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June 15, 2012 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:30
Edition 83 - UFOs In 2012

This edition we meet US-based Richard Dolan - a prolific researcher and author with anacademic background and an excellent track record - We hear more about his latest research on the waythe truth about the UFO phenomenon is bound to come out.

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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.
Thank you very much for your support, moral support, financial support through your donations and the wonderful emails that I've had recently.
If you want to get in touch with the show or leave a donation for the work that we're doing here, by the way, just go to the website www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, the website designed by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who gets the show out to you and is an all-round top guy.
Your emails, thank you very much for them.
Just a snapshot of some of them that have come in recently.
Mark, thank you for your email.
David Riley in Iowa.
Thank you for your suggestions, David.
I'm actually thinking of taking you up on the visit to Iowa.
Sounds nice.
Rachel Rombelow, I'm looking at your suggestion, Rachel.
Thank you for that.
Intriguing one.
Ryan, suggesting David Paul Edis as a guest.
Ryan, I'm on it.
David, I'll need to do a bit of research about this one, but the Baltic Sea UFO case is what fascinates you.
Fascinates me too when I look into it.
It looks like one massive cover-up, if it is all to be believed.
Paul Richards, thank you for your email.
Kevin, thanks for the good thoughts, Kevin.
Ken Shermer in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Used to be the home of a radio station I had the jingles for.
61 Charlotte WAYS.
They called it Big Ways.
And when I was a kid, I had this selection of jingles from that radio station.
I thought they were the best radio jingles I'd ever heard, Ken.
Nice to hear from you in North Carolina.
Macy J, thanks for the email.
David, I hope you're feeling better.
And Diana, thank you for your email.
Just a tiny snapshot of the mountain of emails that I've had in lately, but thank you very much for them.
Please keep your thoughts coming in, good, or whatever, your reflections on how the show is being done.
You know, I'm always happy to receive constructive feedback about what we're doing here and any ideas about how I can develop it.
I'll always take those on board.
Thank you very much.
This is not a big corporation.
It's not a big operation.
It's only you and me and Adam Cornwell who gets the show out to you.
So literally, you send me an email, I get to see it.
And if we can do something about it, then we will.
So thank you very much.
Hope you enjoyed edition 82.
Edition 83, this one will be.
And it's returning to a subject that I know we've covered a lot, but we haven't covered as much recently as perhaps we might have, simply because I don't think there's been enough new research in the field of ufology.
You might well disagree.
Let me know if you do.
But we're going to talk to a man who's been prolific is the only word I can use for him in Rochester, New York.
His name is Richard Dolan, and he's either written or been involved in a whole clutch of books to do with UFOs, cover-ups, underground bases, the whole nine yards.
So high time we talk to him.
He's also got a book that hasn't come out yet, but is on a fascinating theme, UFOs for the 21st century mind, something I've given a lot of thought to.
You know, how do we regard UFOs in this 21st century?
In the 1900s, people thought they were extraterrestrials.
In ancient times, people thought that UFOs were some kind of manifestation of the gods.
So different eras visualize and rationalize things differently, don't they?
So the fact that Richard Dolan's got into that, I think, is worth talking about, and we'll do that in our conversation with him.
Like I say, thank you for your feedback.
And if you want to give me feedback or a donation, the address to go to www.theunexplained.tv.
That is our website.
And even if you get the show through iTunes, please check in on the website.
Always important that you do that for us.
Thank you very much.
Let's get now to the United States, to Rochester, New York.
And Richard Dolan is there.
We're going to talk about UFOs.
Richard, thanks for coming on The Unexplained.
Howard, it's a pleasure.
Thank you for having me here.
How is Rochester?
Well, it's cloudy today, which is more or less what we're used to.
I live right off of Lake Ontario, which is in upper New York State.
And we get a lot of Canadian winds coming in that blows the water right over the city.
So we have nice four seasons.
We get cold winters, we get hot summers, and we get spring and fall.
And I don't know about, I was mentioning on the last show that I did that we've had some really wacky weather here in the UK recently, a lot of heavy rain that we don't normally get at this time of year.
And before that, we had a heat wave.
Yeah, right.
Right.
And I think that applies to a lot of different parts of the world where they've had strange weather.
Things are a bit out of whack.
I think we can all comment on that.
In the States here, we've had tornadoes hitting places that just never get tornadoes.
A year ago, Massachusetts, of all places, was hit by a fairly severe one.
And in the central U.S. and the southern part of the U.S., tornadoes went inland into places that really they'd seldom gone and did a great deal of damage.
And, you know, if you think about it, those are not the areas that you associate twisters with at all.
No.
And just while I'm at it, Texas has gone through probably the worst drought, certainly in my lifetime.
I turned 50 in a couple of weeks.
One of the worst droughts it's ever had.
Texas went through a year ago, and it was just horrible.
It's all change.
UFOs and ufology, that's your thing.
And I've described you in the intro to this show as prolific because by the looks of your website, you are.
What sparked your interest?
What started you off on all of this?
Well, yeah, about 20 years ago in the early 90s, I had little interest and no knowledge of the UFO topic.
At that time in my life, I still was gunning for a PhD in history, studying Cold War studies at the University of Rochester.
And I was pretty good at that.
I had done a lot of European history, a lot of German history.
Then I moved on to U.S. diplomacy by the early 90s.
And my goal was to be a professor at some college, and that was what I was going to do.
I had been a very dedicated young academician back when I was in my early 20s.
I had once won a scholarship to study at Oxford University, where I did.
I was at Exeter College for a while there and studied under a Rhodes scholar, a South African émigré, who said to me, Richard, I believe you should apply for the Rhodes.
Very good accent, thank you.
Yes.
Well, that's how it sounded.
And I did apply, and I made the final cut, actually, for the Rhodes Scholarship, did not get it.
As a result of not getting that, I ended up here at the University of Rochester, where I did very well.
And I was, as I said, very motivated.
Did nothing with UFOs, nothing at all.
But here's what happened.
I was, even then, I really look back, I see I was always a kind of guy who was pushing the boundaries of what I was supposed to be doing.
Back then, I was very much a Noam Chomsky sort of intellectual.
That is certainly a critic of U.S. foreign policy.
I think I always had been one of those.
