Sir Charles Shults III, a knighted aerospace engineer and AI researcher, presents image-enhanced "sand dollars" on Mars—fossil-like structures (shark teeth, squid, starfish imprints) found in 2005 rover data—arguing their biological origins despite NASA’s silence. He warns of Earth contamination risks from Martian samples, citing nematodes surviving re-entry, and dismisses genetic code objections, proposing life could use opposite-handed proteins. Shults also critiques SETI’s narrow focus on radio waves, suggests orbital solar power satellites remain politically stalled, and discusses AI’s potential beyond human-like cognition. Callers speculate on autism links to NASA immunizations, time travel paradoxes, and U.S. invisibility tech, while Bell questions why feasible energy projects fail amid secrecy. The episode blends fringe science with conspiracy musings, leaving unanswered whether Mars hosted life—or if Earth’s own mysteries are being overlooked. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and that great American Southwest video, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, as kids may be, and all the time zones across this great club.
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Each and every one of them covered by this program one way or the other.
I started to get humored by the whole thing toward the end, to be honest with you.
I don't know how many of you could tell on my voice.
Speaking of my voice, you'll have to excuse me this morning, but I did the one great physical exercise that I do, and I climbed up and did antenna work on my roof yesterday, and my back, you know about my back, right?
It had me out of here one time before, absolutely threw a fit.
So tonight is one of those nights.
Nevertheless, this is going to be a lot of fun.
We're going to do open lines later.
But here at the beginning of the show, we have Sir Charles Schultz.
Sir Charles Schultz, listen now, worked at Martin Marietta Aerospace for 10 years on weapon systems and computer-based automated test equipment.
He wrote the nuclear EMP test software for the Pershing II missile system.
He worked on the Patriot, the Copperhead Tank Killer, and advanced attack helicopter systems.
He has performed research under grants on nuclear fusion.
He was knighted and received a long-term grant for his present research in robotics and artificial intelligence.
He's written many technical publications and magazines, articles on space, astronomy, the atmosphere, and space resource development.
In addition, Charles, or Sir Charles, I guess, has also appeared on many TV and radio programs.
This will be, to the best of my knowledge, his first appearance here, certainly with me.
And he's here tonight to talk about some findings that he's made on Mars, which I think actually are quite spectacular.
You know me.
I told you all some time ago that try as I might, you know, two-dimensional visioned me sees nothing but, you know, mostly rocks.
I meant this as no insult to Richard.
He has nevertheless not called me since I mentioned to him that I can only see rocks.
He hasn't called me once.
But Sir Charles Schultz, I believe.
Now, I reviewed this before I decided to put it on the air, and I'm telling you, what you're about to see, what you're about to hear about, I guess, is it's striking.
It may make a believer out of you with regard to Mars.
What it amounts to, really, I think, are sand dollars.
Sir Charles Schultz has found sand dollars on Mars, some perhaps with the imprints of biological things.
Now, whether you agree or not about the imprints, I guess we'll get to that.
Quite clearly, he's found something anomalous on Mars.
There's no question about it.
I can even see that with my two-dimensional vision.
So what you should do while we're getting ready to do the interview is to go up to the website and take a look at the photographs.
You'll see the link to Sir Charles sounds so good, doesn't it?
You'll see the link to his website there.
And it's best you go up and start looking now so that you know what we're talking about.
Well, there's a fellow by the name of Dr. Nelson Ying, and he is a baron in Scotland by right of purchasing a large tract of land, which comes with a title.
And the terms of Magna Carta, he is allowed to knight people into his service.
In this case, for some research that he paid for, one of the honors bestowed upon me was being knighted and receiving a five-year gift grant to fund my research.
But, but, but, after reading what I just read about you, after we get to that, if you wouldn't mind, I have a few questions about some of the work that you've done.
I think that would be fascinating.
I mean, you're just into a million fields here that I'm highly curious about.
So can I pummel you with a few questions about that afterwards?
Well, it's because throughout my life I've always been fascinated by space and science.
And in fact, my interest in space is what drove me into the aerospace industry in the first place.
And studying for such things as weapons and space flight and defense systems, there are a lot of things you learn in physics, and there are a lot of things that you can apply from other fields, such as astronomy and electronics.
And by learning all these things, you always have another option, another way of thinking of a solution to things.
So the more you know, the more powerful your solutions become.
And aerospace was a natural outlet for me.
And studying Mars over the years, I learned such things, mostly about all of the solar system, but Mars in particular, because it was such a fascinating world, its atmosphere, its history, and so forth.
While we're on that subject, since you have studied Mars, what is it that you believe?
There's a million theories out there, you know, that perhaps Mars had a close brushby with some other large planetary body that stripped its atmosphere.
There's exploding planet theories.
There's all kinds of things out there about what happened to Mars.
Mars and the Earth, as well as all the planets, were formed from the same material at the same time.
And the only difference is their distance from the Sun.
Mars is a much smaller world than the Earth, and because of its weaker gravity, it cannot hold onto an atmosphere as well.
But it also had another blow dealt to it, and that was that while Earth has a very large core and can drive volcanoes for billions of years, Mars has a very small core, and its volcanoes burned out.
Well, calculations done by a number of people interested in astronomy, in particular driven by science fiction writers, believe it or not, has shown that if we were to put a breathable atmosphere on Mars, it may last as long as 50,000 years.
On a planetary scale, that's not very long.
But on our human lifetime scale, that would be quite significant.
One of the projects we're working on is to build a simulator that allows school children and college groups to log in and run a rover on a Mars simulated surface.
And as a matter of course, we were analyzing the images as they came back because it's fascinating material.
And around February 14th, when I saw the images, I began to suspect when we first saw the blueberries pictures that something wasn't quite right, that there were some very interesting patterns that were showing up on them, and they were showing up in more than one of them.
Well, when we got more images in, I was very, very certain right away that this looked like the same sort of material that you might find in a tide pool or in a beach or the sort of litter and fossils that you find washed up on almost any shore.
And so by doing image enhancement and studying the data as it came in, we were able to discover that we had what appeared to be sea urchins, sand dollars, and other aquatic organisms.
Anyway, you know, is there any other process that might have occurred on Mars that could account for the rounding of the material in this manner, other than an ocean or water?
Well, there are a number of processes that can create round minerals.
The concretion theory, of course, depends on water, and that's basically that water seeps through strata in the rock, and it dissolves minerals, and then it finds a point at which the minerals all come together and form a nodule.
And another method is some crystals can form, but understand that almost all of them require the presence of water to become rounded.
On the other hand, if you had material that was blown about for many millions of years in the sand, you could round it down just like a rock tumbler would.
But the thing that discounts that is that all of these are such uniform structure and form.
If you had, let's say, a wide spectrum of sizes, that would be far more believable.
On the other hand, if you look at these, you see structures that appear and are repeated on different ones of these.
The features are identical on many of them.
And when you look at the features, they're clearly symmetrical.
And the one thing that discounts mineralogical processes right away is many of them have five-pointed stars on them.
Now, in nature, there are no five-pointed crystals.
There is only one sort of five-pointed crystal, and it's called a quasi-crystal, and it's artificially made.
and how strongly is life suggested by what you found i mean And the reason I can say that is because of such a diversity of forms that absolutely match living or fossil organisms we have on the Earth.
And if somebody said, well, that just eroded, and I had maybe one or two such samples, I might be able to agree.
But when you start running into dozens or hundreds of samples, the probabilities are trillions to one against it being pure and simple erosion.
We have an organism that looks like it has a hand print on it.
It's sort of like a starfish print.
We found four of these altogether.
Two of them happened to be side by side.
One was smaller than the other, and they both had the hand print.
And here's the interesting part.
On the smaller one, the hand print, which is identical to the larger one, is in the same scale, as if the things actually grow with the print on them to become a larger size.
You would think they would want to trot these photographs out at least as something to present to the larger scientific community for evaluation, even if they took that careful a step.
