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April 18, 2004 - Art Bell
02:53:02
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Sir Charles Shults III - Fossils on Mars
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Music From the high desert and the great American southwest, I
bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, as the case may be in all the time zones across this great
globe, each and every one of them covered by this program one way or the other.
Coast to Coast AM, I'm Art Bell, it's the Weekend Edition.
Howdy everybody, always an honor to be here with you.
I thought last night was fascinating.
Michael Pimento was a fascinating guest.
I mean, really fascinating, in my opinion.
As the program rolled on, it became more and more obvious that he was a real industry kind of guy, one way or the other.
He sort of blew himself up at the end.
I thought to business about why there was nothing wrong with Agent Orange?
Nothing!
Bioxin?
Dioxane cocktails.
Incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
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 in 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 through 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 weapons 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 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.
but in a moment sir charles shultz
sir charles shultz welcome to the program Well, thank you.
It's an honor to be on.
And speaking of honors, I've never talked to a knighted person before.
Well, I imagine it doesn't happen every day.
No, it doesn't.
Tell me, how did you come to be knighted?
Well, there's a fellow by the name of Dr. Nelson Ying, and he's a baron in Scotland by right of purchasing a large tract of land which comes with a title.
Under 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.
Excellent.
Well, you know, we're here to talk about what I call sand dollars.
Okay.
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.
Can I pummel you with a few questions about that afterwards?
Well, certainly.
Anything that isn't classified that I can speak freely about, I'd be glad to talk about.
But the classified stuff would be good.
Well, I'm sure you can understand that wouldn't be helpful to anyone.
I do.
All right, good.
Anyway, look, it seems to me that you found something, well, anomalous on Mars.
And even in my so-called two-dimensional vision, I can clearly see this.
Now, I've just sent the larger part of the audience up to the website to have a look.
Certainly, you've got a lot of expertise, but none of it listed in Mars.
So, how do we get from the kind of work you were doing to what you're doing here?
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 is 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 brush-by 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.
What do you think happened?
Well, actually, it's much simpler than that.
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, and so it can't replenish its atmosphere as well.
Hmm.
That's dependent on volcanic action.
Right, a lot of our atmosphere is replenished by volcanic activity.
Fascinating.
There are those who discuss, and I don't know how I'm going off drifting in this direction, don't worry, we'll get back where we ought to be, but a lot of people discuss the possibility of some day in the far future terraforming Mars.
Does it have enough gravity to support something that we would artificially generate there, do you think?
Well, calculations done by a number of people interested in astronomy, in particular driven by science fiction writers, believe it or not, have 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.
It would.
It would.
Alright, let's plunge into the material.
How did you find... I can't help but call them sand dollars.
They really look like sand dollars that you'd pick up at the beach.
Well, certainly yes.
And the findings were actually kind of natural.
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 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.
So you agree it's sort of a sand dollar then?
Absolutely.
There's no question about it.
In fact, we have some three-dimensional views that you can see if you have red and blue glasses.
They're called anaglyphs.
Right.
And they will show you the dimensions of them, so you can see that it is flattened, actually, and it looks exactly like sand.
I can clearly see that.
Is there any way... Sir Charles sounds right.
What should I call you?
Well, Sir Charles is fine, but whatever you're comfortable with.
I like Sir Charles.
Anyway, 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 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.
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.
Yes.
Now, in nature, there are no five-pointed crystals.
There's only one sort of five-pointed crystal, and it's called a quasicrystal, and it's artificially made.
But nature has no five-pointed crystals.
So you're sort of ruling out everything else, and you're suggesting really only water, and how strongly is life suggested by what you've found?
I mean... I absolutely believe that this is life.
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.
The features are too uniform and too identical.
There's one other argument.
Yes?
One other argument that actually clinches it.
We have an organism that looks like it has a hand print on it.
It's sort of like a starfish print.
Right.
We found four of these all together.
Two of them happened to be side-by-side.
One was smaller than the other, and they both had the handprint.
And here's the interesting part.
On the smaller one, the handprint, 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.
Yes.
And so that supports a biological theory right there.
All right.
Very clearly.
I'm not sure how far you've been with this.
It would be the time to ask.
This is pretty startling stuff.
And I wonder if you've been to NASA with it, or anybody who analyzes for NASA, and shown this to them, and have you had any response?
Well, I have.
I sent all my material in emails to various offices of NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab early on, and I've received absolutely no response.
Really?
But along those lines, I know a couple of people who work in the laboratories, and one on the rover team, and they agree with my findings.
They do.
Well, if they do, I mean, that is that then they should be able to at least march it up the line a little bit.
This is too big, right?
Well, I would think so.
I can only surmise that they have reasons of their own, whatever they may be.
Perhaps they're trying to perform verification of their own.
I don't know.
But I would think that at this point it's very, very clear what the conclusions would be if they simply look at the data.
You would think they would want to trot Well, that would certainly be the starting point.
to the larger scientific community for evaluation even if they took that
careful step not not well i don't think i have five it's life you know but at
least getting it out there publicly well that would certainly be the starting point
and 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
they 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
sir charles there have been others richard hogan uh...
among them who have uh...
are presented things for a long time to nasa some of which i
Some that I don't have sympathy with as being interesting, and some that I just can't see the way, you know, the way Richard sees it.
And I'm sure you are familiar with Richard.
Yes, I've heard of him and his work.
Sure.
But this, it seems so clear, so unambiguous, and it seems to say all at once, okay, there was water on Mars.
Guess what?
There was also life on Mars.
Here's the proof.
I mean, this is so non-trivial, such a gigantic thing.
Well, you know... I mean, Richard runs into a lot of trouble with NASA.
Understandably, in some cases, perhaps.
But maybe there's something to it, Sir Charles.
Maybe NASA... Well, maybe they've got their own timetable, or their own agenda, or whatever.
Well, perhaps.
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.
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 the 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, you know, 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 organisms would be very much the same.
Well, consider this, though.
If there was a 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 all kinds of things, on religion, on, I don't know, look at ourselves, the fact that it might even happen to planet Earth.
I mean, it would have a big impact.
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 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.
It comes from reading Genesis.
I mean, Genesis is quite literal about how it all happened, and it didn't say a darn word about Mars.
Well, that's true, but you have to understand that a lot of people I think of God as creating just the Earth and just life on it, but to me that would be a very limited view of a God.
For me, a God would be capable of creating billions of planets with life.
But, Sir Charles, you have a wide-ranging mind, obviously, but there are people who believe, and I'm not saying they're narrow, it's just what they believe, and there are a lot more than you know.
We're talking to them right now, Sir Charles, right all the way through the Bible Belt, and they take the Bible very literally.
You may have a very good point there, and I'm sure that has a bearing on the issue, but when you really come down to it, you can't use religion to hide the facts.
question on it and i think that i think that he frees and that might be the
reason what do you think you may have a very good point there and and and i'm sure
that has a bearing on the issue
but when you really come down to it you can use religion to hide the facts
uh... any religion that uh... that in any reasonable sense would say
well what we're declaring is right Pay no attention to those facts over there.
And I know that it has happened in the past.
Well, yes, it has.
I was going to say history perhaps isn't on that side.
I would like to think that we were a little more sophisticated than that.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I hope we are, but there has been a lot of revisionism in the past.
I mean, that is history.
The winners write it pretty much, you know.
I mean, you found Life, for God's sakes.
That's how jumping up and down I'd get about it.
You found life.
If this isn't life, what is?
I did jump up and down.
I went in the back room and jumped up and down a few times, but it's all sunk in pretty well now.
Yes, there is life on other worlds, and we've got fossils on Mars.
Now, this is something that does concern me, however.
How long have you been working on this?
How long now?
Uh, let's see.
Actually, ever since the rover images started coming in from Spirit, and I guess that's, uh, 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.
And when did you have your point of epiphany?
Oh, February 15th, definitely.
February 14th, I wasn't certain.
February 15th, I absolutely knew it.
All right.
Uh, Sir Charles, hold on.
Sir Charles Schultz is my guest, and if you didn't do it before, then do it now.
Make your way up to the website at coastscotian.com.
And you better start through these pictures right now, because what Sir Charles Schultz has found is life on Mars.
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Well, I guess I better deal with these right now.
These are fast-blasted to me.
A couple that say, you've got to stop your Christian bashing.
I'm not Christian bashing at all.
I'm just laying down a fact.
As a matter of fact, I'm, I guess, Christian myself, really.
But, uh, I'm laying down a fact.
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 fast-blasts, well, this is bogus.
You see just what your mind wants to believe.
I've 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.
Take a good, close look.
and look at the markings once again search for a short so welcome back
Alright, 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.
Well, the thing is, some people just don't have the visual acuity, and other people simply will not see it because they choose not to.
So you're dealing with three basic sections of society.