And trying to understand the true structure of power on planet Earth, not just the grade school version that I think most of us live with.
And if you think about it, there is no better field, I would argue, and I guess you would argue too, because that's why the two of us do the things that we do, no better field that reflects the failings and the weaknesses of politicians and the political system than ufology.
It's written right through history.
That's what I discovered.
That is what I discovered.
In the early 1990s, I was in a bookstore and I saw a copy of another very famous UFO book, Tim Goode's Above Top Secret.
And it was the subtitle that really caught my attention, which was The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up.
I had never heard of this book.
I didn't know who Tim Good was.
And I remember picking that book up.
For those who haven't seen it, it's a big fat book.
It's got a lot of data.
It's a very, very fine book on UFO cover-up.
I flipped through it and thought, wow, I recognize a lot of the names here from my own studies.
He had documents in the book that looked like they were real.
So I bought the book.
I was very intrigued.
And I read it.
I thought this is a really good book.
And my interest then, I became obsessed.
And I just wanted to know one thing.
Was this real or was this BS?
In other words, not even were UFOs real, but was this a genuine part of my country's and the world's history?
That is, were UFOs considered an important part of America's national security issues in the early Cold War?
Because that's what I was studying at that time.
I was focused at that moment on Harry Truman and the Soviets, circa 1950.
So all of this was very important.
And in those studies, in the academic world, of course, flying saucers don't ever come up as an issue, I can assure you.
And yet if you talk to people who are into ufology, Stanton Friedman, Tim Goode, whoever it may be, and I've talked to all of these people over the years, UFOs, ufology, and whatever else might be out there are intertwined intensely with those eras that you've just been talking about.
Well, precisely.
So I thought I would just take a few months out of my life.
I mean, literally, this is how I thought of it.
This is in 1994.
And I thought, I want to find out what's the deal here.
So I made a project simply to hunt down the most important books in the field, do a bibliographic search, essentially, find out, get a factual overview of this phenomenon, just resolve the matter once and for all in my mind.
Well, that's when I became hooked, and I've just never left.
That research morphed into my first book, which took me five years to write.
It was a 500-plus-page book.
I called it UFOs and the National Security State.
It came out in the year 2000.
And that was a treatment of the phenomenon, but also of the cover-up from the years, the early 1940s to the early 1970s.
Writing that book during the late 90s was my education in the field.
I started truly with zero knowledge and ended up by the end of that book with a pretty good knowledge of the field.
I'll never forget when that book was released, I was very gratified that some very experienced researchers truly were blown away by it.
Don Ecker of UFO magazine here in the States really just raved about it.
I did an interview early on with Whitley Streeber, who also was similarly into it.
And I thought, wow, I made a nice splash here.
And the problem that I had was people were so into the book, they said, well, great.
Now what about the rest of the story?
Because you ended it in 1973.
And I thought, great.
I don't know jack about what happened after 1973.
So here you are, a man who approaches these things with academic rigor.
You did your research and reading.
You tried to assess the veracity of the stuff that you were going through.
This was just like a holiday project for you at the beginning, and suddenly you find yourself on a life path.
Yeah, well, it was the doctoral dissertation that I ended up not doing in the academic world.
That's really what it was.
I was working.
And what did your academic colleagues or former colleagues think about all of this?
Because, you know, look, in journalism, there are people who think that I'm wacko for having this particular interest.
And I would imagine that in the world of academe, there are people who just don't get it.
Absolutely the same thing.
Yes.
I had a number of pretty close colleagues previously who just thought, what happened to Dolan?
My old advisor as an undergraduate who is like my academic daddy, I love him and we're very close.
But he really had a hard time because I was always his prize student.
And he had had these ideas of me going into this one direction.
And then suddenly I take this intensely sharp left turn.
And he just said, Dolan, why UFOs?
But I mean, eventually I discovered he was cool with it.
And then it turned out, I learned, I was having dinner with him and his wife, they had had a UFO sighting.
Really?
Yeah.
And she was into it.
And his attitude as well, we don't really know what that was, but apparently it was a really hell of a sighting.
And it was just so typical how you get this mindset.
The academic world wants nothing to do with this topic, just as the journalistic world wants nothing to do with it.
And why do you think that is?
Because there is such a huge history there.
Is it because down the centuries, down the decades, certainly, ufology and UFOs and the people who are interested in these things have just simply got a bad rap?
Well, I think that there's a couple of intertwining reasons that go.
One is a cultural reason, which is simply that, you know, I remember being 20, 21 years old, looking at the academic world.
I was very wide-eyed and idealistic.
And I really did think at that time that here was a place where you could have a true battle of ideas, you know, out on the field and may the best idea win.
And that's really, and then as you get older, you realize, well, no, it doesn't quite work like that.
Professors develop their turf.
They guard that turf like a mother bear guards her cubs.
You know, pity on the fool who tries to invade that turf, right?
There's a lot of ego that gets involved and a lot of fear over one's reputation.
But I think what really was the case within the United States, and I think this is a model that has gone throughout the world, which is that there's a very close relationship of the U.S. intelligence community to the academic world, and that's just the way it is, as it is to the world of journalism.
So it doesn't mean that the CIA controls every university professor or every journalist.
It's never that simplistic.
But it does mean that there are working relationships that CIA has had with, say, Yale University or with Harvard or with University of California, Berkeley, or with any of the other big guns in the U.S. Does this come down to money then?
That everything depends on money.
So if the CIA say, look, if you continue to probe this area, then we're going to make sure you don't get the funding for X, Y, or Z. Well, I think that works into it.
But even more simply than that, let's say some university professor at some mid-range or lower-end school gets the UFO bug and starts to write about it.
Well, that's no problem because one of the Harvard people connected to CIA just smacks them down.
And in fact, we know that this was the case.
Harvard University had Donald Menzel there for years, who is one of the top astronomers in the country.
Turns out, had deep connections to the United States intelligence community, was the world's leading debunker on UFOs.
No one knew about his connections to Intel until long after he died.
And this is just how this relationship works.
In the late 70s, Carl Bernstein, one of the journalists who investigated Watergate, did a nice expose on the CIA's connection to the United States media, pointing out that hundreds of U.S. journalists had been on the CIA payroll for years and years, and no one knew it.
So it's not that the CIA can control every single thing out there, but when they need to call in their chips, they will do it.
