The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 140 - Micah Hanks

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Jan. 18, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:06:17

Edition 140 - Micah Hanks

A return visit to US researcher/broadcaster Micah Hanks.

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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 Unexplained.
	And I really can't believe that this is Edition 140.
	I remember sitting exactly here recording edition 10 and thinking, wow, look what we've achieved.
	And now we've done 140 shows and we're powering into 2014 with your help and support.
	Thank you very much indeed.
	I've had some great emails from you recently.
	You've made some really innovative and really interesting guest suggestions, a lot of people that I've never heard of.
	And sometimes when you suggest somebody I've never heard of, I contact them, put them on the show and they turn out to be great.
	So this is all a work in progress and thank you very much.
	The way to contact me is to go to the website www.theunexplained.tv.
	That's www.theunexplained.tv and send me an email through the site.
	And if you'd like to make a donation, you can do that on the site as well.
	There's a PayPal link there.
	And thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, the man who devised the website and also gets the show out to you.
	A lot of stuff happening in the news, some of it way too depressing to talk about here, but I read in the papers this morning that America's NSA is harvesting, I don't know, maybe this shouldn't be a big surprise, maybe it isn't, is harvesting about 200 million texts per day, which should, for most of us, prompt a couple of questions, and those questions are, what do they do with that amount of information?
	How can you collate that?
	And why are they doing this?
	Are they doing that in our name?
	I think there are lots of questions to be asked about that, don't you?
	The weather continues to be bizarre.
	A lot of rain, very mild temperatures in the UK.
	A lot, a lot of flooding here, which continues to be a problem.
	46 degrees Celsius temperatures in Adelaide, Australia yesterday, making this the hottest place on earth.
	Norway, deep freeze there.
	Talked to somebody on radio this morning in Norway where temperatures have been so cold that a bay froze and managed to freeze solid all the fish in the bay or a lot of the fish in that bay.
	So something weird is going on with our weather.
	Now before we get to our guest this time, a return visit from Micah Hanks, very briefly I'd just like to ask you a favor.
	There are two people I've been trying to get on this show for a very long time.
	Dr. Stephen Greer is number one and Graham Hancock is number two.
	I know you've heard me mention them before.
	If you could email them through their websites and please ask them to come on this show, that would be great.
	I have tried so many times over the last two, three years.
	So I'd like you to help me if you possibly could and maybe we can put some pressure on them.
	Okay, let's get to the guest this time.
	It is Micah Hanks in America, writer, researcher, lecturer, radio personality.
	And his biography says his work addresses a variety of scientific concepts and unexplained phenomena.
	And he's open-minded and skeptical in his approach.
	I like the sound of that.
	Very good guest last time.
	This time we're going to talk principally about his book, The Ghost Rockets, Mystery Missiles, and Phantom Projectiles in Our Skies from 1946 on.
	Should be a fascinating conversation.
	Thank you very much for your support.
	Please keep your emails coming.
	I will do some shout-outs next time.
	Let's get to the guest now in the United States.
	And Micah Hanks, welcome back to The Unexplained.
	Oh, always my pleasure, Howard.
	So remind me where you are again.
	You know me, I'm very forgetful.
	I'm in Western North Carolina, in the town of Asheville, North Carolina.
	It's a beautiful little place.
	And maybe as beautiful as you could ever ask for because of the weather differential.
	If you don't like the weather, wait 10 minutes and it's something different after that.
	Just like London, really.
	I was telling my listeners that we have this ongoing rain problem here.
	We've got really mild temperatures, about 12 degrees Celsius, what's that, 54 Fahrenheit.
	And we've had temperatures around there for four or five weeks now.
	But we've also had these tremendous rainstorms, a lot of flooding and stuff like that.
	And nature is really confused because nature now, around me in London, believes that it's springtime.
	So first thing in the morning when I get up to go to work, the birds are singing.
	And if you look at the trees, they're beginning, some of them to turn green, certainly giving signs of that.
	And spring is not supposed to be for another two months.
	Very weird.
	Wow, that is weird.
	You know, well, and conversely over here in the States, you know, we've just emerged from what they call this polar vortex that essentially covered the Midwestern United States.
	But we were affected down here in Western North Carolina just as well.
	It was nine degrees when I departed for a trip to Mexico last week.
	And then the day before that, it got down to exactly zero.
	That's the coldest in living memory for me that I have ever recalled seeing it get.
	And so many people throughout the United States have just been saying, what is going on?
	And again, you know, I guess the term climate change is most appropriate because things are certainly changing.
	But, you know, the variables in the temperature and the extremities of the ups and downs just seem to be greater than ever before.
	Well, I've never been Al Gore's biggest fan, but certainly what's happening now seems to be bearing some of that up.
	We've got to say to our European and Australian New Zealand listeners who deal in Celsius, which they've told us to deal in here in Britain too.
	We were on Fahrenheit for years, but they've got us on Celsius as well.
	You talked about 0 degrees.
	You're talking about 0 Fahrenheit.
	And freezing point in Fahrenheit is 32.
	So it's 32 below that point.
	That's damn cold.
	It's damn cold, yes.
	No matter how you look at it.
	Damn cold.
	Now let's reprise, reprise what we talked about last time.
	We were talking about UFOs and ufology last time.
	And I know that having read your updated website, it's not just UFOs that you deal in, is it?
	No, it's, as a matter of fact, when it comes to my interests, there are a wide variety of different things that really have captivated my attention, especially aerial phenomenon.
	And I don't know precisely what it is about aerial phenomenon that really drives the point home for me at least.
	But I think because when I really came into this as a person who began to question aspects of the world around us, I was more interested in the zoological component to all this, you know, and whether or not there was any potential for the existence of a creature like Bigfoot or Sasquatch.
	Now, that, of course, I know I'm in good company here, but let's just go out into the mainstream for a moment and say a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable with the idea of talking about that very seriously.
	You know, Bigfoot is a myth and a modern myth at that.
	And I saw an editorial about this that was written just maybe a couple of weeks ago.
	A Seattle-based newspaper had said, well, you know, even though the whole thing is based on a hoax, people and belief in Bigfoot among those zealots who choose to believe in it nonetheless persist.
	Why is that?
	Well, the thing is, is that really in truth, people who have read more about this subject, they know that belief in Sasquatch doesn't go back to a hoax that occurred in 1958.
	There is a much older cultural tradition that has to do with all this.
	And so I began with that primarily because I was interested in ancient humans and ancient hominid cousins, which of course have died out over the hundreds of thousands of years.
	Modern humans still exist.
	But in our ancient past, there was never a time where there wasn't something like what we see today, what people claim to see and call a Bigfoot.
	It doesn't seem to be outside the realm of the possible that they have existed.
	So is there something to some of these reports?
	Now, I think that there is some compelling data to that.
	But at some point on down the road, looking for the more likely of the anomalous elements in our world around us, it eventually did lead me to aerial phenomenon.
	And I think I'm fascinated with it primarily, Howard, because with unidentified aerial phenomenon, there's almost always a national security component involved.
	Second to that, there's also this aspect of the UFO enigma that seems to be inextricably related to the Second World War.
	And so my latest endeavor with this goes right back to the very end of the Second World War, actually even throughout the Second World War, we began to see what some perceived as a highly advanced technology in the midst of the conflict that was far more capable of evasive maneuvering and far more capable of any kind of aerial acrobatics than anything that we knew to exist at that time.
