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Jan. 5, 2012 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:36
Edition 74 - UFOs In Wartime

Howard talks with American author Mack Maloney who has written UFOs – in Wartime – What TheyDidnt Want You To Know. Mack is a journalist who once worked as a Press Officer for one of the biggestcompanies in the world and his research is fascinating and extensive.

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the Return of the Unexplained.
And it's a return after four or five weeks away.
I'm really sorry that I haven't been able to be here over that period.
I think it's the longest gap we've ever had and I do apologize.
Very good reason for it.
If you've got my message online on Christmas Day, it's because just before Christmas, my father was taken very seriously ill with a severe stroke.
He is now in respite care, despite the fact that he's going up in years.
He made it through it, but the road back to recovery is going to be a long and difficult one for him.
He's having speech therapy, movement therapy, just about every kind of therapy.
But right now, he's in a respite home at Southport in northwest England, and we're all praying for him.
And thank you very much for your good thoughts and your good wishes and your own personal stories that you were kind enough to tell me.
It means a very great deal to me.
Thank you so much that the show that I'm doing here means something in your life and the fact that clearly I do.
Thank you.
You know, a lot of you are never even going to meet, but we are part of a family here in a way and thank you very, very much.
Thank you also to my very supportive webmaster, Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who gets the show out to you.
Now, if you want to make contact with me, to make a donation to the show, to leave me feedback, to make me a guest suggestion, go to the website www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
By the way, Martin, who did our theme tune, been a long time since we've been in touch, Martin, but happy 2012 to you, my friend.
I hope it's all okay.
Now, the show you're about to hear is one that was literally set up in about three hours.
This morning I got up and I thought, okay, time to get the unexplained rolling again.
I've got a couple of days off work, so let's do this.
And I checked my emails to find one from a guy called Mac Maloney near Boston in the US, who's written a book, it's out in paperback in Penguin books, called UFOs in Wartime, What They Don't Want You to Know.
That title grabbed me from the start, and then I read more about this book, and I thought, got to get this guy on.
So I emailed him and I said, are you available in Boston today?
And it turned out he was, and he's about to come on this show.
So that's what we're going to do this time.
As I say, if you have any ideas for shows that we can get into in the future, please let me know.
Go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, and I will put in bids.
I will try to get the people on and I will action your requests because this is your show.
Right, let's get to Boston, United States, and talk now to Mac Maloney, who is a journalist and author.
Mac, thank you for coming on the show.
Well, thanks for having me, Howard.
Now, before we get into talk of UFOs and why wartime stories of UFOs and military combat stories of UFOs may have been covered up by somebody over the years, tell me about you, because you've got a journalistic background, haven't you?
Right.
I went to, I grew up in Boston and I went to high school and then college for journalism.
And then I went on to get a graduate degree in filmmaking from Emerson College in Boston.
But the first job I got after leaving college was as a sports writer.
So I was a sportswriter for a couple of years and then I actually was a PR guy for a General Electric Company for a few years and just didn't like that at all.
So when I had the opportunity to start writing books full-time about 20 years ago, I jumped at it and I've been writing books full-time ever since.
So you didn't like working for the man?
I didn't like working for the man.
And that was a pretty big man.
General Electric is a pretty big man.
As big as they get, really.
You're a prolific writer, too.
According to your biography here, you've written 30 books.
It's more like close to 40.
You're supposed to stop counting after 20, someone told me once.
But it's pretty close to 40.
And most of them have been military fiction with a few science fiction books thrown in.
But you're telling me that this book about UFOs, UFOs in wartime, what they didn't want you to know, you're telling me this is a work of fact.
It's not faction.
No, it's non-fiction.
It all started, I was having lunch with my editor one day, and, you know, I was obviously into military stuff, but I was always interested in UFOs too as a kid.
And somehow, just one day, the two genres kind of crossed in my mind.
And I thought, you know, it seems like there's a lot more UFO reports when, you know, during wartime and when we're getting ready for war.
And I just happened to mention that to him.
And he said, you know, that might be a good idea to do a book on, but, you know, it would be a non-fiction book.
And so we just, you know, kicked around the idea for a while.
And then, you know, two years later, here we are.
It is a great topic for a book because over the years I've talked to a lot of UFO people at every level from Stanton Friedman onwards.
I've had them all on here over the years, both on the radio show and on this online show.
And all of them peripherally or tangentially mention these wartime sightings, wartime experiences, flu fighters, all the rest of it.
But I don't think there have been that many people doing pieces of work about this specific subject.
So you've found a real niche, I think.
Well, like I said, I just kind of stumbled upon it.
And I thought at first that maybe, well, the book mostly details encounters with UFOs in the 20th century.
And I thought, well, maybe because since aerial warfare started in the early 20th century and there are planes in the air and there's more opportunity for people to see things flying in the air, more opportunities for people on the ground looking up into the sky, I thought it might be something like that.
But as we did the research and as we went along, it really changed.
My opinion changed and it really kind of got me to the point where I thought, you know, it looks like these things are watching us as we are at war or preparing to go to war.
Or might potentially have been somehow involved in the process of our getting into war.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
Now, one of the things about UFOs in wartime, certainly thinking of it from a British perspective, is, of course, we were afraid of being invaded by the Germans in World War II.
So we devoted a lot of our resources to scanning the skies, not only military people doing that, but getting civilians to do it.
Lots of eyes turned on the skies.
But militating against any reports of UFO sightings was the tremendous, and the same in America too, I would imagine, tremendous tide of secrecy that was so much a part of our lives and maybe still is now.
Well, that's for sure.
I mean, there's an incident Where there was a UFO appeared over Los Angeles in February of 1942, where they figured that at the time there were 2 million people living in Los Angeles and at least a million people saw it.
