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Sept. 23, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:56
Edition 222 - Bob Davis

Bob Davis Phd - and the scientific way of investigating UFOs and alien abduction...

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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.
Well, coming towards the back end of September now, this month has gone really quickly and we've seesawed between heavy rain and storms and bright warm sunshine.
We've just had some really heavy rain here in the UK.
I think we're in for some nice weather, if you believe the papers here.
And I don't always do that because sometimes they are well wrong, as we say, here in London.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
I'm going to do a mass of shout-outs on this edition.
So if you've emailed recently, the chances are I'm about to mention you.
And if I haven't been able to fit you in, I do apologise, but do know that I have seen your email.
And thank you very much.
Keep the emails coming.
You can do that through the website, theunexplained.tv, and that website, maintained by Adam Cornwell, a creative hotspot in Liverpool.
And if you want to make a donation, please do.
You can do that through the website as well, theunexplained.tv.
The guest on this edition is a man who has academically researched the UFO phenomenon and written a book.
Among the people he works with, I'm talking here about Bob Davis, the guest on this show, Bob Davis, PhD.
His colleagues include people like Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo astronaut.
So his credentials are pretty fine.
We'll talk with him very soon after we've done the shout-outs, which is happening now from Kurt.
He says, when I started listening to the episode with Ron Feldberg about the Mojave incident, it all fell apart when you started asking him the more straightforward questions.
I noticed his speech started to stumble a bit and he became seemingly unsure of himself.
Okay, well, you noticed that.
A lot of people liked the show.
I have to say I didn't notice that, but maybe you've listened to it more intensively than I have since I did it, Kurt.
And of course, you are welcome to your views.
Of course you are, and that's why I always welcome people to get in touch and tell me what they think of the shows.
Mike Dorley in Mansfield, Texas.
As I remember, Klaus Donner was planning an expedition to research artifacts in July of this year.
Isn't it time for an update?
We've been trying to make one happen, Mike.
Thank you.
Karen Folks in Barrie, Ontario.
Nice to hear from you.
Dr. Peter McCaskin.
Doctor, I've promoted you here.
Peter McCaskin, asking for Dr. Jonathan Reed.
We're going to try and do that.
Nikki in the US, nice to hear from you again, Nikki.
Mike Robinson at Bloomington, Indiana.
Thanks for the email.
Chris Sims in California listens on his daily commute.
You painted a real picture there, Chris, and I hope that your commute is going well today.
Neil Shaw in Brighton, UK, we're hoping to have Graham Hancock Neil on this show.
He should have been on this edition, but hopefully he's going to be in mid-October now.
Colin at Armagh Planetarium in Northern Ireland, and nice to hear from you again.
Colin, of course, a former guest on the show.
Daniel Bryant, an American in Germany, interesting stuff, Daniel, about night vision, the Mojave incident, and the military.
I took it all on board.
Andy in Indiana.
Thanks for the email.
Julie Janssen and your husband, thanks for yours.
A retired U.S. Air Force man, Kevin Lammons, in New York City, sends me a quote, and it's his favorite quote.
And I think it might be about to become one of my favorites.
Here's the quote, Death is merely turning off the lamp with the arrival of the dawn.
Nice.
Peter in Stockton-on-Tees, northeast of England.
Thoughtful email.
Thank you.
Ian Casey in Cork, Ireland.
Nice to hear from you, Ian.
Mr. Shelley Mayne in Monmouth, South Wales thinks that I should put on unexplained conferences.
It is an idea I've been pushing around lately, Shelley.
Thank you very much.
We might well do that.
Mark Intreherbert, South Wales, not far from you.
Thank you for your kind comments.
Philip Jackson, an Englishman in Japan.
Nice to hear from you.
Jared Royal in Foster, New South Wales says, good eye, Cobber.
He says, remember, my theory is that aliens, stroke-evolved humans, have not traveled through time or anything like that, although they seem to have worked out space travel.
They have simply evolved on another planet over thousands of years since we last saw them.
Ronnie Slocum in Rockford, near Chicago, thanks for the email.
Amanda in Rochester, Minnesota says, I think you need to, well, actually, I say, I think you need to contact David Paul Leidas.
Amanda, because of the things you told me about those missing people, I think he would be interested.
Mary Stevens in Illinois says, I listen to your podcast, primarily when I'm training for a triathlon.
So I'm either running or riding a bike through the cornfields of Indiana.
Greg Horacek, it might be Horacek in Medina, Ohio.
Nice to hear from you, Greg.
Al in Brighton says, I found the show with David Paulitis thought-provoking and in a way very scary.
I don't think you're alone with that, Al.
Laurentino Martins from Portugal, Bombia, Lorentino, and I understood your English in the email perfectly.
Tony in Malden, Massachusetts.
Good suggestion.
Tom at Bampton, near Oxford, wants a show on Transcendental Meditation.
