Art Bell from Manila warns of Typhoon Queenie’s rapid intensification while linking Iraq War dissatisfaction to Democratic election gains and Pentagon plans for second National Guard tours, citing Marine General Peter Pace’s strategy re-evaluation. Former UK MOD UFO head Nick Pope denies imminent alien invasion claims but stresses the need for military preparedness, referencing Bentwaters (1980) and triangular UFOs over British bases. Callers debate Iraq withdrawal risks—Sunni-Shiite conflicts, Kurdish independence, and caliphate threats—while Art advocates global awareness and strategic patience, underscoring America’s potential to repeat Vietnam’s post-war trauma if missteps persist. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippines, Manila, I bid you good day, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be in the known universe.
I'm Mark Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM tonight, wide open.
You name it, let them rip, open lines.
That's what we're going to do shortly.
A few things for you here at the beginning of the program.
Now, if you've checked out the coasttocoastam.com website, you can clearly see that we are having the typhoon of the week again.
This one is ominously called Queenie.
Queenie has been approaching the Philippines for the last couple of days.
We get what are called warden notices from the American embassy here.
And I quickly scramble and go look and see where the monster is.
Queenie approached from the usual direction.
Most of them seem to hit the island I'm on, Luzon, which is where Manila is located.
As a matter of fact, there's a map up there on the website.
It will actually help you to understand where I am geographically.
And we're reading ominous things like this.
A drop of 57 millibars in just six hours may put Queenie as one of the most rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones of all time.
Its track is very similar to super typhoon Cimarron, which crossed the same area exactly two weeks ago.
All interests in Luzon and northern Visayas, Philippines, should closely monitor the progress of Typhoon Queenie.
They call it Chevy.
You always get two, you get the Far Eastern name and you get the Western name.
The Western name is Queenie.
I wonder who was responsible for coming up with that name.
Anyway, Queenie is probably, my best guess by looking at the map, Queenie is just about directly north of Manila right now.
We have cloudy skies, a little bit of wind, a little bit of rain, nothing too awful.
I'm very concerned about the northern areas like Baguio.
That's a mountain city, and some areas up there that are probably really getting clobbered by Queenie.
But this one just missed us by just enough, I hope.
Now, what happens when the other side, you know, when the cyclonic movement goes past us and we kind of get the other side, I don't know.
We'll wait and see what happens.
The webcam photograph is courtesy of Irene, Erin, if you will, tonight.
She took that with her cell phone, and then we sent it to the web, and then we converted it and put it up there.
So it's a little grainy, cell phone-type picture, but taken a few days ago, and she was kind of proud of that one, so I put it up there.
And speaking of Irene, I've always been dead-flat honest with you guys about everything that's going on in my life.
I don't know.
It's almost an illness with me.
I just, you know, if there's something going on in my life, it pours out of me whether I want it to or not.
So the latest is she's having some trouble with her pregnancy.
Nothing particularly unusual, and a lot of women have it.
It's a little bit of bleeding, you know, but it's just scaring the hell out of us.
And she's ordered to bed rest and taking medicine and, you know, has been seeing her doctor and that kind of thing.
So that's what's going on here.
And, you know, it's just scaring the you know what out of us.
I'm obviously pretty old to be a daddy, but nevertheless, it happened.
I mean, before leaving this life, there's nothing like a little bit of eternity that would be lodged within a child.
And so hands together, prayer, and all that stuff, that it comes out well.
All right, we're going to look at the world a little bit, and then we're going to just let it rip tonight with open lines.
Irene is going to just take it nice and easy, and I'm going to sit here and listen to what all of you have to say.
It's been an incredible week, and of course, I watched the election avidly on Fox News here.
And I must say, it was interesting watching the Fox News reporters.
I mean, they are kind of conservative after all.
And so they were doing their dead-level best to sort of hide or mask whatever depression they were feeling as they were reporting what was going on.
But it was pretty clear that they were fairly depressed.
And of course, the Democrats, what was the word?
Thumping, I think the word was, certainly deployed quite a thumping, took both houses of Congress.
Stock market loved it.
And the stock market went up, hit new records and all of that.
I think they like the people who invest in the market for some reason love a divided government.
I think the reason for that is because when you have divided government, you don't have very many new laws.
I mean, they go into sort of a gridlock.
And those who invest don't like new laws.
New laws might not be good for their money.
So I think that's the answer to why the stock market goes up when everything gets divided in government.
And so there you have it.
That's my view.
I'm sure others would have other views.
Meanwhile, this is kind of interesting.
Senator John McCain, somebody I like very, very much, considered the frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, intends to launch an exploratory committee next week, according to GOP officials.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid preempting any sort of statement that the senator might make himself, of course.
McCain, The GOP Maverick, who unsuccessfully sought his party's nomination in 2000, already has opened a bank account for the committee, according to one official.
So looks like McCain's going to run.
A new recording Friday attributed to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq mocked President Bush as a coward whose conduct of the war was rejected at the polls, challenging him to keep U.S. troops in the country to, quote, face more bloodshed because we haven't had enough of your blood yet, end quote.
That was Abu Hamza El Majir, identified as a speaker on the tape.
Because we haven't had enough of your blood yet, huh?
The Pentagon is developing plans that for the first time would send entire National Guard combat brigades back to Iraq for a second tour.
The Guard's top general said in the latest sign of how thinly stretched our military actually has become.
Smaller units and individual troops from the Guard have already returned to Iraq for longer periods, and some active duty units have served multiple tours.
Brigades generally have about 3,500 troops in them.
So I guess we are stretched pretty damn thin, and I'm going to have a question for you about the war.
U.S. military commanders are, in fact, re-evaluating strategy in Iraq to determine what changes are needed to, quote, get ourselves more focused on the correct objectives, end quote.
Nation's top general said on Friday, I think we have to maintain our focus on what objectives we want for the United States.
And then we need to give ourselves a good, honest scrub about what's working and what is not working.
What are the impediments to progress?
And what should we change about the way we're doing it to ensure that we get to the objective that we've set up for ourselves?
That was Marine General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And that was aired on the CBS early show.
And emotional President Bush said Friday that he would present the Medal of Honor, America's highest military decoration, to a Marine who died when he jumped on a grenade in Iraq, saved the lives of his two comrades.
Boy, the medal will be given to Corporal Jason Dunham, who died on April 22, 2004 of wounds he suffered when his patrol was ambushed near the Syrian border.
Crew members aboard a runaway train carrying rail equipment tried frantically to slam on the brakes as the locomotive barreled down a very steep Sierra Nevada slope and then derailed, according to investigators on Friday.
The bodies of two crew members recovered Friday from the smoldering wreckage of Thursday's derailment that, of course, spilled thousands of gallons of fuel near a thick forest and sparked a big fire.
An American diagnosed with AIDS these days, the AIDS virus, can expect to live for about 24 additional years on average, and the cost of health care over two plus decades is going to be more than $600,000, according to new research.
That's a lot of money.
Both life expectancy and the cost of care have risen from earlier estimates because mainly of expensive, effective drug therapies.
Jack Palance has died.
The craggy-faced, menace in Shane, Sudden Fear, and other films who turned successfully to comedy in his 70s, that's a time to begin a career, huh?
With his Oscar-winning self-parody, City Slickers, died Friday.
He died of natural causes at his home in Montecito, California, surrounded by family.
He was 87 years of age.
Now, the only question that I think that I would pose for you tonight, and it's the toughest question we're all facing right now, is about Iraq.
And obviously, the election has told the president what the American people think about Iraq, I think.
And that's not much.
I don't think anybody could reasonably argue that the results of this election were not Iraq all the way, just about all the way.
There may be other factors, of course, but mainly I think it was Iraq.
So the question is, can we afford to lose another war?
And as you may or may not know, if you go back a long time now, I was very much against our going into Iraq and argued very strongly against our going into Iraq.
But once there, it became my view that we damn well better win.
I read a little thing from a general, I don't know, a few weeks ago about the implications of losing the war.
And we can lose.
Make no mistake about it.
We can lose.
We lost Vietnam.
And the loss in Vietnam, many of you now, of course, are not even old enough to remember Vietnam, but the loss in Vietnam traumatized America.
It traumatized America so hard that we're still traumatized about that loss.
And I'm just wondering if we are forced to remove our troops from Iraq and the world sees that we have lost this war, what do you think that's going to do to the American psyche to lose another war?
I forget what it'll do geopolitically and in so many other ways, what it will do.
But if we are perceived as losing yet another war, how it's going to affect us?
Can we really afford another loss?
Can America afford another loss?
Can the American People digest another loss.
As I said, many of you who will call aren't even old enough, no doubt, to remember the Vietnam War, much less the feelings of loss and all the rest of it that went with what happened in Vietnam.
But this would, if we pulled out, suddenly pulled out, it would essentially be the same thing, even if it's a slow pullout with a slow Iraqization of the war.
We had the Vietnamization of the war, some of you will recall.
We called it that as we sort of withdrew and turned it more and more over to the South Vietnamese when, of course, just about the last American hopped on a helicopter from the top of a building and left Vietnam.
That was it.
