All Episodes
Previous Next
July 17, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:10:24
Edition 166 - Peter Davenport

This time, one of Art Bell's favourite guests - Peter Davenport.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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.
Well, I'm recording this on a sweltering July night.
We certainly have summertime here in the United Kingdom, and as I always say, and I'm going to say it again, I ain't complaining, because we have an awful lot of winter months ahead of us.
So that's why I'm not saying this is a bad thing.
Now, lots of reaction coming into edition 165.
I'll be going to your emails and reading some of them out and doing some shout-outs in a future edition.
But the show we're about to do is going to be a big one.
But thank you for all of the reaction to Jenny Cokell and her reincarnation story that I found fascinating, and many of you did too.
She was Edition 165, along with the wonderful Mike Love from The Beach Boys.
And we talked, he and I, about doing a full unexplained together about transcendental meditation.
So, Mike, if you're listening to this, and I did give you the web address of The Unexplained, www.theunexplained.tv, please get your people to contact me.
I don't have people.
There's only me.
And that's one of the great advantages of doing what we do.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, hard-working webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for all of his hard work on this show and making sure the shows get out to you and everything is, as we say in England, ship-shape and Bristol fashion.
Jolly good.
It's all right.
I don't normally speak like that.
This time round, special guest Peter Davenport.
You've asked for this man.
He was a regular with Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM in the glory days, director of the National UFO Reporting Center, and also he has served as the Director of Investigations for the Washington chapter of MUFON, the mutual UFO network.
I've been reading his biography.
It's pretty damned impressive.
He has an active interest in UFOs and has had since he was a boy, like a lot of people we talk to on this show.
But he had his first UFO encounter over St. Louis, the airport there, back in 1954.
And he investigated his first UFO case in the summer of 1965 in New Hampshire.
He's been witness to a number of anomalous events, possibly UFO-related, including a dramatic sighting over Baja, California, February 1990, and nighttime sightings over Washington State in 1992.
He's pretty well qualified.
A full panoply of qualifications this man has got.
And in 1986, he was a candidate for the Washington State Legislature.
And in 92, he was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives.
So this man has a pretty impressive track record, one way and another.
Thank you very much for your emails.
Please keep them coming.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv.
There you can send me an email with your feedback about the show, any thoughts you'd like to give me.
Gratefully received.
You can also make a donation by following the PayPal link there.
And those donations are the rocket fuel upon which this show runs.
All right, let's cross to the United States.
Now I'm going to do some shout-outs in the next edition of this show.
But for this edition, we have a lot of ground to cover with Peter Davenport, Director of the National UFO Reporting Center.
Peter, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Well, it's my pleasure, and I'm delighted to be here, and I'm delighted to have an opportunity to share a lot of what I consider to be extremely interesting information about the UFO phenomenon.
So I'm really pleased to be here.
Well, you are one of many guests who've been suggested by my listeners, but you've been on my radar, Peter, for a very long time because I used to obsessively listen to Art Bell.
And I'm talking about the early days of when we had computers.
I got my first computer in 1997 with a dial-up connection.
And one of the first shows I discovered was Art Bell.
And I thought, oh my God, I've been talking about these things on radio for years, but this man has taken it to the nth degree.
And I heard you on there so many times, and I always got the sneaking impression that you were one of his favorite guests.
You seemed to get on really well.
Well, we did.
And your antennas are feeding you a good signal, Howard, because Art and I had a very nice working relationship such that if something really unusual happened, I could call him literally 15 minutes before the program.
He would listen to the story and he would say, okay, let's have you on.
And he would give me just a few minutes to share with his listeners some very dramatic information.
So you are right.
It was a lot of fun.
And I have a similar relationship with George Norrie now and his engineer, Tom Danheiser.
We work very well together.
Well, this is good to hear because radio, and I've done radio for years here in the United Kingdom, mostly news, doing things like covering the death of Princess Diana, and I was at Ground Zero and all of those sorts of things.
But it depends on the team.
If you're working with good people who know what they're doing and also good people who don't take themselves too seriously, then life is pretty good.
Oh, yeah.
If a group of people working on radio clicks, as we say, it's really a lot of fun.
And I prefer radio to television, actually.
And a lot of my close friends say that's probably a good thing.
But I think you can tell a great deal more about a person just listening to his voice than you can watching him and listening to his voice.
I completely agree.
On the last edition of this show, I included just a little bit of an interview that I'd done for my radio work with a guy called Mike Love, a founding member of The Beach Boys.
We talked about transcendental meditation.
But, you know, Mike is a hero to me.
I mean, all of the Beach Boys are.
I think they're probably my favorite musicians, even though I only discovered the Pet Sounds album in 1999 and then played it all day and discovered all I could.
My sister had been a big Beach Boys fan.
I didn't know much about them and I became a completist.
But what I learned about them is that they are all about the sound.
The sound is where it's at.
Doesn't matter what you have to do to get it.
The sound is where it's at.
And I think that's where I come to radio.
You know, we're all about the sound.
All we have is the human voice.
So we can communicate everything through that instrument.
But some people can't do it.
I'm not saying that I do it fabulously well, but I'm learning every day.
Oh, you seem to do it very well, Howard.
And I think listeners learn more from a guest over radio and they remember more from a guest over radio than they do if they're watching the same person on television.
Although, of course, if we go back to the great presidential debate where, and I don't know if you might have seen this when you were quite young, but Kennedy and Nixon, Nixon won the radio debate because he was so good on radio.
Kennedy won the TV debate because he looked good.
Yeah.
And we know what the results of that were.
Well, we could debate those.
I don't think we've got time to do that, but we could certainly have a big, long debate about all of that.
Now, your biography is pretty damned impressive, but it tells me something that is quite remarkable, and that is that you had your first UFO sighting over St. Louis, the airport there, only seven years after Roswell.
Talk to me about that.
What was that like?
How was that, you know, how did that affect you?
You were a boy.
Yeah, I was six and a half years of age at the time.
This was, I believe the date was July of 1954.
For a host of reasons, I believe that, because I know the car that I was sitting in.
And our family, my mother, my brother and I had dropped my father off at the airport so he could work during the evenings.
