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March 3, 2007 - Art Bell
02:38:42
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - UFO Incidents - Nick Pope - Whitley Strieber
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From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in all the time zones covered so prolifically by this radio program, Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell, here to escort you through the weekend, and what a weekend it should be.
We did not have a first hour guest until yesterday, and I happened to pick up the phone and gave Whitley a call on a matter, and we decided what the heck.
We're in the middle of probably one of the biggest UFO flaps we've ever had, so it would seem timely.
And so, in a moment, Whitley's coming up.
Looking at the world news very briefly, it's as depressing as ever.
Iraq terror group posts tape of killings.
Looks like they killed 18 kidnapped government security forces in retaliation for the alleged rape of a Sunni woman by members of a Shiite-dominated police gang.
In Baghdad, Iraq's Prime Minister said Saturday he was going to reshuffle his cabinet within two weeks.
Let's see.
Will that help?
Don't know.
President Bush went down and offered comfort to those, well, surviving.
You cannot comfort the dead.
So he helped the survivors of the terrible tornadoes that ripped through Alabama and Georgia.
The weather is just simply awful.
Just simply awful.
But that is another story in another book.
In the science wing at Enterprise High School, Marissa Yohinian huddled for hours with her classmates in the protection of an interior hallway as tornado sirens wailed throughout town.
They joked, they thought about how hungry they were, and I'm sure they were frightened out of their wits.
The 17-year-old was among the first to see the tornado coming.
A flying tree struck the house, ripped the roof off.
There was no funnel, just darkness and objects swirling as a howling noise grew in pitch.
If you've ever been near a tornado, you will never, ever forget it.
See the moon go away tonight?
Moon darkened, reddened, and turned shades of gray and orange Saturday night during the first total lunar eclipse in nearly three years.
What'd you think of it?
In a moment, Whitley Streber By the way, tonight's webcam photograph put up at the last moment was two days ago, and on the occasion of Erin's 23rd birthday.
And she was given a very nice surprise party by Karen and a whole group here in Pahrump.
And it was pretty cool.
It was very cool, actually, and she had a grand time.
Actually, the first surprise party of her entire life.
Well, all right.
Now, coming, Whitley Strieber, author of Communion, author of War Day, my favorite, author of The Coming Global Superstorm.
Became the movie, Day After Tomorrow.
And, uh, you know, you look at that movie now and that book, And I hate to say it, but it's, uh, save the dramatic moments of the movie.
You know, it had to be fast.
It was a movie.
Otherwise, it's almost history.
It's almost becoming history before our eyes.
Whitley, welcome to the program.
Well, Art, I'm glad to be here.
Very exciting.
It's good to have you, buddy.
What?
I said it's good to have you, buddy.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
And my very best wishes to Erin on her 23rd birthday.
That's very cool.
It is cool.
Indeed.
At any rate, listen, a lot has gone on since we last spoke with Lee, and we did an experiment last week, not that it was needed with what's going on.
Well, I listened into it.
I thought it was very interesting.
It was.
Oh, it absolutely was.
And maybe it contributed to the UFO flap that's going on right now.
It's not all that frequently in past years, or in recent years, I guess, Whitley, that we can say, hey, we're in the middle of a UFO flap.
But we are.
We are, yeah.
The last time when it was this intense was probably in the 70s.
And prior to that, the The flap that has the structurally most similarities with strange meteors and events like that was the one from 1947 up to 1952 and then into 1954.
And this one, there are a lot of unusual meteors that are taking place right now.
and then into 1954. And this one, there are a lot of unusual meteors that are taking place
right now. And there was just one a couple of nights ago in Southern California that
flashed across the sky between San Diego and Los Angeles about 9.30 Thursday night, and
was briefly picked up on the media, but it appeared to be just a perfectly normal meteor.
But the thing is that it was one of so many and you have to wonder, you know, since we're not in any particular meteor shower right now that would be producing these very large You have to wonder what they are, like on January 2nd in South Africa there was a very dramatic event when the administrator of a small town called Lepalale heard a tremendous roar at 4 o'clock in the morning.
She described it as like a jumbo jet, starting its motors in these massive screaming turbines.
All the clouds turned bright orange-red, and an object looking like a comet with an orange tail shot out of the sky and hit the ground with a huge explosion.
And then, that's the end of the story.
We haven't been able to get a hold of her or found any follow-ups so far.
But it is typical of the type of peculiar event that has been taking place.
And, you know, you jump forward a few, about six or eight weeks, and then you find another event in the Seattle area where there was a fall of ash that had a kind of a volcanic look to it.
I was actually on the air when that occurred.
Well, that could be meteoric in origin.
It could be.
It could also be fireworks that were going off for the Chinese New Year.
I heard all kinds of things.
All kinds of things, but it was probably too extensive to be explained by the fireworks.
I heard that too.
Yeah.
But in any case, then you get to, and we'll deal with this a little bit later, Iran and so on and so forth.
I'd like to first talk about the United.
Really?
UFO sighting in last November in Chicago.
And the reason I'd like to talk about that is that there have been some developments.
First, Dan Aykroyd says that he has video of it.
Really?
Yes.
And that he is going to be showing this video at some point.
Oh, no, but now I wonder where Dan got it.
Did he say?
He has not said.
But I have seen reports.
I have not talked to him personally.
i have seen reports the fact that he does have Dan Aykroyd says he's got it.
I'm betting he's got it.
That would be my assumption.
I think he's extremely straightforward, honest, and competent in this area.
In fact, in every area as far as I know, but certainly in this one.
So yeah, I would think he probably does have it.
In any case, That's not the only thing.
You know, the FAA immediately said that it was a weather phenomenon.
However, the witnesses said that it made a hole through the clouds.
When it shot up?
When it shot up.
Now, listen to this quote.
The ability to group together very quickly in a tight formation when more than one craft are together, evasive action, ability indicates the possibility of being manually
operated, or possibly by electronics or remote control, and under certain conditions, the craft seemed to have the
ability to cut a clear path through clouds.
That statement is in a memo prepared by Lieutenant Colonel George Garrett
that was disseminated on October 28, 1947.
Now, the military has known about this aspect of this phenomenon for that long,
and yet it happens in a place and in a situation where they want to deny it,
the FAA wants to deny it, or perhaps people at the FAA are unaware of this aspect of the phenomenon,
and they just say, well, it was some kind of weather phenomenon.
William, but what about the witnesses, Whitley, who not only pointed to the hole in the sky, as it were, But also said they saw, prior to it shooting up through the clouds and creating a hole, a metallic craft.
Now... Yes.
These are qualified airline workers.
They know what they're looking at.
Well, exactly.
They know what they're looking at.
And... Also, how are they so easily dismissed?
Well, they were dismissed because they... for two reasons.
It's fairly complicated.
One is that there is this culture of denial that has grown up around two things.
The continuous denial on the part of the government from the beginning, which has created, we want to believe our government, and the denial on the part of the media, which has become embedded in the media.
They've been denying this since it began.
And they now have a vested interest in it not being true, because how embarrassing is it going to be for the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and Time Magazine, and Fox News, etc., etc., if this turns out to be something real?
They don't want that.
And as long as the phenomenon itself is not aggressive enough to force them to face it, they don't have to, and they ain't gonna.
Okay, a culture of denial, we've always had that.
But beyond that, we're talking about qualified mechanics, aircrew, that kind of person who saw a metallic craft, or what they described as a metallic craft, prior to it shooting up and leaving a hole in the sky, or the clouds.
But then what was triggered was a mechanism of denial.
The FAA made its ritual statement.
It was a weather phenomenon.
And we'll talk about some of these other ritual statements over the course of the program as well, because they've been made a number of times in recent cases in the United States in particular.
And then the media seized on that.
They could then go on to the next thing.
This is case dismissed a weather phenomenon.
No one has to investigate it.
No editor has to put a reporter on it any further.
Nothing more need be done.
Then what will happen is, Dan may come up with his video.
It will reach us, those of us who believe these things and think they're important.
But I will tell you something.
In fact, this phenomenon isn't just important.
It is one of the most important things that has ever happened.
And there is all around us In the bodies and minds of the close encounter witnesses, in the debris, in the way the craft function and operate, in every single thing, every detail about this phenomenon from top to bottom, an absolutely astonishing wealth of knowledge and information that is being ignored and it is being wasted because of the fear of a government
Of having to admit that there is something there that it can't control, and the arrogance of the media in not wanting to face the fact that they have to say, we don't understand.
I actually think it's the former.
I think it's the fact that the government simply can't do anything about it.
Absolutely.
And if they can't do anything about it, they can't turn around to their citizens and say, Okay, we don't know what it is, or we do know what it is, that would be another can of worms.
Either way, we can't do anything about it.
We can't control it, we can't shoot it down, and so it doesn't exist.
We're going to keep our mouths shut, and maybe the fact that they ignore it, it sends a signal, in effect, to whatever's out there, that since we are ignoring them, that we don't want to deal with it.
And therefore they just sit and wait, passively, until we do something, like you attempted last week, which I thought was extremely interesting.
It was.
Yeah, indeed, that we begin to do things that say, no, we're ready to do something, we're not going to ignore this anymore.
And I think we should build that, and we should do more of it, because in the years, the 11 years I had of close encounters with the visitors, there were a lot of close encounters, a lot of them, I learned that they are very, very adept at picking up thought.
They do it as naturally as we pick up vocal sounds.
Oh, Whitley, I've got to ask you, now on two occasions I've had the opportunity to interview this fellow Jim Sparks, and I wonder if you've heard the programs, either one of them?
I heard the second of those programs, and I've also interviewed Jim Sparks, or Linda has interviewed Jim Sparks on my show on Dreamland.
Okay, and your impression?
You know, I can't, I can't come to, I can't come to rest on that one.
I, his, his experience is so much more.
Thank you.
Open and kind of easy to deal with mentally than my own was I was in the 11 years of experience I had it was an enormous struggle beginning middle and end a to overcome the fear and B to even manage any kind of communication at all and there were so few instances where it was absolutely straightforward physical face-to-face contact and Annoyingly enough, mostly that happened not to me, but to witnesses, people I drew to my cabin to witness it.
They always had the straightforward context, and then I would be left with the flashing lights and the weird experiences.
So I don't know where to come out with Jim Sparks.
I think a lot of what he says has a very authentic ring to it.
I will certainly say that, and I would love to interview him.
It's something I've got on my agenda for Dreamland.
Well, his memory is so intact about the whole thing.
Exactly.
He claims the reason for that is that he was so damn angry.
He fought them and fought them and fought them.
And he says that's why he has such a detailed memory.
By the way, before we get away, you opened up with the meteorites.
Yeah.
And I would like to say that, you know, When something flashes across the sky, we cannot call it a flying saucer unless we have a flying saucer basically hovering right above or one that has landed.
With respect to meteorites, I don't think we can call them meteorites until we have a smoking rock.
Well, in Iran they must have had a smoking rock just a couple of days ago.
Yeah, I know.
What's going on there?
You know, when I first heard about this, I thought That's us.
That's gotta be us.
You know, we're very, very concerned about Iran right now, and anything we have that would scare the hell out of them or yield intelligence, I'm sure we would fly in their skies.
Well, I have to tell you that I think something else is going on in Iran, and we can talk about that in more detail.
In a few minutes.
I don't think it's clear at all that this is us.
I think it's, I think, as I say, if it is us, then we do have possession of technologies that are so UFO-like that I have to believe that Gary McKinnon, the guy who hacked into the NASA computers, might have really found something when he said that he found Evidence that there were these space forces flying around, that there was a large human presence in outer space.
By the way, where are we with all the McKinnon stuff, Woodley?
Well, right now, Gary McKinnon is... Let's see.
I have to confess that I know there was a story up on my own website a few days ago, because I glanced at it, and I believe that he is...
Gary McKinnon is, they're still trying to decide whether or not to extradite him.
I think that the British government really does not want to extradite him, because he committed the crime in Britain, and normally in Britain, if you commit a crime in England, they will try you there, under their law.
