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Nov. 10, 2006 - Art Bell

02:38:01

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Open Lines - Nick Pope - UK Disclosure - Crop Circles

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	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 Art 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 on 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!
	Approach 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.
	His 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, little bit of wind, 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 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 a... 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'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 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 and I don't know, I guess I've come to terms with it.
	It's a joyous thing to do, I suppose.
	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.
	Alright, 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 the 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 gonna 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 al-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.
	Guards 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.
	Nations 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 menacing 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.
	you 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 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 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 will 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, that would essentially be The same thing, even if it's a slow pull out, with a slow Iraqization of the war.
	We had the Vietnamization of the war, some of you will recall.
	And 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.
	It 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 would 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 maybe it's going to be open lines all night long.
	Thunder Music
	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, Colm Culliher, And Cullum 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 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?
	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.
	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 to 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'll happen if we do the following.
	See what'll 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.
	The question about Iraq.
	Clearly the country is in a lousy, lousy mood about Iraq.
	And that's what happened in the elections.
	The further question is, do you think that we can stand another loss?
	In the American psyche, can you 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, 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.
	French.
	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, Philippines.
	I am Art Bell, filling in for a very hard-working and deserving of a day off, George Norrie.
	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... I can 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 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
	Um...
	There are, at least now, several times a day when I absolutely say to myself, that's it!
	That's it!
	Not one more and that'll last for a couple or three hours and then usually I cave in.
	Now I've been doing pretty well and you know if you look back on what I was doing compared to what I am doing now I'm down to about a tenth of what I was originally smoking.
	But have I actually cast it off completely?
	Is it out of my mind?
	No.
	Am I still smoking one every now and then?
	Yes.
	Am I looking for ways... I've run out of nicotine patches.
	In fact, the last one is attached to my ankle right now and I don't have any more of those.
	But that cannot be the long-term answer anyway.
	So I suppose there has to be this mental final, final, final, final decision because I've had many final decisions already to quit.
	And then you just have to do it.
	I don't know.
	Maybe I should try hypnosis.
	West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Brian from Northern California.
	Hey, good afternoon, Art.
	Hi.
	This is a long time coming.
	I was going to make this a ghost-to-ghost call, but our phone lines went down, so I got knocked out of the queue.
	But it's a story I think you're going to find worth the wait.
	Well, okay, I don't want this to turn into another ghost-to-ghost night.
	No, no.
	Consider this just unexplained.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Now, about nine years ago, I was in Poland, and I made a point of visiting the camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau.
	And Auschwitz itself is actually this old converted Polish cavalry barracks sort of area that's, you know, 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, That's the sort of thing anyone who has any even faint doubt only has to go there.
	But there's one particular area that's most chilling on the tour, and it's called the Death Block.
	And it's just a very low, nondescript brick building alongside the 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.
	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 the fact that this is the place that they first conducted experiments with Zyklon B on Soviet prisoners.
	Those would have been those waiting for their fate, huh?
	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 had 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, It's 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 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.
	And I thought, you know what?
	I'm never going to be here again.
	And so when you go down, I opened 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.
	So in you went.
	And I went and I pulled the metal grating shut to take a look.
	And I stood there in the darkness.
	I thought, alright, we can just close this most of the way.
	So, I reached down, put my fingers in the air holes, closed it most of the way, stood up again to get a feel of the dark and claustrophobic.
	And I'm not claustrophobic by nature at all.
	But a moment later, you can imagine my surprise when I heard a very firm click and the wooden door closed.
	Oh my God.
	And I heard the sound of the latch.
	I immediately dropped to my knees.
	And there was no one out there.
	There was no sound of footsteps.
	There was nothing.
	So I'm standing there.
	Now this is also on Easter weekend, Art.
	And Easter weekend, Poland being a very Catholic country, the whole place shuts down.
	I'm sure you thought that's it.
	I'm here.
	I'm thinking this has become the Twilight Zone episode, you know, from hell.
	They're gonna find me on Monday or Tuesday, and my hair's gonna be white, and I'm just gonna be gibbering, but I thought, all right, just get a hold of yourself.
	There'll be another tour group, because it was still early enough in the afternoon.
	Well, you got your money's worth, didn't you?
	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 the space that my feet are in.
	Uh-huh.
	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, and 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 self 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.
	There was nothing irrespectful about this.
	And any tour guide worth their salt is going to stop somewhere along the line and count.
	Hopefully yours did.
	Well, what happened was a moment later, I said, let's go down and kind of shake that a little bit and start talking, saying hello, anyone out there.
	And, you know, 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, immediately I shot out of that like you can't imagine, Art.
	I mean... No, I can't imagine.
	As I said then, you got your money's worth.
	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.
	That's one hell of a story.
	I'm sure glad you got through, and as I say, you got your money's worth.
	Maybe that was a little lesson from, well, I don't know, above or below somewhere.
	Well, thanks for taking it, Art.
	Thanks for making it, sir.
	You take care.
	That really was something.
	My God, can you imagine?
	I've done that a million times.
	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 Corregidor.
	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 up to the very top of the pyramid and actually, you know, lie in the sarcophagus without a lot of people around at all.
	That was very lucky, very fortunate, but I did, I had a feeling that just cannot be described, lying in a 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.
	Ted.
	Good afternoon to you, Art.
	Yes, sir.
	I've listened to you on CKLW and I've listened to you for at least 10 years.
	I must say, I really enjoy your program.
	Thank you.
	I have a couple of questions for you, Art.
	Sure.
	One question.
	I know you are a long-term Nevada resident, and my wife and I have gone out there on vacation many times.
	We even stayed a couple times in Pahrump.
	I'm curious about all the nuclear tests they did for many years north of Las Vegas.
	Remember the experiments they used to do?
	Well, I remember, sir.
	I was on KDWN in Las Vegas, and I used to announce Uh, the countdown to, uh, when they'd light one off and our building would shake and, you know, we'd warn everybody to get off, uh, um, you know, difficult places and off high ledges and buildings and all of that.
	So do I remember?
	Yes, very well.
	Was that back in the 60s or?
	No, no.
	Uh, we were, we were doing testing, uh, sir, underground testing, uh, into the 80s.
	Well, I remember seeing in Las Vegas there's this famous poster that everyone used to have parties to sit out and watch when the blast used to go up in the air at night time.
	Yeah, that's going back even a lot farther.
	Well, that's going back further, right?