The North Vietnamese were closing in on the capital, and it was all over that quickly.
Would the same thing happen in Iraq?
Well, probably.
And then one other question before you render any sort of answer or call with any sort of thought on this, and that is that if we do leave Iraq, aren't we eventually going to be back fighting Iran anyway?
I certainly don't have all the answers, and nobody, not a one of us, want to see anybody die anywhere in the world that doesn't have to die any of our American soldiers.
We don't want to see them die, do we?
Nobody's going to argue that.
Everybody doesn't want to see that.
So the question hangs in the air, and I thought it'd be a good one for open lines if any of you want to venture an answer to it.
At any rate, those of you who know the numbers, you're welcome to pick up a phone and begin to join us, because, baby, it's going to be open lines all night long.
There is just one more thing before I go to the lines.
This may also cause you to comment.
It certainly caused me to think.
United Kingdom scientists have applied for permission to create embryos by fusing human DNA with cow eggs.
Researchers from Newcastle University and King's College London have asked the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority for a three-year license.
The hybrid human bovine embryos, yuck, would be used for stem cell research and would not be allowed to develop any more than a few days, but critics say it's unethical, potentially dangerous.
One of them, we know him, Colin Culleher.
And Colum thinks that, well, you might be able to start to undermine the entire distinction between human animals and humans.
Humans, animals, and humans.
Human animals, I guess would be the right term, wouldn't it?
Stem cells are the body's master cells, and five-day-old embryos are packed with them.
Each the potential to turn into any body, any tissue in the body.
It could grow an arm, for example.
If it is this ability, which scientists want to harness to treat diseases like Parkinson's, strokes, Alzheimer's, and so forth.
To do that, they've got to have access to thousands of embryos for research.
The supply is short.
The way to cure that, they say, is to combine humans and cows.
Let's think about that.
They would insert human DNA into a cow's egg, which has had its genetic material removed, and then create an embryo by the same technique that produced Dolly.
Remember Dolly, the sheep?
Well, the resulting embryo would be 99.9% human.
The only bovine element would be DNA outside the nucleus of the cell.
It would, though, technically, be part human, part animal.
The aim to extract stem cells from the embryo when it's six days old before destroying it.
So I guess the danger is that you undermine all of our humanity when you do this.
On the one hand, it seems like a rational step if you've got to have these embryos to do the research for the disease.
You could argue that it would be ethically a disaster not to do it.
And you can argue that it would be ethically perhaps also a disaster to do it.
So I'm not sure whether this license ought to be granted or not.
Actually, they have that line.
It would actually be immoral to prevent it just because of a yuck factor.
That's Dr. Evan Harris saying that.
So there is a yuck factor.
I wonder how you feel about that.
Taking animal and human DNA and combining them to create something that we need for research.
Now, I know they say that they would destroy whatever it is after a very few days, but don't you think there would be the inevitable scientific curiosity that would push somebody to go more than just a few days, see what would happen?
Science is like that.
I can tell you, from my little venture into science and electronics, you always want to see what will happen if we do the following.
See what will happen if we push that button, right?
The button to push or not to push.
That is the question.
Or in this case, to combine human and animal DNA.
That is the question.
And I wonder how all of you would feel on that.
Actually, so both questions.
A question about Iraq.
Clearly, the country is in a lousy, lousy mood about Iraq, and that's what happened in the elections.
But the further question is, do you think that we can stand another loss?
Can the American psyche stand another loss?
If you were the president, how would you proceed from here?
The American people have just told you they don't like what the hell you're doing.
So what next?
Remember when President Nixon took the reins and the French kept backing away?
Or rather, the North Vietnamese, excuse me, kept backing away from the peace talks?
North Vietnamese kept backing away.
He loaded up the B-52s and just bombed the holy hell out of North Vietnam.
And they came wiggling back quickly.
So I suppose we could escalate matters in some way or another.
I don't know what that would be as an occupying force in Iraq, but we could do a Nixon.
And then this stem cell stuff.
I wonder how you feel about that.
Two things to sort of digest and perhaps comment on, or anything you want, because it's open lines all night long.
I'm Art Bell from Manila, the Philippines.
I am Art Bell filling in for a very hardworking and deserving of a day off, George Noray.
He's normally here doing open lines with you, but indeed he's got a day off, and he definitely deserves it.
Believe me, doing a five or six day a week talk show is rough stuff.
You've got to be on top of your game every moment.
All right, in a moment, that's exactly what we'll do.
We'll begin the game of open lines.
Now, if anybody along the way comes up with any special line they'd like to see open, you know, I'm always be influenced in that direction.
There's a million different things we could do, but I thought tonight for at least a little while we'd just sort of throw it open and see what happens.
By the way, I have been really, really, really, really trying to quit smoking, and I am reporting mixed results.
There are at least now several times a day when I absolutely say to myself, that's it.
Now, about nine years ago, I was in Poland, and I made a point of visiting the camps at Auschwitz in Birkenau.
And Auschwitz itself is actually this old converted Polish cavalry barracks sort of area that's very standard factory-like brick buildings.
And a lot of it's been very preserved.
And it's a very compelling tour, needless to say.
I mean, it's the sort of thing anyone who has any even faint doubts only has to go there.
But there's one particular area that's most chilling on the tour, and it's called the Dust Block.
And it's just a very low, nondescript brick building alongside a firing squad wall and bounded by barbed wire and everything else.
And you go in, and it's old, worn wooden floors and rooms, each one with various instruments.
It's real chamber of horror stuff, a portable gallows, a whipping horse, etc.
Then they take you down in the basement.
And the basement is nothing but cells and small enclosed rooms, including in fact this is the place that they first conducted experiments with Zyklon B on Soviet prisoners.
And those would have been those waiting for their fate, huh?
unidentified
Yes, when they were first trying to perfect the so-called final solution.
And they're just tiny rooms with individual radiators in them with railings attached to the radiators, and they're not for comfort heat.
You know, I mean, just nothing about the place is good.
But you come to one particular room right near the end of the basement, and they have something they called standing cells.
And if you picture a space about the size of a phone booth, only it's completely enclosed brick.
And then down at the base is about an 18-inch by 24-inch hatch.
And they would put up to four people at a time in these for an indeterminate amount of time.
And normally there was originally a whole wall of these, but they've torn most of them down.
And so there's a painted brick square on one corner of the room, and then a Little lower level of bricks that you can sort of stand in the middle of it, and then one that's knee high, then one that's waist high, then shoulder high.
So you have an idea.
And the very last one is a complete booth.
Well, our tour guide, you know, I was at sort of at the tail of a small group and had given us the whole explanation of it and everything else.
And then he pointed to the complete one and just with this kind of cryptic smile said, and of course, the doors are open in case anyone wishes to try it for themselves.
And of course, without waiting for an answer, he said, I thought not, and beckoned everyone out.
Well, as I said, I was at the very back and going through the sort of ankle-high, knee-high, waist-high one.
I thought, you know what?
I'm never going to be here again.
And so when you go down, I open up and there's two hatches.
There's actually a small metal grating out of just, you know, iron.
And then there's actually a wooden door that closes over that that shuts out almost all light and air.
Well, I'm standing there in the darkness, and it begins to dawn on me how many hundreds, if not thousands, of people have died in this space that my feet are in.
And then you begin to realize that you are not alone.
I mean, you can really and truly feel it.
I took out my camera, and I sort of held up to the ceiling and aimed a flash shot down just to get a momentary look in there.
No graffiti, anything else, this sort of nondescript gray-green paint and everything else.
But as I stood there, I said, you know what?
No one's coming.
And I looked at my watch, which lit up in 10 minutes, not another group, no other tourists, no sign of anyone.
And so at this point, I began talking and very quietly and apologetically saying, look, I just wanted to understand.
It was not frivolous.
If you were here and you saw me, you understood.
I started at one level of cells and went to the other.
And I just wanted to know.
And I still don't understand, but please understand what I'm saying here.
It's that there was nothing irrespectful about this.
Any tour guide worth their salt is going to stop somewhere along the line and count.
Hopefully yours did.
unidentified
Well, what happened was, a moment later, I decided, let's go down and kind of shake that a little bit and start talking, saying hello, anyone out there in the poor tourist Polish that I knew.
And I reached down and locked my fingers in the grate and began to push, and it swung out effortlessly.
There was nobody there.
Well, I immediately I shot out of that like you can't imagine art.
I stood out in the hall, no one in the hall, all the way down.
These are old wooden stairs, and you could hear anyone on them.
I walked back and backtracked the cells in this very quick sort of walk.
Looked in, no one, no one, no one.
I made my way out, and that evening, when I was in Krakow again, and at one of the bars, I started to tell the bartender the story, and he was pouring me hot mead, and he just continued pouring me mead for the rest of the evening without charging.
I've been on so many tours, and it gets kind of old, and you kind of lag a little bit behind, and they show you these incredible things, and you're sort of wishing, well, the whole crowd wasn't here, and you could take a moment and contemplate quietly the importance of what you're seeing.
I experienced some of that when we took the tour of Corrigidor.
Now, there's a haunted place, if there ever was one.
You can feel it everywhere around you.