One, people who see whatever they feel like seeing, whether it's true or not, or not seeing it.
People who have the visual acuity to see it and will see it, and people who simply aren't capable of seeing it.
And it really depends on the individual, I guess, their abilities to see.
I can look at a lot of things and find things very easily, and some people can't.
Well, the markings though, they do seem really clear.
You would have to work at not seeing them.
Well that's true 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, then 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.
Once you've seen it, you've seen it.
For the record, let me ask you, have you examined any of the images that Richard Hoagland
has put up there?
There have been many, many, many, many.
I did see one in which he showed the fossil bed sheet, and yes it is a fossil bed, and I've got a copy of that with the fossils outlined in pretty good detail.
So you concur with him on that then?
Oh yes, that is definitely a crinoid in the middle of that thing, there's no question about that.
But if you look at the page on my site, you'll see I've also got many others that are on that same sheet marked out.
Now we did an unscientific test We printed out a copy of that page, of the fossils, and we took it to local business establishments, like a laundromat, for instance.
And we showed it to people and said, how many fossils do you see?
And people from all age groups looked at it and picked out anywhere from three to fourteen fossils, and signed their names, saying how many they found.
Now here's the interesting thing.
When we told them, this is a picture from Mars, many of them backed away and retracted.
Oh, well...
And it says more about human psychology than Mars.
Well, gee, it 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.
Well, that's true, and one of the reasons that I need to get this information out is so that many people have the opportunity to see it and make their own minds up.
There's enough information here that anybody with a mind and a pair of eyes can look at it and see for themselves and if they doubt my findings they can go to the original NASA data and they can do the same process I did and find the same things.
That to me was the most important thing.
Replication.
Other people can do this.
But one point remains in my mind in this thing and that is There may not have been everything on Mars dying when its extinction occurred.
Yes, its atmosphere is gone, its oceans are gone, and the possibility strikes me that there could still be bacterial or fungal life that exists there, and I do believe that there are still some organisms alive.
All right.
Somebody just asked the following question, kind of interesting.
If there was life on Mars and an atmosphere and water and all the rest of it, could there be, under the Martian surface, oil?
Oh, it's definitely possible.
There's 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.
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, concludes, you know, my conclusion is they did find fossil organisms in that meteorite.
But in the same vein, the Vikinglanders, the Gill-Levins experiment, I do believe found biological activity in the soil.
They seem to conclude otherwise.
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 the conditions here are just wonderful.
And consider, we can't even control an athlete's foot or mildew in the shower.
Well, 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, 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.
Right.
And so in another world you would expect that there would be other radical differences.
True.
So if we find something that's alive, but its genes don't match anything we know, 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 Right-handed proteins, left-handed sugars, or left-handed proteins, right-handed sugars, alien life could have exactly the opposite.
And that would be a key indicator right there.
Do you have any reason to believe that there was more complex life, perhaps, on Mars at any point?
Well, yes I do.
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, Terri 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.
So far?
So far, yeah.
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 fissure.
Nevertheless, Sir Charles, there are all those suns, 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.
Well, that's true also.
And there could be many, many number of reasons for that.
Any number.
In fact, it's called the Fermi Paradox.
Why is it so quiet?
Nobody seems to know where everybody is.
And one possibility is that most planets don't have a lot of plate tectonics, volcanoes like we do.
In those cases, they would probably end up being water worlds, all ocean and no dry surface.
Yes, but all that said, Sir Charles, still, the numbers are on the side of life by a long shot.
You said that yourself.
Absolutely, and I do believe that.
So then where are the signals?
And that, once again, I don't know.
If we had used fiber optics instead of radio, nobody would have heard a peep out of us.
And that's a possibility.
That's absolutely a fact, of course.
And there are other things as well.
Maybe technical civilizations don't come along very often, and so we can only detect civilizations that make radio waves, or something we can pick up.
And if they're not generating those things, we don't know whether they're or not, and so we can't really draw much of a conclusion.
True.
And of course, Eddie has not yet by any means surveyed all there is to survey, although they've done a fair amount, enough to be almost troubling.
Well, that's true.
But there's one thing to keep in mind.
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 the frequencies... Hydrogen.
Hydrogen, you got it.
So we're assuming that they would be broadcasting on that frequency, but interestingly enough, we don't.
So why should we assume that they do?
You want to hear an interesting story?
I interviewed Seth Shostak, who is The guy at SETI.
And he said, we did one brief transmission near hydrogen.
It was about a 10 or 15 second blast of, 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.
Well, that's always something we'd have to consider.
If we believe they're intelligent aliens, we have to consider whether or not we really want to call them towards us.
And that is something that you'd have to think about.
But on the other hand, how many years would we have before they get here, if such a thing were to be the case?
The signal they sent out, I think, was to a star that was something like 50,000 light years away.
So, you know, we've got a long lead time for them.
It depends on the speed of their ride.
Well, but still, the signal would have to reach them first.
Yeah, well, that's true.
Certainly, that's true.
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, hydrogen, near-hydrogen blasts into space as a beacon, but we're not doing it.
And that really is the reason.
Well, that's true.
And, you know, once again, we can't really assume anything.
And we've got to be very, very circumspect about anything we say and anything we do.
When we make a claim or when we take on an action, we have to think about what we're doing because it could have unforeseen consequences.
Speaking of that and your claims, Sir Charles, how's it gone down so far?
I mean, a lot of people who present this kind of evidence in a very public forum like this get rained on.
Well, that's true.
But you know, I've got one thing in my corner, the biggest thing of all, and that is that this is a fact.
So, it doesn't matter what anybody says, it doesn't matter what anybody thinks.
The right people are going to find this, and they're going to see it, and they're going to say, why yes, this is in fact the case.
It's only a matter of time.
Quite right.
And that they have not done that yet.
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.
We'd scream.
That's what they say.
Well, yes, and that would be my reaction.
Gee, we need to run with this and find out everything we can.
I really wouldn't even begin to theorize as to why nobody has responded yet.
I know that this is a fact, and anyone who can look at it can see that it's a fact.
There should have been a response, and it's just a matter of time.
Time's on my side here.
I've got a huge, huge bundle of data here, and every bit of it is absolutely verifiable, and all of it goes right back to NASA.
I've got you.
It's their data.
But somehow or another, until Dan Rather says it, it just ain't so.
You're absolutely right.
I suppose it's more or less that people, even when they can see a thing for themselves, wait until there's the blessing.
Yes, you can believe it now.
That's something I don't really understand.
I've seen examples of it time and again.
On the other hand, quite a few people have been very, very supportive of what I've found so far.
I think a lot of people are more worried about what people will think of them.
Oh, you're one of those Mars life weirdos.
Well, right.
No, right.
I mean, really, right.
That's exactly, I guess, what I was getting at.
That, you know, you're going to be taking pot shots at you.
And I would think... I'm not worried.
I'm not worried in the least.
No.
As you said, though, you work with, you know, some pretty important people who get, what, probably a lot of money from the government for their funding and so forth and so on, and this kind of thing filters down.
Well, yes.
I would hate to think that they were more interested in keeping their job than doing their job.
That would be a very sad thing.
Yes, that would be sad.
But, you know, I have a very good friend who lives in Las Vegas, John Lear, son of the fellow who invented the Learjet, you know, Bill Lear.
And he was a commercial aircraft pilot.
And think what you will of what he would talk about.
He came on my show 10-12 years ago and talked about UFOs.
Right.
Well, that cost him a job as a commercial pilot.
Just talking about them, Sir Charles.
And I understand there's a huge stigma attached to it.
Personally, my feeling is, until I can see the evidence I'm not going to draw any conclusions.
I know that it's possible.
I'm not going to discount it, but I would really like to see some compelling evidence.
Right.
Well, what you have is really compelling.
Really compelling.
So compelling that, as I said earlier, NASA should at the very least say, all right, these are serious findings.
Here's the evidence.
Would the scientific community please review them and get back to us or something?
Well, and there's another thing to consider as well.
I'm sure that their websites and email addresses are inundated with crackpots and strange claims all the time.
I would take some time to sort through all that material.
Right, but you've had the advantage of talking to some people on the inside, and you would think they would have tried to have taken it further.
You would think so, yes.
We've got a two-month lead time at any rate, and that in itself says a lot.
I've covered my trail very carefully.
I've notarized and documented everything.
So there can't be any question about the finding, the dates, what we've discovered and everything.
And the technical work, everything is heavily referenced.
Everything has backups.
And if you check the site itself, there are links to everything.
So everything has an authority or a reference behind it.
That's the most important thing.
Listen, you're a really obviously interesting guy.
How about sticking around for a while?
It's okay, I'll be glad to.
I'd like that.
The radio's a luxury of, you know, doing hours where you can actually approach various subjects in depth instead of having to do it in sound bites.