And we go into detail in the book about it, and there's a photograph in the book that we used as a permission from the New York Times.
I mean, the Los Angeles Times gave us permission to use this photo that shows this flying saucer caught in searchlights and being shot at by anti-aircraft guns and so on and so forth.
No one ever figured out exactly what this was.
And as you say, the secrecy took over like two days later when, because we were at war at the time, Pearl Harbor had only happened a few months before, and military censorship just clamped down on this story.
And it still has never been investigated, but it's still probably the largest witnessed UFO sighting of all time, yet very few people in the United States even know about it.
Presumably, a number of alternative explanations were put up for this.
What were they?
Well, some of them were really more fantastic than a UFO.
I mean, the Army at one time thought that what these objects that had appeared over Los Angeles were airliners, actually bombers disguised as airliners being launched from a secret Japanese base in Mexico.
And, you know, that sounds like a really bad movie to me.
Sounds like a hell of a stretch to believe that.
Right, right.
But at one time, that was their official line on this.
The Army and the Navy were at each other's throats the day after this incident happened because the Navy wanted to say that nothing happened.
And the Army wanted to say, and the Army did say, something happened.
We just don't know what it was.
What they do know is that there were no American planes in the skies that night.
There were no barrage balloons or anything like that.
These things were picked up on radar.
They were seen by, as I say, at least a million civilians, seen by many police officials, a lot of reporters.
We go into detail with a lot of quotes from the reporters on scene at the time.
There was a battle that went on for more than two hours, anti-aircraft guns firing up at these things because there was a lot of defense plants in L.A. at the time and they were ringed with anti-aircraft guns, a lot of civil defense in the city, a lot of military in the city.
And there was so much anti-aircraft fire shot at this thing that six people on the ground died from falling ordnance.
That is astonishing.
That really is astonishing.
And a lot of damage, too, a lot of property damage.
But once it was over, and the Army and the Navy basically started fighting, arguing with each other what had happened, the military census just came in, put a clamp on it, and then we went on to other things because we were just in the opening days really of World War II, at least in the United States.
And there were a lot of people who thought that the Japanese were going to physically invade the West Coast.
But later on, once the war was over, U.S. military officials asked the Japanese specifically, did you have any aircraft over Los Angeles on this particular night?
And they said, no, in fact, they didn't have the capability to bring an aircraft carrier that close to the Pacific coast or whatever.
So whatever it was, a million people saw it.
They have a photograph of it.
They even have film footage of it, but no one ever figured out exactly what it was.
Of course, one of the problems is, and especially in the era that we live in now, we can't be sure what they, in other words, the government, has that they don't tell us about.
You just think about the case of the stealth fighter.
That was kept under wraps for years until they eventually revealed it to us.
So there is a possibility that even way back then, there was something, some technology that they had access to.
And, you know, where did they get that technology from?
Well, that's a whole other question that they weren't about to tell us about.
Right.
I mean, that's true.
I mean, the question people have asked me now since the book has come out is, you know, what do you think the U.S. military knows?
And I can say that I am 100% sure that they know more than they're telling us.
But exactly what is it that they know?
Do they know what UFOs are and they're keeping that from us?
Or is it that they don't know what they are and they're keeping that from us?
You know, it's kind of like 50-50.
Obviously, they know more than they're letting on, but exactly what they know, that's the question.
It is the question, and it's a question that has rung down the decades, I would guess.
For me, and you're a journalist, I'm a journalist too.
The greatest material you can get is direct from the source.
So when you talk about that Los Angeles case, I'm presuming there are still some people alive who might have talked about this.
And have any of them talked to you if that's the case?
I received a, the majority of the information on the LA case I got from other sources, people who have really spent a lot of their time looking into various UFO incidents.
In fact, I should say up front that I don't really consider myself a UFO researcher.
I consider myself a journalist, as you just said.
I feel like I'm a reporter who was able to kind of take pieces of information and research that other people did and line it up in a chronological order to make the case that, you know, UFOs are more prevalent in wartime or when we're getting ready to go to war.
But I did receive an email from a gentleman whose father was an air raid warden during this LA UFO attack.
And he told me that what people were doing afterwards were they were picking up pieces of charred metal and twisted burnt metal that had fallen to the ground.
And they were trading these things because they thought that the U.S. had shot down a UFO or shot down whatever this thing was over LA.
And they were actually thinking that this was the debris from it.
This gentleman told me that his father picked up a piece of the debris and then traded it to their local mechanic in exchange for the mechanic getting the father's car running again.
Wow.
So it became currency in a way.
So some of this stuff might have ended up as the tail fin of a Ford car somewhere.
Who knows?
And do we know anything about that material?
Well, I think probably most of it was, you know, was expended anti-aircraft shells that, you know, once, I mean, when you fire an anti-aircraft shell into the air, if it doesn't hit anything, it's going to come back down again.
And that's how, you know, the six people were killed and a lot of property damage happened.
There were no American planes in the air that night because they were afraid to send them up because the sky was just filled with this AA fire.
So it was probably, I'm going to think that probably all of that material that came down was expended AA shells.
Now, one of the interesting things, Mac, to look at is how media report these things.
Because if a few days elapse or a couple of years elapse, you get people interpreting things, you get the veil of secrecy dropping down.
So sometimes with a lot of these phenomena, to call them that for the want of another phrase, it's much better to look at what the media is saying right at the start.
What was the media in Los Angeles saying about this at the beginning?
Well, they said a lot, as it turned out.
I think at the time, Los Angeles had six daily newspapers, and the night that this happened, they had reporters all over Los Angeles.
A lot of them were on the roofs of buildings.
A lot of them were accompanied by police officials and military officials.
And we go into the book extensively on some of the quotes that came out of that.