And another.
I don't have a story to match that man's, but I did go, as you know, to Egypt.
And I had an opportunity to go into up to the very top of the pyramid and actually, you know, lie in the sarcophagus and without a lot of people around at all.
And that was very lucky, very fortunate.
But I had a feeling that just cannot be described, lying in that sarcophagus.
And I had many quiet moments to do so and sort of try and discern what I was feeling.
And whether that's something that your brain generates for you because you know you're in this kind of situation, or it's a real external feeling that's happening to this very day, I couldn't tell you, but I can tell you this.
It certainly was weird.
Wildcard line, you are on the air from Windsor, Ontario.
Sir, I was on KWN in Las Vegas, and I used to announce the countdown to when they'd light one off, and our building would shake, and, you know, we'd warn everybody to get off difficult places and off high ledges and buildings and all of that.
We were doing testing, sir, underground testing into the 80s.
unidentified
Well, I remember seeing in Las Vegas, there's this famous poster of everyone used to have parties to sit out and watch when the blast used to go up in the air at nighttime.
Las Vegas is bounded on all sides by mountains, sir, and that's exactly where it's going to stop.
Now, with regard to the above-ground testing, the majority of the winds took whatever radiation there was into Utah, into portions of Utah, as opposed to Nevada.
So it was kind of a prevailing wind situation.
unidentified
Well, wasn't there that big controversy, too, with Utah with those famous movie stars that all died of cancer filming that one movie in southern Utah where they think the soil was contaminated?
Well, again, if you take a look at a map, you will see why, particularly with the prevailing winds as they were, that it was Utah that became the controversy.
And I'm sure, you know, I'm sure that there was some very serious effect in Utah.
I don't doubt that for one second.
Now, we don't really get reports, do we, of what and how much has leaked, how much has gone into the atmosphere, what the effect has been.
These are not things that the government advertises at all.
So we don't really know the truth about all of that, and we're not likely to be told the truth about all of that.
But we did one hell of a lot of testing, both above and below ground.
You know, the testing we did in the Pacific, and then we did an awful lot of testing in Nevada, first above ground.
I was not there for any of that.
But I do remember sitting in front of the microphone at KDWN in Las Vegas and telling people exactly when it was going to occur and to get off, you know, people would wash windows or be in dangerous locations to get back inside because everything's going to rock and roll.
And believe me, it rocked and rolled.
And you could feel it was exactly the same as a rolling earthquake.
There wasn't a vertical sensation at all.
It was all sort of a rolling, well, it was a seismic event kind of deal, folks.
That's what it was.
East of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
First of all, I'd like to say that I know I speak for all the listeners that listen to you every weekend.
Ooh, I'll have to go to what they call National Bookstore here and see if I can't find it.
unidentified
Oh, yeah, I went to the library and I checked out every one of them.
But anyway, as I was saying, I was watching NBC this morning, the news, and I read and watch the news.
That's mainly what I do.
And, of course, it was the local station I was watching.
And you know how on the bottom of the screen they have old little tidbits rolling across where you can read it if you get tired of listening to the talking head?
Well, so I'm reading it, and all of a sudden I catch it, and I have to go back and keep watching it and let it roll through again because the first thing I see is that a British intelligence officer in the 1990s has just said that he expects extraterrestrials to attack the Earth any day now, and that people are not mocking him because he is an actual British intelligence officer who is well respected.
Let's see if we can get some help from the audience.
We'll definitely find the story, sir.
Thank you very much.
And so here's what I would ask the audience.
The resource is gigantic out there.
You all are the resource.
Who knows about this story?
A British intelligence officer saying that he has information that causes him to suspect that there will be an invasion of Earth by extraterrestrials in the next few days.
That's quite a crawl, no matter where you put it.
So if anybody has any information on it or can send me a follow-up story, get to Fast Blast and let me know.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast2Coast AM.
Ask and ye shall receive.
In fact, Ask and Ye already has it, actually.
It's on the website.
It's on the Coast to Coast AM website under Hot Stories.
You have to click on more, depending on what kind of screen you have.
Under Hot Stories, aliens could attack at any time Warren's former MOD chief.
Now, this ran in the Daily Mail, and apparently it was picked up from that, and that's what the caller saw crawling on his screen.
It says, UFO sightings and alien visitors tend to be solely the reserve of sci-fi movies.
So, when a former MOD chief warns that the country could be attacked by extraterrestrial extraterrestrials at any time, you may be forgiven for perhaps feeling a little alarmed.
During his time as the head of the Ministry of Defense, UFO Project, Nick Pope, now Nick, if it's the same Nick Pope, we've had him as a guest before, was persuaded into believing that other life forms may visit Earth and more specifically, Britain.
That's interesting, isn't it?
Why Britain?
His concern is that highly credible sightings are simply dismissed.
And he complains that the project he once ran is now virtually closed down, leaving the country wide open to aliens.
Mr. Pope decided to speak out about his worries after resigning from his post at the Directorate of Defense Security at the MOD this week.
The consequences of getting this one wrong could be huge, he said.
If you reported a UFO ziding now, I'm absolutely sure to just get you'd get the standard letter back telling you not to worry.
Frankly, we are wide open.
If something does not behave like a conventional aircraft now, it's going to be ignored.
The X-Files have been closed down.
If these words had come from a sci-fi fanatic, well, they could easily be dismissed by cynics.
But Mr. Pope C. V., well, he was head of the UFO project between 1991 and 1994, and so he simply cannot be ignored.
When he began his job, he, too, was skeptical about UFOs, but access to classified files on the subject and investigation of a series of spectacular UFO sightings gradually changed his mind.
And while Ms. Pope says there is no evidence of hostile intent, he insists it cannot be ruled out.
There's got to be the potential for that, and one is left with the uneasy feeling that if it turned out to be so, there's very little we could do about it.
And then the article goes on to talk about a number of sightings and things that have occurred.
So I'm pretty sure that's the same Nick Pope that we have interviewed any number of times on this exact topic.
So obviously, it would be interesting to talk with Nick Pope and ask him why he believes that such an event might be imminent.
Boy, is that fascinating stuff or what?
It just falls right into your lap when you do this program.
I'm Art Bell.
All right.
Can you imagine that if something were to occur and it were to be hostile?
Nick Pope is right about that.
We certainly are wide open.
Although that's what we're being told publicly, that we don't investigate those things anymore, right?
But that doesn't mean that that's what's going on privately.
That doesn't mean that the government at some level is not well aware of something that we're not.
You always hope that, anyway, that they're on top of it, right?
A little hesitant to go to anybody who calls themselves Matrea in St. Louis, but it's open lines.
So on the wildcard line, Matrea, you're on the air.
Well, the main aspect would be the plan, I guess, that I have.
And it's funny that I had been doing all this stuff for the last year or so.
And it was just recently that I even became aware of Maitreya and Benjamin Cream and this whole story on basically outlining, describing this is what's going to happen and it was basically a word for word description of what I already was planning on my own.
But to achieve that goal would at the very least have to mean that you would be in a very powerful position.
You would have to be leader of one of the world's, I don't know, industrial giants.
At the very least, you'd have to have a lot of power.
unidentified
Well, I have to be able to communicate this to the whole world and have everyone able to consider this and discuss it.
I mean, much like the whole world was instantly discussing Marx's talks on this new system presented, and obviously that had a lot of flaws to it, and so it didn't quite go over and caused a lot of problems.
But I think that Everyone, the moment they see this entire complex philosophy, if you will, on just a complete redesign of how we run things, I mean, really focusing on efficiency and truth and transparency are kind of the main principles, if you will.
And I think it's very difficult for anyone to be able to argue against implementing this immediately.
Well look, I don't I don't mean to I mean, you are on a national, even international radio program right now, but you're going to need a lot more than that.
unidentified
Right.
And well, and and it's nice that it that it forecasts uh I mean on on uh Benjamin Cream's uh website when he I mean, he's the one that's supposed to supposedly trans simultaneously trying to release this to
the entire world, per se.
And obviously, that's a very huge, complicated, and costly kind of task.
But it's nice when he says on there that what is going to happen first is, and it's kind of scary in a way, but is the American economy collapse.
And he says upon that happening, that is kind of the key.
He says he doesn't know why Maesh RIA says that this has to happen first, but he apparently feels it is necessary.
And at that point, he will be invited to speak at the UN.
And he says at the UN, I'm not exactly sure that that's the definite location, but it definitely says he or I will be invited to, will speak on TV to every person in the world through linked satellite, general.
Well, a year ago, I started working on this whole plan and really decided to dedicate my entire life to humanity.
And several instances along the way, I would think about Jesus or I would read something about the Second Coming and I would just get these huge chills.
But it wasn't at that time that I really – I kept trying to put that out of my mind because I'm thinking this can't be – everybody's telling me I'm crazy the moment I try to mention anything like that.
But I would say it was in – Right.
I would say it was in this summer pretty much when, I mean, I really, you know, had this all planned out.
It's not just, you know, desires, not just me having these wild, you know, expectations and good intentions, but not really anything to back it up.
I mean, here I am with, wow, this is the answer to world peace.