And so I've got those.
What the hell, then?
We'll do some more.
Because there's a lot of stuff here that you've worked on that I'd love to ask you about.
For the record, do you believe that That ETs exist, that there are extraterrestrials?
Well, at this point I'd have to say yes.
We found life on Mars and there's nothing that says it can't be elsewhere.
So then your belief is purely a sort of a scientific statistical probability?
Yes, it's the 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 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.
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.
Sir Charles, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour, and we'll be right back.
All right?
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, so we will.
I'm going to play a little bit of it.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sand, or the strength of an oak when it moves 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 memories whole And to use them to help us to fly
Yeah!
Thanks for watching!
Do talk with Art Bell.
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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.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Good morning everybody.
This man is obviously a heavyweight, the real McCoy.
Just great to have you 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 ten years.
Now listen carefully.
On weapons systems and computer-based automated test equipment, he wrote the nuclear EMP test software for 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 around 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 don't think there's an argument about this.
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 Fossil's, 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, rock.
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 EMPs.
You wrote the nuclear EMP test software for the Pershing 2 missile system.
That'd be something.
In other words, you had to design a protection system of some kind.
That's true.
Pershing 2 missiles and 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.
Actually, it's not that difficult.
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.
But, you know, EMP is not a really mystery thing.
It has its uses, but as a weapon it isn't really that effective for most things.
Well, do you have any... What would happen if a very high megatonnage weapon were detonated in the atmosphere?
You know, the old... Right, exactly.
That's a real threat, 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.
Understand that the biggest problems we're going to run into will be bulky semiconductors, power systems going down, that sort of thing.
But on the other hand, if you think that's going to happen, you can easily buy a couple of radios or electronic devices, wrap it 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 telephone that's going to work.
But short of that, the question I wanted to ask you is, a high altitude burst somewhere in the center of the U.S., how far would the effect be?
Would the average radio and circuit mount circuitry, that kind of sensitive stuff, just be dead meat?
Would all the computers go down?
Well, a lot of them would.
Estimates say that it would take something on the order of 500 megatons above the geometric center of the U.S.
to do a lot of damage, but there's nothing that big, and there's certainly nothing that could launch anything that big.
Most of the warheads are far, far below that size, and so you don't really have any real worries about it.
If something like this comes along, it's going to be localized.
Okay, I'm gonna 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 oh It was now a few years ago.
I you know 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 a 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.
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.
It's important to the story.
I get my internet here.
There's about, I don't know, ten 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 Pahrump, 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.
Across a very large part of the spectrum?
I mean, it would have gone from 2 to, I mean, I'm going up on about 11 gigahertz.
And the internet was at 2.4, so, man, that's a wide, that's a lot of the microwave spectrum It's a wide-band spectrum, absolutely.
If you had a... Let's theorize for a minute.
If you had an intentional white noise source in the microwave band, and you amplified it, you could do that.
It's not that hard to do.
Well, can you speculate at all?
Do you think, for example, that the United States possesses the ability to do that?
I mean, I saw it done.
I'm not surprised at all.
Somebody wouldn't be surprised in the least.
Really?
Yeah.
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 a 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, you know, like the eclipse had gone away and suddenly signals, all the signals were there again.
Damnedest thing I ever saw!
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, you know, 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.
We might not always like it, but it's always there.
There's always a simple explanation.
Because if you could do that, I mean, you could literally disable the communications of an entire city.
That would be quite an ability, and that would be quite a weapon, wouldn't it?
Well, it would.
And if you think about how you can make a portable transmit station that's in the kilowatts, It 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... No, wait, one more question while we're on the subject.
I have up maybe one of the largest loop antennas on a ham operator.
Okay.
Perhaps one of the largest loop antennas of its type in the country.
It's gigantic.
It's on 13 towers and involves, I don't know, almost 4,000 feet of wire.
It's a big, it's a great big thing, way up in the air.
I have a consistent voltage on that antenna, which I have to protect my equipment against, that's around 300 volts.
Ah, that's actually a real simple thing to explain.
There's two things that can cause that easily.
Okay.
Number one, Wind, dry air moving over a conductor.
On a totally still day, and I mean without so much as a wisp of wind moving, so I'm ahead of you there.
Alright, and the other explanation is, there's always a potential voltage difference between the Earth itself and the sky above it.
And when that potential becomes very high, it arcs and we get lightning.
But it can be at a lower level, not high enough to cause lightning, and there can be a very high standing DC voltage on something.
I'll give you an example.
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, you know, the air above and Earth.
Right.
Well, there's a very simple device that people can make called a charge mill, and it's basically a very lightweight a static motor and it runs on static electricity and you're on 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 cause a little static mill or 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 power simultaneously.
You need to leap over to it.
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.
Well, I realize it's fairly low current, but it's enough to knock me on my butt.
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 there's any... whether 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's getting to be a pretty important thing in the world these days.
Well, that's true, but in all my experience, I've never found anything for free.
You know, you don't get any free lunches in this world.
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 like magical Oregon 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 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.
And that's a very doable technology.
They were talking about it in 1970.
About the only possible problem that I see with that is the stability of the satellite.
That might be a little worrisome.
But of course we use station keeping on satellites right now, and that limits their useful lifespan when they run out of fuel.
On an investment of this sort, obviously you would keep it manned or operated remotely, and you'd want to refuel it.
This would be an ongoing investment, something that you would have to maintain.
But the payoffs would be immense.
Indeed, but on the other side of the coin, if it were to drift, it would be a killing machine, wouldn't it?
Well, there's ways around that.
For instance, Are you familiar with the pilot beam concept?
No.
Essentially, you make your receiver on the ground a part of the circuit.
And the only way that it can broadcast is if it's locked onto the receiver.
Gotcha.
And so this means that unless you physically go up there and make some hardware changes, you couldn't turn it into a weapon.
And there are other things you can do, too.
You can broadcast from a very broad area, and you can use, let's say, even a wire antenna with a rectifier on it to pick up the power.
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.
How much potential power would you imagine could be collected and then transmitted?
Have you looked into that at all?
Yes, I have.
I've done a bit of work on it 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.
Oh my god, yes it is!
With a huge, huge amount of power 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.
What do you think the effects would be on the various layers of the atmosphere transmitting that kind of energy through it?
Anything potentially, or what?
Actually, the atmosphere is almost like a filter.
It has certain colors or frequencies that can get through it very easily.
Right.
You can imagine a sheet of colored glass that's red, and only red light gets through it easily.
Sure.
Well, the atmosphere has the same sorts of windows, and certain frequencies of light or radio waves get through easily, and what we would do is we'd choose one of those frequencies, and there'd be next to zero interaction with the atmosphere that way.
Do we have the ability to do something like that now?
Actually, we do.
We've had it for 30 or 40 years.
But basically, the project was shot down by some members of Congress back in 1970.
Why?
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.
And shot down.
Why?
And it was shot down.
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.
Really?
very simplified that the very simplified way of stating it but essentially
we signed away our rights to do anything in space to keep the peace
the u n uh...
well you know uh... the u n didn't get in our way particularly when we
want to go to iraq 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.
How wide a beam width would something like that have at the ground level?
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're standing in the sunshine.
Well, that slight warming, of course, is microwaves, but that's a new cooking Is what it is.
I've been up on towers in front of microwave dishes and noticed, gee, my leg's getting warm.
Look down, you're standing right in front of a microwave dish.
Exactly.
You know, on a tower.
But fortunately, we have the ability to put, let's say, a no-fly zone or a cordon around that area and say, just don't fly there.
If you're dumb enough to fly through the beam, you deserve what you get.
I mean, that's Darwin in action.
That would be a cool sign.
Actually, worded just that way.
Sir Charles Schultz is my guest.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
la mi enmarco I boom
and you hear my heart beating this song to me
Dream Ten after midnight
I'm the starry satellite skies A lightwig digging in the cover of dark
Can't stop, did I hear that right?
In life conversations Be the natural song in the dark
Real life phone line on air express On the world things are falling apart
Coast to coast To the average Joe it may be hard to tell
But I am, I'm the sun close Yeah the truth is out there
Ask up in prayer Area 51
Here they are some lazy guys Getting in ties to wars and lies
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Can't tell where I am.
This, of course, is Sean Hogan.
And by the way, this record, which is about this program, is available.
You can stream it free of charge.
We've got a link up on the site now.
Same place you can see the photographs that Sir Charles Schultz has up there.
You know, they're a must-viewing for anybody out there.
This is life on Mars.
There seems very, very, very little Question about it.
This is Life on Mars.
Go look for yourself.
These are sand dollars, and on the sand dollars are impressions of life.
Life on Mars.
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, where's 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?
Yes, there is one thing that really stands out in my mind, and that is There is a sample return mission scheduled for 2005.