So that's one way.
And so it creates a culture within the academic world, within the journalistic world, of if you know it's good for you, don't go into this topic, because A, you're going to be ridiculed, and B, your career is going to be dead in the water.
So if you're trying to have a cover-up at the highest possible level, the best way to do it is the way that they seem to have done it, and that is to make sure you keep a clamp on the people who have and disseminate ideas.
Because once you've done that, then the only other people who are going to get this stuff out there are people whose credibility you can easily challenge.
You control the choke points, absolutely.
Choke points of knowledge and choke points of credibility.
And they have done that, and they continue to do that very effectively.
Today, the CIA says, well, we don't have working relationships like that anymore.
They don't need to.
They don't need to.
I mean, journalists and professors jump over each other to have such a relationship with the CIA because it's a career maker.
So there's this revolving door between the intelligence community.
And it's the same in Britain, MI5, exactly the same types of, and six, the same relationships with British media.
I've had my encounters with BBC so many times now.
And in fact, if I just may have an opportunity to bitch a little bit, I have not found any organization so difficult to deal with and so hostile to the UFO topic as BBC.
Don't you think, rather than conspiracy, and I've worked for the BBC.
I'm a commercial radio guy really through and through.
It's written through me like a stick of rock.
However, I have had my little dalliances with the BBC over the years.
And their culture is all about two-source confirmation, total provability.
Everything has to be rock solid.
Otherwise, we don't even go there.
And with ufology and UFOs, sometimes you can't get multiple source confirmation of the information.
So they're not going to do those stories.
Well, not only do they not do them, but when they do, they ridicule the hell out of them.
So it's not even that there's this actual detachment.
They really go out of their way to do hit pieces time and again.
That's my experience.
But yes, ufology does make it difficult because, you know, inherently, if you have a conspiracy, then a culture that says, well, we don't investigate conspiracies.
Conspiracies are silly.
You know, you're at a real disadvantage when there is a conspiracy, when there is a cover-up.
And the UFO matter is, I think, the ultimate cover-up, to be honest with you.
You know, go way back to the 1940s.
Let's take a little journey back into the past and pretend for the moment that a crash at, say, Roswell did happen.
I believe, in fact, that it did.
The evidence for Roswell is actually really good.
When you go through the mass of witnesses that we have now gotten, I think it's a very strong case.
In fact, I personally have spoken to a number of pretty high-level, very high-level U.S. national security people, men with scientific credentials, men who are friends with U.S. presidents, who have told me that Roswell did happen.
So I'm confident it happened.
So let's just say that it did.
So, and that you are Harry S. Truman, the United States president, and this incredible information is presented to you.
Your top generals or scientists say, sir, we've recovered technology that is not of this, that does not appear to be of this civilization.
So what do you do about that incredible piece of knowledge?
You might Have an instinct to tell the world, at least for a moment, until you thought twice.
Well, you might.
Yes.
And then you realize, oh, damn, if I do that, they're going to know we have this incredible technology, and we've got this Cold War going on.
We got the Russians.
We don't want them to have access to this technology.
In other words, if you tell the world about this, it becomes very difficult then to keep that technology to yourself.
And which means the biggest thing of all, though, with politicians and people who make the decisions, U.S. presidents, whoever, that if you tell the world that this stuff exists, then suddenly you are not the ultimate authority in your country.
Somebody else with superior technology from somewhere we don't even understand actually has quite a place.
Right, absolutely.
Your authority will become questioned by a number of the people, no doubt.
And then the other problem from a politician's point of view is you tell the world, now you have to do something about it.
You can't just tell the world and say, okay, well, we'll get back to you in 10 years.
That won't fly politically.
So this is like another agenda on the plate, just in terms of time commitment.
The whole logistics of managing this publicly would have to be a nightmare.
So you have this choice then.
Is it a two-way choice?
You have the choice of do I tell the world about it?
And for all the reasons you've just outlined, you don't probably tell anybody too much about it, other than those with security clearance.
And if you don't tell people about it, then your other question is, how do I cover this up?
Precisely.
And that becomes the real issue.
Well, one of the ways you have to cover it up is you must create a black budget culture.
It must be done.
Now, there had been the model of this when the United States had the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.
And that was a very deeply secret program.
And there were other secrets.
You know, the cracking of the Enigma program and a lot of other things during the Second World War served as models for the secrecy.
But the UFO phenomenon, in fact, I think students of the black budget in the open world have sort of failed to recognize this, that the UFO phenomenon is an important foundation of the black budget because you've got this technology.
You don't want anyone to know about it.
You can't tell Congress.
If you tell Congress, then that's telling the world.
So you must create a non-constitutional means of managing this problem through secret funding and through what ends up as privatization of the secret.
Because if you need the technology studied and hopefully replicated one day, well, at some point, you're going to have to give it to your defense contractors, whether it's Lockheed or Boeing or General Dynamics, General Electric, and so forth.
They're the guys.
They've got the scientists, the R ⁇ D personnel who actually can do something about it.
So the secret eventually, through the 1950s, I believe, went private increasingly so.
And then it becomes profitable.
You know, within a special access program, deeply clandestine, you've got a bunch of genius scientists puzzling over this technology.
They may not be able to duplicate it, but they might get some pretty nifty ideas that might end up with improvements in our own technology, maybe better integrated circuits or solid-state technology or high-tensile fibers or fiber optics.
Some of the things that Colonel Philip Corso claimed in his book, The Day After Roswell, I think, did happen.
So, Richard, are we being given this superior technology or have we chanced upon it in incidents like the Roswell crash?
Well, I don't know.
It's a great question to ask.
You know, did these other beings, whoever they are, allow this to happen or did it happen by accident?
I don't know.
Don't know.
But it does seem to me that we've come now, gotten a great deal of leaked testimony from enough sources, enough disparate sources, that I do believe we had a number of crash retrievals, not only Roswell, but Roswell being the most prominent of them.
And were they all in America?
I always get asked this question here in the UK.
Were they all in America?
Absolutely not.
They were not all in America.
Most of the ones that have been researched we know of are American.
But I think the only reason for that is that through the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, really the most active UFO investigations really had been taken place in the United States in terms of the most really dogged investigators.
So I think they came up with American cases.