You know, I've got a bunch of several other things aside from the plan.
I mean, ideas on their very own, if it's a good enough idea and you light the fires of a majority of the people out there, you light their inner fires with the power of this idea, then who knows, you actually could achieve what you want to achieve.
However, calling me up and saying you've got it but can't talk about it isn't going to get you anywhere, I guarantee you.
And so what is the point of the call if you can't tell us?
unidentified
Well, I mean, I guess I was hoping you'd find it interesting.
I mean, regardless, I am going to, the moment I publish, if you will, I mean, however I get it out there, however I end up communicating it, the moment I publish this new entire theory on a whole new economic system, I mean, I am going undoubtedly to be well known around the world.
And I mean, it seemed like a perfect opportunity.
Well, tomorrow I have some other plans.
I'm planning on announcing what I'm going to call the World's Cure for Cancer.
Now, I may end up modifying that slightly before tomorrow.
But the basic concept is, I mean, you've probably heard, I don't know if you've had a lot of people on your show speak about this, but the idea that you really, cancer, according to the science, cannot exist if all the various tissues in the body are alkaline.
There's a whole set of – I mean, and it's kind of – it's a complex set of things to eat and different things in your daily life to adjust to work towards that.
I'm 36 years old, and I've been following this situation just as much as anybody else has.
And what I find interesting is our reasons for the government, their explanation of why we went into Iraq.
And when I was about 17, 18 years old, living with mom and dad still, I had watched a documentary About it was about six or eight Iraqi scholars who had left Iraq and had come to the U.S. pleading for our support, advice, and help into turning Iraq into a democratic state.
And these six or eight people, I don't exactly remember the number, had stated that at that time they felt they were ready to turn Iraq into a democratic state and diminish the regimes that were controlling Iraq at that time.
And I guess I just maybe wanted to bring light to the situation that, you know, being that, you know, whether we went in for weapons of mass destruction, whether we went in for whatever reasons, it seems that these six scholars came here and nothing has ever been said about that.
And given the current situation, sir, if you were the president at this point and the nation had just told you, we don't like your policies, we don't like the war, what would you do?
unidentified
Gosh, you know, maybe light needs to be shed on what I have just said to you.
In the sense of instead of us being in there to wipe out some dictatorship or regimes, fundamentalist regimes, maybe we're there to actually change the country into something other than a dictatorship by request.
Whether they have requested it, and there are some in Iraq who certainly did, or not, that is our goal.
But whether we can achieve that goal or not, particularly with the American people turning against the whole concept of our even being there, I think is very much open to question.
So, you know, again, I'll make you the president.
And the country just said, look, we don't like what you're doing.
unidentified
Then I guess if I was the president, I would ask the public to, or I would explain to the public this situation.
I've never seen any light shed on the situation or the documentary that I had seen years ago about these Iraqi scholars that came here pleading with our government to help them.
But at the same time, it may, instead of viewing our situation in Iraq as we're there to eliminate a certain regime or dictatorship, we're actually there to change the future of Iraq.
And we're not doing it because we may have given Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction or we may have given Iraq various means to defend themselves during a certain time period.
But again, to me, whatever may have happened so long ago is indeed, at this point, academic.
And I'll pose the very same question to the rest of you.
What would you do?
Now, one thing I suppose the President could do, and something that we don't do in America very frequently, is to have a kind of a referendum.
That would make everybody think about it.
We just don't do that in America.
And maybe we ought to.
Maybe if the American people actually thought, were forced to think hard about it, perhaps they would at this point say, look, we've got to finish the job.
I was as much against going into Iraq as I could possibly be before we did it.
But after the fact, once we're there, once we're fighting, once we're engaging these people who want us dead, and they do want us dead, make no mistake about that.
They want us dead.
That's their goal.
They don't want really our policy to be changed.
That might be something they would immediately say.
But they really, in the end, want us dead.
They've decided that if we don't convert, we should be dead.
Now, how do you deal with these people?
And if we do leave Iraq, I mean, this is a kind of argument that it seems to me ought to be put in front of the American people, and they ought to be given the opportunity to make a decision for themselves.
Maybe that's some kind of referendum.
Maybe that's just something you don't do in America.
I don't know.
It's easy to sit back and complain, and it's much harder to say, well, look, all right, if I was president, here's what I would do.
Maybe that's a question I ought to be posing to you, and in fact am from Manila in the Philippines?
I'm Mart Bell for George Norrie.
This is the very essence of this program, actually.
We had a caller who said, gee, I saw a crawl at the bottom of my screen saying that somebody in Great Britain, an intelligence type, had said that the Earth may be invaded any day now.
And we went from there to an article in the Daily Mail saying, which is headlined, Aliens Could Attack at Any Time, Warren's former MOD chief.
Now, the name Nick Pope popped up in the article.
Nick Pope was the one warning indeed.
It's on the coasttocoasta.com website under Hot Stories.
And lo and behold, guess who's coming up in a moment on Coast to Coast AM, all the way from Great Britain?
It will be Nick Pope.
You know, I never thought in my lifetime that I would get to see what we are doing right now.
And what we're doing right now is an amazing thing.
I mean, you think about it for a moment.
I am on the other side of the world from most of you.
I'm in Southeast Asia here in the Philippines doing a long-form talk show.
And I think we are the first ones that have ever done that in history.
Only a company like Premier and a company as big as Clear Channel could do something of this magnitude.
It's just simply amazing.
Here I am, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, doing a long-form talk show, first time in history, then able to reach out not just to the U.S., the other side of the world, but on around to the other side of the world and grab a guest named Nick Pope.
Somebody called the show a little while ago in the last hour and said, hey, there was a crawl on my TV screen that said a British intelligence operative just said that the U.S. could be invaded within days.
Now, that may have been an exaggeration because I read an article now in the Daily Mail there in Britain that's entitled Aliens Could Attack at Any Time.
Warren's former MOD chief.
That would be the name Nick Pope popped up, and I said, see if you can get Nick on the phone.
Yes, the story, it won't surprise you to learn, is a little bit exaggerated.
I'm not saying that there is an imminent alien invasion.
But what the story is, is that last week, after 21 years in government service, I left the Ministry of Defence.
I had resigned.
And in my resignation statement and shortly thereafter, I had obviously talked about my time running the British government's UFO project.
And I had said it was unfortunate that the research and investigation that I had done when I was fronting this project in the 90s had now effectively ceased.
Because I said, and this is really where the story has come from, I said, because if we now had a significant UFO event, there would be very little, if anything, we could actually do about it because we're not undertaking that scientific research and investigation anymore.
Of course, the difficulty is that I'm still bound by my secrecy oath.
And that actually, even though I've left the department, is binding for life.
But inevitably, I think what it does do, and you see this all the time in the media with retired military officers talking about Iraq and Afghanistan and related issues, I think what it does mean, what it will mean, is that I will inevitably be able to speak out a little bit more freely on these issues.
But I don't want to rush in and make any sort of preemptive statements.
Let me rephrase the question in easier form for you.
If, Nick, you were not bound by this lifelong agreement, you were not bound at all, is there anything that you could tell us right now that would rock our lives, that would just absolutely shock us?
From what I understand, the answer to that is no, because it would be handled on such a tight hold that even the special relationship on this issue would be unlikely to count for anything.
We in Britain, a few years back, set up a classified study into UFOs code named Project Condine.
And one of the things that I discussed with my opposite number in the Defense Intelligence staff before we set up this project was what the situation was elsewhere in the world.
And what we said was that there is some indication that there is an informal grouping within the U.S. intelligence community looking at the UFO issue, but that we had no access to that grouping, its conclusions or anything.
So we were not, if you in America have this sort of data, it wasn't being shared with us.
The article goes on to suggest that though you were not a believer, after investigation, after investigation, after investigation, you became convinced.
I think it was cases such as the Bentwaters incident from December 1980.
And of course, I've seen the Ministry of Defence case file on that encounter.
And indeed, I reopened the investigation afterwards And checked the radiation readings that had been taken from the landing site.
And again, the Defense Intelligence staff confirmed to me that the radiation readings taken right from the point where the craft came down were significantly higher than background levels by a factor of about 10.
But there were a number of cases like that.
I had a case, again, that occurred on my watch where, again, a UFO flew over two of our Air Force bases.
And this was, probably, you and your listeners won't be surprised at the description because it's one we've all heard time and time again.
It's this vast triangular-shaped craft with lights in each corner and a dimmer light in the middle on the underside of this thing.
It's the same UFO that the Belgians encountered in 1989 and 1990 when they scrambled F-16s to try and intercept it.
It's also the very same one that I saw no more than about 150 feet above my head, Nick, pass soundlessly over my head.
And it was the event of my lifetime.
However, I am...
I certainly cannot say it was extraterrestrial.
It could have been a U.S. craft of some sort, although I have no idea what it looked very metallic to me, very gigantic, as a matter of fact, Nick, and not at all like anything that we're even close to from any technology that I could even sort of project from what we now have and imagine that we might have.
It just, it almost had to be extraterrestrial because of the way it acted.
Yes, I think, I mean, of course, at any given time, we'll have all sorts of prototype aircraft and UAVs being developed and test-flown.
