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May 21, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:31
Edition 158 - Bill Chalker

Another guest you suggested - leading Australian UFO Researcher Bill Chalker in Sydney...

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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 if I sound just a little bit hot and breathy, it's because where I am recording this is a little bit on the hot side.
I'm not really complaining because we've got a bit of a mini heat wave going on here in the UK at the moment as I record this.
Temperature's up to about 25 degrees or thereabouts in London, which is very, very nice.
But as always, it's not going to last.
And at the moment, as I speak these words, it looks to me that the sky is getting itself ready for a big thunderstorm to cool things down, and then maybe we'll start again.
But it's been an interesting few days here.
Thank you very much for all the feedback to the last show, A Deadly Haunting with Debbie Moffat.
Very few shows have divided you, quite as much as this one.
I've got a lot of email about it, and thank you for the response.
It's always good to hear what you think of shows that we do.
Some of you believe that Debbie Moffat is misguided and misleading.
Some of you feel that she was a highly credible guest and told a very good story that you believed.
So very, very split.
I mean, literally, I would get, say, two emails coming in at the same time from different parts of the world.
And the response would be completely polar opposite.
Quite amazing when that happens, but perhaps we're getting something right when it does.
So thank you for all the response.
Still time to get yours in.
If you want to contact me, I see all emails.
We are small media.
That means I deal with email here, nobody else.
Go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, and the website designed and created by the great Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Still doing very hard work on this show.
The guest this time is yet another guest who you suggested to be on the show, so I tracked him down.
He's an Australian UFO researcher called Bill Chalker.
Very, very well known down under and pretty well known in places like America.
Let me tell you a little bit about him from his biogue.
Born in Grafton, New South Wales in 52, educated at the University of New England.
He's one of Australia's leading UFO researchers, written extensively on the subject, and certainly looking on the internet he has.
He's a contributing editor for the International UFO Reporter and coordinates the New South Wales UFO Investigation Centre UFOIC.
He's done an awful lot and I'm sure will be an incredibly good guest.
So in just a moment, we'll connect by digital connection to Australia where they're 10 hours, I think, in front of UK.
So I'm in morning time here.
He's in evening time.
It's always fun and exciting when we do that.
Please keep your feedback coming.
Send me your emails and please, if you can, possibly make a donation to the show.
That will be gratefully received.
I work on minimal funding for everything that I do here.
It's always a bit of a knife edge.
So if you can help out, then I can develop this show.
That, as I always say, is the aim here.
We want to compete equally with the big guys, which we are doing, but we can take them on even further and do this even more.
You know, I know that the future of this kind of media is online.
A lot of talk broadcasting is going to the wall, is being rationalized, slimmed down, trimmed down, dummed down.
This is the one place that you find more interesting content.
I'm not specifically talking about this show.
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This is the future of media.
Forget the big corporations, the big organizations.
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And you'll be able to make a donation or send me an email, whatever.
Let's get to Bill Chalker in Australia now, Australian UFO researcher.
And Bill, thank you very much for staying up late to do this show.
It was good of you to do that.
Now, we're recording this.
We'll let our listener into a secret.
10 o'clock in the morning, UK.
What time is it in Sydney where you are?
It's just turned 7 o'clock at night.
Does it ever strike you as strange, the way that one person is getting up and having breakfast while you've had your working day and you're preparing for the next one?
Well, I'm actually fairly nocturnal, so it's all over the place with me anyway.
I tend to be a bit of a night person most of the time and do my best work at night.
Now, you've got a fantastic crack record.
I was sharing with my listeners here your biography and some of the groundbreaking stuff in Australia that you've done.
But you have to forgive people, especially in the US, but also here in the UK, for thinking that UFOs and ufology are very much a European and mainly American phenomenon.
The things that happen happen in Arkansas or they happen in California, Rocky Mountains, somewhere like that, but not in Australia.
Well, I guess that is the case.
You know, the early history of the flying saucer UFO phenomenon sort of played out from 1947 and it was very much seen as a kind of a US states phenomena type thing.
But it was pretty obvious very, very quickly that this phenomenon, whatever it represents, had worldwide dimensions.
And for quite a time during the 1970s and 80s, I was associated with the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, APRO, which was run by a married couple, Coral and Jim Lorenzen, who were kind of legendary in the field.
And the one thing that that organization revealed pretty unambiguously was that they had very, very impressive international connections.
And it really established extremely well that we're dealing with an international phenomenon.
An international phenomenon, arguably, around which there have been multiple cover-ups.
And some of those cover-ups arguably have been participated in by Australia quite actively.
I mean, if you even think, I know it's not ufology, but if you think about the Apollo moon landings, the pictures, I am told, were beamed back to somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Australia before they reached the rest of us, where it is alleged they were degraded so we didn't see anything up there we shouldn't see.
Well, the Parkes radio telescope facility was actually instrumental, and there was quite a humorous film that was made called At this Hue that plays on that whole theme of Australia getting the whole Apollo 11 landing first before anybody else in the world, and that some of the original material was actually in colour.
So it was really we got this sort of black and white food that went internationally because basically that's what was aired as they got going, basically.
But it was some of this rare colour footage that's doing the rounds.
I think at the moment it's been recently rediscovered.
But yes, Australia was in the heart of it.
Do you believe that there was some kind of cover-up, that those pictures were deliberately degraded?
Because as you say, some of the footage that came through, some of the pictures were very good.
I think that's by common consent that's the case.
But the pictures that we got were sent to us with a camera pointing into a monitor and then shoved around the world, degraded to black and white.
