Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center since 1954, dissects eyewitness accounts like Kim Schaefer’s August 2nd copper-colored disc near Bristol, Tennessee—dismissed by military radar due to transponder absence—and Steve Catola’s July 27th silver-black object over Washington, both defying known physics. He highlights the Phoenix Lights (1997), a boomerang-shaped craft mocked by media but later linked to flares despite witnesses’ claims, and questions why press ignored FAA/military records like the 2002 D.C. UFO sighting amid $25T debt and systemic secrecy. Davenport warns of ufology’s self-sabotage—reposted claims, hidden agendas—and insists governments must disclose truth, even if it disrupts faith, as citizens may solve related mysteries. [Automatically generated summary]
We're going to talk about what we do so much on this program, Utology, with one of the best, Peter Davenport.
Now, Peter is a director of the National UFO Reporting Center.
He was the founding president of a Seattle-based biotech company which currently employs over 300 scientists and technicians.
Peter's been an active, had an active interest in the UFO phenomena.
From early boyhood, he experienced his first UFO sighting over the St. Louis Municipal Airport in the summer of 1954.
Investigated his first UFO case during the summer of 1965 in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Peter has been witness to several anomalous events, possibly UFO-related, including a dramatic sighting over Baja, California in February of 1990 and several nighttime sightings over Washington state during 1992.
In addition to being director of the National UFO Reporting Center, Peter has served as director of investigations for the Washington chapter of the Mutual UFO Network.
And we have so many times before, we're going to have a number of witnesses here for you.
And in the first case, that of Mr. Kim Schaefer, who you will hear from shortly, we have a video to go with it.
So I thought I'd give you a little heads up.
If you go to the coast2coastam.com website, you will prominently see that video available for you.
And I suggest you take a look and a good close look.
I think I've seen it about five or six times now.
And God bless Kim for having a camera there to sort of share this with you.
I mean, it's a whole hearing words are one thing, and we do a lot of that, and naturally so, because not everybody, or it might be said that most people wouldn't have a camera nearby at that moment.
Certainly I didn't when I had my big sighting.
No camera.
Nor, frankly, might it have even occurred to me, I was in such a state of shock to grab it had I had one.
Of course, I had some time afterward to go after myself for not having a camera, and that hasn't changed me because I still don't carry a camera wherever I go.
However, earlier today, my webcam shot, if you want to take a look at that upper left-hand side of the website as you enter, says Art's webcam, you'll see a whole group of people there.
And this is a group of people who showed up at my house today.
A whole group of hams that came from as far away as Washington State, people that I talk to on a regular basis.
Very nice group of people in Arizona and California, just all over the place.
And so I took an opportunity in my front yard to snap a photograph of all of them.
In this case, someone else snapped, and you'll find me.
You can search for me in the crowd there.
So we did that earlier today, and that's on my webcam site right now.
In a moment, Peter Davenport, and oh yes, tonight we will talk about ufology.
We'll talk to witnesses.
We'll show you a video, and then we will talk about the general state.
We'll broaden the conversation and talk about the general state of ufology today and where we go from here.
In fact, in my opinion, Art, this video that's on your website is some of the best video I've seen probably in the nine and a half years since I first started as director here at the UFO Center.
I didn't, at first I didn't really take note of the case.
I got a call from Kim Schaefer back in Bristol, Tennessee.
He said he had this.
He sent a written report.
And we hear a lot of stories about people who have photographs of UFOs.
And I estimate that only about one out of a hundred bits of photographic evidence that are sent to us really address any kind of UFO sighting or a photograph of UFO.
Most of them are hummingbirds or starlings or pigeons or you name it.
We get it.
But when I saw this tape, I was just agog when I popped it in the VCR and watched it.
Some of the best video I've seen, and Kim is really to be congratulated for he's one in a thousand among observers of UFO events.
My son and myself were actually working on an automobile on August the 2nd, and we generally look at the sky.
And I turned around, and I saw this little thing in the sky.
It was going in and out of a cloud bank, and I thought it was a balloon.
And I told my son to keep an eye on it, and I went in the house and got my binoculars, and I came back outside, and I was dumbfounded when I put my binoculars on it because it was a very reflective copper-colored disc.
And it was the most perfect symmetry that one could see.
So you've had a lot of time now to reflect on what you saw.
What are your major choices here?
Do you think that you saw an alien craft, Kim?
Do you think you saw an experimental U.S. government craft?
What do you think?
unidentified
Honestly, I do not know.
I really have no idea.
I would like to think that this thing that we saw exit the clouds and fly away was something that our government has probably been keeping From us, and that's what I would like to think.
After the laughing, after the laughing, they informed me that no matter what was in the sky at that time, their radar would not confirm nor deny that there was anything there due to the fact that if it had no transponder on it, that it wouldn't register on FAA radar.
Are most airports equipped with both transponder receiving radar and the good old-fashioned reflective bounce type radar as secondary capability or what?
The U.S. is, to the best of my knowledge, completely covered with radar coverage and with transponder capability.
Transponder capability meaning that the airplane carries a radio and if the ground signals the radio, the radio sends out a coded signal that identifies that airplane positively.
And what the air traffic controller sees on his screen is a blip indicating an aircraft or a target.
And right beside it, if that aircraft has a transponder, I believe I'm correct in saying that the transponder number that that aircraft has been assigned by the air traffic controller actually should show up right next to the appropriate blip.
A very important point, because across the United States, we have all of this radar coverage, but am I believing here, as I listen to you, Peter, that our radars across the nation might not see UFOs because the computers might filter them out as not part of what the guys are supposed to be watching for?
The question is whether air traffic controllers see UFOs, and I think the answer to that is sometimes they do.
Case in point, over the state of Rhode Island, June 22nd, year 2000, an object was seen by Providence Approach Control to actually reverse its course and follow an aircraft over the shore of Rhode Island.
And all of you who have not had the opportunity yet, do take a moment to get to your computer and go to the coast2coastam.com website and look at this video.
It's unusual.
Normally, all we have is words, but there is a man who took the time and trouble to get a video camera out and hit us with what he saw.
I mean, that's just absolutely wonderful.
unidentified
So that's what we're, if you go up there and take a look, that's what we're talking about tonight, folks.
The phenomena of UFOs or ufology is a very, very frustrating phenomenon because it's something that you get close to in varying degrees, but you never quite nail it down.
That doesn't mean it's not there.
It's there.
Be assured it's there in our skies.
Be assured of that.
But you never quite nail it down.
So that makes it very frustrating for people like Peter Davenport, I'm sure.
You still keep plugging away, but I bet there's a lot of frustration, huh, Peter?
It's an interesting job dealing with all the people I deal with in the course of a typical day, but frustration with a capital F. And what we have done in the ufology over the last 56 years, since the official beginning with the sighting over near Mount Rainier up here in the state of Washington, is just accumulate eyewitness accounts, the likes of which we heard tonight, although in the case of Kim, he did just the right thing.
He grabbed a camera and he got it on film.
That's a world apart from an eyewitness account.
Point of interest, Art, part of the reason I'm having these two witnesses on who've seen discs recently during the past year is that I think it was two days after Kim got his on film.