Plus, I think there does make sense to the argument that a lot of UFO activity had been America when you've got objects that appear to be interested, at least in part, in high technology.
You know, in the late 1940s, the United States had a monopoly of working nuclear technology, and a lot of the sightings took place over places like Los Alamos, National Labs, the Hanford Nuclear Facility in the state of Washington, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
All of these are important atomic nuclear scientific facilities.
But no, the worldwide phenomenon, absolutely.
One case in point, there was a crash of, but it was certainly a UFO over Bolivia in the year 1978.
I don't know if it was an alien craft or not, but it could have been, actually, when you really look at all the data we have.
What we do know is that this object went down and the Bolivian military did send an expedition to go get it, but there were also two American military advisors who went in and promptly took over the whole operation.
And this we know.
We have this from State Department documents that were released soon.
Now, that might be easy to do with Bolivia, but say it happened, I don't know, think of another Commonwealth.
Say it happened in the Soviet Union.
I'm sure it did.
Right.
Well, the Soviet, particularly during the Cold War era, they had their own situation going on.
You know, during the Cold War, the West really had very little knowledge of Soviet UFO incidents.
But we have since learned, particularly during the period when the Soviet Union was cracking apart, late 80s, early 1990s, when there was a brief moment when a fair amount of UFO-related data came out.
That spigot has since been turned off to a large extent.
But for about a good three, four years, a lot of data came out.
And we learned that the Soviets had a long history of UFO engagement.
Absolutely they did, with their own crashes.
Hey, Britain, the UK has had a number.
There's a case in Wales, 1974, that I think is a very good case.
Very famous one.
I keep getting emails about it.
The Bedin Mountains in North Wales.
Very famous.
And I think it's a very strong case, too.
My friend Nick Redfern did a really good study of that, good research on that case, wrote about it in one of his first books.
And when you have a case like that with the U.S. and UK, clearly that's a relationship in which, frankly, on the level of intelligence, you're really talking about one single entity.
You're really not talking about two entities.
You know, the governments may be elected by different people.
They may have different domestic issues.
But in the intelligence community, the U.S. intelligence community and Britain's intelligence community share much more than they don't share.
Yeah, no, I think you'll have a lot of people agreeing with you there for good or ill.
That's very, very much the case, I think.
What about the axis between Moscow and Washington?
There is a theory that a lot of people have propounded over the years that Moscow and Washington have always cooperated about these things because they are so game-changing, they are so huge, and if they got into anybody else's hands, they would change everything that it's in their interest to cooperate.
Yeah, I think the answer is yes to that.
We have some pieces of evidence to rely on as well.
There was a treaty in 1971, I'm pretty sure it was 71, where among the things that were discussed between the United States and Soviet Union were UFOs.
That is, you know, I'm doing this off the top of my head.
I wish I could pull out the data immediately, but there wasn't an implicit recognition to check with each other over unknown aircraft, UFOs, before engaging in any hostilities.
And the reason was that the United States and the Soviet Union had, in the course of the Cold War, an actual shooting war in which U.S. and Soviet aircraft would invade each other's territory.
It happened all the time.
But there was this other issue of unidentified objects that it was understood was a completely different scenario.
And what they did not want was to start hostilities based on a misidentification of UFOs.
And this is all in the realms of diplomacy.
And we know that in the diplomatic sphere, by and large, nations get on with each other because ultimately they have to.
However, if there is a cover-up, and in a couple of your books, you say there has over the years been a cover-up, and I believe there's been a cover-up.
I think it's fairly plain that there has been over the years.
However, is it possible really to keep the lid on everybody?
In other words, somebody may get to retirement age or may get to a point where they disagree with the regime or whatever, and they reveal what they know.
And that kind of stuff doesn't really happen, does it?
Well, it does and it doesn't.
See, there are leaks.
They occur all the time.
The problem, I think what the guys who are at the top of the human heap of power here have learned is that you actually don't have to keep the lid down 100% for this to be effective.
So much has come out, particularly in the last 20 years with internet, the World Wide Web.
It's an explosion.
Anybody who wants to research the UFO topic, my goodness, one day on Google will do it for you.
You will find a tremendous amount of information and a lot of good information.
But here's the problem with it.
The leaks that have come out, there have been a number of statements by very high-level individuals.
Former Canadian Minister of Defense, Paul Hellier.
I've spoken to him, absolutely.
Is he still speaking on this subject?
I spoke to him about six years ago on radio here.
Yeah, he is.
The man is unbelievable.
He's in his mid-80s.
He's in fantastic health.
I think he's 6'4, 6'5.
He's a giant.
And he looks and acts like a man 20 years younger than his age.
It's really extraordinary.
And what I was most impressed by him when I spoke to him, by his, and you could tell, even though I wasn't looking at him, I was only hearing him.
He had an air of credibility about him.
Of course he did because he'd been a government minister.
He ran Canada's defense during the 1960s.
Now, you know, he has said over the years, as in his capacity at that time, he did not have UFO information.
And then in the years after, when he was a member of the Canadian Parliament, he did not have UFO information, but that he, through his contacts, after his retirement, became interested and had this information confirmed to him through certain American colleagues.
I think he got to know Colonel Corso.
I think that's part of it.
He certainly mentioned Corso.
He did not know Philip Corso.
I don't think he did because Corso's book came out in summer of 97, and Corso himself died less than one year after.
Okay, so he was certainly, he mentioned him, so he must have been influenced in some way.
He very much was.
Corso's book was one of the key things for Paul Hellier that really turned him around on this issue.
As a matter of fact, I met Paul at the very conference where he came out, as it were, that was in Toronto in 2005 at a conference.
I was one of the speakers.
Paul was speaking.
Paul's one who got all the attention, of course.
But Stanton Friedman was there, and I sat next to Stan during Paul's speech.
And all I remember is Stan groaning the whole time too, because Stan is not a believer in a Philip Corso story.
And he was so upset that Paul Hellier was coming out on the basis of Corso.
He thought, oh, God, this is the worst.
I don't have the same opinion about Corso that Stanton does, actually.
I think that although the book was mangled in many ways, that there is truth to Philip Corso.
Be that as it may, there have been leaks.
There have been statements.
You know, in the late 1970s, just to get back onto this, in the U.S., there were two fundamentally new prongs of attack on the world of secrecy.
