Nick Pope, ex-British MOD UFO project lead, compares his work to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, noting 80% of cases were misidentifications while 5%—like the 1993 silent, triangular UFO over RAF bases—remained unexplained. Rendlesham Forest’s 1980 triangular craft, with radiation readings seven times normal, and radar blips at 25,000 mph suggest advanced energy sources, yet no official threat assessment was ever conducted despite speculation from figures like Lord Hill Norton. Pope dismisses crop circles as mostly human-made but hints at possible symbolic connections to UFO sightings, leaving his role due to career rotations rather than censorship, while Bell concludes that governments may still hide what they know, leaving humanity’s understanding of these phenomena dangerously incomplete. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean he was up at the top there, so he's the guy.
Find out what the Brits know.
Now, after this weekend, I'm gonna be gone for a couple of weekends.
I'm going to get a bit of a change of scenery.
So I'll be gone for a couple weekends.
Let's look at the world news.
The French are once again rioting.
They seem to do a lot of rioting in France.
They have a lot of time on their hands.
Police loosed water cannons and tear gas on rioting students and activists who rampage through a McDonald's figures, right?
They'd hit a McDonald's, and attacked storefronts in the Capitol Saturday as demonstrations against a plan to relax job protection stuff.
Oh, that's what it is, you see.
The French are guaranteed their jobs.
They have like, I don't know, five or six weeks of vacation every year.
They've got it really good.
And so they want to relax the job protections.
And, of course, they're rioting about that.
And my kitty cats are batting their heads.
If I turned up the audio.
Now he's not doing it.
Little head was hitting the door pretty hard there.
All right.
Anti-war rallies mark Iraq anniversary.
Thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets around the world on Saturday, making the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with demands that coalition troops leave right now.
The Arab Muslim League Federation had addressed more than a thousand people who gathered in Times Square near a military recruiting station, which was guarded by the police.
Anybody out there remember why did we start that war?
Well, I guess they're not there, so it couldn't have been it.
Now, because Saddam was being so mean to his people, hmm, that one doesn't exactly hold up because, you know, there's mean dictators all over the world, and they're mean to their people.
You know, if that was the reason we'd been at war in Cambodia a long time ago.
Stopped killing fields.
Much worse than anything that went on in Iraq.
And then there was oil.
It probably was oil, right?
But we didn't say that, and we don't say that.
We dare not speak the word oil.
I'd have a lot more respect.
But I hear that door.
I'm going to have to give it up.
I've got a loose wire under there, and if I let the cats in, they will...
Fine.
Come on in.
What the hell?
There's a little wire under there, and if the cat hits it, it'll start humming.
But there's obviously, I'm not going to keep them out.
So I'd have had a lot more respect for our government if we'd said, well, it's the oil.
Our country runs on oil.
We've had a bad policy of not pursuing other alternative methods of energy, and so we need oil.
And so we're going to go invade Iraq.
I've had more respect for him.
Louisiana, it seems, once, you know, coastal folk, I mean, they just love that Bayou country.
Trouble is now they're leaving since the storms.
They're leaving in droves, actually leaving the place forever.
By the way, today's scorer is Navy 1, Pirate 0.
Our Navy, United Arab Emirates is where the story comes from.
Two U.S. Navy warships, two of them, mind you, exchanged gunfire with a suspected pirate ship off the coast of Somalia.
Now, you've got to see this ship.
It's sort of like a Rowboat Plus.
So I'm sure that probably the pirates fired first, which was really stupid.
Firing on a U.S. Navy ship is just, under any circumstances, stupid.
But being in a rowboat and having, you know, maybe a grenade launcher or something like that, really, really stupid.
So two U.S. Navy ships opened up on them.
Pirates, mind you.
And I think we killed one and captured five, and they were not happy at all.
So Navy 1, Pirate Zero.
Oh, here, you're going to love this.
Then we'll do a break.
It's tempting to blame big food companies for America's big obesity problem.
After all, they're the folks who supersized our fries, family portioned our potato chips, and big gulped our sodas, right?
There's also the billions they've spent keeping their products ever on our minds and in our mouths, likened by some to the way tobacco companies seduced smokers.
Such practices have made the food industry the target of lawsuits and legislation seeking to yank junk food from schools and curb advertising to children.
That's how it begins, right?
It began that way with cigarettes.
They stopped advertising to children, aiming at young people, and then pretty soon TV ads were illegal.
And then I think billboards became illegal.
And now it's going to be food.
So they will rip that Big Mac from your hands.
Soon, not just smokers will be, well, how are we thought of these days, smokers, as we're pariahs.
Let's just say it.
Pariahs.
And so now it's going to be, you know, if you're seen with a Big Mac or maybe some McNuggets or, I don't know, something from Wendy's dripping and you've got it in your hand and somebody, some food cop will come up and I don't know what they'll do.
Probably eventually arrest you, make you eat it out on the street, not near any young people who might be influenced by seeing you down a Big Mac.
Oh, America, America.
We'll be right back.
We're going to open line shortly, but, you know, the news goes downhill from there.
The first story's headline from the Independent in Great Britain, where you get these things, you see, from Great Britain.
We don't publish them.
It says, climate change irreversible as Arctic sea ice fails to reform.
See, that's got to catch your attention right away.
Think about it.
Climate change irreversible.
That's in little quotations.
As Arctic sea ice fails to reform.
Now, that should get your attention.
Sea ice in the Arctic has failed to reform for the second consecutive winter, raising fears that global warming may have tipped the polar regions into irreversible climate change far sooner than predicted.
Now, that's a big word, irreversible.
Irreversible, meaning the poles are going and you can't stop it.
Satellite measurements of the area of the Arctic covered by sea ice show that for every month this winter, the ice failed to return even to its long-term average rate of decline.
It is the second consecutive winter that sea ice has not managed to reform enough to compensate for the unprecedented melting during the summers.
Scientists are now convinced the Arctic sea ice is showing signs of both a winter and a summer decline that could indicate a major acceleration in its long-term rate of disappearance.
The greatest fear is that an environmental positive feedback has now already kicked in where global warming melts ice, which in itself then causes the seas to get warmer further as more sunlight is absorbed by the dark erosion rather than reflected by the white ice, less white ice, less reflection, more dark water, more absorption, more melting, and the whole thing becomes a runaway feedback cycle.
Mark Serenz, a sea ice specialist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, said in September 2005, the Arctic sea ice cover was at its lowest extent since satellite monitoring began.
First satellite we had to do that in 1979, probably the lowest in the last hundred years.
And he said, well, we can't be certain.
It sure does look like 2006 is more of the same.
Unless conditions turn colder, much colder, we may be headed for another year of big sea ice losses, rivaling or even perhaps exceeding what we saw in September of 2005.
We are, of course, monitoring the situation closely.
But again, the headline is climate change irreversible as Arctic sea ice fails to reform.
Now, from there, we go on to even better stuff like bird flu to hit the U.S. within three weeks.
I'll cover the details tomorrow night.
Or is Siberian thaw the beginning of climate tipping point?
That also from Great Britain, so much coming from, and then from BBC.
Let's see, U.S. climate scientists have recorded a significant rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, pushing it to a record new level.
BBC News has learned the latest data shows CO2 levels now stand at 381 parts per million, 100 parts per million above the pre-industrial average.