Another gentleman up near Vancouver, British Columbia got essentially the same thing on videotape as well.
Equally dramatic.
Just 48 hours later, I believe it was.
I've forgotten the exact date.
But in addition, I should explain to you and to our listeners tonight why I've decided to have these witnesses on.
Just 12 days ago, a gentleman called us from Fort Myers, Florida.
He was absolutely flabbergasted, as flabbergasted as a gentleman of his ilk and his cut ever gets.
I did almost everything in my power to get him on this program tonight because he saw a disc as overtly and which was as dramatic in appearance as what Kim just described to us.
There is a beautiful graphic of what this gentleman allegedly saw on the 4th of January.
I think that was Sunday.
Daylight sighting, no clouds, perfectly blue sky over Fort Myers.
And this guy stood there absolutely aghast looking at this object maneuvering in the daytime sky.
This whole first part of this program with these witnesses who have witnessed discs was predicated on my early assumption that we were going to be able to get this gentleman.
We were going to twist his arm and get him on this program.
It is the object right on our homepage from Fort Myers, Florida.
scroll down half a page on our home page and you will see the others rendition got it of what he saw in addition to the laws that's That's just classic.
I mean, look, people have jobs and they have lives, and nobody in their right mind is going to jeopardize their living, meaning their family, by making such a report.
So you can imagine why pilots don't do it and other officials don't do it.
They're going to go back to the unit and say, hey, I saw a flying saucer.
We're going to have to ask you to see the company shrink, if you don't mind.
And it gets worse from there.
So, I mean, really, folks, think of your own situation.
Do you have a job where it would be jeopardized by reporting something like this?
In fact, when you looked at the bottom and it turned itself kind of upward so that you could see the bottom clearly, there were no discernible features other than a very thin silver ring all around the black.
And then when it would turn the other way so that the top surface, the silver metallic surface, was facing you, you could see the entire metallic surface.
You could see the sun reflecting off of it.
And you could see features, one of which was a very subtle cockpit that was sort of oblong in shape that actually came to kind of a point on one end.
And you could tell that there were shapes and different surfaces on the upper part.
Any way you could make a guess as to the physical size compared to, say, an airplane, like a commercial jet, a 727, whatever?
unidentified
The problem with that is that by not having any grasp of what this thing really was like, if it were a 747 flying by, you could say, well, it's three miles away or it's 10 miles away or something like that.
But because it has no real, there's no way to judge its dimensions, I could only take a look at it from the viewpoint of where I stood relative to the river itself and also its elevation above the ground, its apparent elevation.
Well, the way I described it is more in degrees of elevation.
I'm a sort of amateur astronomer, you know, so I kind of think about the sky in terms of how many degrees from horizontal upward do I look.
And so it was up about, oh, maybe 20 to 25 degrees vertically above the ground.
So if the distance that I was guessing it at to be, you know, six, seven miles, maybe some degree or something like that, it would have to be above 10,000 feet, I would think.
those are just very speculative numbers and i wouldn't want So you watched this for a total of how long?
unidentified
Oh, I actually recorded it, or I mean, watched it by watch, you know, for about 20 minutes, but I'd actually been seeing it probably five or ten minutes before that.
But the airplanes left, the boat races started up again, and nothing ever happened other than this thing just stayed out there at this fairly high altitude and fairly distant position.
And again, it maneuvered in such a way as if the pilot were practicing or something.
You know, he'd kind of slide up in a curve that would turn the bottom up towards us, and then he would turn over, and the top would then be pointing towards us.
He just kept kind of going around in a pattern as if he were exercising this machine to really enjoy its ability to fly.
And the whole thing, the whole pattern, tended to drift slightly to the east over time.
And I'd say in a matter of, oh, the 20 minutes or so that I observed it, it probably moved, oh, maybe 5 to 10 degrees to the east in asmut, you know.
Well, you know, I've given that a lot of thought, and I've talked to people, and I've explained to them what I've seen, you know, and I think it's one of three things.
It's a possibility that it does really, it is a real alien craft of some sort that, you know, comes from some other dimension or whatever.
That's one possibility.
The second possibility is a balloon, that someone has built a model of some sort that is powered and can maneuver in this strange pattern, you know, being held up by air buoyancy.
Number three is that it's an advanced military craft of some sort that is being tested and people practice with it, you know, and they do it in odd places that don't normally see much air traffic.
And, you know, this would be an ideal place.
The place that I would have located it on the map if I were to put a mark on there is over an area called the Horse Heaven Hills.
It's a very remote, rural part of the country.
There's very few farms out there.
It's mostly dryland farming and population centers that are none.
There's no cities.
There's no villages.
An occasional ranch you find out there, you know.
So it would be a good place to practice if you wanted to kind of be off the beaten path.
But, you know, if you're an extraterrestrial craft and you don't want to be seen, or, gee, if you're an Area 51-type secret craft and you don't want to be seen, in either one of those cases, the last place you'd want to appear, it seems to me, would be adjacent to an air show where everybody'd be looking at the sky.
What do you think?
unidentified
Well, you know, that's a good point.
The only thing I'd say is that if you didn't know where to look for this craft With the naked eye, you would probably never see it.
How big was it, Steve, relative to how big a star would have been in that part of the sky?
Was it that size?
unidentified
Oh, yeah, it was bigger than that.
Like, for example, if Venus were up or something like that, you know, and it was dusk and you could actually see the disk of Venus, this would be, oh, at least twice the size, maybe three or four times the size of the surface.
Excuse me, for something to hover for 30 minutes, if it were man-made, that is a long time for an object to stay more or less motionless in the atmosphere.
They can do it.
Helicopters can do it.
But when they do it, they burn a huge amount of fuel.
And for example, a helicopter probably would not hover at high altitude.
unidentified
I could not see anything in the way of a wake or thermal heat trails or anything like that because a lot of times when you look at a plane from as it disappears kind of horizontally away from you, you can see the heat distortion in the sky.
And you could not see anything like that around this object.
It was clear.
It moved with grace and smoothness.
It wasn't unstable in any sense of the form.
It had a very controlled attitude.
It was just amazing to watch the thing.
I've never seen anything like it.
And I've been observing the sky ever since I was a kid.
And Peter, of course, hang tough, and we'll be right back.
All right, my guest is Peter Davenport, who for years has been listening to the reports, actually, like the ones that you're hearing tonight.
Thousands and thousands of them.
we've got one more witness coming up shortly and then we're going to broaden the discussion and it's going to be a tough one into ufology in general uh...
unidentified
Be it sun, sand, smell, touch, the something inside that we need so much.
The sight of the touch, or the scent of the sand, or the strength of an oak roots deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing, to lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing, to have all these things in our memory's heart, and they use them to help us to fight.
Wanna take a break?
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
There have been a number of polls done on that art, and all of them seem to suggest that about 30% of all adult Americans believe that they have had an overt sighting of a UFO.
Yeah, a third of the world's population has seen something that doesn't belong in our skies.
well uh...
one of the most famous of all incidents that occurred occurred over the city of phoenix and it occurred while i was on the air the phoenix lights case so-called uh...
it uh...