	Yeah, oh yeah.
	I was curious about that, whether the government has done a lot of testing, like radiation testing in that area.
	I see how Las Vegas moves further out and out and out and expands.
	Um, it just makes me wonder, you know, the toxicity.
	of that area north of Las Vegas.
	I wouldn't worry too much.
	Las Vegas is bounded on all sides by Mountain Sur 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.
	Right.
	As opposed to Nevada.
	So it was kind of a prevailing wind situation.
	Well, wasn't there that big controversy, too, with Utah, with those famous movie stars that all died of cancer?
	In that one movie in southern Utah, where they think the soil was contaminated, like John Wayne and Agnes Moorhead.
	Yes, yes, not just movie stars, not just movie stars, sir, but a lot of people who lived in that part of Utah.
	I'm just curious whether, in Nevada, they've done the same type of testing.
	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.
	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 awful lot of testing uh... in nevada first above ground i 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.
	Hi.
	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.
	We wish the best for you and your family.
	Thank you.
	Yes, sir.
	Also, I've been afraid to call in before.
	Actually afraid, I don't know if that's the right word, but I've always thought about the Cray computer.
	You know, hey, should I call the call up coast to coast or am I going to be listened to or what?
	But I finally come to the realization that I really, really just don't care anymore.
	But anyway... You actually do get there with all of this business.
	You just sort of assume after a while that you're being monitored.
	And so, you know, what the hell?
	Right.
	You know, I mean, we all know that you can't really trust nation-state governments anyway, so we might as well just go with it.
	But anyway, my main reason for calling is this morning I was watching NBC News, and of course I read and watch news.
	That's mainly what I do.
	I'm an avid reader.
	As a matter of fact, I'm reading the Richard K. Morgan books that you're reading right now.
	Altered Carbon, I'm on actually the second one now.
	All right, have you read any more besides the first one?
	I have not.
	I just finished that one.
	I'm on to another book now, but there's a follow-on to Altered Carbon?
	Yes, sir.
	I'm reading Broken Angels.
	There's actually four more books in the series after that.
	Yes, sir.
	I'll have to go to what they call National Bookstore here and see if I can't find it.
	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.
	Uh, of course it was the local station I was watching and you know how on the bottom of the screen they have, uh, uh, old little tidbits rolling across where you can read it if you get tired of listening to the talking head.
	Okay.
	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, uh, in the 1990s has just said, uh, that, uh, 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.
	Would you mind telling me what newscast this was?
	You say it was NBC?
	Well, it was the local newscast here in Little Rock, Arkansas where I live.
	And of course it was rolling across the bottom, and I was amazed at that.
	I mean, you just never see that on mainstream news.
	And so, of course, I switched over to CNN and Fox and all the other news channels, and the local ones too, and nobody ever says anything else about it.
	So I called up the local news, K-A-R-N is who they are here in Little Rock, but I called them up.
	I talked to the guy, and a young man answered, and I let him know.
	Of course, I told him just what I told you.
	Of course, he stifled a chuckle, and he told me to hold on for just a moment.
	Then he came back and said, well, you're right.
	You know, I'm looking on our website here, and that's what it's saying.
	That's what I told you.
	So, you know, I'm just amazed at that.
	And of course, I talked with your screener, and she said that George had mentioned something about it last night.
	All right, 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 a 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 Coast to Coast 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, warns 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 M.O.D.
	chief warns that the country could be attacked by 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 sighting now, I'm absolutely sure 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.
	Mr. Pope's CV.
	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 Mr. 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.
	Thank you.
	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.
	I'm a little hesitant to go to anybody who calls themselves Ma-Trea in St.
	Louis, but it's open lines, so on the wild card line, Ma-Trea, you're on the air.
	Hello, thank you for having me.
	You're very welcome.
	This is actually the first time that anyone has heard my voice.
	I've been just going by an alias online.
	But I wholeheartedly believe that I am the body that has been chosen for the long-awaited task to convert over to the new age, if you will.
	Okay.
	What is it that makes you believe this?
	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.
	Give me some idea of what that plan entails.
	What is it?
	Well, I'm not ready to release it to the public.
	Oh, I hate that.
	I hate when I get guests who tell me they've got something hot, and then they won't tell me what it is, or it's a real-life book.
	But it's actually for a very good reason.
	I mean, basically it is a complete redesign of the socio-political economic systems altogether.
	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.
	Well, I have to be able to communicate this to the whole world and have a lot of power.
	Have everyone able to consider this and discuss it, 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 cause 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, you know, 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 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.
	Right, and it's nice that it forecasts, I mean, on Benjamin Cream's website, I mean, he's the one that supposedly gives these messages to the public from a Tibetan monk who originally receives them, but it's nice that he has said Because I originally had this huge, giant kind of plan that I was getting together for 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 Maitreya says that this has to happen first, but he apparently feels it is necessary.
	And at that point, he will be invited to speak with the UN, you know, at the UN.
	And he says at the UN.
	I'm not exactly sure that that's the, you know, definite location, but it definitely says he will.
	He or I will be invited to speak on TV to every person in the world through linked satellite, general... When did it occur to you that you are this person?
	Well, good question.
	And it's funny that until one year ago, I really had no concept of God.
	I considered myself agnostic my whole life.
	Several people in my family have very, very awesome, miracle-type stories with angels and stuff, so I could never... Alright, but a year ago...try to answer the question.
	A year ago is when this occurred to you?
	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, yeah, I kept trying to put that out of my mind.
	I'm thinking this can't be, you know, everybody's telling me I'm crazy the moment I try to mention anything like that.
	But I would say it was in... There is that danger, you know.
	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 expectations and good intentions, but not really anything to back it up.
	Here I am with, wow, this is the answer to world peace.
	Now I've got a bunch of several other things aside from the plan.
	But again, you can't tell me what it is.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, it's such a complex set of... I mean, it's such a complex philosophy that, I mean, it is... Let me try this on you.
	The ideas do have power.
	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?
	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 That's tomorrow?
	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. The world's cure for cancer.
	That's tomorrow? I missed it by one day? Well I mean so you know I'm hoping... You don't
	want to give me... why don't you give me that little tidbit right now?
	That I can't.
	That I can do.
	Proceed.
	Alright, well, I'm trying to make it as simple as I can.
	I mean, the whole world wants one simple answer for everything.
	Okay, so out with it.
	Alright, well, I call it the Alkaline B-17 Spirit Regimen.