And the United States has made a special request that this extradition take place, and the problem is, that under British law, he committed a fairly minor crime.
And under American law, it's an extremely serious crime, and one that could put him in jail for 70 years.
And the British government is having a little trouble with that disparity, because, you know, they should really try him under British law, and it's really an accommodation to the Americans, and the difference between the sentences is making them hesitate.
I think in the end they'll probably will extradite him, and I think it'd be unfortunate for him if they did, because he's going to go to jail for a very long time.
What about the material that he gathered?
Well, he gathered... I interviewed him on Dreamland, and he had a very interesting story to tell.
He didn't gather all that much, but the most interesting thing he did get was what appeared to be a list of names, and he saw these.
He was not able to...
Print them out, or anything like that, of what appeared to be extraterrestrial craft, but human-operated craft, and the names of some of the individuals who were on these craft, which was a rather surprising thing.
Yeah, I'll say.
Quite surprised by that.
And he's made a number of statements about other things that he saw, but there was no real super, super smoking gun, because that could also have been just somebody's video game records.
I mean, it could have been anything.
Well, maybe.
But why are they trying to shred him alive?
Well, exactly.
Methinks they protest too much in this case, that they're trying to eat him alive because they do not want anyone to go in and try to do that again.
Because the other side of the coin is, there's not a lot of security around.
The US government is a big, complicated organization and it is it leaks like a sieve and they know that and I suppose that if there was a determined effort made from the outside by somebody with more sophisticated abilities than Gary McKinnon they might be able to find something.
Well one would think they'd plug the holes by now but if he had a list actually of officers or people who have actually flown or been on an extraterrestrial craft or one that we have recovered and flown whatever the case is That's pretty big evidence.
It tells us a lot.
For one thing, it tells us that we have made some kind of deal, or we at least got our hands on some kind of craft.
Whitley Streber is my guest, and we'll be right back.
Indeed, here I am.
You know, the trouble with Iran, even if they've got, just about have saucers landing, And Tehran is that no matter what they see in their skies, most Americans are going to go, yeah, it's probably our stuff.
On the other hand, even with that in mind, it's a good place to look for the latest of what we have, isn't it?
Whitley Strieber, back in a moment.
One more thing, Iran is an emerging nuclear power.
I don't think there's too much argument about that out there.
And traditionally, UFOs have made a pretty good showing over nuclear installations.
In fact, that for us in the modern day is where it all began.
Whitley?
Yeah, it sure did.
And I've always felt that the initial UFO wave that started in 47 had something to do with nuclear weapons.
Me too.
Because the first real UFO events took place in, like in New Mexico, the Roswell crash took place 30 miles from, and one of the reasons it was kept so secret, 30 miles from the only installation in the world, the 509th Bomb Wing at the Roswell Army Air Force, that had nuclear weapons.
And, you know, I knew General Arthur Exon.
General Exon was my uncle, Colonel Edward Strebers, commanding officer and close friend for both of their entire careers.
And my uncle told me, after he read Communion, I never mentioned it to him, because I didn't know what he did.
I knew he was in Air Force Intelligence, but he never said a word about what he did.
He called me up.
I lived in New York, and he was living down at that time, retired, at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.
He said, you know, I want to talk to you about this Roswell business.
I didn't even know what it was at the time.
I vaguely knew.
And I said, well, sure.
What was that?
And he said, I had something to do with it.
And Ann and I, of course, jumped on an airplane and went down to San Antonio and had lunch with him and his wife.
And he said that he had helped to attempt the assembly, reassembly of the debris at Wright Field.
And I was fascinated, of course, by that time I had read the Berlitz book on Roswell.
I read it on the plane on the way down, in fact.
Did he describe the debris?
Well, he said, yeah, he said that the debris was badly mangled and they couldn't do anything to it.
In other words, it was all bent and broken, but they could not change the shape of it at all.
There was nothing they could do to it.
And it dovetailed with the descriptions of it that came from, and I'm going to forget his name, unfortunately, the officer who remembered his father bringing it in as a boy.
Jesse Marcel.
I mean, Jesse Marcel, yeah.
And in fact, Jesse Marcel's seniors videotaped comments about it, that it was as thin as a cigarette paper.
But, as the foil used to be in cigarette packs in those days, but that you couldn't even shoot a bullet through it.
Apparently, Mickey had about the same experience with it.
In any case, he introduced me to General Arthur Exon, saying that General Exon had been his commanding officer, and he knew a great deal more about this than Mickey did.
I spent a couple hours in total on the telephone, two or three calls with General Exon.
Who gave a brief interview to Stanton Friedman that appeared in a book about Roswell, which confirms that he did say these things.
But he said that everyone from Truman on down had known this thing was not of this world within 24 hours of their finding it.
Now, to me, that confirmed it.
I wrote a whole novel called Majestic, based on the things he told me about the reasons for the secrecy and why the CIA had gotten involved, and on and on, all kinds of stuff.
Fascinating stuff.
But, the reason for this interest seemed to me to have to do with the presence of those bombs.
Now, fast forward to February of 1954.
Dwight D. Eisenhower disappears.
For an afternoon.
A very strange event that UFO investigators like Stanton Friedman have investigated thoroughly and found such things as he allegedly went to the dentist.
However, the dentist was never sent a letter of thanks from the White House, which was extremely unusual.
And the dentist, when questioned, would never admit to having seen the president.
General Exon intimated that the President had had a close encounter of the third kind at Yurok Air Force Base at that time.
And I think it had to do with nuclear weapons and the fact that there was a tripwire out there.
That if we were to detonate nuclear weapons in violence again, something would happen that we would not like.
That that is too far to go.
Well, if that really is their concern, Whitley, then they would notice and be alarmed by, if they're following world events, as alarmed by what's going on in Iran as we are.
Exactly.
Which would explain this presence in Iran.
And my guess is That it won't be long before, if it hasn't already happened, these Iranian leaders end up in the same kind of face-to-face encounter.
But what will they make of it?
Muslim fundamentalists, what will they think that they are seeing?
What sense will it make to them?
I just don't know if it indeed happens.
Or what kind of resources the visitors may bring to it.
But they did not show up when India and Pakistan were building their bombs.
Whether they showed up in North Korea or not, no one knows, because the North Koreans would certainly never have said.
But they did not in those two cases.
However, it could be that they are aware Of who may use them and who probably won't.
Yes.
And that disturbs me.
I've heard stories to the effect that Ahmadinejad doesn't even have nuclear weapons, etc, etc, etc.
I don't know.
I don't think so.
I have a feeling in this particular case that we are really looking at somebody who's working very hard to produce U-235, which fortunately is not that easy to create, but we're in a pickle over there.
And I'll tell you exactly why.
They have buried their nuclear facilities below the level that our conventional bunker-busting bombs can reach, unless they have a point of weakness to follow.
In other words, they need something like an air vent.
Problem is, our intelligence operation was rolled up in Iran a few years ago.
Not by us, but by the Iranians.
I noticed this appeared very briefly in a couple of newspapers, then it was gone.
But I have also understood that we do not have knowledge of where the vents are.
Let me drop something in on you, Whitley.
As you know, where I live is adjacent to Mercury, where they test bombs.
Right.
Or where they did test bombs.
Now, they had a scheduled test that was to go not very long ago and got canceled but it was a nuclear weapon it was a very special nuclear weapon they said would produce a mushroom cloud above ground at mercury once again and what it was was some kind of nuclear bunker buster bomb nuclear is the operative word here that's correct now there is one kind of nuclear weapon
That could be used, that is possessed both by the Israelis and by the United States, from what I understand, in Iran, that would break the centrifuges with the shockwave from above, and that would be a neutron bomb.
Right.
Any other kind of nuclear weapon is going to spread nuclear material all over the Middle East, because it's not really all that big an area, and they're going to cause immense I mean, diplomatic problems for whoever were to be foolish enough to blow one off.
But a neutron bomb would provide the shockwave, but not the radiation.
But I don't think that's the problem.
I don't think that's why they're there.
My guess is that unless desperate, the Western powers will not use nuclear weapons.
And I would guess that they would have to be attacked with nuclear weapons first before they did that.
That would just be my thought.
My guess too.
With respect to the activity going on over Iran, it's because the Iranians might be aggressive about use of nuclear weapons.
How intense is the activity in Iran?
Well, there's a lot of activity, and for example, we've counted over 30 stories in the various parts of the world press, including the Iranian press, About various UFO events in Iran just since December.
For example, possible UFO crash in Iran reported 12 January 2007.
Preliminary reports of a possible huge explosion in the Iranian desert on Thursday.
Not followed up in the general media.
By the way, I will say this about Unknown Country, my website.
I think it's one of the best places in the world to get UFOs.
They're very good, these young people who work for us, at finding these stories.
I agree with you.
I'd use a lot of those on your website, wouldn't I?
We have people who read Farsi, they read the news on Iranian websites, and so forth.
Now, fast forward to March of 2007.
Another crash, this is associated with a Now, first of all, this was seen dropping out of the sky during the day with a smoke trail behind it, and the Iranian news service said that meteors do not smoke.
This is not true.
Meteors often leave smoke trails.
Sure.
But here's what they don't do is leave a thick spiral of smoke coming up from the ground.
Now, this made me think maybe this was a spy craft, but here's the problem with the spy craft.
Oh, they'd be jumping up and down.
We'd have pieces of that thing on every newscast in the world if they found a spy craft.
You bet.
You bet.
And that never comes up.
But here's the interesting thing in this recent one, there has been a radiant plasma-like UFO that has been seen in Iran, but also in Ecuador 20 years ago.
It's a type that is often seen near nuclear installations.
This is the type that is being seen in Iran.
As big as a ball with a yellow ray and a bright reddish color in the center.
This is moving at very low altitude.
If something like that showed up in the United States, Even the American media would have to admit that it was a little strange that it wasn't actually a flock of geese.
In any case, it's a type of UFO that is seen around nuclear installations.
Throughout a long period of the Cold War, there was continuous interest in nuclear installations in both the Soviet Union and the United States.
There was even one situation in the Soviet Union, according to George Knapp, who I know you know well, he's been on your program, is a great, cool, incredibly cool guy, did a lot of research into Russian UFO cases, and he reported that there was a case where a missile installations command center had been taken over by a mysterious force while a UFO was hanging above the installation
and it had gone through level after level moving ever closer
to releasing its weapons and they took that installation apart
piece by piece and left nothing but rubble after they, after
what the russians did to make sure this could never happen again
that is a true story i know it
incredible story it actually put it in a launch sequence and here in the u.s.
We had some craft hovering above our installations.
In our case, our ICBMs were disabled.
Exactly.
So, a message went out to both sides.
Now, I've thought a lot about this, Whitley, and it seems to me that if the visitors have interest in our Earth, or us, they're obviously going to be interested in the one thing that could make this Earth unusable for tens of thousands of years or longer, and virtually extinguish all life.
So, it makes sense.
It makes absolute sense.
But the thing that fascinates me is, I think we were contacted.
I think that the Eisenhower encounter was real.
And that there was a decision made that we would not be the first to shoot off nuclear weapons.
I have a feeling, based on the way the Cold War unfolded, that the Russians may have had a similar encounter.
Because neither side, ultimately, we would always back down.
Both sides.
Now, my question is, as I said before, what about the Iranians?
Is somebody going to be talking to them?
And if that is the case, could it maybe make it even worse?
Because they may not react with the way we reacted, thinking, well, these are maybe beings from another world, or beings from another level of reality, or something like that.
They may take a very religious view of it.
And it might be that they just dismiss it as being gin or something like that.
In other words, not take it very seriously.
I really hadn't thought about how they would react.
That's interesting.
Well, I don't know how they would react.
I don't know what kind of people they are, what kind of culture they have.
I know a fair amount about Iran, because while I certainly don't put their names up on our website, we do have correspondents in Iran from an unknown country who write us all the time.
They're very Western people.
They're very oriented toward the West, and they're trapped.
Because what happened after the Mullahs took over, they very intelligently took the existing intelligence service of the Shah, and transformed it into something like the Stasi, or the Gestapo, or the KGB.