Oh, by the way, by the way, by the way, tomorrow night, I think it's tomorrow night on 60 Minutes, there's going to be a very, very interesting segment in which the man that we have not heard from on the climate is going to speak.
So we're going to hear something tomorrow night.
I urge you not to miss 60 Minutes tomorrow night.
One of the segments will have that climate scientist on.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
I have a possible solution to your cat problem in your radio room.
I've read a couple of articles where people have built shelf ledges around the upper part of their room because cats love sitting up high where it's warmer.
Well, they built a shelf that went all the way around the room in like a little steps, like a little, like it would be like a knick-knack shelf kind of thing.
But it was for the cats.
And anyways, the other thing, when you're on the telephone, cats don't know what a phone is.
They hear you talking.
They think you're talking to them.
And why aren't you paying attention to them?
That's why they're always bugging you when you're on the phone.
So close your eyes and try and imagine what it's like to have five cats.
Every one of them a darling.
But they all, well, there is something about a closed door that causes Alarms to go off in a little cat brain.
Inside that little furry head, alarm bells go off, and doors must not be closed.
And whatever's going on on the other side of that closed door is obviously more interesting than where they are.
So even though they have the entire house to roam and trouble to get in, it is that one room they must get in.
In that case, my studio.
Wild Carline, you're on here.
Hello.
unidentified
Hey, Art.
Hey.
I want to know, there's a lot of things I'd love to do about, but I want to know if you were to talk to somebody from the future, let's just say that's me, what would be the one science question you would absolutely want to know, first and foremost?
Well, unless you're a time traveler, and then you can look ahead, and you can see bodies all over the place, people not being able to breathe, gasping for breath, the climate changing.
You can see, if you're a time traveler, all these things and tell me, roughly, by what day or what year it becomes uninhabitable.
unidentified
Well, you're speaking of some gross circumstance, and there's never a gross circumstance.
Most climatologists now have gone off the bandwagon of trying to unsell this because they can't, because the truth is now in front of us.
And so I would urge you, I'll tell you what, buddy, you get out and you talk to some of the people that you respect in climatology these days and see what kind of opinion you get.
See how many dissenters you still find to the obvious fact that our climate is in very, very fast change.
In other words, where do you cross the war threshold of dislike?
Iran, yeah.
unidentified
Well, I know no one really wants war, but what's better, trying to prevent the spread of these weapons or allowing the spread of these weapons where they may eventually be used one day?
Yeah.
You know, I mean, it's like a lose-lose situation.
We're having a lot of earthquakes on the moon now.
Wait a minute.
Earthquakes on the moon.
Earthquakes on the moon as four kinds of, actually deep moonquakes, 700 kilometers below the surface, vibrations from the impact of meteorites.
Well, that figures right.
A thermal quakes caused by the expansion of the frigid crust where first illuminated by the morning sun after two weeks of deep freeze night.
Okay, well, that makes sense.
Shallow moonquakes, only 20 or 30 kilometers below surface.
Okay, well, the one that doesn't make sense is that it's seismically active at 700 kilometers below the surface.
Now, that means there's a whole lot more going on the moon, in the moon, than we suspected by a long shot.
Once again, don't forget tomorrow, you're going to hear from the NASA scientist on 60 Minutes who tried to warn Americans about global warming.
He says the White House won't let them, and correspondent Scott Pelley has obtained documents that show just how much editing White House officials are doing that lessens and sometimes changes the very findings the scientists reported, the very findings.
So in other words, they're saying the White House is actually altering the results of what NASA is saying to them so that you won't have to be bothered by hearing that kind of thing.
Researchers have discovered a way to infect RFID tags, that's radio frequency identification tags, with a computer worm, raising the disturbing prospect that products, ID cards, even pets could be used to spread malicious code.
So your little ankle-biting dog could be a virus spreader, and it would spread from one RFID tag to another like the plague.
I shouldn't laugh.
You know, they come out.
Inevitably, man comes up with some sort of absolutely unsinkable.
That's a great word, unsinkable, right?
They don't say that about any ship anymore.
They did try that, unsinkable, of course, saying.
And so, you know, with regard to code and RFID tags and all the rest of it, it cannot be broken, cannot be tampered with, absolutely safe, and then here we go.
So it's a never-ending battle, you know, but it'll still be like Navy 1, Pirate Zero.
I just want to throw out a rhetorical question for people to ponder regarding what probably most of the people in this world are thinking and have been for a very long time.
If America and a few, a little handful of countries can and are allowed to have nuclear weapons, why the bleep can't anybody else?
And I'm not supporting what any other country does or regime, but isn't it pretty obvious that these people have a right to look at us with a very skeptical eye?
I mean, your argument has merit, but look, think of it this way.
Nuclear weapons are endgame things.
They're for mankind.
They're endgame things.
So we got them.
The Russians got them.
Now, what?
The Pakistanis, we think they have them.
The Israelis, they have those ones that they don't have in the desert.
And on and on.
So I guess the nations realized that they're so horrible that they really do have to stop proliferation.
And if they don't, it'll be the end of all mankind.
So if you were in charge of whether to try and stop nations from getting them or not, knowing that if you didn't, it would be the end of mankind, what would you do?
Just wanted to say, regarding your cats, I've discovered something with my cats that keep them very occupied, and it was something that I never would have expected.
But me and my girlfriend just recently bought a Russian tortoise, a baby Russian tortoise, and we have her in a tank, and they are fascinated.
And I also, I admit, I have no idea, no idea what to do.
And I don't even know that if we were to stop burning all oil right now, that it would have any effect whatsoever on the changing weather.
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, I think you and George both do a great service by covering this quite a bit.
But the reason I called tonight is I'm in Dayton, Ohio.
My name is Brad, by the way.
Yes, Brad.
And I've not been here long.
I've visited a lot when I was a child, but I've only been here maybe two years.
And I am right down the street from Wright Pad.
As a matter of fact, above my home is all military airspace.
And I've heard stories.
You know, I know a lot of the things that, I guess, have allegedly went on as far as maybe, you know, like Roswell and them transporting the craft to Wrightfield.
Speaking of facilities, I didn't know how much you knew about the Southwest Regional Spaceport they're putting down in UFOM, New Mexico.
This is a project sort of gone through Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson, who also has gotten together with the state of New Mexico and the XPRIZE Foundation to build this facility kind of through Virgin Galactic.
I'm not sure exactly how all the groups have put this together, but the state of New Mexico signed off an agreement for $250 million in December, and they're going to do space tourism down there, including rocket races and other things.
Well, they chose, I guess they were shooting between somewhere back east, New Mexico and California, and they picked New Mexico for the clear weather and clear airspace.
As a matter of fact, if they'd come out and they'd actually said something like, well, I don't know, yeah, we need oil.
We absolutely have got to have oil.
In Iraq, but we didn't.
Hey, Corporal, look, a nuke.
Weapon of mass destruction.
But we didn't do that.
That's to our benefit.
Listen again, I want to remind you after this weekend, I'm going to jump for a brief change of scenery, so I'll be gone for a couple of weekends.
And Oh, oh, while we're on that subject, if you're listening out there, Ms. Producer, how about rerunning one of the early, maybe even the first, interview with Colonel Philip Corso?