They were both very, very important.
One was the newly energized Freedom of Information Act, which, you know, prior to the mid-1970s, if a UFO researcher were to call conspiracy, the government could say, well, you know, says you, but actually, no, we have no interest in this matter.
And that researcher would have a difficult time proving it on the basis of government documents.
After the mid-70s, that situation was different because the newly energized Freedom of Information Act enabled thousands of pages of documents to be released from FBI, from CIA, from all the military agencies.
Some incredible documents that showed not only that there was indeed a true UFO phenomenon, that the military engaged, but that it was a grave matter at times.
This was a serious matter.
So that was one problem.
The other problem was in the world of leaks from people who started coming out of the woodwork, I think partly as a result of this new openness.
And they started to talk about their story to various researchers quietly.
Stories about crash retrievals of UFOs, stories of having seen alien bodies in storage at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and on and on and on.
And a lot of these came out in the late 70s.
It was a two-pronged attack.
And that prompted, I've argued in my books, a counterattack by the intelligence community to disable that threat.
We are in the process of reinventing everything.
And so I ask myself, you know, in the long view, look ahead, 20, let's say 30 years, let's say 50 years, to be very conservative, all right?
Will we as a society, 50 years from now, have the tools to literally to prove that there is a UFO reality and has been a cover-up and so forth?
And I think the answer to that is yes.
So you think technology and the availability of information will open things up to the point where this truth is an inevitability?
Yes, I do.
I keep in mind that even something as basic to us as the internet really was not foreseen by, I don't think, by anybody, even a little over 25 years ago, prior to the late 1980s, and even in the early 90s, I don't believe that people truly could have predicted how the web would develop in our own era.
It's been an explosion of information, and it has not yet resulted in the end of secrecy, but it has resulted in a sea change of cultural attitudes and opinions about many things, including UFOs.
Of course, this is all good.
The change in certainly perceptions is a good thing.
And the fact that people are much more open-minded, it seems to me, than ever they were, and that's another good thing.
The problem is, and I've discussed this with Nick Pope, a famous British ufologist, many, many times, there is so much information available out there, and every so often the British release a tranche of previously classified documents, and they release everything.
So you get all the stuff, even the stuff that is not interesting, which is leading you down… But you get little nuggets, like, for example, Nick tells it better than me, but there was one case of a British naval ship that had spied something weird in the sky, and the logbook from that warship somehow went overboard.
They lost it.
They didn't have a record of it.
But, you know, you get little nuggets like that in there.
In amongst this great morass of information that is not going to take you anywhere.
So information and its availability is a good thing mostly, but there are downsides.
And the downsides relate to the quantity of it and the interpretation of it, don't they?
Yes.
Yes, they do.
And in fact, I'm very glad you brought up the release of documents by the MOD because really it's a very mixed bag.
The MOD has released really almost primarily little more than what I would call law reports.
What they have not released are any actual analyses or evaluations of this phenomenon, very little to none.
And you think about it.
You know, Nick was at the desk back in 93 when there was essentially something akin to a mini UFO invasion for a night or two over the UK.
It's a very significant series of events in March of 1993.
Where is the analysis?
And we just have to say, for people who haven't heard this before or haven't heard me talk to Nick Pope before, but Nick Pope used to work for the Ministry of Defense.
He was paid to collate UFO reports for them.
He's now an independent consultant.
Right.
Exactly.
But what the MOD has not ever done in their releases is to provide an intelligence analysis to the public.
I haven't read it.
Why do you think that is?
Is it because we can't, I mean, these days we really can't afford it, but we can't afford it or we don't want to.
Well, do you really think, honestly, does anyone honestly think that the MOD is just going to sit on their ass, sorry, and just say, oh, yeah, well, we'll just collect these reports and we'll let the Yanks take care of it.
They'll do all the analysis for us.
Really?
I don't think so.
So clearly, there are agencies in the UK that have been studying this.
Of course they do.
Of course they're going to study it.
When objects fly over very sensitive airspace, such as over the Bentwaters facility in 1980 or over many parts of the country in 93 and many other incidents, you must take it.
Anyone's going to take that as a matter of national security.
And they're going to do an analysis.
And yet we had the 30th anniversary of that event, the Rendlesham Forest event out in the east of England just a couple of years ago.
And I thought, okay, this is a chance for people who went through that, who perhaps have better knowledge now because of the availability of information, that perhaps they're going to be less inclined to keep quiet about it, to keep stumb about it.
Here's the opportunity to really get somewhere about this.
And that anniversary, the 30th anniversary, came and it went.
And we didn't really get any far further.
No.
Well, here's the big part of the problem.
We have the age of internet, we have the age of information as we like to call it, and it is in many ways.
And in other ways, unfortunately, it is not.
You know, going back to my own country, the U.S., no one really knows how, what percentage of U.S. government documents are classified, but it's a very high percentage.
There's a very good book by a Brit named Trevor Paglin called Blank Spots on the Map.
I think he's British.
And it's about the U.S. defense secrecy, especially in terms of physical bases that are just not on any map.
They're blank spots.
They're secret.
His conclusion, after going through this, was that roughly 50% of all U.S. government documents are in one manner or another classified.
So you think about that.
So if he's right, that would mean if you're an archivist or a historian of United States government, that you really could make a case that half of your government's activity is secret, which is an incredible thing.
Now, maybe it's not 50%.
Maybe it's 30%.
Maybe it's 40%.
Who knows?
I don't know what it is, but it is a lot.
We know that it's a tremendous amount.
So despite our access to information, we live in a world, and Britain's the same.
Most of Europe is the same, in which classification of information considered national security, quote unquote, is very widespread.
I mean, it's now 50 years since the murder of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
And guess what?
Tremendous numbers of documents, thousands of pages of documents, are still classified on that and are going to remain classified.
This has just been a recent controversy, a matter of discussion, because a number of Kennedy scholars had been hoping that for the 50th anniversary, which will be next year, that all of the Kennedy assassination documents would be released.
And it's turning out that this is not going to happen.
And the conclusion that most of us come to, and probably rightly, is that there is a reason for that.
And we probably know what the reason for it is, that we haven't been fed the truth about the assassination of Kennedy.
Of course we haven't.