And you can't even whisper in Iran now Without it being heard all the way up to the top, if necessary.
And the result is, this is a country of people who don't really want it to be the way it is, who've been captured.
They're more like people behind the Iron Curtain were during the Cold War.
We always think of the Iranians as though they all want this, but the actual truth is that the number of people who are fundamentalists and who are on Ahmadinejad's side is not large, and that's reflected in their elections.
But hasn't that always been true of governments that would own the world?
I mean, the majority has not necessarily been with them, but a lot have gone along to get along.
They've gone along to get along because they were forced to.
The Nazis never won a majority until they could control the elections.
And they got in because Hindenburg basically got old and weak and let Hitler in.
And in the case of the Iranians, there was such an explosion against the Shah, the intellectuals, middle class, the educated sort of pro-western middle class thought they could control what was happening, and it just ran totally away from them.
Totally.
If Iran obtains a bomb, if they don't already have one, is it your view that the minority will find a way to use it against us?
I think that there are two possibilities here.
First, they are trying to produce U-235, and they need a lot of centrifuges to do that.
They will, in my view, not go for a bomb.
I think they would go for a much easier target, which is a dirty bomb, a conventional dirty bomb.
Which they would try to get into Israel, because Israel is such a small place.
If you blew off a dirty bomb with a lot of persistent radiation in Tel Aviv, you would ruin that country permanently.
Its economy would be destroyed permanently.
Now, the other possibility is that, and they have a sort of a missile program, I think it's a lot less significant than if the u.s. intelligence services worry about but it
their job to exaggerate because they you know they're having their job is to protect us and you
don't protect people by saying oh it's not a problem that you know so
but it probably is not very real and uh... the accuracy that
the chances of their being able to build a missile with a and launch a bomb like
into europe anytime in the naza it's good point with a It'll probably be Tel Aviv.
A dirty bomb in Tel Aviv that can be delivered physically over land.
Alright, folks, it's unknowncountry.com.
That's Whitley's website.
You're well advised to go there.
You'll be up on the latest of everything in the UFO world.
Whitley, hey buddy, we gotta go.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you very much, Art.
Have a good night, we'll do it again soon.
I'm Art Bell, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Hey everybody, coming up in a moment, Nick Pope, that's going to be very, very interesting.
I want to address something very quickly.
A shout out to everybody at the fantasticforum.com.
Yo, pirates.
Hey, that brings up the subject of the internet.
And I want to register a formal complaint here.
There is somebody on myspace.com who is pretending to be me.
I got an email about it several days ago, which reads, there is a MySpace page, Art, where a user is listed as you.
And annoyingly, the first thing he does is, he's got a little thing at the top, let me assure you, I really am Art Bell.
Well, no he isn't.
No he isn't.
It's www.myspace.com forward slash artbell1 and that is not me much as it may look like me and there's nothing really objectionable on the page except for the fact that the guy is assuring everybody that he's me and he's not!
I've written to the abuse people at MySpace and received no answer at all and it seems to me that's pretty big abuse when somebody is uh...
Now there's a million things that are not true that are written about me on the web every day.
I'm used to it.
That's part of the job.
But to have an entire page devoted to claiming that it's you when it isn't is a little bit over the top, I would say.
So if anybody at MySpace is listening, hey folks, do something about that.
That's not me.
That's a pretender and a pretty bold-faced one at that, saying, oh, I can assure you I'm Art Bell.
And he's collected a whole bunch of very nice people who think it's Art Bell.
Well, it's not.
Nick Pope, coming up in a moment.
Nick Pope used to run the British government's UFO project.
That's no trivial matter.
The British government's UFO project at the Ministry of Defense.
Initially skeptical himself, his investigation of newly reported UFO incidents and access to government files On the whole subject.
Soon convinced him that the phenomena raised important national security issues.
Very important, because the one thing governments have said, specifically ours is, whatever they are, they're not a threat to national security, right?
Important national security issues.
Especially when the witnesses were military pilots, or where UFOs were tracked on radar.
Nick also looked into other mysteries such as alien abductions and of course crop circles.
He now continues his research in a private capacity and is recognized as a leading authority on UFOs and the unexplained.
He's done work, extensive media work, lectured all around the world and has acted as a consultant on several TV documentaries.
In a moment, Nick Pope.
Oh, I've got to remember this just before Nick Pope.
Listen, folks, next weekend I will not be here.
I'm going to be in Los Angeles accepting an award.
A Lifetime Achievement Award from Radio and Records.
It's a high honor, and so I thought I would take the weekend off.
That'll occur on Saturday and Sunday.
Well, as the saying goes.
And I'm not kidding.
I think I'll go to Disneyland and take care and enjoy Disneyland.
All right, all the way to Great Britain, and Nick Pope.
Nick, welcome back to the program.
Hi, thanks.
It's great to be back.
Good to have you.
We had you sort of on an ad hoc basis when I was in Manila, when there was some news breaking about your retirement.
Yes, yes indeed, yes.
That was, I didn't anticipate that it would be quite the international news story that It turned out to be, but I mean, yes, I got a call from yourself and came on the show to explain to you and the listeners a little bit about it, but I was interviewed by all sorts of different TV and radio stations.
I mean, I even had a photo shoot with a Croatian magazine that I did in front of Parliament here in the UK.
For some reason, My leaving the Ministry of Defence seemed to really capture the imagination and fire a lot of interest.
Partly, I have to say, because it was misreported a little bit.
Maybe we can talk about that.
Alright, you ran the British government's UFO project at the Ministry of Defence.
Now, initially you were a sceptic.
I can imagine they would not hire a ufologist to do that job.
So, I guess you were pretty much a sceptical person in the interview for the job?
Yes, there wasn't... I mean, it was a slightly unusual interview.
In a sense, I was headhunted.
And what happened was that I was already working in the division where the UFO project is embedded, but I was working on other duties.
I was doing a job.
That had to do with preparing briefings for senior military officers.
It had to do with military aircraft crashes and things like that.
And then during the first Gulf War, I was seconded into what was called the Joint Operations Center, and specifically the Air Force Operations Room.
And again, I was Effectively, I was doing a briefing job.
My job was to collate Air Force related information and get the raw data on things such as military losses.
uh... bomb damage assessment after uh... bombing raids and things like that
i had to kind of take that raw data and turn it into information which was
easily digestible by uh... ministers and and the service chief in the in the big
daily briefings and
and walked i was there what i was working there i was working to particular person
uh... in the division and he said to me look he said i
i know that you'll you looking at it to transfer after the uh... gulf war is
over out of the division
He said, why don't you reconsider that decision?
He said, because we forged a good working relationship.
Why don't you reconsider that decision?
Instead of transferring out of the division, transfer across.
to the vacancy that I have.
And I said, which vacancy is that?
And he said, well, it's the UFO job.
And so effectively, I was I was headhunted into it.
And I wasn't really asked about my knowledge or belief on UFOs.
But or so far as I can recollect now, of course, we're talking about events over 10 years ago.
But I really did have no knowledge of the mystery at all, and certainly no belief.
In what way, Nick, was your retirement from that job misreported?
Well, some of the news headlines said that I had resigned from the ministry specifically because I was dissatisfied with the government's policy on the UFO issue, and some even went so far as to say that I stated that an alien invasion was imminent.
Now I was fortunate that once these stories got out, obviously as you can imagine, they
attracted even more media attention, so I did have the opportunity to go on television,
particularly onto the BBC News, and put the record straight.
Now the reason I left actually had nothing to do with UFOs.
The reason I left is that I'd served for 21 years, I'd had tremendous fun, I'd done a
whole range of very different jobs in the department, not just running the UFO project,
but all sorts of other things.
But 21 years struck me as being a long time.
I've got various outside business interests and I just wanted to spend more time devoting to those business interests.
Alright, well something that a lot of people might not know is that your investigation was a little wider than just UFOs.
Apparently The Ministry of Defence undertook a study into something we've talked a great deal about on this program, remote viewing.
Is that true?
That's correct.
Now I should say that I wasn't involved in this, but the whole point about running the UFO project was that anything weird and wonderful Tended to come my way.
And you mentioned, I think, at the top of the show, some of those things, for example, alien abductions, crop circles.
I was approached by some remote viewers, but this particular project took place after I left the department.
But this, again, this has been international news.
In the last couple of weeks, and it's absolutely sensational.
Yes, the Defence Intelligence staff within the Ministry of Defence ran in 2001 and 2002 a classified study to look at the remote viewing phenomenon to see whether it worked and whether it had any military applications.
Do you know how they did that and what the results were?
Yes.
In a sense, it's a story of triumph and tragedy.
The triumph, I think, is that the ministry was prepared to do this at all.
There have been many people here who say that it was a waste of time and money, and of course, the defense budget is under huge pressure.
There are many, many competing Responsibilities, the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, amongst other things.
But I think it's commendable that the government was prepared to think outside the box like this, and dare, perhaps, to speculate about, well, about the unknown.
No less way outside the box, all right.
How did they actually conduct the study?
Well, this is where we get to the tragedy, because it was completely mishandled.
What they tried to do, which I suppose is a good start, is they tried to get in touch with some of the people who claim to be remote viewers.
And as with many classified studies of this nature, it just started out on the internet with a search through various websites of organizations and individuals who claim a track record in this.
Now, of course, details of exactly who those people are have been withheld.
That's alright, I think I probably know who they are.
It's interesting, Nick, because a lot of these people have made claims, you know, they track their website responses, and they've made claims that a lot of intelligence agencies are constantly on their sites.
Apparently true.
Well, yeah, in this case, I think it was true.
So that's very interesting, and yes, I think we can all speculate about some of those individuals and who they are.
Now it will be very interesting, large parts of this classified document, and when I say
classified, secret UKIs only was the original classification, so that is, it's really pretty
much as high as you can get without getting into top secret information.
Not UK, US, just UK?
UKIs only.
But I'll come on to the US in a minute because there is an American angle to this.
But details of who those individuals and organizations have been withheld, large parts of this report
have still been blacked out.
This was obviously obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
In fact, it was obtained by a friend of mine, Timothy Good, who you'll know as a UFO author, of course.
But he then passed this document to me.
and asked me to break the story in the media, which I then did.
So we don't know who was approached.
We don't know how they were approached either, because the email that was sent to them, and that seems to
have been how it was done, has been completely withheld.
But clearly what they didn't say is, hello, we are conducting a classified study for the British
government.
So this was probably masquerading as a commercial or a private study.
So it would be very interesting to see any remote viewer who received an approach, I guess we would be talking early or mid-2001, which looks a little bit suspicious.
Because for whatever reason, and there have been jokes about this, maybe the remote viewers knew that it was the government, even though they were hiding the fact, but they didn't participate.
Would the email have originated in the United Kingdom?
Yes, it almost certainly would have done.
Although, because great efforts were made to hide the true identity of the sponsor, who knows?
Maybe it was rooted through a third party.
We just don't know.
But my estimate would be, yes, it was.
But for whatever reason, they didn't buy it.
This email was not successful in attracting the attention of any of the people with a proven track record of remote viewing or indeed who are high profile in this particular area.
I see.
Well, maybe it started out saying something like, I'm a relative of a British royal family member who has just passed away, leaving a giant fortune unattended, or something like that.
Just joking.
I mean, we don't know, but it's interesting.
I think what will happen now is that, as has happened with other important releases under
the Freedom of Information Act, other researchers will doubtless make further requests in relation
to this document, and they'll chip away at the bits that have been blacked out, and they'll
appeal the decision.
And I suspect that over the next few months, we'll possibly get to know a little bit more
about this, and it might shed some light on why they weren't able to attract any of the
known remote viewers.
And that, of course, almost doomed the study before it started.
I was going to say, if they couldn't get hold of any of the real remote viewers, how did they do the study?
Well, what they did is they relied on novices.
They said, to be fair, they were still obviously hoping to attract people with a track record in this.
There are a couple of quotes which are quite interesting on this.
I mean the first one is, let me just read a couple of quotes if I may.