I think that that was one of the more important interviews that I ever did.
Top ten for sure.
And Colonel Corso knew he was at the end of his life, and he told us the story of what he did.
You know, he exchanged alien technology.
He slowly integrated it into the modern day world.
And if you believe Colonel Corzot and I tend to, then a lot of things that we have today, we can thank Roswell for.
That was an important interview.
And I think if you're going to rerun an interview during my change of scenery here, why, that would be certainly one hint, hint, hint to rerun.
Coming up now in a moment, Nick Pope.
Now, this ought to be good.
I mean, he used to run the British government's UFO project at the Ministry of Defense.
He was initially skeptical, as I'm sure he should have been, to do this.
His investigation of newly reported UFO incidents and access to government files on the subject soon convinced him that the phenomenon raised very important national security issues.
I love that one.
Especially when the witnesses were military pilots or where UFOs were actually tracked on radar, Nicolzo looked into other mysteries such as alien abductions, crop circles.
So we'll ask about all of this.
He now continues his research in a private capacity, is recognized as a leading authority, of course, on UFOs and the unexplained.
He's done extensive media work, has lectured all around the world, has acted as consultant on several TV documentaries.
Now, I've always wondered, the U.S. has always said, whatever they are, they're not a threat to national security.
And I've always wondered how the U.S. government defines national security.
If an object racing at 25,000 miles an hour traverses your atmosphere and the fastest gun you have will not shoot it down and the fastest airplane you have can't possibly catch it then how is it that our government or any government defines national security in the first place?
Nick Pope coming up to answer that question, I'm sure, in a moment.
So what it boils down to, I think, is Nick Pope essentially ran the equivalent of Project Blue Book in Great Britain.
And as a matter of fact, that's where he is right now, Great Britain somewhere or another.
I mean, the terms of reference for the British government's UFO project are really identical to the old United States Air Force project.
It was basically as simple as look at all the UFO sightings reported to the department, be they by public or military sources, evaluate them, investigate to the best of your ability, and see whether you think there's evidence of any threat to the defense of the country, anything, as it were, of any defense significance.
Yeah, it always comes down to that, Nick, and that leads me right back to what I was saying before I came to you, and that is the United States has sort of always laid back in the end and said, well, whatever they are, they're not a threat to national security.
And, you know, that's so cool that they would say that.
If an object's doing 25,000 miles an hour through the atmosphere and we can't catch it, we can't shoot it down, we can't figure out who it is, and we can't stop them, and that doesn't constitute a threat to national security, then what does?
Well, when you said that in your introduction, I kind of winced a little bit here because I thought, how can I actually go any better than the answer you've just given?
There's really not much I can do except agree with the assessment you've just made.
And in a sense, it's rather disturbing because if somebody rather more powerful than you just hasn't done anything so far, but you don't really know what their intentions are, then it's a fairly big assumption for any intelligence analyst to make.
No, the odd thing is it didn't actually have a formal title at all.
Oh.
Although back in 1950, the project has its roots in something called the Flying Saucer Working Party.
Now that, I mean, that's very interesting.
If you're interested in a little bit of history and about how one of the greatest figures in the British establishment got involved in this and started the whole thing off, it was the great World War II radar scientist, Sir Henry Tizard, who actually said that UFO sightings shouldn't be dismissed without some form of proper scientific study.
And he said this in 1950.
Winston Churchill had brought him back into government after the Second World War in the difficult post-war years.
And he was a chief scientific advisor.
So, when the Ministry of Defense's chief scientific advisor is the one setting up your UFO project, I think that's quite interesting.
And the odd thing is, unlike Blue Book, where you could say it was Project Blue Book before that, Project Grudge, before that, Project Sign, we never gave ours a name.
So, when I'm talking about the British government's UFO project, I'm just sort of saying what it did, really.
It's slightly odd because to me, every kind of project should have a name, it should have terms of reference, and it should have detailed outputs that are required so that any project manager will tell you that you've got to have output deliverables, and then you get assessed on how well you do against them.
Actually, I want to take you off course for just a moment.
Maybe it's not really off-course, but I'm very concerned with our climate change over here.
And over here, I mean, we're all experiencing the same possible climate change.
In fact, Europe could be victim of ocean current change that would freeze you guys.
And anyway, what I'm getting at is whether you agree or disagree with any of that, so much of the news that I'm getting, Nick, comes from your country, actually, from various publications in Great Britain.
And all of these climate change things are, as a matter of fact, are coming from Great Britain, and they're not being published here, Nick.
And I wonder why Great Britain, which really, in our way of thinking as Americans, isn't supposed to be that open, but you guys are publishing all this stuff, and we're not here.
I have to say, it's not my area of expertise, but I share your concerns, as do most people here.
I just think we are a very open society.
And we have one or two figures, and I'd better not name names, but some senior figures who are concerned about this and who are prepared to speak out and start the debate.
And I think, to a certain extent, I think the Internet and the increasingly global nature of our societies is pushing this in the right direction and giving us a more global mindset than purely national.
I received about 200 or 300 UFO reports each year whilst I was doing the job in the early 90s.
And of course, like any other UFO researcher, like a civilian UFO researcher, and like my predecessors both in Britain and America, most of them turned out to be misidentifications.
The figures that I would say are most accurate is to say about 80% I could explain very well as aircraft lights, weather balloons, satellites, meteors, all the usual things.
Another 15% probably went into the insufficient data category, leaving a 5% of extremely interesting cases.
Pardon me, one case that we were looking at, and it happened just before my watch, but I saw the report from the pilot, was on 5th of November 1990, a half squadron of Royal Air Force fast jets were crossing the North Sea, and they were overtaken by a UFO.
And they were talking to Dutch military air traffic control about that.
And they described a sort of large metallic object of some sort, and they actually had to take evasive action.
So again, it's interesting, talking what you mentioned in your introduction about defense significance, there's a whole subset of ufology which we could get into about the flight safety implications of this.
And I've seen files with our civil aviation authority talking about some terrifying near-misses between aircraft, both civil and military.
A passenger airliner was coming into Manchester Airport here in England, and a UFO suddenly effectively crossed the front of the aircraft.
And the pilot instinctively grabbed for the control stick.
Had he made that sharp, evasive maneuver, the UFO actually went before he could complete it.
But his Instinct was to throw the stick violently to the side because he feared a collision.
As I say, if he'd actually made that maneuver, he could have crashed the aircraft.
And a friend of mine who sadly died last year, but there was a man called Graham Shepard, a senior British Airways pilot, and he lobbied the Civil Aviation Authority here in Britain to include in the pilot's training syllabus some material about UFOs so that air crew were at least ready for these things to occur.
I think the first thing is almost before you get to the UFO encounter, to make sure that air traffic control is properly looking out for uncorrelated targets.
And again, it disturbed me.
I spoke, obviously, predominantly to military radar experts.
And very often, these were people that I would enlist in my investigations, of course, because one of the first questions in any UFO investigation in the military is, was it tracked on radar?
And I would have radar tapes impounded and sent to me.
But you know, I heard many times people say, well, we get these fireballs on our radars from time to time.
They come in, they do speeds of, say, 20,000 miles an hour, and then they just disappear.
And I said, how do you know that they're fireballs?
And the answer was, well, because they go very fast.