You were telling me on the phone before the program, a lot of people don't know about the Phoenix Lights, or seemingly so.
In fact, what has given rise to my inviting our next guest on the program tonight, even though this case is seven years old, about two weeks ago I was talking to a journalist out in the Midwest, works for a major newspaper.
I'm going to go easy on him tonight, I guess.
I won't name the paper, and I won't name the journalist.
But he professed to be knowledgeable in the field of ufology, was very interested in it.
He was writing an article, and he had called me.
He and I talked for about 40 minutes.
During the course of that conversation, Art, I alluded to the Phoenix Lights case, and he said, what's that?
Now, Coast to Coast and its host back in 1997 had this case before, I don't know how many listeners you have, but many listeners within about an hour of the end of what I consider to be the most dramatic UFO event, dramatic and overt UFO event that we are aware of in the field of ufology.
Objects one to two miles in width, and we'll return to that issue of size in a moment with our guest, went over the city of Phoenix and they were over that city for an estimated hour and a half.
I asked myself, how can it be that people still are not aware of what happened over Phoenix just about seven years ago?
I'll never forget that night as long as I live.
You and I talked a couple times before we went on the air with that case.
But some people who may not have been tuned in seven years ago on the 13th of March, that Thursday night.
And I thought it would be very interesting to bring on to the program not just an eyewitness, but a woman who, in my opinion, one, had one of the most blatant views, one of the most dramatic views of one of, we don't know how many objects went over Phoenix, but several that night.
She had a dramatic view of an object that came across Camelback Mountain in the north and hovered over her and her four children for approximately five minutes.
If the kids were waving at it, you don't do that unless something is really close, like a helicopter or an airplane is really low, so low you can almost look into the cockpit and see someone.
I mean, that's when you start waving, right?
unidentified
Right, right.
It was just, it was that, it was that close.
It felt that close.
It felt that, you know, exactly.
It was over us, and we thought, oh, this is amazing.
So then either we have to have a lighter-than-air vehicle or we have to have something which is evading normal gravity.
And then this item, this craft, then, I guess, passed by.
And then you also then, I guess, saw USAF, you know, Air Force jet fighters take after this thing?
unidentified
I think other witnesses saw that.
I saw, I did not see that.
I actually saw a very strange sight from the front of the right of the vehicle, and that was a laser that kind of went down toward the middle of the city, which I thought was just, it just kind of went, I kind of screamed when it happened, oh my gosh, did you see that?
I know you're in a kind of a state of shock, but I mean, you see a laser go down.
And what do you think that we're under attack?
Did that occur to you?
Or what did you think was happening?
unidentified
You know, we weren't fearful at all.
That's amazing.
I mean, we're just, oh, wow, you know, and again, we can't wait to hear what this was, you know?
Sure.
And just assuming, again, in a big city like Phoenix, that a lot of people are going to come out and tell us on the 10 o'clock news exactly what we were watching.
Yeah, we're pretty well known down in that neck of the woods.
Sue, you are an American hero, in my opinion.
You're one of the best witnesses that we've been able to identify from that incident that Thursday night back in March of 97.
But I have a specific question.
My objective in having you on this evening is to lay to rest for the many, many people who are listening to us tonight.
Lay to rest once and for all for those listeners we have as to whether this object that went over your head, and I think you've answered the question already, could possibly, could possibly have been Venus, as some people have suggested,
or could possibly have been those military flares 80 miles to the southwest of Phoenix over Gila Bend firing range, or could possibly have been the Canadian aerobatic team, the Snowbirds, as has been suggested.
What would your reaction to those proposals be based on what you and your two sons and two daughters saw that night?
Well, immediately when you were saying it again, I just almost want to laugh.
I mean, I want to laugh because those are the most preposterous descriptions of what we saw.
It was a vehicle that was flying over our house very slowly.
It was not separated in any kind of, it was not flares.
No.
It was a solid unit.
It was an aircraft with lights around it that was very much together and very close and very close and very, very, very large.
And again, just assuming that everybody was going to be able to tell us on the news, we did not feel like we were anyone special that night that we thought everyone was going to be talking about it and that it was going to be something that was going to be explained on the 10 o'clock news.
And when the rest of you got together, you know, as a family afterwards, and obviously you're going to talk about this a little bit, right in the beginning at least.
unidentified
We actually went in and drew it together because I had called about it and we decided we better put it down on paper.
These folks are doing what a lot of people, even most people, just wouldn't do.
They wouldn't risk it.
All right.
Hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
My guest is Peter Davenport, and we're talking about UFOs.
unidentified
Now it begins, now that you've gone, needles and pins, why that you've done, watching back the
sky, till you return, hiding the blackboard, and watching you burn.
Now it begins, you see me and you talk about anything.
You got the bad.
Give up the booze and the one night stand And then he'll settle down It's a quiet little town And forget about everything
But you know he'll always keep moving You know he's never gonna stop moving'Cause he's rolling, he's the rolling stone When you wake up it's a new morning The sun is
shining, it's a new morning You're going home, you're going home *music* Talk with ourselves.
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I was on the air doing this program, which was certainly at that point well defined in the sense that we look at paranormal phenomena, we look at ufology, we look at things that other talk shows don't look at.
That's all there is to it.
I mean, we were defined as that kind of program then, and certainly are now as well.
Well, everything went nuts.
I mean, it went totally nuts.
Something gigantic passed over one of the largest cities in the United States, Phoenix.
It's well over 2 million in population now.
unidentified
Something really major occurred over one of our biggest cities.
All of a sudden, one night on ABC and NBC and CBS and everywhere, just like it had happened just that minute, that all the nightly news reported on the Phoenix light and what had happened in Phoenix.
Like, somebody threw some damn switch somewhere, and it was time to report on this.
It was the time I've never seen anything like it in my whole life.
I happen to have been on my way to the East Coast.
If I'd known what was about to happen in the press over the Phoenix Lice case, I would have stayed at home.
I would have just canceled all my appointments on the East Coast because it was like the damn burst as a result of one article in USA Today by, I think the gentleman's name was Richard Price who wrote it or Mr. Price anyway.
And suddenly everybody in the world had to know what was going on or what had taken place in Phoenix.
That was when Governor Symington, I think it was Friday the 20th of June, when Governor Symington paraded that poor, helpless employee out on the stage in Phoenix.
The guy was dressed in an alien suit.
And Governor Symington said they finally had the answer to what had happened over Phoenix three months earlier.
It was just nonsense.
People seem to think that the interesting part of my job is the UFOs.
I don't think so any longer.
The most interesting part of my job is the human psychology I see, but even more than that, the response of our society to the UFO phenomenon.
I sit here day in and day out taking data, as you know, and I am incredulous.
I can't believe it that the press is not addressing this issue the way, for example, Coast to Coast has addressed it.
Squarely, honestly, but they won't touch it.
Not the way they did back in the 50s.
When I was a kid, you probably remember as well, it was frequently the case that newspapers and radio stations would report UFO events.
Today, not at all, except in local press.
They will handle it.
In fact, they clamor for information.