	And so this latest book that I've written is called The Ghost Rockets, and it really kind of delves into some of those technologies.
	Now, for many people, this was very much a melting pot of a time.
	It was the end of the war.
	We were beginning to dabble in nuclear technology.
	We'd witnessed its power at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so we knew about that.
	But also we had Roswell, and we had the dawning of the modern UFO era.
	So this thing that you're talking about now dovetails very nicely with that.
	Oh, it does.
	You know, again, it's so curious to me that right there around the end of the Second World War, we start seeing all these technologies.
	I mean, a lot of people would discount the claims of what initially was reported as a flying saucer recovered by the U.S. Air Force on a little ranch south of Roswell, New Mexico.
	I think it was south, but I know it was just outside of town.
	When Mac Braswell walked out onto his ranch and he found what appeared to be the scattered wreckage of some sort of an aircraft, initially it had been reported that this was a flying saucer.
	Now, whether or not it was actually disc-shaped is kind of a question of history now, because in truth, after Kenneth Arnold, about maybe less than a month, after he had his first initial reporting, or rather his sighting, which he reported to the newspapers as being an object or a series of objects that flew erratically like a saucer skipping across water, the press jumped onto that.
	And so it was natural that the press would begin reporting virtually every UFO incident as being a quote-unquote flying saucer.
	Now, some of them certainly are, and I've heard some incredibly compelling cases over the years that do involve actual disc-shaped craft.
	So it's not to say that there may not have been at some point some sort of a technology employed that was actually disc-shaped, but we've got to keep in mind that toward the end of the 1940s and into the 1950s, the conventional term that the press began to apply to all these unidentified aerial objects was flying saucer, whereas what was described as being recovered at Roswell seemed to be something more akin to a flying wing type aircraft of some variety.
	And of course, they tried to palm it off on the public as weather balloons.
	Yeah, I'm not convinced that that was a weather balloon.
	And frankly, you know, and again, call me a conspiracist, but the release of the details of the Project Mogul that followed a few years after the fact, you know, that doesn't seem to really be satisfactory either.
	I'm convinced at very least, and if that could even give just a conservative estimate of what seemed to be going on at Roswell, I think some sort of an aircraft landed there, and it seemed to have what at the time the Air Force recognized as a variety of exotic technologies.
	I don't know how exotic necessarily those actually had to be, because one of the curious aspects of the UFO phenomenon, and this is something that's troubled some of the more insightful researchers over the years, is that rather than being something we would expect to be hundreds of years or maybe thousands of years ahead of us, as we would expect of an extremely advanced extraterrestrial technology, a lot of the UFO technologies that we witness tend to be what really are just maybe a few decades ahead of us.
	And remember the old adage that whatever the military has is roughly 20, 30 years ahead of what we have?
	I wonder sometimes how many of these aircraft actually, if not the military, just belong to terrestrial technologies.
	And this is the problem, isn't it?
	A lot of this is in a great big soup.
	There is this mix of sightings and reports and phenomena and technology.
	And then you have reports that a lot of this stuff, if it was captured and if it isn't ours, if it's theirs, has gone to places like Wright-Patterson Air Base or Area 51, as it was later called in another place.
	It's just a mess, isn't it?
	There is no one definitive account of what all this stuff was.
	No, not at all.
	Yeah, you're completely right.
	It's very difficult.
	I think that, honestly, a lot of modern UFO researchers and people who've looked into the UFO problem as I have, again, being a person who came into this with a secondary interest to UFOs, and it's become very consuming for me as a writer these days.
	And even my editors and publishers prefer, they say, Mike, write something about UFOs for us because it's such a hot question.
	Still, even more than half a century after the fact, but we haven't got a single narrative.
	I think many people have tried to apply a single narrative to it, and that is an extraterrestrial component.
	And frankly, a lot of people are displeased with my determination on that point.
	And that is simply this.
	While I can't rule out, and I don't think that any person rightly can, the extraterrestrial potential, I've found in most UFO cases no direct hard evidence of that.
	We have evidence of a technological phenomenon.
	It Seems to exceed what we know to exist in terms of modern aviation, but that does not alone prove an extraterrestrial component.
	And so, when many people try to say we're dealing with aliens visiting Earth, that's one interpretation of an apparent phenomenon in our midst that seems to be of technological origin.
	I mean, what you're saying really is that this could be our technology, it's just simply secret technology, but that begs the question again, doesn't it?
	That if we had technology that advanced, might we have got it from somewhere?
	Yeah, that, of course, is a possibility.
	And so, again, I think when it comes to a narrative, we have to be very careful with trying to pigeonhole it.
	It could be a variety of narratives.
	Think of it like the four fingers on a hand.
	You know, the hand functions so much finer when you've got all the fingers and a thumb there to pivot, you know.
	And with ufology, maybe we should take into consideration each of the individual digits and not just try to make it one blunt stump.
	Those aren't very formidable, are they?
	One of the many people we lost in 2013, Micah, was Jesse Marcel Jr., son of Jesse Marcel, who effectively carried the can for the whole Roswell thing.
	He was the fall guy for it.
	A very sad story, but a fascinating story for many of us.
	So sad and fascinating, they made a movie about it.
	What did you make over the years of the accounts that Jesse Marcel Jr. gave?
	Very much supporting what his father said, very much giving accounts of material recovered from whatever it was that crashed at Roswell and very much painting a credible picture of what went on.
	Yes, he did give a very credible description of what he, you know, of course, claimed his father brought home and talked about.
	And, you know, Jesse Marcel Jr., I think, is a man of integrity and a man who was very, he was very interested in trying to find answers, just like I think his father had.
	Now, a lot of people have also, and it's only fair to say, they've questioned his father's recollection of certain things.
	I think that, you know, on a couple of occasions, he had kind of inflated maybe certain titles and roles that he had played when he actually served with the Air Force.
	And that was later found out.
	But what I do think at the end of the day, and I think that a bit of confabulation, unfortunately, is just par for the territory.
	But what at the end of the day, I think probably is the case, is that Jesse Marcel certainly had an experience with the recovery of some kind of an aircraft.
	And I think that his son accurately attempted to represent and carry the torch, as you'd said, for what his father experienced, and that they, as experiencers, were just seeking the truth, just like everybody else.
	Now, at the top of this show, I gave the title of that new book of yours, and that's what we're here to talk about, this research, The Ghost Rockets, Mystery Missiles, and Phantom Projectiles in Our Skies.
	Does this mean that Micah Hanks is now leaning towards explaining aerial phenomena, UFOs, in a more rational way?
	Yes, it's interesting because it's a good bit of a departure from my last book, The UFO Singularity, which was a speculative endeavor to try and look at where future technology is going.
	And a lot of people don't like that book as a result of the fact that they don't feel that it did a very technical, or whether it didn't do justice to the technical interpretation of UFOs, much more like the Ghost Rockets does attempt to do.
	And so to kind of qualify my last work and then the departure from that, with the UFO Singularity, I have to argue that that book actually has less to do with UFOs and has more to do with the idea of technological singularity, which very concisely defined it, as I've defined it before here.
	It is essentially the creation of artificial intelligence or intelligence that exceeds natural capacities of human intelligence, which gets into the realm of artificial intelligence and also a variety of other different kinds of things, such as transhumanism.