But going back to your question, I think what I would tell pilots is, generally speaking, if you see a UFO, it's probably got greater speed and maneuverability than you.
Yeah, but I'm going to, it's on my list of extremely urgent things to do to check that this material that Graham Shepard was wanting incorporated has been incorporated somewhere.
Because, of course, pilots, I've spoken to many, many civil and military pilots, and they see UFOs a lot.
But there are huge under-reporting issues here.
Many, many pilots, particularly Air Force pilots, took me aside and said to me, you know, I've seen these things, and I've heard some fascinating accounts, not of lights in the sky.
I mean, I'm talking about metallic craft doing speeds and maneuvers we can't possibly approach.
And I say, where's the report?
And very often they'll say, well, I didn't really make one because I wouldn't have known what to said.
I would possibly have been questioned as to whether I'd been seeing things.
I had one person say to me, and he made a joke of it, but it's a comment that sticks in my mind all these years later.
An Air Force pilot said to me, I didn't want to be known as Flying Saucer Fred in the officer's mess.
So when you've got that mindset, it's difficult because, of course, those are probably the best sorts of UFO reports you could have got from trained observers such as pilots.
Music If you're just tuning in, what the hell's wrong with you?
This is important stuff.
You should have been here some time ago.
We've got Nick Pope here.
He's a guy who ran the equivalent of Project Blue Book in Great Britain, and that's where we've got him on the phone from right now, is Great Britain.
And he mentioned metal, and, you know, that's an important one for me.
If you get a pilot reporting a metallic UFO, in other words, you didn't just see a light, maybe you saw something big, you saw a disc or whatever, and you really saw it, and you're a pilot and you reported that.
Serious stuff.
What kind of reports in that category, Nick, have you had?
And one that stands out in my mind, and this goes back to your question about interesting UFO incidents that happened on my watch, is that in March 1993, we had a massive wave of UFO sightings in the UK, particularly on the 30th and the 31st of March.
And UFOs were seen all around the country, and the descriptions were fairly common.
We were talking about our old friend, the triangular-shaped craft, which, of course, is very much a feature in our skies, so it seems.
Is it?
And this UFO was seen, as I say, all around the country, but it was particularly noteworthy that it flew directly over two military bases in the Midlands.
Yes.
REF COFORD and REF Shawbury.
And it was seen by a patrol of Air Force police officers at the first military base.
They made an official report to me afterwards.
And the interesting thing is then it headed towards the other base, which was just a few miles away.
And the meteorological officer there took a phone call to say there's a UFO coming your way.
And the base was pretty much shut down at night.
It was just a skeleton crew.
So he walked out of his office and looked across the fields.
And sure enough, he saw a bright light in the distance.
And this thing got closer and closer until he saw that it wasn't a light, but it was the lights on the underside of a massive triangular-shaped craft.
And I asked him to estimate the size, and with typical military precision, he picked two aircraft.
He said midway in size between a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.
I mean, my wife and I were on the way home from Las Vegas one night, and she turned around and said, what the hell's that?
And I stopped the car in the desert where you could hear crickets at a quarter mile, and this thing flew straight over our head and out toward Area 51, Nick.
And it made no sound.
The moon and the stars went away above us.
It was that big.
I felt like I could have thrown a rock at it, Nick.
It made no noise whatsoever, absolutely silent.
And we stood and just watched it sail.
And that's the word I'd use, sail, because it wasn't flying.
It wasn't supported by aerodynamic flight.
It was floating either because of anti-gravity or lighter than air.
I have no way of knowing.
But it didn't look at all earthly to me.
And that's how close it was.
That's why I was laughing because I was as close as you can get to one.
Well, the meteorological officer, he said this thing was about 200 feet above the ground and maybe another 200 feet to the side.
So it didn't come directly over his head.
And a really interesting feature of this case is he said how slow this craft was going to start with.
But I'm going to tell you the story, and you may laugh again because I think these are things that you'll recognize maybe from your own sighting, but certainly from descriptions that some of your other guests have given.
But this is from a military report made to the government's UFO project here.
He said this thing was going maybe no more than 20 or 30 miles an hour.
There was a narrow beam of light, he said, firing down from this craft and just sweeping across the fields.
Well, these UFO sightings happened too late on the 30th to get into the papers On the 31st, so if the story had run, it would have run on the 1st of April.
And who would pay attention to a UFO story running on the 1st of April?
So perhaps it's the one night that you can really get away with flying so obviously, blatantly over someone's military facilities and get away with it.
If we had those sorts of things for real, well, you know, we wouldn't be driving motor cars and taking seven or eight hours to fly across the Atlantic.
We would have a new, I mean, beyond that, we'd have a new power source.
Certainly the Earth is starved for some sort of alternative to oil, and a drive that can do what that apparently was doing would probably solve that problem as well.
So this is big stuff, very, very important stuff.
Is it your feeling, Nick, that your government and my government know about all of this, that we have encountered and made some kind of deal with these beings, whoever it is, or what do you think the state of knowledge is in our governments?
My honest answer to the question about the American government is I have no idea.
I could never get any access.
Even I could never get anything other than the party line, which is we're not in this game anymore and haven't been since Blue Book was shut down in 1969.
In my own government, where I can speak, I hope, with some degree of authority, my view, my feeling is that there is not a cover-up, that there's not any knowledge that these things are real.
I think we're searching for answers.
There are certainly many people in government, in the military, who are prepared to look at this with an open mind, but it's not my feeling that somewhere there's someone here that knows about it.
Is it your view and the view of a lot of Brits that the American government does know about it, has made contact, and does know a hell of a lot more than it's saying?
I mean, do the British suspect the American government of knowing what they don't?
Do you think that a lot of people in Great Britain do, I mean, you can answer it this way: do you think they suspect the American government knows much more than anybody's been told?
There are several such things, but I promise you, there's nothing that if I said it, you would say, well, he seen one of these things in a hangar somewhere or seen a file that explains what it's all about.
To the best of my knowledge, we don't have anything like that in the UK.
Did you ever have a feeling when you were doing your job, heading up essentially Blue Book in Britain, that you were being a Patsy, Nick?
Did you ever have that feeling, that you were just sort of a store dressing, that you were there to do what we think Blue Book did, which was to just sort of wash the whole thing away?
Did you ever feel like you were being assigned to do that, Nick?
I didn't, because I was receiving military reports as well as public reports, and I worked very, very closely with the Defense Intelligence staff and the sorts of people who conspiracy theorists.
theorists here say must have been doing the real UFO job.
Well, in fact, we were in and out of each other's offices all the time.
Having seen it personally, I do believe that the odds are very heavily that it was an extraterrestrial craft.
And by the way, the newspaper reports with regard to the object that I saw, Nick, came out, oh, I don't know, about a week later in our newspaper.
Many people, not just myself and my wife, had seen this, but many people here in the valley.
And they contacted the military, and the military's response was really funny.
The newspaper article said yes.
The military said there had been a secret mission which may have overflown the Prump Valley, where I live here, and that the aircraft involved was a C-130.
And I laughed and laughed and laughed.
I flew in C-130s, and of course, if it were that far over your head, it would rattle your teeth with the noise.
I'd better not comment on the specific, but what I can tell you is that I've been trying in Britain to raise awareness of these issues, not just with the public and the media, but within government and the military.