Oh, that's right.
In fact, you were about to talk about that.
I hope you'll talk about that, please.
Well, sure.
I'll spend a few minutes on it.
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 a 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.
We don't know.
Might grow up and eat us.
And toward that end, do you know we're collecting cometary material right now, too?
We have another spacecraft tailing a comet, as it were, and collecting material from its tail.
Would that have the same caution for you?
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.
In my opinion, and understand that I'm very pro-space and pro-technology, and 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 I'm 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.
Right.
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.
Really?
I had not heard that.
Well, the fact is, if this biological serial ...were to be returned, and it were in a space station, or on another vehicle, and even if it went through a fiery re-entry, there is no guarantee that it would be the end of those organisms.
That worries me.
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, Look at this!
Oxygen!
Water!
Let's rock!
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, 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.
And the odds are on the side of it perhaps enjoying what it finds here.
And quite possibly, you know, it might love ocean water and frozen food and there's nothing we could do about it.
Like I said earlier, we can't stop athlete's foot or mildew in the shower.
Something totally foreign.
We have no, there's no bets on this.
There's no way of knowing which way it would go.
And maybe there's nothing I mean, they make claims that they find Mars rocks in the mountain.
That's correct, yes.
They do make it here.
There are some meteorites.
Yes, there are some meteorites, and they're called SNCs for Shergoty, Nakla, and Chassigny, the three locations where they're found.
And these SNC 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 travel 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.
Absolutely.
Is there any danger at all in your mind from a rock from Mars which is sterilized on the outside?
Is it even conceivable Do you believe there could be life inside one of these rocks?
Well, it's possible.
Just not?
I wouldn't really hedge my bets.
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.
Even some terrestrial organisms can live through horrible conditions.
That's amazing.
As you see, I haven't heard any of that.
Wow, it survived, huh?
Yes, indeed it did, and it cultured successfully.
Okay, we'll probably come back to this.
Just, I don't know, two or three weeks ago, or whatever, DARPA held this really cool challenge out in the desert.
Yes, the vehicle race.
Yes, to make the autonomous vehicle, and to 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 that 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, and it didn't work out.
I was one of those kids that grew up believing we would have cities on the moon, and hotels in orbit, and a 150 mile an hour lane 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, it 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.
Oh, I bet.
Just wiring a stereo, you know.
Yeah, I guess it's harder than we imagined in our science fiction all those years ago, huh?
Well, there are a great number of details.
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.
What kind of robotic research or work did you do?
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.
Well, OK, then on to artificial intelligence.
That's in here.
That is maybe one of my favorite topics of all time.
I'm watching this computer evolution, as everybody else is, and I'm fascinated.
Our computers are getting fast at an amazing rate.
And it seems like you don't have to project that far down the line to see we're going to be bumping into something Pretty soon.
You know, is artificial intelligence possible?
I absolutely believe that it is.
If you even stop and think for a moment, we're made of neurons.
And you know, our brains are.
And our brains are made of many billions of neurons.
Now, we know that a single cell, as far as we can tell, doesn't think.
But then on the other hand, we know that a full-grown human being does.
And somewhere between a single cell and a full-grown human, there has to be a line you cross where it's thinking.
I mean, that's pretty obvious.
That's logic.
You know, there's got to be a boundary line somewhere.
How are we going to know when we reach that point?
Give me a sort of a scenario where we'd say, well, there it is.
Okay.
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.
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.
It sort of muddies the water, but it's a thought.
I don't know what the test would be.
I'm thinking of something simple.
I mean, if it comes back and makes an inquiry about the nature of its own origin, or something that would indicate And that's a very good indicator.
That's probably a strong indicator.
But there's a danger line there and that is, what if somebody programmed it to do that?
And you might not be able to tell.
So you see, there is a very fuzzy line there and it's hard to determine whether or not it's truly thinking.
I think that until people can agree on the definitions of what thinking is, they can't really make any headway.
My computer's never suggested anything to me, yes.
But we are moving fast.
Now, where do you suppose, projecting ahead, Sir Charles, that we might see indications that we've passed some kind of threshold?
Well, okay.
First we have to consider how fast computers are becoming and how rapidly it's happening.
There's an old thing, it's a rule of thumb, called Moore's Law.
That says that processing power doubles roughly every 18 months.
And so far it's held.
At this point, in the scale of making smaller and smaller devices in integrated circuitry, we've just about reached a barrier.
And manufacturing these things is getting tougher all the time.
And so we may run into a wall with how fast and dense we can make traditional microchips.
And so alternatives are being explored, which I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about.
But the fact is, we have extremely powerful machines right now.
Would that detail be classified?
No, not necessarily.
It's just really a matter of economics and physics and, you know, who's willing to pay more money to make denser chips and still make a buck off of it.
That's the real limiting factor here.
Physics and economics.
But when you start looking at how a system is meant to function, we're slaves of the software still.
And there, let me tell you, there's some pretty pitiful software out there.
I think the real solution is not going to be faster and better hardware.
It's going to be in our software.
The sorts of methods we use to determine things.
How we store information.
So you're saying it's not just a matter of speed and storage.
That's correct.
But of software.
Exactly.
You have to have the program.
Well, I'll give you a perfect example.
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?
Yes, I do.
And here's the interesting thing.
Oh my!
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?
Right.
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 and we're going to put this calculator chip in your head instead and give yourself a couple 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?
He's using a crutch?
He's using a machine to do it?
Just very quickly, let me stop you.
On Discovery the other day, I saw a special about a man who had a capability with numbers that was so Astounding, Sir Charles.
He could beat a woman with a calculator in any sort of calculation.
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.
It was just talent!
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 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 you went into a trance and He would just rattle off numbers at an incredible pace in doing a calculation faster than, you know, the gal with the calculator there could do.
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, and 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?
Well, certainly, that's a possibility.
But understand that everything we do comes at a cost.
I would imagine that... Okay, here's a little cautionary tale.
Hold the cautionary tale.
We're at the top of another hour.
I'm going to just presume you can stick around.
For a little while longer, yes.
All right, all right.
Precious seconds indeed with Sir Charles Schultz.
On the weekend, this is Coast to Coast AM on Mark Bell.
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Well, never fear, we'll get to open lines everybody.
That is coming up, but when you get a mind this good, Sir Charles Schultz, you Absolutely take it for all its worth.
So that's what we're doing.
And we'll get right back to him.
stay right there i really think uh... even the biggest skeptics out there
who would look at the material
Thank you.
That Sir Charles has up on the website right now would be shaken.
I really mean that.
The most serious skeptics with regard to the possibility of life on Mars would have to be shaken by what they would see up there tonight.
So take the challenge and you'll get further in the little cars than DARPA did here recently.
Welcome back, Sir Charles.
Thank you.
A cautionary tale, we were talking about DNA manipulation and you know making the mind work in new ways.
Well yes, 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.
Yes.
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 they had just so much capacity, and they got aimed in one direction and were unable to compensate in the other.
So the hard drive that is our brain can run out of space?
Pretty much, that's the case, yes.
In fact, there have been estimates that said that the brain can store roughly 600 megabytes of information.
Whether that's a true estimate or not, I don't know, but that was just based on... Oh, that's not even what some DVDs can hold!
Exactly, and so if you think about it, then perhaps it's how we organize or program that information.
That is important, not the hardware itself.
Ah, going back to your argument about the software perhaps being the key to artificial intelligence.
Oh, fascinating, alright.
You also worked or looked at nuclear fusion, and I don't know what aspect of it you worked 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 ColdFusion again because maybe there is something here.
What do you think?
Well, that was some of the things that I worked on myself, ColdFusion, and we even have 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.
So that's a very important thing.
Alright, what can you tell me though about what you know to be true about cold fusion?
Based on the experiments we did, I firmly believe that we got definite results.
We had heat output that was in excess of what we expected based on the energy that went into the cells that we built.
Now understand that it was a very small amount of energy, and it would require some serious research to be able to scale it up to a useful effect.
Would it be scalable?
I believe that it would, but that's just a personal prejudice based on seeing it work at all.
Most of the time, when you find an effect like that, you can find something to do with it.
Can you tell me how much energy you measured and what you began the process with?
Okay, well our input energy was typically from around a hundred millionths of a watt or a hundred milliwatts or so to charge a cell up.
So there was a total input of maybe a half a watt put into the cell to get the process started.
And we got energy out from 5 to 15 watts in many cases.
And it was all showing up as heat energy, and it was low-level heat.
The thing got hot, that's all it did.
But the point is that if we can trigger that thing on a larger scale, we might be able to run something useful like a thermal voltaic generator.
So it's your position then that this is a legitimate claim, even though you cited some other things?
That's correct.
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 do a test on it and then you collect your data and then you make an assessment of what you found.