	They're very controversial subjects today.
	But I see, and if you dig into the reports of UFO contactees, whether or not you believe that this is exactly physically what happened to them, whether you believe that there is indeed an abduction program going on, whether you believe that these technological craft are indeed of alien origin, again, I look at a more earthly terrestrial component with all of that, but I cannot remove the transhuman parallel.
	And if you read the UFO Singularity, I think that a lot of people will begin to see that.
	But in the present day, in terms of trying to understand, and more importantly, maybe looking to the past and trying to understand technologically what we're dealing with, after presenting kind of a thought exercise with the UFO Singularity, I've gotten back to bare bones with the ghost rockets.
	And yes, I do look, going all the way back, as we've already discussed, to the end of the Second World War, which is why it's so great to frame this conversation with a bit of discussion about Roswell, Kenneth Arnold, Jesse Marcel, and his son.
	Because right there at that period, just after the war, even before Kenneth Arnold, even before Roswell, by 1945 and 1946, there were reports of incredible technologies and not just seen over Europe, although the epicenter of this phenomenon would truly begin in the summer of 1946 over Scandinavia.
	But some of the more compelling reports, and one that I chose to open this book with, actually took place in the summer of 1946.
	Captain Jack Puckett, he was the Assistant Chief of Flying Safety with Tactical Air Command, and he was flying a C-47 on August 1st, 1946, headed to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.
	He was flying from Langley Field, and he and his crew observed a brightly illuminated object.
	It looked a lot like a long fuselage without wings or maybe a rocket.
	It appeared to be rocket propelled, and it had two rows of windows or portholes along the side.
	Now, this object was flying almost on a collision course for him and his crew, and this object, they barely missed it, and they watched it travel away from them at incredible speed, and so they filed an official report after the fact.
	Now, again, often you'll see today, and I think it's important to highlight this, and many people have said, you know, you say too much about the skeptical interpretations of these things, Micah.
	You know, you're preaching to the choir when you do interviews like this, but I think it's important to say that a skeptic will look at that report and say, I misidentification.
	Oh, maybe they were just telling a tall tale.
	Think about what it would take for, seriously, for U.S. Air Force officers of no less integrity and, of course, position of authority than Puckett was there with Tactical Air Command.
	Think about the repercussions that would stem from just putting out a phony story about something like that.
	And keep in mind also that Puckett wasn't the only person who saw this rocket-like, this fuselage with no wings being flown.
	Reports like Puckett's led the Air Force to actually conduct an inquiry to see if a technology could exist, perhaps if driven by nuclear power, that could Actually, cause an aircraft to behave and fly in the fashion that this object that Puckett had seen managed to do.
	Well, look, it was a brave thing of him to do to report it because we know that people in uniform risk their careers and a whole lot more in some circumstances if they do this.
	But there is the simple fact that he may have been mistaken.
	He could have.
	Yes, indeed.
	But now the question would be, what had he seen?
	Now, it could have been perhaps some sort of advanced aircraft that was being tested by another agency.
	There have been whispers, of course, that since the end of the Second World War that the Nazis had been working on some advanced technology and that some of it could have gone down to South America.
	This is largely viewed as a conspiracy theory these days.
	But again, it's important to note that the Air Force had thought enough of at least one individual who had traveled to Argentina named Ronald Richter to investigate him just as well, because it was rumored that he had been working on an advanced kind of physics that could be used for an alternative to modern aviation.
	And so over the years, there have been whispers of people who have come and gone who have indeed been involved in what appear to be or what may point to advanced aviation projects.
	Well, let's face the fact here, at the end of World War II, America wanted to get its hands on the rocketry technology that the Nazis had.
	They were very advanced with that.
	And the fact that we had an Apollo series, the fact that we had a space shuttle is largely down to the work of people like Werner von Braun, and we know where he came from.
	Absolutely, yes.
	And of course, von Braun's, he's kind of the protege of an earlier rocket pioneer, really the father of modern rocketry, and that's Hermann Oberth.
	Who, interestingly, although von Braun also spoke about UFOs, Hermann Oberth actually wrote a really concise article on the subject that appeared in Fate magazine in the 1960s.
	And I referenced that in the Ghost Rockets because I wanted to show that the early rocket pioneers from the Nazi era, that they had, whether or not they were willing, of course, and I don't think that von Braun or Oberth either of them were willing participants in what the Nazis were doing during the Second World War, but of course their technologies were employed during the conflict.
	Neither of these men seemed to have a full grasp of what the UFO situation was.
	They didn't claim to come out and have answers, and they didn't claim to be in the know, so to speak, as some authors, including Joseph Farrell, have asserted, particularly about Hermann Oberth.
	I kind of bring a counter opinion to that, because whereas Joseph Farrell has said that clearly Herman Oberth was lying when he talked about the different varieties of UFO technologies that may have been represented when he wrote for Fate magazine in the 60s, I think that really he was probably more genuine than he's been given credit for.
	I think that he was trying to find answers just like anyone else and was genuinely fascinated with this subject.
	But what we can't rule out with regard to the rockets that were seen just after the war over Scandinavia, which again, in modern times, ufologists refer to as ghost rockets, is that these technologies, rather than the saucers and some of the more advanced technologies that were witnessed over the years, these technologies did appear to behave far more like the rockets that were being employed by the Nazis during the Second World War.
	But the question is, is who would have been using them or testing these technologies over Scandinavia in the summer of 1940?
	Well, don't forget, of course, and unfortunately, the generation that will remember this all too clearly is leaving us now.
	But the fact of the matter is us, here in Europe, we know this better than most.
	After the war, everything was carved up.
	The Russians got their slice.
	The Americans got their slice.
	We got our slice.
	So if there was technology of that kind around in the Nazi era, rocket technology, secret technology, the Nazi bell, and all the rest of that stuff that we've read about, then that would have been divided between the Americans and the Russians.
	And of course, the Russians went into space, didn't they, with Urika Garin and the dog that they sent up there?
	What was it like?
	The Americans did their thing, too.
	Now, one of the test areas, of course, for Russia for rockets, and it's a place where they do all sorts of stuff.
	Well, it's the northern hemisphere, isn't it?
	It's the high northern hemisphere, Scandinavia.
	Absolutely.
	As a matter of fact, I think that I believe it was 2010 that this famous report of this spiral over Norway appeared.
	And what was supposed at first was that this was some sort of a strange, maybe a natural phenomenon or something along those lines.
	Of course, many ufologists were saying it was something more exotic.
	What it actually ended up being was a missile test gone awry.
	Often if there's a problem in the guidance system with a missile and they begin to spin wildly out of control, you'll get that kind of a swirling configuration in the sky.
	And so the Norwegian quote-unquote UFO of 2010 actually was indeed a missile.
	And so this is one of many instances where I think certainly over the northern hemisphere there, or parts of Scandinavia, it seems likely to me that maybe the Russians had been involved with some of these things.
	But later, of course, they would deny having involvement with that.
	The United States, of course, had become very interested.
	And the Swedish government during the summer of 1946 were the most interested.
	They actually put together an official task force to try and deal with these so-called ghost rockets.
	And this is singular because, again, while I feel that it's pretty clear, as you already alluded, that somebody, one of the two emerging superpowers in likelihood, were testing rocket technologies.