And the three of us then went around the airport to the other side and were watching what we call a drive-in theater.
We were parked in the theater watching a film and suddenly a disturbance started brewing in the theater.
People were running around.
There was almost panic in the theater.
Car doors were slamming.
People were walking in front of our car and they were pointing up in a direction to my right.
And I looked out the right-hand side of a 1953 Studebaker.
That was our family car at the time with a silver ring and the nose of it.
And I saw the most bizarre thing that I have ever seen in my life.
And Howard, it is as clearly and indelibly imprinted on my memory today as it was the day after the sighting 60 years ago, this month, ironically.
It was a red object, distinctly blood red, about the color of a traffic signal with a little orange in it.
It was oblong, horizontal, or the long axis was in the horizontal plane, and it was moving very, very slowly across the sky out to my right.
Suddenly it accelerated and at a blistering pace in about two seconds.
It went from my right to gone over the horizon in the northwestern sky.
And it took literally two seconds for it to accelerate from a dead stop and be gone over the horizon.
And I believe that that sighting almost 60 years ago to the day goes a long way towards explaining why I am the director of the National UFO Reporting Center in the United States today.
It imprinted in me a keen interest in what this UFO phenomenon is all about.
And I've been hooked ever since, I'm afraid.
It's like an addiction.
Well, two things strike me.
Number one, you were six and a half and could remember it so well.
I mean, I've got a great memory for things that happened when I was a little kid, but the story you just told me is so detailed.
Number two, at six and a half years of age, you were lucky enough to have one of the classic UFO sightings you hear, don't you?
The classic story of a light in the sky that moves faster than anything realistically can.
And you had that at six and a half.
You were born to do this.
Yeah.
And there's a lot I've left out just to compress the story a little bit.
But one of the interesting aspects of my sighting was that not only did that object accelerate at a blistering pace, but it followed an S-shaped curve across the night sky.
And this was directly above the St. Louis airport.
It's called Lambert Field, one of the earliest major airports in the United States, built in the 1920s, I believe.
And it went right over McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, which at that time was on the north side of the St. Louis airport, now part of Boeing, of course.
But it was a dramatic sighting, and you're right.
I remember it just vividly, vividly clearly in my mind's eye, down to fine detail.
So all of the facts surrounding that sighting seem to have imprinted themselves on my mind.
You said there was a little bit of a frisson in that open-air drive-in that your studio baker was at.
Can you remember the reactions of people there?
Yeah.
I remember very distinctly that three men, probably in their 20s or 30s, one of very short stature, he had his packet of cigarettes rolled up in his right T-shirt sleeve, as American males were wont to do back in the 1930s.
I remember from the movies, I do, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
If you've seen it in the movies, you know what it's all about.
And they sort of annoyed me because my recollection is they blanked out my view of the screen and I was watching the movie.
But shortly within a second or two, I realized that they were pursuing something.
They were walking towards this object off to my right.
And I looked out the right-hand window of this Studebaker.
And there was this most amazing looking object.
I can't call it a craft, technically speaking.
It was just a very, very bright red object hovering motionless in the sky, about the size, the apparent size of a full moon.
And it was really quite something.
This touches on another subject, Howard, and that is how many people report their UFO sightings.
And I'd like to share that with our audience because it's very significant.
My estimate after 20 years now, this month Of having worked as director of the National UFO Reporting Center is that out of 20,000 adult, competent, clear-thinking Americans or Brits or people of any nationality who see a genuine UFO, out of 20,000, only one will ever come forward under his or her own steam.
The rest of them will think about it.
They'll chat about it at the 4th of July party or Coronation Day picnic, but they won't report it unless they see somebody else first come forward.
Then there will be a flood of people.
It's a very interesting.
Not only is it an amazing reflection on human psychology, it is archetypal crowd behavior, really.
And I studied crowd behavior at my politics course at Liverpool University, and we had a guy there called Hans Shadi, who talked about the thing he called crowd.
We're going to talk about crowd behavior today.
And that's a very poor Dutch accent, by the way.
I'm so sorry if you're Dutch and listening to this.
That's not a good representation.
But we talked about how people act together.
So if you're one person on your own and you feel that other people who may have seen this are not going to do anything about it, will you step out of line and do something about it?
Probably not.
And if we think about that, that statistic of one person in 20,000 becomes quite credible, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Well, this was a dramatic sighting.
I suspect certainly hundreds and maybe thousands, even tens of thousands of Americans saw that same object that I saw over St. Louis 60 years ago this month.
And yet there is only one written report on our website about that event.
Most people do not report their UFO sightings.
And it's probably a good thing because if I had 20,000 times the workload I currently have, I probably would not be physically fit enough to speak with you today.
Well, you'd need to employ about a thousand people, wouldn't you, in order to be able to even start doing this?
I mean, the depressing thing is that although we have better technology to chronicle these things, that muddies the water a great deal.
Plus, here in the United Kingdom, the organization that was run by Nick Pope at the Ministry of Defence to collate UFO reports, that of course was scaled back, closed down.
So there isn't a proper way to report these things anymore here in the UK.
So it comes down to media reports and the water further muddied by the fact that everybody's got a mobile device these days and so everybody takes pictures.
I go to work every day and I'm looking for light stories or stories that will make people think on top of all the local news that we have to do and the national news that we have to do and the international news, I'm looking for unusual stuff as well.
And of late, there have been many stories of people who've taken pictures and it's the same old, same old, really.
They take a picture of light in the sky and then underneath this, you must have seen this a million times, Peter, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 comments from people say, nah, you've faked that.
And that's about as far as we get.
So I wonder, even though we've got the ability to record and chronicle these things better than ever before, maybe that's not such a good thing.
Yeah, I tend to agree.
And a lot of people press me to set up our online report forum so it's compatible with so-called mobile devices.
I'm not sure we want to do that.
What I prefer to get is a well-composed, detailed, objective statement.
Two or three paragraphs is usually enough describing what a person saw.
A mobile device really is not conducive to that kind of detailed composition of the witness's statement.
So I agree with you entirely.