Right at the bottom of page 107 of this document, and perhaps I should mention that people can actually now obtain this document themselves, it's on Yeah, it's on the Ministry of Defence website, which is just mod.uk, and then from the A to Z menu, go to F for Freedom of Information, and once you hit that, this document is pretty much the top choice and it will be readily apparent in the Freedom of Information section, and it's just called Remote Viewing.
Excellent.
There's a quote at the bottom of page 107, It says, however, the key issue in pursuit of scientific understanding of RV activity is getting talented subjects who will cooperate with scientific testing regimes.
I don't think you can really dispute that, but what they did is they got novices, to be fair, What they hoped was that these novices, the scores, and we'll talk perhaps about the methodology and the scoring in a minute, but they were hoping that the novices would serve as a baseline, of course, against which future tests involving more expert remote viewers could be judged.
But perhaps I can read the absolute killer quote in this whole document.
Really?
Perhaps it just sets the scene for what this is all about and what we were obviously trying to do.
At the bottom of page two, there is a sentence and it says, it is conceivable that the trial could be conducted in two phases.
The first phase could be to recruit and assess the individuals and to perform some remote viewing tasks which are not subject sensitive.
Then it goes on to say, and this is the critical sentence in the whole report, the second phase could involve the selection of one or more individuals who it is felt can be trusted to be used for the sensitive targets.
The next bit is completely blanked out.
All right, hold it right there, Nick.
Remote viewing is a fascinating topic to me, and one of the most criticized, ostracized, and loved people in the whole field is Major Ed Dames, and I'll tell you something.
Lately, a lot of his wilder stuff has looked like hit, hit, hit, ding, ding, ding.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
I'm going to tell you, Ed Dames is scorned by many because the predictions he makes are pretty wild.
You know, I'll give you that.
They call him Dr. Doom.
But if you carefully track what he's said over the past several years, not only has he been consistent, admitted he's been wrong several times, but I'm sorry to say on a number of the bigger items, for example, the sun, for example, pollinating bees, And on and on and on and on, with weather changes, all the rest of it.
Ed Dames had all of this nailed some time ago now.
The timelines may not have been right on, but the headlines are beginning to match up in a very, very worrisome way.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
We'll be right back.
Alright, we're mainly going to concentrate on UFOs in this program, but Nick Pope now telling us that the Ministry of Defense undertook an investigation into remote viewing using amateurs, basically, I guess, and that's all very, very interesting.
Was there sort of an overall conclusion, Nick?
Yeah, this is the interesting thing, and perhaps I should go back and say that the protocols used in terms of methodology were very much the ones developed by Stanford Research Institute and based on the work of people like Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ and Ingo Swann and such like, and indeed the The specific protocol, the Controlled Remote Viewing Manual, which I believe was written by PJ Guinier and Ingo Swann, was actually used in setting up the experiments, which were basically, what they did is they got very specific images of people, places, and objects,
I mean, for example, one of the images was a picture of Mother Teresa.
Another one was a picture of a glass of wine.
And these were carefully sealed under controlled experiments into envelopes with a clear question underneath, along the lines of, who is this person?
Or what is this object?
And the people had to see if they could come up with it.
And interestingly, we talk about these people as novices or amateurs.
It's not stated, but it seems to me quite possible that what they did is they got military personnel to volunteer, given that they couldn't attract people.
I think they had to get people.
So we're probably Talking about military personnel or Ministry of Defence employees being these novices and indeed some of the report talks about their unease at taking part in this trial at all.
There were also, there was a commercial company involved and some psychologists associated with this and then again there is reference to the psychologists being extremely uh... disturbed about this work and actually walking out
refusing to take any further part
now it's not entirely clear why and i think it is a lot about this study
that we still don't know but of course
that there were three potential scores but uh... these people could could have
there was a complete myth uh... that was a complete hit and all the possible
Interestingly, in 28% of the sessions, even the novices were adjudged to have possibly accessed some features of the target.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, really the purpose of this with the novices was just to establish the baseline against which further tests involving experienced remote viewers would take place.
And that, of course, ultimately, one can read into this, I think, perfectly legitimately.
The aim, as I mentioned in that quote, was to really develop an operational
remote viewing capability.
And of course, the question that all the media have been asking in relation to that little quote
that I gave about remote viewers trusted to be used for the sensitive targets.
People have said, well, what are the sensitive targets?
And as I mentioned, the following sentence is completely blanked out.
But it to me It's perfectly clear that we are almost certainly talking about Osama Bin Laden, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
We're talking about late 2001, we're talking about November, December 2001, these tests were done.
It would be amazing to me If targets like that didn't feature, because after all we know from some of the CIA and US Army remote viewing programs that of course the targets they went after were things such as hostages in Beirut, the location of Soviet ballistic missile submarines on patrol, arms dumps, drugs shipments, that sort of thing.
The defence intelligence staff will have regarded remote viewing as just another potential intelligence-gathering capability.
And like any intelligence-gathering capability, the issue is just how can I best configure this capability onto my current requirements?
And, you know, so all you really have to do is look at what the intelligence requirements were in late 2001, early 2002, and there's your answer as to what the sensitive targets were.
Certainly.
I'm sure that's what they went after, and so they really don't need to fill it in.
We can all pretty well read between the lines and imagine what they went after.
Yeah, but I can't stress just how much, of course, this may have been Sabotaged inadvertently by the desperate need to keep secret the fact that this was a government project, right down to the fact that they even hired a commercial property where these tests would take place.
So again, there was no obvious link back to the Ministry of Defence, the Defence Intelligence Staff, the British Government.
I sure would love to know the genesis of it.
In other words, what got them so interested in remote viewing to even attempt any sort of test?
Well, one possible answer to that is that I had actually written about it.
I've written, now this is almost too bizarre to believe, but sometimes in this business, you know, that's exactly what you have to look for.
One of my books is a science fiction novel called Operation Lightning Strike.
In that book, I talk about an operational remote viewing capability embedded within
the Defense Intelligence Staff.
The interesting thing is the manuscript for that book had to be cleared with the Ministry
of Defense.
So it will have been read by the very people who ended up commissioning this study.
Now, I'm not claiming that what I wrote in a science fiction book prompted this study, but you know, it might just have made them think, well, yes, I've heard of remote viewing.
That's an interesting thought.
And maybe they went to check out some of the books and websites on the material and decided, well, Let's give it a go.
It's a classic.
It's what you would call, I guess, to adopt the language of business, low probability, high impact.
They probably thought, well, this is fairly off the wall.
It probably won't work.
But if it does, if it does, the potential returns are just vast.
So in a sense, it's money well spent.
Nick, I've interviewed most of the known remote viewers.
I'm impressed.
I believe what they're doing is real.
I think it has application.
In fact, to the degree that I even believe that we're still doing it.
Now, most every remote viewer will tell you no.
They don't think so.
You know, they kind of speak out of both sides of their mouth, because on the other hand, they will assure you that remote viewing works, that it's real, and that the only reason that governments are not using it now is the embarrassment factor.
And I just simply refuse to believe that.
I mean, if you can pinpoint somebody's big bad bomb, or whatever else, its location and the nature of it, you're going to use that no matter how embarrassing it is.
You might hide it real well, but you're damn well going to use it.
Well, that's absolutely spot on.
I mean, you know, there's no such thing as a capability that's not used.
If, as you say, if it works, it'll be used.
I can't say too much about this, but again, if people go and look at this document in the Freedom of Information section of the Ministry of Defence website, mod.uk, you'll see Particularly if you read first the covering letter that certain parts of this report have been withheld, and it makes it very clear, it's interesting, some of the exemptions relate to what it refers to, our working relationship with another nation.
And this so-called Section 27 International Relations part, and it's perfectly clear that contact, as you would have expected, was made with certain other countries.
And, you know, again, one can speculate as to what those countries were.
Nick, it sounds an awful lot like you know more than you're willing or able to say.
Well, inevitably, having worked for the government for 21 years, even if I didn't know for sure what's underneath these blacked-out sections, I know the game well enough, because I've played it, to make a pretty good assessment.
But it wouldn't be proper of me, and indeed it would be illegal for me, to do that.
And I'm not a whistleblower.
I may be a maverick, but I'm not a whistleblower.
Nick, if I were to ask you, for example, what knowledge you have of an ongoing or present program in Britain with regard to remote viewing, how would you have to answer?
I honestly could only speculate about that, but I couldn't really disagree with your own assessment.
If there's even a chance that this works, I would find it inconceivable that this wasn't being used.
I mean, we know, for example, let's give another example.
We know, and I'm sure the same is the case in America, I know in Britain, because I've worked with a lot of police, that most police forces will use psychics.
Now, again, you hit the nail on the head, I think, where you said that the embarrassment factor was a part here.
And, of course, any defence lawyer who got onto this, particularly in relation to any remote viewing or psychic involvement that led to someone being arrested, say, for a particular crime, the defence lawyers would have a field day in trying to get the case thrown out.
So a lot of this is done on a sort of unofficial, behind-the-scenes, back-channel basis, whatever you want to call it.
But yeah, I would be surprised and in a sense disappointed if the British government and indeed the American government wasn't doing this at some level.
All right, we'll leave it there.
I'm sure it's still going on.
I trust that it is.
If there's something to it, and there certainly seems to be, Then it's going on, and it's being well hidden.
And in fact, one of the best ways you could hide it would be to say, all right, we admit, we studied it, you know, here in the U.S.
for 20 years.
We spent X number of millions of dollars on it, but we are no longer doing it.
That's it.
If you're starting to get leaks, if you were worried about it getting out, that's exactly what you do.
What do you think?
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you.
It's very often, it's down to the best place to hide a book is in a library, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
Alright, well listen, your job in the government was UFOs, and before we get into specifically what you did and what you found, I wonder, since you ran the British government's investigation into UFOs, obviously you would have some knowledge of what other governments are doing.
Yes?
Yes, correct.
If you were to list the governments that you considered to be most active with the investigation into ufology, What governments would you list?
Well, I'm going to have to be fairly careful again on this area, because parts of my answer here could be quite controversial.
But as you well know, the official line of the American government is that since the
closing down of Project Blue Book in 1969, there is no active UFO project.
Do you believe that, Nick?
It's sort of, it's partially true.
It's true to say that there's no formal project, but there are many ways to skin a cat, aren't there?
In my own investigations, and this can all be backed up with documents released under the Freedom of Information Act here in the UK, There are certainly hints that there are those in America still taking a look at this, yes.
I really can't say much more than that.
But any country that says they don't have a formal UFO program probably are looking at it informally, whatever that means.
How could you not?
I mean, if, as happens, for example, your own military personnel, your own pilots, are seeing these things.
Your own air traffic control and radar specialists are seeing these things on their radar screens.
Blowing holes in clouds right over O'Hare, you know, that sort of thing.
Sure, yes, and that story generated quite a bit of coverage even over here.
So, yeah, these things, it's an ongoing situation and whether there's a, in a sense, Whether a particular government has a program set up with terms of reference and people like myself running it or not isn't the question.
The question is, when there is an event like O'Hare or something like that, does somebody take a look at it?
And again, it's inconceivable that somebody wouldn't be looking at it.
Somebody within government, military, intelligence, wherever.
Is there any government you could name that's on top of the game more than others?
In your opinion?
Well, a few years ago I met some people from the Italian Air Force and they were quite open about their UFO project and it wasn't particularly different in terms of its setup and its methodology, in terms of reference to the program that I ran.
But the Italians struck me as quite impressive in their professionalism in looking at these reports, particularly the ones from pilots, police officers, military personnel.
They seemed quite open-minded about it.
And indeed, to the amazement of many people, they actually sent a couple of officers along, officially on duty, in uniform, to give a presentation at the The San Marino conferences run by Roberta Pinotti and the San Marino Ministry of Tourism.
So it's a very rare occasion, I think you'll agree, that you get uniformed Air Force personnel turning up at a UFO conference and giving a presentation.
But that's precisely what happened.
Is there somebody who filled your slot in Britain when you left?
Yes, indeed.