We've been trying to get Mike Love from the Beach Boys back on here to, as he promised, come on here and talk about that, because he uses that.
A French-Canadian man in Tunisia, Maxine Poulin.
Now, if your name was in France, you would be Poulin, wouldn't you, as they are in Paris, places like that.
But I know that you're Poulin in Canada, Maxine, thank you.
Nice to hear from you.
Susan Bourne in Traverse City, Minnesota or Missouri.
I'm not sure.
I can't read my own writing here.
Not sure which, but Susan Bourne in Traverse City.
Thank you for your email.
Donna Tripp in Myrtle Beach, California.
Really enjoy your program, and I could listen to you talk all day, says Donna.
That's kind.
Thank you, Donna.
I think some people may not agree with that.
Chris in Hubbards, Nova Scotia.
Thank you for yours.
Greg, a retired lawyer from Dassel, Minnesota, kind comments.
Kathy Barlow in a great-named place, Kathy.
A Beau Dessert.
Or it could be Beau Desert.
I think it's Beau Dessert.
In Queensland, Australia.
Thanks for your email.
Sherry Johnson at Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Some nice words from you, Sherry.
Thank you.
Brian Bogadis in the US.
Thank you.
Nick Malkuit or Malki, 90 miles north of New York City.
Nick, thank you.
I think you're going to like this show on UFOs.
New listener, Heidi in Michigan, says, please don't listen to those jackass listeners complaining about how you interrupt guests.
You don't.
You do an excellent job, says Heidi.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you very much.
Charles Mazur in Philadelphia, thank you.
Bill Height in America.
I didn't get that email you sent me about Art Bell and the Sea Crane Company Bill, so please send it again if you can.
Pat Branson in Camrose, Alberta, Canada.
Thank you for the email.
And Ernesto, Jason, Nathan, Patrick in Portland, and Danny Fernandez.
Thank you for your emails.
Wow.
If you want to get in touch with the show, you know how to do it.
You can go to the website of theunexplained.tv and send me out an email from there.
And you know that I will see it.
And that sets me apart from a lot of the mainstream media where they simply put your emails in the pin.
They don't do anything about them.
Dan Pettit is a musician in Saltburn, North Yorkshire.
And he produces some pretty good stuff.
He sent me a couple of CDs.
One of the CDs is called Roswell.
And I'm going to close this show because Dan has allowed me to with a track called Roswell from Dan Pettit.
So Dan, I said I would do it.
And if you listen out to the end of this show, we're going to put some of your music on the back end of here.
Watch out for him, Dan Pettit.
Let's get to the guest on this edition of the show.
It is Bob Davis.
And he says to me that the website that he's part of is Experiencer.
That's the website.
Scientific investigation of those reporting UFO-related encounters.
And our results from approximately 1,200 subjects are extremely interesting.
Says I'm confident that your audience will be very, very interested in what I have to say.
I think so, too.
So let's cross across a five-hour time distance and difference across to the United States and get to the Eastern Seaboard and Bob Davis, PhD, on this edition of The Unexplained.
Bob, thank you very much for coming on.
It's a pleasure to be here, Howard.
Thank you.
And thank you very much, Bob.
We've had various technical difficulties to try and get through on this edition.
Listeners to this are not going to appreciate how we tried everything.
We tried Skype, and now we're trying a cell phone.
So let's hope this works.
Now, you're a scientist, investigating a field that has defied scientific investigation, legitimate scientific investigation for years.
You know, credible, legitimate scientists often won't touch it, and those who do often get the wrong end of the stick.
So where are you coming to this from?
I'm basically an agnostic as far as the UFO phenomenon is concerned.
I believe and I don't believe I essentially have no clue.
I am skeptical, but I am anxious, like millions worldwide are, to figure out what governs and regulates this fascinating mystery.
I firmly believe that UFOs are real.
I don't think there is any debate about that, although many people demunk it and dismiss it for whatever reason.
But the question again is, what governs this behavior?
Is it under intelligent control by being from another dimension, planet, wherever?
And I think if somebody would look at the evidence in a collective fashion, objectively, non-biased, I think I would come away concluding just the same that it is a phenomenon that does exist, that defies logical explanation, and is worthy of scientific investigation.
Now, you say if somebody would investigate this in an unbiased way, which of course implies that you believe that you've done it that way, and yet a lot of the people who come into research like this have read comic books when they were kids, are interested in space, and would kind of rather like to believe that all of this is true.
Can you honestly put your hand up and say, I am doing this in a completely impartial way, and whatever the findings, they are the findings, and they will be presented without gloss?
The next question, I am trying to accomplish that outcome as best as possible, although having a human brain, as we all do, it is often difficult to do so 100% of the time.
But in attempting to prove just what you mentioned, my book, The UFO Phenomenon, Should I Believe, which listeners can read via Amazon, represents an attempt to provide that objective approach where I just throw out the facts,
certainly some of my opinions, but in an objective manner to let the reader understand and best interpret the collective evidence in order to formulate his or her own opinion.