The technology is not going to improve the quality of UFO reports or is not going to increase the likelihood that we capture quality information about UFO sightings.
I'm sort of old school.
Now the age 66, I guess I'm becoming one of those old geezers and curmudgeons.
But I'm not sure cell phone cameras, by the way, are going to help at all because most of them are not of high quality.
And further, most people who have them, irrespective of the quality of the camera, don't know really how to use them effectively.
So we don't get high quality, really convincing photos with them.
I mean, I have to say that I've just got, and I had to be pushed kicking and screaming into it, my very first smartphone.
On board this smartphone, which is by no means an expensive smartphone, it's a basic one because I've got to learn all of this.
And, you know, I've done technology all my life, and I'm so embarrassed that I'm just starting to do this.
It has an eight-megapixel camera on it, which is good, but I don't think eight megapixel pixels really cuts it.
I bought a little camera from a supermarket, a Sony, that has 20 megapixels.
And I took some night sky photographs, some sunset photographs at a place in West Sussex where I spent two nights recently.
That was my holiday for this year.
And we had beautiful, clear skies, gorgeous sunset.
And you can zoom in and in and in and into those pictures of 20 megapixels.
Maybe if there was something in the sky, in fact, there were birds on that picture.
This is the point of the story.
There were birds flying across the sky that I didn't even see when I took the picture and I saw afterwards.
But I don't think you get that with eight megapixels.
You need 20 upwards to be able to even start.
So I'm not sure how much of an adjunct to what you do, the technology is at the moment.
Yeah, it's a very good point you raise.
And in direct response to your question, it's not much of an adjunct at all.
I'm getting those pictures taken with cell phones all day, every day, probably five an hour is what I receive.
Five an hour.
Yeah.
And particularly when there's a flap.
We had a flap last night over the southern tier of the United States.
Very, very dramatic.
Maybe we can talk about it later.
But a lot of people caught the object with cell phones, the ones who saw it long enough to be able to activate their phone and get the photo.
But they're not high-quality photos.
All you see in most cases, easily in excess of 90%, maybe 98% Of all those cases, all you see is just a tiny little speck of light or a few specks of light against an immense sea of darkness.
And that's not much information, not any detailed information, anyway.
I compliment those people who have the presence of mind to capture the photo because I'm always haranguing people for not having gotten the photo.
But there's a big difference between a high-quality photo taken with sophisticated photographic equipment and a photo taken with a cell phone or a smartphone.
So you're exactly correct.
We're on the same frequency there, Howard.
All right.
Remind me to come back to that as we close this out, but that's not going to be for quite a while yet because we've got a lot of ground to cover here.
So this started in boyhood for you and your biography, and I promise you this is the last thing I'll lift from your biography because I hate it.
You know, one thing I cannot bear is when I hear radio programs that I know are running to a script.
You know, a conversational program needs to be a conversation.
And Art Bell, I used to say, good on you, Art.
Every time I heard him say this, he used to say, I don't do tons of research for my shows because I let the conversations go where they will.
You learn more that way.
However, having said that, I am going to refer just once to your biography once again.
Your first UFO case investigation was 1965 when you would have been, what, 13 or 14?
I was 17.
Oh, 17.
Okay.
Math was never my strong point.
Okay.
And this was, where was this, Exeter, New Hampshire?
It was a dramatic sighting.
In fact, there are many books and articles written about this incident.
It took place on the morning, the very early morning of September 3rd, 1965, in Exeter, New Hampshire, which is about 50 or 60 miles straight north of Boston.
At the time, I had just graduated from high school in a nearby town, the city of Derry, New Hampshire.
Ironically, the home of our first astronaut in space who lived actually in East Derry.
He would turn over in his grave if he knew I'd put him in Derry rather than East Derry, for heaven's sakes, a mile to the east.
Alan Shepard came from the same town and attended the same high school I did.
But a nearby town is Exeter, New Hampshire, home of a celebrated boys' school up there.
And a young fellow was hitchhiking home in the wee hours of the morning from Massachusetts, and he was chased by a disc, a big disc, and chased to the extent that it drove him into a nearby swamp on the edge of the road that he was hitchhiking on.
And he was hunkered down in the mud and the brambles.
And this disc, he asserted, glided directly above him and stopped.
It appeared to tilt 90 degrees, he thinks, but he can't be sure.
And it turned on its very bright lights.
He said he's never experienced such bright light.
Well, after the disc then moved off in a direction he didn't really comprehend at the time, or didn't register, I should say, he ran two and a half miles into the nearby town Exeter and broke in, burst in to the police department there and told his story to the radio operator who put an all-points bulletin out to all their cruisers.
They had just two cruisers at the time, two vehicles.
And one of the officers responded immediately because he had encountered a woman on nearby highways earlier in the evening, probably six hours earlier, who asserted to this officer that she had been chased by a disc, chased on the highway.
And when he came upon her car, which was parked out in the middle of a traffic circle, not a good place to be parked, he approached the car, not knowing what to expect.
And as I remember, this is all now 49 years ago, he discovered the woman in the back seat of her car, hiding down on the floor of the back seat.
Her dog was in the front seat, hiding, cowering down on the floor as well.
And she told this officer the story.
He sent her on her way, as I remember, but he recorded mentally, of course, what she had said when six hours later or so, he heard this radio broadcast that a hitchhiker had been chased by a disc.
He responded immediately.
He went into the police station, picked up the hitchhiker.
His name was Norman Muscarello.
The officer was Officer Bertrand, very nice guy.
I interviewed both of these gentlemen, and he took the hitchhiker out to the field where the hitchhiker had last seen this object.
They walked into the field and saw nothing initially.
However, as they turned their back on the distant corner of the field, they suddenly realized that their bodies were casting a marked shadow.
And the shadow was getting shorter and shorter very quickly.
They wheeled around.
Oh, my lord.
Here is a disc hovering above them, or close to above them.
And just at that moment, a second police cruiser, the other second Exeter Police Force cruiser, pulled up.
And these three gentlemen, two police officers and an 18-year-old hitchhiker, stood there for several minutes watching this disc flit about the field.
And it scared the living daylights out of them.