I get calls all the time from local and regional newspapers wanting to know if a UFO event has occurred in their area.
They're doing a program, or rather, they're doing an article, preparing an article, and they would like to know what's happened in their locale.
Well, I point out to them that the locale is unimportant because we appear to be dealing with objects that can travel at certainly thousands and maybe tens of thousands of miles an hour.
So it is more logical to ask if anything has happened anywhere in the world at about the same time as another event.
Well, one might speculate that local press would not be controlled.
If you want to believe the conspiracy That the national press is controlled, then you might by extension believe the local press is not so well controlled.
The only bone I have about all of that is that nobody's ever tried to control me.
And we're definitely national, but then again, maybe we're sort of pigeonholed away as that UFO show.
I don't know.
And handled that way.
And maybe the rest of the national press is somehow manipulated.
I mean, at radio stations across America and television stations for that matter as well, the basic news source, Peter, is the wire.
And for all the years that I've been in radio, when you get the news, you run into the other room and you rip five minutes of news off the Associated Press or UPI or whatever it is you're getting, and you read it.
That's it.
And that's how, if you were going to control it, it would have to be at a wire-type level.
I think the same thing has happened to journalists that has happened to light astronomers.
It used to be the case that astronomers would sit out at night, sometimes with their telescope, looking at the night sky, recording the things they saw and so on and so forth.
Not any longer for most of them.
Most of them, the grad students, sit down in a basement in front of a computer and they tap out a command that goes to some light telescope halfway around the world and they get data coming over their computer.
Well, that is very similar, in my opinion, very similar to what has happened to members of the press.
They sit in front of their computers, they wait for the wire feed.
Our press has become principally a business, principally a commercial process, whereas I think 100 years ago it was principally a process to inform the American people.
But you see, Peter, though, this kind of story, you would think, as we move into the world of infotainment, and by that we mean sort of the chuckling newscasters, we mean the magazine-type programs, you would think that these types of programs would clamor to get something like a UFO story.
And when you look at the tripe that they trump up into these stories that we see night after night after night that mean absolutely nothing and do nothing constructive for the American people or their nation, I agree with you.
Something like the Phoenix lights, they yawn and go back to sleep.
And in that case, it's very important to understand that it wasn't a case of the press failing to cover it.
It was a case of the press refusing to cover it.
For example, you mentioned the press.
Friday morning, the 14th of March, 1997, I spent hours calling every newspaper that I could think of off the top of my head in the United States.
All the papers in Seattle, the Los Angeles Times.
I called the Arizona Republic.
I called newspapers on the East Coast, the New York Times.
My phone bill shows these calls clearly.
Nobody was interested.
Nobody, absolutely nobody returned my calls.
What in heaven's name is going on?
This is unbelievable.
And I would hearken back to our last witness, Sue Watson, very clear thinker.
I don't think she really communicated to the audience as clearly as she could how big that object was above her house.
It was five widths of her fist side by side above her head, between 100 and 120 times the diameter of a full moon.
The minute she said that her children were waving, that did the trick for me.
Because you don't do that until you're close enough that you think you can see someone through a little window, or someone, if they were looking, could see you that close.
In fact, either that object or one somewhat similar to it was seen perhaps 10 or 15 minutes later going southwest down over Interstate 10 that leads from Phoenix down to Tucson.
And it straddled the highway so thoroughly that the people on the left side of the vehicle were looking at one wingtip of the object out the left side of their car.
The people sitting on the right side of the automobiles were looking in the other direction at the other tip of the object as it moved over them seemingly slowly.
The object was over their heads.
Many of them reported for between one and two minutes as it moved the opposite direction.
And journalists still, still are, when I call them, when I talk to them, when I give them data for their articles, when I ask them if they know of the Phoenix Lights case, they profess Total ignorance on the subject.
We are alert to almost every airliner's path, or we're trying to be.
I mean, they're just totally freaked out on the subject, and rightfully so.
So you would think that any object that, for example, would be seen on radar, if they're seen on radar, would get really quick scrutiny from the Air Force.
You know, and people with shoulder-fired missiles and whatever all.
I'm hearing they're doing all kinds of wild stuff now.
So the world should change out there a little bit with regard to UFOs, shouldn't it?
I mean, they're going to be regarded as at least hostile and dangerous to American interests.
And in fact, this happened over Washington, D.C. I believe I remember the date.
It was July 26, 2002.
About 1 o'clock in the morning, four F-16 fighters went out of Andrews Air Force Base, which is just, as you know, about 20 miles or so east or southeast of Washington, D.C. Right, you are.
And people were awakened out of sound sleeps that morning, 1 a.m., probably 2002.
People got outside in time to see these F-16s going over their heads at relatively low altitudes.
I say relatively because it's the objective of most fighter pilots when they take off to get to altitude as quickly as possible to conserve fuel, get up where the air is thin.
These F-16s were going right over people's houses with their afterburners lit, and the people who got out quickly enough saw a bright red light on the nose of the lead F-16.
Now, I just talked to Joan Woodward, who is an investigator for MUFON back in Maryland, just two days ago.
She and I were talking.
And she has now found that there appear to be anomalies in the records that were kept by the military and by civilian airports, by the FAA for that particular day.
I'm hesitant to talk in any great detail because she said that she was still collecting data, but she found that there were gaps in the data that would leave a reader with the impression that absolutely nothing had happened during that day and at that time.
I actually talked with a gentleman who works in FAA headquarters who was very circumspect with me and very cautious with what he said.
But he admitted that he knew of that case and he would say no more.
The question is, in my mind, with regard to this case I'm discussing, is whether there might have been an AWACS flying over the Washington, D.C. area that got the whole thing on radar.
Now, this is the most troubling aspect of ufology to me.
Really, you said it earlier in the program an hour ago or so.
How many more of these sightings and sighting reports and how many more witnesses do we have to parade out on programs like this before it doesn't do any good to do it anymore?
Whenever anybody lies to you, and I may err in using such a harsh term, but the federal government has been lying to the American people for over half a century with regard to the subject of UFOs.
And do you recall the search for the Roswell records?
And do you recall the answer that was given to Representative Schiff that, son of a gun, all of those records somehow have been mistakenly erased or are missing?
How can the American people accept that answer that for the most famous UFO case in all written modern history, the records, well, they're missing.
How can people accept that?
Unless, Peter, they accept the fact that it's all being covered up.
And the American people have simply come to the point where they accept that.
And so when they hear all the records are missing, they just, I don't know, they just sigh and go, internally, mentally, yeah, they trashed it.
You know, I mean, after all, Rosemary Woods, she did what she did.
It wouldn't be very hard for the government to do what they do.
And they just accept that.
All right, hold on, Peter.
My guest is Peter Davenport.
We're having a talk about ufology and UFOs in general.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
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log on now I'm telling you, before I get the song, don't leave me down.
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Good morning, breaking news, everybody, at this hour from CNN.com.
A huge car bomb kills 18 in Iraq.
At least 18 people were killed.
Two U.S. Department of Defense workers, 16 Iraqis, early Sunday when a suicide car bomber detonated his bomb outside coalition headquarters, right outside coalition headquarters in Baghdad.