Well, I don't really, that's not an area that I get into heavily.
I haven't done a lot of research on that, the Apollo 11 kind of all the various conspiracy theories that attended.
I tend to sit on the fence with most conspiracy theories simply because I prefer to really get stuck into the UFO phenomenon.
I don't particularly care about conspiracy theories all that much because it doesn't really add much to the picture.
It just contaminates and muddies the waters.
I'd rather deal directly with the UFO phenomenon.
And as I think you're hinting, Bill, you can end up, and we've seen this happen many, many times, running around in circles, chasing your tail and getting nowhere.
A lot of smoke and mirrors.
Yes, I've had access to the government UFO files over decades, and there are a lot of smoke and mirrors and a lot of sort of dead-end trails, et cetera, and a lot of interesting kind of verifiable paper trails.
So I tend to prefer to relate to those paper trails, et cetera, that kind of thing that are verifiable.
I participated actually in a pretty major kind of UFOs and government kind of history study.
That was the name of the book that came out, UFOs and Government, only a year or two ago.
And that was put together by a thing called, or a team called the UFO History Team, which I was a part of that.
The principal authors were Dr. Michael Swords and Robert Powell, the research director of MUFON.
And collaboratively with a number of other contributors such as myself, we put together a kind of a pretty massive documented study that was only focused on verifiable documentation rather than sort of whistleblowers and trails that never seem to go anywhere or very, very sort of ambiguous kinds of information trails.
So we stuck to absolutely what was verifiable.
And that book has sort of been very well received simply because it is pretty authoritative in the sense that it's all verifiable stuff.
And for me, the main thing with it was that it verified a litany of lost opportunities that, you know, there was a lot of kind of empty gestures in many ways through various governments, particularly in the United States, where there were so many opportunities to do incredible science in extraordinary phenomena that was being witnessed.
And yet a lot of those opportunities got lost for all sorts of different reasons, etc.
The book itself is not a study in conspiracy theory.
It's really based on hardcore fact.
And you say a lot of this stuff was lost.
What in particular, you know, some of the big stories, what in particular do you think that we haven't got to see or got to exploit that maybe if people had been working together properly, we would have?
Well, when I mentioned lost, basically I was mentioning lost opportunities because what we had a situation of, and you saw time and time again in these government files, not only in the United States, but here in Australia and in Europe and in other places, these regular lost opportunities.
And they were essentially really potent cases where there was a quite extraordinary kind of phenomena that occurred, things like sort of angel hair cases, electromagnetic cast off cases, that kind of thing.
The Air Force, US Air Force in particular, seemed to have a bit of a standoff approach.
Whenever things got fairly exotic or fairly confronting, they tended to ignore or bypass a lot of these cases.
So that's what I'm talking about in terms of lost material.
The cases were actually examined in many ways, but some of the investigations were pretty ordinary and there were really extraordinary examples.
For example, one case involved, I think, a police officer having an encounter.
The Air Force officers were somewhat skeptical and all the rest of it.
And I think the police officer recognised that, didn't want to put his career path on the line and didn't really want to answer questions.
And therefore, issues that would have come out under a reasonably open and direct interview didn't come out.
One of the elements that did come out subsequently, and that was brought out by Dr. Jim McDonnell, who was quite prominent in the 1970s.
He conducted a very public kind of investigation of UFOs and tried to get a serious UFO science going.
In his interviewing of the same witness, the police officer, it emerged an element that I've been studying quite extensively, particularly recently, and that is what we refer to as solid light cases, where UFOs seem to project what appears to be like a beam of light, but that beam of light doesn't behave in the way that we understand light.
You know, for example, if you normally shine a torch beam or whatever, the beam diverges.
Well, in these sorts of cases, the light appears to be very much non-divergent.
In other words, it looks like a consistent diameter tube of light and appears to behave like a solid sometimes.
And these are quite fascinating cases.
And I've been studying much of that in recent times, particularly worldwide.
I've been getting a lot of sort of feedback and assistance from all sorts of different Groups around the world on that.
So it's kind of been a bit of a hidden phenomenon in many ways.
People have recognised that they've existed, but they haven't been really looked at in a hardcore way.
Bill, have you noticed because we're now connected around the world, you're in Sydney, listeners to this will be in America.
I'm sitting in London.
Over the last week, there have been quite an uptick, quite a build-up in UFO reports from different parts of the world, things that people claim to have seen.
And I'm not just talking about suspicious YouTube videos that go viral.
I'm talking about news reports of these things.
I'm just wondering if you've noticed there's been a bit of a pickup of reports lately.
Yeah, well, certainly you see this pretty regularly, and certainly at the moment there does seem to be a lot of increased activity.
You know, I think researchers and investigators like myself, we tend to look at that and just bide our time, basically, because you can get all sorts of kind of false signals going on.
And really, it's the benefit of time and in-depth kind of investigation that verifies whether these things are legitimate kind of increases in activity, that kind of thing.
But there are celebrated cases that appear and then disappear.
A couple of years ago, at great expense on a cell phone connection to a ship, I interviewed the guy who was diving in the Baltic for something that was supposed to be on the floor of the Baltic that looked like some kind of craft.
Some people said it was just something that had been left there from World War II, but we never really got a satisfactory answer about that.
Yeah, I do recollect that controversy.
You know, it did seem kind of somewhat interesting, but like a lot of these things, you know, they're kind of like almost overnight wonders and they go into a huge kind of escalation of interest and then they just seem to peter out.