And I just had an article published in the Ministry of Defence's magazine called Focus about the UFO project and about the Rendlesham Forest UFO.
And one of the things we did is we got published the sketches of the Rendlesham UFO that Jim Penniston made really to nail the lie that this was lights.
It wasn't lights.
It was a craft.
You know, the drawing from the official United States Air Force witness statement makes it quite clear this is a craft, right down to symbols seen on the side of it.
And of course, the British government has released, under the Freedom of Information Act, now our act has only been on the statute book for just over a year, but we've already released the file on the Rendlesham Forest issue, including the fact that the Defence Intelligence staff assessed the radiation readings taken from the landing site.
The story is that in December 1980, effectively on Christmas night, a patrol of United States Air Force security officers at the twin bases of Bentwaters and Woodbridge in Suffolk saw lights in the forest and they thought that an aircraft from these bases, these were American Air Force bases in Britain.
They thought that maybe one of the aircraft had crashed.
So they went out to investigate and to initiate a search and rescue operation.
They didn't find a crashed aircraft.
They found a landed UFO, a small triangular-shaped craft, which was maneuvering through the trees.
And at one point, this thing actually touched down in a clearing.
And this is hugely important because this is where some of the best evidence came.
And effectively, one of them, Jim Penniston, there were three people in the patrol, Jim Penniston got close enough to touch the side of this craft.
So, you know, this is for all the people who say, well, it was a meteor or just the lights of the lighthouse.
No, this was something that you could reach up and touch the side of.
And there are sketches in the official witness statement, the United States Air Force documentation, showing the craft and showing some symbols on the side of it, which I can only liken to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
And of course, I actually have heard this story before, Nick, but I'm kind of comparing notes here on what I heard and what I'm hearing now, and it's very much the same.
How specifically are what's on the side of the craft there in Great Britain, the one you're talking about, how specifically accurate are the representations we have of what was written on that craft?
And he was actually able to sketch the thing contemporaneously.
When he then got back to the base, he took his notebook and, of course, frankly, his hand had been shaking, I think.
The drawings in his notebook are a little bit wobbly, but he immediately wrote up a better version.
And so I think, given that this was sketched at the time by a security policeman, I think there is a fairly high degree of certainty that he got it pretty close.
And as I say, this thing actually touched down and the indentations where this thing had landed were still there the following morning when they reinvestigated the landing site and they plotted it out and it formed the shape of an equilateral triangle suggesting that the thing had been on some sort of tripod-like landing legs.
They took a Geiger counter out to the landing site and they got higher than average readings.
And the readings peaked, it won't surprise you to learn, in the three holes where this thing had come down.
Now, these readings were then sent to the Ministry of Defense, and again, the Defense Intelligence staff looked at them and their assessment, and again, this is now a matter of public knowledge.
This is in no way me telling a story that can't be backed up by the officially released papers.
They're all out there.
The Defense Intelligence staff said that the readings taken were, quote, significantly higher than background, unquote.
And it goes on to talk about the figures.
And it's higher by a factor of about seven.
Now, this wasn't high enough to pose a danger to any of the people there, but it's evidentially significant.
Since you know the details of the story, one obvious question is, when you see something of this magnitude, you see a craft on the ground, my God, don't you immediately call in the cavalry?
These people almost like a lot of witnesses that I've spoken to, and I've spoken to hundreds of UFO witnesses, not just members of the public, but police and military.
And there's nothing, although the military are generally, of course, pretty good witnesses, they're human beings, and I think they react in exactly the same way.
There are some hints and clues, and certainly I've subsequently seen some interviews with Jim Penniston, and it's quite clear it's affected him quite deeply.
But, you know, the interesting thing about all this is this wasn't just these three people that saw it, because it came back on the following night.
And on that occasion, there were many, many more witnesses, including a man who I'm sure you and your listeners have heard a lot about, Colonel Charles Holt.
And what happened was, Holt, of course, knew about these UFO sightings, and it was he who had the witness statements drawn up, the sketches formally recorded.
And he was at a function the following evening, and the door burst open, and a young airman rushed up to him, and he said, sir, it's back.
And Holt looked a bit confused, and he said, what?
What's back?
And the person said, the UFO.
The UFO is back, sir.
So Holt threw together a small team of about half a dozen people and they went out into the woods.
He took, again, a guide decounter with him.
He took a tape recorder, and he's recorded his progress through the crime scene, if I can call it almost a crime scene, because that's almost the mentality.
Well, maybe so, Nick, but you know, somewhere there's a commander who is commander of that base, and he's got an unknown, possibly threatening object above a military base.
So to not respond, it seems to me somewhere along the chain of command, if you could get it from the military, somebody said no.
The first problem was that for most of this encounter, the UFO was actually out in the forest, and Colonel Holt, who was the senior officer on duty, of course, was there, and they had comms problems.
Their radios kept cutting out, so it's doubtful that they would have been able to radio back to base.
That was the first problem.
The second issue is interesting in itself.
Because this happened over the Christmas period and at night, you know, there was a fairly limited number of people.
A lot of the key players were on leave.
A lot of the key commanders would have probably had to have been gotten up.
And again, this, as I say, I didn't want to inadvertently mislead anyone.
The UFO being directly over the base, it only happened very briefly, right at the end of the incident.
Well, at least we have our records, but again, one of the records does say that not all the radar equipment was functioning, and some of the equipment that was functioning was not functioning properly.
So the best thing I can say about that is inconclusive.
But, you know, recently, I was able to speak with a radar operator at a nearby Air Force base.
And he said, and again, this is now on the public record, he said that he had received a telephone call from the military base to say that they had an uncorrelated target over the establishment, was there anything on radar?
He said he looked down at his screen, and just for about 30 seconds, maybe about three sweeps of the radar, he said there was something there, and then it just faded away.
And it's interesting, again, looking back at some of the things we've spoken about in the earlier part of the show, of course, the Belgium UFO from 1990, that was tracked on radar.
And, of course, the fact that it was tracked on radar is what caused them to launch the two F-16 fighter interceptors.
The 1993 sightings that I spoke about weren't tracked on radar, although when I really dug down into it, I did find one or two inconclusive returns.
I actually looked at the radar data myself, together with an Air Force officer for that.
We had it downloaded onto VHS video cassette, sent to us.
And we sat in front of a TV looking at these little dots fade in and out.
But it was, as I say, it was inconclusive.
It was nothing like Belgium, where it was solid enough that a fighter controller instantly said, we've got an uncorrelated target in our airspace, launch.
Well, I'm sure this is going to be a troublesome question, but it's one we've dealt with here in the U.S., and people have very differing views of it all.
There is actually a view out there, kind of like Bigfoot, that, you know, we should shoot one of them down.
And then, you know, learn about it.
And maybe we've already done it.
At any rate, there is some evidence, certainly, that we have been shooting at UFOs, perhaps even using Star Wars magnitude stuff to shoot at them.
I mean, there's all kinds of stuff floating around out there, STS pictures and some of the rest of the stuff.
What's your view, just sort of generally, Nick, on the shooting at these?
Okay, well, firstly, I should say that I've got nothing to add to this particular debate by way of first-hand knowledge.
I've seen nothing in the Ministry of Defence that leads me to suggest that Britain has been engaged in any kind of hostile action against UFOs, any attempt to engage them.