These people were seeing through, a lot of them were using high-powered binoculars.
They saw these objects flying over Los Angeles.
Some were reported in chevron formations.
They were reported to be discs round.
They were not airplanes.
And these reporters were all throughout the city basically seeing the same thing.
And then, of course, the ultimate sighting was this large UFO right over Los Angeles that was caught in the photograph by the Los Angeles Times.
They still own the photo, and they gave us permission to use it in the book, where this large object is caught in the searchlights and in anti-aircraft fire hovering over Los Angeles.
So it was well covered by the media at the time that it happened and the next day.
But then probably two days later, I'm going to say, the military census just clamped down on the story and very little of it about it came out after that.
And this is where we come to a great big contrast with the time that we're living in now, because we would like to think that if something like that happened in this day and age, it will be much, much harder to keep the lid on it.
It would be impossible with everyone walking around with cameras in their phones and things of that nature, and where there are video cameras now just everywhere.
I think it would be impossible to keep something like this under wraps like they did in Los Angeles, but it was a different time.
What do you believe this was?
Well, I think it's what we call a UFO.
I mean, if you just take away all the kind of explanations that the military try to come up with, you know, at the end of the day, there's a saucer-shaped object caught in a photograph over Los Angeles, and it looks like nothing other than a flying saucer.
And with this particular phenomenon, were there any effects observed on the ground?
I'm thinking about classic UFO stories, classic abduction stories, even like Betty and Barney Hill, where cars stop and electrical objects cease to function as they did.
Anything like that reported?
Nothing that I saw.
The city was in blackout, but I didn't see anything about cars stopping or any kind of electromagnetic pulse or anything along those lines.
No.
So we're brought to the fascinating premise here that something from somewhere, assuming this technology wasn't ours and we just didn't know about it, or we back-engineered something from somewhere else, something from somewhere wanted to be in Los Angeles or over Los Angeles at this crucial time in American history, in world history.
It seems that way, you know, and it seems that that happens a lot, actually.
I mean, this was obviously a huge sighting if more than a million people saw it.
But all throughout World War II, these UFOs, or they called them Foo Fighters back then, were just showing up during bombing raids over Europe, during military action in the Pacific.
They're not trying to hide themselves from us.
A lot of people are under the impression that UFOs try to hide themselves from us.
They don't.
They're there right in plain view a lot of times, and especially during times of war.
This Los Angeles case, the question I should ask and should have asked earlier on, really, this phenomenon appeared, but when a thing appears, it has to disappear.
And it either disappears gradually or it disappears snapping a finger all at once.
As far as you're aware, how did this thing disappear?
It did not go in the snap of a finger.
They just flew off.
They flew over the city.
They were continuously flying over the city, and then they just flew away.
Almost sounds like close encounters of the third kind, doesn't it?
Something passing slowly over your head.
Well, you know, the strange thing is that we can blame Steven Spielberg for the reason that this isn't a larger story.
And because he did a movie called 1942, which was about this.
They took it from the perspective that this was a Japanese air raid or that everyone thought it was a Japanese air raid and no one really figured out exactly what it was.
But 1942 is kind of like Animal House with airplanes.
And it's a comedy.
Not a really good movie.
But anyone who saw it, you know, if that's their perspective of history of what happened, they're just going to think that it was just this fast.
What they should do is do a really good movie about exactly what happened, then I think people would pay more attention to it.
The difficulty is you're trying to look at something that is more than six decades ago.
Right, that's true.
A lot of people involved in it are no longer here.
Those who are here may not want to talk about it, may not even be able to remember it.
And that is always the difficulty when you get that fog of time descending on things.
Look at the difficulty they had trying to reinvestigate the shooting of JFK, for example.
Right, exactly.
So that is always going to be the problem that you face.
Now, you've talked to a lot of people when researching this new book.
I'm wondering if any of those people perhaps worked for the alphabet agencies, you know, the Secret Service.
The unnamed three-letter government agencies, you mean?
Yeah, the ones we don't talk about, yeah.
Right.
Yes, I talked to people who work for those agencies, but it was strictly on background, strictly anecdotal.
These people and people who work for the military, and as an extension of that, a lot of airline pilots who are former military pilots, they'll tell you stories, you know, that will really open your eyes.
But a lot of them just will not do it on the record.
And it's the same with the people who work for these agencies.
They, along with the U.S. military, I'm sure of it, know much more than they're letting on.
And frankly, I think that not telling us everything they know is really, it's almost criminal in a way.
Because, you know, if UFOs come from outer space or another time or another dimension, you know, we should be able to know that.
The human race should be able to know that because it would be an incredible discovery, one of the biggest discoveries in the history of mankind.
And if they're keeping that from us, they're really doing us a really large disservice.
True enough.
Now, without giving away the contents of your book, you said that some of these people had told you things.
And when you use the phrase off the record to a journalist, we both know what that means.
But nevertheless, you can still cover the story.
You just can't source it to a named individual.
So I'm wondering what the more hair-raising and eyebrow-raising stories that you've been told of that kind are.
Well, they confirmed stories that we got from other sources and other research that the whole incidence of UFO incursions over U.S. ICBM plants, I mean, ICBM bases, are just unbelievable.
I mean, we had, in 1962, we had what was called the Cuban Missile Crisis here in the United States.
And, you know, that was a scary couple weeks where the Russians had put missiles in Cuba and threatened to fire them at the United States.
And the United States threatened to then bombard Russia with nuclear weapons.
So that was over in two weeks.
But shortly after that, another missile crisis started in this country that not many people know about.
And that is that as soon as they started installing ICBMs in the middle of the U.S., into these vast open plains of South Dakota, North Dakota, and Colorado, UFOs started showing up over these bases.
And infrequently, they would fly over these silos.