According to U.S. military sources, this was a gigantic bomb.
A military spokesman did not say if the Defense Department workers were soldiers or civilians.
Captain Jason Beck of the 1st Armored Division said about 28 others were wounded, most of them Iraqi civilians.
He said the wounded included a U.S. soldier with non-life-threatening injuries, four U.S. civilian contractors, 23 Iraqis, at least one of them a member of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
Video showed at least three cars on fire, several civilians lying on the ground and bloodied.
U.S. troops and tanks were on the scene, and gunshots could be heard in the background.
I believe Peter and I agree, and I have nothing in the world against UFO reports or talking to witnesses on air, and these were particularly good ones tonight.
Nothing in the world against it, but I have been listening to UFO reports, intently listening, because of all of you, for all the time that I've been doing this program, and that is now many, many, many years.
And the same goes for Peter Davenport.
And so we have to find a way to move to the next level, to try and answer this question at the next level.
More reports, interesting always, but it isn't going to help us begin to answer the really profound questions that are associated with this phenomenon.
And they are profound questions.
And I guess we have to talk about our government.
We have to talk about our government.
I just read a bulletin about Iraq.
Whether you are for or against the Iraq invasion and now occupation, you have to wonder, as many people are doing right now, how the decision to invade Iraq was made.
A lot of controversy about that right now.
And I guess you have to wonder about how a lot of decisions in government are made, huh, Peter?
A lot of people in government are interested in our cases.
You know, I sit up here.
Not only do I take cases, but I ruminate on this subject aggressively.
This is an intellectual challenge for me to explain what is going on with regard to UFOs.
I am a person for whom it is a given that UFOs are present on this planet.
And I've posted 27,000 reports to our website, many of which I think any one of which would support my statement.
But I've gotten to the point where I'm now wondering, what is the significance of all of this?
And how are these, I presume, aliens we're talking about, how are they manifesting themselves on this planet?
Are we to believe that they just fly by, go streaking by in the atmosphere, pull back up into space, and they're gone?
Possibly, but I don't think so.
Now, I'm the first to admit that terrestrial logic, the type of logic that you and I as human beings on this speck of sand have grown up with, does not apply.
It doesn't necessarily give us any hint as to how aliens from other parts of our galaxy or universe would think.
But it does not seem logical that they would come all this distance from another star or another galaxy, just whisk by for a matter of a few seconds and be gone.
Well, here's the other thing that doesn't make sense, why we've got to talk about government.
We all know they're here.
We have sightings of nausea.
They're here.
Come on, they're here.
We don't have to prove that.
It's just a fact.
And so our government, particularly with Homeland Security and with all the awareness going on, and long before the need for all of that because of the First Terrorist Act, our government is damn well aware what's going on one way or the other, whether they're the source or whether it's aliens.
And I suspect it's aliens at least some of the time, some small percentage of the time.
I've heard enough to believe that.
Then our government also has to know.
As a matter of fact, they know a hell of a lot more than we do, Peter.
In fact, I'm sitting here looking at my bookcase art, looking at the Encyclopedia of UFOs by Ron Story that has a copy of Jimmy Carter's written eyewitness account of the UFO he saw when he was a governor of Georgia in 1969.
But I mean, do you think he was officially briefed?
Or do you think that President Carter, who was regarded by many in the military-industrial establishment as not military-friendly at all, actually, was kept out of the loop?
It takes me back to that scene in Deep Impact where there's this, the President of the United States has this epiphany when he discovers that his advisors have not been squaring with him with regard to this issues of aliens and UFOs and so on and so forth.
But for some reason, and I anguish over this all the time, some reason, a series of presidents now, they have all consented to not even talk about this subject.
That worries me profoundly.
And let me cut right to the issue that worries me the worst, Art.
This is my greatest concern.
We know that these aliens have a profound grasp of technology.
Their ability to manipulate matter, information, and energy goes beyond anything we can imagine as mere terrestrials.
When they do so, it looks like magic.
Is there anything, I ask myself rhetorically, is there anything that would prevent them from participating in our society in one way or another without being seen, without being detected or detectable?
And I have to conclude, based on the fine work of people like Dr. David Jacobs and Bud Hopkins, John Mack, John Carpenter, people who specialize in the abduction phenomenon.
But they all seem to agree that the alien phenomenon or UFO phenomenon, which appears to me to include aliens, and I'll come back to this issue in a moment, is real and it has a real effect on some human beings.
We don't have any idea today how many people have been in proximity to aliens or been affected by them one way or the other.
We're at the very, very beginning stages of our study of ufology.
All of these reports that we have taken, all of it amounts to nothing but hearsay information, and we are only just awakening as a planet to the presence of other intelligent, I believe, intelligent life forms in our galaxy.
But the thing that concerns me most of all is the possibility That these creatures, their presence here, has had an effect on our government or governments on this planet.
And I have to say, when I look at some of the things that our government has done, even done to the American people, I get really alarmed.
The debt.
Debt, in my mind, is tantamount to it is a mild form of slavery, and I'm not sure, actually, it's so mild.
When I look at the intrusion into personal lives, particularly since 9-11, as a result of the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act Reborn, I get very troubled because these are things that are being promulgated by public leaders who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not to rewrite it or re-engineer it or dilute it or whatever they're doing to it.
I don't think strip searches of older folks at airports is providing us with a wits' worth of added security, however.
I am cognizant in the background, there is the risk, there is the reality that we're dealing with people who would do us immense harm if they got an opportunity to do so.
There are some ghastly weapons around.
We all know that, that could re-engineer our society.
But I think we have to be very cautious about what we do to the Constitution and all of those constitutional rights, which after all, we are told are inalienable.
They cannot be taken away from us.
And I, for one, am a very alarmed citizen, and I think we have to be very cautious with this federal government.
And some of our listeners may be saying, good heavens, who is this guy, Davenport up in Seattle?
After all, he's only a UFO investigator.
What does he know about government?
Many of our listeners may not know that I have run for public office, ran for Congress.
I was a declared candidate for Congress in 1992 from the Russ District in Washington.
Before I became a, let's say, a prominent UFO investigator, I was quite active in politics, ran for the legislature, Washington state legislature, know many people who hold office, and I've studied the subject.
So it's not as though I'm a rank amateur in this field.
But what worries me is the possibility that some of these things we see happening in our government could in some way be related to the UFO phenomenon.
I would like to qualify that statement or corroborate it in the following respect.
You may recall, I think it was back in 1998, when I reported for the first time publicly the fact that I had been approached by some people in the U.S. government.
They held very responsible or very positions of considerable responsibility in our government, I think is the proper way to state it.
I met with them on the 14th of May 1997 back on the East Coast.
They requested my presence.
They called me up.
They said, Peter, we know who you are.
We've heard you on the radio.
We've seen you on television.
We've been to your website.
We've read all of the cases there.
We would like to have a sit-down meeting with you.
That meeting did take place as I reported on coast to coast.
The agenda was they had a specific interest in all of those cases that we had posted to our website that pertained to the alleged presence of a UFO in proximity to a commercial airliner.
After all, this was only about 10 months after the tragedy of TW-800 off the coast of New York.
