Sir Charles Shults III presents NASA’s Opportunity rover images as "irrefutable" proof of Martian fossils—trilobites, coral, and squid-like remains—suggesting past oceans and hidden water, while alleging photo tampering like cropped geysers and embedded symbols. He proposes orbital solar mirrors to control climate, citing a Russian experiment’s partial success, and questions why scalable solutions like $3B solar power stations or superconducting satellite launchers aren’t prioritized despite economic urgency. Callers debate NASA’s suppression of biology research post-Viking, while Shults III dismisses microwave interception risks for space-based energy, endorsing carbon nanotube elevators instead. Ultimately, the episode blends Martian life claims with energy tech critiques, hinting at classified knowledge and systemic delays in innovation. [Automatically generated summary]
One way or the other, and a lot more of it this morning because we're having a brief, free weekend, and I'll tell you more about that.
But first, there is some upsetting, shocking news, and it may be something, or it may turn out to be hopefully not too much.
But Whitley Streeber was scheduled in this hour to talk about a story down near home for him in Texas.
A story about the possibility of chupacabra, actually.
But I'll tell you what, as I am accustomed to doing, I called my guest.
I called Whitley about an hour prior to the program.
And he picked up, and you could hear a lot of shuffling around.
And he said, Art, I can't be on tonight.
Ann just collapsed and hung up.
Anne is Whitley's wife and a very good friend of ours.
And so I hope you will join me in saying a prayer that Anne is all right.
If we should get some sort of update during the program tonight, I will definitely give it to you.
But he sounded, you know, just in absolute panic, as you can imagine, a spouse would be.
So Woodley Streeber not with us this hour, and again, just a very time for a very quick panicked and just collapsed call, he told me, and click.
As it should be, you know, his duty was to, immediate duty was to his wife.
And I have no idea.
I have no details beyond that whatsoever, except to tell you that I'm very, very, very concerned.
So join me, please, in saying a quick little prayer for Anne Streeber and hope she's all right.
And again, if there's any updates during the program, I'll get them to you.
He was going to discuss this creature.
And you can still go to his website and see a photograph of it.
And it is in, it's definitely bizarre.
The headline is, another Texas chupacabra.
Local animal experts are having a very hard time indeed identifying whatever in the hell this is.
Again, if you want to see it, it's at unknowncountry.com.
Some are saying it might be a dog.
I think that Whitley was going to break news that there had been genetic testing and that it didn't come right, didn't come back for a dog.
I mean, it's...
The animal's blue-gray skin is almost hairless, appears to be covered with mange.
A closer look at the animal's jawline reveals a serious overbite, to say the least, and four gigantic, sharp, canine teeth and a long rat-like tail that curls behind the animal's emaciated frame.
The animal, the reason they've got it is it was shot before noon on Friday.
And so they've got another case of what in the hell is this in Texas.
And you're welcome to go take a look if you wish.
But again, I think Whitley had told me that there was late-breaking news about this animal and that a genetic test denies its canine roots or something.
Had he been here, he certainly would have caught us up on that.
And again, I'll update you on this emergency if I'm updated.
Please say a prayer for Anne.
Nationally, obviously we'll go into open lines in a moment.
President Bush turned the table Saturday on Senator Kerry declaring the best way to avoid the draft is to vote for me.
And he pledged to oppose mandatory military service.
The Democrat, on the other hand, stuck to his domestic issues, blaming Bush for a shortage of flu vaccines.
Kerry also opposes a draft and has suggested that re-electing Bush would greatly increase the prospects of one.
The president, feeling that young voters may be swayed by the charge, fired back, the person talking about a draft is my opponent.
How many of you are going to be glad when the election is over?
You know, you get to a national election as we're right on the cusp of right now, and you get to the point where you've had it right up to there.
See, there is more.
You know, this is actually pretty interesting.
Eight states, just eight states, mind you, worth 99 electoral votes are up for grabs in the closely fought presidential race.
It may come down to eight states, and we're one of them.
I'm one of them, in one of them.
Essentially, Florida, of course, right?
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and New Mexico are what it will come down to, they're saying.
And so here I am in a swing state.
Can you believe It we may actually determine the outcome of the election in part.
Little Nevada, well, actually, it's big Nevada, little Nevada population-wise.
In Iraq, explosions hit five churches in Baghdad, killed two U.S. Army, two U.S. Army helicopters, crashed elsewhere in the capital.
So, two American soldiers are dead, two others wounded, as violence continues to flare in Iraq.
This is an odd piece of news that I'm about to read to you, and I don't know what to make of it.
But something's going on.
You all remember NIDS, right?
Colin Cullagher and NIDS, backed by Robert Bigelow.
Well, I found this on the net today.
I occasionally, let's see, surfing the Apocalypse Network, I occasionally surf the National Institute for Discovery Science, NIDS, their website, to look at their articles on cattle mutilations, the Skinwalker Ranch, and black triangles.
In fact, it was NIDS who provided the mainstream science.com website with an article on the triangles, black triangles, as a possible secret aerospace technology.
This was quite recent, certainly within the last month.
Suddenly, though, the entire NIDS site has been pulled and replaced by a static page.
The page announces that, well, I'll read it to you in a moment.
At any rate, it announces essentially their suspension, I guess would be the word.
And this, the person writing here says, I think the possibilities are, one, NIDS was becoming financially and or politically inconvenient to its founder, Robert M. Bigelow, even though he was previously committed to it.
In other words, he acquired, for example, the ranch in Utah, which was the source of paranormal phenomena.
Or, two, NIDS informed guesses about Black Triangle's earthly origins or other matters were simply too close to the bone and the research was suppressed.
Or three, NIDS actually discovered something earth-shattering and was shut down thereafter.
Or it was never Bigelow's aim to share this information publicly.
And to be sure, I'm a friend of Robert Bigelow's.
He's quite a guy.
He's a billionaire and has provided many, many grants to people studying in these fields and a lot of money for research into things that all of us on this program want to know more about.
So it really does come as a shock.
I tried a quick call to Robert Bigelow and didn't get through.
But it is odd.
So I immediately, of course, went to the website myself, and it says, and I quote, We at the National Institute for Discovery Science have come to a time in which a decision must be made as to the direction of the Institute.
We have labored long and hard, coming to the conclusion to place NIDS in an inactive status.
The reasons for this decision are as follows.
One, we have not had the need to do any major investigative work for well over two and one-half years.
Two, in view of that fact, we have decided to reduce our staff.
Three, our administrator, Colin Culleher, has taken a position outside of Nevada to do cancer research.
Colin's ambition had always been to do cancer research and was employed in the field prior to his employment with NIDS.
We are sorry to see him leave.
It goes on, it is unfortunate that there isn't more activity as there was in the past that warrants investigation.
However, we will still retain our secretary receptionist who will remain at NIDS to answer your calls.
Her name is Mary Allman and can be reached at area code 702-798-1700.
She will be talking daily, rather, to Mr. Bigelow's assistants, Janice and Donna.
Should substantial activity occur with the need for investigation, then NIDS will be reactivated with new personnel.
And so I must say, this is quite a mystery indeed.
And as was speculated by the writer of the, what is it, the Apocalypse Network?
It was posted by ILMARINEN, whoever that is.
It's interesting that perhaps it became financially or politically inconvenient to Robert Bigelow to continue it.
Or the informed guesses about the black triangles hit too close to home.
Or NIDS perhaps discovered something very big indeed.
And in fact, I would say of Robert Bigelow, and he is quite a guy, you can't rule out number three.
Robert has always played things very close to the best, and I guess you have to do that.
He's a kind of a mysterious man.
You may recall I interviewed him, and he has an aerospace company and wants to get tourists into space.
He's quite a guy.
But he does play everything very close to the vest.
And so could they have discovered something really major?
Okay, you've seen the photograph then on Whitley's site.
unidentified
Yes, and previously I saw the pictures from the one from around San Antonio, and I thought it looked similar to that, but it didn't have the spots, and the ears looked a little bit different.
But the picture that I saw just tonight looked what I believe is exactly what I saw.
I was mowing my hayfield, and I stirred the thing up.
It kind of ran off, and I'd never seen anything like it.
I just thought it was a little gray, hairless dog or something until this recent activity that's come out.