Although, of course, over the years, if we've detected UFOs on radar, we have scrambled aircraft, but these have been generally armed with gun cameras, and the only shooting that we've tried to do is with film.
But my own view, I mean, just as a human being, is that violence should be the last resort, and really we should only shoot if we're shot at.
I think trying to shoot down a UFO out of curiosity or anything like that is criminal and suicidal and probably both.
But you see, if you're dealing with a civilization that's more advanced than our own, and if you're really dealing with a civilization, as many believe, that is capable of interstellar travel, then shooting at them, however good we think our technology is, is probably not a very good idea because they can probably shoot back with bigger and nastier things.
It's just that the military, I mean, that's what they do.
They shoot.
And they particularly shoot things that they think might be a threat.
And I'm convinced that, well, when they're over in military bases, or, for example, missile silos here in this country or in the old Soviet Union, I would think the urge to shoot would be absolutely irresistible and that the military probably would do that.
At the same time, though, I follow your line of reasoning that it would be stupid.
I think it would come down almost to an individual decision from the chain of command.
And rules of engagement is a whole area which I'd better not get into.
Generically, rules of engagement.
I'm not talking about any special rules of engagement with UFOs.
I just mean sort of judgmental shoot, don't shoot situations.
It's a difficult area.
It's a very difficult area.
But my view is that if any of these UFOs really are craft belonging to extraterrestrial civilizations, we should be reaching out with the hand of friendship and trying to establish a dialogue.
Nick, out of curiosity, if you were in charge of doing exactly that, reaching out with a hand of friendship, something very unmilitary-like, but nevertheless, you were in charge of trying to do that.
I think what I would start With is just information.
There was an article, and I'm afraid it escapes my memory, pardon me, who it was, but somebody wrote an article, I believe in Scientific American, some years ago, suggesting that SETI, if SETI detects signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, because of the light speed problem, the radio signals won't go any faster.
So we won't be having two-way conversations.
But there'll be a kind of galactic internet, a kind of cosmic internet where civilizations effectively put information about themselves out there.
And I think to answer your question, that's what I would do.
I would say, this is our art.
This is our mathematics.
This is our poetry.
Now, a lot of that may not translate at all, but our understanding of mathematics would translate, of course.
That's the truly universal language.
So I would just put up all the information and say, look, this is us.
If this will drag you off point a little bit, but if a, I don't know, intergalactic civilization were monitoring us, and we have every reason to believe that they probably are.
I mean, that's what these craft are all about, some sort of monitoring, they would be able to look down on our world and look at what's going on and make certain judgments, even from relatively afar, Nick.
They could come to some conclusions.
And, you know, not all of them would necessarily have favorable results for us.
But for every Hitler, there's a Shakespeare, and for every person who's doing some questionable things, there are people doing charitable works, and people concerned about the environment, and people concerned about animal welfare and such like.
So I think if someone was truly looking at us, they would see that, well, there's good and bad.
But somebody like Dr. Michio Kaku, who I interview frequently, thinks that the kind of civilization that would produce the craft that would get here, that would be monitoring us right now, might perhaps not regard us any more than we would regard an anthill.
Some of the ants having come into our kitchen and crawling across the floor.
So they might not regard us any more than that, and they might step on us without even thinking about it twice.
I accept that there is probably going to be a gulf of technology and that there'll be more advanced, but I don't agree with that because I think that we do display things that would set us apart.
I think they would, and I think the curiosity as well, the fact that we're doing things like sending space probes to nearby planets and indeed out of the solar system, the fact that we have a SETI program listening, I think it shows that the human spirit is ultimately one of questing, one of adventure, one of trying to reach out for answers.
And I think even if they're more advanced than us by a big factor, that there's something about that that would say, well, you know, they're explorers too.
Well, I'm not a psychologist, but I think what I could say is that the world would change forever on that day.
And people would look back and they would characterize this as there being a time before we knew for sure, and there being a time after we knew that we're not alone.
It's the immediacy that would certainly provoke a reaction.
But at risk of sounding glib, I think that reaction would depend what the message was.
If it was prepare to be invaded, then I take your point.
But if it's something like, you're not alone, and we have technology to share with you and we have a welcoming hand to extend, which do you think is the more likely, Nikki?
And of course, if we were judging by our own pretty dire record, instances of contact between technologically advanced and less technologically advanced civilizations have not played out very well for the underdog.
A lot of people in the audience would certainly like to know that during your tour of duty doing this, was there ever an instance where somebody in greater authority than yourself said, don't report that.
Of course, there'd be no way of knowing whether that person who had just made that comment to you, which is sort of a suggestion, might have known that you were about to stumble into something gigantic.
Yes, I mean, I can't prove that, but I suspect that had that been the case, I wouldn't have been allowed to start the investigation at all, because you never know in an investigation when you are going to stumble across the solution.
And I was, you know, I was never really obstructed in any way.
It's just I had other things to be doing, and resources were limited.
Effectively, the conclusions were almost done on a case-by-case basis.
In other words, they were either explained as whatever it was that we tracked down that in all probability had been seen, or they were unexplained.
Now, of course, I took my job as being to try and have as few unexplained as possible.
If I was doing a good investigation, I figured I should be able to get a solution to most of these UFO sightings.
But, of course, I began to realize, and my conclusion, although it wasn't an official one at the end of the project, was that there are always going to be ones that we can't explain.
And there is some intriguing evidence that some of these UFOs really are craft.
They're displaying speeds and maneuvers way ahead of anything that we've got.
Because that wouldn't quite have been the party line.
Although, to be fair, the party line, which you can read on the Ministry of Defense website, is that the department is open-minded about the possibilities.
See, it's so compelling that I wonder why it didn't force some kind of conclusion statement on your part that, oh, God, I don't know, hinted at something so gigantic, Nick.
One of my predecessors, in fact, the head of the division, was a man called Ralph Noyce, and he went on after his retirement from government service to take a great interest in UFOs, crop circles and psychic matters.
Well, I did wonder whether it would affect my career.
But I think looking back over the years, and again, I've written about this quite widely, but looking back, even right at the heart of the British establishment, there's been almost a sceptic versus believer debate raging for many years about the UFO phenomenon.
And many, many senior figures in Britain, great figures like Lord Mountbatten, Earl Mountbatten, Lord Dowding, great establishment heroes have spoken out as to their belief in an extraterrestrial reality.
It's just the nature of the connection with Great Britain now.
Beyond that, obviously, don't call and say, Nick, my uncle Fred saw a light back in Ohio somewhere.
Can you tell me what it was?
Because obviously he's not going to be able to.
Here we have the man who ran the equivalent of Project Blue Book in Britain.
So if you have something to ask about his career or about what he's encountered or, you know, something that would make sense to ask Nick, then please bring it on.
We just gave the numbers, the portals to get in and be part of all this.
It should be a very interesting hour.
It all depends on the nature of your questions.
Coming up.
The End Once again, Nick Pope.
And just before we go to the phones, Nick, I want to ask something.
There have been all these reports, Nick, that we've sort of heard rumors about here in the U.S. about these fast walkers, these things that are tracked by national security agencies, whether it be from the ground or satellite, that actually they've seen many of these things traversing the atmosphere at like 25,000 miles an hour, the higher atmosphere.