Now, if anybody heard that story today, they would tend to say, well, there must have been somebody in the area experimenting with something they'd bought from Radio Shack, but this was 1965.
Exactly.
It's hard to put all of this in the form of a drone or a crash dummy or swamp gas or a weather balloon.
All those ruses that skeptics or skeptibunkers, as I like to call them, use in order to try to dissuade people's interest.
Of course, sometimes, Peter, the things that really do pose the big question marks are the associated phenomena, electromagnetic phenomena, car engine stopping, radiation that you can measure with a Geiger counter.
As far as you knew, you were only 17.
Did you know whether there was any of that stuff going on?
Well, it's interesting you should ask because in the course of my investigation, I was on site, I think it was probably the 6th or 7th of September, just a few days after the event.
And one of the people I contacted, one of the facilities I contacted was Pease Air Force Base in the southeastern corner of the state of New Hampshire.
And I borrowed a Geiger counter, a radiation detector from our local civil defense unit in the city of Derry and found no detections.
But that is a human bias that suggests to many people that because these UFOs are sophisticated and because nuclear engineers are sophisticated, therefore, whenever a UFO sets down, there must be radiation.
But I don't think there's any strong evidence to suggest that that's the case.
But I did detect no radiation that I could detect with that Geiger counter.
So if it's possible to come to conclusions with UFO cases, and quite often it isn't, but what conclusion in your 17-year-old head did you come to?
Well, I wrote two articles for our local newspaper just before I went off to college in California.
And I tried to maintain a sense of neutrality.
Even at the age of 17, I recognized that a journalist is not supposed to become part of his story.
So I took a neutral position, but there's no doubt in the writer's mind at the time that I was dealing with something very real, particularly because of the testimony of those two officers, Officer Bertrand, whom I mentioned earlier, and another gentleman, Officer Hunt, a big burly teddy bear of a fellow, both delightful gentlemen, wonderful police officers, I suspect, now both deceased, I'm told.
But it left no doubt in my mind that they had seen something very, very unsettling to them.
And when I went to Pease Air Force Base, I interviewed either a first or a second lieutenant, what you call lieutenant over on that side of the pond, of course.
And he was a very serious-minded, although young officer.
But I asked him what he thought about this case, and he admitted that he had been assigned to investigate it.
And after his investigation and after having talked to the actual eyewitnesses, he said he just didn't know.
And that's almost an exact quote from 60 years ago.
He said he just didn't know.
But my impression of the gentleman, even though he was probably five or ten years older than I, I judged his sincerity and what he was trying to tell me with body language and so on.
It was clear that he was intrigued by this case.
We often hear of UFO cases being hushed up, of men in black and others putting the lid on things and even more serious events than that.
You know, sometimes people die if you read, well, if you believe what you read on the internet.
Yes.
Obviously, you were hooked on all of this then, so you had to continue, and you continued for, what, 29 years before you became the director of the National UFO Reporting Center.
So you must have been through a lot of cases.
I suppose because we can't talk about all of the cases that you undertook, I wish we could.
We perhaps will on another occasion or several other occasions or many.
When was the first occasion that you became aware of secrecy involved in this stuff?
Yeah, I think I've suspected it.
And of course, that subject has been discussed widely in ufology for many decades, probably seven decades, going back to the first case.
Ironically, the case that kicked off what we call the modern era of ufology occurred here in the state of Washington, where I'm in residence.
It was the Ken Arnold case of June 24th, 1947.
But my suspicion is, absent proof, my suspicion is the governments, major governments of this world have known about the UFO phenomenon for quite some time that antedates that sighting in June of 1947, probably certainly back as far as the Second World War with the so-called Foo Fighters, of which I'm sure you read, you have read on many occasions.
And it may even go back as far as the First World War.
There were some very strange incidents for which there's no conventional explanation that occurred during the First World War.
Disappearances of air crews, disappearances of whole units.
And my suspicion is major governments would have investigated those incidents to the point where they had at least a suspicion that something of very unusual nature had taken place.
We could even go back to the 19th century.
I think it was 1887 or so, the disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste that sailed out of Boston that year.
I think I have the year correct, but people could certainly find this case on the internet.
The Mary Celeste was a sailing vessel that was loaded with casks, wooden casks of alcohol, and it was headed to the east coast of Spain across the Atlantic.
And perhaps two weeks or so after it had sailed from Boston, its sister ship happened upon the Mary Celeste, hailed it from afar, could not raise anybody on the ship, and they approached it, they boarded it, and everybody was gone.
So governments may have been at least suspicious that unusual, seemingly inexplicable things were taking place for which there was no conventional or terrestrial explanation.
So I think governments put the lid on ufology a long time ago, including the very dramatic crop formations over in the UK.
At least they started in the UK.
Of course, they're now continuing.
They're now appearing in other nations as well.
Recently, Denmark, Italy, I think Spain, and so on.
You know, we haven't, normally we do have a couple of newspaper features about crop circles.
I'm only about, what, 70 miles away, 60 miles away from where all of that stuff really happens, and that's around the Stonehenge area, you know, sort of West Country.
So I'm not too far down the motorway for that.
But we haven't had a rash of those this year.
That's interesting.
I guess what I wanted to ask you is when you, Peter, first became aware of perhaps an investigation that you were doing as a young man.
Somebody didn't want you to do it, or there was stonewalling involved.
You talked about that policeman on that very early investigation, and you could tell by body language and that alone.
But I wonder if and when you became first aware of more serious activity or inactivity going on.
Yeah, there are a number of examples I could cite, but I'd like to go back to the incident at Exeter, again, the 3rd of September 1965, because that spring, actually that summer after the incident at Exeter, I had a summer job.
I used to drive newspapers for the local newspaper that had hired me after graduation from high school.
I used to drive them probably 100 miles up to Maine to fold them, and then I would drive back in the wee hours of the morning, two or three or four o'clock in the morning, to deliver the newspapers back to the newspaper that had printed them.
Well, one night after the incident at Exeter, I encountered a car that had shut down or broken down on the side of the road.
And being sort of a big-hearted person by nature, I stopped.
There were three grown men in coats, and they had coats and ties on, sports coats and ties, well-dressed.