They would put the missiles deep underground.
The UFOs would fly over these silos.
And as a result of them flying over, the power would be turned off.
In some cases, the missiles' tiling systems were affected.
In some cases, the missiles themselves were affected.
Are there warheads done something to there is nothing more scary, is there, if you've got intercontinental ballistic missiles there on the ground, which suddenly appear to be under the control of someone or something else?
That's right.
And then there's a case that we talk about in the book where in the Ukraine, it happened in the 80s, where UFO showed up over what was then a Soviet ICBM base and started the launch procedure.
And there was nothing the people in the base could do about it.
And finally, thank God, it stopped at 20 seconds before launch.
These things, I mean, if you really look at them objectively, let's say, it seems like someone's trying to warn us about something.
But as you say, the message they're definitely giving to us is that we can control these things.
And as far as the U.S. ICBM basis, I mean, it's probably the longest chapter in the book.
There's just incident after incident over the past 15 years, actually in the 60s and 70s.
And now I hear lately that it's actually happening again, where these ruffles will show up over these things and affect what's going on in these underground silos that contain these ICBM missiles.
It's really pretty scary.
And there are many people who've made various extrapolations over the years, usually along the lines of they are a superior intelligence.
They see us finally having the power to destroy the entire planet, which perhaps is not in their script.
And they want to come and make sure, number one, that doesn't happen, and also to see just how much we do know and how we're using that technology.
Well, yeah, I think, you know, if when I started researching this book and I heard that theory, I mean, I had heard that theory before, whether I took it as seriously as I do now, I don't know, but I do take that very seriously now.
It just seems to be an exercise in giving us a message and letting us know that they can control these things.
You know, it leads to actually what my theory of these things are, which I'll tell you.
I don't really necessarily think they're extraterrestrials.
I think that there's a good case to be made, and I'm not the first one to come up with this, but I think there's a good case to be made that these are actually time travelers from our own future.
And they're coming back to see history as it's being made.
And maybe, you know, to prevent us from blowing us all up.
There's just a lot of evidence that kind of points in that direction.
You know, and I always use the example of if you have a vehicle, let's go back to the Foo Fighters for a second.
Some of these Foo Fighters were described as these amazing flying machines that could just move at incredible speeds and maneuver and so on and so forth.
If you had the technology to build such a machine, why would you fly 200 feet off the wing of a Lancaster bomber while it's bombing Berlin in the middle of the night, unless you wanted to see history as it was being made?
So that's a theory that I'm coming around to, that there are people from our own future coming back to see history.
They might even be tourists.
A lot of people, especially in this country, always equate flying saucers and UFOs with little green men from Mars.
But it doesn't necessarily have to be that.
I think there are a lot of people saying that these days, that maybe we even left this planet, we went somewhere else.
We had separate developments and a long way away.
Us, a variant of us, is out there, has technology that we can't even conceive of and wants to come back here and see how we did things.
And maybe, as you say, it could even be tourism.
It could be tourism because I use this example, too.
You know, if you won a safari today, for instance, okay, what would you do?
You would have to fly a long distance down to Africa.
They would put you on a truck with a camera and you would go out into the Serengeti and you would see the lions eating the antelopes and the crocodiles eating this and that.
And these animals would see you, but they couldn't conceive what a truck is, what a tourist is, what a camera is.
So they just go on their daily lives, go about what they do every day.
But you'd be there watching them.
Well, in a way, UFOs could be the same thing where we see them all the time.
I mean, they're all around us all the time.
And I think several hundred or even a thousand are reported every day around the world.
They're not trying to hide, but we can't conceive what they are.
So we just go along with our daily lives.
And so, you know, just like there's a tourist in the Serengeti watching the animals in Africa go about doing their thing.
Maybe that's what UFOs are doing to us.
Who knows?
That's your theory.
You're not alone.
I've thought of this one too over the years.
What about the people you've talked to?
Some of those people who don't want To be named, who you talk to for research on this book.
Do they concur with that?
I think a lot of the people in the military and that will talk about things like this, ex-military and also the intelligence agencies, I think the groupthink, if there is a groupthink among them, I think that they believe they're extraterrestrials.
And I think the reason for that is that back in 1947, after Kenneth Arnold first saw, you know, what he reported seeing nine UFOs over Mount Rainier in Washington state.
And later on, when he talked to the press, he said that they were like saucers skipping across the water.
And that's where the term flying saucer came from.
But when that happened, there was flying saucers all of a sudden seen all over the United States.
And the military, for the first time, got involved in looking into this because they thought maybe these are Russian secret weapons or whatever.
And so the Air Force ordered a section of the Air Force called the ATIC to look into what UFOs were.
Now, six months, they did a six-month study and they came back and they reported to the Pentagon that UFOs were real and that these things were not someone's imagination.
They're not from Russia.
They're from somewhere else.
Well, the Pentagon being what it is, it was an answer they did not want to hear.
So they told these people to go back for another six months, do another study.
And come up with another answer.
Come up with another answer.
And they did.
And the answer they came up with was that, you know, UFOs are the result of hallucinations of people who are deluded or religious fanatics or hoaxes or whatever.
They were everything but extraterrestrials.
But the thing is, is that there was that original report, and you know that a lot of people saw that, and maybe a lot of people still see it today.
And that planted in the mind of the military, and I think the intelligence services, that if these things, if there's any explanation for them, they are extraterrestrials.
And I think that is, like I say, the groupthink of people in that position now.
I didn't hear anyone, I didn't talk to anyone in the military or the intel services who said, gee, these things might be time machines.
I think they think that they are ETs.
Now, there's a thing in America called the military-industrial complex, and the government is somehow connected to all of that in ways that are sometimes not revealed to the public.
How much do you think that, for example, the office of the president has over the years known about this stuff?