And unless you're fairly determined to follow that particular individual trail, more often than not, a lot of it remains unresolved.
And what about the spiral of light over Norway?
That was something that was reported and everybody said this is definitely a phenomenon.
It's not the northern lights.
There's something going on here.
Whether it's an Eastern European military trial, but we don't think it is.
It's probably extraterrestrial.
You know, that came and went as well.
Well, one of the things about the spiral cases, et cetera, around the world, I'm a little jaded with regard to spirals because one of the things I have done a lot of, and that is I've focused very much on the Asian UFO experience as well, apart from Australia.
Spent a lot of time in China and one of the things that kind of almost defined the early kind of opening up of Chinese ufology because they really didn't have a public fascination with ufology until the end of the 1970s, particularly because of the Cultural Revolution.
I didn't even know there was a UFO scene in China.
I thought the government would kind of make sure that that could not propagate itself.
Well, it was very much non-existent until the end of the 1970s.
And people like Dr. Sun Shi Li, who at that point during the mid-70s was basically being re-educated like a lot of intellectuals were under the Cultural Revolution.
And I think at the time was in some sort of agricultural field out in western China and or central China.
And he saw something that he had no real reference point.
The only reference point he had was that potentially it looked as though it was some sort of advanced sort of aerial vehicle that presumably had something to do with the Russians or something like that.
Because it was a period where there was a little bit of, I don't know whether you use the term near Aji Baji or a bit of sort of hostility going on between the two communist powers.
And once we're brothers, then they were often furious enemies and had a lot of border skirmishes and that kind of thing.
And so that was the only context that he had.
And after his period of, how shall I say, re-education out there digging ditches and doing a little bit of agricultural work, that kind of thing, he returned to basically academic duties.
And one of those was that at some point he was acting as the Chema Mao's Spanish translator or interpreter.
And among other things, I think he was at Wuhan University, he was given a book to translate, a Spanish book.
And luckily enough, in retrospect, that book turned out to be an anthology of research articles, much of it from, I guess, the Spanish-speaking world, but a lot of it was sort of translated material from the US, Europe, that kind of thing.
And so in one kind of foul swoop, Sun Shu Li was able to translate an anthology of research about flying sources and UFOs.
And he was asked to give a lecture at initially, I think it was Wuhan University, and then he became kind of famous over the knife and became the father of Chinese ufology by virtue of giving this lecture and was asked by many universities within a short period of time to give the same lecture.
And very quickly, a UFO research society was formed in Wuhan.
And then it really sort of the scene unfolded from that point on.
And within a short period of time, there were UFO groups popping up right across China and a lot of the major cities.
And it hasn't looked back since then.
You say that somebody gave him a book.
That would prompt the question, who gave him the book?
Because it sounds to me like whoever gave him the book wanted knowledge of this put out there.
I think that came to him.
I'm pretty sure it would have come to him through government hands.
And I know I did interview Sun Shi Li in Dalian at a UFO conference in northern China back in 2005.
And it was, I don't remember the specifics of actually who gave it to him.
I think we probably did address that because unfortunately Sun Shi Li is not that proficient on English and very good on Spanish.
And so I had a university student translating for us throughout the whole interview.
And it was really great to be able to catch up with him and sort of get that kind of early kind of history.
And he's quite sort of well Liked and occupies a fairly senior position within, I guess, the UFO community in China.
And he's obviously had the opportunity to go to a lot of different sort of symposiums, conferences around the world as well.
And he's kind of the face of Chinese ufology in many ways.
You see, this is what we forget about Australia, especially here in England, where we have a kind of, well, some people here do, old-fashioned colonial view of Australia.
You are connected now more than ever to Asia.
You are part of the whole Asian experience these days.
Forget the old Her Majesty the Queen connection, all the rest of it.
Your trading and your future is in Asia.
So it's quite natural that you would be looking towards research there.
Well, exactly.
That was one of the points of at the point when I originally went into China about 2002, it was kind of really one of the last opportunities I felt where you were getting almost a kind of a, well, I think it'd be a bit presumptuous to assume that it was sort of unpolluted by Western kind of ideas.
But even when I was there during 2002, wandering around, particularly Beijing and other places, you were still getting a lot of stairs and Westerners still stood out big time.
Now they wouldn't get a second look most of the time, other than from a tourist point of view.
And it was clear at that point in time that there was a huge preponderance of bikes, you know, versus not that many cars, a lot of trucks, that kind of stuff.
But within space of a few years, and my next visit was in 2005, the difference was astonishing.
There was certainly far less number of bikes and a huge increase in the number of actual motor vehicles or cars rather than trucks.
And that's just gotten worse.
One can see the news reports these days of congested traffic and all that kind of stuff and pollution in Beijing, where it's become pretty problematic all the air quality.
They've had whole days recently where people have been unwise to go out of their homes because of the quality of air.
But look, Bill, it...
Actually, the reason why I segwayed into the Chinese I'm glad we have.
Yeah, it was the spirals that you were referring to in Norway.
Well, one of the prominent UFO events that kind of launched the early phase of Chinese ufology, particularly the late 70s and early 80s, were a number of spiral cases.
And these were quite spectacular spiral cases, even more impressive than the events over Norway.
And the factor there was that having looked at that fairly carefully, I gained the impression that I'm sure that I put this to some of my Chinese friends as well, and some accept it and some don't and all the rest of it.
But the impression that I gained from a lot of that data was that the spiral cases were often due to Chinese missiles being launched.
And the cover story of flying sources was a very convenient kind of measure to not only gather anecdotal evidence of the extent and nature of some of these malfunctions, but also to kind of keep quiet the Chinese rocket phase that would occur on a regular basis.