	The Alkaline B-17 Spirit Regimen.
	Yes, now I may end up modifying that slightly before tomorrow.
	Really?
	But the basic concept, 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.
	I heard that.
	There's a whole set of, I mean, it's a complex set of things to eat and different things in your daily life to adjust to work towards that.
	I'll tell you what, we're way short on time so what I'm going to have to ask you to do is to compile all of this into an email and if it makes sense we'll put it up for all to see.
	But basically, boy I hate it when people do that.
	I hate it when guests do that.
	I hate it when anybody does that.
	They sort of tease you with Well, I've got the answer to it all.
	I've got the next world economic system.
	I will bring peace to the world.
	But, unfortunately, I cannot tell you about it today.
	East of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	Hello.
	How are you doing?
	This is Mark from Winona, Minnesota.
	Yes, sir.
	You were talking about the Iraqi situation earlier and asking for people to call in with comments.
	I'm 36 years old and I've been following the situation just as much as anybody else has.
	What I find interesting is our reasons for the government, their explanation of why we went into Iraq.
	When I was about I was 17, 18 years old, living with mom and dad still, and I had watched a documentary about, it was about 6 or 8 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 6 or 8 people, I don't exactly remember the number, Um, 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.
	Um, and I guess I just maybe wanted to bring a 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 The six scholars came here and nothing has ever been said about that.
	Well, that's history now.
	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?
	Gosh, you know?
	Maybe light needs to be shed on what I have just said to you, you know?
	Well, how would that change what's going on, you know, currently?
	Maybe it would sway public opinion.
	In what sense?
	In the sense of, instead of us being in there to wipe out some dictatorship or regimes, you know, fundamentalist regimes, maybe we're there to actually Change the country into something other than a dictatorship by request.
	Well, I mean, clearly that's our goal.
	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.
	You know, again, I'll make you the president, and the country just said, look, we don't like what you're doing.
	Well, then I guess if I was the president, I would ask the public to, or I would explain to the public the 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.
	Yeah, but at best that's academic now, right?
	True.
	But at the same time, it may, instead of viewing our situation in Iraq as we're there to eliminate, you know, 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, you know, various means to defend themselves during a certain time period.
	Well, during the war with Iran.
	Alright, well, listen, thank you very much, 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 the 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, alright, if I was president, here's what I would do.
	Maybe that's a question I had to be posing to you, and in fact I am.
	From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art 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, warns former M.O.D.
	chief.
	Now, the name Nick Pope popped up in the article.
	Nick Pope was the one warning indeed.
	It's on the Coast2CoastAM.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, for 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.
	Nick, welcome to Coast to Coast AM.
	Hi Art, thanks.
	It's great to be on the show again.
	My God!
	Somebody, just to fill you in, 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 US 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 Yes, the story, it won't surprise you to learn, is a little bit exaggerated.
	M.O.D. chief. That would be the name Nick Pope popped up and I said see if you can
	get Nick on the phone and sure enough here you are. So comments please. Yes the
	the story it won't surprise you to learn is a little bit exaggerated. I'm not
	saying that there's an imminent alien invasion but what what the story is is
	that last week after 21 years in government service I left the Ministry
	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, And that makes absolute sense to me.
	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. And I said that's, in
	my view, that's a mistake.
	Nick, and it makes absolute sense to me, Nick, now that you are retired, is there anything you can say
	that you were unable to say prior to your retirement.
	How's that for a question?
	Yeah, no, it's a good question.
	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 statement.
	Let me rephrase the question in an 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?
	My honest answer to you is that yes, there are things I could tell you that obviously I couldn't tell you, but, now I want to qualify that, I don't think it's the sort of thing that would actually rock your lives.
	For example, I would not be saying, because I honestly do not, it's nothing that I have seen first hand, I have not seen, for example, evidence that the Air Force in Britain has any recovered vehicles or bodies or anything like that.
	So there's nothing earth-shattering like that that I would be able to reveal if I wasn't found.
	If the United States had recovered vehicles or recovered bodies, would the British Ministry of Defence be aware of that?
	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, codenamed Project Condine.
	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.
	Okay.
	The article goes on to suggest that though you were not a believer, after investigation, after investigation, after investigation, you became convinced.
	Is that accurate?
	That's accurate, yes.
	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 have 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, you 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'm not convinced, and I wonder how you feel about this.
	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, you know, 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 know, 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.
	It just seems too far ahead.
	That's exactly what I thought.
	How do you feel just being retired a week now?
	How does it feel to be out?
	It's very strange indeed.
	I had 21 years of government service.
	I very much enjoyed working for the Ministry of Defence.
	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.
	It's a great family, the civilians and the military, a 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 it's 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.
	Understood.
	Alright, 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.
	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 would agree with that.
	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, that 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 develop more, 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 Yeah, I know.
	Believe me, I know.
	saying that this is obviously just cabal propaganda and disinformation and
	well you know how dare I say such bad things about the space people.
	Ha! Yeah I know, believe me I know. Let me try this one out on you Nick, if there's an
	unidentified object over British airspace or over US airspace Well, the normal thing to do, I suppose, is send out a signal and find out if it's 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?
	That's an area where I really can't go into details, I'm afraid, because that's kind of delving into operational issues.
	Well, I guess that's another way of simply asking, are we shooting at them, Nick?
	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.
	In other words, if we are attacked, we'll defend ourselves.
	Yes, well of course, if we're attacked.
	But I'm going to drag you into areas where you can't really respond.
	Again, I'm saying here comes some object moving at several times the speed of sound across your airspace.
	Now, you're going to try to identify that craft as friend or foe.
	If you cannot do so, then I guess you're going to scramble jet aircraft that are going to give chase to this thing.
	If it doesn't respond... No, I've got you in a place where you can't answer.
	Yeah, I mean, I think... I don't disagree with the scenario you're painting there.
	If the Air Force believes that a solid craft has penetrated our air defenses, then of course, whatever it is, there will be a response.
	But I think the way I would answer your question is to say we would not engage Anything unless there was some clear evidence of hostile intent.
	But beyond that, I'm afraid that's an area where I.
	I obviously can't go in because I'm delving into operational issues about the UK's response.
	Sure, sure, sure.
	I think the US 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.
	Do you know offhand, Nick, whether the Without telling me what the rules of engagement are, do the US rules of engagement and the British rules of engagement differ?
	That's not an area I can discuss at all, I'm afraid.