And I offered to drive them into the next town.
Their car was incapacitated and dark.
They had no flashers or no lights on it at all.
So the three got into the van that I was driving.
One of them, as he reached over to close the door of the van, I saw was carrying a sidearm and a holster on his belt.
So it took me many decades, Howard, to realize that those gentlemen may have been affiliated with the U.S. federal government and may have been investigating that incident up in Exeter.
Of course, there are many other possible explanations, but that is, it took me literally two or three decades to remember that incident and to come up with a possible significance to it.
They may have been investigating the incident at Exeter, and one could only conjecture as to why their car had gone dark and why it gave out.
Usually federal vehicles are in fairly good mechanical shape.
So that's the first suspicion.
The second suspicion is right after I took over the hotline in 1994, I was the second director.
The hotline was founded by Mr. Robert J. Gribble, a former Seattle fireman, who ran it for 20 years.
How he did it, I don't know because I've done it now for 20.
I'm nearly exhausted.
But right after I took it over, I would get telephone calls, strange telephone calls from the same fellow with a bogus German accent.
And I can say bogus because I used to work in Germany.
I resided and worked in Germany with the U.S. Army for two years, spoke German while I was there.
And this guy was not a German, but he masqueraded as one.
And they would always call me at between 11 and 1 a.m., 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.
And I think what they were trying to do, and this is pure surmise and conjecture on my part, is they were trying to wear me down very early after I had taken over the hotline to try to get me to drop it.
And they had no idea what kind of stamina I have, particularly in the face of government interference, an old American tradition, as you know.
Independence.
Independence and free thinking.
Yes.
And I would bestow that luxury on all people on this planet.
I'm so inured to it.
Well, listen, I believe that stuff goes on because I've told this story before, and I'll tell a very short version of it now.
I did an interview with Paul Hellier, former Defense Minister of Canada on radio.
Very, very nice man.
I recently caught up with him on his 90th birthday, and he was kind enough to do an interview with me then for this show.
But I was doing a radio show in the centre of London on a Saturday night, really late.
And it was about two weeks after I'd done the interview with Paul Hellier.
And one night, this was an area of London that was absolutely dead on a Saturday night.
It was a commercial area, very busy Monday to Friday, but Saturday night, dead.
No one there ever.
Dave, my young producer and I came out of the building.
I was off air at 11 o'clock.
We came out of the building by 5 past 11.
We were on our way home.
And, you know, Dave said, what's that over there?
And I hadn't seen it.
There was a black Jaguar, you say jaguar car.
And in the car, you couldn't make this up, were two guys who looked like the Blues brothers in dark suits.
And on the dashboard, mounted on a kind of stand was a camera.
And the camera was pointing at Dave and me.
And I thought, what the hell is this?
You know, I'm doing a radio show, and I don't think I'm any threat to national security.
But anyway, these guys pointed the camera at us and clearly got whatever recording or pictures they wanted to get of us.
And then they drove off.
And Dave said, do you believe you just saw that?
And I said, Dave, no.
And to this day, and it is, what, eight years or so now, neither of us, and I only very occasionally hear from Dave on Facebook, neither of us knows what it was.
But all I do know is that the radio station changed hands, which was going Through anyway.
And a matter of weeks after that, my show came to an end.
I don't think there's a conspiracy about that.
That's just commerce.
But I've always wondered what those guys were doing.
Yeah, I do too.
And I could cite a number of other examples for which I have no proof, regrettably.
But the Phoenix Lights, the great Phoenix Lights event of March 13th, 1997, is another case which makes me very suspicious that there was government interference with regard to the follow-up to that case.
That night, it was a Thursday night, at least five objects, not fewer than five objects, loitered over the city of Phoenix in Arizona in the southwestern United States for approximately two hours or a little bit more.
And it was a dramatic case.
The objects, when we apply trigonometry to those objects, we know that they were not less than 7.4 miles in width, 7.4 statute miles.
They were able to fly at supersonic velocities.
They could accelerate blisteringly rapidly.
And they were capable of hovering motionless in the night sky for at least five minutes in one case.
But the interesting thing among many about that case is that it took 93 days for that case to make the national news in the United States.
The story, quote, quote, broke on the 18th of June, 1997 on the front page of the USA Today newspaper.
But what troubles me is that it seems to us, and how this can be, I have no idea, but it seems to many of us in ufology that somebody has influence with the major newspapers, sufficient influence to induce them not to cover some of these dramatic cases, which clearly warrant immediate coverage and investigation.
It kind of harks back to Roswell, doesn't it?
Where the true, well, I say true, the story that a lot of ufologists believe is true was the first one out.
Then reverse gears were hit, and a little while later, a completely different version is put out.
Maybe someone somewhere, and this is just a speculation, wanted to put the brakes on this for a while until they could get another version of this out.
By the way, do you know Dr. Lynn Kitte?
Oh, I know her well.
Well, she was a guest on my show.
I'm trying to work out the number of editions ago, 133 shows ago.
So we told this story, and she told me, I thought that that was just the one-off phenomenon.
Stuff is still going on around there.
Yeah.
We get reports from across the country.
And for the interest of our audience, two years ago, a normal number of reports per month for me was between 200 and 400, roughly 10 per day, let's say.
By way of comparison, last night I took between 80 and 90 reports in the course of one evening.
That is how much.
That is reflective of how much the UFO phenomenon has increased, certainly in volume.
Now, of course, there could be many reasons for that.
It could be programs like this that make many, many people more aware of our facility and aware of the fact that they can submit written reports if they've had a sighting of something unusual.
Well, this is the problem, isn't it, Peter, that these days we know if we watch depressingly enough television with all these reality TV shows, everybody wants to be a rock star and thinks they can.
And perhaps everybody wants to feel their special.
And one of the ways they might want to feel their special is by saying, I saw a UFO.
That is true.
And we all worry about that in the field of ufology.
But it's interesting how a little bit of experience listening to people over a telephone will give a person very good instincts, very good senses as to whether the story being recounted by the caller is accurate and true and truthful or not.
And after a day or two on the hotline, I think, Howard, you would agree with that statement.