And it's hard to confirm that because obviously most people probably appreciate how secretive Chinese government is, particularly from the late 70s, 80s and early 90s, they're getting less and less, but still there are issues.
But it's difficult to penetrate the military side of things in China, particularly defense science, that kind of thing.
Although, you know, we've had some successes in that area.
But my general persuasion is that a lot of these spiral cases are due to malfunctioning rocket tests.
China is a country with a huge interest in space.
Its lunar probe, for example, there are people reporting that that has been nobled recently and hasn't been able to do its full job because somebody got to it.
Whether that's true or whether that's not, neither you or I, I guess, could say.
But China, very interested in space, very much has its eyes on the skies.
Do you think that, like the Americans, the Chinese have been able to get hold of, capture, acquire exotic technology?
It's very difficult to confirm that.
There are a lot of anecdotal stories.
Now, one of the most notorious is the story of the discs that were found in remote China.
The problem with those stories of the discs and that kind of thing, I have not yet to date been able to confirm with all my contacts in China a Chinese origin to that story.
The story kind of originates principally from European sources and has been repeated at Ad Nausium ever since.
And to me, it doesn't appear to be a story of Chinese origin.
It appears to be more so a story of basically German origin in particular.
I'm talking, referring to the Draper discs.
A lot of people, if they look it up on the web, the Draper story, D-R-O-P-A.
The Draper story appears to come from originally a very obscure German vegetarian newsletter.
So that's a fairly uninspiring kind of source for such extraordinary story.
And that story still does the rounds.
And I've had Chinese researchers ask me about the story, and yet they've not been able to confirm any kind of Chinese source to it.
The closest we ever got to it was, I believe, an American researcher who said that he was working in some sort of secret facility, was hosting a visit from Chinese scientists, etc.
I believe it was actually back in the early 80s, which seemed a bit problematical considering, I guess, the political kind of situation between China and the US.
But basically, what he was saying was that there was a female Chinese scientist that he had discussions with who said that her parents recollected part of that Droper story.
But that to me doesn't constitute proof of a Chinese origin simply because that Droper story came through and was reprinted in a publication, I think it was Sputnik or something of that nature, which one of these Russian magazines that was kind of like Reader's Digest, that kind of pocketbook size.
And these were widely distributed through communist countries, particularly in China, or much sought after because there really wasn't a lot of published material being floated around.
So any copy of a magazine like Sputnik or whatever would be circulated and read not by just one person, it'd be read by large numbers of people.
So one magazine would be read by literally hundreds of people.
And that Drober story was covered in that magazine.
And that's how I believe that probably this Chinese scientist's parents would have come by the story.
And so we've got this kind of repeating cycle.
And it really pays to try and dig down really deep into these stories to see if there's anything substantive to the story.
And in the case of the Draper story, it's one of these stories that doesn't have any kind of local Chinese credibility.
And one of the key people who looked into this carefully, and this is way back, I believe in the 70s of all things, Gordon Crichton, who later became the editor of the British Flying Source Review,
at the time when he was basically doing a lot of really good quality translations, one of the languages he was very good in was Chinese because he actually served as a consulate official in China and had actually a UFO sighting in northern China in about 1944, could have been 1942.
So a very early UFO sighting.
So he was already sensitised to the subject.
But because of his Chinese language skills, he saw the original accounts of the Droper story and basically his attitude was that it had no credibility whatsoever because all the names were not realistic Chinese names.
And so either a lot was lost in translation or Gordon Crichton's position was that he felt it was a hoax and a hoax perpetrated by the West using, I guess, remote China as a convenient source that's not going to be readily verifiable.
But the Chinese, of course, have caught up with us in the last 40 years in a quite staggering way.
I remember studying China for my A-level geography.
And I remember this was back in the 70s, mid to late 70s.
And my geography teacher said to me, China will become a superpower within our lifetimes.
It will be an amazing country.
And we used to look at these magazines called China Reconstructs with smiling faces of people digging dams and all sorts of stuff.
And it did look like a country that was building.
I wonder if with the increase in education, the increase in modern technology in China, perhaps just a little bit of liberalization that's going on there, although of course the Communist Party still rules with a fist of iron, there may be more possibilities for reports of credible sightings and credible cases to get out in China.
Oh, there absolutely is, because I recollect earlier I was talking about the UFOs and government book and the lost opportunities of various governments around the world.
We didn't get into China at that point with that book, but I certainly have in terms of my connections in China.
One of the remarkable cases that has come out was a military case that took place in 1998.
And it involved basically a whole bunch of military people that were being assembled for an unmanned, well, the tests of an unmanned aircraft program.
And this was actually one of the first of the Chinese supersonic drone vehicles.
And this is back in 1998.
And the military official, military scientist that was generally associated with being the father of Chinese drone technology was a General Zhao Xiu.
And he was actually present for this test.
And so were a lot of other scientists and military at this northern Chinese base.
And it became rather problematical, the trials, because in the middle of it arrived two UFOs and they sent up pursuit jets to pursue these objects.
And the general, not General Zhao, but the general's base was actually receiving direct communications from his pilots and they were informing him of what they could see at a distance from the ground.
And that was these UFOs were projecting, once again, this element that I've been fascinated by.
And that's this projection of solid light.
And they were actually observing this.
And in each case, the objects would project two parallel solid light beams.
And the general himself made specific reference to those solid light extensions.
And this is quoting him, Commander Li, based on descriptions from his pilots, Captain Liu Ming and Wu Shaohung.