The problem was that as I left people began to take another look at this and at about the same time we began to realise that we would get a Freedom of Information Act and I had years ago made I think it will amaze a lot of people that Britain didn't actually have a Freedom of Information Act until very recently.
We like to call ourselves the mother of all democracies, but in fact it only came into force in the year 2000.
But I predicted many years ago UFOs would be the big subject under FOI, and it was.
Well, it certainly has been here, and I guess, as you mentioned, your Freedom of Information Act is young compared to ours, so maybe there's a lot more to come.
All right, Nick Pope is my guest.
When we return, we'll talk about some very specific incidents that were investigated by Nick Pope and the Ministry of Defense.
He ran the whole show in Great Britain.
From the High Desert, I'm Art Bell.
A creature of the night, there's no doubt about it.
Good morning, everybody.
We're talking to a very interesting individual, Nick Pope.
He actually ran the British government's UFO project at the Ministry of Defense until recently.
He just retired.
And if you're listening carefully to Nick's voice, as I am, It's obvious there are many things that he would like to talk about, but cannot yet.
I wonder if the day will come when all can be talked about.
I rather doubt it.
Actually, we'll ask that question and talk about some specific incidents in a moment.
All right, Nick.
Jim in Susanville, California says, Dear Art, I hope that Mr. Pope will give us his latest conclusions on the Rendlesham incident.
Yes, indeed.
Well, this is still Britain's most famous UFO incident.
It's sometimes called Britain's Roswell.
Do you want me to start with an overview?
No, by all means, go ahead, do that.
Effectively, this occurred over a series of nights in December 1980 and involved The two American Air Force bases in Suffolk, England, Bentwaters and Woodbridge.
Now, Rendlesham Forest lies between these two bases, and on the first night of activity, some of the military personnel saw strange lights in the forest, and they thought at first that one of the A-10 tank buster aircraft had come down and crashed.
So they went to investigate.
What they found Was not a crashed aircraft, but a landed UFO.
And one of the individuals in this patrol, Jim Penniston, got close enough to this object to see hieroglyphs on the side of it, which he sketched and he said they were, well, I say hieroglyphs, he said they were strange symbols.
Egyptian hieroglyphs was the thing that he could most liken them To the sketch of those markings and indeed of the craft itself in his witness statement, which which has now been released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Interestingly, he and the others, of course, I mean, one of the obvious questions is, well, look, these guys in the patrol, they were security police.
Well, they sketched the thing, but didn't they photograph it?
Well, yes.
A number of them say that they photographed the craft, but that they subsequently were told that the processing laboratory at the lab had looked at them, but the pictures were completely fogged.
Conspiracy theorists have obviously Uh, questioned and challenged, uh, that statement.
Uh, but, but for now, um, the sketches are all we have.
Uh, but those in themselves are, are remarkable.
Uh, now, then what happened was that the, uh, deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt, got to hear about this and he was the one who had the, uh, the people involved in the patrol write up their, their accounts, uh, do the sketches and, and such like.
The following night, there was a social function at the base, and the doors burst open.
Someone came up to the Lieutenant Colonel and said, Sir, it's back.
And the Colonel, he looked confused, and he said, What?
What are you talking about?
What's back?
And the young airman said, The UFO, Sir, the UFO, it's come back.
So Colonel Holt threw together a small team of of personnel, and he took into the forest with him powerful mobile light generators called light tools.
Interestingly, both those light tools and the radio communications started to cut out as they went into the forest.
His mindset was interesting.
has gone on the record of saying he went out into the forest to try and debunk
this, his own words, but he couldn't debunk it because he became a witness himself
and he and his team saw the UFO and at one point it comes very close, it's directly overhead,
it's firing light beams down at them and interestingly right at the end of the encounter,
several hours later, it's over the base at Woodbridge and again it's firing beams of
light down at a particular part of the base that was nicknamed Hot Row.
I'm not going to go into details of what may or may not have been there, but again, it was interesting that the light beams were firing down at this particular area of the base, which was
probably the most sensitive area of all, with no adverse consequences.
So the light beams didn't appear to be any form of attack.
It may have been more to do with study.
But again, that's speculation.
One very interesting postscript, and this I think perhaps answers the question that
posed about what the latest situation is on this.
There's a very interesting little postscript to this event.
Oh, by the way, I missed out one important factor.
There was a subsequent examination of the landing site.
They went there with a Geiger counter and they took readings which were assessed by the Defense Intelligence staff at the Ministry of Defense as being significantly higher than the background levels.
So this is not just testimony from the military officers.
There's some scientific data to back this up.
But the interesting postscript is that shortly after the incident, the Commander-in-Chief The United States Air Force in Europe, General Gabrielle, made a visit to the base and actually took possession of certain items, including a copy of the tape recording that Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt made as he went out into the forest and encountered this UFO, and maybe some other items as well.
There's reference to General Gabrielle's visit in the British file on this incident which again has been released under our Freedom of Information Act and again you can find that at the MOD website and indeed the key documents are reproduced at my own website but what's interesting is that a couple of researchers both in the UK and in the US are now using the Freedom of Information Act to go specifically after details of General Gabriel's visit
And they're asking, wait, what was the purpose of this visit?
What items relating to the Rendlesham Forest incident did he take possession of?
Where were they taken?
What study was done on them?
And what happened next?
Because the paper trail seems to go cold at that point.
So that's what people are looking into.
Because it's very interesting.
On the one hand, you have people say, yeah, well, we closed down Project Blue Book.
We're not in this game anymore.
On the other hand, you have an Air Force General taking possession of this material, and that is, of course, very interesting to people.
So that's the latest thing that people are trying to find out.
Is there any chance that your Freedom of Information Act will actually yield that information?
I think it's more likely, from what I understand, that it's approaches in America that might bear fruit there.
The Ministry of Defence has, I think, searched and found no records relating to this visit, which in itself is interesting, because a visit by the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Air Force in Europe is no small thing, but I think it will probably be the American requests that are more likely to bear fruit on this particular one.
The eyewitness testimony from that incident It was so amazing, Nick.
I mean, it was just so... It was almost like a smoking gun.
It was... I just don't know how it could be ignored.
I agree.
I mean, UFO incidents, in terms of evidence, in terms of, you know, people saying, well, what more do you want?
This case really has it all.
It's a multiple witness sighting.
Those witnesses are trained observers in the military.
Indeed, most of the witnesses are security police.
So they're particularly trained as observers and trained to record information accurately.
You've got the radiation readings taking up the landing site.
There was also an air traffic controller who recorded an uncorrelated target briefly over the base at the time of the incident.
The UFO Did some damage to the trees as it smashed its way down through the canopy.
Some branches were snapped off and some bark was stripped from the trees.
There was even marks on the ground where this thing had landed.
There were three indentations which, when they were examined, were in the shape of a perfect A triangle, an equilateral triangle, and surprise, surprise, it was in those three indentations that the radiation readings peaked.
Of course.
And as I say, the assessment, in fact, was that they were higher than background by a factor of about 8 to 10.
So, although the levels were not high enough to pose any danger to the personnel, they were significant in scientific terms.
end way that this was attempted to be explained away?
Oh, skeptics have all sorts of theories for this, including the local lighthouse, which was nonsense firstly because of course all the personnel based at these military establishments were familiar with the lighthouse.
It was a something of a local landmark and indeed Charles Holt At one point said, well, we almost took a bearing on the UFO by reference to the lighthouse.
He had both in view at the same time.
Skeptics have suggested some sort of combination of satellite re-entries and meteors, but none of these theories remotely add up and certainly don't explain the physical evidence, nor indeed does it really explain the level of
interest taken in this.
I mean, for C&C, USEFI to fly in and, as I say, take possession of these items relating
to the case, you don't do that for a bunch of people who've mistaken a lighthouse for
something.
Yeah, I think this is a very fair analogy to say it's the British Roswell.
I think so.
I think so.
Although the one interesting difference, of course, is that although sometimes this incident is referred to as a crash, that's not strictly correct.
The UFO was moving under its own power.
Now some people have speculated that it was nonetheless a sort of forced landing, that this was a craft that for whatever reason came down and perhaps needed to repair.
Before it flew off.
I mean, that's speculation, of course, but it's a possibility.
In the U.S., in fact, in the first hour, we were talking with Whitley Strieber, who, or I guess I pointed out, that there's been a gigantic correlation between nuclear facilities, whether they be nuclear weapons or other nuclear facilities, and the visitation of craft.
Yes.
Is that a fair comment with reference to Great Britain as well?
It is, but I'm afraid I'm going to... This is an area where, again, as I say, I may be portrayed sometimes as a maverick, but I'm not a whistleblower, and I take my oath of secrecy seriously.
Firstly, for reasons of loyalty and honour, but secondly, for understandable legal reasons, I'm not going to go into any detailed discussion of nuclear issues.
I hope that you'll understand that.
I do understand.
Nick, it's very frustrating as an interviewer, but I do understand.
Let me ask you this, Nick.
If you were able to freely tell us anything, if you were completely released from anything you've ever signed or any oath you've ever taken, would you tell us things that we would find shocking?
Yes.
Damn!
Sorry.
Alright, look, let's move on.
To the Custard incidents.
Sure.
It was in 93, right?
Yes.
This was right in the middle of my tour of duty and Rendlesham, of course, was many years before I even joined the Ministry of Defence, let alone the UFO project.
I reopened the investigation because I felt it had been mishandled for a number of reasons, but my My research into Rendlesham was, of course, years after the event.
My investigation of the so-called Cosford incident was real-time.
I mean, I was taking the calls, investigating this incident, you know, pretty much as things were unfolding.
And this was the most sensational case to have appeared on my watch, as it were, in my three years running the UFO Project.
This was the most compelling case I came across.
And again, it's interesting because it features military bases and direct overflight of Air Force facilities.
And that in itself is, I think, always of interest.
But this was a period of several hours from the evening of the 30th of March to the early hours of the 31st of March, 1993.
A wave of sightings over much of the UK, involving a whole mixture of people, members of the public, police officers, military personnel.
In all, we'll probably never know how many sightings there were in all, because of course many people didn't make reports.
The usual reasons, fear of ridicule, lack of information about where to go.
But we had, I think, about 60 reports.
Speculate that there were probably several hundred people who actually saw this.
Descriptions varied, but one that came up again and again was our old friend, the large triangular-shaped craft.
And the highlight of this incident was that it flew over two military bases.
It was seen by a patrol of Air Force police at one military base, RAF Cosford.
And then it went on to RAF Shawbury, and it was seen by the Met Officer, Meteorological Officer at Shawbury, and he described to me a vast triangular-shaped craft moving very slowly over the countryside, perhaps just a few hundred feet above the ground.
Did he describe it as flying, Nick, or floating?
And he just said moving in a fairly steady way with no obvious form of propulsion.
But that's the way he characterized it.
I mean, I think bear in mind that he was completely mesmerized by this craft.
He was an Air Force officer with eight years experience, but he said he'd never seen anything like this in his life.
And here's a guy stationed at a military base where they do flying.
He describes this thing firing again a narrow beam of light down at the fields.
He said this light was sweeping backwards and forwards as if it was looking for something.
He said there was a very low frequency humming sound coming from the craft.
One of those unpleasant low frequency sounds that you can feel going through your body as well as here.
And then he said suddenly the beam just switched off and the craft from a very, very slow speed Maybe 20, 30 miles an hour, something like that.
Just shots away to the horizon.
And there you go.
Nick, that would be floating.
That would be defying gravity.
I know of no craft that can go, and I had one go over my head just exactly the way you described, Nick.
And trust me, it wasn't flying.
Flying requires enough forward speed and lift under some sort of wing or Or foiled some sort to keep an aircraft in the air.
What I saw wasn't flying, and it sounds like what he saw was not flying.
Well, you know, it's always good, I guess, when your own sighting is confirmed by other people.
And here you're in very good company, because this was a really great military witness.
Yes.
Well, I saw mine close up, went straight over our heads.
Ramona and I just sat there in shock.
Actually stood there in shock.
Our heads up.