Well, they say that when someone becomes president, that they're told three or four things that keeps them up at night.
And whether UFOs is one of those things, I don't know.
I have had people tell me, people connected with the Intel services, is that, and again, this isn't the first time anyone said that, said this, is that when it comes to the subject of UFOs, there's probably a department somewhere deep in the Pentagon, mid-level, that keeps an eye on these things, keeps track of sightings, who knows what they do as far as investigating them.
But it goes no higher than that for a good reason.
That reason is that everyone from the general zen on up right through the White House can say, I don't know anything about these things because they don't know anything about these things because they don't want to know about these things.
It gives it plausible deniability.
That's the phrase, isn't it?
We've used it on this show before.
You know just as much as you need to know.
If you knew any more, you might have to put yourself in a compromising position and you wouldn't want to do that.
That's right.
And, you know, I don't know if you've heard about this, but there was a petition last month.
A petition was given to the Obama White House by a number of people, 25,000 people signed this petition.
And the question was, does the U.S. government have any knowledge of extraterrestrials, contact with extraterrestrials?
And Obama had one of his kind of low-level scientific advisors come out and say, no, we don't.
But I think that that petition, the question was worded wrong.
I think what they should have said was, does the U.S. government have any evidence of contact with intelligent life forms other than human beings?
I think you might, maybe get a different answer to that.
But again, getting back to what does the president know?
What do people in the Pentagon know?
Everyone thinks that the President of the United States is privy to all national security secrets.
And that's not true because they're going to come and go.
They're either going to be here four years or eight years.
And there's some stuff that they don't know, some stuff that they're not told.
Maybe UFOs are one of those things.
How will we ever know unless one of them comes out and tells us directly?
But George W. Bush, towards the end of his reign, took an interest in space.
Obama has taken an inordinate interest in space.
And there are those who say they're not going to be doing that for nothing.
It's not just part of racing the Chinese or the Indians into space.
There is more to this than meets the eye.
And the fact that the Chinese and the Indians are both interested in space means that they know something too.
Well, that could very well be.
I mean, you know, Obama, you would think that he was someone who would kind of, you know, low-key things with NASA and things of that nature.
And he just was unlucky enough to be in office when the space shuttle fleet became, you know, so old that it almost became obsolete.
But they do spend a lot of money and time, you know, on things having to do with outer space.
The Air Force has a secret robot space shuttle, they call it a space plane, that's been orbiting the Earth since March.
Very few people know about this.
No one knows what this thing does.
It looks like a miniature space shuttle, and it's unmanned, of course.
No one knows what this thing does.
It could be a reconnaissance thing.
It could be some kind of military applications.
I also saw the other day that there are satellites up there that specifically up there to look for nuclear detonations on Earth, but they also are able to see fireballs coming in from outer space and whatever they may be, meteorites or pieces of asteroids or space junk.
Now, formally, whenever one of these satellites would pick up this information, it would be just freely passed around to the scientific community.
But I just read the other day that there's an embargo now on information about fireballs picked up by U.S. satellites of stuff falling to Earth.
So, you know, why would that be?
I mean, I look at this thing as a huge jigsaw puzzle.
And every once in a while, we get a piece here, a piece there, and sometimes it doesn't fit here, but it fits there.
And eventually, hopefully, all these pieces Will fit together and we'll know what the answer is.
But when that will happen, you know, who knows?
I hope it happens in our lifetime, but, you know, I mean, there's no way of knowing.
And as you hint, it is very disturbing to think that the American military has reconnaissance out there in space that we're not supposed to know about.
It does beg all kinds of questions about what do they want that for.
You know, is it just simply to keep an eye on what the Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese, whoever wants to go into space might be doing?
Or is it keeping an eye on something else?
And if that's what they want to do, why do they have to keep it so secret?
Well, that's the question, isn't it?
I mean, nothing that has to do with NASA or space exploration should be kept secret.
But we know that there's a lot of transcripts from astronauts in orbit, you know, during the heyday of NASA that are classified.
There's a special switch that NASA would use where you can hear astronauts saying, we're going to switch over to number eight or something like that.
And they would flip that switch and everything that was spoken in that communication became classified.
So, yeah, you ask a good question.
Why would any kind of space exploration be classified unless it had to do with something they don't want us to know?
You talk in the book about the Roswell incident, but you don't come at it from a perspective that perhaps a lot of researchers have come to it from.
And that's almost the perspective of believing the thing from the start.
That's not what you came out with, yeah?
Right.
I mean, I looked into the Roswell thing a lot, and I'd been interested in it for many years.
In fact, in the 90s, there was a group who wanted to go down to Roswell and do an archaeological study on the area where the debris was found.
And I thought, boy, that's a great idea, because who knows what you would find if you did it in a real scientific method.
And if you did it with today's equipment, which of course they didn't have 60-odd years ago.
Right, right.
But, you know, just looking at it, and I know that when I was reading UFO books as a kid in the 60s, there was never any mention of Roswell.
And Roswell all of a sudden burst back on the scene in the late 70s and early 80s.
And then I just look at the photographs of the famous photographs.
And when you match up that debris with the pictures of, I mean, what the alternate story is, is that the U.S. was launching spy balloons that had listening devices on them, and they would float over the Soviet Union to see if the Russians were exploding nuclear bombs.
And that what really crashed in Roswell was one of these spy balloons, and that the debris came from what they called the kite's tail, which was the thing that would kind of control the balloon on its flight.
And when you look at the debris that they found, and then you look at what was on these kite tails, you can almost match it up exactly.
And then just all the kind of really fantastic stories that came out afterwards, and now there's people saying that dozens of flying saucers crashed there, and there's dozens of alien boys.
I just don't buy it.