He said, surprisingly, these two light beams of light were not as we normally see light beams, as has been according to the distance and spread, but as two light-emitting entities sticking out from the bottom of the UFO ending at a certain length.
At least today, we have not got control of this sort of light technology.
Now, that was back in 1998.
And one thing I do know, I've been following it very carefully, is that the Chinese have very much accelerated a program of research that focuses on the ability to control light as we know it to the point of creating almost de facto forms of solid light.
And they're really at the cutting edge of some of this kind of technology.
A lot of research groups around the world are doing this.
And obviously, there is obviously some perhaps not well-known kind of research programs that have some sort of military connection that are a lot more clandestine.
But there is a lot of activity going on in this area of controlling lights.
And unfortunately, from a military point of view, they're obviously looking at it as perhaps military technology or as a weapon.
But there are lots of other applications that Scientists are looking at as well.
So, if this phenomenon of the light beams, the parallel light beams, is as common as you say it is, then of course governments are going to take an interest in that.
The Chinese certainly will want to take an interest in that.
And they will want to either acquire it or try and replicate it.
Oh, well, I think very much so.
And it appears as though the Chinese have gone at it in a lot of detail.
And that's one particular case that I've been fascinated by.
I was just amazed that the case actually came out.
And it took me a while to verify that it did come out through legitimate Chinese mainland sources rather than one of these sort of things that have been lost in translation through multiple rebirthings on the internet, that kind of thing.
So it does come from Chinese direct origin.
Well, this is the first conversation I've been able to have with somebody who knows anything about the scene there in China or indeed anywhere in Asia.
It is amazing, I think, to us out West to understand that this kind of stuff goes on there.
And although the conduits for getting the information out there are not as clear-cut as the ones that we have, stories do get out.
And this 1998 story has clearly been very well documented, and somebody clearly allowed the details to get out there.
Yeah, well, it was one of the principal reasons why I went to China in the first place in 2002, because I thought it was practically the last opportunity to get an uncontaminated view or relatively uncontaminated view before the modernization and birthing of China as kind of the world economy that really got underway, because I didn't think there was much time left to achieve that.
And so I spent a bit of time in China in 2002, made a lot of connections.
And it was pretty apparent to me that the UFO phenomenon, while in China had a lot of kind of obvious similarities to what was occurring worldwide, they certainly had some unusual and somewhat unique features as well.
And they had some quite a complement even by then of quite extraordinary abduction stories and that kind of thing as well.
And so already by then, one of the cases that was most famous was the case of Meng Zhao Gao from Harbin in northern China.
That's where they have the annual ice sculpture tourist kind of event where you can go and see all sorts of frozen sculptures because one thing it is there is it's bloody cold during the winter.
So it's a very interesting place.
That's far northeast, isn't it?
Harbin?
Yes, it is.
And it was quite a striking case.
It's probably the most famous of the abduction cases to occur in China.
And it sort of led to a lot of interest.
And even with the early space program, I think it was Matthew Forney, one of the Time magazine writers based in China.
He did maybe a tongue-in-cheek article, but he sort of said, forget the taikonauts.
That's the Chinese term for astronauts.
The most famous space traveler in China was Meng Zhao Gao, the Chinese.
And so that's how it was seen there in China.
He did become quite famous, or perhaps more appropriately, notorious, but he had this encounter, and it was almost a case very similar to the classic story of Antania Villa Boas, the Brazilian who claimed to have had a kind of a sexual liaison with an Aden being.
And that's what's in common with this Ming Jia Gao story.
I wonder if there are similarities.
We have a British counselor, Simon Parks, who I interviewed very recently on this show.
You may have heard of him.
He tells a very credible story of contact liaison with aliens for his entire life.
So this is something similar.
Yeah, it certainly is.
And one of the other kind of complex alien abduction cases I'll mention in China was one of them involved a traditional healer by the name of Cao Gong.
And this is a case that occurred in December of 1999.
And it was a kind of a quite involved abduction story being abducted from Beijing to Qinghong Dao, which is more or less a seaside city to the east of Beijing.
And during this abduction, when he's located at Qinghaung Dao, he encounters a young Chinese girl inside the craft and is apparently somehow brought there to conduct some sort of, I guess, parallel kind of healing activity.
And once again, in this case, it has seemed to involve the use of this kind of solid light kind of phenomena that where, but at a very localized level, where the girl was somehow enshrouded with what seemed to be like liquid light, and then that became solid like a kind of a transparent kind of solid raincoat.
And then she was bathed in this multicolored light kind of thing.
And it was a very interesting case.
But no one could find the girl in the wake of this abduction.
And a friend of mine, quite prominent Chinese ufologist, Jing Zhengping, a Beijing-based researcher, he undertook a fairly extensive investigation of this.
And with the assistance of about a thousand university students and the assistance of the local police sort of identicate artists, they produced an image of this girl and did a door-to-door through thousands of households in this area and assumingly were able to locate the girl that was involved in this case.
Now, she seemed to be somewhat compromised in the sense that she was intellectually impaired, it seems, but there was evidence that she had gone missing at the time of this event and also had unexplained scars on her body as well.
So it was a very interesting and rather compelling kind of case.
And so I had the opportunity To meet with Cao Gong in Beijing and have a talk to him as well, along with my friend Zhang Jinping.
So it was a very striking case.
So they do have their cases like that in China.
Interesting, isn't it?
Because a lot of people say the debunkers like to say, well, these things happen in America, they happen in the UK, they happen in Australia, because we are saturated by popular culture.