I don't try to sway the reader one way or another.
Likewise, I'm not going to try to do that during my conversation.
As a scientist, I try as best as possible again to maintain that objective approach.
Yet when I look at the evidence throughout the years, I can't help but at least make the firm conclusion that, again, this UFO phenomenon is real.
That I'll go on to Lima and say, I have no clue, however, as to whether or not it is governed by intelligence foreign to our planet or any other possible explanation.
It is still an extraordinary mystery, especially since it impacts in profound ways so many thousands, if not millions, of individuals worldwide throughout the centuries, I think, who yearn for an answer, who have had these extraordinary encounters with this phenomenon in varying ways that should be acknowledged by the scientific community much more seriously and should be undertaken using a multidisciplinary scientific approach
in order to better understand the phenomenon.
Instead of looking retrospectively at past events, we must look prospectively and apply current scientific principles to studying the phenomenon, which may not be appropriate in 2015.
We may simply not have the appropriate principles to apply to answering the who, what, and why is associated with the phenomenon.
All right.
That sounds very impressive.
It's a great mission statement.
What scientific tools have you deployed that make you different from other scientists who've tried to get into this?
The tools I'm using is shared with other scientists who are part of the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters.
The acronym is known as FREE, F-R-E-E.
And the website is experiencer.co, not com, but.co.
And the executive director is Dr. Rudy Shields.
She's a retired professor of Astrophysics at Harvard.
I'm again also a member of the Board of Directors and on the research team along with other scientists, psychologists, and others across a variety of disciplines.
And we're trying to facilitate an investigation into UFO-related contact experiences with so-called, shall we say, non-human intelligent beings.
We'll refer to them as EPEs for now, along with associated paranormal activity using this scientific process.
And we want to essentially know if people are, in fact, experiencing contact in varying ways with non-human intelligent entities, which seem to violate known physical law.
How can you know that then, Bob?
You know, other people have tried.
How can you know that?
Because certainly if you think of like the granddaddy case of them all, the Betty and Barney Hill case and other cases, apart from one or two things that perhaps don't add up, like I think there was a pink powder involved, apart from that stuff, the only evidence that you have is in the accounts of the people that you're talking to.
Indeed.
And that's what we have historically, anecdotal evidence, reports by people who have had upfront and close personal experience with the phenomenon, whether it's astronauts, pilots, military civilians, etc.
There are thousands of incidents and events, Roswell, Reynolds and Phoenix Likes.
We can go on and on.
There's numerous books on the topic.
A lot of sense and nonsense out there.
People don't know who and what to believe.
Same with me, which is why I'm anxious as part of the Free Foundation to be engaged in this kind of effort whereby we are now undertaking, using a very large sample population of over 2,500 individuals who claim to have conscious recall of UFO-related contact in varying ways.
And we are now finishing our quantitative survey responses, which consists of about 600 questions, and we're going to be moving into now a more descriptive, a qualitative phenomenological aspect of the study to complement the quantitative information.
And this is the first attempt, as far as I'm concerned, that utilizes such a large population of those who have, again, conscious recall, not hypnotic recall or lucid dreams, which is subject to controversy, I'm well aware.
And that's critical.
Now, the results, which I would like to share with you and your audience as appropriate, I think is startling.
And I think the scientific community, once they become aware of the similarity and the remarkable information derived from these individuals, should take notice and hopefully stimulate interest among many other individuals, scientists included, to continue prospective-related research along these lines.
Not that we will have a final definitive answer as to the who, what, and why is associated with the phenomenon, but I think we will gain considerably more insight into the phenomenon by understanding what people's experiences are regarding their contact with ETs in varying ways, then analyzing Roswell, Betty and Bardian Hill, and Rendlesham, et cetera, et cetera, which is interesting.
It's informative.
We learn from it.
I don't dismiss it, discount it, or discredit researchers who pursue that line of inquiry and evidence, but it is somewhat misleading because it tells us something about the phenomenon, but it only accounts for a piece of sand on all the beaches on our planet.
We need to move forward, adopting different types of studies and hopefully scientific principles that are yet to be realized.
We don't have them now probably to come up with the definitive answer.
How did you get hold of a 2,500-person database?
In various ways, we solicited many UFO organizations, websites, UFO websites, trying to, and through our own website where people can access the survey.
So through word of mouth, through radio shows, by asking people who have had these experiences with conscious recall, which is a critical component to this process, to respond and take the survey.
And we've done so here in America, and it's now also being conducted in Latin America.
It will also be done soon in Germany, among other countries.
So nevertheless, time permitting, and with your permission, I'd be happy to share some few of the 600 responses we obtained to date.
I think many scientists would be thrilled, possibly slightly skeptical, that of 2,500 people, you were actually able to get 600 of those 2,500 people to take a survey.
It was 2,500 individuals.
We asked 600 questions to these individuals.