We learn that way.
We ask questions and we learn from them.
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'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.
Well, it's just like your Mars stuff, really.
Well, that's true as well.
In a certain sense.
Now, what was it?
Ponds and Fleshman, wasn't it?
That's correct.
And they became so frustrated at some level here in the United States, they felt compelled to take their work to Europe.
What process do you think There was a lot better funding over there, and there is an atmosphere here that certain processes are not possible, and it isn't even worth investigating.
And, you know, whether that's true or not, it isn't up to an established older fellow with gray hair to say, no, you can't do that.
It's up to the people who have the willingness to actually set up and try the experiment to see whether it's true or not.
I mean, you don't believe everything you're told, and you don't believe everything you read.
And certainly along the way some mistakes are made, or some omissions are made, or some questions haven't been asked.
And so the whole concept is, we as independent thinking people have the opportunity to invest our time and our effort into pursuing the facts.
That's science right there.
Do you think that it's headed somewhere?
I believe there's a very strong possibility, yes.
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.
Cavitation in the sense of a submarine cavitating in the water?
It's similar to that.
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.
Wow.
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 turn 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 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 fuses 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.
How do you feel about the construction of conventional nuclear power plants?
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.
Then there was Chernobyl.
Right, and human intervention.
Now, Chernobyl was an interesting case.
They were using a design that we've never used over here.
They're using a carbon blocks to moderate the speed of the neutron particles.
Carbon will slow down and absorb some energy from 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 autoclave properly.
Again.
That's what started the fire.
Human error, again.
Exactly.
I actually am a strong supporter of the nuclear power industry.
I think that it's just that we need to face waste disposal properly.
Well, they're about to do that in my backyard now that you mention it.
I've heard that before, yes, and it's not a pleasant thing when you think about it.
I think there are alternatives.
I think there are alternatives.
While we're at it, do you think that the storage at Yucca Mountain, considering the length of time that it's going to have to be safe, is safe?
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.
I would recycle it.
Yeah, there have been demonstrations that that is possible, and there is another one that hasn't been followed.
You know, tonight, already, we've run into how many things that should be, and just They're not happening.
They're snubbed technologies, things that never materialize.
Yes, but this world, in its present condition, and I could really go on about that, isn't in a position to be snubbing its nose at these things.
Well, and I think a lot of it comes from the fact that there's a great deal of fear associated with things.
You have to admit that many people today Don't have even half the understanding their parents or their grandparents had of how things work.
Well, I'll tell you... Add to that.
I'll tell you what I'll give you.
I'll tell you something that will give you that perspective.
Go take... There's this young lady who rides through Chernobyl and the adjoining towns and takes photographs.
This tour of, you know, this death zone.
And when you're done looking at all those photographs, maybe a couple hundred of them, You sit down and you think real hard for a while.
Yes, you do.
Yes, you do.
And it's something that never should have happened.
And, you know, obviously, that sort of a reactor would never have been built here.
And it never has been.
There's a huge difference.
And on the upside, we have better designs now that have not been put into practice, but they could be.
And one of them is called the Pebble Bed Reactor.
In one of the tests on a pilot model, they literally pulled the control rods out and walked away to see what would happen.
Wow.
And it reached a certain high temperature, and then it stabilized, cooled down, and stayed there.
And the effect is, this is a meltdown-proof reactor.
It can't be melted down.
Uh-huh.
And if you really want to build nuclear power plants safely, that would be the way to do it, the pebble-bed reactor.
It certainly would be.
It certainly would be.
I think we build disaster into a lot of our hardware based on either ignorance or economics.
And that is our downfall.
We have to pay great attention to the details.
The devil is in the details every time.
Well, I understand, but again, let me try this final, 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?
Well, that does concern me a lot.
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.
That's totally unworkable.
But killing all life would be... Well, that would be close enough.
Okay, and I understand.
From the practical standpoint, don't destroy the world.
I keep all my stuff there.
I need a place to put my stuff.
Well, if you look at it from the standpoint of, we couldn't really destroy the planet.
Yeah, it doesn't matter if everybody's dead.
You're absolutely right.
But a lot of the things that we consider to be things that could cause a disaster are really not as dangerous as we thought.
There's a great deal of hype.
I do worry about such things as a bioengineered organism getting loose, such as a bacterium or something.
Exactly!
That's what's bothering me.
Yes!
And yes, people do have a great deal of hubris.
You know, they feel that they can handle anything and they can do anything and there really won't be any consequences.
And I think that we're at a point where we have to decide, we have to decide whether it's worth taking an advancement or slowing ourselves to the crawl.
And we're always walking the balance.
Because if we take every advancement, yes, we run the risk of disaster.
And if we don't take any advancements, we run the risk of stagnation or worse.
Right.
So we've got to walk the balance.
And the system is, there's no real checks or balances system for it.
And, you know, the human ego gets in the way of human common sense every time.
Well, certainly any government is not going to be regulating out at the leading edge of these sciences.
Well, they can't.
They don't understand it.
Exactly correct, yes.
So, these leading sciences are always sort of on the edge of making their own decisions about whether to progress or not.
Is there a lot of talk in scientific circles about that question?
Well, you know, I've noticed something, and I don't know if anybody's ever taken notice of this.
You don't see any evil, mad scientists, do you?
I mean, think about it.
Well, I don't know, personally, no.
Okay, the people who are brilliant enough to follow this research through They typically don't have the need to destroy with it.
They're generally out after a result.
Well, I'm not going to kill everybody.
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.
I'm just thinking of a mistake.
And that's our biggest problem, a mistake.
People don't always evaluate things objectively.
We'll make a decision based on their feelings rather than the facts, and that's what we have to worry about.
On the other hand, we really don't have a mechanism for controlling creativity, and I don't think we would want a mechanism for controlling it.
We're in an impossible situation to be absolutely blunt.
There's no way of predicting what will happen, or how to control it, or if we need to control it or want to.
It's a scary world from that standpoint.
It is.
I really can't thank you enough for being here tonight.
What a total pleasure.
I'd love to schedule another program with you, perhaps sometime in the future, and we can go into all kinds of areas.
Plus, I'm sure there's going to be a follow-up to your research, right?
Okay, well, thank you.
That would be something I'd look forward to.
Sir Charles, thank you.
And thank you.
And good night.
And there you go, folks.
Wow, that was Class A+.
No doubt about it.
Alright, we are going to now delve ourselves into the human genome.
Otherwise known as Open Lines.
That's right, Open Lines.
Anything goes, unscreened, rip'em, tear'em, no net, live radio, Open Lines, coming right up.
But this is Coast to Coast AM.
Woo!
What's the bottom of the town?
You're one of my last dreams.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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 800-825-5035.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
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.
That would be us.
Good morning, everybody.
It's great to have you along.
And Sir Charles was absolutely excellent.
to change.
So if you have some follow-up you want to make to that, or any other subject, that's what Open Lines is really all about.
anything you want to talk about that's Exactly what's coming right up?
I would like to point out that in my opinion the good lord did not
construct our backs with sufficient engineering knowledge to make them hold up
Bye.
Ha ha ha ha.
That's just a sort of a mental note I'm making, that the human back does not seem properly constructed from an engineering perspective, purely, to comfortably hold up what we put upon it.
That's the statement of a... Oh, there's one more thing.
This is earlier today.
My wife and I were watching CNN, and they were doing a story on Johnny Cochran, 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 Uh, and, you know, 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, uh, you know, they went in to excise it before it could grow.
You've got to laugh at life sometimes.
Sorry, Johnny.
I thought that was so funny.
I don't know why.
She just hit me at the right moment with that.
Maybe it's a conscience.
First time caller on the line.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi, Mr. Bell.
Hi.
It's a great show.
First time caller, long time listener.
You and your guest discussed the SETI radio telescope.
That's right.
And wouldn't it be possible to put a much smaller, yet effective radio telescope on the dark side of the moon?
Oh yes.
Maybe like 10 meters across or something?
Absolutely.
And attain the same performance?
No, you'd get much, much better performance.
That's right.
In other words, you would be shielded, protected entirely from all the noise, of Earth.
It would be, believe me, the radio astronomers dreamed happened.
Right, yes, right.
That's it?
Yeah, well, yeah, no, I read an article about the fact that the astronomers themselves felt that, you know, that was one of the things that was hindering them finding anything, was the radio interference on Earth here.
Yeah, it is.
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.
You know, that's a possibility now, or even a good possibility.
Yeah.
That's pretty freaky to think about.
I mean, what if we are, what if we really are alone?
Well, that'd be pretty terrible.
Well, I think it would be.
Alright, thank you very much.
I wonder how many of the rest of you think it would be terrible.
How do you feel about that?
Would it be terrible if we were alone?
Would it really be?
Oh, I guess in one way, perhaps.