Watched it float out across the valley.
But as it came over our heads, the moon, the stars, everything just disappeared.
Didn't make a sound.
I saw that, and for as long as I live, I'll never forget it.
From the High Desert, I'm Art Bell.
Here in the U.S., you can believe about a tenth of what you read on the web.
It's very unfortunate.
I referred to that incident earlier with somebody pretending to be me on MySpace.
But that's just an example.
Generally, you can believe about a tenth of what you read.
Now, ufology in the United States, as I've said before, eats its young.
And I wonder if it's any different in Britain.
I suspect not.
In a moment, we will ask Nick Pope.
Nick, as I mentioned, we eat our young here in the U.S.
I've never seen anything like it.
Here in the U.S., the Internet is bad enough on any given day.
If you go into a chat room or something like that, matters quickly go from bad to worse.
The very best intended subject ends up with people fighting.
Just horrible things go on in these chat rooms.
For that reason, I don't go to them.
In the world of ufology, it seems as though that's true times ten.
These people shred each other.
True in Britain also?
Absolutely true, yes.
There are two problems, I think, with the internet.
Now, I'm actually a fan of the internet.
Oh, as am I. Many good things, of course.
But two problems which will be familiar to you and all your listeners I'm sure.
Firstly is just the signal to noise ratio, the amount of just bogus information, false claims, forged documents, etc.
etc.
It's just phenomenal.
And secondly, as you say, just the hatred, the abuse, the jealousy.
The trouble is that the Internet has given a voice to people who previously would never and should never have been published.
And, you know, everyone can be king of the castle, so they think.
And given an opportunity to write something nasty without having to sign your own name to it.
Oh absolutely, absolutely.
I'm a victim of all sorts of, you know, abuse on the internet and I've long since and give up trying to keep track of it
uh... some of it is it's sort of you know reasonably well intentioned i mean i
people have said well you know how can we trust this guy
and he worked for the government has he really left uh... if
if his information just disinformation things like that but But some of it just goes so way off the deep end that I can't even keep track of it.
And some people, a small group of people in the UK, seem absolutely obsessed with me, almost to the point of stalking.
I've been followed around at conferences by people who have filmed me.
I have one guy who kind of collects Every single interview that I've ever done and transcribes them and goes through them with obsessional zeal, I've had all sorts.
In a sense, it's almost like cyberstalking.
No, it's not almost like it is.
Well, yes, I guess it is, but having said that, the funny thing is that a lot of these people, thank goodness, actually lack the courage to actually come out and ask me something straight out.
So they turn up at conferences and sort of film me and then say, oh, I was there, I was filming you, I've got you on film, like as if I really could do anything about it or minded or cared.
I've got this other person saying to me, Will, in 1998 on BBC Radio Three Counties, you said this.
Okay, you know, fair enough, quote something I said and ask me about it, but these guys are obsessional.
I know.
So the current state of ufology in the United Kingdom is fill in the blank.
Fragmented.
Fragmented, yeah.
There are a lot of people out there doing some good work, but in the old days, in the days before the Internet, I guess you could say there were a few big groups doing this sort of thing, the obvious one being the British UFO Research Association.
I think in the 90s, with the rise of the Internet and the explosion of interest in this subject through reference to perhaps Sometimes science fiction, such as the X-Files, led to an explosion of UFO groups, independent researchers, and the whole situation really fragmented.
You had UFO groups with about three people in them, with a president, a chairman, and a treasurer, and then the two people would fight over who was going to lead the group, and a group of three people would split.
If it wasn't so farcical, it would be hilarious.
You know, I think now we see the rise of really the independent researcher, and particularly we see the rise of people using the Freedom of Information Act, which I mentioned in an earlier part of the show.
I predicted, before it came in, I said, well, I think that UFOs is going to be a big subject here.
And surprise, surprise, the number one subject that the Ministry of Defense gets requests on is not Iraq, it's not Afghanistan, it's UFOs.
And so there is a breed of UFO researchers who go after documents using the Freedom of Information Act.
Listening to your voice, it sounds to me like you want to encourage them.
Yes, very much so.
I work with a number of UFO researchers, both skeptics and believers, and advise them on how to exploit the Freedom of Information Act correctly, how to word your requests so that they're targeted specifically on what you want, and some of the big document releases here in the UK I like to think have come about because I've given that advice, and I give this advice, of course, freely to people, whether they're believers, skeptics, or wherever.
But doesn't some of that advice, Nick, particularly coming from you, get very close to the line?
In other words, you might suggest, I can imagine, for example in a meeting, to somebody that, listen, you might want to make a request Using the following words about the following, you know, about incident X. No, I wouldn't do that.
I think that would be inappropriate.
But what I will do is when somebody contacts me and says, look, I'm doing some research on this incident.
How should I word my request?
In a sense, the answer isn't, it's not rocket science, it's put as much information in your request as you can about the date and location of the incident, and you know, just phrase it in the right way.
As I say, in the early days, there were so many people just writing FOI requests, which said, please send me all your information on UFOs.
Now of course there are so many hundreds upon hundreds of files that a request like that falls outside the Act because of time and financial constraints.
So of course something like that would be thrown out straight away.
Are there a lot of these things that we talked about earlier, Nick, that you're going to have to take to your grave?
Or will there come a time toward the end of your life when either you think the information will be declassified or you'll get to the point where you don't care anymore?
I think the Ministry of Defense has It started this process of gradually disclosing its documents.
There is a long way to go.
There are some big problems.
One of the obvious problems is often overlooked by people, but it's to do with personal privacy.
Obviously, if you made a report of your UFO sighting to the government, and then somebody Information about triangular-shaped craft seen in the valley in this particular date.
The government can't release your name and personal details back to this third party because of privacy.
In the UK, this is set down in what's called the Data Protection Act.
I'm not sure what it's called in the States or elsewhere.
So all the UFO files, even before you can consider them for release, you have to go through page by page Sentence-by-sentence, line-by-line, word-by-word, to make sure that you don't, when releasing these under FOI, inadvertently release somebody's name.
Because, of course, then you violate their privacy and government would be in breach of the law.
So it makes it very difficult.
It's a big job, but to answer your question, yes, there is a rolling program of disclosure underway.
And every time another nation announces that it's going to do something, and you'll have seen recently, of course, the announcement that the French are going to declassify their archive.
And surprise, surprise, they've run into exactly this same problem that I've just set out.
They didn't realize, I think, when they made this announcement, just how big a job it was to make sure that they keep people's details private.
But, OK, there are other reasons, of course, why information is withheld.
Some of the information, for example, might relate to the frequency and capability of radar systems.
There are other factors too.
But I like to think that we've made a very strong start here in Britain on releasing the documents.
But, I mean, you know, we've had a UFO project since 1950.
And indeed there have been some earlier sightings too.
The Ministry of Defence has over 10,000 reports that have been made to it over the years, and some individual case files of course, with the big incidents, can run to hundreds of pages of documentation.
It's a massive job, and that's just the sighting files.
There are all sorts of other files dealing with policy, media, Public, Parliament, etc.
etc.
I mean, just to give you an example, recently a researcher here in the UK made an application under FOI for what information the MOD had on crop circles, because I'd opened a file on that.
And he emailed me back to say they say that they can't find a file and they're not sure there even was one.
So I emailed my old section, and I said, look, I can even remember, I think, the file reference of the case and the number.
And now they had to look again, and they apparently, I think, have now tracked this down.
But if you have that sort of problem finding one file, it's a massive job.
But the program has started, but there is a lot more to come.
You did look at crop circles, Nick, obviously you looked at crop circles.
Did you come to any conclusion with regard to crop circles?
There were some, of course, that were obviously man-made, but there's big controversies.
Many of us believe that many of them were not.
Yeah, we did a little bit of work on this, but it was outside the formal terms of reference, so my hands were tied and I couldn't devote as much time as this to that as I'd hoped.
But yeah, I didn't close the door on more exotic possibilities.
Were there any conclusions reached about any of the crop circles?
No.
I mean, as you say, many of them are clearly made by people, but with some of the most complex ones, the best assessment I could make was insufficient investigation has been done to resolve this mystery.
We needed to get into soil samples, cellular analysis of crops and things, and we weren't resourced to do that.
Um, you're a successor.
Uh, did you have an opportunity to meet with him before you handed over the mantle?
At the time, the policy was that you would have a handover.
So yes, in fact, my successor sat alongside me for a couple of days and I went through some of the files and the incidents.
But thereafter, of course, they had to find their own way.
Increasingly, my successors became embroiled in the Freedom of Information Act.
And before we had the Freedom of Information Act, we had something called the Code of Practice on access to government information, which is a kind of mini FOI.
And as the subject took off, more and more requests for UFO information came in, to the point that the people dealing With it.
The people on the UFO project, doing the job that I used to do, spent, and now spend, so much of their time dealing with FOI, they have no time for any of the meaningful research and investigation that I was doing, and that I believe a properly set up UFO project should do.
That's the tragedy of the situation right now.
And yet, you're encouraging it.
Well, because I'm a passionate believer in freedom of information, what I believe is that you should be doing both things.
People do have a right to know and the government should and is disclosing UFO information here in the UK but in parallel, not as a sort of instead of, in parallel there needs to be proper research and investigation into this phenomenon done in a proper scientific way and that's not happening at the moment and that's I believe a mistake.
Are you convinced that if all were known, if everything the British government knows about UFOs were known to the general public and or to the audience listening right now, that there would be a sea change in public belief?
Yes, I think there probably would.
I think there probably would.
And even if it didn't resolve the mystery beyond all certainty, I think it would raise the level of public, media, parliamentary and scientific interest to the extent that we would very much have to get back into the game and set up a UFO project on a much bigger basis, resource it properly, staff it properly, get the right experts involved from a multidisciplinary approach.
So, you wouldn't want to take a moment here and just simply tell us everything you know and go to jail?
Sorry, no.
No deal.
I understand that, but it is so frustrating.
I can hear it in your voice.
You know, your encouragement of the Freedom of Information Act requests, all the rest of it tells me that you quite obviously know so much more than you can tell, and it's important.
And that's enough to keep me going right there, but gosh I wish you could talk.
Is this the kind of thing that you feel like you'll end up taking to your grave, I ask again?
No, because I do think that this rolling program of disclosure that the government has will eventually get to the point where all the information will come out.
I think it will take a few more years But I think we're getting there.
And the other thing is, of course, in a sense, this is, as I sometimes like to say, events led.
And perhaps in this multimedia age, and in the age of the internet, if something like the Rendlesham Forest incident or the Roswell incident were to happen now, something on that scale, and O'Hare is interesting, but it doesn't have all the features that a case like Roswell or Rendlesham has.
If something like that, Roswell or Rendlesham, happened now, I think the cat would be out of the bag.
Well, it's getting pretty hot out there right now, Nick.
We're having a kind of a flap now.
Yes, and there have been some interesting sightings in the UK too.
And indeed, literally yesterday, a story broke, and I think it's on UFO Updates, about a A possible mid-air encounter over Britain with some American Air Force F-15s and a UFO.
And a UFO?
Yes, indeed.
Oh, now I hadn't heard about this one.
Nor had I until yesterday, but apparently it's... somebody put it up on UFO Updates yesterday, and apparently there's a link to a website where there's an audio tape, so needless to say...
I haven't listened to that yet.
There's all sorts of... It's what we talked about earlier.
We didn't have to verify this information very carefully.
There are so many hoaxes.
But British... supposedly British aircraft and American aircraft and... Pardon me.
My understanding is that it was actually American aircraft but exercising in Britain.
But as I say, this story is literally just breaking news and I throw it in No, I don't.
only to give an example of the sort of high profile incident.
You said that there was a flap and I really I was agreeing and saying yeah, these sorts
of interesting high profile incidents do seem to come around pretty frequently.
Do you have any further details on it since it's breaking?
No, I don't.
I think people will just have to, I think it's at the UFO updates mailing list on the
Virtually Strange Network.
I'm sure we'll all begin to look into it very carefully.
All right, Nick, hold tight.