	And furthermore, these technologies were being tested and seen over parts of the neutral Scandinavian countries.
	I think it's pretty clear that we're dealing with terrestrial technologies.
	But I think that there are other aspects of this that should be, at least historically viewed of importance just as well.
	Well, that American report you told me about first, the military guy who made a report, you said that that thing appeared to have a seating area windows.
	That's much more than what officially we were being told was achievable at the end of World War II, which was something akin to the doodlebug rockets that flew to London and dropped ammunition explosives on us.
	Right.
	You know, and actually, Howard, that's a good point because I should bring that up.
	And only to return very briefly to Sweden, I did want to point out that during that summer of 1946, this task force that was put together by the Swedish government to interpret the ghost rocket phenomenon became historically what we would call the first governmental task force that investigated what we would call in the modern era unidentified flying objects.
	So that's something of historical importance to point out.
	But what you bring to the table here is important just as well, because yes, what was seen as Captain Puckett flew to MacDill Air Force Base was not something that should have existed at that time.
	And therefore, what we have to look at is the fact that although we refer to historically the tests of rocket technologies over Scandinavia of unexplained origin.
	That doesn't mean that they're necessarily exotic.
	That just means that we've yet to come to a governmental determination, at least that the public is aware of, about what those technologies represented.
	But I employed the term ghost rocket to mean a variety of technologies that resembled rockets and sometimes large and possibly manned aircraft just as well, like what Captain Puckett observed.
	I mentioned again that this object was seen many times, and I think that there are different varieties of similar technologies that have continued to appear over the years, and I get into those throughout the book because I bring this technology from the 40s all the way up to the present.
	I don't make a, or attempt to make, any kind of connection between them all and say that there is one singular ghost rocket phenomenon that began in 46 and is continued today.
	But what I do is I employ that term because it is familiar to UFO researchers.
	And I use that to reference a variety of rocket and missile reports that continue today.
	And, you know, if you'd like, we can talk about some of the more modern ones just as well, because those to me are some of the more compelling.
	We still are experiencing what I think are very similar to the reports of ghost rockets, even in the modern day and right over here over the United States.
	I want to do that, but do you feel, it certainly sounds like you do, that the genesis of all of this is back in World War II, and there was technology, whether it's the Nazis who had it, or whether it was around in some other form, and that's even more of a conspiracy theory, isn't it, that there was technology that was way advanced of what we officially had.
	And that's nothing to do with UFOs.
	I do agree.
	Yes, yes.
	I think that there is far more advanced technology that is in our midst and has been since the end of the Second World War.
	You know, again, unfortunately, and this is the sad reality, is that, you know, when you enter a conflict, you know, necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes.
	And so what we see here is that during the war, I think that obviously there were some technologies being innovated right there at the end of the Second World War.
	Let's keep in mind also that we weren't sure how long peace would be maintained.
	We've been lucky enough to wear that there, I mean, there have been some serious conflicts in the years since, but we have not had a full-on, all, you know, out-and-out major superpowers colliding again on par with the Second World War.
	And we're lucky for that.
	But all throughout the Cold War, we were concerned about that very possibility.
	And so I think that there were always technologies.
	After the Second World War, we look at that historically today as being the end of the conflict.
	People at that time may not have looked at it quite so much the same.
	And they were probably concerned and no doubt weapons tests continued and maybe even increased so as to potentially ward off the threat of violence or conflict that may ensue thereafter.
	If there was so much in this end of the war and beginning of the Cold War era, if there was so much weird stuff flying up there and periodic sightings, how come military pilots didn't see this kind of thing more often?
	If you remember for a very long period, and certainly before my time, but it was very much a phenomenon, America kept this thing called the Chrome Dome going in the sky.
	And that was essentially planes that flew 24-7, keeping an eye out for Soviet missiles.
	They were up there all the time, constantly being refueled, constantly on service, constantly being replenished, new crews, new planes all the time.
	The Chrome Dome was keeping an eye on all of us right round the clock.
	Surely if that level of vigilance was up there, then we'd have had an awful lot more sightings.
	If there was some kind of secret behind-the-scenes experimentation going on, then some of this would have got out.
	A lot more of this would have got out.
	Well, a lot more of it would have gotten out unless there are two components that we take into consideration.
	For national security reasons, if, again, there are intelligence officers, or I should say, Air Force officers, servicemen who are making these observations, for reasons of national security, certain protocols may have been employed so as not to release that information, for instance, to the press or to the public.
	Now, in the instance where there are civilians that observe these things, of course, it'll go to the press.
	And what's interesting, Howard, is that when you look, and I get into this during the book, after the 1946 wave, after the initial ghost rocket splash over Scandinavia right after the war, I progress on into the 1950s and look at how many newspaper articles actually did deal with reports of flying saucers and things seen over the, especially the American Southwest.
	Now, what's interesting is that the descriptions of those quote-unquote flying saucers don't involve saucers at all.
	They involve objects that obviously to me were probably early jet aircraft, missiles, rockets, things like that.
	They behaved a lot more like jet aircraft or ballistic missiles, and the descriptions of them were consistent with that.
	Yet, again, the popular term, and I want to point this out again, the press was employing that popular term flying saucer for all these things, whether or not the craft really appeared to be saucers.
	But the other reason maybe that this would be kept from the public, in addition to the reason, or in addition to the potential for protocols, the other reason might be that if there were such tests going on, maybe military and government authorities were involved with this.
	They were aware of it.
	And what the civilians would have interpreted as being something anomalous, certain government agencies wouldn't, because they were in the loop, they knew what was going on, and certain testing would not have been reported.
	And so I think that maybe there's a case to be made for why there may not be more military reports, although I get into a lot of them in the book.
	And I do look at a number, and those are, to me, the most valuable.
	When we have trained pilots who are aware of military pilots I'm talking about, we have trained pilots and servicemen who have a good idea about what kinds of technologies and what kinds of aviation innovations are ongoing, and yet they see things that to them appear truly exotic.
	Did any of these rockets defy the laws of physics?
	To quote Scotty, as we knew them at the time?
	I would not say that they defy the laws of physics per se, but I would say that they defied what known technologies of that era were capable of.
	In fact, there was a very revelatory statement that was made by one of the Swedish defense officials who had served on the Ghost Rockets Task Force.
	And years later, he was interviewed by a pair of renowned Swedish UFO researchers.
	And he had said that what we were observing over, and keeping in mind, by the way, that the Swedish determination at the time, the government determined that there wasn't enough evidence to substantiate the belief that there were indeed ghost rockets.
	They couldn't find evidence of these things, but that did not necessarily mean that there was not a phenomenon.
	That was their scientific interpretation, which is consistently seen over the years.
	Every time a scientific Body attempts to determine something about UFOs.
	They will tell you the same thing.
	And let's not misconstrue whether it be Edward Condon or the Swedish government have said.
	It's not that they say that UFOs could not or do not exist.
	It is that they have not found scientific evidence that warrants further study.
	We have a thing called the United Nations, and Sweden is part of the United Nations.
	Could the Swedes, maybe they did over the years, could they not have asked formal questions there as to this stuff is appearing in our skies.
	We don't know what it is.
	We would like some answers about this.