Not going out and saying, oh, it's life, it's life, you know, but at least getting it out there publicly.
And the whole idea is by publishing this widely and getting a lot of people to look at it, there are enough people in everyday life who are familiar with fossils and organisms that can look at these things and see them very clearly.
And so it begs the question, why have we not received a response?
I really would like for somebody to get with me and have a look at what we've got here and give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down and tell us why.
Well, Sir Charles, there have been others, Richard Hoagland among them, who have presented things for a long time to NASA, some of which I have sympathy with as being interesting and some that I just can't see the way, you know, the way Richard sees it.
I'm not really one to subscribe to a conspiracy theory, and I do have to work with these people from time to time on other issues and other jobs.
But it is interesting because, as you said, it is very clear.
If you look at the images, you can see right away that these are not just simple minerals.
And it also sends a very clear message to us, and that is that two worlds in this solar system hit with life.
And the odds are very good that there will be many more worlds.
I'd estimate probably 10 billion in this galaxy alone with life.
And whether it's complex life or not isn't even the issue, but the fact that life shows up is a very enheartening thing.
I mean, to know that there's the possibility that we may not be alone in the universe, that we found fossils, and that indicates not only that there was life, but also from looking at the fossils, that the evolution of organisms on Mars followed almost identical paths as it did on Earth.
Well, that tells me that the laws of chemistry and physics are identical everywhere, and the solutions to life's problems would be the same, and the organisms would be very much the same.
If there was life on Mars and it was extinguished by whatever means and in whatever way, then what can happen to Mars?
Perhaps NASA's considering what impact that would have on and on all kinds of things, on religion, on I don't know, look at ourselves, the fact that it might even happen to planet Earth.
Well, that's true, and I'll take both of those points and go through them.
Number one, one of the reasons that we know that it's very unlikely that sort of event would happen here on Earth is because Earth has a very stable biosphere and a large gravity well and plenty of atmosphere, whereas Mars lost its atmosphere to solar wind eroding it and its low gravitational field.
And so we can learn a lot from it.
It's not something that we can say, gee, we can stop our atmosphere from going away this way, because Mars is really a very different case in that particular point.
But as far as religious implications, I know a lot of people are going to be very upset about the information once it strikes home to them.
And that's because many people have a very narrow view of their religion.
Actually, ever since the rover images started coming in from Spirit, and I guess that's right in the beginning of January when the stuff first started coming in.
And I've been following it very closely since the very beginning.
There are a lot of very literal Christians out there who believe the Bible word for word, and that's a social fact that anybody who's going to announce they found life on another planet has to deal with.
I mean, it's just a fact, that's all.
So I'm not Christian-bashing.
Not at all.
I respect people's beliefs.
Just a fact.
You know, it was in the Brookings report that that would have to be dealt with when life was announced, if and when life was announced.
And I hope Richard actually isn't upset with me.
I'm certainly not upset with him.
In fact, I haven't even talked to him since I said I saw only rocks.
Now, with respect to this, somebody has passed blasts, well, this is bogus.
You see just what your mind wants to believe.
I made that argument myself.
There are no markings on these spheres.
Well, but there are.
There are two.
Go look very carefully.
How can you not see markings on these spheres?
This represents, without question, I believe, an important discovery, not of complex life, but of life.
I think it does represent that.
a good close look and look at the markings Once again, Sir Charles Schultz, welcome back.
All right, so what do you say to that?
This is bogus.
You see what you want to see what your mind makes out, and they don't see any markings on the spheres.
And one of the objections that I had from somebody was that the images that had been sent back were very low resolution and not sharp enough to be able to see these sort of details.
And what I did was I resorted to a tool used by astronomers and law enforcement, and it's called frame stacking.
And basically you take a number of pictures of the same object and you stack them together and your signal gets clearer and better.
You get a better image.
And there are also some other image processing tools that will extract and amplify the features that the lighting was poor and you couldn't make out or whatever.
And so by combining contrast enhancement and other image tools, I've been able to bring some of these images out more clearly than many of the original NASA images.
But the interesting thing is, once you see the features and you go back to the original images, they're very clearly there.
Well, Gia could say a lot of things, but it kind of makes my point, I guess.
All I've been saying is that Richard or yourself or anybody who's going to say, look, life or prior life on Mars or artifacts or something like that is going to run into a brick wall.
There was a fellow by the name of Thomas Gold, and he hypothesized years ago that petroleum really wasn't a fossil remain, but instead came from the methane and other materials that our planet was formed from.
The minerals and the gases and dust contain large quantities of methane.
And when this material, this gas, is compacted and heated underground over billions of years, it forms petroleum.
And so that would indicate that not only Earth, but probably Mars as well, would have petroleum.
And a paper I wrote in 1992 about Mars predicted, based on his theory, the gold hypothesis, that there would probably be organisms that digest petroleum, just like we have on Earth, and the signal for them, the sign to find them, would be fine-grained magnetite.
Well, four years later, they found the Martian meteorite, and one of the things they found in it was fine-grained magnetite, which, to me, my conclusion is they did find fossil organisms in that meteorite.
But in the same vein, the Viking landers, Gil Levin's experiment, I do believe, found biological activity in the soil.
Yes, well, the only way they can find out, according to them, is to send another mission and get some samples.
But I am very, very, let's say, unhappy about the prospect of bringing something back from Mars to the Earth without the absolute utmost in biological containment.
And the reason is, if there were just an organism similar to a fungus still alive in that sample, it would probably find the Earth a very good place to live.
And, you know, the conditions here are just wonderful.
And consider we can't even control athlete's foot or, you know, mildew in the shower.
Since we're on the subject, Sir Charles, a couple of points.
One is, it's my understanding that prior to the two most recent landers that, and I could be wrong about this, but I heard that we did not sterilize anything that we sent to Mars early on.
And so there are those now suggesting that if we find life on Mars, we may have put it there.
Well, and that's a possibility, but it's an easy one to dismiss.
And here's the reason.
There's no reason to believe that Martian organisms would have the same genetic code that we have.
Even on the Earth, there's more than one genetic code.
And so on another world, you would expect that there would be other radical differences.
So if we find something that's alive, but its genes don't match anything we know, and it's obviously an alien organism.
And there's other ways you can tell as well.
For instance, proteins come in right-handed and left-handed versions.
We've heard a lot about left-handed sugars and right-handed sugars, and some you can digest and some you can't, and you can eat it without gaining weight.
Well, we use like right-handed proteins, left-handed sugars, or left-handed proteins, right-handed sugars.
I found a couple of shark's teeth, and they absolutely match terrestrial shark teeth exactly.
That's an amazing thing to me.
And the most complex thing I found is squid, and we've located three, possibly four now.
And my assistant and I, Terry Lynn Sadler, who's doing some research with me here, Has found a couple of organisms of her own, including some small seashells, and we located some squid.
Now, the squid is actually a fairly intelligent creature, but I don't, and I have to stress this, I do not find any evidence of anything smarter than a squid or a fish.
Of course, we've looked at a limited area, but I don't think, and this is just my opinion, but I don't think the biosphere was good enough, long enough, for anything larger or more complex than a fish or a squid.
Nevertheless, Sir Charles, there are all those sons, as Jodie Foster said, you know, what a great waste it would be of space or whatever if there's not life out there.
Well, that's true.
And yet, SETI has not heard a legitimate whisper yet.
And of course, SETI has not yet by any means surveyed all there is to survey, although they've done a fair amount, enough to be almost troubling that they have to be able to do that.
They tend to survey sun-like stars, and that's only 10% of the stars in our galaxy.
And also, another thing is they tend to stick around one particular set of frequencies known as the water hole, because it's the frequencies of hydrogen, you've got it.
So we're assuming that they would be broadcasting on that frequency, but interestingly enough, we don't.
I interviewed Seth Shostak, who's the guy at SETI, and he said, we did one brief transmission near hydrogen.
It was about a 10 or 15-second blast of, oh, just, I don't know, millions of watts.