And I wonder what you've got from Britain on that sort of thing.
Well, certainly we've had all sorts of uncorrelated targets on the radar.
And I was saying earlier about the mindset sometimes is that whether you're looking at a conventional air traffic control radar, whether you're looking at a military radar, or even if you're using, say, the ballistic missile early warning center space tracking radar, all sorts of strange things, as you say, do turn up.
But if the mindset is that anything that moves incredibly fast must be a fireball, then it's the mindset that you really need to challenge.
Yes, we do get these things, but until the training manuals say, don't assume, please don't assume that just because it goes that fast, it's a meteor or a fireball, until that change is made, we won't get any answers.
Yes, there are various things that I can't go into.
But there's nothing that's going to turn anything that I've said on its head.
unidentified
Correct.
There's no implication through that.
I assume you were never briefed at any time during your tenure about the existence or even the possibility of extraterrestri intelligence outside of our Earth through physical or tangible or communicative evidence?
I never had a briefing that said, we know these things are real.
I never was shown any artifact and was told this came from a craft.
Now, I did have a briefing where certainly some people in the Defense Intelligence staff spoke quite openly about the possibilities of these things being extraterrestrial, but they didn't, that briefing was not given from a point of view of we know, but it was more a speculative, look, what else could it be with some of these things?
There is, but the slightly, depending on your view, disheartening thing is that we have been a victim of our own openness, if I can say it that way.
I mentioned earlier our Freedom of Information Act, which only came fully into force just over a year ago.
Now, it won't surprise you to learn that in terms of the requests made under the Freedom of Information Act to the Ministry of Defense, requests for information about UFOs are right up there in about the top three, alongside things like the Iraq war and various other situations.
There has been a steady program of official disclosure, both at our National Archives and indeed online at the Ministry of Defense's website, and an increasing number of UFO documents are now steadily being published.
I've seen the sorts of documents that, again, researchers like Stan Friedman show around from the NSA.
But generally speaking, there's a limited, very, very limited redaction in the British documents.
But going back to the original question, what this has meant is that the section that is involved in the UFO phenomenon is now having to devote virtually all of its time to dealing with these FOI requests.
And I do not believe that they are really even in the business of research and investigation of the phenomenon anymore.
What have you seen that would turn civilization upside down?
unidentified
The general population, the military, they have a lot of good thinkers.
And the general population couldn't have the beginning ability to investigate the phenomena what's going on.
The surveillance we're under with these, you call them ETs or whatever, what have you, what's going on is beyond our comprehension, a lot of scientific areas, how they're getting here, how they're moving about.
Just do the best you can with words and try and answer that question, sir.
What is it you have seen that would turn civilization upside down?
unidentified
First of all, if the government were to tell people that there's another existence, be it a biological robot or extraterrestrial, that were conducting surveillance,
monitoring us, doing medical research on us, cataloging us, manipulating our events of history, and doing things like securing military bases so they can't perform certain technologies that they're developing, interfering with cities and technologies and so on.
But the main reason actually I called was basically that in the early 50s, our scientists were investigating UFO phenomenon, and we did actually have one crash that we intentionally used.
We figured out our scientists, our physicists figured out how they were operating, and we used an oscillated microwave frequency to deorbit one of these things.
But, you know, the first part of what he was saying was kind of interesting, and that was that, you know, there could be knowledge out there that simply couldn't be given to the general public.
And if it was given to the general public, it would have such a horrible impact on all of our social structures that, you know, as he said, if we were being examined medically and sort of dissected every now and then and watched, we just couldn't.
All I'd say is that I don't really have any information that would support that hypothesis.
I mean, I agreed with what Yokoha said about there being some great thinkers in the military, but there are great thinkers in all sorts of other fields, too.
And I think it's arrogant to assume that only the military would have a take on this.
I think the civilian scientific community would be able to contribute.
And, you know, I come back to the point, I think, if we had some of these technologies and had figured out how to use them, I don't know why we'd be doing space shuttles and rockets anymore at all.
Art, Nick, thank you very much for taking my call.
Nick, I have a question to ask you about that large triangular craft you saw.
Yeah.
The one I saw was up in Franconia Notch, up in New Hampshire, back in 1994, in October.
I was up there looking at the Milky Way.
You can actually read a book up in Franconia Notch by the Milky Way.
That's how bright it is, the stars are at night.
And it was a totally cold, clear night.
And this craft blotted out the stars.
There were no running lights.
It was easily 300 feet on the side, equilateral triangle, and it appeared to have some type of hemispheric dome on its belly.
But the curious thing about this, and I really appreciate talking to somebody who's actually an official with some government about this, and you mentioned that you saw one.
I probably could not have done the job because I think I could only really do that job effectively if I was coming to each and every case really with an open mind and a blank sheet of paper.
If I had believed in any of this or had seen something, I don't think I could have been even-handed in my investigations and with great reluctance, because, of course, it was a fantastic job.
I think if I'd have seen something, I would have had to have placed an official report on the record to ask one of my colleagues to investigate, and then I think I would have had to have asked for a transfer to other duties.
It was not very many years, Nick, you know, after I started doing this kind of program that I had my sighting, and I struggled terribly with whether or not to make it public.
And then when I finally did, I dragged my poor wife in front of the microphone as well and made her confirm everything that I was saying.
But prior to that, I struggled with it terribly because I discussed this kind of subject matter, and I wasn't sure what it would do to me.
That's certainly what I understand from my dealings with witnesses, but I'm conscious I haven't answered your caller's original question, which is about the lights and the potential engines, the power source, or whatever.
Just to describe what was seen in this particular UFO sighting in 1993, and this is a description that I've heard before, is essentially people viewing this from almost directly underneath and seeing an equilateral triangle,
or in some cases a slightly more elongated triangle, and seeing three lights in each of the corners and one larger but dimmer light in the middle.
That's effectively the description that I received.
And this craft was, again, just to go back to the point that Cora made, I sort of talk about a flat triangle, almost like a, at risk of trivializing it, a slice of pizza or something, but that kind of shape.
But some of the other descriptions did suggest at a little bit more height and depth.
So there were some indications that we were dealing, in some of these cases, at least, not with something flat and triangular, but something more diamond-shaped.
You're on the air with Nick Pope in Great Britain.
unidentified
Hello.
Hello, this is Roger from Washington State.
Yes, sir.
And two years ago, I think it was about two years ago, and I can't remember whether it was a magazine article.
It seems to me that it was actually a newspaper article.
I read that Israel was developing a craft with a light alloy exostructure, which would be filled with a helium or a lighter-than-air gas, and it would be parked in a geosynchronous orbit, suborbit, above their country.
And I was wondering if Nick had maybe heard anything about anything like that.
The structure would be filled With this gas, and so that it would be lighter than, basically, not lighter than air, but it would be easy to elevate up to a suborbit.
You know, tomorrow night's going to be really interesting.
James McCanney is going to be here.
He's a physicist, and he's had decades in promoting, among other things, and we're going to talk of many things, his view of what comets are, not the dirty snowballs that NASA has been always saying they thought they were, knew they were, really.
And now, Project Stardust is done.
We have obtained material from a comet tail.
We have it back.
We've analyzed it.