	I mean, we really are delving here into two areas where it's just not a place I can go.
	I'm sorry to be so cryptic.
	I think inevitably, if I was sitting here answering all your questions, you'd be a bit surprised and think, well, hang on.
	You know, but I genuinely am bound by my secrecy oath and do have to be careful when discussing anything that might betray our operational response.
	Of course, of course.
	You just keep telling me when you can't go someplace.
	Yeah.
	But what do you think, generally, of the concept of shooting at them?
	Because there have certainly been instances when we have shot at unidentified flying objects.
	We have done that.
	Now, how do you feel about doing that?
	Well, I think unless we are actually fired upon, or unless by its actions a UFO I think it's absolute madness to do this.
	Without wanting to be glib about it, you could start a war of the worlds.
	If any of these things are genuinely extraterrestrial spacecraft, we should be reaching out the hand of friendship.
	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.
	What do you think the odds are, Nick, friend or foe?
	50-50, or is it just the mere fact that they're so advanced more likely to mean they're socially advanced as well, and so you could err a little bit on the side of they're probably more friend than foe?
	I tell you what, Nick, we're at the top of the hour.
	Hold tight.
	Hold it right there, Nick.
	Can you hold on for a few?
	Yeah, sure.
	All right.
	We're at a break point, so hold tight.
	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.
	I mean, it has to have been considered.
	Maybe Nick knows about that, and maybe Nick can talk about it, maybe he can't.
	In a moment, we will find out.
	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.
	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 To the best of my knowledge, no there isn't.
	And I think of course that's, again, that's a mistake.
	That would would would allow an international response to something
	deadly To the best of my knowledge. No, there isn't 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 Yes.
	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.
	Well, you're right.
	I would tend to absolutely agree with you.
	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.
	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.
	All right.
	In all the years that... Here's a response from a listener.
	Lexi 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 those, 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.
	Any comments?
	Yes, that could well be the case.
	Also, you could be dealing with With, I guess, and it's a well-known condition, Stockholm Syndrome, where a kidnapped victim, and let's not, you know, 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.
	All right.
	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?
	That's absolutely correct.
	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.
	You were rather more dependent on the testimony, but that's not to say I wasn't interested.
	What about that which England has a great deal of and that would be crop circles as well as the animal mutilation phenomena.
	Both of those are pretty well proven.
	Sure there's some college kids out there that did some things but there's also the real McCoy.
	The way for me to characterize this is that formally these phenomena were outside the terms of reference.
	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 just like Project Blue Book, we were a fairly small outfit and just the two or three hundred 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.
	So that's it.
	Whatever they are, they're not a threat to national security.
	I wonder 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?
	I've always been so curious about that.
	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 defence 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 defences are routinely penetrated By structured craft of unknown origin, who display speeds and maneuvers way ahead of anything we can match, when these things are tracked 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.
	I agree.
	Well, if that doesn't constitute a threat to national defense, then I would be interested in the definition of exactly what does.
	You may be familiar, I'm sure you are, with a former Chief of the Defence 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.
	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 the 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.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Even though he made that quote probably about ten years ago now I don't think in
	many ways it's been bettered.
	And again, this brings us back to the international aspect of it.
	If there is an invasion, it's probably not going to be of just Great Britain or of the U.S.
	or of any other single country.
	It's going to be of the planet.
	And we have no planetary defense agreements that I'm aware of and apparently that you're aware of either, so I can't even imagine how the world would begin responding to an actual invasion.
	It would be kind of a country by country, there would be no coordinated response at all.
	Yeah, I think that's right.
	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, 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.
	Indeed.
	Nick, now that you have left government, do you plan to write a book?
	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.
	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.
	I will perhaps return to that issue in the future.
	It very much sounds as though you do.
	One question I posed to you about, well, if you were not bound by the secrecy, is there
	anything you could really tell us at Wachowkison?
	And basically you gave us a yes.
	There really is.
	Yes, without a qualified yes.
	It wasn't a sort of, we have a spaceship in a hangar somewhere, yes.
	But it was a, well I could tell you some things which you'd find interesting, surprising, disturbing, whatever.
	Uh-huh.
	And I would think then that if that's true in Britain, it's certainly true or would be true for the United States as well.
	Yes, I think so.
	In other words, if we had access to all the secrecy, it would just cut right through the secrecy, there would be a number of things that would shock us.
	Do you think any of these things would be enough to convince a rational person that extraterrestrials are real?
	Yes, I think so.
	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 diehard skeptic.
	Oh, that's quite a statement.
	Listen, Nick, I really, really... I've got to go back to open lines.
	I really, really want to thank you for coming on with no notice whatsoever.
	I mean, here we had a caller, led to a newspaper article, then led to Nick Pope, and so what we'll do, Nick, is book you again for a future show, and we'll just do a whole show with you.
	How's that?
	That's fine.
	I'm happy to come on and discuss this with you and maybe take some calls.
	All right, buddy.
	Thanks a million.
	You have a good, what is it, morning there?
	Yes, it is.
	Morning.
	Okay, Nick, have a great morning in Great Britain.
	We'll talk to you soon.
	Thank you very much.
	All the best.
	Take care.
	All right.
	All the best to you, too.
	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.
	Good day everybody.
	I'm Art Bell filling in for George Norrie, who's taking a very well-earned night off.
	We're into open lines now, once again, and anything you want to talk about is absolutely fair game.
	Let's go here to, I believe, North Hollywood, California, and Bruce.
	Hi, Bruce.
	That's me.
	Hi.
	Amazing night so far.
	Amazing show.
	You've had the Maitreya and the Pope.
	How do you follow that?
	I don't know.
	With you!
	I gotta tell you though, that Maitreya didn't really build up a lot of confidence in me.
	It didn't seem very credible.
	He was calling from St.
	Louis.
	Isn't that a dying city where like two-thirds of the population or like a third of it's like disappeared?
	You know, I've heard that.
	That St.
	Louis is kind of dying away.
	Is it really true?
	Yeah, like 20-30% of the population has left.
	To build a base of operations to be the religious leader of the world and pick St.
	Louis, I don't know, I'm a little skeptical.
	Maybe he'll be the only one there.
	Could be.
	The kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, right?
	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've got to reach through the phone line and grab him by the throat.
	I was just thinking the same thing.
	Anyway, I called about Iraq.
	Yes, sir.
	Your, 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.
	I think it's a very important subject.