And the reason that we haven't done any more, Sir Charles, is because there's actual fear that maybe sending a signal out there that, you know, sort of a beacon of here we are might not be a good idea.
Anyway, one of them's on the way out there, but that's nothing.
And it is kind of a puzzle when you think about it, isn't it, that we have the ability to send out, you know, near-hydrogen blasts into space as a beacon, but we're not doing it.
I mean, this would seem so compelling and so strong.
What you found, and frankly, some of what Richard has found as well.
It's all very compelling and very strong, and yet nothing.
That's so fascinating.
It's just silence at the top of NASA.
And I've had NASA people on, Sir Charles, and I've asked them, and they said, oh, boy, if we found life, we'd be shouting from the rooftops because it would give us, you know, we'd get funded with a manned mission to Mars and everything.
As you said, though, you work with some pretty important people who get probably a lot of money from the government for their funding and so forth and so on, and this kind of thing filters down.
We found life on Mars, and there's nothing that says it can't be elsewhere.
So then your belief is purely sort of a scientific statistical fact that we can look through space with radio telescopes, and we see clouds of organic molecules everywhere.
So we know that the stuff of life is everywhere.
And we can see even in the outer solar system, they've just discovered another body out past Pluto called Sedna, and it's covered with a reddish-brown scum of organic molecules.
And that can be seen with Hubble.
And so we know that organic molecules are everywhere.
By the way, I've heard that Hubble just observed that Sedna is not turning as rapidly as it ought to be, that there ought to be some sort of, oh, I don't know, moon associated with it.
They can't find the moon, so they can't figure out why it's turning so slowly.
It's all fascinating.
Sir Charles, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour, and we'll be right back, alright?
All right.
Sir Charles Schultz is my guest, and he's a good guy.
I think we'll keep him around a little bit, and we'll reread this bio when I get back.
He's done a lot.
We need to talk about some of it.
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We will.
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This man is obviously a heavyweight, the real McCoy, and just great to have here.
Sir Charles Schultz Is his name.
And I want you to listen very carefully so you understand who you're listening to.
Sir Charles Schultz, worked at Martin Marietta Aerospace for 10 years.
Now, listen carefully.
On weapons systems and computer-based automated test equipment, he wrote the nuclear EMP test software, the Pershing 2 missile system, worked on the Patriot, the Copperhead Tank Killer, and Advanced Attack Helicopter Systems.
Charles has performed research under a grant on nuclear fusion, was knighted, and received a long-term grant for his present research in robotics and artificial intelligence.
He's written many technical publications and magazine articles on space astronomy, the atmosphere, and space resource development.
In addition, he's been on many radio and television shows.
First time round here, and it's with a bombshell, to be sure, confirming some of what Richard Hoagland certainly has done.
take a look at the website tonight it's right there and it's i don't think I think it's clear and unambiguous.
These are sand dollars.
These pictures are of sand dollars, and the imprints on them are of perhaps not complex, but definitely life.
Life on Mars.
That's why he's here tonight, but there are some other things I'd like to ask about.
Neil in Olympia, Washington Fast Blast.
Hey, Art, the final assorted fossil bed picture with outlines speaks volumes, compelling.
I'll bet you wonder why you can now see Sir Charles' fossils, even though you can't see Sir Richard's perception.
He said, perception can be an elusive mistress.
Yeah, that's right.
I guess so.
But in a lot of cases, you know, when I've looked at some of what Richard has clearly said is this or that, I look at it and I go, wrong.
And, oh, well.
Anyway, I guess I'm right.
It's an elusive mistress.
I do see this.
I do see the imprints on the sand dollars just as clear as can be.
So I guess the rest of you ought to take a look and make your own judgment.
Sir Charles, there's a lot I want to ask you about.
So let's see where to start.
You apparently know a lot about EMP since you wrote the nuclear EMP test software for the Pershing II missile system.
That would be something.
In other words, you had to design a protection system of some kind.
Pershing II missile system.
Protect against EMP.
I thought that that was like just a hardening process that you had to get lots of lead or something to protect the circuitry.
It's protecting against EMP, for the most part these days, a good conductive shell around something, like a metal wrapping or a metal box will do a huge deal of good.
On some things, up-close hits or very sensitive materials, you may want to wrap a couple of times, get a couple of layers of protection between you.
Lead doesn't really do it, but any good conductor, copper or aluminum or even steel, if it's galvanized, helps a lot.
And if you had an extremely large warhead detonated above the atmosphere or very near the atmosphere, you could get an extremely large spread of EMP over a wide area.
I understand that the biggest problems we're going to run into will be bulky semiconductors, power systems going down, that sort of thing.
But if, on the other hand, if you think that that's going to happen, you can easily buy a couple of radios or electronic devices, wrap them up in a metal box or some foil in a metal box, and bury it somewhere or just out of the way.
And if something falls, you know, if something is done, you've got a radio or a telephone that's going to work.
I'm going to ask that you be patient and listen to a brief story, and maybe you can imagine what might have happened here for me.
It was now a few years ago.
I used to do this show five, six days a week.
And during one of my programs, Sir Charles, something very odd happened.
I uplink my program.
I have a satellite dish in the backyard that uplinks it on KU band.
I assume you might know what that is.
Right, yes.
Right.
And one night, we started to have trouble.
The network finally lost me altogether.
And what was happening is the transmitted signal and the received signal that I get here suddenly began falling, just falling and falling and falling, the EB it's called, to the point where it went below the receiver's threshold at that time in Oregon to even pick up the signal.
And it just kept on falling literally to zero.
Now, I could have attributed that to equipment failure or a million other things, except, sorry that you have to listen to all this, but it's important to story.
I get my internet here.
There's about, oh, I don't know, 10 towers here in town, and a very nice company sends us internet at 2.4 gigahertz, and we get a high-speed internet.
That's how we get into my little rural town.
Well, they run these, they have feedback all the time, telemetry on the various radios that are transmitting the internet in different parts of town here.
And they actually graph the performance of the radios, and they could actually go back to the time when I lost my uplink.
All of their receivers and transmitters at 2.4 went down.
Every single one of the radios showed the same downward graph.
And I could go on with some other anomalies, but what I'm telling you is some kind of electromagnetic blanket came down on this valley.
Now, I live in Perrump, Nevada, not all that far from Area 51, in a place where they do sort of strange experiments all the time.
It wouldn't be too surprising, I can tell you this.
If you had a powerful microwave transmitter or something operating like a powerful microwave transmitter, it's very easy for it to blanket out a number of signals.
After all, if you think about it, all you need is a powerful transmitter, a good amplifier, and the signal, like a wideband amplifier that can cover a number of frequencies, or you could have a number of frequencies mixed and fed into one amplifier, or you could have a number of amplifiers at different frequencies, and all of them could broadcast simultaneously.
And by the way, there's any number of ways to do it.
And by the way, when it came back, it came back in the same manner, a slow, linear, upward progression until finally it's like the eclipse had gone away and suddenly all the signals were there again.
Well, I'm sure there are a lot of unusual things that happen from time to time that are very hard to explain and even going back over them with reason and technical expertise is very difficult to explain.
But somewhere at the heart of it, there is a simple explanation.
We might not always find it, and we might not always like it, but it's always there.
how you can make a portable transmit station that's in the kilowatts that runs on a generator and if you put a number of transmit stations out there each on a different channel or a different band all of them could blast away and you could blanket a city with a jamming signal like that okay you worked I have up maybe one of the largest loop antennas.
There are also theories, I'm sorry to interrupt, about lightning, since you mentioned it, in other parts of the world conducting through the atmosphere and producing a charge that is present between the air above and Earth.
Well, there's a very simple device that people can make called a charge mill, and it's basically a very lightweight static motor, and it runs on static electricity, and you run a wire up into a tree or up on a pole, and the voltage difference between the wire up in the air and the ground itself causes a little static mill or a voltage mill to run.