You can tell a lot about a person.
Most of all, if you have a technical background, you can start picking apart the or attempting to pick apart the sighting as it is being recounted and challenge it and try to come up with some terrestrial explanation for what the person is describing.
For example, satellites or the International Space Station, all sorts of things are reported to us, and only a fraction of them are genuine UFOs.
And what about stuff, this is going off completely at a tangent, but I wanted to run this past you.
I've had a couple of guests on here who do this in a very serious way.
What about stuff that you can only see with high-grade night vision?
Yeah, I don't know what to make of that.
The night sky is a very, very active place.
Probably a lot of people in cities are not aware of that.
But with a good pair of binoculars or, as you point out, night vision devices, you can see a lot of things.
But it requires a little bit more than just the means for seeing these things to determine whether the objects are UFOs or not.
And you have to address questions such as did they turn?
Did they maneuver relative to one another?
All sorts of criteria you have to address to rule out all of those things that might have been of terrestrial origin.
I don't have a pair of night vision devices, but I'm in a very good area of the country.
We have beautifully, beautifully clear skies.
And I think that should be one of my next purchases upon your recommendation.
And I'll let you know upon the next interview what the results are.
I'll answer your question then.
Well, one of my guests in the west of England just over a year or so ago, and we did a fast.
I didn't know anything about this man.
He's not a national name.
But he told me the story of how he's intensively researched using a grade of night vision that I don't think you're actually supposed to own in this country because it's very sophisticated stuff.
You can own them in the US, but in the UK, we have to wait for things.
But he told the story of how he regularly sees what appear to be dog fights in the skies over England that you cannot see with the naked eye.
Well, that's quite possible.
I can't address those cases without first having looked at the data.
But the important thing would be to not just see it and talk about it, but rather see it, record it, and document it.
That's the important thing to do.
And it's slightly more difficult than just talking about it.
But one thing I know from experience, the field of ufology draws people who want to talk about their experiences like an electromagnet draws iron filings.
And you have to be very, very careful with all the information that in the final analysis you accept as being truthful and reliable.
My father was a policeman, and one of the problems with telling your story and then retelling and retelling your story is that things get lost or added along the way.
Yeah.
That's one of the reasons I have adapted over the course of 20 years on the hotline.
I have suddenly come to not want to talk to people.
In fact, people are taken aback that I don't want to talk to them for 30, 45, or 60 minutes, hearing every little jot and tittle about their sighting.
What we want them to do is tell us briefly in 15 seconds or less what the object was they saw.
And then I invite them to immediately go to their computer and compose a detailed written statement, which they hopefully spell check.
Nobody ever does, I observe, and then submit that report using our online report form.
That's the way we like to do it.
And I agree with your father 100% that the more you talk about something, the more likely you are to have it change as you discuss it.
And the other issue is, and this is a little more subtle, the more we talk with a person, the less likely are we to receive a follow-up written report.
And that is a tragedy because it is the written report that is the important aspect, the important part of a UFO sighting for our purposes here at the National UFO Reporting Center.
And I've looked at the way that you document these reports.
They look to me like the police reports.
My dad, I mean, we lost him last year, but he used to take me on duty with him at times.
Whether he was supposed to or not, I'd go and visit him at the police station.
Your reports are written like the ones that he used to write.
Yeah, some of them are, but before I post those reports, I do a little editing.
Capital letters, punctuation, minor things like that.
And so those are the result of a bit of editing on my part.
I'm a former English instructor, so I guess I'm a bit of a stickler for that aspect of a report.
But if you want to see a very, very interesting report, or if anybody in our audience would, I would commend to your attention a report that came to us on the 3rd of July this year, 2014.
That was a Thursday night, of course, at 11.15 p.m. from Niles, Illinois, in the central part of our country.
The gentleman who submitted that report, and he identifies himself and his title in the report.
He was a state police officer for the state of Illinois.
And that night, this is just nine, 10 days ago, all of the electronics in his squad car were neutralized, he suspects, by the two UFOs that flew right over his position.
It completely paralyzed his internet connection for his in-car computer.
His texting device would not work, and his cell phone would not work.
About five or 10 minutes after, he writes in his report, all of those objects, all of those utilities came back and were normally functioning normally after the UFOs had disappeared in the night sky.
But you're exactly correct.
There are a lot of very, very strange things that are going on around us all the time, to include last night.
We took a very dramatic sighting, a number of sighting reports from all across the United States last night.
One of the reports was from a police officer.
Another one is from a senior co-pilot with a major U.S. airline who saw the whole event from his cockpit at 32,000 feet.
Good Lord.
So I'm looking forward to receiving that co-pilot's report.
He was very adamant that what he saw was dramatic and it was not of this planet.
Now, we have to say that mostly with these unexplained shows, I usually record them and put them straight out.
There are occasions when I get a little bit ahead of myself, and we're recording this on the 13th of July.
I'll say that.
In fact, I've recorded two shows on one day.
I don't often do that.
I usually just record them, put them straight out.
So there will be a bit of a delay in hearing this.
That's why some of the dates, if you're hearing this a little bit later in a few days from now, you may say that wasn't last night.
But I just want to explain to my audience what's going on here, Peter.
You know, today is one of the days when I'm trying to get ahead of myself in recording two shows.
But this sighting last night is remarkable, isn't it?
I mean, this is big stuff.
Yes.
Yes.
I should have clarified that.
And thank you for correcting my error, Howard.
It was the night of Saturday, the 12th of July, 2014.
The first reports we took were from Louisiana.
And suddenly the phone just started ringing off the hook.
The next calls came in from Texas.
Then we had calls from Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, the state of California.
And I think I mentioned earlier in this program, I think I took 80 reports last night.
The majority of those reports were of the two, we believe it was two objects that streaked across the southern United States from east to west.
And then, interestingly, the co-pilot I alluded to earlier, a few minutes ago, saw the One object that was coming from his left as he proceeded to the south split into two separate distinct objects, slow and come to a dead stop.
And we have reason to believe that they then reversed their course and went back to the east, and they were reported going back over those states I mentioned.
Very, very dramatic case.
We should have all of those reports posted to our website just about the time that this program airs.