Similarly, in the UFO case, the reason a lot of this stuff is not going to come out and is going to stay redacted or kept secret from documents and from public prying eyes is that simply the truth is in there.
Well, that's right.
This is why I think, you know, something like WikiLeaks is, in fact, really could be of critical importance in breaking this log jam.
Back in the late 70s, when the Freedom of Information Act was going full guns, by the way, that's been very emasculated in many ways in the U.S. But for a while, it looked like FOIA could be the magic bullet, so to speak.
It didn't turn out to be.
But now Wikileaks, in many ways, I think, has taken that place.
Whereas the Freedom of Information Act acted through law, legally, Wikileaks, of course, doesn't.
It breaks the law.
Doesn't matter.
They're doing the same thing.
They're getting documents that were classified and they're releasing them.
And there'll be copycat organizations, without a doubt.
And we're only at the beginning of the Wikileaks era.
Okay, so do you believe that this thing that so many people talk about, this wonderful golden dawn of disclosure, is going to happen as one event that somebody comes out and says, okay, here's the truth because we've got to tell you now.
Or it's going to happen in the way that it's happened up to now, and that is drip, drip, drip pieces of information coming out in a jigsaw style?
Well, I think it's mostly the latter, but it will end up, there will be a moment when you have this statement.
And it's going to be, in other words, there are three factors in the secrecy equation.
You have the secret keepers, okay, so the guys in the intelligence and privatized financial world that I think are very powerful in this that control the secret.
Then you've got these other beings.
Let's not forget them, whoever, whatever they are, whether there's multiple groups or one group, they certainly are a factor in this equation.
And then you have us, the people, our society.
And I think that we are the dynamic factor in this equation.
We are the ones that actually are changing dramatically, that are going eventually to force a secret out.
And we are doing it.
WikiLeaks is a symptom of this phenomenon of the global community pulling information out of the classified world.
And I think it's going to manifest itself through the UFO phenomenon at some point.
Another way that we're going to, I think, threaten the secret is in the continuing growth of things like YouTube and UFO video.
Now, I'd be the first to acknowledge a lot of video that's out there is questionable or even fake.
And that's very difficult to then to analyze a lot of video.
It makes it difficult to credit a lot of other video that may very well be legitimate.
But I don't think that it's going to be forever that we're at that type of an impasse.
Our cameras right now have HD, our phones have HD cameras on them right now.
Soon they'll have infrared capability, I bet you, or other abilities to detect maybe electromagnetic.
But again, all this stuff is a double-edged sword.
In the days of analog, it was really hard to fake because you could see it a mile off.
In the days of digital, faking is really easy.
I take your point, but it's also the case.
I certainly agree with you there.
But how long do you think it's going to be before there's a multiply recorded mass sighting that actually hits the, as we say in the States, hits the sweet spot?
Well, isn't it funny, though?
Every so often we seem to be getting there.
I was re-listening to an old Art Bell show, an old coast-to-coast AM, only two days ago, and his guest was Bud Hopkins from the UFO Reporting Center.
Fascinating, fascinating show, one of Art's best.
But Bud Hopkins at the time, and this was a show that was replayed from 1997, talked about a sighting, I think it was in New York City, of somebody being escorted From a high-up window, a bedroom presumably, by a couple of aliens.
And this thing was apparently independently reported by, I think, between three and five independent witnesses.
Smoking gun, I thought, but that was back in 1997, and I haven't heard any more about that since.
Oh, well, I actually know that case very well.
In fact, I know a number of those witnesses personally and interviewed them myself a couple of years ago.
Tell me more.
Bud wrote his book.
It's called Witnessed.
And in fact, that book came out, I think it came out in 96.
That case, it's the Linda Cortill case.
And she had that event happen in 1989.
And he had written about it in the mid-90s after he had done a great deal of analysis.
Yes, it was multiply experienced.
And in fact, Bud always hinted, and it was very widely understood among researchers, that one of the individuals involved in that incredible event was then United Nations General Secretary, Javier Perez de Cuellar.
Right, I remember, yeah, because he was in a car, wasn't he?
Passing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely, yes.
And it gets even crazier than that.
But actually, shortly before he died, got a little bit annoyed at me because I mentioned de Cuellar's name in my book when I discussed that case in my second volume of UFOs in the National Security State, which covered 1973 to 1991.
That's a 600-plus page book.
But I spend a number of pages treating that incident because it really is important.
And I just decide, hell with it, I'm going to mention his name.
Bud never has, but I don't care.
Everyone knows, everyone in the field knows that it was Perez de Queer Bud was talking about.
And so I did.
And I learned through Leslie Kane, who was a very good friend of Bud's, that Bud was a little bit annoyed.
But anyway, the point is that there were a number of witnesses to this event, quite a few.
And you're right, though.
You know, what's the end result of it?
Really, nothing in terms of public moving this issue forward at all.
And it's a very good case.
What happens, though, with all of these UFO cases, all of the good ones, I don't think that there is one single UFO case that's a good case that has not been smeared or attacked violently by skeptics slash debunkers.
And I think they have to do this.
Even if they don't truly debunk a case, what they end up doing is sowing the seed of doubt.
And in the mind of the public, that's actually enough.
In the mind of the mainstream media, that's enough.
So you take what looks to me and to many people like a very strong case, which is the Brooklyn Bridge case, and you throw enough mud over it.
You trash the key witnesses just enough so that people think, oh, well, yeah.
You know, this also happened.
Another case from the same period of time in the late 1980s in Florida, the Gulf Breeze case, which went for several years.
Gulf Breeze is right on the Florida panhandle for a number of years in the late 80s, early 90s.
There were spectacular, I mean, just incredible UFO sightings seen by many, many people down there.
One man, Ed Walters, ended up photographing these multiple times.
And people were very suspicious of him.
They're like, how did you get to be the guy to photograph these so much?
And these photographs are so incredible.
I mean, come on, give us a break, man.
And not only that, but Walters claimed to have telepathic communication with these entities at times.
Now, especially in the late 80s, that was so out there.
I mean, nowadays, honestly, I cannot even count how many times I've spoken directly to witnesses who've had what clearly, to me, are telepathic communication.
But for Walters, he was a repeater.
He was getting all of these photographs.
But here's the thing.
I think Walters was legitimate.
I absolutely do.
But he was smeared so badly.