But these things are test-flown very, very carefully in prescribed areas, generally well away from the public.
And certainly, you know, in the UK, we know where we test these sorts of things.
So even if I wasn't briefed in, as of course I wasn't because of the need to know principle, on the details of specific black projects, if we'd stumbled across any UFO sighting that was just one of ours, I would have been quietly warned off.
But I think you're right.
You know, there's a lead time with these sorts of things, and you can say, well, you can imagine a technology sort of 10, 15 years ahead.
But when you see the speeds and maneuvers of some of these UFOs, that really does make you think, as I think you mentioned, that this is unlikely to be one of ours.
I very much enjoyed working for the Ministry of Defense.
I've done a series of absolutely fascinating jobs.
I've been to countries that I would never otherwise have been to.
I've done some amazing things and been a part of something fascinating.
And it's a great family, the civilians and the military, great bunch of people.
And it really felt like it was a part of something important and interesting.
On the other hand, I think inevitably after that amount of time when you leave something, there is a sense that perhaps it was the right time to move on.
And I have various outside business interests, and I just wanted to devote more time to those.
You say something else that absolutely catches my attention because, I don't know, the majority of those involved in ufology, and I mean it's a pretty giant majority, think that Yes, there are aliens.
Yes, we are being observed, if not manipulated, but most seem to think that it's benign, that there's nothing to worry about, and that they would be our friends.
Now, I've always been very hesitant about that, and I've always felt there's at least as much chance that they would not have our best interests in mind, and we'll put it that way, as that they would come down to be giving us new technology and medical breakthroughs and warm and fuzzy little people who would help us join the galactic empire.
In other words, I'm worried they might treat us as a human would treat an ant.
I mean, I think we would all love the idea that first contact between humanity and extraterrestrials is a benign experience, and as you say, that we're welcomed into some sort of galactic federation.
That would be great.
Unfortunately, that's an assumption that I believe militarily to be foolish.
The philosophy is always don't assume that everything is going to be fine and rosy and then get caught out when it isn't.
Make your contingency plans based around the worst-case scenario.
Make sure that you're ready to deal with that.
And then, of course, we can all be surprised and relieved and glad when that doesn't come to pass.
But it seems to me that at the very least, there is a potential threat.
And that being the case, as I say, this is one of the reasons why I shall lobby more aggressively than I could when I was within government for both government, the military, the intelligence community, the scientific community to devote more time and resources to this issue.
I mean, it's interesting, you know, since this story has broken in the media, I've received a lot of positive comments and support, but I've also received quite a lot of abuse from what you might call the new age angle in ufology, saying that this is obviously just cabal propaganda and disinformation, and that, well, you know, how dare I say such bad things about the space people?
If there's an unidentified object over British airspace or over U.S. airspace, well, the normal thing to do, I suppose, is send out a signal and find out its IFF, identified as friend or foe.
Now, if we don't get a response, or you, for example, in Britain don't get a response saying friend, then what is going to be the military's probable reaction to something in its airspace?
Oh, well, certainly in terms of rules of engagement, again, whilst I can't say much about that, what I can say is that if you were dealing with an extraterrestrial situation, if you were dealing with a UFO that you really thought was from another civilization,
there would be no question of our opening hostilities against them, though I think in general terms what I could say is that if hostile action was taken against us, we would respond in an appropriate and proportionate manner.
unidentified
In other words, if we are attacked, we'll defend ourselves.
I think the U.S., since 9-11, is very, very, very sensitive about anything flying.
They can't identify and understand that it's on an approved flight path and all the rest of that.
So do you know offhand, Nick, whether the without telling me what the rules of engagement are, do the U.S. rules of engagement and the British rules of engagement differ?
Well, I think unless we are actually fired upon, or unless by its actions a UFO displayed some other form of clear hostile intent, I think it's absolute madness to do this.
Without wanting to be glib about it, you could start a war of the worlds.
So if any of these things are genuinely extraterrestrial spacecraft, we should be reaching out the hand of friendship to these people.
That's not to say I'm buying in, just to go back to my previous answer, I'm not necessarily buying into the whole sort of New Age take on this, but inevitably, whether you take a New Age view or not, you would want first contact to be benign, and it would be silly to take any action that might move things the other way.
Nick Pope, sort of a surprise, last-minute guest because of a news article that's popping around the world right now that began in Britain.
I'm Art Bell in the Philippines.
Many of you may recall that President Ronald Reagan on a number of occasions made reference to the possibility of an invasion and Earth having to essentially get together to repel or to fight anybody who would invade our planet.
We're just a little blue speck, but you certainly have to imagine, and I do imagine, that it could occur.
Maybe this little blue speck is a lot rarer than we think.
Maybe life and planets that are able to harbor life of the kind we're familiar with are a lot rarer Than we think they are, imagine they might be.
And if so, then perhaps somebody would like to take possession of this nice little blue speck that we all live on.
And so here's what I'm wondering, and what we'll ask Nick Pope in a moment.
Perhaps having just retired from the Ministry of Defense by a week now, he could answer this question.
I wonder if there's any sort of international plan in place, and I said international, for a response to an invasion.
You know, they might be friend versus foe, and I'm sure we would all hope that would be true.
But the military, by the very nature of the military, has to assume the worst.
You always have to assume and prepare for the worst.
That's what our military does.
That's what the British military does.
And so, you know, Nick, it's not so far out to imagine that our planet could be invaded.
Now, I doubt that it would just be Britain that would be invaded from space, or that it would be just the U.S. or any other country you could single out that would be invaded.
It would be our planet.
And so that begs the question, is there any kind of international agreement that's been made that you're aware of that would allow an international response to something deadly?
And I think, of course, that's, again, that's a mistake.
But then, you know, it's a mistake that has its roots in the flawed national approach to UFO investigation.
I mean, I thought it was crazy that the Americans had Project Blue Book, we had a separate project, some nations were all looking at this on a purely national basis, and no one was making any attempt to kind of draw this together.
Whereas to me, this was crying out for some sort of international effort, probably under the auspices of the United Nations.
Well, many have a dim view of the UN, thinking it can't get much done looking at history because it hasn't done so.
But I agree.
I don't know what other international body there would be, so it might have to be under the UN.
Is that something you would urge now, Nick, That even though you're out of government, that you're crying out that it's high time there was some sort of international plan.
Now, it could be done under the auspices of the United Nations.
On the other hand, some of the world's great powers could simply come together and make a treaty on this.
But, I mean, to me, again, it's crazy that many nations may have a piece of the puzzle here that if they actually got together and pooled all the data they have, and I mean, just to give you a statistic, I mean, the British Ministry of Defence, since our UFO project started in about 1950, we have 10,000 UFO reports.
But no one's ever made an attempt to kind of put the whole jigsaw together, as it were.
So I think that is something that I would urge.
I mean, just to go back to a point that you made before the break when you were, I think, speculating, well, friend or foe, I think the answer is probably both.
my reason for saying that is I think it's very unlikely that we share the cosmos with just one other civilization.
I suspect there are many out there, and if I were a betting man, I would give you the safe answer, which is 50-50.
In other words, some will be friendly and some will be hostile.
So for there not to be a global plan, at least the world's great powers, some kind of global plan to respond to something like this is just absolutely insane.
And to not imagine there could be life out there and that it might not be our friend is also crazy.
So I don't know where we go with this, but it may be something through the scientific community because, of course, in relation to the detection of a radio signal, there is the detection and declaration principle.
So that's an example of where the scientific community has come together to make a protocol.
Now you can have a debate that that's not necessarily binding, but at least there's a model for something.
There's a model that governments and the military could build on.
I mean, it goes against all my training.
My training is always that you have a contingency plan for everything, a standard operating procedure.
Alexi in Seattle says, in defense of new agers, at least some of us are abductees, and I doubt very much they regard aliens as warm and fuzzy.
Well, actually, in fact, many abductees do regard them as warm and fuzzy.
And I've had a number of people on the show saying, well, their memory, the memory of many of those who have been abducted, is kind of a screen memory.
And they have this memory that they had a good experience.
But if you dig a little deeper, you find something else.
Also, you could be dealing with, I guess, and it's a well-known condition, Stockholm syndrome, where a kidnapped victim, and let's not be afraid to use that analogy, feels a bond of some sort with the kidnapper.
Well, that's a well-known and proven phenomenon.
So it may well apply to the UFO alien contact scenario.
In your years with the Ministry of Defense, Nick, did you give much weight to the abduction phenomena or to the crop circle phenomena or any of the other associated phenomena?
I suppose you looked one way or the other at most of them, right?
You can't run a UFO project without finding yourself the recipient of anything strange that's reported to government.
All I can say is that in relation to alien abduction, yes, it was something of interest, but it wasn't something that one could really investigate in the same way as UFO sightings where you had radar and various other tools available to you.
The way for me to characterize this is that formally, these phenomena were outside the terms of reference of the UFO project.
So what I tended to do was just keep what we would say a watching brief on these issues as opposed to any real investigation.
Now, if I had had more resources, of course, I would have liked to, in relation to both crop circles And animal mutilations.