Well, you've heard all the stories about Chupacabra, right?
That is Correct, yes, sir.
Do you think that's what we're dealing with here, or just something else new?
unidentified
I think it's something new.
As I said, the encounter I had, it was not aggressive, did not seem threatening.
We do run goats here, and I haven't had any problems even with coyotes, or we've heard some big cats last year also in the area.
And just one thing I wanted to note is I've done a little bit of research locally and found that there's just up State Highway 105 on the Trinity River, just say 10 miles west of us, there's been two Bigfoot sightings this year.
Well, I'll tell you, Texas, all right, thank you very much.
Texas really is a place where a lot of this stuff goes on.
I've just been handed a note that Richard Streeber, who's Whitley's brother, called, and apparently Ann is in stable condition, and they're not sure, but it could be a possible diabetic reaction of some sort.
It says Wit will call when he's able to.
So that is the latest.
Richard Streeber saying that it may be some sort of diabetic reaction.
Look here, there was a strange note in today's newspaper here in Columbus, Georgia.
By the way, this is Stephen.
About a guy that watched the day after tomorrow, after drinking nine or ten beers and seeing the movie, decided to set his own house on fire and said the world was coming to an end.
Well, in the category of idiotic, let me make a couple of ads here.
These are possible Darwin Award nominees.
For example, James Burns, 34, a mechanic of Alamo, Michigan, was killed, tragically, in March as he was trying to repair what police describe as a farm-type truck.
Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway, get this, while Burns hung underneath so that he could ascertain the source of a troubling noise.
Well, predictably, Burns was later found actually wrapped around the driveshaft.
Troubling noise.
And then Charles Berger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, North Carolina.
It seems he awoke to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed and steady answered a Smith Wesson 38 special.
Which with predictable results.
You know, he put it to his ear and police said that a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 stories to his death.
A police spokesperson said that Gary Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the building's windows to visiting law students.
You know, it was sort of, well, hey, check this out.
No matter what you do, ah!
And then from Bloomberg, a terrible diet and a room with no ventilation are being blamed for the death of a man who was killed tragically by his own gas emissions.
There was no mark on his body.
And you can imagine they did an autopsy, of course.
It showed large amounts of methane gas in his system.
His diet had consisted primarily of beans and cabbage and a couple of other things in parentheses.
It was just the right combination of foods, a tragic combination indeed.
It appeared the man died in his sleep from breathing the poisonous cloud that was hanging over his bed in his nearly airtight bedroom.
According to the article, he was a big man with a huge capacity for creating this, in quotes, this deadly gas, end quote.
Three of the rescuers got sick and one had to be hospitalized.
So, you know, there's a lot of that going around.
We're going into open lines past the bottom of the hour break, which is coming right up in the darkness.
You're listening to Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
I'm Art Bell.
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.
To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From West to the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country spread 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 Again with Art Bell.
And then there was Michael Anderson Godwin, who made the news of the weird after he, well, passed on.
It seems he had spent several years awaiting South Carolina's electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison.
And then one day, shortly thereafter, while sitting on a metal toilet in his seat, trying to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.
The End Once again, we've got a free Streamlink going on this weekend, you know, like HBO and Schutheim every now and then give you a free weekend, right?
That's what we're doing.
To sort of introduce you to Streamlink, it's the audio service on our website, coastcoastaium.com, that allows you to listen to, and I don't know if you knew this, the last 90 days of shows on Coast for about what amounts to 15 cents a day.
Now, back in March, we added what's become a very popular feature, as you might imagine, that allows people to actually download and then burn to MPEG-3 any of the last 30 days of shows.
And indeed, we also bring on every now and then an absolutely classic program.
So that's going on this weekend, free of charge, anywhere in the world.
You can listen to Streamlink.
And that's really cool because I know in a lot of other countries, this morning they will be listening because it's free if they happen to stumble across it, I suppose.
Well, sadly, I must report, for those amateur radio operators and shortwave listeners, and this is really more of a blow than you might imagine, the Federal Communications Commission decided on October 14th to go ahead and allow broadband internet access over power lines.
They have approved it, ladies and gentlemen, despite all the protest.
It's going to give the cable and phone companies a little competition.
It's a sad day, though, for shortwave listeners, definitely for hams.
The new service will cause extensive interference to receiving shortwave signals from around the world.
Now, even if they somehow manage to notch out the handbands and make the handbands livable, if you're one of those people who likes to listen to, well, I don't know, the BBC, what's left of it, Radio France, International, and a million other worldwide broadcast stations, this may well end your listening career.
And people like Tom, who sent this to me, think that it will prevent, you know, it's virtual jamming in a way.
It will prevent Americans from listening to the broadcasts of other countries.
It will literally completely interfere with all shortwave broadcasting.
Now, they will, of course, attempt to make aircraft frequencies free of BPL and that sort of thing.
But I think it's probably the worst news you could imagine for international shortwave broadcasting, and it will virtually bring it to an end, the listening that is, in this country.
Should it be deployed nationally, why that'll be the end of that, and that's a very important news source, in my mind, gone.
So the implications of this decision are very widespread and very dire indeed.
I think that the price of gasoline on the spot market per barrel is out of control of the President of the United States.
They can release strategic reserves if it gets really bad, but other than that, and that is sort of working at the margins of being able to affect anything, they really can't affect it.
unidentified
I mean, I know a lot of small businessmen, we all own our own routes, and we're forced to buy the gasoline.
And if the price of gasoline continues to rise at the rate it is presently without relief, the price, of course, at the pumps lags the price per barrel that we see, which has gone through the roof, then we will have another recession, if not a depression, as a result of it.
And that's why you don't hear the presidential candidates talking about it a whole lot.
There's not much they can do.
It's affected by many, many things.
And it was completely predictable that the price rise would begin.
And I don't think we're going to see it go back down again.
Or if we do, it'll be a very small cyclical downturn at some point when supply rises finally, but never going to go back to the prices we used to see.
It never will, and it's going to continue to go up.
And it will indeed precipitate a gigantic crisis, worldwide crisis.
When we sneeze, the world catches cold, and the world is beginning to sneeze.
I'm not one to be like a doomsdayer or I like to be positive and whatnot, but the way that I've been watching TV and stuff lately and seeing the way that society is sort of going downhill and younger people are turning to where the language they use on TV, you can't watch TV these days without everything being bleeped out.
And if we're supposed to be so evolved and moving towards a better society and everything, it seems that we wouldn't be so backwards in what we let go, you know, how our manners are and our mannerisms in the world.
Yeah, and I believe that's one of the final things of a civilization before it collapses that people go and go to the poor and the lower class and what some people would call the middle class, but I would even call it just the uneducated, slain class starting to take over and all the people want to be, you know, just because you make $400 million selling records or whatever doesn't mean that people in society should listen to you or want to be you.
It's almost like producers and people are selling out our own society just to make a buck.
And the next thing I could see happening would be we would turn to a dictator or something after we lost our civilization because of the slippery soap effect.
Before you know it, we're going to be overrun with immigrants and everything and something bad's going to happen.
And then next thing you know, somebody's going to come around and say, let's just put martial law into action.
And next thing you know, we'll be just, you know, we'll go right into it and say, yeah, we need martial law.
And it's really our own fault for not stepping up right now.
I know people think of America as a forever thing.
And I think that every major world power at its zenith and somewhat past it have thought of themselves as just the unsinkable, the unbeatable, the or just eternal.
But it ain't that way.
In fact, there's something like 200-year cycles, and we're out toward the end of that one.
So we'll see.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Yeah, this is Maddie.
I'm in Alphadena, California.
Let's see on KFI 640 a.m.
And I was going to talk about high gas prices.
I still am, but I think we should have an alternative energy day.
Something like Earth Day and get people out there promoting hydrogen power.
We better have more than An alternative energy day.
This nation had better start on something with the urgency of the Manhattan Project for alternative energy, or what you just heard this last man say and others is going to come true.
We're going to fall.
Well, you know, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
And without oil, our fall will be pretty hard, sir.
unidentified
Yes, it will.
Here in California, Governor Schwarzenegger had something about a car that he was fueling with hydrogen, but isn't hydrogen rather difficult to put in a car and store and so forth?
And if you look at what's going on in the world right now, for example, the story right in front of me, squid catch stuns scientists.