At one point, a model of the UFO was planted, was clearly planted in the attic of the home he had previously lived in, that he had moved out of.
Who did that, do you think?
Well, I don't know.
No one knows.
It was definitely an op.
And the reason that, I mean, it was proven to me that this was a plant, because when the model was studied, it was discovered that it was made with Walter's architectural papers, because he was an architect.
So that would be damning, right?
Except for the fact that the papers were dated after the point that he moved out of that old house.
And he had been complaining for ages that people were fishing through his garbage.
So in other words, the model was made with papers that he made after he moved out.
They were then put together in the form of this UFO model and then snuck into the attic of his former home.
And that sounds too comprehensive a job for a Joker to perform, doesn't it?
And the whole thing was discovered because a journalist who had always been hostile to the whole Gulf Breeze UFO thing was interviewing the new resident of that house and asked one leading question after another, like, so have you found any evidence showing that Walters was hoaxing this?
And the guy living in the house was like, I don't know.
I don't think so.
No.
But what happened was this new resident had discovered that the refrigerator in his house had an ice maker and the ice maker wasn't functioning.
And he tried to figure out the problem.
So he traced the plumbing line to the attic somehow.
This is the bizarre construction of the house.
And in the attic, he found that the pipe was crimped, was tightened, was, you know by like a screwdriver or some pliers and where the problem was was the model the model was placed right where he was going to find it and he said oh well yeah as a matter of fact i found this model coincidences yeah right and and that was what got out there and and the press then just said oh well walters
obviously faking it.
Here's the model that he was using to build, and he was photographing models just like this one.
And it really hurt Walters.
But it was a long time.
So, if it's so easy to knock down cases and debunk them, you don't have to have very much information.
You don't have to do very much in the public's mind to destroy a good case.
Will we ever get the truth?
Yeah, I think we will.
And this is why my co-author and friend, Bryce Zabel and I, i wrote a d after disclosure as a matter of fact which was a real adventure for us to write uh during uh 2010 and then we we came out with a a revised edition of that book just recently in 2012.
And the idea is this.
Look, if UFO secrecy has been going for all of these years, you might just think it's going to go forever.
And in fact, I've often characterized secrecy as a kind of paradox, or rather I've characterized disclosure, the end of secrecy as a paradox.
On the one hand, it's impossible.
It will never happen because as we've been discussing, it's gone for about 70 years.
And despite leaks, it's maintained itself.
But on the other hand, the end of secrecy is also inevitable.
It's an inevitability because, as I've also been trying to suggest here, we as a society are not in a stable situation.
We're moving.
We're dramatically changing.
And I do believe that we are gathering the tools that will enable us to make a breakthrough here.
And when that happens, it will happen because information and evidence is somehow amassed, whether through leaks, whether through a mass sighting, through some way that it becomes an impossibility for the political elites to ignore any longer.
And then they will have to come clean.
And of course, when they do that, you know, we don't have a utopian view of this.
I can just tell you.
It's not like the CIA and all the intelligence agencies are just going to walk away from the table and say, OK, here's all the information, guys.
No, I don't think so.
There will be spin, spin, more spin, and delays and delays and more delays on releasing the relevant information.
They will hold on to everything they can as long as they can.
And then they will continue to try to seek to control this information because they will realize, all right, once you tell the world, you'll say, yes, apparently we've discovered that some of these UFOs apparently are not ours.
They do appear to be from another civilization.
Once you let that bombshell out, everything is up for grabs now.
It's a new game because the questions are going to multiply very rapidly.
Aside from the initial issue of people asking, are we safe?
Certainly they'll want to know that.
But then they're also going to want to know, how the hell have you been able to keep this secret all these years?
And then they're going to get, some of them are going to get angry because we've been lied to.
Absolutely.
You'll have class action lawsuits all over the place.
You'll have citizens wanting public action taken against the secret keepers.
And they're going to want to know, who are these secret keepers?
And even worse, you know, in some communities you could risk, I would think, and that's probably one of the reasons why stuff has been kept secret for a long time, you could risk civil unrest.
Yes, and all of these things Bryce and I really tried to address.
When we wrote this book, we tried to treat it the way a think tank would, honestly.
That is, to look at this with our feet on the ground, not pie in the sky stuff, but really looking at how society is possibly likely to be affected by the end of UFO secrecy.
I mean, clearly when you're looking at something this dramatic, I have no doubt that we've gotten a lot of things wrong, that when this event happens, it's going to go down differently in many ways.
But what we tried to do is open a conversation and open a way of thinking.
There had been so many people who talked about the need for disclosure at the end of secrecy.
And I've always felt that they had these very utopian, I mean, naive ideas about disclosure, that, yes, once it's out, it's going to be wonderful.
We'll have truth.
One guy kept saying, we'll make the deserts bloom with all the new technology, and it's going to solve our problems.
And for once, you and Bryce have confronted those issues.
It isn't going to be like that Carpenter's song, calling occupants of interplanetary craft when they come here.
It's all going to be wonderful.
There are going to be practical difficulties, and there are going to be still debunkers and still people who don't want this process to go forward.
Absolutely.
And here's the other very potentially unsatisfying part of disclosure, which is that if you're one of the world leaders giving this information out, it's very possible that you won't have access to everything you need anyway, for several reasons.
First of all, maybe the black budget intelligence community itself doesn't know everything.
I think that's entirely possible.
They may know a lot more than you and I know.
I'm sure they do.
But they probably don't know everything.
And then they may still continue to hide information from the political leadership.
You know, it's not like Barack Obama has total access to everything within the black budget community.
He doesn't.
This is part of the problem, isn't it?
And our time is getting short, sadly.
We're going to have to talk again, Richard, without a doubt.
I remember people going on phone-in shows in America and in this country saying, OK, well, disclosure, the truth about UFOs and aliens.
aliens uh barack obama is going to be the man who is going to do it in this presidency we're going to make greater progress than we've ever done before that's not true a load of crap and and uh there are people who said obama was going to disclose and it always angered me to hear this nonsense uh i always said no no no no he won't There's nothing showing this.
And a lot of these, honestly, there's a people who wanted nothing more than attention drawn to themselves, I'm convinced.
And they would say, yes, it's going to happen.
And they had their moment in the spotlight.
