some of the strange comments that have been made by setting specialists about national security.
I want to look at the evidence that they're here.
I want to look in detail.
I've been to 19 archives, look at some government documents we have, like the Operation Majestic 12 documents discussed in Top Secret Magic, M-A-J.
Now, Dr. Shuck, if you have read his book and if you became convinced that, in fact, we have been visited and or are being visited right now, why not take your resources and apply them to search for what may be already here or in orbit or has been here or taking your money and trying to prove that it's already happened.
There are people like Stan who are doing the research and doing it in a credible way.
I will defer to them.
Stan uses the term SETI specialist.
I think this is an important term and an appropriate one because we do in the sciences and in technology tend to specialize.
We put our skills and energies to work in a direction where we think we can make the greatest contribution.
There are a lot of people out there who are capable of doing UFO research.
I salute them.
I wish them well.
I am one of many people capable of doing astrophysical research using radio telescopes, and I will continue to concentrate on what I know best, and I'll encourage Stan to concentrate on what he knows best, hoping that we will, of course, share our findings.
Then, with 1,350 SETI League members around the world, we have our own email lists through which we disseminate this information in a systematic way so that we can get independent verification from around the world.
Once that has been achieved, once we are convinced that what we're seeing is real and duplicable and verifiable, then we tell everybody.
And I'd be delighted to be on your show telling everybody through your wonderful audience and your great radio network.
And if our government were to come to you before all the emails went out, somehow they found out, just before all the emails went out, and they came to you and they said, look, Doctor, you've made a great find.
This is something we've known about for years.
This is an absolute national security issue.
It's an issue for the security of the entire world, in fact.
And we're asking you, as a patriotic American, to hold off.
But it's kind of moot because by the time I've verified the signal, my colleagues in Eastern Europe and Australia and South Africa and Asia have already verified the signal.
Well, the process of verification is already pretty well underway to the point that as soon as something is detected by one station, there is a closed email list that immediately relays the coordinates and the frequency and the specifics to all of our other stations around the world.
Well, if this government that you both admit lies like a bandit and watches us all very carefully and intercepts any email that goes anywhere, anytime that seems important to it, it could crush that baby in the tribs.
Well, Congress certainly thought so, and that's why they canceled the NASA CETI program.
Yes, I'd like to see a return of government funding to SETI.
On the other hand, FETI is doing pretty well privatized, and maybe it's a good thing, because after all, the minute governments get involved in science, the project ends up taking twice as long as it offering twice as much and working hard as much as well.
And for that reason, I believe that Stan's research and ours are complementary and both worthy of time and effort on the part of those most expert in those fields.
There have been many dissertations written on radio astronomy, but very few on SETI, because in the scientific community stand, SETI is still somewhat of a four-letter word.
Well, that's what our 115 stations around the world are using right now.
Converted backyard satellite TV dishes in the 3 to 5 meter diameter range.
That's 10 to 15 feet or so.
You add some electronics, which we help our members to construct, and we identify sources.
Our SETILeague tech manual gives you a lot of this information, and there's detailed construction information in my new hypertextbook, Tune In the Universe, which is available through the nonprofit SETILeague and also linked from the Art Bell website.
Tune In the Universe is a hypertextbook on CD-ROM.
You read it on your computer using your web browser software.
It's compatible with Windows, Unix, and Macintosh systems, and it leads you step-by-step through the process of constructing your own radio telescope.
It also tells you how to do the search.
It gives you an overview of the history of SETI, some of the technology.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
These are two great men in their own fields, a nuclear physicist, Stanton Friedman, and Dr. Paul Schalk, who is headed.
He has been head of the SETI League and continues to be involved in the SETI League.
And they both, frankly, have a great deal in common.
In fact, really, all three of us have a great deal in common in terms of what we're looking for, what we imagine might be true.
So what I think I'll do is to begin opening the phone lines for the audience and let them field your questions.
That's coming right up.
By the way, when I'm in the next hour, 2 a.m. Pacific time, in about, I don't know, 47 minutes or so from now, I will be myself radiating heavily on 3830 on the 75-meter handband.
That's 3830, 3830 on the 75-meter handband.
You might find it very, very interesting.
Ham radio is an awful lot of fun, as the good doctor, I'm sure, would tell you, isn't it, Doctor?
Well, coming from a biblical standpoint, I don't have much of another one, but I feel like we're supposed to live forever given the capacity of our brain.
And the universe seems to be almost infinite.
And I asked Art, what if we're quarantined to this planet until we get rid of the way we destroy things?
Oh, what if God's not letting us go out into the universe because we just mess it up?
John raises a good question, and I don't think we really need to look to an external force, be it a deity or an extraterrestrial force, to quarantine us.
I think we tend to quarantine ourselves through our own short-sightedness and closed-mindedness.
And as we grow out of that and develop a more positive cosmic consciousness, perhaps we will discover capacities in ourselves that we can now only begin to imagine.
We have a situation between India and Pakistan right now that could result in nuclear war.