And it's an interesting demonstration device that sometimes physics classes build.
But another thing that I've noticed is that if you work around a lot of tall towers, you often will have those towers on insulated pads, and they will run a ground wire, or they'll say, when you step on this tower, when you climb it, don't touch the ground and the tower simultaneously.
You need to leap over to it.
And that's because of that voltage potential that builds up on those things.
So there are a number of very simple effects that can cause a voltage to build up.
I realize it's fairly low current, but it's enough to knock me on my butt.
And there's a way around that.
I know there is, and I've already found it.
Thank you.
I protect my equipment.
No problem there.
Where I was going was somewhere different.
This is the kind of thing that Tesla was working on and was rumored to have been working on.
And I wonder if you think there's any possibility that there is a source, some sort of ultimate source, if we figure out how to tap it properly, of power available to us.
I mean, power is getting to be a pretty important thing in the world these days.
But in all my experience, I've never found anything for free.
You don't get any free lunches in this world.
And there are some power sources that are very high-grade and we should be using, that we aren't.
But I don't think we're going to tap into magical orgone waves or zero-point energy or any of this other stuff.
There is energy there, but you can't use it.
It's a part of the vacuum itself.
The zero-point thing is, I think, pretty much a boondoggle.
But there are some other avenues that we can take.
For instance, what's to prevent us from putting solar power satellites in orbit?
We could eliminate almost all of our use of petroleum if we used sunlight from an orbital power station and beamed that energy back to the ground in the form of microwaves.
Now, this would mean that you would have a large area, perhaps in the Midwest, a farmland, or even over a desert, where the power density would be lower than that of sunlight, and yet it would arrive as useful electrical power at the antenna.
And nobody would be in the area, and there'd be no damage, and there'd be no danger.
And I think the estimates that I saw last was one collector about the size of Manhattan Island could put out somewhere between 30 and 120 billion watts.
And each of that, that's equivalent to 30 to 120 nuclear power plants.
And yes, the initial investment would be high, but it's in our interest to do something of this nature because there's not a gram of hydrocarbon burnt once the stuff is up there.
And it means we have a viable space industry, something that I think would rebuild our economy from the bottom up.
But basically, the project was shot down by some members of Congress back in 1970.
And there was a fellow by the name of Gerard K. O'Neill, who was out of Princeton, who invented an electromagnetic engine that could be used to throw payloads without the use of a rocket.
And this is only going to be good on a place with a vacuum like the moon or in space.
But basically, the proposal was seriously made back in 1970.
Well, I don't really understand why it was shot down, but I know that one of the recent factors in us not expanding our industries into space was the United Nations Space Treaty that we signed.
And it means essentially that we as a nation cannot develop any extraterrestrial resources without involving every member of the UN in the profits.
That's a very simplified way of stating it.
But essentially, we signed away our rights to do anything in space to keep the peace with the UN.
This is true, and I have the feeling that in the near future, we may not honor that space treaty.
I don't see what it's getting us right now.
I don't see what it's buying us.
And I do know that if people are concerned about, let's say, petrochemicals or, you know, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the use of petroleum, this is certainly an obvious relief, something that we should pursue energetically.
And I don't mean that in a pun, but seriously, we should go after this because there's an immense amount of power in the form of sunlight just above our atmosphere.
Well, at the ground level, the beam could probably be three or four or five miles wide, and that would mean that the power density would be well below any danger levels.
By making it diffuse and spread out, making your collector very large, there's never any chance of anything passing through the beam encountering more than a slight warming that you'd get like you'd standing out in the sunshine.
These are sand dollars, and on the sand dollars are impressions of life.
Life on Mars.
Sh-*Dies in the background* You know, this is a very well-heard national program.
And oh, by the way, on that score, if for any reason your radio station is not carrying the full program on both Saturday and Sunday, you need to contact them and say, hey, what's up with that?
I mean, whereas Coast, it's the only program of its kind.
And if it wasn't for Coast, this kind of material wouldn't get on the air at all.
I mean, that's all there is to it.
It just simply wouldn't get on the air.
And that's a topic all of its own.
All right.
Well, we're picking the brain of Sir Charles Schultz, who's got these incredible images, which you must go to the website and see.
And make, I guess, your own decision.
But then Sir Charles, would you like the audience to do anything?
I mean, should we be emailing, I don't know, NASA or somebody what?
There is a sample mission scheduled for 2005 in which they plan to bring materials back from Mars.
And my feeling is, if they have even the slightest feeling that there could be any sort of life still on the planet, and I believe that there is, any sort of germ or fungus or organism they might bring back could pose a real threat to us.
And we have to be extremely, extremely circumspect about a decision to bring back an unknown organism.
I mean, it might be innocuous, it might be harmless, it might be worse than Ebola.
Well, I wouldn't worry so much about that because at most on a comet, you would expect maybe to find some organic molecules.
I would never expect to find living organisms on a comet.
The conditions are far, far more severe there than they ever were on Mars.
And so I'm not worried about a comet sample return mission at all.
What I am worried about is a Mars sample return mission.
And in my opinion, and understand that I'm very pro-space and pro-technology.
I do support these things.
But I think that if we bring any sort of sample back, it should get no closer to the Earth than the Moon.
And the reason I say that is space stations can fall, and even things coming in, fiery re-entry, there's no guarantee that it will be incinerated.
I know that many people are still in shock about what happened with the Columbia burning up on re-entry, but the fact is there was a biological experiment package on it that carried a number of nematodes.
Think of them as like small worms.
And this biological package made a fiery re-entry into the atmosphere, hit the ground, and when they recovered it, all the nematodes were still alive.
Well, the fact is, if this biological material were to be returned and it were in a space station or on another vehicle, and even if it went through a fiery reentry, there is no guarantee that it would be the end of those organisms.
Would it be reasonable, Sir Charles, to conclude that any organism now alive on Mars would have, from an evolutionary point of view, had to work so damn hard to stay alive under those conditions that if it were to get here to Earth, it might go, aha!
Well, it may well be that those things could kill it.
We don't know, but on the other hand, it may be that it'd be the perfect environment for it.
Understand that anything that is alive on Mars, as far as a bacterium today, has been exposed to vacuum or near vacuum for millions of years, and that doesn't kill it.
And it's been exposed nightly to freezing temperatures, you know, like 22 below, and that doesn't kill it.
And it's been exposed to extremely salty, briny environments, and the salt doesn't kill it.
And it's been exposed to the sunlight, and that's raw, ultraviolet in the sunlight, and that doesn't seem to kill it.
So if there's anything that is alive, it's been exposed To those four terrible conditions for a very long time and had a great deal of time to adapt to them.
And you could expect that if it were to arrive here, we wouldn't have any way of controlling it if it found this to be a clement environment, a place it would like to live.
Yes, there are some meteorites, and they're called SNCs for Shergotti, Nakla, and Chassigny, the three locations where they're found.
And these SNCC meteorites have entered the atmosphere, and their surfaces have been burned and scoured quite thoroughly.
This is unlike a biological containment bottle.
These meteorites were fragments of Mars from a distant past, and they traveled through space typically for some millions of years before arriving here.
And when they did, they went through the atmosphere and got scorched and sterilized just like anything else would.
My real concern is a containment vessel meant to keep something alive would survive a re-entry.
I do have to point out that when we made one of the Apollo landings, they brought back some parts of a lander called Surveyor 3 that had landed before.
And when they brought them back to Earth, they found that there was a virus on one of them that had been on the moon for, I think, three years, exposed to sunlight and vacuum, and it didn't kill it.
And when they cultured it, it lived.
So even some terrestrial organisms can live through horrible conditions.
Yes, to make the autonomous vehicle and see how far one could go.
And it was fairly pathetic.
I think in a couple of miles, all of them pooped out.
I noticed here that you worked on robotics.
And when I was a child, we had movies that were promising us, but by the time I got to be my age, oh, man, there would be robots doing all of the work for me, and I would be laying on the couch and just issuing commands.