Sitka, Alaska!
A large humbold squid caught offshore from Sitka is among numerous sightings of species, a species, seen for the first time in waters that far north and the first of the species recovered from British Columbian waters.
The five-foot jumbo-flying squid was shipped this week to California to be kept for research at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
Now, let me tell you something, folks.
The fact that this squid is that far north means that ocean currents are changing.
In other words, where it was warm, it may be getting cold.
Where it was cold, it may be getting warm.
I don't know.
But as these currents change, the fact will be illuminated by stories like this, finding sea animals and fish in places where they ought not be.
And they are there because of the changing ocean currents and temperatures.
And that is what drives the world's weather.
And that was the basic premise in the day after tomorrow, that the ocean currents change, among other things, and we end up with drastically altered weather.
Now, of course, it was an exaggeration for a movie.
But if you look at what's going on in the world right now, it sure does read like that movie.
To recognize and resist the misleading words of leaders who deceive us into doing harm to others, to do no harm, to help us deal swiftly with those who bear false witness, who covet what is not theirs or ours here and abroad.
All right, coming up in a moment is a very, very, very bright guy.
His name is Sir Charles Schultz III.
And he really is a fascinating guy.
He's made some discoveries about some photographs that NASA ostensibly released recently.
And it's his contention that they might not be all they're cracked up to be.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
Be it sight, sound, smell, or touch, the something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch or the scent of a sand, or the strength of an oak leaves 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, From the Euston, to calculus, to fire.
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing, To live in a meadow and hear the grass sing, To live in a meadow and hear the grass sing, To live in a meadow and hear the grass sing, To live in a meadow and hear the grass sing, To live in a meadow and hear the grass sing, To live in a meadow and hear the grass sing, To live in a meadow and hear the grass sing, 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.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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.
Oh, it's very interesting, isn't it, when we begin getting that many calls just in an open line session one hour on the price of gasoline and energy and worry about the whole thing?
That means the public is beginning to wake up a little bit.
Louise in Grover Beach, California, fast blasts me the following.
She says, hey, Art, we need an Energy X Prize.
Well, hey, Louise, that's a pretty good idea.
An Energy X Prize.
Perhaps $10 million coughed up by somebody who would come up with a provable free energy source, or if not free energy, then close enough as to change the likely outcome if we run out of oil, which it appears we're in the process of doing.
You know, we could use a little race like that.
Kind of like the space race, huh?
Only here on Earth with our own hides at stake.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
Coming up in a moment is Sir Charles Schultz III.
Sir Charles Schultz worked at Martin Marietta Aerospace for 10 years on weapon systems and computer-based automated test equipment.
He wrote the nuclear EMP test software for the Pershing II missile system, worked on Patriot, the Copperhead Tank Killer, and Advanced Attack Helicopter Systems.
Wow.
He has performed research under grant on nuclear fusion, was knighted and received a long-term grant for his present research in robotics and artificial intelligence, one of my favorite topics.
He has written many technical publications, magazines, articles on space, astronomy, the atmosphere, space resource development.
In addition, Sir Charles has also appeared on several TV and radio programs, this being definitely one of them.
Sir Charles Schultz has been on the program previously.
He's a very brilliant fellow.
And if you'll go to coast2coastam.com and click on his name, you will then be escorted electronically to his website, where, among other things, you will see pictures taken on Mars of what amount to sand dollars.
They are sand dollars.
I think it's almost, well, I guess not irrefutable, but it appears very close to irrefutable evidence, and he may say, he may use that word, I don't know, that there was life on Mars.
The discovery of life that had been on Mars without nearly any question.
I suppose there's always a little question when you're not actually there.
But aside from that, the photographic evidence appears to be almost airtight.
Well, the interesting thing is, while there's been no official confirmation by NASA, I have been contacted by a number of people who work for both NASA and JPL.
And while they are not allowed to speak publicly because of the non-disclosure agreements that they have signed, they have confirmed to me by telephone and by email that my findings are correct.
That's really a good question, and it has been suggested to me by a number of people that they're able to prolong their funding for missions and exploration as they stand right now, because some feel that if this question is answered, they're going to lose some funding.
I, on the other hand, along with a lot of people, seem to feel that findings of this nature would actually drive more funding into exploration, not less.
So many people have come to me and given me confirmation that otherwise, due to the non-disclosure agreement, they would end up in a federal prison and they would lose their academic credentials.
And, you know, one of the most interesting pieces of evidence has also apparently been silenced as a fellow by the name of Formasano, and I know that Richard Hoagland has discussed him in the past, who found traces of ammonia and methane in the Martian atmosphere.
And he was scheduled last July to make a release about the ammonia findings, and he was essentially silenced.
And then he did emerge with a paper on the methane and how it could be produced underground through volcanic methods or how it could be the product of biological processes.
And to show some interest in the methods of methane being emitted from the ground is one of the things that you've got to pursue.
Where does the methane come from?
He's got evidence of geysers that completely backs up what I've found.
And so at this point, there are people who are making findings that corroborate this, that there must still be biological activity, and the evidence of water has been there all along.
It's a very good and strong indicator that if there was life and there's still water, there still is life.
I mean, at that level, right, I wouldn't think so.
Now, intelligent Martians, that might be another story entirely.
Well, let's think about this a little bit.
Let's try and delve a little deeper.
Could it be that there is a contingent of very religious, faithful people out there who, even with life at the level that we're talking about and demonstrating certainly on your website, would find that heresy that life was only bestowed upon the planet Earth as described in Genesis, and there is nothing else.
And so is it that group of people they're concerned with?
Well, I would certainly hope that those were not the people in control of discovering new facts.
However, historically, that's often been the case.
And so I suppose this is a possibility.
I did work at a local science center for a number of years, and we often ran afoul of some of the things that we could say or do because some of the funding came from local churches and religious groups.
And so that's an amazing thing to discover, that a science center would actually suppress certain things or would not allow you to say certain things because some of their money was coming from religious sources.
Well, I've had a number of people communicate to me, typically through email, that they felt that there were aliens and people knew about the aliens and the government and this was being suppressed and To admit such a thing would mean that they'd have to come clean about other conspiracies or things that had been covered up in the past.
If that's true, then I can see that there would perhaps be a reason to try and cover it for a while.
But then again, with the findings we have, it only makes sense to admit the facts and move on.
Because obviously when you look at a fossil, you know what it's made of, you know the environment it's in and the conditions that were there in the past.
And all the fossils fit together into the same sort of context.
They lived in the same environment.
And there's a very strong case for it being exactly what you see it is.
Assuming that NASA suddenly announced that, yes, irrefutably, these are photographs of life, and frankly, we have the signs that there's probably continued life on Mars even now.
Well, first off, it would mean that many of the conclusions that they had drawn and stuck to very publicly over years past were, in fact, completely wrong.
And so you could see that any of the things that they'd said about the conditions on Mars would then be called into question.
And there are a lot of very good people who've done research and posted things, and their name is attached to this, and their reputations would suffer.
And there obviously would not be everyone in on such a plot, you know.
Surely there are many very good and honest people working on this data, and they're just dying to say what they've discovered.
And they're obviously being told by someone, no, you're not allowed to say that, or, well, we'll eventually get around to saying that.
Implications.
Well, I suppose there's not very many government agencies I trust.
You know, as I've grown, when I was young, Sir Charles, I did trust them, and most Americans did.
I'm old enough.
I'll be 60 in June.
And so I can remember a day when, boy, I'll tell you what, when the FBI came on TV and said something, you could take it to the bank.
Absolutely.
I mean, there was that day in America, and we have had so many lies told to us and so many conspiracies that, frankly, have come true that Americans have become rather cynical, and I'm one of them.
That happens with age as you watch these things unfold.
When I was a child, I thought NASA was the greatest thing there ever was, and I was very inspired.
And the actions of the astronauts, very courageous people who went and risked their lives for exploration and discovery, without a question, that's a fantastic thing.
And it took a great number of very honest, hardworking, and technically-minded people to put that program together, to get things to work.
And to then make discoveries of this sort over the last few months, it really is disheartening, to say the least.
I've got almost no confidence in anything presented by NASA at this point.
Well, gosh, Sir Charles, when I first interviewed you, it was a very electrifying interview indeed.