And so it's going to be a hell of a night to have McKenny on the air.
I've always thought that that would be a logical type of craft to develop, you know, something with a lighter than air gas in it.
And I don't, you know, I can't remember if it was an article, but I've always watched for some follow-up on that article, and I've never seen anything.
I don't know that it would go to the kind of altitudes he was talking about, geosynchronous, but certainly some kind of, I mean, we didn't really abandon the whole project after the Hindenburg, right?
And certainly I've seen some more generic material about airship technology and such like, but I guess a bit of Googling may well be the answer to this one.
Listening on the superstation, C-J-O-B, and we're glad to have it.
Just a question for your guest.
Basically, I'm Mike Art has mentioned.
I've spotted a couple UFOs up here in Canada.
I spent a good deal of time up north, and I saw a documentary a number of months ago, for the second or third time, on orbs, that you have tremendous amount of crop circles over in the UK.
And there was a number of amateur, I would imagine them to be amateur photographers, up on a hillside.
They had a beautiful view of the valley and this huge cornfield, I guess it was, perhaps.
Now that is an intriguing piece of film footage, not least because I believe that Colin Andrews subsequently tracked down the driver of the tractor, who quite independently from the people taking the film was able to corroborate the story.
We had a watching brief, certainly on crop circles.
I think the best way I can answer your question is to say that certainly, in my experience, it was impossible to run a UFO project without finding yourself on the receiving end of any reports that don't really kind of fit the pattern.
So crop circles, animal mutilations, ghosts seen on military bases, alien abductions, anything weird and wonderful was reported to me.
I had people phone up and ask if they could remote view for their country and become psychic spies.
I had people ask me what plans the Ministry of Defense was developing to develop technologies to engage road comets or asteroids on collision course with the Earth.
So yeah, the UFO project, although its terms of reference didn't cover these things, inevitably the reports had to go somewhere and they came to us.
Well, I'm going to say something which probably won't be too popular with some of your listeners, but I think that most, if not all, of the complex patterns I believe are probably made by people.
But I think that there is a genuine phenomenon in terms of the very simple circles.
And that, you know, it hasn't gone away.
It's just that it's not being reported when there are all these much more newsworthy crop circles which make much better pictures in the newspapers.
And I think the answer there, frankly, is likely to be some form of meteorological phenomenon.
But I don't buy into the theory that these are being caused by UFOs, either landing in some way and swirling these patterns or creating them with Some sort of directed energy weapon.
I just haven't seen anything that would support that hypothesis.
Well, maybe you could explain to us how these intricate, amazing formations get done over acres and acres and acres of land without people getting caught and that sort of thing.
I think the first point is to stress that although people have this image of Doug and Dave as being the kind of archetypal crop circle hoaxes, I think that firstly the answer is there are much larger teams of people out, so there's just more or less work for the individuals to do, and everyone has their little piece to do.
The other answer to your question, and I'm going to have to choose my words extremely carefully here for legal reasons and not mention any names, is that, of course, some farmers might find it quite lucrative to have a pattern on their crop.
Because the value of the lost and trampled corn pales into insignificance when you add up the fact that once word gets around, as long as you put a couple of people at the gate and take a pound of time for someone to come in and lurk,
over the course of a long summer's weekend, certain farmers could stand to make several thousand pounds because the interest, of course, is that big.
So again, choosing my words carefully, the issue about not being discovered and things like that, well, they might have some inside help or even inside sponsorship to produce these patterns.
Shouldn't we, by now, caught some people or had some people come up and admit they were part of a very complex scheme and then laid out for us how they've done it?
Because looking at some of them, it just doesn't seem humanly possible, particularly for them to have formed in such relatively short periods of time.
There is a legitimate perhaps criminal mystery here.
Firstly, at least one person has been caught making crop circles and was actually charged and convicted of criminal damage.
Good.
The second answer is as to why the people engaged in really complex patterns wouldn't come out and say so, I think it would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Part of their motivation is to keep the mystery going.
And in a sense, I think to understand it, one has to look at the mindset of the conceptual artist, where for a conceptual artist, the effect of the artwork on the population is as much part of what they're creating as the pattern itself.
And part of the conceptual art is, I think, getting these things in the papers, getting them discussed at news conferences, UFO conferences, and wherever.
Now, I know there's a very deep-held belief in the minds of many people that there's more to it than that.
And I know I'll have just upset a big bunch of people, and I apologize for that.
No, that's quite all right.
I can't not tell you what I think, and that's what I think.
Well, I just, you know, I'm willing to follow that path with you, but it just seems the size and the quickness with which some of these are laid down, and then, of course, you mentioned the lights, right, that were captured on video.
I mean, there is something I'm sure that a lot of it is, I don't know, physics students may be out having a blast at night, a lot of them, or something, but not all of them.
First-time caller line, you're on the air with Nick Pope.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, gentlemen.
I'm interested to know what information you can share with us of Mr. Bell's audience about UFOs in regard to either war games or other sites of battle, say in the Falkland Islands or in the Middle East or wherever.
And I'll be glad to take your comments off the air.
Of course, there's been a long history of close association between UFO sightings and military bases.
In terms of military exercises, yes.
I guess the story of Operation Mainbrace in the 50s is fairly well known, that UFOs were detected in a big NATO exercise.
And I am aware of a case more recently involving a British Navy ship, HMS Manchester, which was again on a NATO exercise up, I think, with the Norwegians and some other nations on what's called a JMC, a joint maritime course.
It's a regular naval exercise that NATO does.
And again, there were sightings of UFOs there.
As to any interference, I'm not aware of that.
And as for an actual war zone, of course, I've seen reports in the literature, but I haven't seen any official reports relating to Iraq or the Falklands or anything like that.
I mean, I guess the point I would make is, of course, there are an awful lot of things flying around, everything from aircraft to missiles, AAA.
So there's kind of a lot of things in the sky anyway.
I think we all made some interesting inferences about that exchange that your government had with the U.S. concerning.
I was wondering if you had any other examples of that.
I think the last caller might have diluted this question a bit, but the proximity you have with other European nations, I was wondering if you had any other examples such as that.
Yes, effectively the terms of reference of the project, which is just to look at UFO sightings reported to me in the UK to see if there was evidence of a threat.
My brief did not say go and start investigating UFO reports that you might have read occurred in China or anything like that.
Not in the sense that a military intelligence officer would understand the concept of threat assessment.
Now, that doesn't mean that people haven't speculated more informally over the years.
And I think I mentioned some fairly big establishment figures who did.
And in fact, someone who I didn't mention, Lord Hill Norton, the former chief of our defense staff, coming out and speaking about his belief in an extraterrestrial reality.
Now, the chief of the defense staff, that's kind of the equivalent of your chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
All right, so how much of it is, I don't know, can be attributed to some sort of psychological maladjustment on the part of the people claiming these stories?
I think a very small percentage, but it would be irresponsible to pretend that it wasn't there.
And I think one could say the same of the abduction reports, that certainly there may well be psychological explanations to some, but not all of those points.
Picking up on your caller's first point, there's some very interesting potential research to be done, I guess, between linkages in crop circle patterns, symbols seen by people on the side of UFOs, and some of the symbols reported by the abductees.
And again, there's a whole symbology, as it were, a science of symbology, and some of the ancient patterns drawn.