	You know, I suppose that they could, but again, their own internal scientific determination had been that, well, we don't have enough evidence to substantiate something to continue with studying.
	So a lot of people have said that that's just, oh, they're just trying to cover it up.
	No, I think that truly this is the problem.
	And again, to bring Sasquatch back into this, kind of funny, which is a game I call seven degrees of Sasquatch here.
	You've heard seven degrees of Kevin Bacon, sort of similar.
	There was a well-known primatologist in the 1970s who had come to a determination, a personal determination, after examining all the evidence before him.
	He believed that while the Yeti was probably unlikely, that there was indeed something to the Bigfoot of the North Americas.
	But he said, we have to keep in mind that the best evidence for this is circumstantial.
	It's based on eyewitness evidence.
	That would not be enough for a physicist or a chemist.
	You know, that wouldn't be enough for a biologist.
	But I think that that evidence stands for something, at very least, in terms of witness testimony.
	The Swedes were dealing with the same thing with the ghost rockets.
	There was credible testimony and far too much of it, but they could not retrieve some physical substance by which a scientific determination could be made.
	Was anything going on at the diplomatic level, as far as you know?
	Were diplomats from Sweden making approaches to Moscow and Washington, just trying to see what is going on here, if anything?
	I do believe that there had been attempts to try and determine, especially if Britain or if Russia had been involved.
	And of course, neither were complicit in saying, oh, yes, yeah, we're just doing tests, which I think maybe is a bit suspect because I think that the question would be if they were conducting tests, maybe more likely Russia, we could even say, as you alluded to earlier, if they had been conducting these kinds of tests, would they have come out and said so?
	Even today, with some of the modern reports of rockets that are seen, I get into, in the introduction to the book, I look at three of the modern cases, one over the coast of California that took place a couple of years ago that was later determined to be an aircraft, literally just a commercial aircraft.
	We look at one that was seen over Newfoundland, and then we look at one that was, of course, seen over Norway.
	In these three instances, I think one was just a plane, one was actually a missile, but that was mistaken for a UFO.
	But then one was actually a rocket or missile of some variety.
	It was photographed, and there were good photographs taken of this thing.
	And whatever this object was, no one would claim to know or would rather claim to have been behind it and responsible for it.
	So if there is a secret program going on, or if there are secret programs in the plural going on, which I don't doubt there probably are, I wonder what the point is in this era of peace and harmony in this world, where supposedly the only real threat is maybe North Korea.
	You know, there are not as many threats as there used to be, and we've learned to settle our differences.
	Why anybody would want to be experimenting with this kind of black ops stuff now?
	Well, you know, I mean, there are any number of reasons, and I think that at the end of the day, you can tell people, you know, you're not allowed to have, for instance, weapons, guns, or something like that.
	But there are always going to be people who say, but you know what?
	I feel naked if I'm not able to arm myself.
	And in the dresser drawer in their private residence, you know, sure, they'll keep a 38 special.
	And they say, you know, damned if anyone wants to tell me I can't have that.
	So it's what we say here in the UK, forewarned is forearmed.
	In other words, you've got to be prepared.
	Presumably, you have freedom of information laws like we do.
	You had the sunshine laws there before we did.
	Black ops is something that it's possible to get a trail for and on, isn't it?
	Because you'll see documents that have big bits redacted from them, and you can join up the dots sometimes and see where that happens.
	Do you believe that there are secret budgets for this kind of thing in the U.S. and have you found evidence of them?
	There is some evidence for those kinds of things.
	And I think I'd begin by saying about that subject that there are instances where we have to take into consideration that with Freedom of Information Act, this is a skeptical argument that's often been brought to my attention because I've always said that obviously there are technologies being employed by governments.
	Now, it's interesting that people say, well, then if that's the case, why don't you just use Freedom of Information to gain access to this?
	I've got friends who have worked with the space agency here in the United States, people who have worked with intelligence, you know, retired.
	They'll all tell you the same thing.
	If you want to utilize Freedom of Information Act requests, you also have to know what to look for.
	And I've talked about in the past on my own program, the Graylian Report, well, maybe we could utilize Freedom of Information Act to disclose some information about what I perceive to be probably these stealth blimps, these large triangles.
	I have friends, you know, who in their positions previously working in government, sometimes decades ago, sometimes more recently, some of them still working with things like the Space Agency Today, they'll say you'd be hard-pressed to be able to find something like that through FOIA because you have to know what to look for.
	So where else does evidence come up?
	And I have to cite an article that appeared in the September 2003 edition of Fate magazine that was very fascinating.
	This article, as a matter of fact, I've got it right here and I wanted to cite it so that if anyone wants to look for this, they can pull it up.
	It was written by Kurt Sutherly, and it's called Shadowcraft and the UFO Phenomenon.
	And he talks about the fact that the Blackbird, the aircraft, of course, the famous aircraft, utilized a variety of fuel that had a about a two-week, no, I'm sorry, this is actually used SR-71 fuel, basically, the bird of prey.
	Now, this aircraft used fuel that had about a two-week shelf life.
	That's what's important here because after, and this is what's interesting, is that after aircraft like the SR-71 and other aircraft were decommissioned, the fuel, the two-week shelf life and all continued to be built.
	And so what Kurt Sutherly points out with this article is, well, is it that this fuel was still being made for purpose of fueling another kind of an aircraft, even if this SR-71 and others had been decommissioned?
	Well, you can easily trace that back.
	It's a smoking gun, isn't it?
	If a lot of this fuel was still being produced, that indicates to you that something else is happening.
	Yeah, something within that two-week period had to have been, That fuel was being used to fuel something within the period of its shelf life.
	So we can't prove that an aircraft exists, but we know that aircraft are utilizing fuel that's still being made.
	And FOIA requests have revealed that indeed that fuel and certain other kinds of things still are being made.
	So it's kind of like you can't see the phenomenon, perhaps.
	It's on the other side of a wall, but between you and the wall, you can see the shadow on the other side of the room.
	And you know that there's a shadow of something.
	You can't make out exactly what it is.
	You've researched a lot of documents about this, I know.
	What about people?
	Have you talked to people who've indicated to you that there's more to all of this than meets the eye?
	Certainly.
	I mean, there have been a number of individuals who've come forward over the years, some people whose families have been involved with intelligence, some people who have claimed to work in different agencies and things themselves.
	And what's the most compelling piece of evidence that you personally have been told?
	Gosh, you know, it's funny because in this realm of research, there are a lot of people who unfortunately have to abide by anonymity because of their backgrounds, because of their...
	It's that they cannot come forward and they cannot put their name behind.
	And don't forget, certainly in the UK, and I'm sure in the US, an awful lot of people who work in those fields and fields allied to them.
	In other words, the service sector servicing security, if we want to call it that, they have to sign documents that basically pledge them to secrecy.
	Exactly.
	And I've never, by the way, I want to say I've never been in a position where I think that someone has ever broken any kind of a secret bow or anything like that.
	What's more compelling to me is rather than having direct access to secret information is having people tell me, you know, I'm sorry, I'm within or I've worked within, I'm in academia and I've worked with people, you know, and spoken with people on intelligence projects that allude to there being far more advanced technologies that may exist than what we know today.
	But I think that, again, when you have a person who is in academia or in government and they are just as perplexed by the phenomena as you or I might be, and yet they too are pursuing the mystery and trying to track down the tails, that is something that's very interesting to me.