In America, they have all these shows, people watch those shows, and then they start living out the fantasy as reality.
You can't say that, at least until recently, about China.
Well, exactly my point, because by 2002, one thing that I was quite well aware of in China was that internet was not readily available by the average Chinese person, et cetera.
There were clandestine ones and the more kind of savvy, techno kind of people were sort of making illegal connections, but it was very much frowned on.
Some Westerners could get internet connections in the best of the Westernized type of motels in the big cities like Beijing.
For example, I couldn't even post on my own kind of webpage or that kind of thing while I was in Beijing.
You had to wait till you got outside or got to Hong Kong before you could do that.
And a lot of it was suppressed as well.
And I did find that there was a fairly limited kind of awareness.
And I took along a lot of Western magazines, particularly some of the Australian UFO magazines, and thinking that they might be of interest, well, they were snapped up and circulated around at the Great Rate of Knots because I was starved for information, the new information, because it was sort of somewhat kind of isolated.
But they were starting to make overtures.
And so it was right at that cusp of the change, into suddenly now it's everywhere.
And it's not going to go backwards, I don't think.
And so from that point on, it became more and more difficult to assume that China was, I guess, cushioned from heavy due influences, particularly on the UFO scene.
Now, up to that point, there is a credible case for that.
Yep, the Virgin Territory up until the point where media saturation gets to the point where it has now.
I want to talk about Australia in the time we have remaining to us because some of us have been lucky enough to go there.
I've been there three times, and I know a country with the most forward-looking people, the most wonderful cities, and huge tracts of empty land.
You go west towards Perth, where you are, you go west towards Perth from Sydney, and you've got thousands upon thousands of kilometers of nothing very much, red dust.
You go up north towards the tropical part.
I once visited Darwin up there, and I loved it up there.
It was just amazing, but so damn different.
I mean, so tropical, so different.
And again, not exactly, you know, not exactly the home of that many people.
Quite not desolate, but quite isolated up there.
If ever there were perfect breeding grounds for UFO stories, they, to me, would be the places.
But we don't get to hear those stories out here.
We certainly do get a lot of stories from our more isolated areas of Australia.
But, you know, as I think most people recognise, the UFO phenomenon seems to occur practically everywhere.
And I know that as I sort of grew up and became more and more acquainted with the UFO phenomenon, it was always an indication that it was an isolated phenomenon, more often seen out in the countryside, that kind of thing.
But that's not really true.
There are a lot of quite extraordinary close countercases in built-up areas.
But to get to the heart of your question, there are some quite prominent cases that have occurred out in country Australia, even in remote locations.
One of the more interesting cases that I got caught up in was almost like an outback version of Roswell in many ways.
It was practically on the edge of what is classically called the Outback of Australia.
There's a place called Burke, and they often refer to the back of Burke, and the back of Burke is really...
I've heard the phrase many times.
I didn't realize.
Okay.
Well, it's really, I guess, well, before you even get to Bourke, you're pretty much seeing the Outback.
But after Bourke, if you continue to head west, you're definitely in Outback kind of territory.
And from that general area, I got to hear of a local Aborigine who for a long time, as a 10-year-old child in 1969, he was at an Aboriginal mission.
He was an Aboriginal, or is an Aboriginal, I should say.
And he, along with about another 100 Aboriginal children and a number of Aboriginal women or mothers, and particularly some Aboriginal missionary people, one that was quite prominent later on in terms of the Aboriginal rights movement, that kind of thing, very prominent Aboriginal, they bore witness to something which occurred actually on the day of the moon landing.
And it involved this large number of people in this remote Aboriginal mission on the outer reaches of Burke observing what appeared to be a disc that rose up from behind a hill.
And then it went down behind the hill.
And then it looked as though there was like a massive mushroom explosion.
And everybody panicked.
And even the missionary people fell to the ground and felt it was the end of the world.
And they kind of were terrified.
And when there was no sign of this object coming back up again, they kind of sort of put it all behind them.
And they weren't game to go into that area.
But over a period of about a decade or so, a number of Aboriginal people had gone into that area.
And that area was seen to be chock full of stories of unusual UFO sightings and that kind of thing.
And that kind of information came to me.
And then eventually, what prompted the Aboriginal gentleman to approach me was that even his own son, who was part of a kangaroo hunting party of about a dozen young Aboriginal men, this would have been almost 20 years after the event,
had encountered in the location what appeared to be a kind of a debris field of metallic objects that appeared to be part of a large kind of unusual arrangement that they thought was some sort of unusual looking aircraft and it was embedded into the ground.
Now, the area of concern is you could class it as like a flood alluvial plain.
Floods in that area, even though it's desert to the west and fairly dry around it, it does experience very large kind of flood events.
And these events generally occur because of massive rains to the north, particularly southern Queensland.
And eventually the river systems take the massive water down the Murray River and into, or largely all the rivers that feed into the Murray eventually.
And so you end up with a very large, massive waterfront that can often inundate any kind of low-lying ground.
And so you get huge amounts of silt and soil coming through and it often can bury things for a long, long time.
And these flood events can often either bury something or quite often they can expose things.
And in this case, it appears as though it actually exposed something that may have occurred or took place back in 1969.
And so we spent a lot of time, you know, aerial kind of survey activities trying to locate this.
But eventually we couldn't find anything.
The ground, even search from the air or search from the ground, it's very disorientating because it's very difficult to find things and get sort of reference points out of it.
Presumably because it's so vast and everything looks the same.
Well, that too.