And then you could imagine that it would even expand from that and, God help us, become worldwide in some twisted way that we don't quite understand right now.
But once the bombs begin to explode, who knows?
If there really are extraterrestrials watching us, do the two of you imagine that they would intervene or simply wait for the new real estate to become available?
I think it would be nice to imagine a benevolent external force that would want to protect us from ourselves, but I also believe that's probably wishful thinking.
Sad to say, and of course I've been in India and I have many friends from Pakistan.
They're both countries with so much potential and so much tragedy.
And I really can only hope that we can transcend these petty differences.
Because if we can't agree amongst ourselves on this planet, how can we hope ever to be admitted into the cosmic community?
If I were writing the prime directive, I think that would be one of my basic rules.
The pity of it all is we have some wonderful radio astronomy facilities in India, the GMRT, the giant meter wave radio telescope, using ropes and stressed parabolas and trusses to pull all this stuff together very, very cheaply, what we like to call the Indian rope trick.
They are absolute geniuses in that part of the world at developing wonderful technology, and unfortunately, that same capacity for technology has led them to the nuclear brink.
This is an amazing story, and I don't know if you can address this caller's concerns.
I mean, he was saying, look, they stopped ICBMs here.
They actually put Russians in launch condition, and then shortly thereafter, we all began to talk about disarmament, and we began to talk about, and, you know, the wall came down, that wall came down, and all the rest of it.
Isn't it possible that there was a really big demonstration made, and it was so convincing that both powers said, well, okay, we see what you mean?
There's so much going on in that realm of high-level military actions.
We don't hear about hard, well, we hardly hear about any of it in general.
We're fortunate that some of the people involved on the U.S. side on the shutting down the ICBMs, a guy named Salas and others have been willing to talk about it.
But we don't know how many more times that's happened.
Okay, well, and then I believe I saw, it was like a 2020 or one of those programs on what happened in the Soviet Union where they actually went into a damn countdown with ICBMs with craft hovering over.
I mean, that's serious stuff.
Is it possible, then, that both governments understood that what they were doing had to stop?
Well, I have no direct knowledge of the extraterrestrial craft that are alleged.
However, I do know that there have been times that we have gone to high alert and then stood down.
I want to thank Bob for the question.
For one thing, it shows us that there is intelligent life in Los Angeles.
Now, in fact, the former Soviet Union had a very strong SETI program.
I know they have extremely high level of interest in these matters.
But I think what the story tells is more important is about our own terrestrial communications capability.
I'm not giving away any government secrets to say that I was in the 1960s in the Air Force in communications, and I did some work with the White House Communications Agency.
So I'm no stranger to hotlines.
And I can tell you that it's a great relief to me that when we reach a high alert state, there is communication between the heads of government.
And more than once, it has prevented war.
No matter what had stimulated the arming of the missiles, the fact is our leaders on both sides had the good sense to talk to each other.
And I think that is our hope for the future, is to maintain good communication worldwide.
He is convinced by talking to military witnesses and people that he considers to be very credible, who have the clearances and all the rest of it, that there is in the planning stages a cosmic deception, that one way or the other, we possess technology that we have back-engineered or saucers that we have or God knows what we have developed.
You both admit we probably have.
And that because we don't have a good enemy right now to keep up this $1 billion a day spending on defense, there's going to be a staged event, something so horrifying, so scary, that the world would quickly unite and the defense contractors would quickly bloat as we tried to get our space war weapons ready.
I didn't say they did, but George Bush may feel that way about it.
In other words, whoever's running the biggest organization in the country is the one that's probably going to end up running things if everything unites.
And other president, that's what I'm asking.
Do you believe that something could be staged for that express purpose, for fattening the contractors for building space weapons, for uniting the world, whatever?
I am not with Steve when it comes to the notion that the government's got free energy technology and a whole bunch of other things that they're covering up.
In a way, you ought to be with him because you're saying we do have levels and levels and levels of technology above what the American people know about right now.
Nuclear physicist En Triedman and Dr. Hall Schalker are my guests, both very nice gentlemen.
Both actually more in agreement than disagreement on most points, actually.
At least that's sort of my assessment.
And that's just fine.
We'll continue to sort of pummel them with interesting questions if you will remain right where you are.
Somebody sent me a picture of a really funny billboard.
I thought it was funny anyway.
That was in Canada.
And the billboard had a picture of the Canadian maple leaf.
And it said on it, Canada leads the world in being just north of the United States.
You know, a lot of Canadians took umbrage to that and said, well, they said a lot of things that I can't repeat here.
I actually love Canada.
In fact, I'm going to be traveling in Canada the first opportunity I get.
I've traveled extensively.
I love Canada, so I didn't mean anything nasty by it.
It was just I thought it was funny.
But you do lead.
I'll tell you what.
Stanton, I'm going to give you another shot at a plug here because not only do you lead us in being just north, but you're going to be on a program that we're not going to get to see, right?
Tells you sort of my life story, encapsulated, has me a little lecturing, responding to questions about various aspects of UFOs, wandering around Roswell, giving my talk out at the Mufon Convention in Irvine, California.