	Look, America, I'm sorry to interrupt again.
	I don't mean to do this, but America is a free market economy and depends on big corporations.
	And the fact that you went to the moon, the fact that you had a space program, well, of course, that was all to do with the extreme involvement of private organizations having billions of dollars invested in them and them investing millions and billions of dollars in technology that they were developing.
	So what I'm saying really is, corporate America, if these things were going on in the U.S., must have had a finger or a hand in that pie.
	Exactly.
	Yes.
	You know, we live kind of in a corporatocracy here in the United States, especially.
	People look at it and they say, oh, the government could do this.
	The government would do that.
	I think it has, in a lot of instances, a lot more to do with private corporations.
	And keeping in mind also that a government can also cite plausible deniability if a branch of government outsources to a corporate entity to develop a project for them.
	They never have to come forward and say, yes, we have people working on this.
	No, they can outsource it and have somebody else.
	But the corporations are not responsible to the people in the way governments are.
	So a great way to keep something secret, I would have thought, is to farm it out to a corporate entity, and they can keep the secret for you.
	Yes, and I don't think that you can rule that out.
	And I have a friend, you know, who had been a former defense contractor, and he had told me one time, he says that, you know, when you start getting into that and into the realm of what we might call black budgets and whatnot, you can only look so far before the people involved begin to look back.
	And, you know, again, modern skeptics and people tend to kind of rule that out and say, oh, that's just conspiracy theory.
	No, frankly, and I will go on the record saying that I believe that is more the reality of the world in which we live and that you do have to take into consideration the fishiness of deaths like that of the journalist Robert Hastings and certain individuals here in the United States, you know, who have unfortunately succumbed to the apparent pressures of people who don't like civilians looking too deeply into these kinds of things.
	And I think that that is very much the reality of the situation.
	Was anybody trying to warn you off?
	I was told a very strange story a few years ago about a gentleman.
	He had reported a UFO sighting to me.
	And when he contacted me, he tried to supply some technical details about an aircraft that he'd seen.
	Well, several weeks passed, and then he told me after the fact, he says, listen, I need to talk to you about an MIB.
	And I thought it would be kind of a funny story.
	And the short version of the story was that he was approached after his work shift one evening and told not to talk to Micah Hanks anymore by a little man, a little man wearing a black suit.
	He says, you're not to talk to Micah Hanks anymore.
	And if you do, you'll see me again.
	And so I asked the gentleman, I said, you wouldn't pull my leg, would you?
	And he says, well, you know, all I know is that if I see this individual again, and he said the little man spoke with an accent, and it was just much more the kind of thing that you'd expect out of a science fiction movie.
	But he says, if I see him again, he says, I'll be carrying a camera.
	And that was the last I heard from that individual.
	So, you know, I don't, I couldn't, I couldn't confirm or deny the validity of that story.
	I'm telling you now as it was told to me.
	But, you know, when you hear stories like that, I think that maybe both for sanity and also for objectivity, you have to take everything with a grain of salt.
	I've never had a direct threat or anything made to me.
	But by the same token, I'm also someone who has said the reality of this phenomenon, you know, and Howard, this is again the truth.
	I think the reality of this is that the majority probably is Earth technology.
	That's not as interesting to me as the potential for something more exotic.
	That's where I'm interested, and that's what I'll always be more interested in.
	Well, you're going to face an awful lot of opposition, aren't you, by doing research like this?
	Because an awful lot of people, including myself, would really like to believe that we are being visited by aliens and maybe some of them have our best interests at heart and they've given us technology and they're keeping an eye on us and maybe we're a great big experiment from, you know, conducted by some great civilization on Alpha Centauri.
	The last thing that a lot of us want to believe is that much of what we have seen in our skies since 1946 is actually on some level ours.
	Right, exactly.
	I do think that there's a little bit of wish fulfillment in this.
	And, you know, that's another important point that needs to be addressed too, is that in regard to people's wish and their wish fulfillment and their expectations, coloring the experience that they have.
	I've often in the past said that there is clearly a psychological component to the UFO phenomenon.
	When you say that to people, especially who are experiencers, they turn red and they will try to hit you.
	And the reason why is because they initially misinterpret what I'm trying to say as being that they have had either a delusion or a hallucination, that they have imagined the experience or had a psychotic break from reality.
	Now, I want to first say that I'm just as offended by the big-ass skeptic that comes along and says exactly that, and many have, that people who have had multiple eyewitness encounters are all suffering from a mass hallucination, that they all suffered from some sort of psychotic break from reality.
	I think that that, frankly, is just intellectually lazy.
	It does not seek to understand the deeper phenomenon.
	Now, when I say that there's a psychological component, I clearly think that there is.
	But what I mean by that is that when a person can have a real experience where they see an unidentified flying object, I think that their expectations, based on their cultural interpretation and understanding of what an unidentified flying object is expected to be, that those aspects color the experience in certain circumstances.
	And a person who maybe sees a light in the sky would interpret it as being a UFO because it defied the normal and what they had expected to have in the everyday consensus reality experience.
	That doesn't necessarily mean we're dealing with aliens or flying saucers or anything of the like.
	It could be natural phenomenon, aerial phenomenon of advanced technologies that are of Earth origin.
	All these different things may be part of the equation, but I think that the viewer's expectations certainly at times color that experience, and that does not remove the validity of the experience and the accounts the witnesses give.
	It merely means that we have to take into consideration their mindset and how they interpreted what they've seen, because it comes down to philosophy at the end of the day.
	Everything is relative to the subjective opinion of the observer.
	And the power of recall is a very strange thing.
	I don't doubt that some people have seen anomalous phenomena, but I'm not sure in quite a few cases whether they've recounted what they've seen faithfully.
	And that's not their fault.
	That's just part of the human condition that if you witness a robbery, for example, or you witness an accident and you try and play back your recollection of that, well, if you get six people together, you may get four or five different versions of the story.
	That's just part of humanity because the brain colors what you see.
	It certainly does, you know, and this is why I put so much stock in the observation of trained witnesses.
	Because, you know, in the Ghost Rockets, especially for the last chapter, one of the probably my favorite aspect of the book was looking into a database that's maintained online.
	It's publicly available and anyone you or I or anyone else can look at it.
	It's the database of an organization called the Aviation Safety Reporting System.
	It's actually overseen by NASA for purposes of objectivity.
	It was designed to be able to allow aviation professionals to anonymously report hazards that could complicate or potentially endanger people in terms of the airspace from commercial to military, but by the same token, also remove the potential for litigation that might inhibit a person or cause them not to want to report what they've seen.
	So the aviation safety reporting system, I believe, was instituted in the late 1980s and, of course, was carried on throughout the 90s and the 2000s and even today.
	And although it's a distinct minority, when you dig into the reports in the aviation safety reporting system, first of all, I want to say that there's a lot of technical jargon, acronyms, and things that are employed.
	And so I had to literally download a key in order to be able to decipher some of the messages.
	What I was looking for specifically were two things.
	UFO reports, which there weren't a lot of, but there were a few, and they're very ambiguous.
	And you have to kind of know what to look for using the search filters if you want to find those kind of reports.
	There were, however, a lot more, well, not a whole lot more, just a handful, but significantly more reports that specifically described missile or rocket-shaped objects as recently as just within the last few years that are maintained in the ASRS databases.