But maybe in another it would mean that humans are really special.
And maybe that's also an extremely egotistical attitude to imagine we are special.
But so far we are.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Is this me?
That's you.
Okay, this is Dr. Daniel here in Omaha.
Hello.
And I think there's no chance in the face of the earth that we're all alone.
You don't think so?
No, I think Sir Charles is quite right.
I think that there's, in fact, enormous amounts of life all over the solar system and probably all over the universe.
I believe that, I think, and I hope you're right.
Well, my background is cryptography and optical neural nets, and the neural nets is the important part.
Neural nets are a way of replicating the human brain in a computer system.
We're doing it optically now, and that means that finally you have non-linear working with non-linear, so we can understand how these things work.
I'm actually seeing communications between one-celled creatures with other one-celled creatures, and it can be across rooms.
Plants have the same ability.
So now you're talking about what 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.
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 synapse, its own interconnections.
Einstein had like ten times the number of interconnects that most human beings do.
He seemed to see it in a more limited way.
Yeah, but it's unlimited.
And then there's the other problem, where's all this stuff going?
Well, I don't know if it's limited or unlimited.
Well, we find that in storing the material away, we can store terabytes, huge amounts of information in the machine because it's non-linear, stacking it in there, it's interconnected and associative memory so that it's But he said you're operating with less than a DVD there, buddy.
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.
I think we're storing it in another dimension.
Oh, you do?
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.
You think we've got the great hard drive in the sky?
I think we're connected to the great hard drive in the sky.
Well, hey, that's as good a theory as any.
By the way, you wouldn't have a back problem if you walked on all four legs.
I'll bear it in mind.
Thanks a lot.
Crawl along like one of my four cats.
Well, I'd get to know them better, wouldn't I?
Back problems.
I'm telling you, the man did not design the human back.
I mean, you look at the rest of us, and it's exquisite.
Really, it is.
The arms, the legs, everything else seems to have form, function, and do its job admirably.
But the human back?
No.
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.
Hi.
Oh, yes, I'm sorry.
I just love the show, and I love the thirst for knowledge, you know, and the truth.
Me too.
I was wondering your take on the Illuminati, and what you think their purpose is.
Oh, I don't know.
You know, the Illuminati, the Masons, and all these groups that people, you know, think have all the great secret knowledge and all the rest of it.
I don't even know if I believe in all that.
I mean, they exist, but I don't know that all that is attributed to them is true.
It's one of those things that I think lives larger in myth than reality.
But I mean, there's something to it.
There's a nugget of Reality to it, but I don't know.
I think the myth is much bigger.
Well, I appreciate that.
Okay, right.
You're very welcome.
Yeah, I do.
I think that the myth, it'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.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hey, Art.
Hey.
Oh, awesome.
Okay.
I haven't talked to you since I talked to Dr. Paul Mahler and just wondered about several things.
I got about 12 questions.
I was really hoping to talk to Sir Charles and I was wondering how I could get a hold of him so I could email him all my questions.
I would recommend going to his webpage before it disappears from our webpage and getting a contact email address on there and sending him a message!
Would you be kind enough to pass that on?
No, I'm passing it on to you now.
Go up to our website, get on his website, find the contact place to send an email and send it.
Okay.
Do you have his last name?
Schultz.
S-H-U-L-T-Z.
Right, as in the Peanuts Crater.
But most importantly, the link is there now.
Okay.
Alright, yeah, I was going to ask you about the Sunstroke book, but just quickly, if I could mention, when you were talking to Dr. Paul Moller, he had mentioned something about launching the Aerocar in spring, and I hadn't heard anything about it.
Nor have I. Okay.
And Sunstroke, with regard to Sunstroke.
Now, I didn't go farther with Sir Charles.
I was really hoping you would.
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, oh no, we were close, really close, and that's with our good technology.
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, shallow depths, 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.
I think you'd interviewed him.
As you know, I've interviewed that author, yes.
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.
Hi, this is Jean.
I'm calling from Calgary, QR 77.
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 happened have come true.
Who made this prediction?
It's an alien that I contacted through a Ouija board.
And his name is McGarris?
I beg your pardon, what was that name again?
McGarris.
McGarris?
Yeah.
And what did McGarris have to say?
That in 2039... Yes?
There will be something like a holocaust.
There will be great fires.
And the state of Kansas will disappear.
Not Kansas.
The whole state of Kansas.
I have friends in Kansas.
I know.
And I wouldn't wish anybody any ill in Kansas.
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
This is an awful lot of information from a Ouija board.
McGarris, you know... Well, I talked to him a lot, and then I threw the board away.
Did you spend hours and hours and hours with McGarris, or what?
Yeah.
Well, you've got to understand, when you use a Ouija board, McGarris could have just been an evil entity masquerading as, you know, an alien.
Well, he said he was a being of light.
Now he's a being of light.
A being?
Of light.
Yes, I got that.
And an alien.
We see all these beings of light all around us right now.
So I imagine it's a being of very high vibration or concentration or rapid energy.
I don't know.
What is light?
I don't know either, but thank you for that, I guess.
And McGarris, McGarris's word, McGarris is an alien, which he had rather extended conversations with over the Ouija board.
And so you can take that prediction to heart or not.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi there, John Kingman.
How are you doing this evening?
I'm excellent, John.
Good, good.
I'm with the Downwinders over here and I read an article in the Prairie Valley Times that they are going to release bio agents over at Frenchman's Flat.
I wonder if you knew anything about it.
Not only no, but hell no.
Let's roll over this one more time.
Okay?
Okay.
Someone emailed me a letter.
First of all, who are the downwinders?
Downwinders.
Between 51 and 62, when they were over there at the National Testing Center and popping off atomic bombs for testing purposes.
The downwinders are what?
Are people who were radiated, and a lot of us have died, from exposure to radiation that came from Those days.
Okay, gotcha.
And you've heard that they're going to be releasing something somewhere near my area?
Yes, at Frenchman's Flat over at the National Testing Center.
What are they going to release?
According to this article in the Prairie Valley Times... That's our newspaper here in town.
Yes, it is.
Bio-weapons.
What?
Yeah.
What?
Smallpox and anthrax.
What?
To see if their testers are working.
Really?
I can't believe you haven't heard about this.
Me either.
That was in the... I do get the newspaper, too.
Yeah.
I subscribe, so... Yeah, this was just somebody emailed me a link, and I went over there and read it on their website, and bingo.
Which was in the newspaper of what date?
Off the top of my head, I don't know.
I can email you the link if you'd like.
Well, not until I hang up.
I haven't... Okay, to answer your question, I haven't heard about it.
Yeah.
Probably means nothing.
I don't know.
That was my reaction, too.
Anthrax would be okay.
Anthrax is already in the wild, but smallpox isn't.
That's my concern.
Well, cheers to you, too, sir.
We'll do the research.
Okay.
Right.
Take care.
We'll check it out.
International Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
I've got the same problem you've got, the L4-L5 thing.
I was under great risk of paralyzation from the waist down.
So I went through the surgery.
Still got the pain, but I'm walking.
And glad to be.
Good for you.
Second item, I don't believe that we are not alone in the universe, and I place that opinion just on the fact that us stupid Human types have got around to juggling our genes and into the cloning business, and if we can do it, there's got to be people a lot more smarter and wiser than we are.
Right.
I agree with that.
Certainly probability.
I am a little bit rattled, I admit, though, by the fact that SETI's been at it as long as they have.
Not even a whisper.
I mean, you've really got to think that one through a little bit.
I agree with you there, but you know, there's other levels of communication that we might not be aware of.
Of course, you're going up a blind alley.
I don't deny that.
Yeah.
But radio or electromagnetic radiation would seem such a common probability, you know, when light got to some certain complexity.
Yeah.
That we ought to be here.
I agree with you, but isn't it a mystery and it's wonderful to think of all those possibilities.
And that's what we're all about, sir.
That's for sure.
Thank you so much for calling in.
Take care.
Alright, well, that's what we're doing tonight, folks.
All night long.
Open lines.
Anything you want to talk about.
From the high deserts, in the middle of the night, this is Coast to Coast AM.
What do Mel Gibson and the Coral Castle have in common?
What do Mel Gibson and the Coral Castle have in common?
Music playing.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area codes.
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.
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 Art at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell 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.
Well, here it is.
I've got the story, of course.
From my very own Trump L.A.
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.
Thank you.
The Nevada Test Site will be the testing ground for releases of chemical and biological materials.
Nye County Commissioners were informed Tuesday.
Mike Skalgard, 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.
Hmm!
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.
Huh.
And the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service.
Huh.
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.
Hmm.
This is a long story.
Let's see.
Certain chemicals, quote here, The really, really nasty stuff can't be released due to treaty considerations, said he.