We're here at the top of the hour.
We'll be back.
We will open the lines as we come back.
Nick Pope was in charge of the entire British program until recently that looked into UFOs.
I'm Art Bell.
As per a Fast Blast request, I just reached over and clicked a photograph of myself in the operating position, where I am right now.
Nick Pope is my guest.
He did the official investigation, or led it, for the British government, the Ministry of Defense, for 21 years on UFOs.
Obviously, a great deal he cannot talk about, but it may be that one of you out there will find a question that Hits just the right spot and lets him talk about enough so we get just a little more and that's why in a moment we're going to open the lines for Nick Pope.
I'm Mark Bell.
Once again, Nick, this may come under the category of something you cannot answer, but Dale from Windsor, Canada asks, Art, can you ask Nick if he knows of any reports at all of any parts or pieces that have fallen off or come off UFOs, in other words, hard evidence, pieces and parts.
You already told us about some.
Are any reports done on searching areas for parts where UFOs have been sighted, and if not, why not?
That's a very good question.
No, I'm not aware Certainly that the British government has an artifact.
I don't believe we do.
We certainly should have looked very, very carefully at the Rendlesham Forest site, because at the very least this was, if not a crash, a possible heavy landing, shall we say.
And given that the area was searched with a Geiger counter, it should also have been searched with a metal detector, it should have been searched manually, we should have gone through the soil, you know, with a fine tooth comb to try and find some just tiny fragment of it.
I would imagine you'd have records of exactly that.
Well, the records are gone.
Incomplete, shall we say, because for a number of reasons this whole investigation was mishandled.
Because, I think in a certain way, because of a jurisdictional difference between... I mean, these were American bases, but on British soil, and yet the encounter actually happened off the base.
Yeah.
in the forest. So you had police involved, you had civilians involved, you had the Forestry
Commission involved, the United States Air Force involved, the Ministry of Defense involved.
This is all the recipe for disaster when it comes to an investigation.
Okay. So the answer is no, I don't think we have something, but Rendlesham was probably
our best chance of having gotten something.
All right.
Doug, west of the Rockies, somewhere in California, I think you're on the air.
South of Hot Springs, California.
After all these years, I finally got through to you.
I got lucky.
My question for Mr. Pope is, you know, with all of the satellites we have orbiting the planet, Wouldn't they be the first line of detection, and the Navy, whether it's American or British Navy, would be the second line?
And the Air Force would be the third line?
By that time, it's too darn late, because the darn thing's already here?
That's a very good question, yes.
I mean, I think the point is that, generally speaking, our satellites aren't deliberately configured to look for UFOs.
They're doing other things, but I think what we're facing here, I believe, is possibly a situation where the UFOs, whatever they are, On one step ahead of the game, as they always seem to have been, when we started tracking them on radar, suddenly some of the most interesting cases then involved UFOs that didn't show up on radar at all.
Now there are suggestions that some UFOs and their sudden disappearance may be due to the sort of optical invisibility that some scientists are beginning to speculate about.
uh... in our own technology so i think you'll you're quite right about that this will
lay at nature of our defenses but those defenses are not necessarily
configured or able to cope with the technology of the u f o s which is in some
way able it seems to mark itself
uh... from from any detection technology that we might uh... cat use
so mister pope if they had any aggressive tendencies towards us
would be pretty much helpless as far as uh...
no defending ourselves that we can detect them and they really wanted to
do it from harm We were pretty much, you know.
Flapping out in the breeze!
Well, I agree with you, and I think it's almost self-evident that if we're dealing, if we are, as many believe, dealing with a civilization from another star system, then they have viable interstellar travel, faster-than-light travel.
And self-evidently, therefore, their technology is significantly ahead of ours.
Yes.
I mean, this is one of the reasons why, when I resigned from the Ministry of Defence, these stories about alien invasion circulated.
And I went on and I made precisely the point that you've made.
I said, well, if they were going to invade us, A, they would have probably done it by now, and B, there's probably not much we can do anyway.
So I'm guessing that whatever the motivations are, whatever the agenda, Alien invasion is probably not what it's all about.
I certainly hope you're right.
It's hard to know when an invader would invade.
In other words, they may be watching our technological progress along with our social progress and or lack of it.
And who knows what might trigger a decision to put a stop to what they see as suicidal behavior, Nick.
Well indeed, it's interesting that the modern UFO era, if you take it as beginning with Kenneth Arnold and then with Roswell, is 1947, just a couple of years after the use in anger of atomic weapons.
I think what might conceivably make us dangerous is the combination of nuclear technology and interstellar travel.
It's at the point where we look as if we're going to develop faster-than-light travel that might actually take us to other star systems.
That's probably the real danger point, in terms of we'd better hope that we've modified our own behavior and that we don't pose a threat, because that's the point.
There were a couple of incidents, now I'm sure you're aware of these, but UFOs hovered over some U.S.
missile silos and deactivated the missile silos.
There's also quite a responsible true story that some UFOs hovered over a Russian facility and started them counting down to launch.
In fact, they ripped that console apart in Russia, the story goes, and never found a thing wrong.
That would seem to be sending a message.
It could well be, or it could well be that of course nuclear technology is amongst the most advanced technology that we've developed and therefore, again, self-evidently, if UFOs are studying us, You would expect that they would look at the most advanced technology that we have.
So it doesn't surprise me that nuclear facilities, military bases, all the sorts of places that they would look at.
But yes, I think there is a point where you have to say, well, at the moment we pose a threat to ourselves, our own fellow humans, other species, the planet itself through all sorts of issues, not least climate change.
The real danger point, I always think, is, as I say, when we perhaps carry the potential to export that danger to others, other civilizations.
So when we develop interstellar travel, we had better hope that we have curbed our more suicidal and homicidal tendencies.
I wouldn't take bets on that.
Gary in Texas, you're on with Nick Pope.
Hi Art.
I have a question for Nick.
Nick, you were in British intelligence for 21 years?
Well, the British Ministry of Defence, so not specifically in the intelligence part of it, though I worked with the Defence Intelligence staff.
And how long did you study UFOs under that title?
That was actually from 1991 to 1994.
I've had all sorts of other jobs.
I mean, like most people in the Ministry of Defense, you get posted every few years.
I've won several promotions.
My last job was in a security-related area and was nothing to do with UFOs.
So I've done a whole range of things.
The reason I ask the question is, with the UFO issue, it all comes down to, in my opinion, physical evidence.
And my question is, did you ever see anything from a UFO, or from an extraterrestrial craft, or from an alien, or touch anything, or in possession of anything that would be conclusive, or did you just mainly deal in hearsay?
Or can you not talk about it?
No, no, I can answer that.
I have never seen or touched anything that I believe was an extraterrestrial artifact, craft, body, anything of that nature.
About as close as we got were good photographs and videos.
Radar tapes of uncorrelated targets, radiation traces on the ground, but yeah, so we were always, as it were, one step removed from the UFOs themselves.
All right, good enough.
Let's go to Phoenix, Arizona.
Matt, you're on with Nick Pope.
Hi, this is Matt from Phoenix.
Yes.
Good evening, gentlemen.
I have a question that I've had for some 23 years now.
I was standing in the middle of the desert with my dad in early, early morning, and I saw a meteorite falling, and I tapped my dad and said, Hey, look at that!
And he turned and looked and saw it, and it continued to fall until about 10 degrees off of the horizon, where it made a right angle turn and continued all the way across the horizon out of sight.
And it kept its tail.
Well that was no meteor.
Meteors do not make right angle turns, right Nick?
Absolutely, correct.
It's not a meteor, whatever you saw.
I've never heard anybody describe a UFO like that before.
Oh yes, oh my yes.
I've had many reports of of things which have been seen from quite some distance away, so people were not close enough to make out details of the shape itself.
But yes, I've come across a number of similar reports to that sort of thing, and indeed I've come across people who describe things in very similar terms to yourself.
In other words, saying things like, I thought it was a meteor, or I thought it was a satellite, until suddenly it just did this crazy turn, or it suddenly stopped and then moved off in another direction.
So yeah, you're in good company.
He sure is.
Tim in Wisconsin, you are on with Nick Polk.
Hi.
Hi.
Thanks for taking my call.
I wonder if you remember about 18 months ago, or approximately, You had mentioned on the show, and I think Nick, Nick, by the way, I really appreciate you coming on here and expressing some of the information that you know.
I think you guys both might remember what I'm talking about.
About 18 months to two years ago, Art, you had put across the airwaves to go download this film.
of a UFO, very bright light, that was entered British airspace with both film and audio of helicopters and possibly some, I believe they call it RAF, planes chasing a UFO through British airspace.
It was going in a northeasterly direction And, uh, after downloading it and watching it myself, it was very, very interesting.
Do you remember what I'm talking about, Art?
No.
I'm sorry, I... Nick?
Yes, I believe I... I believe I know which case this is.
This... Yes, and I... Hold on a sec, caller.
Hold on one sec, Nick.
I believe this involved the police helicopter at Brighton.
Absolutely, yes.
And my question is tonight, is that although the film was taken, and I mean it was very, very apparent that the security personnel involved that were following this thing, they were extremely agitated and excited.
It was as if they really had Found something that was really out of, you know, their normal realm of experience.
And to my knowledge, it left British airspace.
And that's about all I know.
Do you know whatever happened with that?
And that, like I said, pardon me, after seeing the film and Reading on the website, Art, what it was about, nothing ever else was said about it.
All right, well, Tim, he's obviously familiar with the story.
Nick?
Yes.
Unfortunately, there's very little that I can add to that.
It's not a case that I looked at personally.
I'm familiar with the film, I've seen it, and I guess it's out there on the internet if people key in terms such as police, helicopter, UFO, and Brighton, which is B-R-I-G-H-T-O-N, I'm sure they'll find a way to access the video and maybe some information about the case, but I'm afraid As far as I can recollect, there have been no new developments on it and the case is still unexplained.
So I'm sorry, I can't really shed any more light on that one.
Do you have, during your tenure, or what you can report on even prior to your tenure, how many cases you would put in the completely unexplainable category?
Yes, I would say that the figures break down like this.
80% explainable to a high degree of certainty as a misidentification of all the usual sorts of things, aircraft lights, weather balloons, satellites.
Yeah, 15% insufficient data, 5% genuine unknown.
Okay, that's a pretty tough assessment.
About 5% genuinely not known.
I wonder what the actual numbers would be.
5% would represent perhaps how many... Not many, just a handful.
I mean, we're talking about two or three hundred reports each year.
So the number of really interesting cases each year is really just a handful.
James in Austin, Texas.
You're on with Nick Pope.
Hi Art.
Hi Nick.
I just have a quick question.
If your agency found real intelligence from another country on an incident or a craft, is it classified automatically?
If the information would reveal anything about methods and sources, or if the information
would compromise either a good relationship because the information had been freely given
or political embarrassment, then that information would be withheld.
And again, if you go to any of these documents on the Ministry of Defense website and look
at the cover letters, there is some information about the various exemptions, and they relate
to defense, to international relations, and things like that.
But, you know, Nick, that would cover almost everything.
Well, that's not to say that all the information would automatically be withheld, but that
part of the information that would either betray methods and sources or...
Or would compromise the working relationship.
In other words, if the CIA told the MOD something, in confidence, and you disclosed that, it would undermine that working relationship.
So you would withhold it.
Yes.
Or if you had radar observations on an object.
I mean, there have been objects traversing our atmosphere at 25,000 miles an hour.
That have been actually caught on radar.
But if you actually gave the data that came from radar, specific data, you'd be disclosing what your radar was capable of.
Exactly, yes.
And that's what we call a Section 26 defense exemption.
But of course, the United States has said again and again that whatever these things are, they're not a threat to national security.
Well, my own view is that until we know what they are, they've got to be viewed as a potential threat.
Nick, we've got to break.
We'll be right back.
That is really a good question, which we'll ask in a moment.
This would be an opinion question, really.
Nick, do you really think that when you took that job, they gave you all the UFO data they had at that time?
Yes, I do believe that.