You were still, I don't know, pretty trusting and very not so quick to be suggesting that something photographs might have been tampered with or NASA might have done something wrong.
I mean, I recall the hesitancy in your voice, and now, just a couple of interviews later, you're beginning to sound, well, Sir Charles, just a little cynical.
In fact, in the course of doing this research, I've discovered that in the past, NASA was caught tampering with images.
There is an article in Mars News from November 8, 2002, that they had presented a low-res cropped image in place of a much higher-resolution image that they had.
And this was discovered by, of all people, Richard Hoakland.
Well, and that's a question that nobody has ever really resolved.
They presented less data than they actually had, a smaller cropped image with lousy resolution, and said this was the best one that they had.
And then three months later, they released the actual image.
It had already been obtained by both Keith Laney, who's a contractor for NASA, and by Richard Hoagland.
And they had exposed the fact that NASA had indeed tampered with the data.
and the interesting thing is many of the mars research community attacked them and accused them of fraud somehow they had cooked up this higher resolution image when in fact That's true.
And in the end, it turns out that the researchers who made the accusations were dead wrong.
So NASA does, in fact, tamper with data from time to time, and there's a history of it.
And when the high-res version became available, what shocking information was on that that would have justified the presentation of a much lower-res image?
There's nothing really shocking or outstanding about it.
It's just a better picture.
And I've looked at the image and I don't see anything outstanding about it.
It just proved that they did not release the highest res image they had, that they, in fact, lied about having the higher res image and failed to release it until later.
But at this point, I have my doubts about such things.
And I've run across a number of cases just recently with the opportunity images, particularly panoramic images and navigation images from Saul 167 and 168, where they have obviously been deliberately tampered with.
They have cut away or cropped parts of the images so that it looks like there's an edge of a crater wall, the sky showing, when in fact, if you look at the identical images side by side, all of that area is filled with rock and other details.
And in later edits showing up on Sol 168 particularly, somebody has left their signature or vanity mark in the white cropped away area of the image, and it looks like a little space invader.
And it's unusual in how it's hidden, and to find it takes a little bit of skill in the photo editing program, but it is definitely there, and that's listed on my site as well.
Now, I looked at other images taken by the navigation cameras on the same saw, wondering what it might be if they were trying to hide something, what it might be.
So whether that's actually what it is or not is difficult to say, but it certainly looks like a geyser erupting with enough force to throw a couple of stones into the air.
Well, I don't know, and they have not yet admitted that the geysers are there, and yet they're clearly there, and so are the signs of recent water activity.
Sir Charles Schultz III has chosen, like Richard Hoagland, a very, very, very difficult path indeed.
When you begin finding things that NASA won't admit are there and you begin alleging that NASA is tampering with photographic evidence for whatever reason, believe me, you have chosen a very difficult career path indeed.
I mean, they're going to be all over you.
All over you.
You know, the bad astronomers, the good astronomers, and NASA in general, and that sort of that whole world out there, they're just going to be all over you, and your career path may be about to take a sudden turn.
So I'm really quite surprised.
Well, in some ways, I'm not surprised to hear Sir Charles beginning to take this path.
I suppose if you're an honest, ethical Person, and you see something that cannot be denied, to sort of put it on the shelf along with everybody else and deny it is to become them.
Sir Charles, I think it would be valuable, since not everybody's heard the previous programs that we did together, for you to summarize, if you would please, the evidence that you found so far that leads you to the conclusion nearly irrefutably that there was life on Mars and is.
Okay, well, and of course, there are many different organisms that other people will recognize because they're a little more familiar with them, or those images appeal to them more, or they're more easily spotted by them.
But overall, we have many, many different fossils.
The seashells are very clear.
We have excellent image of coral from Sol 15.
So altogether, it states that Mars was an ocean-covered planet, and there are many, many fossils all over the place.
And we found similar structures in both Gusev Crater, which appears to be in the lower layer very similar to what's in Meridiani, which is where Opportunity is.
And so overall, the planet must have had oceans all over the place.
And when they dried up, lost because of the thin atmosphere and low gravity, they left the salts and the fossils behind.
But there's still quite a bit of water in the soil.
You heard me mention coming into this half hour that it, you know, doing what you're doing right now, talking about life on Mars, then and now, talking about modified photographs coming from NASA, this is a career-damaging move.
Certainly, Richard, I've been friends with Richard for a lot, a lot of years, and I've watched him take an enormous amount of really severe personal criticism.
I mean, it just really is a career, if not ender.
Certainly it's the beginning of real trouble for anybody who starts talking about the kind of things you're talking about right now.
And really what it comes down to is, number one, it confirms that we're not unique in the universe, that life is probably everywhere.
And number two, and this is something that many people might not have thought of, just as we search through the rainforests and in these seas for new chemicals for medical treatments, think of the new possibilities that are opened up with alien organisms.
I can think of, let's see, at the last time that I took account, there were something like 150,000 products that were direct spin-offs of the space Program.
The advances in microcircuitry and computers, the advances in plastics, metal alloys, power sources, batteries, materials, optics, lasers.
We have developed so many products, and the industries that have spun off from space research have just been amazing.
Our whole way of life is based on things we've learned in the space program.
And in fact, because of the fact there is much more water there than we've been told, it will be a much easier task than we've been also told.
It would be easy enough for us to bring some sort of, let's say, a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to raise the temperatures, perhaps to place reflectors in orbit around Mars to raise the amount of sunlight it gets, and that alone will allow us to melt some of the ice.
Recent estimates say there is enough ice under the soil of Mars to equal the amount of ice in the ice cap covering Greenland today.
And we're increasingly seeing signs that the ocean currents that drive in part our climate are changing radically.
And when you look at the North Pole and you look at the South Pole and you look at them over, say, 10 years, if you don't get rocked back in your seat and go, oh, my God, you know, the top and the bottom of the world appear to be melting.
Yes, and, you know, the thing is, the people who do research in climatology don't even agree between themselves whether it's a man-made effect or a natural effect.
My position is, whether it's man-made or natural, we need to study it and know what's going on so we know what to do.
Well, there's an easier solution than that, and it goes right back to the same sort of deal that I was talking about with the orbital solar power stations.
If we change the amount of sunlight we receive in various parts of the world, we can alter the climate to suit ourselves.
In other words, we put large solar mirrors in orbit.
We can increase or decrease the sunlight in certain areas and alter the climate to our liking that way.
Well, if we put large, let's say, rectangular arrays of mirrors that were stabilized with some sort of structural material, like, say, a metal frame, and we set them up like Venetian blinds or louvers, we could use a computer to control their aim, where they end up, and how much sun we either aim at the earth or shut off from the earth.
We could cool areas by blotting out sunlight in some areas, and we could heat areas by adding sunlight to others.
And now, of course, that is tampering with Mother Nature, and there's always the possibility of, I don't know, unintended consequences when you do that sort of thing.
Well, somebody just before you got on said, you know, there ought to be an X Prize for energy, the way we just had the X Prize, which has now been a one for, you know, what is it, a craft that will carry as many as three into low Earth orbit?
Think of the barnstorming era at the beginning of the last century and how quickly aircraft spread all over the world.
Now that it's been shown that it's nothing more than some complex plumbing and some computer control, and that anyone with a little money, not necessarily a government, can accomplish space flight, I think that what it means is NASA, as we know it, is on the way out.
And private industry is going to pick up the ball and run with it.
We're going to have a huge increase in space flights in the very near future.
I know that it makes some of them wonder why it takes them many billions of dollars to fly seven people in a shuttle, and for $20,000, $25 million, we could have had nine people up.
We had three individual flights that cost very, very little and completely reusable at that.
Well, I'm sure publicly they're cheering for it, but I wonder if privately they're not cheering i don't think they're that incredibly happy about the prospects of losing a large chunk of their let's say satellite launch or transport business and let's you know look at that from that other standpoint nasa is essentially a transportation company to get stuff off the planet and while they do a huge amount of research in other fields they were basically founded to get people off the planet and
I mean, if the private sector is not stopped and we begin to have people, you know, little space hotels and motels and people spending periods of time in space, is that what lays ahead?
Bert Rutan's ship could easily be modified to launch a satellite from.