I just don't think anything happened there, really, other than this spy balloon crashing.
And there was a cover-up, but the cover-up was they didn't want people to know that we were spying on the Soviet Union with these balloons.
So I'm not saying that there isn't some crash flying saucer that's been recovered by the U.S. or some other country that's hidden away somewhere.
I just don't think it happened in Roswell.
Do you believe that America, maybe other countries, maybe even the UK, has stuff that's been recovered, is keeping it secret somewhere, maybe even has alien bodies or even aliens themselves hidden away?
Alien bodies, I don't know.
That's really a stretch.
Do they have things in their possession that they don't know what they are or where they came from?
I would believe something like that is possible, yes.
But nobody that you've talked to has told you anything about that or wants to.
No one mentioned anything about alien bodies to me, no.
Of all the cases that you looked at, and this book covers a hell of a span of time from 1909 to about a decade or so ago, what is the most eyebrow-raising case perhaps outside the United States that you can talk about?
Well, there was an incident off the coast of Canada in 1956, which to me it's one of the very eyebrow-raising.
Basically, what happened was that there was a U.S. Navy transport plane carrying troops and military personnel back from Europe to the United States.
They were at the end of their tours.
And they were about 90 miles off of Newfoundland when the pilot happened to see a bunch of lights out in front of him on the surface of the ocean.
And at first, what he thought was that they were wildly off course and he was looking down on a city.
But then they checked with the navigator.
The navigator said, no, we're right on course.
So now the question is, what are all these lights about?
So it just so happened that some of the people who were the passengers in the plane were also aircrew, people who flew airplanes.
So the pilot asks for all the aircrew members to come up into the cockpit.
And if you can imagine, all these people are jammed into this cockpit.
Now it's the middle of the night.
And they're looking down on these lights.
So you've got a cockpit full of observers.
Exactly, right.
And so as this is happening, all of a sudden these lights break into rings.
And one of these rings comes flying up at this airplane and was on it.
The airplane was almost five miles high and was on it in eight seconds.
And it turned out to be this enormous flying salsa, 600 feet long, 30 feet thick.
And now, as you say, you have all these trained observers looking at this thing.
It ran, it flew alongside the airplane for about a minute or so, and then it took off at tremendous speed.
Now, the airplane, obviously everyone in the airplane is kind of shaken by this.
They call ahead to Ganda Air Force Base in Newfoundland and ask, did you see anything on the radar?
And as it turns out, they did see something on the radar.
The plane finally lands.
There's U.S. intelligence officers there from the Air Force to debrief everyone on the airplane.
They do that, and then the airplane then goes on to its eventual destination, which is Pax River down in Maryland, the Pax River Naval Air Station.
And it lands.
A couple weeks later, the pilot is contacted by a scientist who's working for one of these unnamed three-letter U.S. intelligence agencies and says, I would like to talk to you.
So the pilot agrees.
The Navy gives the pilot the okay to talk to the scientist.
The scientist and he meet, and the scientist basically asks him about the incident again.
And then at the end of this interview, he pulls out a portfolio of photographs, and there's a dozen of Them and he says, point to the photograph of the object that you saw.
And the pilot is just amazed that there's a dozen photographs here of different kinds of UFOs.
And I think he said the third photograph was exactly what they saw.
And he says, it's that one.
But he says, no, I want you to tell me how do you have these photographs.
And he says the scientist didn't say another word.
He just packed up his stuff and left.
Now, there's an incident where, as you say, you had a lot of trained observers seeing this huge object.
I mean, they're not in a position of perpetuating a hoax at the time, which is what we get into the book a lot is a lot of these people, especially who saw Foo Fighters, they're over these German cities.
They're bombing German cities.
Fighters are attacking them.
AA fire is being shot at them.
They're not about to come up with a UFO hoax at that moment.
They're fighting for their lives at the moment.
Well, almost the same thing.
These people run this airplane.
They're all trained observers.
Why would they come up with a hoax?
And this thing was also spotted on radar.
And now you have this scientist who has photos of these things.
So it goes back to what I was mentioning before, is that the U.S. military and the intelligence services, they have to know more about these things than they're letting on.
But the question is, is what do they know?
And the other thing that occurs to me is that this story got out there, because we're talking about it now.
How many stories didn't get out there or didn't fully get out there or were put out there in some form and laughed at, officially ridiculed, rubbished or whatever?
Right.
Well, that is especially true when it comes to the Foo Fighters, because when British bomber crews started seeing these things, you know, right after the bombing campaign against Germany began, they would come back and they would be debriefed.
And the debriefing officers would listen to their stories about the Foo Fighters, but they wouldn't take any action on them.
And very slowly, it turned out that the mindset became that if you start reporting these things, you're going to be ridiculed.
Like sometimes the crews are asked, well, were you drinking during the mission and things like that.
So the message was pretty clear.
You know, probably don't talk about these things if you want your reputation to be intact.
Now, there's almost a reason for that, and I can almost understand it.
The primary mission of the Allied bombing command, both the U.S. and the British at the time, was to defeat Germany.
And they really didn't have the time or the wherewithal to try to figure out what these strange things that were trailing our aircraft were.
A lot of people thought that they were German secret weapons.
That turned out to be not true because at the end of the war, we went to the Germans and said, you know, were these things, did they belong to you?
And the Germans basically said, we thought they were your secret weapons.
We thought they belonged to you.
But the thing is, is that if you have an atmosphere where pilots and observers are reluctant to talk about these things, then yes, you're going to have a lot of reports that are never written.
They're going to be anecdotal, maybe just talked from person to person.
So by creating that atmosphere, you miss out on a lot of evidence that could help us figure out what these things were.
So Keith Chester is another author who wrote a book called Strange Company and devoted entirely to the Foo Fighters.