I was one of those kids that grew up believing we would have cities on the moon and hotels in orbit and 150-mile-an-hour laying on the highway, and we'd all fly to work by 1980.
And, of course, none of that happened.
I felt a little let down.
But on the other side, we can't really predict what's going to come along.
Now, as far as the robot challenge, the DARPA challenge, I think that it's a very humbling experience the first time you build something that has to operate in the same environment that a human being or an animal does.
Electronics, at first blush, seems to be durable enough, but when you expose it to the mud and the noise and the heat and the vibration, you learn very, very rapidly how to shield things and how to make things a little more durable.
Just try building an electronic system for a vehicle, and you'll know what I'm saying.
There are simple solutions to them, but you have to know all those details in order to make it work.
And I think that the people who are in these engineering groups have learned a very hard lesson at the outset.
On the other hand, don't think too badly of them because this is the very first step in a process that's going to be an evolution of smarter and better machinery.
Well, some of the things that I worked on were a robot that would locate and extinguish fires, and another one was for a robot that would use ground-penetrating radar and look for mines or explosives.
Just to name a couple of them, autonomous navigation is high on the list, but understand that autonomously navigating or running around on your own inside the halls of an office building is a completely different challenge from going out across the street and picking up the mail.
I think that the best way of looking at it at this point is a human being or any thinking system is a very complex system.
As a matter of fact, it's many systems working together to create what we call intelligence.
And when we start looking at systems, we have to decide based on how they respond.
I mean, that's how we decide with human beings.
We may never be able to determine fully whether a system is truly thinking and feeling the way we are, but that it certainly acts like it is.
And so we have to decide whether that's good enough for us.
We might not find a means of determining whether it's truly alive or not, or thinking or not.
But think of it like the Turing test.
And that's basically if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
And that's not a very rigorous test.
But if you have a system that acts in every way like a human being, then people, whether it's thinking or not, are going to accept it as a thinking machine.
You can have a box with a processor in it, and you can program it to act just like a PC, or you can program it to act like the fuel control system for a big generator and run a factory.
And it's the same box.
The hardware is identical in both cases, but what has changed is the software, the instructions you put in the box.
Do you think that artificial intelligence, that moment of perhaps even something as dramatic as understanding of self, would be a matter of programming?
I think that many systems are doing, let's say, low-end thinking tasks in one sense or another.
Let me give you an example.
We can all use a calculator to do mathematical processes, okay?
And some people are better or worse at understanding what numbers are or how they're handled, but we can all pretty much agree that we know what math is.
And so when we use a pocket calculator to do the math, we wouldn't argue and say, well, you're not really thinking about the numbers.
You're not really doing the math.
The machine is doing it.
Now, let's suppose you have some sort of an accident or a tumor or whatever, and the section of your brain, and there is one, that is dedicated to processing and understanding numbers, is destroyed or damaged.
And so let's say some surgeon and some cybernetics guy comes along and they say, you know, we've got this procedure.
We're going to put this calculator chip in your head instead.
And give yourself a couple of weeks to learn how to use it, and you'll be back on your feet again, you know, thinking about numbers and doing your calculations.
Suppose they carry that procedure out.
Now, you're able to do your math again.
Only, let's say it's a little better, faster, or a little more precise.
Would you then say, well, this person isn't really thinking about the numbers?
On Discovery the other day, I saw a special about a man who had a capability with numbers that was so astounding, Sir Charles, that he could beat a woman with a calculator in any sort of calculation.
It doesn't matter, multiplication, giant division problems, whatever.
He could just do it.
And they demonstrated his doing it, rattling it off as fast as he could.
There was something about that man's brain that's very different from the rest of us.
Well, understand that every time you learn something, you actually are literally rewiring a part of your brain.
And some people, let's face it, some people have a talent in mechanics or mechanical vision, and some people have a talent in music, and some people have a talent in numbers.
People, unlike machines, are very different from each other.
And talent is, in part, I believe, determined by your wiring, and in part determined by your learning.
You can certainly have a predisposition to do a thing or not do a thing, and think of it from this standpoint.
Most of us have normal color vision.
Some people are colorblind.
There's some difference in their wiring or in their sensory system that doesn't allow them to perceive it.
Some people might have an extra perception of color that we don't have.
And on the average, some mutation or some change, something at random, will occur where somebody is a little different like that.
And in the same vein, you can imagine that some people would genetically be predisposed to writing music or to understanding numbers or working out ballistics or whatever.
So it's not hard to understand that once in a rare while, somebody will come along with a portion of their mind or their brain predisposed for functioning with numbers.
And they take to it very easily, and they learn, and they amplify on that ability.
Anything we practice, we can get better at, obviously.
But the average one of us could practice at this until the cows came home, and we'd never be able to do what that man did.
So some brains are, in fact, wired.
It was kind of like he went into a trance, and he would just rattle off numbers at an incredible pace in doing a calculation faster than the gal with the calculator there could do it.
So, I mean, it does prove that some brains are wired that way.
And if we ever are able to genetically manipulate a little bit, we're getting closer to that, it may well be that we can flip the little switch that enables that sort of ability.
And, gee, that would just be the beginning, wouldn't it?
Precious seconds indeed with Sir Charles Schultz on the weekend.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. on Mark Bell.
Glad you could make it.
Stay right where you are.
unidentified
We'll see you next time.
I was dancing, baby, on my shoulder The sun is setting like molasses in the sky But it's simple, I have a room Everything's...
I'm going to go in my gibson and the coral cat rolling over.
White bird must fly or she will die White bird must fly or she will die The sun sets
come, the sun sets go The clouds will fly, the rhythm's soul The young girl's eyes, you always know She must fly, she must fly She must fly She must fly
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And the thing that concerns me is when we start making changes to a system as complex as, let's say, a human body, there's going to be a cost.
We don't know what sort of gain we will get versus what it's going to cost us in the end.
For instance, in something, any organism, there's a certain amount of energy and resources disposed for each thing that the organism can do.
For instance, if you look at birds, their arm bones are very lightweight so that their wings can actually lift them.
They've cut back everything they need to fit within their niche.
And as far as the human brain goes, there's just so much circuitry you can cram inside of a skull.
When you start adding or subtracting or changing, you may get the effect you want, but at the cost of some other sense or sensibility.
Consider people, for instance, people who are commonly referred to as idiot savants.
And they sometimes are autistic or something, but they show an amazing mental ability, such as the ability to sculpt anything they've ever seen, or to play any piece of music they've ever heard, or to calculate any date on the calendar or huge numbers.
And yet they lack some of the very basic social skills.
And it's almost as if it's as if they had just so much capacity and they got aimed in one direction and were unable to compensate in the other.
Going back to your argument about the software perhaps being the heat artificial intelligence.
Oh, fascinating.
All right.
You also worked or looked at nuclear fusion.
And I don't know what aspect of it you work in, but there was a story that ran on the wires recently, Sir Charles, that cold fusion was to be looked at once again.
Apparently, people are feeling, well, we better look at cold fusion again because maybe there is something here.
Well, that was some of the things that I worked on myself, Cold Fusion, and we even had a patent application we went for back in August of 1994 on the system that we had come up with.
However, because there was a great deal of hype and controversy at the time, just about everything involved with it was pretty much ignored.
And yes, there were a number of charlatans, and yes, there were a number of misleading signatures that looked as if something were happening when it really wasn't.
And just within the last year, I did an analysis of the metal, palladium, that they often use in cold fusion, and I discovered one of the effects that is often used as a key indicator that it has happened is, in fact, a red herring.
And it's a texture change in the metal that makes it look as if it's melted.
So some people who have claimed to have results actually didn't.
And they used this signature, oh, look, the metal melted, when in fact it wasn't happening at all.
And you see, one of the most important things in any scientific inquiry is to be able to debunk your own claims and make sure that you're not falling prey to wishful thinking.