Now keep in mind that they don't go into orbit at this point.
simply break atmosphere.
and then re-enter shortly afterwards but imagine that instead of sending up spaceship one they send up a booster with a satellite on it well these days satellites can be made the size of a baseball that's right and so you could load a couple dozen micro or nano satellites into the nose cone of a small booster carry it up to 50,000 feet and launch it just as their ship was launched.
Now you don't have to bring the whole ship back.
You can increase the amount of fuel you have, and you can put these satellites in orbit.
Well, presently you do have to have the proper forms and regulations observed and filled out.
So, yes, it's still controlled by the government.
So, in that respect, it could be stopped legally one way or another.
They could always find a method.
But I don't think they'd really want to when you come right down to it, because if NASA, as we know it, ends up not being able to shoulder the load, who's going to do it?
If we go back to the way we opened the program, and there really are all these secrets that are being kept from the world by NASA, and I would presume as well the Russians and others who have been to space, the Russians certainly have had probes on Mars and so forth and so on.
So they must know these things too, these giant secrets that would disturb the force as it is.
I mean, the private sector would eventually get hold of these secrets, and you know they're going to start screaming and yelling.
If these secrets are that important that they would lie to the American public, modify photographs, allegedly, then they certainly would go ahead and stop any effort that would reveal all of that, wouldn't they?
I would expect that there would be a move to do that, and they could easily do so with any number of regulations that are in effect right now.
For instance, they could say, gee, we're at a state where perhaps terrorism is a threat, and we're not allowing anyone to launch anything right now for fear of what it might be.
I can think of probably a dozen regulations that could be pulled out of a hat and used to stop somebody from launching something.
Then this really must be a really gigantic secret.
I mean, the implications, maybe I'm just not seeing them clearly.
I do understand the religious possible disturbance that would be created, and I guess some others, but I just don't see anything massive enough to hide such a gigantic...
There obviously has to be a reason for them to make the choices they do.
As to what it is, once again, I can't even begin to speculate what it might be.
there are all kinds of wild thoughts and rumors about it and of course you had Edgar Mitchell on Dr. Mitchell from Apollo 14 on the 4th and he basically stated that was George Yes that was George interviewing us he basically said more or less that the government had alien hardware stashed somewhere if you really listen to what he said he didn't say it in so many words but by implication and and that's a very unusual thing to hear somebody of that background say well
One of the men who walked upon the moon is saying that.
And the astronauts are saying a lot more, too, if you listen very carefully.
Even Neil Armstrong has said things intended to get the real thinkers out there energized and really thinking.
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is my guest, Sir Charles Choles III, of This is Interesting.
Kim writes from, uh, Manhattan, Kansas.
It is wrong to extrapolate that life on Mars implies abundant life everywhere.
It could be that we're just in a unique center of life in the universe, and life can be found only near Earth.
So, there you have it.
Even if there is life on Mars, there are a lot of people who are going to think that the Earth is the center of everything, and the only reason it's found on Mars is because it's here on Earth.
I think it's very important you know who you're listening to.
Sir Charles Schultz worked at Martin Marietta Aerospace for 10 years, and he did a lot of weapons systems research, computer-based automated test equipment, wrote nuclear EMP test software for the Pershing II missile system, worked on the Patriot, the Copperhead, tank killer, advanced tank attack helicopter systems.
Charles has performed research under grant on nuclear fusion.
He was knighted, received a long-term grant for his present research on robotics and artificial intelligence.
He's written many technical publications and magazine articles on space, astronomy, the atmosphere, and space resource development.
I mean, this is a man of a lot of accomplishments.
And so I wonder how you get from that, Sir Charles, to the kind of work you've done here on whatever this big secret is.
Research in robotics and trying to build simulators and researching the things that NASA is doing so that the robotics and simulation can be as realistic as possible.
And in the course of analyzing the data and making these discoveries.
I'm simply saying that at this point it's very unlikely and that I don't see any life on Mars ever reaching a stage of development where it would be building monuments and artifacts.
Well, again, again, it's impossible not to come back to this, Sir Charles, but so what?
I mean, really, so what?
But then we have this message from Kim, and Kim is saying, look, you shouldn't extrapolate that just because there's life on Mars, it's everywhere or abundant.
You know, Kim thinks that we are unique.
We are the center of life in the universe.
And if there is life on Mars, it's simply because there is life on Earth.
And the reason that life on Mars and on Earth is similar and it developed at roughly the same time would be because the composition of those two planets and where those two planets came from was very similar.
And when we look at the composition of the clouds of dust and gas around other stars that we see in space, they're very close to what we had in our solar system when it began.
So by extrapolation, we can say that the same sorts of conditions existed there as existed here.
And it would be easy to say, given what we know, that there should be life everywhere.
Chemistry and physics works the same everywhere in the universe.
And so we know that that's one of the rock-solid foundations of the things we know about science.
There are a lot of theoretical physicists now who think that there are other dimensions, for example, where the laws of physics that do operate as we understand them here don't there.
Understand that the forces of nature, such as the electromagnetism and gravitation, are geometric, and that if you change the number of dimensions that you model those forces in, you change the way those forces would act.
For instance, because gravity works with the inverse square law, if you move from three to four dimensions, suddenly you find that gravity becomes weaker by one order of its exponent, and planets wouldn't orbit a star due to gravitation in a four-dimensional universe.
So changing your number of dimensions changes how those forces act.
Antimatter is identical to normal matter, except that the charges and spins of the particles Are reversed.
Think of it as mirror matter.
Antimatter can be made quite easily, and some of it is made in the course of normal reactions.
For instance, there's a process known as beta decay, where certain radioisotopes break down in a manner that produces either electrons or antimatter electrons called positrons.
So that's a natural source of anti-electrons right there.
We can make antiprotons by using a linear accelerator, for instance, or a ring accelerator, and smashing normal protons into a block of dense matter such as tungsten.
And then some antiprotons will emerge from the other side.
Now, there are sure to be much more efficient ways of making antimatter.
And they have even made anti-hydrogen by putting antiprotons and anti-electrons together and done some small experiments on them.
Well, it's thought, Sir Charles, I'm sorry to interrupt, that matter and antimatter, when they come together, annihilate one another with a very large kaboom.
Yes, they do, and it's more like a whoosh than a kaboom.
What happens is the particles are attracted to each other and they eradicate each other and give off a huge burst of gamma radiation.
Depending on the type of particle that comes together with the opposite particle, it generates different output, but in the end, it turns into a lot of gamma radiation.
And if you generate and store antimatter, it could be used as a wonderful source of power because it's basically the densest way of storing energy that we know of in the universe.
If this is a true article, if the Air Force is pursuing antimatter weapons, well, you understand the military, of course, would look at something like this for its weapons potential.
Apparently, it has quite a bit.
But it would also have the potential to be a new energy source if we could harness it, right?
I got all these calls in the first hour, Sir Charles.
Everybody's beginning to react rather dramatically to the price of gasoline.
And, of course, you know, the price per barrel of oil has risen, I forget where it is now, $52, $3, whatever.
On the other hand, if you look at the energy it took to launch the Apollo moonships, five grams of antimatter would launch all that hardware very easily, and it would be cost competitive at the cost that it took to make the launches at that time.
With all the work that you're doing, Sir Charles, is there anything looming technologically that you're aware of that would be a savior for us in terms of energy?
Well, right now, we have rather limited options for generating our energy.
We have hydro, wind, we have petroleum, and solar, and solar isn't that good on the planet.
And of course, I'm a major supporter of the effort to put solar power stations in orbit around the Earth.
One of the things that we have to deal with is storage technologies.
And I know that for transportation, such as airliners and vehicles like automobiles, petroleum is still the number one because it's so easy to process and transport and use, and it has a very high density.
I just recently heard about a fuel cell vehicle that was just created that used, apparently, it could get 1,800 miles out of a single gallon of hydrogen.
It would indeed be an answer to our problems because even if we only, in the very end, got half of that energy back compared to what we collected, we'd still be way ahead of the game.
We wouldn't have burned a gram of petroleum.
And that energy is there as long as the sun shines.
Why we're not doing it?
Well, once again, the cost of transporting things into space has been pretty high.
And the efforts to get a group together to design and put the package in place has been at a standstill because of the cost of starting up, which would be, in my estimation, about $3 billion.