And that appeared at the outset of what was to have been a one-hour meeting.
In point of fact, it went to four hours nonstop, Art.
So I conclude from that fact that they clearly were getting information that they found interesting and that was worth their while.
Halfway through that meeting, Art, one of the individuals present turned to me and they said, Peter, this individual said, Peter, we have a special question for you.
And I can almost repeat the question verbatim from memory.
He said, in all of the data you have collected that we see on your website, is there anything that has given you the suspicion that there might be someone working inside the U.S. government in an extra-constitutional fashion?
That is the term he used, relative to the UFO phenomenon.
Now, the people who have heard me before on this program, who know me up here in Seattle, and you, most of all, know that I rarely have any difficulty in expressing my opinion or speaking my mind.
This was one incident in which I was almost stunned to silence for, I estimate, three to five seconds, saying to myself, good mother of all creation, if you people do not know the answer to that question you've just posed to me, what in heaven's name, hope do we have?
Now, I don't know.
It took me a couple days to realize that they might have been testing me.
They might have been setting me up, trying to figure out if I'm one of these people who subscribes to conspiracy at a wholesale level.
Well, I don't, although I do believe that this government is keeping things from us.
They're lying to us.
Certainly, with respect to the UFO phenomenon, they are not being honest with the American people.
Few Americans could be left these days who do not believe that government lies to us.
It's like part of the job description.
Job title.
They do lie to us.
I mean, just face up to it, folks.
I too used to believe that every word from the FBI, every word from our president was like 24-karat gold descending on us.
The absolute unadulterated truth.
Well, the only part of that that I believe in now is the adulterated part.
So, yes, they lie to us, and they probably almost definitely lie about what we have in our skies, which means they know a whole lot more about it than we do.
How much do you think they actually know, Peter?
Do you think, for example, they met with alien races?
My suspicion is they have, but it's only a suspicion.
When we sat down for this meeting that I've been describing here the last several minutes, they said, Peter, and our listeners who remember my first broadcast on this point can go back to the original program and see how accurate I am.
I think many people were, and I would love to reveal who they were, but they requested anonymity, and that is the foundation of the National UFO Reporting Center.
Peter Davenport is here, and we're talking about UFOs.
However, perhaps, I don't know, from a slightly different perspective, maybe a more jaundiced one.
I think a lot of you out there are frustrated with the whole subject the way both Peter and myself are.
And I mean very seriously frustrated.
It's a profound, important subject.
I mean, if we're being visited, if our skies are full of things from elsewhere or very secret things that we don't know about that our government has, either way, it's a pretty big story, I'd say, wouldn't you?
Yes, I notice our president is about to make an announcement, I believe, probably in the State of the Union, maybe later, that people should be given the opportunity to opt out of the standard Social Security fund and put their money into other things, you know, like securities and stuff like that.
And I wondered at the time why he would say something like that.
You know, we are projecting a $480 billion deficit in this fiscal year.
It's important to put that into perspective.
I'm going on memory now, but Jimmy Carter's last Christmas tree budget after he had lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980 was about $365 or $370 billion.
That was his budget.
Many of the people who are in Congress today decried this spendthrift.
How could a person possibly spend that much money?
Those very same people who were criticizing President Carter's alleged profligacy routinely today sign off on budgets in the vicinity of $2.2 to $2.4 trillion.
Budgets six times larger.
The deficit of this fiscal year is going to be bigger than Jimmy Carter's last budget.
For my money, one of the most productive, one of the most interesting academicians of the 20th century was Peter Drucker, who studied organizations.
And he discovered that they're all pretty much alike.
A military company or platoon is not much different from a church social in an organizational standpoint, how they operate, how they grow, how they fall apart, how they support themselves, what they do after they reach a certain size, and so on and so forth.
One of the things that Peter Drucker looked into, and I studied this when I was a business student, MBA student, about 20 years ago.
He was a fascinating man, and he did some fascinating work, real insight into how the world really works.
One of the things he addressed, I seem to recall, was the issue of leadership.
I was enthralled.
I was fascinated to discover that we really don't know what constitutes leadership in an individual.
Some people are charismatic, they're good looking, and they're leaders.
Other people are even better leaders, and they don't have any of those visible assets.
We really don't know what a leader is.
But there's one thing that Peter Drucker identified that leaders cannot do and still remain leaders indefinitely, and that is lie to their subordinates.
We need a sense of resolve on the part of the American people.
People have to step forward To run for office, and we've got to get, in fact, we don't have to replace the entire Congress.
Interestingly, if you get just 15 or 20 or 25 people in Congress who are like-minded, acting in concert with one another for the betterment of this country, they can, for all intents and purposes, control or at least vastly influence a lot of what goes on there.
Well, I'm not sure that ufology by itself is going to be a sufficiently strong or mobilizing pretext to get a lot of people elected to public office.
In fact, it's probably not a very good one.
We really don't know much about UFOs.
But there are a lot of people out there who just don't run for office because it's such an unpleasant process.
One of the things I said, this was 12 years ago when I was a declared candidate for Congress.
It was my opinion, it still is, Art, that we have the same problem with candidates for public office, selecting them, that we have with candidates who apply to become prison guards or candidates who apply to become law enforcement officers.
Namely, you've got to screen them very carefully to make sure that you don't get people in the population who are there for the wrong purposes.
And we don't seem to do that in a very discriminating fashion, in my opinion, in this country.
Most of all, because most people don't vote.
I've got many, many friends in the Seattle area ranging from their 20s to their 70s, and people appear to have given up with regard to wanting to have any role in selecting public officials.
I vote in local elections, but, you know, for example, watching the Democrats right now and Iowa about to happen, that's big news, right?
I find myself intensely unexcited about who it is who's going to be the Democrats nominee, and then the presidential race and whoever it will be that wins.
I guess I have lost a little bit of hope that there would be any change.
Old boss, new boss, same as the old boss kind of thing.
I don't think that at that level, I hate to say this.
Well, if you were doing the cutting and doing the budgeting, Peter, would you or would you not include money to build a base on the moon and then maybe go to Mars?
We've got wonderful state-of-the-art scientists doing all of that.
But when I look at the problems on this planet, overpopulation, our energy problem, clearly, clearly, in the near future, we've got to get away from petroleum.
And we could be spending that money on issues that are much higher priorities with regard to the survival of our race and the comfort of many people on this planet.
I would be willing to push it back a few decades until we get the budgets under control, until we get some other issues resolved that I think are much more important to the future of this planet.
And plus, let it be said that the way technology is unfolding, we saw an unprecedented explosion of technology over the last hundred years.
I mean, 100 years ago, first airplane flew, obviously.
100 years ago, first trip across this country in a car.
The next hundred years is going to be even more breathtaking if we can keep things together, if we don't blow ourselves to smithereens.
Consequently, we have no idea what those new technologies will allow us to do much more cheaply, much more efficiently, just as the computer has allowed us to reduce the amount of diesel fuel and cast iron we have to throw at a problem today.
When you think about it, you mentioned the last hundred years, right?