I do believe that there is a legitimate effect in cold fusion, that some sort of a nuclear process is taking place.
And yes, it's notoriously difficult to locate and duplicate, and I don't think the mechanisms are really fully understood at this point.
But now you see that people are trying to look at it again, because there are many unanswered questions.
And if you think about it, the process of science is based on looking at something, formulating a theory, and then, let's say, let's do a test on it.
And then you collect your data, and then you make an assessment of what you found.
And we learn that way.
We ask questions and we learn from them.
And in any sort of thing where we're investigating something as important as the production of energy, if there's any slim chance of something producing power that we can use, then certainly we should pursue it.
But, you know, you've got the same problem in any field that you do, well, you run into crackpots or charlatans or someone who's trying to make a quick buck, and it really gives a black eye to serious researchers who are trying to find out the facts.
And one of the most promising methods they're looking at is something called cavitation, because it allows you to create extremely high pressures and temperatures with very common pedestrian equipment.
They create very powerful ultrasonic sound waves inside a liquid such as water, and those sound waves collapse and expand and create tiny microscopic bubbles.
Now, the interesting thing when they started experimenting with this is that you could make ultrasound bubbles glow.
You could get them small enough, fast enough, and hot enough to hit almost 50,000 degrees Kelvin.
And so that's just little bubbles in water.
And the effect was you got a soft blue glow out of a container of water when you turned some sound waves on.
And so that is a very promising method of focusing extremely high temperatures and pressures in a small volume.
Now there's another technology, and this is very interesting.
The inventor of the television, Philo T. Farnsworth, and he was a master at designing electronics and vacuum tubes.
He came across a system that eventually demonstrated that you could use voltages rather than magnetic fields to contain and fuse hydrogen.
Well, the Farnsworth fuser was covered by patents, and he couldn't go anywhere with it essentially because of legal obligations with his employer and the patents that they held.
And the big move was to magnetic confinement fusion, which has had billions of dollars spent on it.
The interesting thing is, now that the patents are available again and open, even college students have built Farnsworth fusers that show neutrons.
They show that they do indeed work.
The only problem is they're way, way below the yield that you would need.
So for the amount of energy you put in, you don't get enough payback to make it worthwhile.
On the other hand, it does work, and it's worth researching.
And it's the sort of thing that a dedicated college kid can build.
Well, I know that it can be successful, and I, for the most part, do trust the use of a nuclear power plant.
But the one thing we run into is human beings and human error.
And in many cases, well, to give you an example, it's often been said that the reason we had a problem with, for instance, Three Mile Island was that the machine did as it was expected, but people didn't believe it, and they overrode the machinery, and the result was a disaster.
They were using a design that we've never used over here.
They're using a carbon, carbon blocks to moderate the speed of the neutron particles.
Carbon will slow down and absorb some energy from the neutrons, so they stick around long enough to react and help you generate your power.
Well, in the process, carbon has two different forms.
Think of it as two different crystal forms.
They're called allotropes.
And the low-energy form of carbon is used to moderate the neutrons.
But the energy of the neutrons changes it to the other form, which is rather energetic.
And so there's something called the Wigner effect that happens.
And basically, it stores energy in the block of carbon.
Now, to get around that, they had to take these blocks out, put them in an autoclave, and heat them up every so often to trigger them to release all their heat energy.
If you don't do that, at random, they begin to trigger and heat.
And when they heat, they make the other blocks trigger, and the heat spread through all the blocks and set them on fire.
So you see, they just didn't get the blocks rotated and autoclaved properly.
Well, I'm sure there are a lot of factors that I'm not privy to.
And I have to admit, this is something that I have not studied in great detail.
I would like to think that it is, but unless I actually see the operation, see how it goes and what's going on with it, I couldn't actually render an opinion on it.
Personally, I would never store nuclear waste for long term.
Well, I understand, but again, let me try this sort of a final question on you here.
You know, we've talked about so many things.
I've observed that science is racing ahead at a fast clip at every level.
Biotechnology is kind of scary.
There's a lot of aspects that are, to me, sort of scary.
And I've noticed that scientists have a propensity for, you know, if there comes a choice where, like, they're going to push the button or not push the button, they push the button.
The testing of the atomic bomb would be a good example.
I mean, there was some solid theory that the whole atmosphere could go up in a chain reaction, and they considered that and said, nah, but probably not.
And they pushed the button.
So I'm sort of saying, generally, with science right now, are you at all concerned that in certain areas of advancement we're about to push the button and make perhaps a big mistake?
But one of the things that works in our benefit is it's very, very difficult to do something that would wreck the world.
It takes a long-term concerted effort for the most part.
And we don't really, you know, for instance, we don't have, if you put all the weapons in the world together, all the nuclear weapons and everything, people talk about destroying the world.
We couldn't.
We could kill all life, but we can't destroy the planet.
Nor am I suggesting, really, that something like that would necessarily be the product of somebody doing it with intent, although God knows there's probably those people out there, too.
My wife and I were watching CNN, and they were doing a story on Johnny Cochrane, who is getting over some unfortunate neurological problem that his camp decided not to make public, which is perfectly fine.
It was one of those classic moments.
And, you know, the CNN had just said, well, they had chosen not to explain what the neurological problem was.
And Ramona looks at me and says, maybe he was growing a conscience.
And I thought, yeah, right.
And, you know, they went in to excise it before it could grow.
Well, yeah, no, I read an article about the fact that the astronomers themselves felt that one of the things that was hindering them finding anything was the radio interference on Earth here.
And the satellites that orbit, all the rest of it, give them false alarms.
But what you can't ignore, sir, and what really is an issue is that, well, they've said it themselves.
If in the next 50 years or so, SETI doesn't come up with something, they're going to be forced, which is kind of interesting, you know, to essentially make a statement saying there may not be anything.
That's a possibility now, or even a good possibility.
i think that there's in fact enormous amounts of life all over the call over the solar system probably all over the universe i believe i think and i hope And the neural nets is the important part.
Neural nets are a way of replicating the human brain in a computer system.
And we're doing it optically now.
And that means that finally you have nonlinear working with nonlinear.
So we can understand how these things work.
I'm actually seeing communications between one-cell creatures with other one-cell creatures, and they can be across rooms.
Plants have the same ability.
So now you're talking about at what point do you say that they're sentient?
How sentient can they be?
If you link enough of them together, you're going to have the same numbers as you would have in the whole human body.
Well, for me, the bigger question would be, how in the hell are they communicating?
I mean, I understand this two places at once kind of theory, but how are they communicating?
That's the big one.
unidentified
Well, in our studies and what we've been doing for the military for DARPA, we've actually run into this to the idea.
First of all, with Sir Charles' size of the human brain, the human brain has no limitation on the amount of intelligence it can put in there because it can actually build its own CNAPs, its own interconnections.
Einstein had like 10 times the number of interconnects that most human beings do.
Well, we find that in storing the material away, we can store terabytes, huge amounts of information in the machine, because it's nonlinear, you're stacking it in there, it's interconnected and associative memory so that it's...
Yeah, but I'm talking about terabytes if you wanted to.
We pick up so much information every day with our brain and our eyes and our sensory system that there's no place to store it.
And like a spiritual dimension, because apparently if you I've seen people have out-of-body expenses and I've had one that you actually take this stuff with you.
I'm telling you, the man did not design the human back.
I mean, you look at the rest of it, us, and it's exquisite.
Really, it is.
the arms legs everything else seems to have form function and do its job admirably but the human back It develops inevitably problems, particularly down around L4 and L5, where all the weight of the human body is held.
And by the way, I must say, I've trimmed way down weight-wise, so that's not a problem anymore.
Not at all.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi.
Oh, yes, I'm sorry.
I just like to say, I love the show, and I love the thirst for knowledge, you know, and the truth.
I think that the myth that's been built around all of these organizations that are secret, because of the very nature of humans to attribute more to, you know, cool secrets than they ought to, the legend grows.