High-level, high-quality reports from credible people.
And when you think about corroboration, that's what you look for when you try and correlate the reports together.
How similar are these 80 reports?
Yeah, that's a very good point.
And that's one of the many, many things that an experienced UFO investigator will do is ask people questions to get them to respond voluntarily with the right information.
Namely, for example, what color were the objects?
What were their sizes?
Although that's a variable depending on the distance between the observer and the object, but most of all, the time and the direction the objects were going.
If one person says they were going to the west and the other person says they were going to the east, that should create a question mark in the mind of the investigator.
But if everybody says they were going west and they were going at a blistering pace, and those are the types of reports I received last night, one right after the other.
There were times when the phone was ringing multiple times per minute, and the people were reporting essentially the same object, and those objects were going in the same direction.
And if this is a hoax, it's a pretty big one.
It's a very big one.
As far as I know, all or most of those witnesses were independent of one another.
And in the case of the co-pilot I mentioned earlier, he had been flying from Chicago.
He was on his way to Dallas and just descending into Dallas.
We also got a report from a police officer in Livingston, Texas, down in the southern tip of Texas.
And he was a very, very good witness, very matter of fact, very objective.
It's clear that this gentleman had a lot of experience in making accurate observations and, in addition, making accurate reports of what he observed.
So it was a very interesting night last night, again, the 12th of July.
And I'm looking forward to getting all those reports processed in the near future and posted so people may enjoy them.
And then do what with them, though?
That's the thing, isn't it?
People ask me that all the time.
Why are you doing what you do, Peter?
I earn no money at this.
I'm obsessed with the UFO phenomenon.
I work two shifts a day, seven days a week, to collect this information and then give it away for free.
It's almost a form of madness, I think.
And I recognize that fully well.
How do you pay for it?
If this is not a rude question, how do you pay for this?
Yeah, I have supported it out of my own pocket for the last 20 years with a few exceptions, various honoraria from speaking engagements.
People have been very courteous in sending us a few bucks now and again.
That is a few dollars, as we call them bucks, as you probably know.
And that gives me a little bit of working capital.
But I argue it sounds very strange to most people.
Why do you do what you do, Peter?
Well, it is because I believe we are dealing with a subject that is the most important issue, certainly scientific issue, that has ever confronted mankind, namely, are we alone or are we not?
And from my vantage point, based on 20 years of work and well over 100,000 cases now in our database, the clear and resounding response to that question is we are not alone and we are being visited routinely.
And if anybody disagrees with my statement, I encourage them to set up a venue where I can present my data to a large group of people and they will see what I'm talking about.
We have collected some very good data over the last 20 years and it is extremely convincing.
It would convince a jury in a court of law.
So I'm convinced that it's more important than any amount of money that a person could receive for this type of work.
And money might even cloud the work a little bit.
And even my dear late Liverpool grandmother, who sadly died 14 years ago now, but I remember her telling me when I was a boy that one night she looked, well, one early morning over Liverpool, she looked out of her terraced house window and saw a metallic disc hovering there.
Now, my grandmother didn't make stuff up, and she solidly believed to the day she died that she saw UFO.
Yes.
And there are probably 19,999 liver puddlians who saw the same thing, but who never, ever reported it to anyone, except maybe alluding to it or discussing it briefly at a dinner party or in the restaurant or probably in the bar.
And that's a shame because that's very, by my measure, by my standards, that's very, very precious data.
It's like stumbling upon a five-ounce gold nugget in your footpath.
It's worth a lot to you.
So it's a shame that people don't report these things more frequently than they do.
Those people who read things and listen to the various radio shows that talk about this stuff, members of the public, could be forgiven for having the idea that ufology was one big happy community.
But I know, and you know, having looked into all of this, a lot of you guys don't agree with each other, do you?
There's a lot of politics going on.
Yeah.
And what you do in a case like that, I am trained as a scientist with a lot of experience in genetics and biochemistry.
And what a scientist does when that type of strife and dispute crops up is you revert to what you have and what you know, namely the data.
What do the data say?
Not what the personalities say, but what do the data say?
And that's what I do.
It's part of the reason I choose to work alone is because I prefer to deal with the data than dealing with other people's surmise and conjecture about what such and such means.
I prefer to look at it on my own.
I think that's characteristic of a scientist.
And just look at what the facts say and try not to overstep your facts.
What many people do is overstep their data, I observe.
And I'm speaking of people in the field of ufology.
They look at a little bit of fact and then they make a grandiose global statement based on it.
And they're much more liberal with their comments than I find I would be in that circumstance.
So that's, you're exactly correct.
And there are a lot of, one has made, or I have made, one can make implacable enemies in this field, that's for sure.
If I read your biography, and I did promise I wouldn't refer to it again, but just one quick one at the end here.
You got involved in politics, didn't you?
Proper politics.
Did you run for the House of Representatives or try to?
I did.
I was a declared candidate for the U.S. Congress in 1992, but I withdrew.
I was running against a gentleman who had immensely greater fundraising capacity than I did.
And I ended up becoming his campaign manager, ironically.
Very nice chap.
I've run for the Washington state legislature on a couple of occasions.
Very interesting.
You meet some fascinating people.
The most important part of a campaign, in my opinion, is the people you meet along the way.
Sometimes not so friendly to you, but oftentimes they are and very interesting people.
And I remain as interested in politics here in the States as I am interested in ufology and almost as active in politics as I am in ufology.
For which party?
For the Republican Party.
I was, for example, a delegate for Congressman Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012, those two presidential election cycles.
Had the opportunity, the pleasure of meeting the gentleman, absolutely first-class chap.
Ron Paul, he was some, I'm sorry for my, I studied politics, I should know this.
He was an independent, wasn't he?
No, he was a Republican.
He was a Republican, okay.
And he was shouldered out by some administrative minutiae.
It angered a lot of us.
There's as much strife inside the parties as there is between parties, you will observe.
But, yeah, I'm as active in politics as I am in ufology.
And what do you think of the work, for example, of Stephen Greer, Dr. Stephen Greer, who takes this stuff to Washington and believes that ufology needs to be delivered right on their doorstep and they have to be a bit more forthcoming up there than they have been heretofore?