So you questioned, you asked, I understand that.
You asked 600 questions of those, but that's a lot of questions.
Indeed, many more important than the others.
And I tend to cherry-pick, so to speak, those questions that I thought your audience would find most interesting.
Can I just ask one thing then?
Before we proceed with the stories, which are, of course, what people want to hear, they want the good stuff.
You're involved with Dr. Edgar Mitchell here.
Now, I interviewed him on this show five years ago.
I never thought of him particularly as a UFO guy.
I thought of him as a guy whose eyes and ears were open, a man who was certainly open to the prospect of us not being alone there.
But is there something that you know about him yourself, because you work with him, that suggests that he's actually well into ufology?
Dr. Mitchell, the sixth Person who walked on the moon way back in the 1970s and founder of the Institute for Neuetic Sciences is very much interested in consciousness studies, but he is certainly also interested in this ET, so-to-speak, phenomenon.
He has not revealed to me any personal upfront and close encounters that he has experienced, but he has shared on numerous occasions about information he derived from others within the military,
NASA, et cetera, who are firmly, who firmly believe that there is some knowledge regarding the existence of ETs who are visiting Earth, as well as our possession of physical craft governed by ETs.
Now, I don't know where he has divulged any more specific information in terms of his sources or other related information, but he is a firm believer.
Now, it doesn't necessarily mean he's 100% correct, but I don't discount them.
I have great respect for him as well as many other leading scientists in the field, like Dr. John Mack, Akainek, among others, who I'd like to talk to also about their relationship to the field of ufology and how it potentially ties into the results of FREE.
Nevertheless, Dr. Mitchell certainly is someone who we should note.
And you said, I don't want to lose this point.
You said that Dr. Mitchell had told you that he believed or had been told that there were craft that were in the possession of the government that were under the control of extraterrestrials, under the stewardship of those people.
I don't get that.
Explain that to me.
I don't want to misquote him, but let me just say that he is convinced that E.T. is here.
He is convinced that we have physical craft governed by E.T. And I'm not sure if he believes that we reverse engineered some of their craft around.
That's the phrase that I didn't understand.
Physical craft governed by ETs.
In other words, they're still in control of it.
I don't want to misquote him in any way, but he's a believer.
Let me just say that up front.
So that implies that they are here.
Fine.
You work with them, I know.
That implies that they are here.
We have their craft.
And rather than us being in a dominant position over them, they're working in cooperation with us.
I don't know that for a fact.
I don't know if he knows that for a fact, if there's a cooperative effort.
I don't know anything more than what I just said that he believes.
That's basically it.
And again, I don't want to misquote him in any way.
He is a believer, and he has apparently excellent sources of where he derived that information from, which made him believe.
And there are certainly other astronauts, scientists, et cetera, who also have had very unique experiences that are also firm believers.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
And I think we should all be skeptical, objective, and not be convinced one way or another.
But we should take some types of conclusions, perspectives by noted authorities like Dr. Mitchell, among others, more so than we should from X, Y, and Z, who wrote a book on, you know, I visited Mars on a flying saucer.
And unfortunately, ufology is too much of a pseudoscience, as far as the scientific community is concerned, because of all this other nonsense that exists out there and New Age group that jumps on the bandwagon.
So I think we need to filter out the fact from the fiction, the sense from the nonsense, and try to listen more intently, make more sense of information derived from more, shall we say, credible individuals who have studied the phenomenon, not that they are correct.
We're all misled.
We all have a human brain.
We all make errors in inductive reasoning.
We all believe what we wish to believe.
We all believe things that are consistent with our belief.
We all make these errors.
And we're all subject to that.
But I think FREE, this foundation, again, which Dr. Mitchell on the board of directors, is a necessary, critical attempt to finally investigate the most mysterious, intriguing phenomenon, in my opinion, of our time.
The problem with ufology, though, Bob, isn't it?
The problem is that the same old stories keep coming around like a fairground attraction, a fairground, right?
They keep spinning around.
A few days ago here, I read in a newspaper, or on a news website, I think it was, to be more exact, that the Betty and Barney Hill case was being re-examined.
And lo and behold, they're saying in the paper, on this website, whatever it was, the map that they were given by the ETs of the universe that included planets that we hadn't yet discovered at that point, or stars we hadn't yet discovered, in reverse, because, of course, they would have seen the universe from the other side, not our side.
You know, that has to be true for that reason, that it's seen in reverse and it's got things on it that they couldn't have known at that time.
Now, of course, we were hearing that 20 or 30 years ago.
That's not new, but these stories seem to spin around and around, and we don't seem to make any great progress.
You know, every so often, a new generation of journalists rediscovers them.
Yeah, I couldn't say it any better.
These stories spin around, and it makes my head spin around, too.
You know, there could be certainly something to it.
Who knows?
There certainly could be something to the Roswell crash, the Rendleson Forest, the Phoenix Lights, the Belgium Wave.