So that in itself shows that it's worth investing in the effort.
And once it gets set up, it would spawn whole new industries that we don't even imagine right now, just as the spin-offs from the space program did.
So you can expect that when we start a venture of this sort, the research involved will lead us in new directions and give us a lot of things we don't have now, we don't even conceive of.
I was about to say it would be clean, but you're beaming by microwave or some method, all of this energy gathered so easily in space back through the atmosphere, right?
The figures show that if we pick the right frequency of microwave, it would pass through the atmosphere so efficiently that the heating effects would be less than that from the light of the full moon.
So it would be an extremely tiny amount of heat deposited in the atmosphere, and almost all of that energy would reach the ground.
Well, I just finished watching the presidential debates, as did many of my listeners.
I watched all three every minute.
Didn't get bored and walk away, as many of my friends did.
And I did and do wonder why what you and I are talking about right now with the rising cost of oil and it beginning to affect people, they're getting angry, why it wasn't at least part of the great debate.
I think it's because politicians aren't physicists.
Very few of them really understand energy and physics and how it's transported and what it really means.
And so the issue of generating energy or collecting energy in space to beam it to the ground never arises because most of them have never even thought of it.
Nevertheless, he was able to articulate the Star Wars program to the point for the world that it scared the holy you-know-what out of the Russians and may have caused them to say, we give up.
You know, I just haven't heard a word in the mainstream press about anything like this.
And I don't think that, certainly for most of my listeners, the concept of collecting energy in space and then transmitting it to Earth is something they can rather easily understand.
Honestly, I don't think it's that tough.
And if it's a viable alternative to, well, let's see, we'll probably have wars about oil if we're not already having them.
I think that what we really need to do is find a way to make people aware of it.
We need some sort of a venue that will expose people.
And in some cases, this is done with movies or fiction.
In other cases, it's done with a government initiative.
We've got to get people aware that this capability does exist and it can be put into practice very easily if they're willing to commit some money to it.
And looking at the price of petroleum, it would be an easy choice, I think, for anyone.
I would think that it could be done by a couple of large companies that were interested in doing it.
And maybe one of the reasons it hasn't been pursued is because up until now, the only way to get hardware off the planet has been through government agencies.
Maybe because of the X Prize being won through the efforts of Burt Rutan, for instance.
Perhaps this will spur some companies to look at what the regulations really are and see if they couldn't, in fact, invest in such a venture.
I could think of four or five companies that could easily afford to do this.
Have you actually penciled this out knowing how much hardware would have to be in space, how many pounds would have to be taken into space at what cost to achieve doing this?
I have done some rough figures, and some of them are based on studies done all the way back in 1970 by organizations the U.S. Navy.
And they estimated that a 60-ton factory on the moon and a 90-ton factory in Earth orbit could, over the course of three years, produce over 100,000 tons of manufactured goods made from lunar materials.
And these goods would be the power collectors and generators used to put these solar power stations in orbit.
Now, the figures back then monetarily are a little different.
Today, my estimates of about $3 billion are based on the same sorts of technologies And the same sorts of figures.
And I think that those numbers of 60 and 90 tons could be scaled way back because we have a far better understanding of many of the processes and materials needed to do the job.
I'm thinking that we could probably put about 20 tons of hardware on the moon that would be more or less a perpetual factory and probably about 20 tons of factory in orbit that could set the whole thing up.
So you're looking at maybe 40 tons of hardware plus whatever it takes to get it to the moon and up in high orbit.
And then the rest would be either done by remote robot or by humans on site.
And I would like everyone to pray, if you wish, for Anne tonight, because we are in desperate, desperate straits.
The good news is she is still conscious.
Her blood pressure is normal, so they think the bleeding is not continuing.
If you are, however, connected in an official capacity with the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Los Angeles at Sunset and Vermont, and there's anything you can do to help speed up the process of getting her into surgery, please call the hospital and do that.
It has to be surgery to remove the blood and another CAT scan to find out whether or not the bleeding is continuing.
And the thing is that this needs to be done quickly, but it's quite slow.
And so if there's anyone out there who can speed it up, do not call them unless you are officially connected with the hospital and know the right numbers to call.
There's no sense in calling the main number.
Do not come to the hospital because we're really not able to do anything about that.
But I love you and all of you, and the bond is very deep, you know, with us and you.
So it wasn't diabetic, but instead a very serious stroke with bleeding on the brain.
And so please pray.
Please pray, as Whitley requested.
It works, you know.
We found out over the years and over the last many months and years now that without a doubt, there have been study after study after study after study, irrefutably proving that prayer does work.
It works.
That's all there is to it.
Back to my guest, Sir Charles.
Welcome back.
Yes, thank you.
That was my co-author, you know, with the Global Superstorm, Whitley Streeber, that became the day after tomorrow.
You know, that is sort of another side of the science.
You're in the hard sciences, Sir Charles, but they've done all these incredible double-blind studies.
And maybe it would be interesting to have the opinion of somebody like yourself in the hard sciences, which prove again and again, I mean, irrefutably prove, that groups prayed for heal much faster than those who are not prayed for.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Does a hard scientist think about things like that?
If you're honest about your science, you have to admit that sticking to the hard and Well-known rules is one thing, but also acknowledging the things that happen in the world around you that you can't explain is another part of science.
And I think a lot of scientists fall down in that area.
They don't look at both sides of the coin.
I know that thinking appears to have had some sort of effect, a quantum mechanical effect, perhaps, and a number of experiments have been done that show that, for instance, the generation of random numbers sometimes appears to be affected by what people think.
Yeah, so do I. And I've become convinced that those who are more successful in life, some of the more powerful, well-to-do people in the world, have become so by jumping when their intuition speaks, as you put it.
I mean, life is nothing but a series of decisions.
All your life, you're making decisions.
Do this, do that, think up something new and go in that direction, whatever.
It's a series of forks in the road, and you're making constant decisions and traveling one or the other, and a certain series of decisions carries you to a very good place, and another series of destructive decisions takes you very quickly in another direction.
Well, the first approximation of the system included very large solar cell panels.
But later refinements showed that because the efficiencies were low, particularly compared to how much they mass, it would be much smarter to use very lightweight silver reflectors like mylar plastic that's been siltered as a collector for the sunlight to focus it on a boiler for water.
So you'd basically have a closed-cycle steam turbine generator.
And that's the most robust and common technology for generating electrical power on the ground today.
You know, early steam boilers, and here it would be the most efficient way to do it in space.
that's amazing you would think it would be a tremendous somehow there'd be a tremendous I mean, you'd heat, you'd have boiling water, you'd drive a turbine, you'd create immense amounts of electricity, and then what?
And then you run microwave generators or infrared lasers and you beam it to the ground.
Now, an interesting note here is that we can reduce the mass of the generators greatly by going to superconductors.
And those are now commercially available for many applications.
So we can reduce a lot of the weight we would have to put into space by using superconductor generators.
And the beauty of this system is, since mylar plastic weighs almost nothing, it's thinner than the wrapper of a candy bar, then the area of sunlight you collect can be absolutely huge, hundreds of square kilometers, and weigh very, very little.
So the main area of collection is the tiniest part of your mass.
The generator weighs the most, and its capacity can be increased by going to superconductors.
Maybe this is a silly question, but if you had a virtual collection farm for sunlight in space between the Earth and the Sun, then that means that a lot of sunlight, which would have reached the Earth, now is not going to.
And they'll never block off the sunlight to the ground.
So there are many schemes for placing those satellites in orbit and capturing thousands of square kilometers of sunlight and never once casting a shadow on the Earth.
Well, once again, it comes back to getting the starter hardware together.
The initial investment, the initial launches, etc.
Now that we do have a small but growing private space industry, I expect that pretty soon we're going to see people test-fly hardware.
And once this happens, once we have privately built, launched, and maintained satellites with no government involvement, I think we're going to see this thing begin to turn around.
As you mentioned, a sort of Energy XPRIZE would certainly be an admirable way of getting this thing started.
Now, here's another thing that we can also extend this technology to include.
And that is, when we look at the travel times for spacecraft in our solar system, we typically see travel times of months or years.
And there is a simple way around that.