And it's obviously that Obama is nothing more, nothing more than a continuation of the presidency of George W. Bush.
Meet the new boss same as the old boss.
Do you believe that he knows more than you and I know?
Presumably you do.
Yes, yes, I think he does.
Well, I think he, no, I don't think he knows more.
I think he's had more confirmed to him.
I don't think that actually he necessarily knows more.
But I think that he has probably had a briefing, probably a briefing that has told him what he needs to know.
Now, Richard, I'm going to ask you to do a very difficult thing now because our time is running out and I'm going to get into all sorts of trouble if I go over an hour or so on one of these shows.
However, can you summarize the new book, the one that's coming out, UFOs for the 21st Century Mind?
In other words, I guess from that title, you're trying to tell us that our mindset towards the phenomenon of UFOs has changed as a community.
Yes, absolutely it has.
I wanted to put together a book that really truly summarizes the entire field in all of its sordid glory and its fascination in one volume so that someone who knows nothing about this field really can appreciate everything about it with a perspective not like a 1985 book.
It seems to me that so many of these UFO researchers, the old school, are really looking at this in a very obsolete way.
And so I wanted to reformulate this problem with a contemporary point of view.
In other words, not just understanding the history of UFOs, which my new study does give a very good primer of the history of the true UFO phenomenon, but also the politics to cover up the deep cover-up, which I really try to get into.
I have a theory which I call breakaway civilization.
I talk a bit about it about that.
But then also I get into some of the really difficult issues, abductions and the mutilation phenomenon, and then other types of alleged contact that people have, whether they claim that they're channeling or having telepathic communication one way or another.
And then the issue of how to do proper UFO research in the 21st century, in an era of YouTube, when you've got videos galore, in an era of Facebook, i.e.
copy and paste journalism.
How do we keep our heads together relating to this topic in the era in which we are at, in which the problem that we have now is not that there's a paucity of information, it's that we are flooded with information, so much of it, garbage.
So these are the types of issues that I try to bring up.
And still discussing the issue of disclosure, that's where I end the book on, I think, my look-see into the future, which, by the way, despite the problems of disclosure, and there are many, I've been talking about them for years, I remain a believer in the need for disclosure.
Let me just make that very clear.
I believe ultimately in truth, not lies.
I believe ultimately that we need to be adults, not children.
And we can't become true adults without true knowledge of the world situation that we are in.
And that is a situation that includes, for better or for worse, the presence of non-human intelligences that have an interest in this planet and in ourselves.
And that's how I see it.
Now, Richard, at a conference a couple of years ago, I interviewed Steve Bassett, who talks a lot about disclosure.
And he was saying he believes it's really imminent.
It's going to happen really soon.
From everything you've said and from everything that I sort of believe in my heart, I don't think it's going to happen.
So I think it may well happen, but it's not going to happen in our lifetime.
Well, I'm right in between you and Stephen.
I've had a friendly collegial debate with Stephen for over 10 years now on this matter.
And he has constantly, consistently, I should say, stated that, yes, disclosure is right around the corner, right around the corner.
And I've said, no, I don't see it.
But I do think it's going to happen within my lifetime.
If I live another 30 years, I think it's going to happen within 30 years.
I don't think it's going to happen this year.
Although, I mean, honestly, from this point onward, it could happen.
So there could be a tipping point anywhere, anytime, and we've just got to be vigilant.
Watch for it.
I think it will happen without warning very rapidly.
I think it'll be a situation where, you know, you go to bed Monday and the world's just the way it always has been.
But by Wednesday morning, everything's upside down.
It could be that fast.
And people who don't believe that could happen have to remember something that happened in our lifetime, and that is the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Everybody said that couldn't happen, and yet one morning we got up and it had.
That's exactly right.
Very good analogy.
I was in Berlin during that period of time, just so happens.
And I predicted, I will just say this to you, it's true, I predicted the fall of that wall in the late summer of 1989.
It was when the government of Hungary opened their borders to West Germany.
At that moment, I said that wall's coming down before the end of the year.
But just like you were talking about with information coming out, it's a process.
It's a drip, drip, drip of information.
That was a process, too.
What was hard to predict was the actual point at which that bowl full of water would get too heavy and tip over.
Yeah, absolutely.
And for years, everyone grew up, all of us who grew up with the existence of the wall, myself included, we just took it as a matter of permanent, you know, this is how it is from now on.
And then one day I got up, went into work in London, and I was announcing to the nation that as a very young broadcaster then that the Berlin Wall had fallen.
Richard Dolan, I don't want to leave it here.
We need to talk again, but I'm going to have to park it there simply for time reasons.
Thank you very much indeed.
If people want to know more about you and your research and your many books, what do they do?
They should go to my website.
It's probably the first place.
That's keyholepublishing.com.
Easy way is just Google my name, Richard Dolan, and you'll find me.
I've got a Facebook page.
Bryce and I have afterdisclosure.com also, which is a really neat page.
We've got a lot of our articles there.
Well, congratulations on your research and the rigor that you and Bryce bring to it, Richard Dolan.
thank you very much for talking with me.
My pleasure, Howard.
Thank you.
The thoughts of Richard Dolan in Rochester, United States, a man who is truly prolific in terms of writing books on UFOs.
And his latest one is UFOs for the 21st Century Mind, due out anytime now and well worth looking at, I would have thought.
Also, his publishing site is Keyhole Publishing, a man who has a lot to say.
And I think he's very much of the view that his research is at its absolute peak now.
And having listened to him, I tend to agree.
Thank you very much to him for being part of the show.
Thank you to you for listening to it.
Please tell your friends about this show.
It's called The Unexplained if you're new to it.
Please check our website, www.theunexplained.tv.
There you can leave feedback about the show or also leave a donation to allow this work to continue.
Thank you also, by the way, for your good thoughts and suggestions about my tinnitus hearing problem that I've had for the last couple of months and caused me to give up work.
I'm hoping to be able to get back to doing some work fairly soon because that's very important to me on all kinds of levels, not least the financial one.
I don't want to go bust.
So I'll keep you posted about that.
But thank you for your good thoughts.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting the show out to you and for devising our website, www.theunexplained.tv.
Gonna get the plug in there again.
And thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
Above all, thank you to you for keeping the faith and being part of this family that we call the Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
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