We could go on and on and on, dissecting these past events, which we have done for decades, with little if any progress being made to understand the who, what, and why is associated with the phenomenon.
That's very frustrating to me.
Not that we will be successful now or in the future, but the point is we do learn something about the Benjamin Bardi Hill incident.
I don't know what to make of it, very intriguing, as well as other noted events that ufologists tend to kick around in varying ways in different media forms.
While noteworthy, while interesting, and I credit and commend those who do study these areas and events and try to understand it for purposes of trying to develop, present a smoking gun evidence,
which in my mind is elusive and we do not have, I think we again need to focus our primary attention to what we need to do now, prospectively, using scientific methods,
if at all possible, through a multidisciplinary approach with scientists from different, again, disciplines, physics, psychology, sociology, et cetera, to try to understand the essence of the experience that thousands,
if not millions, of people worldwide are having now and have had in the past regarding their upfront and close personal encounter, so-called allegedly, with E.T. wherever they may be, a non-human intelligent being.
Bob, before we get into the cases and the explanations, your Bob Davis Ph.D. What are your credentials?
What is your PhD in and where have you taught?
Have you lectured?
What are your bona fides?
I have a PhD in neuroscience and hearing science from the Ohio State University.
I taught for over 30 years at the State University of New York.
I've been a closet ufologist since a child from watching too many episodes of Star Trek, like many others have.
And I saw two orange orbs with my wife in Sedona, Arizona, a few years ago, which compelled me to write the book, The UFO Phenomenon, Should I Believe, which listeners, if interested, can purchase on Amazon and visit my website, the UFOphenomenon.com.
And after the observation of the two orange orbs, I tried to apply a somewhat objective scientific-based approach, looking at the evidence and letting the reader decide for him or herself what the phenomenon represents.
But again, that experience since the donor compelled me, motivated me, inspired me to do write a book.
And I don't try to persuade the reader again one way or another, like I'm not trying to do right now.
I can't help but have some opinions, but I try to do so in an objective fashion and let the listener reader make his or her own decision.
And it's unfortunate because many ufologists contend they have the answer and try to arms with us and believing their firm conclusion that ET is here and there from XYZ.
And I'm sorry, but most of these conclusions are unsubstantiated in my mind.
They may be right, they may be wrong, but I don't see any smoking gun in terms of where they come up with these kinds of conclusions, like dead aliens were recovered from Roswell and we studied them and we reverse engineered them and et cetera, et cetera.
Maybe they did.
I don't know.
But where is the firm, irrefutable evidence to support such conclusions?
All right.
Well, how have you moved things along then with your 2,500 people and your 600 questions?
Would you like for me to share some of the answers, responses to those questions?
I would.
And just before you do, I want to say to our listeners that we're doing this program on a cell phone.
We tried, didn't we, Bob?
We tried for about 40 minutes or so on a Skype connection that was very bad.
I'm not sure exactly where you're located, but I don't think your digital communication connections are the best way you are.
So that's why you're hearing this on a cell phone and not something higher grade than digital.
I can certainly hear what Bob says, but I know if you're an audio purist hearing this, you will say, why is he doing this on a cell phone?
And Bob, you and I can agree it was the only way that we could do this, and I wanted to have you on this show.
Talk to me about the specific cases then.
Sure.
Here again, we conducted surveys as part of the quantitative phase of a multi-phase study in approximately 25 individuals who claim again that they have had conscious recall of their experience with ET.
And we completed a survey of about 600 questions.
I cherry-picked a few, which I thought your listeners might find particularly interesting.
And for the next few minutes, let me kindly just share some of the questions and related responses.
One question.
Did you ever have any type of contact with an ET where you saw the ET physically here on Earth?
60% said yes.
How many times have you been taken by an ET and relocated to another location?
25% said 10 times or more.
Over 50% said one to two times.
Do you ever recall being on an ET craft?
50% said yes.
How many times were you on a UFO?
31% said more than 10 times.
And again, emphasizing conscious recall.
It doesn't mean they're not all lying, but again, the similarity of the responses is intriguing at some level.
Next question, were you told why you were taken on a UFO?
70% said no.
Did you experience telepathic communication by an ET?
75% said yes.
Did you have contact with an ET aboard a craft?
Over 50% said yes.
What type of entity did you have contact with on the UFO?
The vast majority of the responses here were human-looking and short and tall grades.
That was the most commonly reported, but it also included reports of insecticoids, reptilian, animal-like creatures as well, but that was from the vast minority.
Was your consciousness separated from your body at the time of the ETC contact experience?
Over 50% said yes.
While in this state of reality, did you feel a sense of harmony or unity with the universe?
Over 50% said they felt united or one with the world.
Just a few more.
While in this state of reality, did you suddenly seem to understand everything?
36% said yes to everything about the universe.
Did the reality of this experience seem real to you?
For example, as real or normal as you are speaking with a family member, over 80% said yes.