The advantage that we did have was that we did have at least one line of sight from the mission area, which I got from this gentleman.
And so we were able to use that.
But the further away this event may have occurred from the mission area, the more remote that it got.
And we were never sure just how far away this thing was.
It was either something that was about, say, 20 or 30 feet across, or if it was actually much larger, or whatever it could have been, or further away, it could have been a massive object by comparison.
So we were never really certain of that.
And so the further away you get from the line of sight that occurred here, the less certain you are as to the actual location.
So ultimately, we got to a stage where we were looking over a very large area.
And we certainly encountered a lot of anecdotal reports from a lot of Aboriginals and even some Western people there as well that operate large farm systems and that kind of thing as well.
So it's an area that's rich in all sorts of UFO folklore and oral stories, that kind of thing.
So apart from not being able to find this object, which was very frustrating, we're hoping that maybe another flood might reveal something.
But we have been able to unearth a lot of UFO stories as well.
Do you get cattle mutilations there?
You've got a lot of cattle.
Yes, we kind of do.
I've always been a bit sceptical of the connection sometimes, but we have had some events that seemingly did involve UFOs, but certainly not in the numbers that seem to have occurred, particularly in America.
But then I guess because of the vast, vast territories we're talking about there, and the fact that some farms stretch over hundreds of kilometers, it would be very hard to monitor things, wouldn't it?
And perhaps sometimes because of the difficulty of communication, things that do happen don't get reported.
Well, that was going to be my point, that a lot of these stories that we've since heard of, we weren't aware of at the time that the cattle mutilation saga was coming prominent in America.
But in more recent times, a lot of these stories have come out.
And so it would seem that there are some stories that appear to give sustance to the idea that maybe there is this cattle mutilation connection and it may involve UFOs.
But I'm not 100% compelled by the evidence that I've seen to date.
There's certainly some very curious cases.
So I'm keeping an open mind, but the connections aren't that compelling.
I've had some pretty bizarre stories told to me, even one that involved down near Lake George, which is not far from Canberra in the Australian, just outside the Australian Capital Territory, actually in New South Wales.
But areas around Lake George, it's quite an unusual place because one of these unusual lakes that empties from time to time and then fills up.
We often wonder where all the water goes, but it has a bit of an unusual kind of reputation.
And in there, there was a kind of a almost, well, certainly a close encounter of the third kind.
And it appeared to be almost an abduction story.
It had some pretty heavy duty consequences for the main witness, who was a farmer who ended up being committed to an asylum by his own family merely because he was repeatedly kept communicating a story of observing a UFO landing on the farm and being abducted by them.
And he did live alone and he was somewhat eccentric, that kind of thing.
But we did have the opportunity to talk to him.
And it would appear that there was this UFO experience.
And he was there with a very vivid account I have on tape of him talking about observing this UFO on the ground and approaching it with his cattle dog and then seeing beings coming out and cattle emerging from the object.
You know, you often get accounts of cattle being taken in, but you don't get many stories of cattle coming out.
So it was a very strange story and unfortunately a sad but also frustrating story to deal with because the- Attitudes to a lot of things both here in the UK and in Australia have changed enormously.
And I guess there was an era when people would have been described.
I mean, we're talking even comparatively recently, where people would be described as completely nuts.
There are still some people who would say that.
Yes, yes.
The story, difficult with this story was that we had a story that was essentially a close encounter with physical traces on the ground, on the property, a UFO sighting, close quarters, etc., and what seemed to be a period of missing time.
Then the gentleman was incarcerated into a mental institution, kudos of his family.
And one of my co-investigators actually visited the institution and was allowed in to talk to the gentleman.
And then when my co-investigator determined that the facility people had assumed that he was a doctor, he immediately pointed out that he wasn't, that he was a UFO investigator.
He was immediately carted out of the facility.
But before then, he had the opportunity to look at the case file, and the case file described all this detail about the abduction experience and observing all this kind of thing.
So it was a very difficult case to deal with.
A very sad one, Bill.
Very sad.
Incredibly so.
And we tried to make kind of representations, but unfortunately the family weren't willing to have any contact with us.
I'd like to wrap up this conversation, if I may, with something from your biography that talks about your research into the Air Force files in Australia.
And I'll quote here, on Monday morning, 11th of January, 1982, I arrived at the Russell offices of the Department of Defence in Canberra to undertake a review of the RAAF Department of Defence UFO files.
It was the first time a civilian researcher had been afforded this sort of access.
How did you get that?
I think through patience and a lot of hard work and a lot of research and basically quoting back to the Air Force their own kind of public statements because for years they were saying that people could actually examine the files, but nobody was getting in.
And at best, people were seeing sort of fragmented sort of documents, edited documents, that kind of thing, small pockets of information.
But I was wanting to see a continuity of files over the decades, basically, to try and establish a kind of untarnished kind of look at the files.
And that was my objective.
And that's what I kicked off in 1982.
And over the space of four visits, the first visit actually arrived on the Monday, Monday morning.
And I think they're expecting me to be happy after a couple of hours looking at a couple of, well, maybe about a dozen files.
But essentially, once I got my foot in the door, I arrived Monday morning and left on the Friday.
There was no getting rid of you.
Yeah, and they actually gave me the office of the Director of Public Relations of the Department of Defense, his office.
He was on holiday.
And I was just busy looking at the paper trail, looking for the file numbers and kept requesting more and more files as we went along.
And so I was able to establish a continuity of files.
And over the space of four visits over a couple of years, it was able to get a pretty good look at it.