I would have liked to have authorized some covert surveillance of places where these things were reported.
I would have liked to have done a lot of chemical analysis of soil samples and such like.
But, you know, just like Project Blue Book, we were a fairly small outfit.
And just the 200 or 300 UFO reports a year that came my way, which was really the bread and butter of the project, that kept us pretty busy and limited our opportunities to look into these other things.
The United States, Nick, after Project Blue Book, said, basically, whatever these things are, we have concluded that they're not a threat to national security.
Period.
And so that's it.
Whatever they are, they're not a threat to national security.
Now, I wonder if that is a, if the British have concluded a similar thing.
And if so, how is something like that sentence justified?
I mean, if something can travel in your airspace and you can do nothing about it, how can you conclude it's not a threat to national security?
That's a point that I've made many times, including in government to my own bosses.
It's the ultimate catch-22 of the UFO phenomenon.
The party line, indeed, of both the American and the British government, and I'm sure others too, is that there's no evidence of anything of any defense significance, so there's no real need to spend too much time and resources on this.
As you correctly point out, that's simply a way of saying that, generally speaking, they haven't actually shown themselves overtly and displayed outright hostility.
But as you say, it's quite right, if our air defenses are routinely penetrated by structured craft of unknown origin who display speeds and maneuvers way ahead of anything we can match, when these things attract on radar seen by pilots, that's got to be at least of potential concern, and therefore it must be of defense significance, and it must be something that we should take seriously.
Well, you may be familiar, I'm sure you are, with a former chief of the defense staff here in the United Kingdom, who sadly died a few years ago, but Lord Hill Norton, he spoke out, and he just summed it up perfectly in relation to the Bentwaters incident in 1980, where a UFO, of course, landed and was seen by Many witnesses, including the Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt.
And Lord Hill Norton, as Britain's most senior military officer, Chief of the Defence Staff, after his retirement, said, Well, he said, there are only two possibilities.
He said, either that event happened exactly as Colonel Holt and his men claim, and a UFO landed next to these two military bases, or Colonel Holt and a large body of his men hallucinated some experience whilst on duty at these two sensitive military bases.
And he said, and this is the great punchline, he said, and in either of those two scenarios, it simply must be of defense concern.
I think there's one encouraging thing, and there's an interesting parallel between the issue that we're discussing and the threat posed to the Earth by near-Earth objects such as comets and asteroids.
And in fact, you can even use the same language.
It's a phrase that I've often used in relation to both threats.
It's a low probability, high consequence, which kind of speaks for itself.
And, you know, I'm involved in the UK in an organization called Space Guard UK, which is a group that lobbies government and the scientific community to take the threat from comets and asteroids more seriously.
And, you know, there, it was crazy.
Scientists used to have this view that you could have an observatory here and an observatory there looking for these things.
And then they realized that most of the observatories were in the northern hemisphere and that very few people were doing anything.
And it just illustrated the craziness of a national approach to an issue like planetary defense.
And I hope that governments, the military, the intelligence community, the scientific community can learn that lesson about the NEO threat and kind of make that mind shift to thinking, well, shouldn't we be looking at the UFO phenomenon in the same way?
And perhaps we should be looking at them together because just to toss this out, Nick, an alien intelligence would have to do nothing more than manipulate a rock five to seven miles in circumference or diameter toward the Earth.
It would hit and virtually sterilize the Earth.
And that would be that.
I mean, life would be over, and it would be ready to be occupied in X number of years.
Yes, this is the, I suppose, what Hollywood has now cottoned onto this phrase, the ELE, the extinction level event.
But I mean, there are two sides to planetary defense, detection and interdiction.
We're getting quite good at detection.
There are now scientists doing work on the NEO threat.
That's getting quite good.
The next step is to think, well, if one of these planet killers, the doomsday asteroid, is detected, what do we do about it?
And again, people are working on that, but I think it's something that needs to be accelerated.
And yeah, actually, you know, a lot of the people and a lot of the resources that would be used on NEO defense, there you've got the basics of how to deal with the UFO issue, detection and if necessary, interdiction.
Well, I've written some previous books, but of course I had to be very careful about what I said.
And again, if I write a book in the future, again, I'm still bound by my secrecy oath, so I would have to submit that book to the government for clearance.
But I don't rule out at some stage in the future writing a book where I perhaps go just about as far as I can.
But that would take about a year of my time, and at the moment it's not a priority.
But yes, I think I have got some interesting things to say, and I will perhaps return to that issue in the future.
I think I've always felt that if you could lay from end to end all the evidence and set it out for somebody to look at not just Piecemeal, but collectively.
I think the case would be compelling.
I still think that I would characterize it as very strong evidence and not out-and-out proof, but I think it would move the debate on, and I think it would shift the belief system of even the most die-hard skeptic.
That's Nick Pope from Great Britain in the Philippines.
I'm Art Bell.
What a rare opportunity to have Nick Pope with us right after the breaking news of his retirement from the Ministry of Defense.
And he did indeed say one thing that kind of rocked me back and has me curious, but I couldn't push any further, folks.
And that was that if he was not bound by this lifetime secrecy agreement, would there be anything that really would rock our world that he could tell us about?
And the answer was sort of a yes.
So you've got to wonder, both in Britain and the U.S., what do they know that we don't know that we'd just love to know?
I guess that's why we have people on like Nick and just push as far as we can.
That drives me nuts, Bruce, when somebody comes on and says, basically, well, I'm the guy, and I have a world plan, an entire new economic system that I'm going to lay out for the world.
But I can't tell you about it right now.
I'm going to reach through the phone line and grab them by the throat.
unidentified
I was just thinking the same thing.
Anyway, I called about Iraq.
Yes, sir.
The way you posed the question and the way you articulated it is very, very important and serious, and there's a lot of areas to touch in that.
And I can't believe only one or two people have even barely mentioned it.
Well, what really, I guess, bothers me is that apparently there is no international plan whatsoever.
I mean, absolutely nothing.
And so then how, you know, once we're invaded, it's too late.
It's going to be a nation-by-nation response at best.
unidentified
That's all we can hope for.
Look, we can't even get along on this planet with each other.
We've got, you know, idiots over in Iran that want to blow up the world.
I mean, how are we going to, you know, it's like we had to get in bed with Stalin just to fight World War II.
I mean, you know, Patton had it right.
As soon as the war was over, we should have gone right in there.
Look at the trouble that caused because we were too fearful to offend anybody.
But anyway, back to Iraq.
In Vietnam, we did not lose.
We gave up.
Militarily, we cannot be beaten.
The problem in Iraq is if we leave, there will be slaughter.
So people that claim to be humanists and, you know, for life, you know, and not wanting to see people die, they're going about it the completely wrong way.
Because If you don't fight to win the slaughter afterwards, it might not be our people, but how can we sit back and restart something?
You know, Kennedy got us into Vietnam.
You mentioned the French before, mistakenly, but actually the French did abandon Vietnam.
I mean, if we do leave, under whatever circumstances we leave, inevitably we're going to be back and we're going to be fighting Iran with perhaps Iraq as its ally.
I really agree with this, and I wonder if, not that we have referendums, America doesn't have referendums on things like this, but if we did, and the American people were actually forced to really think about this, how do you think they would vote?
unidentified
I think they would vote to stay and win.
The problem is they want it done yesterday.
That's not how the real world works.
If you want to become a doctor, you have to go through years and years of medical school and training, and you just don't do it overnight.
They want the war to be three months, we win, come home, and that's the end of it.
Well, it almost seemed to have worked that way in the first Iraq War.
But, of course, we were left with Saddam.
And perhaps, as you mentioned, with the Soviet or with Russia, we should have gone in there, and perhaps we should have finished up the job by absolutely.
unidentified
Absolutely.
We start something and we don't finish it the right way.
And when you're talking about war, there's only one way to do it.
You go in and you win.
You give them everything.
If I was president, I would go in to Iraq.
I would just absolutely just obliterate any and all of our enemies, and then I would go into Syria and Iran.
I wouldn't even wait.
I don't want to see Israel or some other country get nuked before we kind of wake up and go, gee, maybe we should kind of get ourselves together here.
It's too late.
You don't wait for somebody to come and punch you in the mouth, knock out six of your teeth, you know, and you full well know he said he was going to do it.
I'm not sure how this kind of thinking develops and is propagated.
But I agree with you completely.
Thank you very, very much for the call.
And I know there are going to be many on the other side.
And I would like to hear them.
I would like to hear the justification for dropping our arms in place and leaving, or any form thereof, which would mean, I suppose, the Iraqization of the war, which we're beginning to do right now, you know, turning over more and more of the responsibility to the Iraqis.
That's the same game we played in Vietnam, turning over more of the responsibility for fighting the North Vietnamese to the South Vietnamese, who collapsed nearly before the last helicopter got the last American off the last building in Saigon at the very end.
Well, yes, in a way, can we deal with another loss?
I'm not sure.
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, you know, during Vietnam, those students that protested against the war and those students that were killed at Kent State and the parents of those kids and the parents of the kids that were killed and the parents of the kids that came home, for them it was a victory that we ended that war.