Did you feel a sense of expanded consciousness in the presence of these ETs?
Over 60% said yes.
Did you feel love from the ETs?
Over 60% said yes.
There's two more.
Do you believe there is a connection between ETs and the spirit world after death world and heaven?
Over 80% said you got it.
Yes.
And finally, do you believe there is a connection between ETs and reincarnation?
Over 80% said yes.
Now, okay, there's a lot more related questions and responses that are more than interesting.
Does it prove anything?
No.
Is it something we should continue to pursue in a qualitative follow-up interview process?
Yes, and we plan to in order to try to find out again the essence of what they are talking about.
Rather than just quantitative survey data, which is important, it must be complemented with a phenomenological approach, whereby we again try to, as best as possible, understand what these individuals are reporting, why they're reporting it, the nature of their experience, the overall essence and meaning that they derive from that experience.
Now, is this science?
At some level, it is.
It's not quantum physics.
It's not theory of relativity.
It's not something you can test and analyze in a laboratory setting, which most scientists would like to see.
But I think this is at the present time the best way possible that we can adequately address the who, what, and whys potentially associated with the phenomenon.
We must rely on experiencers in order to understand this phenomenon and associated critical question, as opposed, again, sorry for the redundancy, trying to decipher whether or not Roswell is true or Rendelsham, whatever.
That's important.
But this is the issue at hand.
This is where we need to move.
This is what we need to try to understand what is going on with the world.
Again, Bob, a great mission statement, and you're very good at putting this stuff across.
My thoughts and possible misgivings would be about the 2,500 people.
You know, who exactly were they?
Were they 2,500 science fiction fans?
How good a survey database, how broad a spread of the population are those people?
Excellent question.
And I had that same question.
And that's why we need to control as best as possible who these individuals are, where are they coming from.
Do they have any preconceived biases about the phenomenon?
Do they have fantasy-prone personalities?
Do they suffer from mental illness of some type that could lead them to respond in the manner in which I shared with their listening audience?
And that's why, to try to control those confounding variables, which we must do, in our interviews and our qualitative questions that will follow up with these individuals, we will ask specific questions related to mental illness and other associated questions that may present some bias or misguidance on their part,
which may lead them to respond inappropriately.
But you must have had some clue as to who these people are.
You must have had some clue as to who these people are.
We had requested on radio shows individuals to take our survey via our website, experiencer.co.
We had sent information to MUFON groups and other UFO organizations requesting them to solicit our survey to individuals who claim to have allegedly claimed to have ET contact of some type.
Now, is this pool of subjects representative of the global community?
Maybe not.
Maybe not.
And we have to be very careful because they may not be representative of the entire population.
So in a way, the real science begins, doesn't it, Bob, when you start to break down these figures and these interviews and when you go and do specific interviews with selected individuals.
That really is when the science will begin, isn't it?
It's a critical component.
Yes, indeed, Howard, a critical component to complement the quantitative information.
We are far, far from formulating strong conclusions whereby we can make these conclusive statements to members of various organizations and eventually in writing for publication purposes.
We're far from being definitive for reasons you mentioned and I mentioned.
We need to simply control better the population we are surveying.
We need to better rule out any confounding variables regarding the psychologic state of mind.
We need to control as best as we can.
And that's why we will do so as best as possible.
Not that we will have the firm, again, smoke and gun answer at the very end of our study, but I think we'll have some Keen insights, which will help formulate the next steps to take by not necessarily us, but by others interested in this phenomenon to expand upon so that we, again, try to reach consensus as best as we can about what governs and regulates the phenomenon.
So have you started, Bob, contacting some of those people who responded to your survey questions and saying, I would like to take this further with you.
Are you willing to meet me?
And if you have done that, how many of you contacted and when are you going to start talking to them?
We're in the process now of developing a questionnaire that we're going to send to them.
They're going to respond back to us by email with selected questions that will help us better control the population we are studying.
In other words, to try as best as we can to rule in, rule out some of these confounding variables that may bias these individuals for whatever reason.
But we have these questions in there that will help us do so so that we can try to have a well-controlled population who have conscious recall of their unique experiences.
We're then going to follow up following their written descriptive responses to our questions.
This is not the qualitative phase that I just shared with the listeners.
We're going to follow up with descriptive questions.
And then following that, we will have one-to-one interviews with individuals who we deem to be high-profile cases.
Individuals, in other words, who we contend are well balanced, as balanced as possible, are not biased, have conscious recall of their experiences, and thus we're going to try to look here again at control for the subject population to study at the end,
and thus we increase the inherent validity and reliability of our results before we make any firm conclusions.
All right.
Talk to me, Bob, then, about how exactly you go about screening out.
I want to try and find a way of putting this politely, but how do you screen out the lunatics and fantasists?
That's not an easy process.
We're undertaking that issue right now as we speak.
There will certainly be questions in there in the qualitative aspect of our study that addresses issues of fantasy proneness, mental illness.