	Well, the answer to that is because they don't know what to say.
	Let's see how you do.
	I mean, it is a tough, it's a very, very tough question.
	I am old enough to have gone through, I was in Vietnam and went through Vietnam, and so I remember so well what it did to the country, and I'm wondering what another loss would do to us.
	Yeah, actually I wanted to address that.
	I'm a bit younger than you, but I remember 75, the fall of Saigon.
	Unfortunately, the slaughter that ensued after that, the North Vietnamese killing all the South Vietnamese, and then over to Cambodia, I mean, how could we as a country face ourselves?
	Because we didn't lose.
	We gave up.
	We forfeited.
	Because militarily, we could have won in five minutes, but if you're going to go into a war, you fight.
	You don't do it, you know, half-assed.
	Boy, you'll get no argument from me.
	No argument at all.
	I've agreed with you tonight on so many things, even the alien thing.
	Remember the scene in Independence Day where they're standing on the rooftop of the Hollywood hotel?
	Very clearly.
	And there's like a couple of dozen there with signs, welcome, we love you.
	And the aliens just zap them, vaporize them.
	That's exactly the way I'm looking at it.
	I don't trust them.
	Any of them until, you know, be ready to fight.
	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.
	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 have 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're too fearful to offend anybody.
	Anyway, back to Iraq.
	In Vietnam, we did not lose.
	We gave up.
	Militarily, we cannot be beat.
	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 want 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 we start something You know, Kennedy got us into Vietnam.
	You mentioned the French before, mistakenly, but actually the French did abandon Vietnam.
	Well, that's right, yes.
	Got us into it.
	But, if you remember back... And then we're going to be back.
	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.
	Exactly.
	And so... Yeah, and we got a beachhead there.
	Why leave it?
	I really agree with this, and I wonder if, not that we have, 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?
	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.
	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.
	It doesn't work that way.
	It does not work that way.
	Well, it almost seemed to have worked that way in the first Iraq war.
	Bye.
	But, of course, we were left with Saddam, and perhaps, as you mentioned, with Russia.
	We should have gone in there, and perhaps we should have finished up the job.
	Absolutely.
	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 mean, come on.
	You're going to be labeled a warmonger.
	I am a warmonger.
	But you know what?
	If you look at the history of the world, and you know history, I could tell, and you were around during Vietnam, and I was too, we're trying to reinvent the wheel as if nothing happened before we were born.
	And that is the biggest mistake.
	And I'm kind of playing along with you with warmonger.
	If somebody wants to kill you, and you want to defend your life, either you have a moral obligation to defend your life.
	If you don't, it's immoral.
	So it's not a warmonger.
	We're not going around starting wars.
	I mean, you know, we have people on this earth that want us dead.
	So what do we do?
	Wait till they kill half of us and the other half will wake up and go, oh, maybe we should do something?
	Or should we just go in and wipe them the hell out?
	I'm not sure.
	I'm not sure, Bruce.
	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.
	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.
	So, I don't know.
	West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Hi.
	Hello, Mr. Bell.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	I just want to tell you what a thrill and an honor it is to be part of your program.
	My wife also is from the Philippines.
	Oh.
	She's from the Bicol region.
	Oh yes, of course.
	Near Naga City.
	I guess you've got to look at the typhoon, if you went up to the website, that just crossed Luzon.
	Yes.
	Actually, it's still crossing Luzon.
	But anyway, I want to speak to your question about Iraq.
	Yes.
	I'm sorry, but I couldn't disagree with you and the previous caller more.
	That's quite all right.
	Let's hear the rationale.
	Well, I think as far as, I mean, your original question was, how will America deal with another loss?
	Well, yes, in a way.
	Can we deal with another loss?
	I'm not sure.
	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.
	I suppose that would be true, yes.
	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 the big domino theory back then, and it was to prevent the South from becoming communist, clearly.
	And if that was the goal, then it was clearly a loss.
	If you watched the movie The Fog of War... I did, indeed.
	...at the very end, what did McNamara say?
	He said, we misunderstood.
	We did not realize that that was a civil war.
	Yes, that's what he said, and that's what the commander from Vietnam told him was, you were wrong.
	That was not, it was a civil war that we were fighting.
	Just like America fought a civil war.
	And in Iraq?
	And in Iraq, 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.
	How many children died Because of the sanctions.
	No, wait a minute.
	That's not wholly accurate.
	They are not simply responding to something we've done or U.S.
	policies.
	They have clearly said, they're not ambiguous about it at all, they have said you either convert to Islam and we give you a chance to convert or we kill you.
	How many people?
	That's been very clearly stated.
	How many people say that?
	Are you talking about all the Iraqis in Iraq?
	The kind of people that crashed those jets into our buildings?
	Those Saudis that did that?
	Well, the Saudis certainly had a part in it.
	No, no, those were almost 100% Saudis that did that attack.
	But you're not answering my question directly.
	They do want us either converted or dead.
	Who is that?
	Who wants us dead?
	The leadership of Al-Qaeda has said it again and again.
	And how many are that compared to the number of Iraqis that we have killed?
	I mean, there may be, let's say that there is a thousand of those terrorists who say that they want Americans dead.
	Why do you think they want us dead?
	They've told us.
	What I'm trying to point out to you is, sir, they have told us.
	They have not said it's because of American policy in the Middle East.
	They have not said it's because of America's support of Israel.
	They have not said any of that.
	They've said convert or die.
	Yeah, but who are we killing?
	We're not killing those people.
	Well, we're trying.
	No, we're killing.
	How many have died collaterally?
	Many.
	Many, many, many.
	And there's no reason for it.
	I wouldn't argue that with you.
	Many have died.
	Exactly.
	So you can't go and say, well, I need to get rid of that 1,000 terrorists, so I'm going to wipe out 100,000 people.
	It just doesn't make sense.
	It's not human.
	I don't think that we've taken that approach.
	In fact, we've made every effort to avoid collateral damage.
	Everybody knows in war, you don't avoid collateral damage.
	It happens.
	But we've made every effort to do so.
	How many Vietnamese did you ever see invade the United States?
	None.
	But we were over there.
	It's the same thing with here.
	Alright, listen, I appreciate your call, but you're not staying on point with me here.
	No, the 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.
	And I guess we are doing something about it.
	Nevertheless, I appreciate the call.
	Let's work our way back toward the wild card line, and Torin from Olympia, Washington.
	Hey Art, how you doing?