Yeah, I know Stephen.
We've met on several occasions.
He's to be commended for having publicized the field of ufology and pressing for disclosure.
We approach the field, I observe, quite differently.
He's much more involved in wanting to take people out onto a hilltop and show them UFOs if there are UFOs there.
I'm much more inclined to sit by the telephone and receive telephone calls from across the country on a more or less real-time basis, actually.
So we occupy different niches in the ufology field, I would say.
And that's true of most people in the field.
Stan Friedman, Nick Pope.
There are probably several dozen very serious-minded people who are investigating this phenomenon quite aggressively and quite objectively.
And each one does it considerably differently from what most people do.
It's a very interesting phenomenon.
I think the human psychology that we see in the course of pursuing the UFO phenomenon is as interesting to me as the phenomenon of aliens visiting our planet.
The facets of the human character that I have seen as director of the National UFO Reporting Center deserve a book.
Many people are surprised to learn that if I write a book in the near future, it will be more on human psychology that I've been witness to than it will have to do with UFOs and aliens visiting our planet.
Now, that'd be a hell of a book.
That's a good question.
Five years ago, I sat with a little recording device in Liverpool, my home city.
I was doing some broadcasting there, and there was also a very big conference there attended by people like Richard Hoagland, who I've known for years.
In fact, I was responsible for getting him invited to the thing.
And various people were invited there.
Nick Pope was there, so I met him face to face for the first time.
And Steve Bassett was there.
I sat on the steps of a bombed-out church.
In Liverpool, there's a church called, I think it's St. Nicholas.
I should know this being a Liverpoolian, but it was bombed out in the war and was left to stand there as a monument to the kind of things that can happen if you're not very careful.
We sat on the steps of this church with some church bells from another church ringing, and we talked about disclosure.
And five years ago, he told me that he thought it was very near.
It still hasn't happened.
And that's disappointing, isn't it, all around?
Yeah, it is.
I was privileged to be a part of the citizens' hearing on disclosure in May of last year, 2013, in Washington, D.C. And Stephen Bassett is to be roundly commended for the excellent work he's done in trying to elicit some kind of disclosure or admission from our government.
I don't think it's going to happen.
The government is implacably now committed to not sharing this information with the American people.
I think it may be the UK, the government in the UK may be in a similar position, but I'm really not authorized to speak on that issue.
But It addresses another issue, and that is my proposal for detecting UFOs in the near-Earth environment using what's known as passive radar, which I talked about at the MUFON Symposium in Denver in 2004, July of that year.
And I believe that we can detect these UFOs using passive radar, which capitalizes on using radio and television signals that emanate from commercial antennas and listening for their reflections from space.
And those reflection points could be satellites, they could be space debris, they could be anything, but they could also be UFOs.
People, if they're interested in the subject, can see my paper on our homepage on our website, ufocenter.com.
Interestingly, the concept of passive radar, I'm told, was first invented, first patented in the UK in 1927.
So I'm by no means the first person to recognize its utility in detecting targets.
It's just been the first person to recognize that you could detect unusual targets using the same technology.
And the great thing about this technology, by the sounds of what you've just said, is that you don't need a government's budget to do it.
Ordinary people can.
Yes, absolutely.
And people who have a technical bent to them, who understand a little bit about radar, it's not a sophisticated paper.
It's written for the layman, not the radar specialist.
I believe for somewhere between a quarter million and three quarters of a million dollars, we could write all of the software and build a prototype passive radar system that would allow us to detect UFOs in the near-Earth environment.
Near-Earth environment would be defined as out as far as the distance the moon is from the Earth, about 240,000 miles or so.
We could detect UFOs in that space, not just in the atmosphere, but outside the atmosphere.
And the interesting thing about my proposal, when my paper was first published by MUFON on their website, I can tell you the date.
It was July 6th of 2004.
So 10 years ago, I received a call from a senior officer at the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C. And he said, Peter, you don't know me, but I know of your work.
He said, I'm very interested in UFOs.
My name is such and such.
I'm a PhD in physics.
And he said, a retired colleague of mine just sent to me over the internet the abstract from your paper on using passive radar to detect UFOs.
He said, I thought I would call you to congratulate you on the paper.
He said, I've read it.
And if you build the system that you describe in your paper, you will be successful in resolving the question of whether UFOs are real or not.
Oh, my God.
He was very careful with his wording.
He did not say you will detect UFOs.
No.
But I think we know what he meant.
Yeah.
And to give you some idea of how senior this officer was, he had been in the CIA for at least two decades at that point.
He said, Peter, I will tell you how senior I am.
I am the person who gives the president his morning briefing at, I think he said, 6.30 every morning.
So this fellow was a no-nonsense type character.
He said, I have built such systems for the CIA for clandestine detection of targets.
And he said, you are spot on.
Your system will detect UFOs if they are there, and it will work perfectly well.
Again, it's based on a patent applied for, first applied for in England.
I presume it was granted back in the year 1927.
I didn't know that until after I'd read my paper.
Peter?
After I'd written my paper, I'm sorry.
You are a fascinating man to talk with.
I'm well out of time now, so we're going to have to do this again and then probably again after that, if you're up for that.
Oh, I've enjoyed it immensely.
You're a wonderful host, Howard.
You're a spirited and high-minded person.
It's been fun to work with you, and I look forward to our next interview.
It would be fun.
Well, it's a privilege.
I used to listen to you on Art Bell's show, and I used to think, my God, I hope I could get people of that caliber on my show.
And here you are.
If people want to know about you and your work, what's the website again?
The website is just ufocenter.com.
And we over here on this side of the Atlantic Spell Center, quite strangely, it's ufocenter.com.
Very simple to remember.
Ah, yes.
We'll have to teach you to do it the right way one of these days.
It's lovely to talk with you, Peter Davenport.
Thank you very much.
We will talk again.
We're out of time.
My name is Howard Hughes.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work on this show.
If you want to get in touch with me, make a donation, whatever, the website www.theunexplained.tv.
More great shows in the pipeline.
Until next, we meet 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.
▲
Export Selection