How do you go about doing that?
I mean, you can't ask them the question, you know, do you think that you're slightly mentally unbalanced?
You've got to be a bit more subtle than that.
So how will you do it?
Well, here again, first of all, confidentiality, anonymity is stressed so that hopefully they feel free to be as revealing as they may feel free to do so.
But we do ask questions like, have you ever suffered from a mental illness?
Have you ever been diagnosed as having a type of mental illness?
If so, what were you treated for, et cetera, et cetera?
Questions along those lines and other related questions.
Here again, we have to be very careful.
It's not like we're working in a laboratory setting where we have great access over control.
We're reliant on individual responses, which could be falsified.
Well aware of that.
Well aware of that.
But that's why hopefully when we get eventually thousands and thousands of individuals who seem relatively balanced, who we feel confident in terms of their responses related to their experiences, we will then use and only use those subjects that we consider to be so-called high-profile cases.
Here again, here again, regardless of what we do, it'll certainly be subject to criticism, scrutiny, skepticism, and that's fine.
That's needed because we're not going to reveal any smoking gun.
I think at best we're going to reveal some additional important insights into the study of this phenomenon, which has not been undertaken.
Muvafon, for instance, is undergoing a survey right now using subjects who have reported contact via hypnotic regression.
Now, I'm not dismissing that completely, but the scientific community does not regard that as the best mode of evidence in terms of memory recall.
Subjects in our group will have conscious recall.
So there are some attempts out there, but I think we're a little bit ahead of the curve.
And I could be wrong, but I'm maybe a little biased in that regard.
But the point is, the major point of this all, listeners, do not interpret the information I just shared with you literally.
I think you should open up your eyes a little bit more and say, hey, maybe there's something to it.
Maybe not.
I'm not pushing this on you.
I'm not trying to arm twist you in terms of believe that people are being abducted by UFOs.
I'm in the middle.
I'm objective.
All I can say is this.
I find the results remarkably interesting, especially since it's consistent.
And that's the key term, consistent among the thousands of individuals who claim to have conscious recall.
We still needed to do a great deal more work to better control for the responses and associated conclusions.
Well, I think that's what makes this interesting, Bob, and I think is actually what makes it quite important.
You know, look, I've had various people on here claiming to have been abducted and telling sometimes quite similar stories and telling quite remarkable and chilling stories.
And a lot of them, listeners, have emailed me back to say, I just think that person is nuts.
But if you do this in quantity, if you talk to a lot of people, if you screen them from mental illness, if you do all of those things and you use scientific techniques to crunch the numbers, then you are doing something very significant and you are then heading off at the past.
Those people who will get in touch with you and say, well, you're just Talking to a bunch of lunatics.
Yeah, I appreciate very much your insightful perspective on that.
Yes.
Are we talking to some lunatics?
Of course.
Some are, obviously.
What percentage of the 2,500, who knows?
But we're aware of that.
And it's an inherent potential, confounding variable in our study.
But it's the best we have because we don't have current scientific principles to give us the answer about the phenomenon, which I believe does exist.
So I think we need to rely on these insights from individuals who claim to have had this type of experience.
On the premise that they can't all be lying.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Certainly some are, of course.
We know that.
But don't interpret, again, the information, listeners, don't interpret it too literally and make any definitive conclusions.
We're still on the road.
And after our study is done, whatever conclusions we come up with remains to be seen.
It doesn't mean that's the answer.
It has to be followed up by other independent studies, by other independent associations like LUFON and many other worldwide UFO-related research groups to see if they can also generate the similar types of conclusions that we do.
And the interesting thing is that this initial research that you've done, and as you implied before, not only are you going to take it further by drilling down into the data and meeting some of these people, but presumably because you've published it, that data of 2,500 people is available for other research institutes and other interested people to go out and do something similar.
So if you have a lot of people tackling the same information and the same subject, the chances that you're going to get some interesting conclusions must be greater.
Exactly right.
Howard, you should be a scientist if you're not one already.
But you hit it right on the head.
And verification through independent research studies is an essential component to trying to prove or dispute, prove a theory.
And we don't, you know, free does not have an answer.
I think we have a process that has potential, a process that has potential in terms of revealing the who, what, and why is associated with the phenomenon.
And I'll go so far as saying that.
Again, however, regardless of what we come up with, if it is duplicated and we come up with the same kinds of conclusions made by others, then here, yes, you're right.
It adds validity to our research.
So this is going to be a long process, but something that I think has the potential to be far more noteworthy and far more of a contribution to ufology and the general science of the community than continuing to dissect, as I said earlier, Roswell, Rendelsham, et cetera, which is important, again, but will never, never get us any closer than we are now to answering these critical questions.
Look, how far have we gone towards understanding or advancing our knowledge of the phenomenon over the many decades of study?