	Okay, sir.
	You know, I think Bruce was right on point when he said that, you know, we just really can't fight a politically correct war.
	Like you just said, they want us to either convert to Islam or die.
	My father was in World War II.
	He was in the Navy and was actually at the Battle of Iwo Jima, but he told me at one point before he died that Our biggest mistake after the war was not allowing Patton to go into Moscow.
	And, you know, another thing he said was, there are no civilians in war.
	It's unfortunate, but it's true.
	And I think America really needs to wake up and understand that these people over there are Hitler in a headscarf.
	And it's either us or them.
	Not all Muslims are evil, not all Muslims will hold a gun to your head and force you to convert, but the ones that will need to die.
	Otherwise, they will kill us.
	You know, I'm here on the West Coast, I'm afraid of waking up one morning and there being a flash outside the window and Seattle would be gone.
	Don't imagine it's not possible because it is possible, I'm sorry to say.
	It is possible, and you know, it's a really scary world that we're living in right now.
	September 11th was the first salvo in World War III.
	And we have to fight for our very survival, or our way of life is just going to disappear.
	And that is the unfortunate truth.
	Do you think that if we had something like a referendum, which of course we don't have in the US, 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?
	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.
	We just have to.
	I've got to run.
	We're at a break point here.
	The consequences of losing are severe indeed.
	Vietnam as an example.
	I'm Mark Bell.
	Here I am.
	By the way, while the map is up there, you might take a quick trip up to CoastToCoastAM.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 One 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, little bit of wind, 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 Art Bell.
	in a moment we'll continue with Open Lines.
	By the way, please feel free to email me at any time on nearly any subject on
	I am artbell, that's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at AOL.com or artbell at Minespring.com.
	The latter is probably the better way to go, it's a bigger mailbox.
	That's artbell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at Minespring, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G dot com.
	Back to the lines we go, and our first time caller line, it would be Michael in Michigan.
	Michael, hi.
	Hello, Art.
	How are you doing today?
	Quite well.
	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 slays me because those people that have that idea that, you know, it's how we treat them, 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, you know?
	And as far as going into Iraq with the Bush lied and the WMDs, quickly, I don't want to
	go over that whole rigmarole more, but, you know, 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 oppress 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?
	You're damn right.
	If we pull out, Art, and I agree with you, if we pull out, and I'm with you on 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.
	And with that, that's really all I've got to say.
	I don't see how we can pull out.
	Oh, one more, I'm sorry.
	I'm a little nervous, so I'm sorry.
	I might be talking too fast, too, but nonetheless, um, um, I, uh, um, um, oh, shoot, I forgot what I was going to say, dang it, I'm sorry.
	Oh, no problem.
	We'll do it next call.
	It might have been about shortwave.
	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.
	Dwight.
	Hey, Art.
	How are you?
	Mabuhay.
	Yes, indeed.
	I'm calling you from Puno, which is at 19 degrees, 30 minutes on the north latitude.
	I guess every time I think of or hear Richard Hogan, I want to tell 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 as a In the same military occupational specialty as George Norrie did, I was in the public information field.
	I see.
	And one of the most common things I remember from Vietnam was that most of the troops would say, regarding the opposition, the 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 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 troop soldier looking around could see that we had already lost the war.
	We controlled I once went on a bird dog flight, a forward 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 control that little road down there, 300 yards in each direction, in the daytime.
	And that's 1972.
	I remember going down into the Mekong Delta, to the human forest.
	Sir, let me stop you and ask you, do you see a parallel between what we're doing now in Iraq and Vietnam?
	Well, I would like to say that America is suffering with erectile dysfunction right now.
	It's a war that cannot be won.
	And so from your point of view, we should do what at this point?
	Well, let me put it this way.
	I believe we were lied into the war.
	Well, shown to be true in events that followed the invasion.
	And I remember the comments that George Bush, I think, was in Woodward'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.
	Do you think it was all about oil?
	Well, first of all, it was not about Al-Qaeda because Al-Qaeda was not in Iraq.
	Yeah, I think that's a fair argument.
	They may not have been in Iraq then, but I think they are now.
	As you can recall from the former Treasury Secretary that Bush's first intention from his first days in his first inauguration, his first period as president, that he was set from the get-go to get to Iraq under pretense of having to avenge his father's trip.
	Yeah.
	And secondly, that Well, that to give a Texas oil man, 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 with 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 US troops and military presence to stay in the area.
	towards your question about winning or losing. America is impotent right now
	Okay.
	even dealing with say North Korea because our being stuck in Iraq and
	America has shown itself for once having been so formidable and thought to be the
	strongest power in the world basically as I stated earlier impotent in Iraq.
	Okay I think I've got it. I'm just saying I think I've got the gist of what you're saying and I
	there are points that I agree with you on and it 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 uh... at this point would be much larger than you can imagine would be uh... a very negative thing for the united states uh... in every way and moreover i think we'd end up going back i think uh... inevitably we'd end up going back and when we did we'd probably be fighting iran and uh... and iraq if not syria in some sort of uh... a coalition at that point it might be a few years down line but it's almost inevitable when you have
	Somebody or a group of somebodies 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.
	Hey, Art, how you doing?
	It's an honor to speak to you.
	Glad to have you.
	Art, you're familiar with the prophecies of the children of Fatima, Portugal?
	I am, yes.
	Okay.
	Well, Art, one of the prophecies the Virgin gave the sister Lucia 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 1937, 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 of my parents, who were naturally born there, and they did see it.
	They'd 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.
	My mother was in Connecticut.
	My dad was in Philly.
	My father-in-law was in northern.
	They all saw it.
	Within that year, World War II broke out.
	Okay.
	But how can you know that really was the sign?
	I mean, you can look back and say, okay, the war broke out.
	What I'm trying to point out here is the sun goes in 11-year cycles, 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.
	Okay, Art, like I said, this is a matter of, you know, 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.
	You reported on it.
	I listened to it that night.
	You were talking to people in Northern Arizona and Virginia.
	My son and my wife and my daughter and my neighbors watched this blood-red curtain shimmering across the sky.
	Within six months, the World Trade Centers were hit and we were at war in Afghanistan.
	I don't dispute anything that you've said, but here's what I would say.
	We do have these 11 years.
	I don't know.
	I guess you can suggest that there are somewhat regular sightings every decade or so of Aurora Borealis.
	It goes into extreme southern latitudes and we nearly always have war.