And for Vietnam, look at the condition that Vietnam is in now and our relationship to them.
People that know why we went there.
I mean, the only way that you can tell whether you won or lost is by knowing what the goals were before you went.
And those people that know the truth about Vietnam, just like those people that know the truth about why we're in Iraq, will know or will be able to deal with us leaving.
Well, I think the goal in Vietnam was to prevent, you know, there was a big domino theory back then, and it was to prevent the South from becoming communist, clearly.
Let me ask you something, because I've heard you mention it several times.
You said, these people that want us dead.
Now, if you count how many Americans have died at the hands of these Middle Easterners, and how many Middle Easterners have died or their children have starved as a result of American policies, then it may be more appropriate to say these people that want us to stop killing them rather than those people who want us dead.
Well, listen, I appreciate your call, but you're not staying on point with me here.
No, the Vietnamese did not, North Vietnamese did not invade the United States, nor would I attempt to make that argument.
No, what I said is correct.
There are many now in the Islamic world who believe that we either convert, we become what they are from a religious point of view, or we die.
And they've clearly said that again and again and again.
And that comes from the top of the al-Qaeda leadership.
Now, when you get that kind of message, you can either ignore it at your own peril and just wait for whatever comes after 9-11, or you can do something about it.
Do you think that if we had something like a referendum, which of course we don't have in the U.S., and the American people were actually forced to think about it and debate it, right now, as one person pointed out a little while ago, we haven't had a lot of calls on the subject because, well, frankly, people don't want to think that much about it.
But if they were forced to think about it, do you think the end result would be the American people saying, lay down our arms, leave Iraq to be Whatever Iraq is going to be and get the hell out, or finish the job?
What do you think the answer would be?
unidentified
Well, living in Olympia, which is a very left-wing city, the majority of the people that I know would just go, yeah, it's a mistake.
It was a debacle to go in.
We went in under false pretenses.
You know, all of that's fine.
I can't speak for America here, but I would like to believe that there's a lot more people understand that even though we are there now, we have to win.
By the way, while the map is up there, you might take a quick trip up to coastcoastam.com, and they've got a pretty good map up there, actually.
It's tracking Typhoon Queenie.
Typhoon Queenie has just basically finished crossing the island of Luzon and is back out at sea, the South China Sea, to be specific, and headed toward Vietnam.
Good luck, Vietnam.
Anyway, the reason I'm suggesting you go up there is it will give you, if you don't have an idea, a pretty good idea of where I am.
Just look for Manila.
It's clearly called out there.
We're in the Typhoon 1 warning area, the very light green area, and you'll see Manila.
It'll give you an idea of, once again, where I am.
Thank goodness this one started to jog south and then decided to go back west again.
So for those of you with relatives and friends and so forth in Manila, nothing more than cloudy skies, a little bit of wind, a little bit of rain, nothing to screech about, but it was indeed a terrible typhoon up north.
That's the situation here.
Manila is safe and well.
I'm Mark Bell.
a moment we'll continue with Open Lines.
By the way, please feel free to email me at any time on nearly any subject.
I am Art Bell.
That's A-T-B-E-L-L at A-O-L.com or Art Bell at MindSpring.com.
The latter is probably the better way to go.
It's a bigger mailbox.
That's Art Bell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at Mindspring, M-I-N-D, S-P-R-I-N-G.com.
Back to the lines we go.
And our first time caller line, it would be Michael in Michigan.
Well, you know, I initially wanted to call you about and talk to you about shortwave radio, you know, and I'm not into it yet, but I want to start.
But the last couple of callers, and especially the one that called about, you know, it's our fault basically to paraphrase, got me going.
So I'd like to talk about Iraq for a minute if I could.
Yes, you know, it just slaves me because those people that have that idea that, you know, it's how we treat them or they're oppressed, because how then do you explain Mogadishu and Somalia and Thailand and even now in Iran where they're killing the black Muslims who always have been Muslims because they're not Muslim enough?
It clearly states that they want to change Islam over not just to us, but the world.
And as far as going into Iraq with Bush Lied and the WMDs, quickly, I don't want to go over that whole regime more.
But we did find WMDs there, and it's been an intelligence report.
And Centorum came out and said that it was just a fraction of what they found there.
And also, as far as the lie goes, that all of Europe, Russia, and China had the same intelligence about those tubes from Nigeria, I believe it was.
And they still stand by that to this day.
Now, I don't know how we can press it.
You know, these people with the same attitude like Rosie O'Donnell today said, all we need to do is talk with them because they're mothers and fathers just like we are.
Well, I don't know anybody here, or I certainly don't, allow my children to blow themselves up with bombs and then praise them after I get a $20,000 reward, you know?
So if we pull out our, and I agree with you, if we pull out, and I'm with you in Vietnam there too, there was a disaster.
If we pull out, I'm afraid that we will never be able to get another ally again.
What will our allies do in the future?
What about the people that we're supposed to be helping?
How can they count on us?
I don't think that we could even ever try to protect ourselves with a coalition ever again.
Anyway, if you go into the world of shortwave and amateur radio, good luck.
And I would say you'll have just an absolute blast.
I've said this before, and I'm going to say it again right now.
A lot of people think that amateur radio is on the decline, and in fact it is numerically.
And probably the chief reason for that is because of the Internet.
God knows I love the Internet, but it's not shortwave radio.
And there is no magic, no magic in the world like being able to talk to people through the air, have your signal bouncing off the ionosphere and back to Earth and around the globe.
And I know it's easy to get on a computer and have a teleconference with somebody on the other side of the globe right now, and we're in a different day and age.
But I would still urge any of you out there that are able to sort of move toward learning about RF, learning about being an amateur radio operator, to proceed in that direction, because there is nothing that matches the magic of being able to do as I described, to bounce your signal off the ionosphere and have it go thusly around the world, never knowing who you're going to be talking to, where they're going to be.
It's just plain magic.
It was magic for me when I was 13 years old.
It's magic for me today.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air from Hawaii.
I'm calling you from Pune, which is at 19 degrees 30 minutes on the north latitude.
I guess every time I think of our here, Richard Hoaglan, I want to retell him about that.
But I'm also a Vietnam veteran, and I wanted to comment on your position on Iraq.
And I would say I served in Vietnam in the same military occupational specialty as George Norrie did.
I was in the public information field.
And one of the most common things I remember from Vietnam was that most of the troops would say regarding the opposition to Viet Cong, communists or the NVA, that if somebody came to America and did to America what we were doing to Vietnam, I heard many troops say they would probably have be just the same as the VC fighting us.
And I was there in about 71 and 72, and I would say the war was lost there from a ground level, a troops looking around, a troop soldier looking around could see that we had already lost the war.
We controlled, I once went on a bird dog flight, a Ford Artillery control flight, and as we flew around, I asked the pilot, gee, you know, isn't this area all controlled by the U.S. Allies?
And he said, oh, no, we just controlled that little road down there, 300 yards in each direction in the daytime.
And that's 1972.
And I remember going down into the Mekong Delta to the Yumin Forest.
And so from your point of view, we should do what at this point?
unidentified
Well, let me put it this way.
I believe we were lied into the war, and it was, well, shown to be true in events that followed the invasion.
And I remember the comments that George was, I think was in Woodwork's book about George Bush having a conversation with the former Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
And Colin Powell instructed George Bush that if you go into Iraq, if you break it, you own it.
And giving that comment to a Texas oil man that if he could own Iraq, it seemed evident what Bush opted to do.
Yeah, I think that's a, you know, that's a, that's a fair argument.
They may not have been in Iraq then, but I think they are now.
unidentified
As you can recall from the former Treasury Secretary, that Bush's first intention from his first days in his first inauguration, in his first period as president, that he was just set from the get-go to get to Iraq under pretense of having to avenge his father's trip.
And secondly, that, well, that to give a Texas oilman, as I said earlier, the chance to own Iraq, what do you think he would choose?
So we kind of, the undercurrent is that we've kind of forgotten the war is about oil because the trouble was someplace else like, say, Somalia, you know, they're not so interested to, the United States is not so interested here.
But here's my point, Art.
The war in the beginning part, when Rumsfeld was there denying that there was an insurrection or this was a quagmire, was wrong.
But of course, we can see now that it is a quagmire, meaning that we are in up to our necks and we are unable to get out of it.
And even the Democrats cannot offer a proposal to get out of it.
And here's what I've got to say.
The war was designed to put America in the region and to stay there.
And the chaos that ensued or was precipitated serves the purpose of allowing U.S. troops and military presence to stay in the area.
And towards your question about winning or losing, America is impotent right now, even dealing with, say, North Korea because are being stuck in Iraq.
And America has shown itself, or once having been so formidable and thought to be the strongest power in the world, basically, as I stated earlier, impotent in Iraq.
I'm just saying, I think I've got the gist of what you're saying.
And there are points that I agree with you on, and one of them happens to be North Korea.
We made a hell of a lot of noise about what we would do if they detonated a nuclear weapon.
And they detonated a nuclear weapon, and we haven't done a damn thing.
Really have not done a damn thing.
So I don't disagree with you totally, but on Iraq, I do disagree with you.
We are there.