And in more recent times, a lot of those files have made it onto the internet courtesy of being able to digitally look at it via your computer through the National Archives.
But unfortunately, a lot of the files that I looked at as well were destroyed through what was classified as routine kind of house cleaning activities.
We hear a lot of that up here too, because you know that the British military, British Secret Service is past master at that.
But you say here the RAAF, the Air Force in Australia, was covering up its high-level involvement in an international cover-up of UFO facts.
Well, I wouldn't actually entirely support that because to me, more often than not, what I saw evidence for was a foul-up rather than a cover-up.
One of the main points that I tend to try and make is that while there is this long history, and I document this in some detail in a chapter, a fairly long chapter in that book, UFOs and Government, that they conducted an investigation of UFOs and flying sources for almost as long as the US government did.
Britain sort of got out, well actually the United States government, no, we did actually, it was the US that ended their investigation officially in 1969.
Britain went longer and certainly Australia went longer and conducted their investigations formally up till about the early 1990s when they finally got out of the UFA business.
And the only thing that they'll look at is if there's something of national security, which I feel a bit kind of strange about because some of the cases that did involve national security from my point of view didn't get much of a look at either during their previous years as well.
So it's a bit puzzling.
But at least that relieves the workload on the Air Force anyway.
What's this nuclear alert at the Northwest Cape facility?
I presume that's an Australian nuclear plant, is it?
Way up north?
Well, Northwest Cape is actually in northwest of Western Australia, a very remote place.
On the map, you'd find it near Exmouth.
And it's a, well, a token joint US-Australian facility.
And essentially, it's a large kind of array of antennas and that kind of stuff.
It's essentially a listing station, eavesdropping on satellites, that kind of stuff, and transmissions, that kind of thing.
And during October 1973, it was a very touchy time.
You had poor old President Nixon kind of trying to dodge the whole Watergate thing.
And some look at this as kind of like the tail wagging the dog.
But at one point, there was an interception by the National Security Agency, very prominent these days in terms of eavesdropping, but they had intercepted apparently some transmissions out of the Middle East that seemed to just suggest that the Russians were going to invade and intervene into the Middle East.
And at that point, it was one of the few times that Nixon actually threatened the use of nuclear weapons.
And US forces in the whole, well, around the world, put on nuclear alert.
And the nuclear alert was issued to US forces in the Pacific Indian Ocean region from Northwest Cape on the same day as the UFO event that I'll just describe in a moment.
Essentially, later that day, in the early evening, there was a fire captain shutting up some of the facilities on the support base just to the south of the antenna array, and he observed what appeared to be an egg-shaped, well, more a spherical shape with a sort of a band around it, like a Saturn shape, the shape of Saturn with its rings.
This was hovering to the west of the base, and it remained there for a short period of time and then suddenly took off at unbelievable speed.
Now, fortunately, this event was simultaneously witnessed by the lieutenant commander of the base.
He was driving a vehicle between, I think, X-Mouth and the base itself and observed pretty much the same thing.
And his description was that it really was something quite extraordinary because in his experience, he'd never seen anything move that fast.
It hovered for some time and then took off at very high speed.
So we had this puzzling UFO event witnessed by two US naval witnesses from a very sensitive US-Australian listing facility on the same day that the base was used to issue a full nuclear alert to US forces in the region.
Now, some people argue that maybe that was an example of spoofing, which is the use of objects or anything to cause a military base to light up all its listing frequencies and they would use that spoofing event to intercept all those frequencies.
That would be credible if it was happening in the last decade or so, but this occurred back in 1973 and the technology for sophisticated drones, that kind of thing, just wasn't there at that point in time.
And one would have thought that the lieutenant commander of the base, at least, would have had some experience with US military technology and would have possibly reconciled that as one of these events, but he didn't.
He believed it was something that didn't belong to us.
And so, you know, we had a pretty compelling case there.
Well, fascinating.
Really, really fascinating.
I didn't think we were going to talk about China.
I'm really pleased we did.
And you've told me an awful lot of stuff that I'd never heard before, Bill Chalker.
I'm glad that my listeners, quite a few of them, got in touch with me and suggested you, Bill.
If people want to know about you and your work, and I would like you to come back on here again, but if people want to know about you, where do they go?
I just suggest they put in my name, Bill Chalker, and the Oz files, that's OZ files into Google, and that'll find my blog page.
And there's a lot of links all over the place on that and do a lot of other things as well, I guess.
And what are you working on right now?
I'm doing a lot of heavy research in terms of a sort of a more detailed history of the Australian UFO scene, the Chinese UFO experience, all that kind of thing.
So my plate is very full at the moment.
Hey, listen, a delight to talk to you.
I know it's getting very late at night now and the morning is almost over here in the UK, but thank you for making time for me, Bill Chalker.
A pleasure.
A pleasure.
What a great guest, Bill Chalker.
And I'll put a link to his work on my website, www.theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell for his hard work devising, maintaining, creating, spinning forward the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
Adam is at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
The website's the place to go if you want to tell me what you think about the way I'm doing these shows, how they can be done better, or like Bill Chalker, you can suggest a guest.
That's how it's done, www.theunexplained.tv.
And thank you for the very nice things you've been saying about the show.
It makes it feel worthwhile for me.
On those occasions when I race back from the job that I'm doing at the moment, tired, exhausted, and then realise I have an unexplained to record, I turn on the equipment and knowing that you care about this show is what drives and powers me forward in not the most easy times.
So thank you very much.
More great shows coming.
Until we meet again here on The Unexplained, stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
Take care.
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