	Now, if you want to connect the two, that's fine.
	I don't necessarily do it.
	I just, I guess I just say it's going to happen again and again, as is war.
	Now, maybe the two do have something to do with each other.
	Who knows?
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Yes.
	Hi Art.
	Hi Millie.
	Hey, I just wanted to say that I think comparing Vietnam to the situation in the East there, Middle East, really it's obscuring the issues of apples and oranges, in my opinion.
	We were attacked on our soil by them.
	I think today that we have not gotten the support by the Arab community saying, hey... Wait a minute, Millie.
	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.
	I agree.
	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, there's Lots of evidence to show that they are gathering money and supporting these people, these terrorists.
	I mean, it's just nothing like Vietnam, is what I'm saying.
	And I'm fearful for my 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.
	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 of a 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.
	I'm a libertarian too.
	I don't like any of my rights being denigrated.
	I've got to hold it right there.
	We're at a break point.
	Millie, you're right.
	And the fellow who said that Seattle could disappear in a puff of nuclear smoke is also correct.
	These are people who want us dead.
	Does anybody honestly doubt that after 9-11?
	I guess so.
	I'm Art Bell.
	How you doing, everybody?
	I'm Art Bell, filling in for George Norrie, who is taking a well-earned day off.
	He's actually earned a lot more than that.
	And I'll be escorting you through the weekend.
	and a surprise on the other side of this break, which is right now.
	There is one great advantage to the screening technique that we have, and that is that you
	you can glance up at the screen and see what's waiting.
	So here, direct from the burning, stewing pits of sewage, is JC.
	Mr. Mayo!
	How dare you!
	You are a dirty, disgustator!
	Take it over the airwaves, and I'm telling you that the threat to America is not coming from little green men, it's little blue donkeys who have gone against the will of God and put, put, put, my country has been hijacked in the last days!
	Little blue donkeys?
	Yes!
	You must mean the Democrats.
	It's terrible!
	It's disgusting.
	I didn't even know what you were politically, JC.
	What are you?
	I am a super Christian conservative.
	You know me.
	You know what I stand for.
	So you continue to carry the water, do you?
	Excuse me?
	I continue to wage the war against media pornography, corruption, and disgustation that I see going across our nation.
	And it's disgusting to see that a woman is going to be running things in the house.
	A woman is meant to clean the house, not run the house.
	See, that's why your woman ran away.
	That's why Edna split in the first place, J.C., is because of that attitude.
	Listen, Edna split because she was corruptized by your pornographizers.
	Oh, sure she was.
	That's why she ran away is because she had her fragile little woman mind corrupted by pornography.
	Have you heard from her yet?
	Have you heard from her, J.C., since she's moved on to greener pastures?
	I have not, but we have some good information as to where she may be.
	Uh-huh.
	And what do you intend to do?
	We intend to return her to her rightful duties at the compound!
	Drag her back to the kitchen, is that it?
	Yes!
	The kitchen!
	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.
	Is that so?
	So, Ann Coulter would be welcome and a replacement for Edna, eh?
	Oh, sure, Ann!
	It makes a lot of sense, but I don't see it being qualified by a man.
	That's the only problem, is she's a willful woman.
	Well, uh, willful, huh?
	So, in other words, she was using your computer to bring in this pornography that you claim corrupted.
	No, no, no!
	She wasn't bringing it in!
	It was your listeners that were sending it, Mr. Bell!
	My listeners?
	Yes, your listeners!
	You know that!
	Well now, they don't even know your email address, JC.
	How could they possibly... It's boilingpitsofsewage at yahoo.com.
	It used to be ednafangel at yahoo.com until it got annihilated.
	Until she left.
	It was deletated.
	I don't know who destroyed it.
	Deletated.
	Yes!
	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 they are any such things, they're devils!
	Demons!
	You know, actually, JC, that is a possibility.
	I know it is!
	I know it's true!
	I hate to agree with you, but that is certainly a possibility.
	But if you look up into the night sky, I doubt you do it very regularly, how can you but not imagine there's life up there, Gracie?
	People shouldn't be outside at night, they should be indoors!
	Indoors?
	They're safe!
	Cats love the night!
	Well, listen, you've got to be able to have lesbian Tupperware parties somewhere.
	Excuse me?
	You've got to be able to have lesbian Tupperware parties somewhere.
	Oh, do not discussate me with such things!
	And those are going to happen more and more frequently!
	Now, they're going to be forcing the lesbian agenda upon America!
	That's what's happening, because she is from where?
	San Francisco!
	Now, Edna didn't leave you for another woman, did she?
	No!
	She left me for apparently someone who rode a motorcycle, and now she's taken up with a truck driver.
	A truck driver?
	She's turned into a raving rabbit hussy!
	So she's going back and forth across America hauling who knows what?
	Probably drugs.
	Because we all know that drugs are one of the reasons that America is being destroyed.
	Listen, JC, we have probably the largest trucker audience in the world, of any radio program in the whole world, so there's a great chance that Edna is, well, in the passenger seat, probably, listening to you.
	That's right.
	So this is your opportunity to say to Edna whatever you want to say to entice her back to the compound.
	I'm going to use the most enticing words I can.
	Women, get home where you belong!
	That's it, huh?
	That's what I have to say, is that she needs to get back at the feet of her man, wherever a 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.
	It's because we have hussies running around with barely nothing on.
	That's the whole reason.
	All right, JC.
	That's about as much as I can handle.
	But I can kind of picture Edna right now, probably in a miniskirt, JC.
	Oh, I don't know.
	Probably hauling down I-40 somewhere next to a trucker.
	That's quite a picture.
	That man is... You know, a lot of people, after he's come on, will write to me and say, that's something kind of set up.
	It's gotta be Phil Henry, it's gotta be this, it's gotta be that.
	It's no set up.
	Whether or not it's Phil, I have no way of knowing for sure, but it's absolutely not a set-up.
	He's been calling the show for years, and there's no set-up about it.
	He is just what he is, as is everybody else on here.
	Let's go to Wild Card Line 3 and Toronto Canada.
	Mike, you're on the air.
	Well, Mike left.
	He was tired of waiting with his Reverend Chuck Roast of the Church of the Subgenius.
	And I think JC is actually one of us in disguise.
	You think so?
	I have a feeling, I'm not going to say who it is because I don't want to out him, but I've heard him almost crack a couple of times.
	He's very good, but he's not perfect.