Of course, I can't prove a negative, I can't prove that there wasn't some information that was withheld from me, but I guess the question would be, withheld by who?
I mean, I was the one getting the reports directly from the public and from the military, so if anyone else was operating some sort of shadow project, They would need to be someone that, you know, we gave the data to.
People have said, well, what about the Defence Intelligence staff, whose role in UFO research was only revealed by the Ministry fairly recently under the Freedom of Information Act.
But, I mean, I had very close links with the Defence Intelligence staff, and we freely exchanged information on this, and indeed worked in alliance.
on this. So I believe, to the best of my knowledge, that I had access to everything. The other
point is that I was never denied anything that I wanted in terms of if I needed a radar
tape for a particular night and location, the Air Force would impound it and send it
to me. If I wanted an opinion from the Defense Intelligence staff on anything, they would
give it. So to the best of my knowledge, yes, I was running the real project and there wasn't
some sort of shadow organization. But, you know, who knows?
Garrett in Tennessee on the wildcard line.
You're on with Nick Pope.
Yes, sir.
First of all, Nick, let me say that I admire your loyalty to your organization.
Honestly, I think it's fantastic.
I've got a question for you about any knowledge you may have in regards to your work with space agencies and what's going on in our solar system currently.
Not to elaborate too much, I think we all kind of know the recent findings and it continues to unfold daily.
Any light you can shed on that by any chance?
I apologize for the train in the background.
Caller, with respect to what, specifically?
Well, with respect to this Planet X issue, with respect to the solar system experiencing global warming as a whole, with respect to... Okay, alright, I think we've got it.
There was a big deal about something called Planet X.
Which many have referred to, Nick, a planet, a rogue planet, that every now and then makes a close pass by Earth and causes gigantic Earth changes and disruptions.
Did you get any information on that sort of thing?
No, I didn't.
And I mean, I've seen, there's an awful lot of speculation on the Internet, of course, and I've seen people tying this in, perhaps, with 2012 and the Mayan end of days prophecies.
The return of Planet X. Every now and then we have scares about killer asteroids, the Doomsday Asteroid and such like.
I mean that's a real issue.
I'm not meaning to disparage anything on Planet X. I'm just saying on that that that's not something that I've looked into and it's certainly not anything that came my way.
Officially at the Ministry of Defense.
What I am involved with is an organization called Space Guard UK which does work on searching for near-Earth objects such as comets and asteroids and works to raise awareness about the threat from NEOs.
How much awareness do you have, Nick, of this object in 2036 that will either hit or come very close?
Oh, I mean, these stories just seem to crop up so regularly, and I mean, to me, on that, I know a lot of your listeners will howl me down for this, but I'll wait to see what NASA say on this.
I think, you know, I think they'll be honest if there's at delight danger of a a collision and they'll pay so and
and of course we'll get the resources and we'll do something about it and of
course there's been a recent initiative as you know
congress has said they're not satisfied with uh... with with really
uh... what what's been done on this issue in the united nations
uh... have have uh... i i think that to be a report that's going to the u n
well and and that's on and now that's on the threat generally and uh...
The specifics seem to change from week to week, depending on which scientists and astronomers you listen to.
Because, you know, they say that there's going to be a potential collision, then they have another look at the data and say, no, it's actually going to come nowhere near.
Okay.
John in Illinois, you're on with Nick Pope.
Good morning.
Hey Art, hey Nick.
I'm calling from Springfield.
Hey, Nick, I wanted to ask you, have you heard any reports from your Navy of any unexplained sonar contacts of, like, craft coming in and out of the water or off your coast?
Very few.
Now, partly, that's because our own reporting system tends to be, and this is obviously a mistake, but our reporting system for UFO encounters is configured primarily at the Air Force.
There have been some cases Involving the Navy.
Not so much a sonar report, but I'm familiar with a case involving a British naval exercise with other NATO countries involving one of our ships called HMS Manchester.
And this was an exercise that took place, I think, in Norwegian territorial waters.
There was apparently a very spectacular UFO encounter Even the former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Hill Norton, who took a great interest in the UFO issue, was not able to get to the bottom of this mystery.
After he left his post as Chief of the Defence Staff, he actually chaired NATO's Military Committee.
So some cases involving the Navy, but not as many as you would expect.
I've talked to some sailors who have had some just incredible stories, and I'm sure you've heard many of them.
Jason in Portland, Oregon.
You're on with Nick.
Hi.
Hello, Art.
Hello, Nick.
This is a great honor to speak with you tonight.
I appreciate you being on Coast to Coast.
Nick, I had a quick question.
I appreciate your honesty and even being straightforward with us when you're not able, for obvious reasons, to disclose things.
Thanks.
Ever become aware of, or even heard rumors of, any interaction between live extraterrestrial beings and humans?
Either government agencies, military, cooperation, you know, or held against their will, anything of that nature?
No, nothing whatsoever on that has come my way officially.
So the only The only information on that is the same information that I'm sure all of us have seen doing the rounds on the Internet and on various programs, but nothing has come my way through official channels to indicate that there's any interaction of that sort.
The abduction phenomenon?
Oh, well, now, abductions are a different ballgame.
I mean, I was drawn into the whole abduction mystery while I was on the UFO project and I did get one or
two cases.
They were generally cases where I could do little more than counsel the people and talk
things through.
I did have a speculative discussion about the sorts of things that we might do involving
monitoring of abductees' properties and things like that.
This has been one of the most interesting shows I've heard in a while.
there were resource issues and indeed legal privacy issues involved in that,
and that's something that unfortunately we could never follow up.
Okay. Lee in Columbus, Georgia, you're on with Nick Pope.
Hi.
Thank you, gentlemen, for this show. This has been one of the most interesting shows I've heard in a while.
I got a question. It's why do you feel the British government's being more open about
this than the American government?
Yeah.
That.
That's a good question and the honest answer is I don't know.
All I can do is say that I served for the uh... and certain the
the ministry defense for twenty one years and uh...
even though many conspiracy theories
theorists regard government and the military as uh...
somehow the bad guys in all of that there's not a person that i've worked with that i haven't
thought has has you know honesty integrity
uh... all those sorts of things that you would expect uh... particularly the military
people that i've worked with uh...
and and i'd just think that the you cannot hugely different from from anyone else
uh... people in the ministry defense were interested in the u f o mystery
and people i think if they have this information are genuinely committed to
open government people's right to know at the british government the ministry defense is making
great effort to try and disclose as much as possible i
I can't speak for the American government, so I can't really do a comparative analysis.
Do you think that Tom Lovercombe and the American government will be more open about the phenomena?
Well, again, I can't speak for them, so the honest answer is I don't know, but what I can say is that Because the British government is pressing ahead, because, for example, the French National Space Agency is pressing ahead, every time somebody else discloses, obviously it puts more pressure on those that still have information to disclose.
So I think, you know, watch this space.
Nick, there's quite a body of thinking out here, and I'm probably in that body, that believes that these things are real, that they are traversing our skies, and that our governments, collectively, can't do anything about it.
And a government that can't do anything about something is not about to openly discuss it with those they represent, because that's an obvious weakness.
I think that's a very perceptive analysis, and it accords with my own thoughts.
The one thing that governments never like to do is to expose a situation where they're disempowered.
That's absolutely spot on.
Joe, in Detroit, Michigan, you have arrived with Nick Pope.
Hi.
Hi there.
Hey, I was wondering if your guest could speak more about the officer that was in the field that actually Walked up and touched the skin of this craft.
You're talking about Rendlesham?
Yes.
This is Jim Penniston.
So if you search for him on the internet, you'll probably find quite a lot.
You can also, at my own website, which is nickpope.net, if you go to the selected documents, You can read his witness statement on that website.
You can see the sketch that he did of the craft.
You can see the symbols that he sketched.
That's nickpope.net, right?
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure I've got those witness statements up.
If I haven't, they're easy to find.
Like I say, Jim Penniston Rendlesham.
There's absolutely stacks of information.
Okay.
Your books, Open Skies, Closed Minds, and The Uninvited.
How old are these books now?
They're about 10 years old.
So, in fact, much has changed, including some of my own views since I wrote them.
But they still, I hope, give a good overview of both the UFO phenomenon and the alien abduction mystery.
What views, that's an interesting point to follow up on, what's really changed since those books in your thought process, Nick?
Well, I think it's, I would say that my thought process is always evolutionary and I hope I, you know, certain cases that maybe I attached weight to are now less significant and vice versa.
I mean, I think particularly information, a lot of new information on the Rendlesham case has come out since I wrote that book, both in terms of people speaking out who were involved in the case and documentation.
So I think, in a sense, the case for UFOs being something more than weather balloons is stronger than it was when I wrote that book.
I should say.
Beverly in Ohio.
You're on with Nick Pope.
Good morning.
Hi.
Hi.
I have a question.
I think I had an experience.
I'm not sure.
This happened a couple years ago.
And I worked late.
My job, I would come home like around three in the morning.
And coming home, I would have to go about two miles down a stretch that was, you know, no houses, no lights, no nothing, just trees and, you know, hills and This one night I'm coming home and I'm talking to my girlfriend on my cell phone, which keeps me company, you know, driving home, and all of a sudden my car died.
And my cell phone died.
And I'm looking around and of course I'm in pitch black darkness, except there is this like a light, kind of like a dull light, nothing bright or, you know, around my car and I look up to see if you know it's the moon or whatever and there's no moon there's no stars except for one what I thought was one bright star and of course the longer I looked at it it seemed to be moving and I didn't know if it was you know a trick of my eyes because of the dark and and whatever and so then I just sat there
What I thought was a couple minutes just looking around, you know, my car to make sure nobody was coming near it or whatever.
And then all of a sudden my cell phone rang and my car lights and everything went back on.
And it was my girlfriend saying, where have you been?
What happened?
And I said, why?
I said, you know, it's only a couple of minutes.
She said, I've been trying to call you for two hours.
Here I had been sitting there for two hours.
Two hours.
Two hours of missing time.
And even at this point, you have no recollection of anything that occurred during those two hours?
No.
Nothing.
Well, that's a fascinating story.
Absolutely fascinating.
It is.
And, of course, the fact that the cell phone died and the car stopped is very interesting, and there have been a number of so-called car stop cases, which is suggestive, perhaps, of the fact that there's an electromagnetic field involved in relation to the UFOs that can do this, whether by accident or design, we don't know.
As to what happened in In the period of missing time, well, you know, people I guess like Bud Hopkins and Dave Jacobs and such like would suggest that possibly an abduction experience had taken place.
Possibly some regressive hypnotic therapy.
Find out what really did happen.
I'd sure want to know.
I think that's the sort of thing where you might want to do a little bit of research, you might want to contact people like the Mutual UFO Network, the Intruders Foundation.
Do a little bit of research and have a think about it, but it sounds intriguing, whatever happened.
All right.
Now, Joe in Georgia, you're on the air with Nick Pope.
Hi there.
Yeah, I'm in Roswell, Georgia.
There was an article on Yahoo yesterday, the ex-defense minister from Canada demanded that the Canadian government expose information about fuels that they've learned about from contacts with aliens.
That's quite right.
Do you know anything more about that?
Yes, I do.
I mean, this, of course, is Paul Hellyer, and in fact, yes, former Canadian Minister of Defence, and indeed someone who I had the honour of meeting last year and having a discussion about UFOs and various other issues.
He is genuinely interested in the UFO phenomenon.
He is convinced from a number of governmental and military sources that Roswell is real.
It happened pretty much as believers say and that there is therefore information about this and about associated technologies uh... which someone somewhere presumably in america
uh... and is not really thing so you would say next spot on for him because uh... with
the state of the world right now
what's going on in the globe if we don't come up with something pretty soon
we're gonna be drowning in our own should've sewage
And on that cheery note, Nick, we're out of time.
We've got to go.
Listen, it has been, again, such a pleasure to have you on the air.
You're an excellent guest, Nick.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, and thanks to all your listeners.
That's it.
Good night, Nick, and for everybody else, see you tomorrow night.
Everybody have a good night from the high desert.
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