	Now, what's fascinating about this is that in the key that I downloaded, UFO is a term that is applied, and it specifically means, just as Ed Rubelt had admitted to be employed when he first employed it in the 1950s, it means unidentified flying object.
	Aviation professionals do report unidentified flying objects.
	Again, that doesn't necessarily mean we're talking about extraterrestrials.
	But the number of reports of alleged exotic craft versus reports that specifically describe missile or rocket-shaped objects, often that don't leave any kind of a jet plume or anything, that are flying dangerously close to aircraft, are pretty surprising.
	And I get into those in the ghost rockets.
	And you told me, of course, about 20 minutes ago in this conversation that some of the more recent cases were some of the most fascinating.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	For instance, I think in the late 1990s, there was a report of something very similar to what Captain Puckett saw in 1946 on his way to MacDill Air Force Base.
	This one was seen, I believe, while flying over California.
	They said it looked like the fuselage of like a B-52 bomber, no wings, and flying along at tremendous speed.
	Now, we know now that there are what are called scramjets that exist.
	You know, for instance, I think that I think it's, I believe it's the Navy that has what's called the Wave Rider.
	And it's the fastest known scramjet, I believe, in existence right now.
	It can get a little over Mach 9.
	There are reports of objects very similar to that that have been witnessed by the crews aboard various aircraft, commercial aircraft and the like.
	Often it's more than a single witness.
	In fact, some of the most compelling and troubling are reports of the entire crews aboard aircraft flying over Long Island Sound that reported seeing what looked like rockets or missiles darting over Long Island Sound, get this, in the months leading up to and shortly after the TWA Flight 800 crash.
	Really?
	Yes.
	Now, why?
	And again, there were some instances where not only were these objects seen by multiple crews aboard multiple planes leaving JFK airport, but they also were tracked by radar and they also were discussed with Boston Air Traffic Control in these instances.
	Again, in the months leading up to the fatal crash of the TWA Flight 800.
	Now, in a lot of the conspiratorial literature pertaining to that crash, people don't discuss the fact that there were reports of what appeared to be rockets, missiles, and flares that were seen in at least three, possibly four instances in the months before and after.
	So the compelling case to be made here is that maybe the missile, if people want to choose that interpretation of TWA Flight 800, if there were some sort of an exterior object or an explosion that caused that crash, it might not have been the first time an object of that variety was seen.
	And the word missile has been used for a long time in connection with TWA-800, hasn't it?
	The FBI were the first to use that.
	The problem is that the results of their official investigation determined that they didn't think.
	They said that there was an electrical problem that caused a spark to ignite in the center wing fuel tank.
	Now, the problem is, is that subsequent analysis in the years since, and then there's a documentary that the STARS channel here in the United States produced that kind of revisits the case.
	And a number of the original NTSB investigators have come forward now, and they say that not only do they think that there was compelling evidence that there was something else going on, but that the FBI was covering it up.
	It looks at the possibility, and I think that there is some decent evidence to suggest that there was some sort of an explosion exterior to the aircraft that caused TWA Flight 800 to come down.
	And what was so interesting and the most revelatory thing about this was that only after I finished publishing the ghost rockets, when this documentary was released, Fox News carried a, it was a brief kind of a debate between one of the civilian physicists who is featured prominently in the film and then the then FBI director involved in the FBI's wing of the investigation.
	And when he was confronted with the fact that there was potentially more evidence, rather than saying that's all completely bunk, he said, well, frankly, I think that that's terrible because if these NTSB researchers or investigators say that there's evidence of something, they should have brought that to the table 15, you know, 20 years ago when this investigation was ongoing rather than today so that they can basically maintain their jobs and whatnot.
	He says that they're cowards if they had evidence that they've withhold held all this time, which to me, while not a direct admission, was paramount.
	It was very interesting because this FBI chief is sitting there saying, well, okay, if there is other evidence, why didn't they tell me about it then?
	I won't deny it.
	But if it was, why are we not hearing about it until years and years later?
	But I think that there are a number of reasons why, yes, people may be fearful for their jobs.
	Yes, people may have been told there are certain things that we can and cannot talk about.
	And many of the NTSB investigators that are featured in that documentary, which I have seen and I do recommend, they do say just that, Howard.
	They say, you know, clearly the FBI, they were telling us what we could not photograph, what we could photograph, what we could say, what we couldn't say.
	But some of the evidence we feel strongly pointed to an explosion exterior to the craft that brought that plane down.
	So could this have been an accident?
	Could this have been technology being used in the skies, which you're saying was used as early as 1946 as far as we know?
	Well, occasionally something's going to go wrong, isn't it?
	And maybe one of these things could explode adjacent to an aircraft or hit an aircraft or come into contact with something that we do know about.
	Yeah, the big question is this.
	Why would missiles be launched by anyone over a heavily trafficked commercial airspace?
	That is the big problem.
	And this has led to conspiracy theories involving a missile that was accidentally launched from a submarine.
	It was a gentleman by the name of Bill Donaldson who had formed a group called the Retired Aviation Professionals, the Association of Retired Aviation Professionals, actually.
	Now, his group, and their website actually still exists.
	I believe it's TWAFlight800.org, but I'll have to double check on that.
	They actually did acknowledge the reports of missile-like objects seen before and after TWA Flight 800.
	They're the only ones that did.
	Well, actually, there were two.
	They did so, and then also the National UFO Reporting Center had also researched some of the previous, the sightings of the rockets prior to.
	But what's interesting is that, you know, when you're getting into those reports and you're looking at some of these things, what Bill Donaldson and a few others had suggested was that they thought that it was a shoulder-mounted missile.
	In other words, that it had been a terrorist act that had taken down the plane.
	The FBI early on did explore that possibility, and they were very concerned about the idea of a shoulder-mounted missile being launched from somewhere on the ground at a plane with purpose of taking down a plane as a terrorist act.
	They felt that they could rule that out.
	Now, if we wanted to apply conspiratorial interpretation, if that had been the cause and not a submarine launching a missile or something else going awry, one could assume that the potential for entering conflict, if there were a direct parallel found between a certain nation or organization and a terrorist act like that, one attempt, and many would probably view this as tenuous, but I think that there are some instances where this has happened in other cases that are far beyond the scope of this conversation.
	But one could view it as being an attempt to actually prevent entering a conflict with another nation if it were actually found that a terrorist act had been carried out.
	Now, I don't know how much convincing evidence there is for an armed terrorist attack.
	I don't think that maybe we can make that case, but many people early on had suggested that, including Bill Donaldson, because they couldn't find any other way to substantiate the idea that there had been a missile.
	All they knew was that many of the eyewitness reports seemed to be in keeping with the behavior of a missile or a flare flying toward something flying toward the craft before it exploded.
	So, you know, again, there has to be an origin, and that's where the speculation comes in.
	What was this thing that struck this plane?
	Well, if you're listening to this right now and you think that this is all hogwash, just think on this.
	I've had at least two guests on this show, and I've heard people on other shows talk about how they use high-grade night vision sites to look up into the sky and the stuff that they see in the sky when the cloud cover is not so great.
	The stuff that they see up there that cannot be explained, the strange craft that move at speeds that we don't know about, things that appear to be in dogfights, things that crisscross each other.