You know, you can't tell a whole lifetime, not the kind of crazy one I've led in one hour, but it's a pretty good shot at it.
And it talks to a couple of critics as well.
And I thought they did a pretty good job.
I was a little worried.
You never know what people are going to edit into things.
And, Dr. Paul Jacques, one more plug, if you would, for the SETI League.
You're a really interesting group.
You're a ham like I am.
I have a very great deal in common with you.
And you have, I think, a great plan, and that is to get people together who've got 12-foot dishes or better and do a little conversion and actually be out there looking.
And you guys could be the ones, or the SETI at home people could be the ones, to find the wow signal that they're looking for at Arecibo and other big dishes that are very narrow, right?
Well, we don't know who's going to be the first to make the detection, but I do know that the more telescopes you have looking, the better your odds.
And radio amateurs around the world and hobbyists and experimenters and even laymen have the opportunity to be a part of this global grassroots search.
You can get involved by going to our website, www.SETILeague.org, or drop us an email.
Those of you listening on the radio can email to radio at SETILeague.org.
Or for those of you who don't have internet access or email, there is always the old-fashioned telephone line.
No, I've never been abducted, and I honestly don't know anyone who's been abducted, so I have to maintain a somewhat more healthy skepticism on the subject.
Well, I haven't been abducted either, but I do know people who have been abducted, and it's not the big difference between contactees, for whom it's a glorious experience where they're being singled out to pass on significant information, almost none of which checks out as being real, an abductee where you're the subject of somebody else's experiment apparently, you know, like a rat in a lab maze, there is a big difference there.
And I'm satisfied about abductions.
I've checked into a lot of contactee claims, and I can't find any of them that stand.
Doctor, Zeta Reticuli really does seem like a fertile ground.
And since you're separate from the SETI Institute and you have your fellow ham operators and members of the SETI League who are down under, why not send out a message that we want that looked at?
And could they please point that direction and do some real careful listening?
I don't think we have the resources to do targeted searching with our small dishes.
If we did, certainly Zeta Reticuli would be on our target list along with several other very interesting stars.
And if we get larger facilities, we'll certainly be looking at stars in both the northern and the southern sky, specific interesting stars, and Zeta Reticuli would be on that list.
Yes, but those colleagues are doing astrophysical research, not FETI, for the most part.
Radio telescopes spend most of their time looking for natural objects, natural phenomenon.
If we're lucky, we can borrow a little bit of that time, or as the FETI Institute does, spend thousands of dollars to rent a little bit of that time to do FETI research.
But most of the time, those telescopes are not available to us.
We're beginning, of course, now to find planets, and it's now thought that planets, even Earth-like-size planets around Earth-like stars, are going to turn out to be rather common.
They're going to be the rule rather than the exception.
Just as I can't very easily imagine a nucleus without orbiting electrons, around certain classes of stars, I just can't imagine them without their retinue of planets.
We've long suspected this.
In the last seven years, we've gotten abundant evidence.
About 6 to 7% of the stars surveyed by the Marcy and Butler team, the leading planet hunters, about 6 to 7% of those stars, they've detected planets around, and they're just beginning to learn how to detect them.
All right, but if all these planets are out there, even Earth-like ones, and we have not yet heard a thing, SETI Institute or SETI League, not so much as one confirmation, not one confirmation of any stray signal that was obviously intelligent life, even sending their version of I Love Lucy or whatever.
We have nothing, zero.
Is it possible that the people who say, look, we've been here 6,000 years, God created us literally just the way it says in the Bible, and there is no other life out there?
And the guest I had on last week said, if there is, it's fairly nearby, and it was seeded from earth, because that's the only place where life exists.
All right, then, for both of you, because you both can probably answer this question.
If there is confirmation, and that means the SETI League discovers a wow signal, or the saucer And the physical evidence become absolutely indisputable.
In other words, whichever one of your disciplines turns out to yield something productive and absolute, how would that change Earth?
How would that change, well, Earth wouldn't change.
I think it depends on the nature of the discovery.
If it's physical evidence here on Earth, that will have more profound implications, I'm willing to concede, than merely the detection of a radio signal from light years away.
The immediacy would be much greater.
On the other hand, in both cases, the knowledge that we are not alone would profoundly change our view of our place in the cosmos.
We would strive to become members of the galactic community, and one can only hope that we would be worthy of membership.
I interview people like Dr. Michio Kaku, brilliant mind, and he says we're a type zero planet.
And he postulates there are many, many, many, many type zero planets.
And I don't have enough time to go through all the different types, but suffice it to say, to get from type 0 to type 1, you have to survive the discovery and the use of Element 92.
And when I really pin him down and I say, Professor, how many such civilizations do you think percentage-wise survive that discovery and use?
I'm probably closer to that industry than Stan is because during my Lockheed years, I was developing the missiles used to deliver those physics experiments.
That's a tough question because if I had declined that particular employment, it would not have stopped the research or the development or the Cold War.