And he really did a great job on that.
And I became friends with him when I was researching this book.
He really brings out the point that because of this atmosphere of ridicule, if you report these things, he figures that only about 10% of all Foo Fighter reports actually made it into official reports.
So there's a lot of evidence out there lost because of, as I say, this atmosphere that was created.
But there will still be, because there are still in this country, a lot of veterans who flew in World War II, who perhaps, you know, at this remove, at this amount of time away from the incident, and they're not bound by anything particularly much, and they're getting up in years and may not be here for too many more years longer, you would think that more of these people would come out and tell what they know, wouldn't you?
Well, yes, I think so.
I mean, there should be, but someone has to ask them.
That's the thing.
I mean, these things, the whole UFO problem, I think, should be turned over to the scientific community.
It should not be in the hands of the military.
And, you know, a good scientific study would be to go and to talk to a lot of these veterans, because as you say, we're losing more of them every day, who flew during World War II, not just in the European theater, but there was also a lot of Foo Fighter reports in the Pacific theater, too.
And get down, you know, in writing or recording or video recording, what these people saw, and then put all that together and see what you come up with.
But see, that would have to be a scientific endeavor.
And a lot of scientists are reluctant to go delve into UFOs too for the same reason.
You kind of get ridiculed if you're looking into something that's considered to be more science fiction than science fact.
In all the reading that I've done over the years about UFOs, and that's a lot since I was a little boy, I never read any reports of anything happening around the Vietnam or Korean wars.
Are you aware of anything at those times?
Yes, we have there's two chapters, one devoted to Korea and one to Vietnam.
And as it turns out, the Korean war is really pivotal in the investigation of UFOs in the United States, and this is why.
As we were talking about before, once the Pentagon decided that they didn't want to hear that UFOs were real, and what they really wanted to hear was their scientists telling them that they're the result of hoaxes or people who are delusional, that's when the U.S. Air Force stopped investigating UFOs for the first time.
Now, six months later, the Korean War starts, and now you have a different situation because suddenly you have lots of airplanes flying over country that's really fairly small.
It's only about one-third the size of Texas.
So you had these very crowded skies.
You have high-performance jet aircraft for the first time flying around with airborne radar.
And so now you have radar in the planes.
You have radar on the ground.
You have radar on ships.
And so you have many more opportunities to spot these things.
And as it turns out, there was a lot of UFO reports over Korea.
We go into several of them where there's an incident where some Navy fighter bombers were attacking a Chinese convoy, and these two enormous saucer-shaped objects showed up, went around, then orbited around them, observed them, and then took off at high speed.
There's lots of instances where they were trailing U.S. ships out in the Sea of Japan.
There's a story there where Army infantrymen were actually had a ray beamed at them by a UFO.
And what happened was the U.S. military was then in a position of where they had just formally come out and said that UFOs are nothing but hoaxes or people who are delusional.
Now you have pilots, veteran pilots, many of them veterans of World War II, reporting these things.
And the Air Force couldn't be in the position of saying, well, our pilots are hoaxes or hallucinating.
So they would create all these really fantastic explanations for them.
Like these two huge flying saucers that were spotted by the Navy pilots, later on they would say, well, they must have been just enemy weather balloons.
Or when some kind of a fantastically bright object would be flying alongside a B-29 bomber on a bombing run over North Korea, you know, later on they said, well, that must have been enemy flares.
They would come up with all these crazy explanations for them.
But behind the scenes, what was happening was they said, now we really have to start looking into these things because our own pilots are seeing them on a regular basis.
And that created Project Blue Book in the United States, which lasted, you know, for all the 50s and right up to 1969.
And even though it didn't do a great job, it was considered by many UFO researchers at least the most open-minded attempt by the Air Force to actually look into these things.
And had all the incidents in Korea not happened, the Air Force probably would not have opened up Project Blue Book.
But they did, and we actually got a lot of research in the book as a result of documents we got from Project Blue Book.
Then we move into the 60s.
We have the Vietnam War.
The technology moves upper gear.
The jet fighters move faster.
We have better technology, better radar, better everything.
But I guess to keep pace with anything that might be reported there, the debunking explanations have to change.
And I wonder if, without being facetious, whether it was sometimes suggested that anything that might have been reported over Vietnam or Cambodia was the result of the use of substances.
Well, I'm sure a lot of it, you know, that's the case in a lot of the instances.
I mean, we go into the Vietnam War, we approach the Vietnam War different from any other war because it was different from a lot of wars.
There were no front lines.
I mean, the objective of the U.S. was, or the strategic objective, was to fly a lot of troops into enemy territory on helicopters and try to kill more of them than they killed of us.
And whoever had the higher body count at the end of the day could declare victory.
But the reality was, was that it was a very unpopular war, that the soldiers serving in it, you know, they weren't really there to win anything.
They were there just to survive the 365 days that you were in country.
And once you got out of there, you were free.
So there were many ways that these people try to cope with this.
Very low morale and very high drug use.
Let's face it, that was the case over there.
So we approach a lot of the instances that we report about the Vietnam War with that in mind.
However, and there are, there are some stories from the Vietnam War of there's one where a guy was lost during a firefight after a helicopter assault and he was saved by what he described as someone who was a giant in a different kind of a uniform with a different kind of weapon, but who shot a communist soldier before the communist soldier was able to shoot this American.
There is an instance where a CIA HIT team was in North Vietnam doing an assassination.
They completed the assassination.
They were on their way back to their pickup point.
They were pursued by communist soldiers.
There was a firefight in which, during the middle of which, a UFO showed up.
The communist soldiers shot at the UFO and the UFO shot back and basically vaporized them.
And when that CIA hit team was returned to base, they were interrogated and, you know, according to the story, were given some kind of amnesia drugs that worked on just everyone except this one person who later told the story.