One might even suggest, and it's hard to get a historical view when you're in that time and we're in that time of this accelerated technological adventure we're all on.
But historically, when people look back on it, don't you think they might say, hey, you know, maybe the obelisk came down about 100 years ago and we just didn't see it.
In other words, history will view this period of time as so odd as to prove intervention of some sort.
I am struck by how different many of my attitudes are today than they were just 10 years ago.
Capital punishment, case in point.
For probably the first 40 years of my life, I accepted it without really thinking about it, without really challenging it.
And now I am very uncomfortable with the notion that the government, a government, any government, is empowered to take the life of one of its citizens.
After all, that legal system is intended to protect society, not to extract a pound of flesh.
Well, we're pretty far adrift here, but that's a very interesting statement, and I might be very interested in taking you on with regard to that a little bit, because I think there are crimes that justify the death penalty.
I really do, and maybe some crimes that would shock you.
But that issue aside, we'll get to the phones shortly with Peter Davenport.
Now, what I want to do, I want to be very specific about what I want to do.
I don't want to take report sightings.
I want to talk about the general state of ufology and the knowledge that our government probably has and how you feel about all of that now instead of reports.
That's what we're going to be looking for when we get back.
Stay right where you are.
unidentified
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful.
Oh, miracle, oh, it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees made me singing so happily.
Oh, joyfully, oh, playfully, watching me.
But then they send me away, teach me how to be sensible.
Logical, oh responsible, practical.
And then they show me your love.
I could be so defeated.
Oh, clinical.
Oh, intellectual.
Cynical.
There are times when all the world is still.
The questions come too deep.
You're such a sinful mind.
Won't you please tell me what's wrong?
I know it sounds absurd.
Please tell me who I am.
Sometimes the music says it.
Why would you say I'll be calling you a radical?
A liberal?
Oh, a magical criminal?
Oh, won't you sign up for me?
We'd like to be your acceptable.
Respectable.
Oh, presentable.
A vegetable.
Oh, jing, jing, jing, ying.
To talk with myself, form a wild guideline in area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call 800618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is most tempting to take Peter on on the death penalty issue.
That'd be fun, but that'd be, I guess, sort of another show.
So instead, what I'm going to do is let you take on Peter, one way or the other.
If you have questions, comments about ufology, remember, we're not taking UFO reports.
We're not doing that.
We're talking about ufology.
Our government's part in all this, the secrecy, how we ever get to it, whether we ever get to it, whether we should get to it, and what it would mean if we did.
All of that kind of thing is what I want to talk about.
If you have questions, comments in that area, then those were the numbers.
And here we are, and we'll be right back and do it.
In fact, I'm looking forward to it very much, Art.
I've been invited to speak up in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island in the state of Washington this coming Friday, 7 p.m. at the Mullis Center in Friday Harbor.
But where it is is really not important.
Friday Harbor is not that big.
But a very, very interesting group of people up there have invited me up thanks to some of the work of some of my friends up there and promoting this.
As much as I've been talking about them for the last hour, it will be UFOs.
I've got an all-new presentation, and we'll be touching on some of the more dramatic reports that have come into the center during my nine years of tenure here.
And should be a good show.
A lot of interesting people there.
I'm putting on a presentation Friday night at 7 o'clock downtown Friday Harbor and then a repeat performance the next day at 1 p.m. for those people who prefer not to go out at night.
So the Mullis Center in downtown Friday Harbor and really looking forward to it.
There's some neat, neat people up there and I'm looking forward to meeting them.
Whereas during most of my presentations, in the past at any rate, I have focused on the more dramatic cases that have come into us.
The Phoenix lights, of course, the 70-foot disc that went over the Bangor submarine-based nuclear weapons storage center five years ago.
You and I did a program on that one night.
Things like that.
I think what I'm going to do is focus on those cases in which the press has intentionally, apparently, not covered really dramatic UFO events to allow these people in the Seattle Times to see how often really good news gets lost in the process.
MUFON, their annual symposium that's going to be held in Denver, Colorado this July 16th, 17th, and 18th.
And I was deeply flattered two, three days ago to have been invited to be one of the key speakers there this year.
I'm really looking forward to it.
It's going to be a great conference, and I'm already mentally preparing an all-new presentation to share with the people there.
I'm going to be talking about all sorts of things, not just cases, but some of the things I see in the future for ufology, some of the things we can do, and so on.
But the one thing this job has done to me, I mentioned earlier, it has changed me in many respects.
One is that it has made me much more interested in questions of religion, questions of morality, philosophical questions such as what are we doing here, why are we here,
whence have we come, and what is the relationship between us as mortals on this planet and these creatures that seem to come here, but which do not want to be seen by human beings on this planet?
Is it that we are some kind of incubator on planet Earth?
There was an abduction scenario reported up in New Hampshire in 1962 in which a seminary student was abducted.
He was taken aboard a ship, and he went up to a larger ship, what he was told was a mothership.
And he asked the occupants there, why are you here?
And he alleges, he has reported in his written report that he was told that the aliens are interested in the issue of soul.
They can manipulate matter, they can create organisms, but they are intrigued by the issue of soul.
Now, that is an immensely interesting response.
But I find that I am becoming much more interested in questions like that than I am in taking my next UFO report.
A very good question by our listener, and I think we could do a program, actually, on the issue of the relationship between religion and ufology.
There are a lot of paths we could follow with that one.
Yes, he seemed to suggest by the manner of his question and the tone that he was aware that this is the case, and he claimed to have worked for the government.
My suspicion is that the government clearly, to get to the bottom of the UFO technology, would hire the very best scientists and technicians they could possibly find to crack this technological nut of how they propel themselves, how they power themselves, and so on and so forth.
I would tend to agree with the gentleman's implied suggestion that there are a lot of talented people working in the field of ufology, most of them for the government, I suspect.
But that's pure conjecture.
I guess what I'm saying is if I were running the country and I were charged with the responsibility of unraveling how these craft, and I think we are dealing with craft, how they are powered, how they are controlled and so on and so forth, I would get the very best scientists I could recruit from around the world and put them on the problem.
I suspect we've been doing that for the last 56 years, ever since Roswell.
I think, Peter, he's saying politely, he was saying, that people aren't thinking for themselves anymore, that they're a bunch of sheep, and they just sort of get caught up in day-to-day living, and they don't follow the workings of our government or care very much, he was suggesting.
Just as an aside, you know, Tip O'Neill once said, he said, all politics really is local politics.
In my opinion, a logical corollary to that statement is that all ufology is political.
Ultimately, it leads right to the centers of power in our government.
But I think what the caller is really alluding to is that it's very easy in a culture as complex as ours where we are overlaid with so many responsibilities everywhere from balancing your checkbook to getting your kids through college,
that the easiest way through this intimidating forest of responsibility is to sort of conform and try to avoid hitting the trees squarely on and trying to slip between them as you go through the forest.
When I look at the entertainment industry, there seems to be no limit to the bludgeon that they will use in stunning the people who consume that entertainment industry, entertainment product.
I agree with him.
We're just in a...
And it sometimes worries me.
I'm in the process of trying to move out of the city here or move out into a quieter spot because I recognize exactly what this caller is talking about.