Now, recently they were talking about using magnetic beams of particles or ions to push spacecraft around, and that's quite fine, you know, and it cuts travel times from Mars, for instance, down to a couple of months.
But there's an even better system.
Using the same methods as the solar collecting satellites to generate the power to run an engine and using, let's say, water as your reaction mass or fuel, if you used a solar-powered engine, it would be a very simple matter to create a spacecraft that runs under a continuous thrust.
Most rockets, and a lot of people don't realize this, when they're launched, they burn their fuel out in a minute or two, and that's it.
But your power comes from the sun and not from the fuel itself, which it could just be water.
You can also raise your temperatures even higher.
They've used microwave tubes in a cavity to get temperatures as high as 40,000 degrees Kelvin, which is far hotter than any rocket engine.
To give you an example, the interior temperature of the engines of the shuttle reach only about 5,500 degrees, if I'm not mistaken, about the boiling point of molten iron.
If you were to go to 40,000 degrees Kelvin, you'd have far higher impulse or energy coming out of your exhaust.
It would take less fuel to give you the same amount of thrust.
And once again, because it's electrically powered and it's running from sunlight, you have no limits to how long you can run it.
Because remember, your collector area weighs almost nothing.
It's very, very thin material.
And when you deploy it, it opens up either like an umbrella or on inflatable struts or a wire frame, anything that you can deploy that can hold that material into its focal shape.
Suppose somebody like Bert Ruttan or somebody who was able to get to space, and we know Bert can do that now, took on launching a scale-down version of what we're talking about right now, or they had that on paper to endeavor to do that.
That's a lot.
And what do you think our government, how do you think they would react if that was the proposal?
Well, that would depend completely on whether they felt that this new source of transportation and energy would be a positive or negative thing for their means of operating.
I think it's because it's one of the building bricks that goes into the overall system for getting humanity's industry off the planet and into space.
You know, it takes a large step to get started, but once you do, then all of these small pieces get done very easily.
It's like any great initiative.
It takes a very large step to get going, a large investment, and then once you're in the air with it, it becomes very easy to make modifications or small variations and learn many things from it.
We've got to get that first step taken very soon.
We need that highway off the planet.
We need that energy in orbit and some way of replacing our diminishing resources on the ground.
In part, because nobody really sees that there's a dollar to be made on it.
I mean, it's interesting and it's flashy and they see that, but they wonder what it's going to do for them.
And everybody surely was interested in getting to the moon before the Russians, for instance.
Once that was accomplished, and they didn't see that there was any particular direct benefit for themselves, I think that in part people lost interest in it because of that and because we'd done what we'd set out to do.
But now we have another younger generation of people that have come along and they believe this stuff and they know it's going to happen and this is what they're bombarded with day and night.
Movies, games, presentations, everything they see centers around space.
I think that what we've really done is cultivate a whole generation of people or maybe two generations by now who know that it can work and if we can get the message to them, they'll see it and they'll pursue it.
Well, you're certainly right about this generation being very space-centric.
I mean, space, everything, video games, movies, the whole culture.
And yet the reality of what's happening, other than this recent incredible move by Burt Rutan and company, everything else has sort of been sitting in place or rotting in place, if you will, with respect to our effort to get space.
I don't know.
It's a mystery to me.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
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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 if you have a good question for Sir Charles Schultz, who's obviously a brilliant man, the aerospace industry, weapons, he's pretty much done it all.
And he knows of what he speaks, particularly with regard to energy.
If you have a question for him, we'll open up the phones this hour.
stay right where you are.
Sir Charles Schultz III, my guest.
Obviously, I'll tell you, Anne and Whitley have been very close with Ramona and myself, and this really has thrown me off kilter a little bit.
Ann, apparently, if you heard the news, Whitley was on 30 minutes ago, has had a stroke, a fairly serious stroke, I guess.
And so Whitley and I are asking for your prayers for Anne.
We certainly appreciate that.
And so it's kind of thrown me off killer a little bit.
Nevertheless, we will take questions.
Sir Charles Schultz obviously knows what he's talking about.
He's describing an energy system, for example, that could be implemented, could be built with technology we presently have that would be an answer, at least in part, to our energy problems, which are looming awfully large these days.
Awfully large.
So, Sir Charles, welcome back.
Thank you.
I just am really stuck on why we're not proceeding.
I mean, is this something that could be done very quickly?
many people who are sort of conspiracy-minded think that every last drop of oil that can be drawn in any sort of economical way should be drawn and profited on until we do anything perhaps like you were describing?
I guess I was implying that there are those who believe in conspiracies that think that we're not doing it.
There's only one good reason we're not doing it, because we want to continue to profit on the existing infrastructure as it's set up for oil right now.
And not until the very last moment do they want to do this.
I would hate to think that is the case, but it makes a whole lot more sense for the people who have the money in hand to invest in the next system and be ready to make a profit off it as well.
Could you hang that mylar material on telephone poles and wires and generate heat or electricity that way?
And could you use that magnifying glass thing to put it on a house or a car and generate a small generator, generate electricity all day, say, while your car is in the parking lot?
The first question about the mylar, the mylar itself does not generate power.
It's nothing more than a passive mirror or collector.
So hanging it on a wire somewhere wouldn't do you any good.
You have to aim it at something that could generate power from the light that it collects.
The second part of your question, you can place a small solar power generator anywhere, but understand that on the ground, the efficiency of those systems isn't very good because the first time the clouds cover the sun or the thing isn't angled properly, it's not going to generate enough power to be useful.
But the most important thing is, on the ground, it's dark half the time.
And if you factor out your average over the course of a day where there is light, you only get about one-sixth of the power that you can get from the same system in orbit.
Absolutely it is, because we have quite efficient generators right now, and we have very good systems worked out for catching the microwaves and converting them back to electrical power.
There are very few steps involved, and the less steps, the more efficiency you get.
Well, we have very elaborate satellites in these kinds of orbits presently to spy on people, and they cost billions and billions and billions of dollars.
Yeah, I had a question about wind dam technologies using large progressive surfaces to harvest wind over large geographic areas that would be pinnacleized, I guess, into turbines.
And the statistics I've seen on those are quite rival that of hydroelectric.
I know that they have a number of large-scale wind farms and turbines, and I know they also have a number of test pilot situations for solar in the deserts that use turbines as generators.
The wind farms seem to do well in certain areas and not very well in others, and a lot of them economically have been on a losing basis.
If you lose the government subsidies that keep them running, they tend to go out of business rather rapidly.
As far as doing the same thing with a solar collector in a desert, that can be done on a short-term basis.
The only problem is storing the power.
It has to be used now because there really aren't very good storage methods for it.
Well, the implication of what you said, when government money is removed, they dry up and blow away.
No, pun intended.
That means they're not economical.
And, you know, I had heard that wind generation was probably the cheapest at somewhere down around, I can't remember, $0.06, $0.07 a kilowatt hour, something like that?
And now that the oil prices have gone up, it might be more economical to run wind generators.
But you know, there's another source of power that we aren't tapping, and it has a lot of potential.
And that would be wave generators that use the differences in tides and waves.
Now, those sorts of systems could be put offshore, and as the height of the water changes as the waves move over, it increases and decreases the pressure driving a bladder or a container underneath the surface, and that runs your generators.
And there's a huge amount of power available there.
And in areas where we have destructive waves hitting the shore, it would actually be an easy way to deflect some of that power and use it.
Well, Tesla had a great amount of genius and invented, as many people don't know, our whole AC electrical system from the generators to the distribution.
He also worked in a lot of other fields as well.
One of the things that people often come up with is his broadcast power ideas.
The man was brilliant, and he had a great body of work behind him and a number of huge ideas.
And he made a lot of great advances.
And I don't think people realize how much influence he has had on our everyday lives.
Some of the things that he designed, for instance, are a bladeless turbine.
And that has applications, special applications, in power generation or in moving fluids.
His Tesla coil is a standard for generating very high voltages and is recently being investigated as a weapon for the Defense Department.
What they do is they create a directed lightning bolt by using ultraviolet laser to create a conductive path through the air where the Tesla coil discharges.
So there are many things that he worked on that have applications we haven't even thought of yet.
And his work is still being studied today.
But I don't think he had anything to do with death rays and aliens, as a lot of people imply.