But the interesting thing about the Vietnam War is that there was one case where it doesn't seem to come from any kind of substance abuse, and that was the case of the Australian warship, the Hobart.
And what that was, was that they started seeing UFOs over the DMZ, which was the demarcation line between the Communist North and the South Vietnam.
The demilitarized zone.
Right.
And, you know, in 1966, all of a sudden, what the U.S. military wanted to call enemy helicopters were showing up over the DMZ.
But the thing is, is what you have to know is that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong didn't have any helicopters during the Vietnam War.
So the U.S. military moved a lot of anti-aircraft weapons, a lot of radar, and a lot of jet fighters up to the area of the DMZ.
And so shortly after this happened, one night, a lot of these quote-unquote enemy helicopters were spotted over the DMZ.
The Air Force launched a lot of F-4 Phantoms, which was the high-tech fighter at the time.
They started chasing these things out over the Gulf of Tonkin and fired at them.
But what turned out was that the missiles fired from the F-4s actually hit this Australian warship, the Hobart, and killed four Australian sailors.
The people on the Hobart started firing back at the F-4s.
It was complete confusion.
And it couldn't be sorted out until the next morning when people realized what had happened, that in shooting at these quote-unquote enemy helicopters, they had actually hit this Australian warship.
Which is the most amazing friendly fire incident of all, isn't it?
Yeah, really.
And later on, the person who was in charge of the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam at the time, his name was General Brown, later on went on to become the chief of staff of the entire U.S. military, joint chiefs of staff.
And he was even quoted as saying, we used to see these things coming over the DMZ all the time.
We had no idea what they were, so we just called them enemy helicopters, but we had no idea what they were, and it led to this tragedy.
What about the Gulf War?
I mean, the Gulf War I covered on radio over here, so I can remember most of the major incidents in it.
I'm talking about Gulf War I. Well, that's also interesting because if you remember, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August of 1990.
And then we had this four or five-month run-up to what they called Desert Storm.
This run-up was called Desert Shield.
And during that time, when, once again, we were obviously preparing for war, a lot of troops were flooding into the area, there were many, many UFO reports, not just over the Persian Gulf, but over the entire Middle East.
We get into them in the book, over Egypt, over Israel, over Jordan, and then over the Persian Gulf itself.
And then when the war started, we have a number of incidents in there that we came upon where U.S. and British warships fired on a UFO that was kind of coming down and flying low over them.
There was an incident, we kept coming upon this story, where four F-16s were on their way to a bombing mission in Baghdad very early one morning, came upon a UFO.
One of the F-16s peeled off and followed this because they didn't know at the time exactly what it was.
And He came upon this saucer-shaped object, which shot at him.
One of the very few instances in the books where, in the book, where we have the UFOs actually taking some kind of offensive action, he fired back at the flying saucer, hit it, and it crashed in the Saudi Arabian desert.
Now, as it turned out that there was, this story came from a Russian military attaché who got to the site of the crash before the U.S. military could, and he says that he saw this crashed saucer.
He and a lot of Saudi Arabian citizens saw it and saw, you know, inside it, and looked like it was designed for short-statured people and so on and so forth.
And then when the U.S. military showed up, they kind of shoot everyone away, packed this thing up, and flew it back to the United States.
So that area of the world has a lot of UFO reports anyway.
Amazing story, that.
I would imagine if we jump right up to date, if there were extraterrestrials wanting to keep an eye on something, they would be taking a close look at Iran right now.
I'm sure.
I'm sure they are.
I mean, we saw, we didn't include in the book because we ended the book right after the first Gulf War.
So it takes, you know, just about the entire 20th century.
But I've seen, for instance, videos of U.S. Marines out on night missions in Iraq seeing these very strange objects through night vision goggles and so on.
I'm sure that there's probably a lot of stuff happening right now over Iran, over Afghanistan, over that whole entire part of the world.
Because if anything big is going to happen, it's probably going to happen there.
That's what people are saying in this year of 2012.
Let's hope we all stay safe.
Mac Maloney, this is really fascinating stuff, and you've lucked into or skilled into quite a mine of information here.
Now, being a journalist, once you start to dig into a thing, I don't know about you, but I always want to know more.
So do we think there might be another book coming on these lines?
Well, you know, maybe.
I have to, you know, you know how it goes.
I'm sure.
I have to go and talk to my publisher and see if there could be, you know, a book two or a sequel.
I'm sure there's a lot of information out there to put another book together, but we'll see.
And just before you do go, Mac, if anybody wants to know any more about you and your work, where do they go?
How do they do that?
Well, the best place to go to buy the book is Amazon.com.
But to find out more about me and other books I've done, they could go to MacMaloney.com.
There's a lot of information there on how to order the book and also some stories about how we put the book together.
A lot of painstaking research in the book called UFOs in Wartime, What They Didn't Want You to Know.
It's published by Penguin Books, and you can get it via amazon.com.
I've done the commercial for you, Mac.
Listen, thank you very much, and have a great day.
We'll talk again soon, I'm sure.
If you're ever over in Boston, you know, get in touch, okay?
The appeal of clam chowder, I'm going to be right there.
Great.
That's great.
Thanks very much, Mac.
Take care.
Thanks, Howard.
Mac Maloney near Boston there here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
Thank you very much for being part of this edition of the show.
Thank you for your kind emails.
If you want to know more about my show, if you want to make a donation to it or send me a comment about the shows, go to www.theunexplained.tv.
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Thank you to my webmaster, Adam Cornwell, for doing a great job as ever.
Thank you to Martin.
Happy 2012 to you, Martin, for the theme tune.
And above all, as ever, thank you so much to you for your kind messages recently and for keeping the faith with the unexplained.
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