I think the consequences of leaving at this point would be much larger than you can imagine, would be a very negative thing for the United States in every way.
And moreover, I think we'd end up going back.
I think inevitably we'd end up going back.
And when we did, we'd probably be fighting Iran and Iraq, if not Syria, in some sort of a coalition at that point.
It might be a few years downline, but it's almost inevitable when you have somebody or a group of somebody who absolutely want you dead.
These are the same people who crashed the airplanes into the Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon and tried to get the White House.
These are the very same people.
And given an opportunity and enough years and enough weapons, we're going to be in a situation that we can't even imagine.
Now, I know a lot of people want to deal with what's now, not what might be in the future.
They tend to cast that off.
We're short-term thinkers, not long-term thinkers.
That's one of America's problems, that we don't think in the long term.
If we did, I think we'd realize we do have to stay and we do have to finish the job.
At any rate, let's move on and let's go to the wildcard line and say, Ron, you're on the air from Yuma, Arizona.
Well, Art, one of the prophecies the Virgin gave the sister Lucia was she told her, when you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is a sign God has given you that the world is about to be punished by another war.
And I believe in January of either 1936 or 37, there was a highly unusual sighting of the Aurora Borealis that they saw as far as northern Africa.
Now, I had heard this.
I questioned both my parents who were naturally born there, and they did see it.
They both seen it.
And I went a step farther, spoke to my father-in-law who was in northern Pennsylvania, and he remembered seeing it.
I mean, you can look back and say, well, okay, the war broke out.
What I'm trying to point out here is the sun goes in.
The sun goes in 11-year cycle, sir.
And in every sun cycle, every 11-year cycle, we have some coronal mass ejections or storms from the sun that are so big and so violent that they're seen right down into South America, right down into Africa, into the southern latitudes.
That happens almost every 11 years on a regularly scheduled basis.
unidentified
Okay, Ark, like I said, this is a matter of whether you believe it or choice.
But what I'm saying is this.
In late March, I believe March 30th or 31st of 2001, there was another unusual sighting of the Aurora Borealis.
One thing I'd like to point out, I think it is fair to point out that I'm not sure that those people that attacked us on 9-11 had a thing to do with what was going on in Iraq.
And I don't even think our president has tried to make that case.
unidentified
I agree.
Okay.
But I do think that there is a broad support by Arabs all over the Middle East for this jihad against us.
And I don't know where you start.
We started in Afghanistan.
That was reasonable.
I mean, if we'd have gone into Iran, I mean, where do you start?
You've got to start somewhere.
And what I'm concerned about is that really what I'm concerned about is that we have people living right here, our neighbors and such.
You know, the mosque are, there's lots of evidence to show that they are gathering money and supporting these people, these terrorists.
And, I mean, it's just nothing like Vietnam, is what I'm saying.
And I'm fearful for my children and their children and what's going to happen in the long run here.
The only analogy, I guess, that I was making was if, for example, you take this election, this thumping that they're all talking about right now, if it is a mandate to get out of Iraq,
to essentially give up and leave, turn it over to the Iraqis such as they are, and they're not ready for it, and leave Iraq, then you do have an analogy that works, and that is America suffered greatly after we lost in Vietnam.
If we have a similar situation with regard to Iraq, I think that it's going to psychologically traumatize Americans in America to the point that we're never going to be able to get much ever done again.
unidentified
Well, that's true.
But I feel that that's a certain amount of ego Involved, and that's another issue.
I'm talking about hardcore, solid issues that face us right now.
And that is really a pretty much life or death thing.
Like you said, they're committed to killing us.
And it's that simple.
And some of them, not all of them, like we said, but some of them live in the same cities we do.
And that frightens me.
I mean, we have to, you know, I don't like any of my rights.
There's a whole lot that needs to be done, and she needs to do it.
And I'm telling you right now that if I could get Ann Coulter to come to my compound, that would be great because she needs a man to back her up so that what she says has validity.
Something happened, and I believe she wiped the files so that I wouldn't be able to contact all these people so that I could administer them the new revelation, which needs to save America.
And little green men, if there are any such things, they're devils.
That's what I have to say: is that she needs to get back at the feet of her man where every woman should be.
Women need to stop talking.
That's one step to getting America back to where we need it.
Women need to shut their mouth, get back in the kitchen, and do what they're told, because a man's will is the will that runs America, runs the family.
And if we had stronger men who would stand up and be men, because all men are afraid to be men nowadays, and they need to run their families and run their women and keep their women quiet and covered up.
And that's another reason why those A-rabs want to kill us is because we have hussies running around with barely nothing on.
I think that Iraq settling into anything at all with any sort of permanency, even if it's not what we call a democracy, but anything less than an Islamic state that trains people to blow things up and to kill us would be a win.
Canada and Afghanistan, and I think the troops are great.
I support them 100%, but what they're doing there, I don't know.
I mean, it's a civilization that was based on warlords from day one, and just to bring in democracy and say, this is what you want right now, it's a hard sell.
Everybody who listens, by all means, then call in.
No, it's not going to be quick.
And the American people are not in the mood, nor have we ever been, for things that are slow.
That's really what happened in Vietnam, you know?
Television every night.
We watched what happened every night, and eventually we ran out of patience.
And, you know, clearly you can see the American people are running out of patience with Iraq.
Question is, what's going to happen if we do leave, if we just decide to throw up our hands, lay down our arms, and leave?
What is that going to mean for the future of America?
It's a doggone good question.
Maybe that's what we ought to be debating.
If we do leave, where are we?
What's going to happen?
On the international line from Alberta, Alan, you're on the air.
unidentified
Well, Art, I would say hello from your friendly, northernly neighbor, but I guess your northernly neighbor is China now, and they're not exactly friendly.
So I'll just say hello from Canada instead.
Okay.
I'd like to make a comment to he thou dubbed Warmonger.
And he said that the U.S. Army is undefeatable.
Have the ashes from the former White House fallen already?
Let me push you back a little bit and ask you why you think 11-11, the numbers 11-11, are sending us a message.
unidentified
Well, just from things that your callers have said, people saying, oh, I wake up all the time, I see 11-11 on the clock.
So whenever I look at the clock, I see repeating numbers.
And I don't know.
I think that I don't know what would be sending us a message with 11-11 other than possibly some greater divine force.
But it might be possible or possibly even beneficial to our race to send a message back to them with 11-11 by holding the moment of silence 11 minutes late.
And this is not to slight the veterans, by the way.
I have respect for the veterans.
I have family that was in the service.
But if this could possibly help us get in contact with something beyond what we could see, feel, touch, and taste, then, hey, I'm all for it.
And you had one caller that was all over the board about you had to hang up on him.
But when I was a young Marine in North Carolina, had orders to go to Lebanon, I realized we had a new enemy on the horizon, even though we were still in the Cold War.
So I'd recommend that caller earlier.
Go live in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, or over there in Mindanao, where you're at and see what's like.
Anyway, I have thought for all my life that one of the best things the United States could do, since we don't get everybody in the military anymore by a long shot, would be as a birthright to every U.S. citizen, we should give them a round-trip ticket to some third world country, somewhere.
I'm very serious, so that they can understand, A, what it is they have, and B, what some of the rest of the world is like.
And I think a lot of our attitudes are born of the fact that we don't understand others.
We're very parochial.
Most of us have never been out of the country.
Frankly, a lot of us have never we never even leave the state we're born in.
unidentified
Yes, exactly.
Oh, I also wanted to ask you this, too, before going to Iraq more.
Yeah, but the fact of the matter is we're in Iraq now.
The American people are voicing their apparent disapproval of it with the election we just went through.
So what now?
unidentified
If we pull out now, it's going to be worse than what Afghanistan was when the Soviets pulled out.
And you've got to look at history, and you've got to look at geographical thinking of people.
You being in the military and you being in the overseas in Asia a lot, I think you kind of understand that.
I spent 10 years in the Orient myself.
If we pull out, it's going to be worse than Afghanistan was.
When the Soviets pulled out, you're going to have Caliphate started by the Sunnis, and they're going to end up fighting the Shiites, and the prisons next door are going to get into it with the Arab Shiites.
I haven't heard about that one, but I don't for one second doubt it.
And they are committed to our death.
And once somebody has said they're going to kill you, then if you don't act in self-defense, you probably deserve whatever comes your way.
And I know that sounds, it's awfully simplified, but we really are at that point.
We clearly have seen the enemy.
The enemy wants us dead.
And you can complain and bitch, as many will, about U.S. policies around the world.
And no, we've been far from perfect.
But we're still the best game going, by the way.
We've been far from perfect, and we've made mistakes and probably got into Vietnam with a lie, probably got into Iraq with a lie.
But even all of that said, we're there now, and we're facing an enemy who wants us dead.
What would you now have us do?
Should we lay down our arms and leave?
And what are the consequences of doing that?
Again, I say that I think as part of an American's birthright, they ought to have a nice round-trip ticket, and they ought to spend at least several weeks in some third world nation somewhere on the globe.
And if they did, we'd have a far different attitude about the rest of the world than we do now.
A wildcard line, David and Sherman Oaks, you're on the air.