	But the question I have for you is, What constitutes a win in the Middle East in Iraq and Iran and all that?
	How do you know?
	That's a very good question.
	What constitutes a win?
	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.
	And how do you think that's going to happen?
	Not quickly.
	But I mean, the question I have is how do you achieve that end?
	The answer is obviously not quickly.
	It's something that is going to take more time than the American people are apparently willing to give it.
	Yeah, like I see decades.
	You could be correct.
	Yeah, you could be correct.
	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.
	I agree with you.
	It's a hard sell, and it may not be the thing that ultimately...
	I'm listening on the big 640 Toronto AM and everybody who listens on it, call in because they need to know we're there.
	Don't do ratings in Toronto at night.
	Okay, alright.
	Everybody who listens, by all means, 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.
	Well, Art, I would say hello from your friendly northerly neighbor, but I guess your northerly neighbor's 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 HeThouDubbedWarMonger, and he said that the U.S.
	Army is undefeatable.
	Have the ashes from the former White House fallen already?
	Well, the United States... Sir, the United States military, if it decided to use all of its force, is clearly undefeatable.
	Oh yeah, if the US used all of their force now to stomp Canada, no problem.
	But the fact is that we've already done it.
	Anyways, that's not what I'm calling in tonight.
	I don't want to do any of the war stuff.
	We have too much of it in the news anyway.
	So what I'd like to call about is tomorrow.
	And a possible way to send a message to whatever is using 11.11 to send us messages.
	Tomorrow, I don't know if you, for Veterans Day, but here in Canada we have Remembrance Day, and I know it's on the same day.
	At 11 o'clock, we hold a moment of silence for the fallen.
	My idea is to push that moment of silence back to 11-11.
	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.
	Well, just from things that your callers have said, people saying, oh, I wake up all the time, I see 1111 on the clocks, 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 1111 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.
	Well, it doesn't necessarily take a mass number of minds to achieve that, so give it a shot and let me know how you do.
	I will.
	One other thing.
	J.C.
	is on, and I've wanted to get J.C.' 's reaction to this comment forever, and I've never been able to get on when he's been on.
	One of the three following statements is invalidated by the other two.
	God exists.
	God is all-powerful.
	Evil exists.
	Which of the three isn't true?
	And I'll leave it at that.
	Have a good night.
	All right.
	All right.
	Well, perhaps on J.C.' 's next visit, he'll attempt to answer that for you, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
	East of the Rockies, Kevin, you're on the air from Houston.
	Howdy, Mr. Bell.
	Hi.
	I called you about Iraq, but before I do, and a couple of FYIs, you had a caller talking about scholars from Iraq here years ago?
	Yes.
	I think I remember that, and one of them is here in Houston.
	He's a prominent doctor.
	Ask me his name, I don't want to lie to you, but he's on the local news on and off.
	They started the Iraqi Congress or something like that years ago?
	Yes.
	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 it's like.
	Actually, I'm not in Mindenow, by the way.
	No, no, no, but south of where you're at, you're at Luzon, right?
	South of me, yeah, I'm in Luzon.
	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 it is
	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.
	Yes, exactly.
	Oh, also, I wanted to ask you this, too, before going to Iraq, Mark.
	What service was you in in Vietnam?
	Uh, Air Force.
	Oh, yes.
	We'll use a flyboy.
	Uh, well.
	I know.
	Okay, anyway.
	You can call me a crazy jarhead if you want.
	No, I wouldn't say that.
	Okay.
	Anyway, on the Iraq thing, I want to split up into two sections here, you know, whether we went in or not.
	If we did not go in, you've got to think of the consequences, what Saddam could have done if we had not gone in, plus if he died or old age or assassinated.
	What would have happened with his sons taken over?
	And there was chemical weapons over there.
	If you remember the news reports, not you specifically, but in general, listeners... Well, he used them.
	We know he had chemical weapons.
	He used them against the Kurds, so we know that.
	Right.
	In his own people.
	I remember one of the military reading the test, reading reports on it.
	It was Soviet-made.
	There's even a movie about this.
	He tried to build the largest cannon in the world.
	That's correct.
	There's a movie made in America about it.
	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?
	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, you've got to look at geographical thinking of people.
	You being in the military and you being overseas in Asia, I think you kind of understand that.
	I spent ten 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 a 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.
	It's going to be a total mess.
	I think that's all correct.
	In the philosophy world, it's split into three countries.
	That's going to be worse.
	The minute you have a Kurdistan, Turkey's going to attack them.
	You've got to know your history, you've got to know your geography.
	There's no simple solutions.
	And the problem with Americans, we want instant oatmeal, instant this, instant that.
	You've got to take your time and do it.
	And just throw this at you.
	These people are dangerous, like you've been trying to point out to your callers.
	Look in Israel two years ago, and this was not in the media, the Israeli soldiers caught a Palestinian terrorist with a dirty bomb.
	You're right, 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.
	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 US policies around the world.
	And no, we've been far from perfect.
	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 wild card line, David in Sherman Oaks, you're on the air.
	My God, I've been on hold for three hours!
	Sorry about that.
	Do you have a clock on your screen to show how long people are on hold?
	Well, actually, there is a clock, but it doesn't function properly, and something resets it every now and then, so I overlooked you.
	I'm sorry, but you're on now, without a lot of time.
	I know, I'm just giving you a hard time.
	Anyway, God, man, Iraq, what a disaster.
	You know what?
	Most people are missing the point.
	Iraq is a pivotal point in the Middle East.
	We've got military bases there that have been constructed.
	We don't have our lounge photos out of it because we're going to be there permanently because we're going to put the Middle East in check.
	Iran, they can't do anything because they're in check.
	If they do anything wrong, it's checkmate.
	Two seconds, we've got a missile in the front door.
	That's why we have bases there.
	Our soldiers there are a diversion to protect those military bases that are being constructed to keep people away from them.
	So we're basically, we have a stranglehold on the Middle East.
	We're going to be permanently based there, but the fighting as it is now, we're going to back down.
	We're going to pull our troops out and just let them have their civil war and have things shake out.
	Well, listen, on that note, I've got to go, but I appreciate your assessment.
	It may indeed work out that way, because the American people have shown that they have very little patience for what's happening.
	At any rate, listen, we'll continue the weekend tomorrow night.
	It has been my pleasure filling in for George Norrie this night, my absolute pleasure, and I'll see you tomorrow night from Manila in the Philippines.

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