Yeah, I wondered, I was going to ask you about Sunstroke book, but just quickly, if I could mention, when you were talking to Dr. Paul Mahler, he had mentioned something about launching the AeroCar in spring, and I hadn't heard anything about it.
But, well, he was saying that there were safeguards, and you can always put safeguards in something.
But, you know, as we found out with, you know, our experience on Earth with nuclear power so far, despite even maybe what we thought were the best safeguards, really tragic things can happen or almost happen, like Three Mile Island.
Oh, we were close, really close.
And that's with our good technology.
unidentified
Well, even just with birds flying through, I guess it would be incinerated and concerned with pilots and humans and planes.
But I guess there was someone that was talking about water boiling very quickly at the shallow depth and how people would have to wear special helmets or something to protect themselves.
I guess that's what the author was saying of Sunstroke.
Sunstroke is about the concept of exactly what Sir Charles was talking about, a satellite that would collect energy in orbit, large amounts of energy, because when you don't have the atmosphere, obviously, in orbit to contend with, the efficiency of gathering sunlight is incredible.
And so you could gather an incredible amount of power, and you could send it by some sort of microwave device to Earth in a pattern of a few miles.
Now, one possible flaw in this plan, as was outlined in the science fiction book called Sunstroke, is that the satellite would become unstable and the protection systems wouldn't hold, which, you know, as we know, is said to be safe and unsinkable and all the rest of that.
But if the satellite were to wander while the beam continued toward Earth, it would obviously sort of fry things as it went.
That was what was contended in Sunstroke.
International Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi, this is Gene.
I'm calling from Calgary, QR77.
I have a prediction.
Oh.
And when you were talking about nuclear stations, I recalled a conversation I had over 30 years ago that I didn't want to believe, but now because so many things that happen have come true.
and it's made worse well, first it begins that there's some two types of gases that are leaking out of the ground because there's so many changes in the earth right now.
Like earthquakes and volcanoes.
And these gases are seeping out of the ground.
And I think it had something to do with the elk outside it.
I went with the Downwinders over here, and I read an article in the Pearl Valley Times that they are going to release bio-agents over at Frenchman's Flat.
But radio or electromagnetic radiation would seem such a common probability, you know, when light got to some certain complexity that we ought to be here.
unidentified
I agree with you, but isn't it a mystery?
And it's wonderful to think of all those possibilities.
I've got the story, of course, from my very own Trump Valley Times.
That's a newspaper here in the town in which I live.
You're just, you're not going to believe this.
It says, the Nevada test site will be testing the testing ground for releases of chemical and biological materials.
Nye County commissioners were informed Tuesday.
That's where I live here in Nye County.
Hence the slogan, the Kingdom of Nye.
In case you've ever wondered, that's where it comes from.
Nye County, the Kingdom of Nye.
This beautiful little patch of desert that I live in.
And look what they're going to do.
I'll tell you more about it in a moment.
���� Alrighty, let's look at this a little bit.
The Nevada test site will be the testing ground for releases of chemical and biological materials.
Now county commissioners were informed Tuesday.
Mike Scalgard, Environmental Programs Team Leader for the National Nuclear Security Administration's Nevada Test Site Office, said his agency began notifying local government officials about the plan last October.
First I've heard of it.
25 comments were received.
Is that all?
During public comment periods, which were generally supportive of the project, said he.
The only agencies that responded were the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The federal government has taken an interest in chemicals that could be used in biological attacks since the September 11, 2001 terror strike, he said.
And the tests are designed to develop sensing devices that detect biological weapons, according to the Security Administration.
Okay, this sort of ties into the story you're telling now.
How much about autism I don't know that you know, but I'm calling, I started to call about your guest speaker last night in regards to the CIPRO and things like that and concerns that we should have about vaccinations.
Well, listen, I've read a ton of stuff on immunizations and all the rest of it, and I have questions myself about the advisability of some so-called immunizations.
I mean, that's just a personal feeling.
But my goodness gracious, last night's guest was amazing.
He really didn't have reservations about anything.
I mean, it was just absolutely, it was like, kind of like I was dumbfounded by the end of the program.
He sort of just stopped me cold, you know.
I asked him, I said, what about Agent Orange?
Oh, hey, no problem.
unidentified
Work with it, touch it, play in it, do anything you want, no problem.
And I could have used easily another hour of calls.
I mean, some of what he was saying, and he was certainly serious, to me was pretty far out stuff.
And so I just sort of smiled.
You can't detect that on a radio, but I kind of smiled and went, wow, this would certainly make an interesting program, which is why at the end I said, you know, you've really got to come back.
I mean, that would be some rip snorter of program.
and and i'm not sure it matters but work interact now and i think if we were to you know i i hated the idea of the iraq war i thought it was a I thought it was dumb.
What happened on September 11th occurred because our head wasn't stuck far enough up, as far as I'm concerned.
and i'm not i'm not even in favor of what we're doing in iraq except to know that we're there now and it's a done deal so i'm not going to We're there.
And we are killing terrorists.
And from my point of view, I'd rather kill them there than here.
Because in all likelihood, or great likelihood, killing them here will be after they pull the, you know, throw the switch on something we're really not going to like at all.
But no, I don't have the answers on how we're going to get out of this Iraq situation.
And one thing I wanted to say was about the Bible code.
I like what you go along with, but it seems to me and never ceases to amaze me, wouldn't you think that as much trouble as people have trying to interpret the Bible as it is, why would somebody want to come up with the idea of going along with a code on top of that?
And I haven't made up my mind yet about whether I have confidence in the Bible code's absolute authenticity.
I know the numbers are staggering and all the rest of it, but I don't understand it well enough to have full confidence in it.
unidentified
Well, I don't go with it, period.
I mean, I just, I mean, it's interesting, but it just doesn't hold water with me.
But something else, too.
Maybe some of your other listeners have experienced this, or maybe it's just me.
But it seems like several celebrities over the past few years, it would seem like I had heard on a newscast that a particular individual had passed away.
Well, then all of a sudden, like maybe a year later or thereabouts, all of a sudden I either see this person on TV or I hear about this person so I'm thinking, I could have sworn that person died.
I'd like to give you an example, Peter Falk was one.
I could have sworn I saw it on a newscast that he passed away in 1999.
And then he said news series of something about Colombo, and I thought, no.
The one example I've given you, of course, is Nelson Mandela.
I was really under the impression that I had heard newscasts claiming that Nelson Mandela was dead, but oh no, you know, he, of course, is not dead and went on to lead South Africa as its president.
But things that seem to have happened, only they didn't happen.
I'm not sure what that represents.
Just maybe little tricks the human mind plays or maybe there is a bit of tampering going on out there.
Why we don't have a moon base and why there hasn't been any evidence of what's happened in the past with lunar landings, proof of it, via telescopic photographs.
And wondered if perhaps the Mars mission could have been faked because of the filming they had done throughout Arizona and in the Canadian Arctic on some island that has similar surface to Arizona, apparently with the red.
Is that what you lean toward believing, that we didn't go?
unidentified
Well, I've just had people show me some books, like one is How NASA Mooned America.
But you think that with the Hubble Telescope and all the massive telescopes that we've got and with the Russians and the space shuttle, we'd be able to get some sort of photographs of the moon's surface.
I thought we had, and I thought they actually had seen something.
Look, I don't know.
I don't know.
I really don't know.
But I'll tell you this.
I firmly believe we went to the moon.
I'm old enough to have remembered watching it on TV, that first step for mankind.
I remember all that, watched it live.
Yeah, I think we went to the moon.
I think a better question is, what happened up there?
Did they see anything that they have not talked about?
Well, I'll tell you what, there are some statements made by astronauts.
In fact, I've got them here.
Or purportedly made by astronauts that would just roll you back on your heels.
They do roll me back on my heels.
Let me see.
What have I got?
Okay.
Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and I've interviewed him any number of times, said or allegedly said, quote, and this is, by the way, from the St. Petersburg Times, newspaper in St. Petersburg, allegedly said, quote, a few insiders know the truth and are studying the bodies that have been discovered, end quote.
It blew me away when I saw this.
I've interviewed Edgar Mitchell at some great length, and I never, never remember him saying anything like this quote, a few insiders know the truth and are studying the bodies that have been discovered.
Aye, yi-yi.
I mean, that's way out there.
Or this.
Major Cooper, another of our astronauts, said allegedly, quote, for many years I've lived with a secret in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics.
I can now reveal that every day in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us.
And there are thousands of eyewitness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public.
Why?
Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders.
So the password still is we have to avoid panic by all means and allege the alleged quote.
And it actually goes on.
And you know, this could be Pure bullet.
It goes on, quote, I was furthermore a witness to an extraordinary phenomenon here on this planet Earth.
It happened a few months ago in Florida.
There I saw with my own eyes a defined area of ground being consumed by flames with four indentations left by a flying object which had descended in the middle of a field.
Beings had left the craft.
They collected soil samples and eventually returned where they had come, simply disappearing at an enormous speed.
I happen to know that authority did just about everything to keep this incident from the press and TV in fear of a panicky reaction from the public, supposed end quote.
So either this stuff, some of it is real or nuggets of real, or it's baloney.
But if these astronauts are actually saying things like that, and again, I don't warrant it as absolute truth.
I have no way of knowing.
But still, it's pretty incredible.
Even if half of what I've just said is true, it's pretty incredible.
I wonder.
How could they not be out there?
And why haven't our friends at SETI found anything yet?
unidentified
I've been wondering a lot about that lay lately.
Leave me this way.
I can't survive.
I can't stay alive without your love.
Oh, baby, don't leave me this way.
I can't exist.
I tried to hold you back when you were stronger To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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There are retro reflectors that if you know the coordinates of the retroreflectors, you can use a reasonable size telescope and a laser and you can get a reflection which you will not get from the surface of the moon.
Now, on the matter of the solar power arrays and microwave transmission to Earth, that can be made absolutely safe because the antenna that's receiving the power has to send a lock-in signal to the transmitting antenna.
He was talking about some pretty serious power, though.
And so even if it's relatively dispersed, you're still talking about immense amounts of power.
And I'd want to look very closely at it before I thought, okay, let's do that.
unidentified
Yeah, I'm not saying that we should do it necessarily, but I think that's it's certainly something that can be considered as a possibility.
And you can build in enough safeguards.
I mean, for instance, the antenna that's transmitting is not a parabolic reflector or something like that.
It's a phased array.
And so if you don't give the appropriate signals to phase the antennas they're transmitting, you just get diffuse power being beamed all over the planet.
So, you know, you know, although I think even with current, I'm, what, At what percentage can a spacecraft of efficiency can a spacecraft panel collect now?
The whole concept is interesting, and it is that we could collect in space.
And I don't know anybody who wouldn't really think that a good idea.
I mean, other than the worries about it, you know, scourging along land and clicking everybody as it goes, which may be unrealistic from a safety point of view, totally unrealistic.
The concept is realistic, and you have to wonder why we have not yet begun to do it.
Economics, well, maybe.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
This is Robert Ann Albany in New York listening on Streamlink.
Yes, sir.
You've been talking both tonight and in past programs for quite some time about people having vague recollections of alternate timelines.
Now, I have other recollections of alternate timelines.
When I was a child, I lived in Brooklyn, very near the Brooklyn Navy Yards.
The World Trade Center was going up, and my father used to complain about how we were getting bad television reception because it was blocking the Empire State Books.
The problem is we moved out of Brooklyn in 1964, and according to the present timeline, World Trade Center wasn't started construction until, I think, 1967.
In 1967, we lived in Orange County, in upstate New York, and would have had no such problem.
All I know is that this is going on, that this is a valid phenomena, that people have these memories of things they thought occurred that just did not occur in today's reality.
Now, does this mean the human brain has just received some sort of trick?
I mean, we hear things incorrectly all the time, right?
And yet this phenomenon seems to stick out from that as being more than that to me.
East of the Rockies, you're on there.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi, Ar.
Hello.
Yeah, I have two topics to talk about.
The first one is I saw yesterday a trailer for the day after tomorrow.
Well, I'm not a big movie fan anyway, so I don't like most movies.
But, well, actually, I think it's cool because the guy that called up, he was from Albany, and I'm from Albany area, so it's kind of cool that two of us called up.
And the other thing is I want to thank you because a couple of weeks ago I called you up and I asked you what your opinion was of storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
I was doing it for a science report.
And so I mentioned you in my essay and then I wrote a transcript of our phone call and I gave it to the teacher and he laughed when he read it because he had asked me if I would be willing to have this stuff stored near where I was in the Albany area.
And I said yes and that threw you off and he cracked up and he read that part.
And so I want to thank you for giving me your opinion of that.
And I was wondering if you'd like me to send you a copy of my report.
Well, I just wanted to get on there and say that from a fellow ham and not just any ham, but one of the crazy moon bouncer types, amateur astronomer and all-around science nut.
Also, an amateur astronomer with a couple of large telescopes.
And anyway, as a general lover of science and quite a thorough studier of biblical principles, this continuing controversy that keeps coming up over life existing off this planet, either in bacterial complicated or intelligent or otherwise, you know, I just don't find any controversy from studying myself.
Me and my wife, we quite intently study, and we use a King James and a Strong Concordance, and we stopped listening to preachers an awful long time ago because they really just looking for their tithe money and trying to build their numbers.
I'm aware of it because I get thousands of emails, sir, and I respect people's faith.
I mean, it comes down to a matter of what they believe, pure and simple.
And there is a reaction from those folks, not all of them, but enough that it would be a social...
I mean, you'd see a pretty big wave out of this one, believe me.
unidentified
Oh, yeah, and that's why the Brookings document is accurate.
And that's why it's just so unfortunate that so many people are listening to others and rather than studying it for themselves.
And that's just something that me and my wife wanted to pass along that anybody out there who's confused by this, go and look at the Genesis account and these things for themselves.
And there's just nothing in there.
In fact, there's a lot of things quite to the contrary.
Many biblical scholars will point to some of the references about God having created a hedge around the earth and protect it.
And if we blow it, he's going to give it to somebody else.
I'm just saying that people interpret and take to heart different parts of the document.
unidentified
Well, I've never actually met very many people who interpret for themselves.
Most people interpret from what they've been told.
And we just wanted to pass that along.
And we spend many nights doing this as well as looking out there into the universe.
When you look out there with a telescope and do some photography, and it's just so massive, how there couldn't be anything else out there alive that God has also created.
Yes, I live out here in the desert where we do a lot of that.
The air here is thin in the sense of, to begin with, we're at about 2,600 feet, not that high, but the air is very dry.
And that's what I really mean by thin.
And so it's wonderful for astronomy out here.
And such a simple act.
You can take a pair of second or third generation night vision outside and point that at the sky.
And you'll get dizzy quickly realizing how many stars you're seeing.
It'll give you a nice broad field of vision, unlike specifically a telescope, for example, which has a very narrow field of vision even when looking out.
And of course, it magnifies light, so you see millions more stars than you would see otherwise, and it's truly awe-inspiring.
And I want to thank you for bringing us always fascinating radio.
You and George, you do a great job at this.
Thank you.
And I'd like to ask you if you have ever taken, and I've done this myself, I was a fire spotter up in Northern California in 92, and I was next to a large array of microwave towers.
Well, it's just it's the nature of RF energy and uh electromagnetic fields and how it works.
And there just becomes enough coupling to fire it.
And believe me, near you know a fairly high power transmitter, kilowatt or so, you just go near the lead wire with a fluorescent tube and she'll light right up.
And it's just coupling enough power to achieve that, that's all.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, Art.
I wanted to tell you about this craft that I saw.
It was like I was looking through it.
It was like mirrored image of the sky or something.