It's very easy to be just inundated in the society.
I mean, in that movie, toward the end, they looked up and they said, look, all of those stars, all of those suns with planets revolving around them, countless numbers, if there isn't life out there, what a great waste it would be.
I suspect, Art, based on my work, based on the diversity of craft and aliens that are reported, that we probably live in a galaxy that is not just teeming with life, but may well, probably is teeming with intelligent life.
UFO and what the government knows, the thing that really puzzles me is that they taught from day one that you look out into the sky and you see all these stars and around those stars are planets.
We're not taking reports tonight, no specific reports, but instead we're talking about ufology as it relates to government and the great secrecy that would have to be kept and a sort of a general discussion of ufology.
If you'd like to join that, pick up the telephone, because here we are.
It's just an urge I have, and I'd like to live somewhere where I can have my own, well, you don't have to walk your dogs on a leash, and you can see the stars at night, and things like that.
What are your thoughts on published stories like Above Black?
For my spare time, I like doing puzzles, you know, puzzles that cause me to put stuff together, not only just physically, but also mentally as far as particular orders.
Throughout the short time that I've been sort of fascinated and inquiring into this subject, I've seen common threads.
You've got this above-black gentleman who claims to have been from NSA and have been in some Project Preserve Destiny situation.
You've got reports from our own astronauts coming around from the dark side of the moon saying, Santa Claus lives on the moon, as well as my own observation.
If you want to observe a country, you would look at its highest level of government.
And why not, if you were trying to observe a planet, look from its highest vantage point, which wouldn't be a mountaintop, which would be its satellite, like our moon.
Okay, so I guess he's asking, if I caught all that fairly well, what you think about, for example, there are people, above black is just one, there are many such things.
The Internet, as a matter of fact, is gee, if you start on research into this, you're going to run into a billion different groups.
How many of them do you think are legitimate truth seekers, Peter, versus science fiction buffs?
One is whether the people in the field of ufology are offering new information or unique information or whether they are just offering somebody information from another website or another source.
That's the first problem you are faced with in trying to get good, solid, reliable, accurate, objective information about the field.
It is very difficult to do.
The other issue is that of the motive of the people who are promoting that information or releasing it.
And that's where the issue gets really sticky.
Is a person's judgment good?
Is he reaching logical conclusions?
Is his motivations, are they above board and for the benefit or betterment of man?
That's where it gets really very slippery.
And I have certain distinct feelings, but they're probably better not expressed over a radio program than some of the people in the field of ufology.
If I was in charge of the secret government that knew all about this, all about the things flying in our skies and who they were and all the rest of it, and I knew all this, and I was in charge of creating a disinformation program to confuse and foul up these people who were looking into what I was holding secret.
You know what?
I would have stopped doing anything long ago because I'd be sitting back and saying, look, they're doing it to themselves.
We've been getting a series of high-resolution photographs back from Mars.
And aside from the seemingly never-ending photographs of the Martian Vista up there with a McDonald stuck in in Photoshop, have you seen anything that leads you to believe that there was a civilization on Mars or any artifact in any photograph yet that says to you,
wow, there it is, a cup, a saucer, a kettle, a pot, a Martian artifact.
He's very dedicated to that, and I congratulate him for that.
But I just, having been born in Missouri, I hope I beg his forgiveness.
I just haven't seen anything that would convince me yet.
That's not to say that it's not there.
But the things that really catch my attention are the articles from 100 or 1,000 years ago that seem to address the same thing that we're dealing with here in today's world with regard to UFOs.
I have articles from 1893.
I have an article from the 11th century AD, ancient Chinese text that appears to address a UFO sighting.
I believe that these things have been here for a long, long time.
And there's got to be some reason that they're here for that length of time, and yet they still don't want us to be fully aware of their presence or even existence.
If the people have, if they have in their comfortable zone, they have something to eat, their life is okay, then they're not going to want to get out of it.
They're not going to want to rock the boat.
Secondly, if they have something to lose, they're easily controlled.
If you have something to lose, you're easily controlled.
And the government does that.
Case in point, UFO-related, the first fellow that, the first station that reported recovered disk in Roswell, the FCC went to him and told him to shut it down.
She's always sat on the front row there and has given hard questions to every president who's come along.
That's right.
On PBS the other night on the NOW show with David Bancaccio.
He interviewed her.
And when the current president at the first press meeting, she asked him a hardball question about separation of church and state regarding, you know, they're about to use the church to put out some of the charity money.
And as a result, she no longer sits in the front row as the common courtesy.
In regards, well, I'm still thinking about to the very first caller you had tonight that was asking about how does, you know, religion and ufology go together, the History Channel, just run it this week, this past week.
They've got three hours of stuff relating UFOs and probably visitors from other worlds or other dimensions.
And it relates it all to the Bible.
The Bible is one of the best UFO documentaries that there ever was, if you look into it, especially the book of Ezekiel.
But anyway, I thought I'd mention that if he was still listening, then you can get on the internet and order those tapes.
The thing that Peter was talking about in the very beginning is about the radar.
Man, that's spooky.
But NORAD out there, you know, they track all of the space junk.
And if anything come in here from outside the atmosphere and everything, I'm sure it would be picked up on that.
Well, based on the laws of physics that we know today, of course, 100 years ago at the turn of the 20th century, if a person had said, well, we'll be flying across the Atlantic in a matter of a few hours, people would have voted to incarcerate the individual.
And yet here we are, within 40 years, people were flying across the Atlantic routinely.
One of the points that Stanton Friedman makes quite frequently, and I think it's an excellent point, is it's impossible to predict the direction or rate at which technological development is going to occur.
I think I've paraphrased him properly there.
And I couldn't agree more with a statement, almost every day we wake up and there's a new breathtaking discovery in one field of science or another.
And consequently, we really don't know where we're going to be 50 or 100 years from now.
Okay, first of all, on the subject of soul, when God made the animals, he called them forth, but when he made man, it was in his image and he breathed it.
The breath of God is soul.
Number one.
Number two, as for Mars, I think where the Hebrews talk about like the angels left their dwelling place, and Mars represents the planet of war.
Maybe.
What I want to ask you is this.
I've noticed like on the anniversary of Waco this year, on April the 19th, okay, it starts February the 28th.
It goes to April the 19th.
And we have had like on the 7th anniversary, they had that earthquake in Seattle.
Starbucks went in.
And this April the 19th is going to be the 10th anniversary.
In 97, we had Hailbob.
Hailbop's a messenger of precursor of coming events.
And from 97 to three years, we had 2001, right?
We had the World Trade Towers.
And then now we've gone to where we're going into this anniversary.
Well, Brookings, of course, reached certain conclusions.
I really don't believe, Peter, that Brookings was wrong then or is wrong now.
In other words, I feel that a complete disclosure would be so upsetting to a lot of people's faith systems that there would be disruption at a level that government couldn't begin to control or tolerate.
That is my feeling, and I think we make a terrible mistake in trying to sweep this issue under a rock such that the American people won't even think about it.
It clearly is there, and frankly, I don't trust government enough to allow them to make the decision for all of us citizens.