Instead, the test will, that's good news, the test will involve pretty benign types of biological organisms, he said.
Most of what we're looking at are not actual chemical weapons.
In fact, we wouldn't release any of that at all, he said.
That's good.
Let's see.
Let me read down here.
The highest concentrations will be 100 meters only from the release sites, he said.
And by 500 meters, the material will be at a level that wouldn't even be detectable, he said.
Let's see.
Hmm.
Well, certainly news for me.
And in the 19 March issue of our local newspaper right here, so they're going They're going to set some of those little things loose up there.
I still love the desert.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello?
Hello?
Yes, hello.
Hi.
Hi.
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.
I thought last night's guest was absolutely amazing.
Yeah, he was.
In more ways than one.
To start, let me tell you, both my son and I have autism.
My son is more severe.
Autistic in what manner?
Autistic in what manner?
Yes.
In other words, I understand that generally with autism, the definition of the word, there's two sides to it, right?
In other words, one side is an ability, many times, that the rest of us don't have.
And the other side... Lack of abilities on the other side.
Sure.
Yes.
So in what manner does the autism manifest itself?
Both.
Both sides.
Well, I guess more specifically, what is the other side?
Well, like in my son's case, he's 11.
He is quite a bit like the, like the, oh, what was that movie?
I can't think of it now.
But anyway, the one with Dustin Hoffman.
Rain Man?
Yeah, that was it.
Rain Man.
Rain Man, yes.
My son is very much like that, with numbers, but has difficulty speaking, and he lives like In his own world, so to speak.
Males have more severe autism than females.
Anyway, getting back to what it was exactly I was calling about.
Both of my parents worked for the government.
My mother worked for NASA and other aerospace industries.
Yes.
And my father worked at Area 51 in the test site.
He did?
When I was growing up.
Really?
I know you're probably not aware of this, but Nevada has the highest ratio of autistic people than any other state.
No, I was not aware of that.
We're like 7 out of 450 people.
Although, if you're relating that to the nuclear testing, then wait now.
Wait for me.
I think there would be a higher likelihood of it in Utah, because actually the testing in Nevada affected the people in Utah more than Nevada.
Well, most of my family is from Utah and Colorado.
Gotcha.
I don't know what difference it does make, but I just thought that that's very unusual.
Well, they were kind of the downwinders, like you heard that man talking about.
Well, now autism is being linked to early infant immunizations, and it's also being linked to more specific racial, like Caucasian males have the tendency to become more infected by it.
I mean if you could read the whole story on it, it sounds like something out of a Robin Cook novel.
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, he 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.
Work with it, touch it, play in it, do anything you want, no problem.
Dioxin, no problem.
Absolutely astounding.
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, it was pretty far out stuff.
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.
Some rip snorter of a program.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hey Art, how you doing today?
I'm doing alright.
Thank you for taking my call.
How are your two cats?
I just got a new cat about a year ago.
I have four cats, sir.
Well, count them, four.
I have two, Orange and Black and White.
Uh-huh.
Amy and Frida.
Uh-huh.
Calling from WRKO Boston, Joe.
And I want to touch on this Iraq.
And it's something I want to touch on.
And the reason I mentioned Iraq and the nuclear power, because a few weeks ago on the Science Channel, They had a man who is making oil from trash.
So it can now be done.
Recycled trash.
He's already got a couple plants.
So I think we should pull completely out of the Middle East.
We've done enough over there.
The more we give, the more we're not appreciated.
Joe, you don't think that our leaving now would be regarded as a loss?
No.
We've lost too much over there now.
We've lost too many people.
More bodies will be coming back, and the more we stay over there, it's going to get worse.
Yes, but if we don't attain our original objective, and we have not done so until... I'll bet you lunch we won't get Ben Laden because Bush could have gotten him.
Well, that's Afghanistan.
You're jumping from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Let's stay with Iraq for a moment, alright?
It's all related, but okay.
Well, I'm not sure it is.
Okay.
And I'm not sure it matters, but we're in Iraq now, and I think if we were to just... You know, I hated the idea of the Iraq War.
I thought it was a... I'm sorry, I thought it was dumb.
I was very much against it, but... I agree with you.
But!
Now we're there.
What can we do?
We can't change these people.
We can't free those people.
They have to want to free themselves.
What we can do over there is kill terrorists, and that's what we're doing.
Yeah, well, we'll be doing that for the next hundred years.
Well, would you rather kill them here, or rather kill them after they did something in L.A.?
I think... I mean, that's a valid question.
Sure, I'll answer it if I may.
I think what we can do is close our borders for a while.
Arm ourselves.
Don't take a new first strike.
We're going to give the submarine commanders I don't know.
I'm sorry.
I can't go along with you there.
I really can't.
Seal up the borders.
Stick your head in the sand.
Look here.
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, there's no point in crying over spilled milk, 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.
I don't have them.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Good to talk to you.
And to you.
Yes, a couple of comments on the lighter notes.
First of all, your guest tonight that you hit on, that guy was great.
What?
He sounded exactly like he knew what he was talking about.
Well, that's because he did.
Yeah.
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?
I don't know.
I don't have an answer to that, and I haven't made up my mind yet about whether I have confidence in the Bible codes 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.
Well, I don't go with it, period.
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 somewhere and I'm thinking, I could have swore that person died.
Like, give an example, Peter Falk was one.
I could have swore I saw it on a newscast that he passed away in 1999.
And then he said, new series of something about Columbo, and I thought, no.
Anyway, I started doing some checking, and he was still around.
Well, there was plenty of news about Peter Falk.
Anyway, I know exactly what you're talking about.
I've had many, many emails from people who have had the same experience, and I'll tell you, there are many who believe that, and I know this is just wild stuff, but timelines have been changed.
And somebody has either tampered with time, or timelines, or some manner of anomaly has occurred.
And what you remember did happen in an alternate timeline.
And crazy as that sounds, there you go.
The other one that really blew me away, this really did, was the one with the Blake Edwards.
I could have swore, swerved down, I saw something about his passing.
It seems like I even remember something about Julie Andrews was on a particular program talking about it and something about his... Right, okay.
Well, listen.
You need go no further.
I perfectly understand what you're saying.
And it's a legitimate area of inquiry.
And that is... I've experienced it myself.
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 Or, maybe there is a bit of tampering going on out there.
Wes for the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello, Ort.
Hi.
Hi, I wanted to ask Mr. Schultz... Well, he's not here.
Yeah, yeah.
Maybe you might be able to answer this.
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.
I don't have answers for any of that.
Do you believe that we did not go to the moon?
I don't have any definitive proof, but I just wonder why we aren't able to prove... Is that what you lean toward?
Is that what you lean toward believing?
That we didn't go?
Well, I've just had people show me some books, like one is how NASA mooned America.
But you'd 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.
God, 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, aye, aye.
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 bull.
It goes on, quote, I was furthermore a witness to an extraordinary phenomena 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 to 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 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?
I've been wondering a lot about that lately.
I can't survive, I can't save a life without your love.
Oh baby, don't leave me this way.
I can't exist without you.
And all I knew that all you did was surrender.
Oh yeah.
And I have met my destiny in quite a single way.
The mystery book on the shelf.
The song is creeping inside.
Want you.
I will defeat you.
Want you more.
Want you.
Promise you'll love me forever more.
Wanna do?
Goodness sake, if I wanna do!
Wanna do?
Knowing I'd face the beat Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
I'm fine as a crazy robot I tried to hold you back, but you were stronger
To talk with Art Bell Call the Wild Card Line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
It is, and we're engaged in outright open lines, you name it, we'll talk about it.
We're from Terram Talk Radio, that's what it is.
Anyway, it's great to be here and I can see the program is elapsing ever too quickly, so we'll get right to it.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Open lines.
Rock and roll.
First time caller line.
You're on the air.
Hey.
Well, now you are.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes, Art.
It's the first time I'm calling.
First time I'm listening also.
It's a fascinating program.
It is.
We spend time, I guess, thinking about stuff up here that, you know, just doesn't happen the rest of the day on radio or TV or anywhere.
And there were a few things, though, that were said that I can correct some errors.
People have said that there's no evidence, for instance, of us having landed on the moon.
Yes.
And that's absolutely untrue.
There are retro-reflectors that, if you know the coordinates of the retro-reflectors, you can use a reasonable-sized telescope and a laser and you can get a reflection, which you will not get from the surface of the moon.
So I've heard, yes.
And that's been proven.
You have to take NASA's word for it.
The smaller telescopes nowadays can do that than any of the big telescopes that were designed for that purpose.
I have no problem believing we went to the moon.
Believe me.
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 end.
I've got all that, but you know a guy named Murphy, obviously.
Sure.
And I don't think you should say that.
It's like saying unsinkable.
It just can't be.
Absolutely safe, it just can't be.