And I don't know whether it really means anything in the long run or not, but I've put up one of the world's largest antennas of its sort literally in my backyard over about five acres here.
It's on 13 towers.
It's a very, very large antenna.
And it does collect just an incredible amount of voltage, somewhere in the order of about 300 volts.
And it does that on a cloudless, windless, calm, blue sky, real nice day.
And to answer another question that you might anticipate, it also does it when there's a power outage in my area, meaning that the lines adjacent to my antenna are not electrified or being coupled.
We've tested that part of it at least.
Now, to also anticipate some of your questions, we've put a scope and there's AC and DC components both involved here.
And frankly, it's an antenna, so my interest was in taking all of this radio-killing stuff to ground and getting rid of it, which is what I've done.
But it's still there.
I mean, I've just, you know, put in inductors to ground and resistors to ground to make damn sure that it doesn't damage my radios.
But that voltage is there.
And somehow or another, it involves thousands and thousands of feet of wire that are in the ground, or above ground, rather, 75 feet or so, 68 and 75 feet, respectively.
And this voltage is there.
From what I don't know, some sort of capacitive effect between the atmosphere and the Earth, perhaps.
Who knows?
But based on what I've just told you, what do you think we might be dealing with?
And, you know, we did talk about this on the first show that I did.
And part of it is probably due to the space charge that is carried in the atmosphere.
There's a field that builds up in the atmosphere between the ground and the sky, and this is where lightning comes from eventually.
And so there's always some sort of a charge present, and that could be accumulating on the antenna.
And I've thought about it since, and what you mentioned about measuring the AC and DC components with an oscilloscope reminds me that it's also very possible that your antenna is acting as a tuned system and picking up extremely low frequency wavelengths.
I mean, this is only sort of a hint, in my mind, that there is something real about this differential, and it is perhaps some kind of power that we should be looking into.
I'm looking past my little local amazement toward what it might mean.
You know, I've got a 100-foot tower and then 13 other towers that are 75 feet tall each.
And so I'm naturally very fearful.
One day, we had a storm that literally, you know, sometimes you can get these thunderstorms that literally form above you in this valley above me here, in this part of the valley.
And it began literally raining lightning.
I mean, oh my God, flash, boom, flash, boom.
I could see lightning get this, Sir Charles, actually striking in the center of the loop antenna, not hitting the towers, not hitting the wire or anything.
It fried some plants in the yard.
That's how close it was.
I mean, it just scared the you-know-what out of us, and it went on for four hours, Sir Charles.
And not once did lightning ever hit any of my towers.
However, I talked to my tower guy who climbs for me.
I've got a commercial radio station I own in town.
And he said, hey, Art, next time it happens, take a pair of binoculars and look at the top of your towers.
And you're going to see a bluish, purplish plasma ball forming.
And then you're going to get some lightning that's going to hit real close by, and the blue plasma ball is going to go away.
It used to be something that was observed on the masts of wooden ships many centuries ago, and it was called St. Elmo's Fire.
And it happened particularly on very odd weather circumstances.
For instance, it could happen on foggy days or very dry days, and it was just an undifferentiated glow, almost like a soft ball lightning, that hung over the tips of masts or the tips of flagpoles.
And it has been observed for very long, and in recent years, some people have researched it as a means possibly of creating and containing hot hydrogen fusion.
Actually, it's much more complicated than people would have imagined.
It turns out that to create a ball of plasma that's stable and self-supporting, it has to have many layers of magnetic field and electrical interaction occurring in it.
There was a fellow, I believe a Japanese man, who was using a microwave emitter to create a ball of plasma that was stable and could be contained.
Incidentally, everybody, tomorrow night we get tangled with a skeptic.
In fact, Dr. Michael Shermer is actually the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine.
so you have these right on up there was get the right skeptical about That's tomorrow night.
should be fun.
you you you My guest is Sir Charles Schultz and he's obviously a brilliant guy and Sir Charles I wonder what do you do other than You do have a website, which is good, but how do you earn a living the rest of the time?
Well, actually, most of my research lately has been concentrating on Mars, and, of course, is paid for by my grant.
On the other hand, I have a lot of robotics work and other research projects that I do.
And I'm also working on getting some more research grants written and some small contract jobs to do things with all the equipment I have in my shop here.
I knew that there was going to be a different Sir Charles a couple of interviews ago.
I really did.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Sir Charles Schultz.
unidentified
Hi.
Yes, thank you.
I agree with this gentleman on his figures on power and outer space versus the planet.
But to make use of what we've got here, why don't we use whatever power we can generate and put it on international semiconductor, or superconductive power lines or even better to get across the Atlantic, hydrogen gas transmission lines.
And no matter where you transmit the power, you'd be delivering it to the dawn and dusk neighboring you.
Well, there's one slight problem with that, and that is with a regular wire or with a superconductor, because of the size of the world, there actually is a slight delay time.
So it's incredibly difficult to synchronize your power grid worldwide.
It is a possibility, and it is the holy grail of superconducting right now.
Now, an interesting development shows that the minerals called perovskites that exist in the mantle of the Earth can show superconducting properties when they're very hot and compress under thousands of atmospheres of pressure.
Well, even you Mars anomaly guys can't agree, huh?
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Sir Charles.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, this is Escondido, Sir Charles, and I have a theory why NASA is so allergic to life on Mars.
I worked on the Viking 75 program, and since that time, it seems that the geologists, I call them the Rockhounds, have just gained complete control of the programs and budgets of NASA.
In fact, a recent guest on Coast said that even the next generation of Mars probes have no biology experiments.
Do you think it's just a matter of the geologists gobbling up all the money and taking over NASA?
They have a huge preponderance of geologists and very little in the works for biological experimentation.
unidentified
Yeah, I think we've got to start demanding that the biologists be given an equal portion of that pie and that they take control of the planning for these Mars probes or else I think the public is going to lose interest.
Hey, Culler, did you, during your time in the program, ever see anything, let's see, how can I phrase this carefully, politely?
Did you ever see anything manipulated?
unidentified
No, I didn't.
I was at a low level.
It was one of my first jobs out of school.
I worked on the Viking 75 surface sampler arm that actually brought back the soil to the biology and GCMS, which were built by TRW.
But I was at a relatively low level.
I didn't see anything.
But since that time, you know, when they declared no life on Mars, the biologists have been shut out, even the principal investigator of the biology experiment himself.
Sir Charles, I have a thought and then two questions related to your space power generation.
Okay.
My thought is that this microwave energy would be great to generate hydrogen to get some portable power, but I'm wondering if that microwave would disrupt radio transmission around the world.
My question was...
Right.
I heard that story, yeah, through the transmission lines.
My two questions are this.
One, would space junk or space dust upset the Mylar?
Is there a safe place out there to put it that isn't full of junk?
And my second question is about recently conversation.
And that would be a useful and economical method of getting things off the planet, just like an elevator.
And so that is a potential, and it is being worked on presently.
Now, your other question.
The solar collectors made of mylar are indeed susceptible to space junk.
However, most of the junk is on the size of a paint fleck or a pinhead.
And since the area of the collectors is so great, all this material would do is punch or vaporize a tiny hole in it, and you still have, what, a pinhead out of many square meters.
I can imagine a lot of things you could do with equipment of that sort.
And I know a lot of people have felt that it was being used to modify the upper atmosphere or to influence radio communications or change the climate or create auroras.
I suppose all those things are possible with that sort of equipment.
Well, with what's going on in the world right now, it would be almost hard to imagine that we're not trying to learn how to affect some of these things before they affect us in some final sad way.
Well, I know that if you're a scientist and you've got your hands on that sort of equipment and you have questions, you're going to try a few experiments.
I've considered the possibility that technical advancement was being suppressed, and indeed there are many science fiction stories that cover the same thing.
Many of Larry Niven's stories have a United Nations agency that suppresses advanced technology to keep peace all over the world.
In the real world, the same sort of thing is possible, although it would be very difficult because in many cases, researchers all over are working in parallel and don't even know it.
Many of the great inventions are arrived at simultaneously by many people.
So suppressing new developments would be difficult.
It could be done, sure.
I don't know if there's any credible evidence that it is being done, but it is a potential possibility.
If you consider the supposed technology that flies those sorts of crafts and the sort of technology that we use, there'd be no advantage to going to that shape.