	It is possible stuff is going on at a level that we cannot be aware of ordinarily, but technology like high-grade night vision that you're not supposed to possess because only the military over here is supposed to have it, but people do get it.
	This is not beyond the realms, it seems to me, of credulity.
	I agree.
	And that's something else that should be considered just as well.
	Although, again, it's getting into the realm of the more exotic.
	There are a few cases where these, what I refer to across the board as ghost rockets.
	And again, not to say that there's one singular technology that's existed since World War II and continues today.
	I think that It's a variety of different technologies, a variety of different unexplained missile incidents, a lot of different things that we look at.
	And I apply that term again because it's familiar in ufology.
	I do want to make that point.
	But there are, however, Howard, a few that are more exotic that I discuss in the book.
	There was a sighting of two objects flying over the Bahamas that was very strange because a missile typically is designed to fly a course.
	It is supposed to fly from point A to point B. Sometimes they can fly halfway across the world.
	I mean, you know, the technology exists these days and has since the Cold War years.
	But what's interesting is that, you know, again, a missile or a rocket is presumed to fly with a purpose.
	It's not something that flies, you know, for purpose of transportation or for pleasure.
	And yet there are very strange maneuvers and very strange, you know, aerial feats that some of these objects are reported doing, which seems to point to there being an alternative purpose for their employment.
	Now, whatever that may be or whoever may be behind that, I don't know, but there are nonetheless some exotic cases that we get into the book that I think that the UFO researcher would find more in keeping with the interpretation of something exotic.
	So just to put that out there, there are a few of those.
	Maybe we can't rule that out with some of these strange incidents that involve the apparent presence of an object that seems to defy rationale, move so quickly.
	No one seems to be able to determine what it is or where it's from.
	There are a variety of elements to this, and it's a very complex mystery, probably a multifaceted one just as well.
	And I don't think we can rule out anything as a potential in this.
	But again, I like to highlight this rocket component in the larger spectrum of ufology because I find that there are, as I found with the ASRS databases, there are a lot more reports of this particular variety of phenomenon that are reported as drones or UFOs or the like that seem to point to something else that has not been highlighted really in a comprehensive way.
	And I also want to point out that at the end of the book, in terms of being comprehensive and maybe exhaustive, I went through and found in newspaper articles, books, periodicals, all different kinds of things, every report of a rocket-like object that I could find.
	And I've put together an appendix at the end of the ghost rockets that actually lists chronologically every single one that I can find.
	And I do believe it's fairly exhaustive, dating ghost rockets from during the Second World War up to the modern day.
	And so there'll be a lot for people to read if they're interested in this.
	And I think it, again, highlights an aspect of modern ufology that's very often overlooked.
	So what conclusion then, at the end of this research and the end of this book, do you come to?
	Because it sounds to me talking to you that you've come out of it with more questions than you've achieved answers.
	Yes, I do have more questions.
	Now, you know, I had somebody attacking me recently and they'd said, you know, you're not looking for answers.
	We know that you just like to dabble and you're just trying to you're just trying to play up the wonder of the.
	I do have questions.
	And when you are a serious researcher, you can't come to definite conclusions when you are operating in the absence of a full set of data.
	So a lot of people have said, you don't draw conclusions and therefore you're not looking for real answers.
	No, what it is, is I'm not going to commit to an incomplete answer for purposes of, you know, maybe increasing my public persona or selling.
	You must have a gut feeling.
	Do you think that it's maybe like the Illuminati, the New World Order, that there's a group behind the governments that we can see and we vote for, supposedly, that could well be the possessors of political power and power of technology that we don't understand, that we haven't seen, that they have and we don't?
	Well, I'll tell you this.
	Despite my attempts at maintaining objectivity and being non-committal without evidence, what my gut tells me, if we're asking what my gut tells me, I do believe that, yes, there are technologies that are far more advanced than what we know on the conventional level that exist today.
	And probably that there are, if not governments, possibly organizations and entities that operate outside of government that employ these from time to time through the same sorts of contracting and black budgets and projects and things that we discussed earlier.
	And yes, when it comes to the discussion of Illuminati and various different secret technologies, maybe employed by secret organizations, you can't rule that out either.
	And anyone who studies more fully, maybe to the degree that I have, the secret history of the Western world and the different agencies and organizations that have directed political and economic events over the centuries, yeah, there's certainly a secret and maybe what we would call a conspiratorial component to it.
	And I think that maybe this all fits into that.
	And what do you make?
	I know this is only tangential to what we've been talking about, about the news today that came out of the UK, but is about the US, that your NSA is harvesting text messages at the rate of 200 million per day.
	You know, on my weekly podcast, which I recorded last night and we broadcast live as well, I brought that up.
	And unfortunately, you know, that's something that I think we're all aware of today.
	And I'm not surprised and not to sound complacent, although I think that unfortunately the amount of reporting that's been going into this, I think, has led to a lot of complacency.
	People are like, well, we know that they're watching us.
	What can we do about it?
	We can't do anything.
	I think that it's wrong.
	I think that we are looking at seriously the potential for an Orwellian sort of a state.
	I think a lot of people have said Orwell was right.
	He just got the year wrong.
	But I think that the other thing, too, about that is that if maybe 10 or 12 years ago, maybe at the outset of when these sorts of mass surveillance programs had begun, or very least we could say shortly after 9-11, when it became kind of justifiable, especially here in the U.S.,
	to allow our Intel agencies for the sake of protecting us to do just about anything and go anywhere, whether that cross-state boundaries or country boundaries, diplomatic relations, to be damned, we're going to watch everybody and everything in the name of national security, and we're going to infringe upon people's rights.
	And I do think it's an infringement.
	If we go back to that point and we told everybody, if we said, you know, listen, everything that you do on your computer can be tracked.
	Everything that you say on your cell phone, every place you go, your position can be globally triangulated and people can find you and know what you do, where you are, when you've been there, what you had for breakfast.
	If you said that to people, you know, maybe a decade ago, they would have called you a liar or a kook or a conspiracist.
	You say it now, and you're someone who's read the news because it's the reality, again, of the world in which we live.
	But bringing people to the fuller understanding of that reality is far easier said than done.
	But I think for the first time.
	I think it's very, Very concerning, and you won't know this, but as you said some of those words, for the very first time in this digital connection, the digital connection started to break up.
	Well, part for the course.
	Now, speaking as a man, and I'm not paranoid, I think I've got my feet on the ground.
	I do keep reaching for the stars, as Casey Caseme used to say.
	But speaking as a man who's had strange clicks on his phone over the last couple of years and stuff like that, I just, maybe that was more than coincidence, Micah.
	I don't know.
	Do you remember there was in the famous James Bond novel Goldfinger that Art Goldfinger says, you know, once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, but three times is enemy action.
	The latest work of Micah Hanks, and I will put a link to his work on my website, www.theunexplained.tv.
	Thank you again to Adam Cornwell, a creative hotspot in Liverpool, for getting the show out to you and devising our website.
	If you want to contact me or make a donation to the show, go to the website, triple w.theunexplained.tv.
	We're coming up on the end of January now, and it'll soon be February, and then it'll be March and springtime.
	The weather has sprung many surprises on us.
	I wonder what else we're going to get wherever we happen to be in the world.
	Please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained, and I promise you I will return soon.

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