There are always some extreme possibilities, obviously, but the point is you can make it sufficiently safe that it's not going to Cause any great damage.
And the power densities are not that high that it's not going to go scorching the earth in any event.
It might possibly expose some creatures or something to a little bit more power than they're getting from the sun.
But, you know, the power densities are only a factor of 10 times or something like that.
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.
Yeah, I'm not saying that we should do it necessarily, but I think that 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.
Why do you think that we have not done it?
At this point, it might be a better question.
I mean, we actually have the ability.
It's cost.
Cost?
Yeah.
It's very expensive right now to put a lot of stuff into space.
And the problem is that You have to build a fairly large structure.
You know, I've got that.
But I mean, think about it, sir.
The Earth desperately needs, and this country desperately needs, power not sourced in coal or oil or whatever.
And that would be a biggie.
That would be a real biggie.
And a lot of things we do up in space, they're almost hard to justify going to space for.
This would be so easy to, you know, people would understand that.
Well, the problem is, of course, that the collecting side, the sun is very diffuse.
So you're talking about a kilowatt per square meter.
So if you're trying to power, let's say, a good-sized American city, you need on the order of a billion watts.
So that means you need a million square meters.
Well, that's a kilometer on each side, and that's 100% efficiency of collection, and we don't have that.
So you're No, although I think even with current... Do you know where we are currently?
At what percentage can a spacecraft of efficiency can a spacecraft panel collect now?
You can get pretty high, isn't it?
30% now.
You're talking about in orbit?
Yeah.
You can get 30% with good, reproducible, reasonably priced for spacecraft solar cells.
Now the kind of solar cells you buy for Right.
Putting on your roof or something are much less efficient.
Right, gotcha.
Alright, well listen, thank you very much.
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 cooking 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.
Wall Card Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi, Arthur.
This is Robert in Albany, 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.
Yes, sir.
I have more than a vague recollection of Nelson Mandela's death.
Yes.
I remember watching the newscast.
I lived in New York City at the time.
I know.
Sir, I could swear the same thing.
Right.
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 Building.
I heard that it began to do that.
Right.
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, upstate New York, and would have had no such problem.
Well, I have a very, very vivid recollection of it.
Fine.
All right.
And so, what do you think about this phenomenon?
I mean, what do you think is causing it?
I have a theory, and I have no way of proving it.
It's just a theory.
On your program over the years, people have done various commentaries on time travel.
And why haven't we seen the time travelers if they exist?
Well, what about Leonardo da Vinci?
What about his 20th century style inventions back in the Renaissance?
What if he were time travel?
What if there are time travelers who have in fact tampered with the timeline?
Michio Kaku claims that you can't go back in time in your own timeline, the grandfather theory.
You can't go back and kill your own grandfather.
You would go back in time and kill an alternate timeline.
Yes, but you would kill him, but you would simply create a new bubble.
That's his basic theory.
I have a much simpler theory.
Occam's Razor says the simplest answer is usually the best.
Which would, you think, be what?
Somebody goes back in time and kills his grandfather, as a result of which he's never born, as a result of which he doesn't go back in time and kill his grandfather.
As a result of which he is born, as a result of which he does go back in time and kill his grandfather, is caught in a temporal loop for eternity.
Huh.
He lives it over and over again.
Well, that'd be hell.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alright, well, hey, that's as good as any.
I don't know.
I don't know.
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 phenomena seems to stick out from that as being more than that to me.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air, hi.
Um, hi R. Hello.
Um, yeah, I have two topics to talk about.
Um, the first one is, uh, I saw yesterday a trailer for The Day After Tomorrow.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, and, um, it looks kind of corny.
Oh, no.
Well, do you think it's corny looking?
No, I don't.
I think it's very chilling.
Oh.
Very.
Which, and I didn't mean that as a, uh, a pun, either.
Oh.
Uh, I meant chilling as in A chilling possibility, and it is a possibility.
Well, I'm not a big movie fan anyway, so I don't like most movies, but, um... Well, actually, I think it's cool, because, like, the guy that called up, he was from Albany, and I'm from the Albany area, so that's kind of cool that, like, two of us called up.
Well, then, there are coincidences!
And, um, the other thing is, uh, I want to thank you, because a couple weeks ago, I, uh, 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 left and 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?
I'd love it.
That'd be a blast.
Sure, I'd love to see it.
Thank you.
And now we have something new to talk about.
The release of, I don't know, Little Things, and testing of biologicals of varying sorts up at the test site.
Great.
The good news just never ends.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, this is Jeff from Northern California.
How are you doing tonight, Art?
Alright, Jeff, what's up?
Well, I just wanted to get on there and say that from a fellow ham, and not just any ham, but one of those crazy moon bouncer types, amateur astronomer and all-around science nut.
That's one of the things, by the way, folks, that hams can do.
They can bounce signals off the moon.
It takes quite an array, and a lot of patience, and a lot of technical ability, but you can sure bounce a signal off the moon.
You've done that, huh?
Oh yeah.
On 2 meters and 432.
Large array on both.
Yeah, that's excellent.
Also an amateur astronomer with a couple of large telescopes.
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.
I just don't find any controversy from studying myself.
Me and my wife, we quite intently study.
He's 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.
Well, while I'm glad that there would be no disturbance in your household, you should be aware that there would be disturbances in other households.
Oh, absolutely.
I'm aware of it because I get thousands of emails, sir, and I respect people's, you know, their 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.
Enough that it would be a social, you know, if life were suddenly announced, there'd be a gigantic social ripple, like throwing a big boulder in a pond.
I mean, you'd see a pretty big wave out of this one, believe me.
Oh yeah, and that's why the Brookings document is accurate, and it's just so unfortunate that so many people are listening to others rather than studying it for themselves.
That's just something that me and my wife wanted to pass along.
Anybody out there who's confused by this, go and look at the Genesis account and these things for themselves.
There's 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.
Well, who else is he going to give it to?
I know.
There's plenty to argue both ways.
I'm just saying that people interpret and take to heart different parts of the document.
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.
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, it's just so massive.
How there couldn't be anything else out there alive that God has also created.
It's not possible. It's not included, but it's not excluded either.
Well, you know, okay. Yes, I live out here in the desert where we do a lot of that.
You know, the air here is thin, in the sense of, you know, 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 a 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.
Definitely awe-inspiring.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi Art, this is Jeff from San Bernardino.
How are you doing tonight?
Okay my friend.
Good to talk to you again.
And I want to thank you for bringing this always fascinating radio.
You and George do a great job.
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.
Oh.
And I was next to a large array of microwave towers.
Yes.
And we took a It actually lit up on its own on the ambient energy that was around there.
That's right.
And I wonder if you've ever done anything like that?
Oh, yes.
Operating your antenna and what your results were.
Oh, yes.
It's possible, for example, to hold a fluorescent, a standard fluorescent light bulb just near the feed line to my antenna.
Really?
And she'll light right up, sir.
Just like you.
Turned the switch on, so sure.
Yeah, what causes that phenomenon?
Anything that maybe Tesla has done and maybe you can elaborate on?
Well, it's just the nature of RF energy and electromagnetic fields and how it works.
And there just becomes enough coupling to fire it and, believe me, near a fairly high power transmitter, a 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.
Good morning, Art.
Hi.
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.
It was really bizarre.
That you saw where?
Well, this was in Fort Worth.
I don't understand the first thing that happened to you.
You saw something like a crack.
Where?
A crack in what?
It was flying overhead and it looked like a mirror image of the sky.
It was like I was looking at mirrors floating through the sky.
It was really the most bizarre thing.
I knew that I was seeing an object, yet it was like I was looking into the sky, but looking at some sort of mirrored image of the sky.
Very strange.
And it was over the Air Force Base out there in Fort Worth.
Okay, well, here's the answer, I think, to your question.
The United States, quite clearly right now, and I'm not giving away any secrets here, because I don't know them to be Reality.
But I think without question, in my opinion, the United States is working really hard on optical invisibility.
I think we've already pretty much achieved radar invisibility.
That's a done deal.
And I actually think we are now working on optical invisibility.
And I think those planes are being tested.
And I've had a lot of reports from people, email and otherwise, who have seen Virtually what that man just said.
You look at something, you actually, in some cases, could hear some sort of propulsion from some sort of aircraft, and you look above, and all you see is a sort of ripply kind of distortion where normal sky should be.
Well, it doesn't take, you know, a rocket, or maybe it does take a rocket scientist, I don't know.
Listen, we're out of time!
I've gotta go.
And it's been just a wonderful weekend.
Thank you very much.
Here is Crystal.
Always just the right words to take us on.
Good night!
Midnight in the desert Shooting stars across the sky This magical journey Will take us on a ride We're filled with a longing Searching for the truth Will we make it till tomorrow Will the sun shine on you?
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