And I'll go back to Alan Hyne, the astrophysicist who led many scientific investigations in the 60s and 70s, and Dr. John Mack, a Peerless Prize winner, noted psychiatrist from Harvard University, who studied this phenomenon with individuals like we're doing now.
And they came away from their independent investigations that this is a real phenomenon.
It is foreign to our terrestrial mode of thinking.
It contains both the physical and the mental.
Let me stress that, the physical and the mental, because we're seeing that too.
There is apparently a psychic component to this.
At least that's what people are saying in terms of consciousness being shifted or altered, telepathic communication, etc.
So here again, trying to connect the dots.
Is there a relationship between what we're seeing on a tentative basis through the quantitative analysis in the 2,500 cases we're looking at now and what they observed decades past using a different, very different approach?
But is there a relationship?
And I listened to John Mack.
I listened to Alan Hynek, maybe more than any other so-called scientist within ufology, although there are many, many good ones.
And I credit all researchers who have tried to uncover in varying ways what is behind this mystery.
But Mack and Hynek are two individuals in particular who I respect and listen to seriously.
And what I'm seeing here is that our preliminary tangentive results are consistent with their conclusions, which that, more than anything, makes me stay up at night thinking about what the heck is going on.
The next stage of your research then, does it just involve you or are there other people involved?
How many people are going to be going out there on the road and talking to these individuals to get more information from them?
It's a fairly large number of interviewers.
I'm not going to be participating in that process, but we have many individuals already lined up and willing, ready, and able to go to eventually conduct the qualitative phase of the study.
But initially, we'll presenting our findings at various UFO conferences next year in conjunction probably with the MUFON study.
But this is going to be quite an endeavor on the part of many individuals, not only myself, but many who are firmly committed to trying to uncover the answer, trying to do so objectively in an unbiased fashion.
But we do believe at least that this is probably the best approach to take in which To accomplish a goal that I think has existed ever since UFOs became more upfront and personal after we dropped the hydrogen bomb in World War II, which I think they have said.
Hey, guys, you guys are being too big, too bad, too soon.
Or maybe not.
I may be dialing to conclusions.
Do you believe there is this kind of, I don't know, soft and gooey view of some of the ETs, that they're watching what we're doing to the planet.
They're not actually getting involved in stopping any of it just yet.
But when we take it to the critical point where we've almost destroyed the place, then they will step in and do something.
Do you subscribe to that thought?
I have no clue.
That's a very fair insightful question, but I don't think there is anyone who can give you an answer to that.
I will say this, however, that Edgar Mitchell, among others, believes that E.T. who is coming here, according to him and others, wants us to keep space free of energy warfare.
And some individuals like him contend that that's why E.T. may be here, to help prevent us from infiltrating their space, so to speak, with nasty stuff.
But what kind of gets my mind thinking about, related to your question, was the remarkable incidence regarding the deactivation and reactivation of nuclear warheads, both here in the United States and in Russia on varying occasions.
Which, of course, people like Robert Salas, who I interviewed quite recently, talked about.
He was in 1967, I think it was, on a base where allegedly that happened.
Exactly.
And it's not a one-time incident, apparently, as well as Robert Hastings, who has done a lot of research in that area.
Apparently, those who were in control of those missile silos said it was virtually impossible for what occurred to have occurred.
They also saw UFOs in and around the base at the same time where these missiles apparently activated and then were deactivated.
Hastings, among others, obviously pumped to the conclusion that that was a message.
Again, you guys are becoming too big, too bad, too soon.
Cool it, or something like that.
But those instances, those events are probably to me more compelling than anything else, along with some personal accounts by the pilots who have had close encounters with UFOs where we have that confirmation of pilots and radar sightings, maneuverability, of course, 10,000, 12,000 miles per hour, hair concerns.
We know it all.
Well, look, you talked about pilots and professionals.
Of the 2,500 respondents that you asked those questions of, were there professionals and pilots among them?
I don't know.
We're going to follow up on that in terms of occupation.
We have not asked that.
We have asked a lot of demographic personal information about their family who may have had contact with it, parapsychological experiences they may have, religious experiences, beliefs, et cetera.
But not that.
We're going to get to that.
It's a very good point.
Because here again, if that is the case, where we have pilots responding to the extent that they've had these kinds of experiences, that's a high-profile case.
Now, there will be some people, Bob, who say that, well, it's not real science that you've done.
Because if you were doing real science, even though it is difficult to get hold of 2,500 people like that, and you have to go on radio shows and in newspapers and pump for people to get in touch with you, but a scientist wouldn't say, and I'm not a scientist, we know that.
I'm an arts guy, but a scientist would say, well, why didn't you ask them what they do for a living?
We're going to do that in our qualitative interviews.
In the questions that we're deriving right now, in fact, that we're going to send to these individuals who are willing to follow up with us, we're asking that.
And in the interview process, we're going to ask also for that.
And you make a good point.
You know, what is science to begin with?
That alone is a debatable issue in and of itself.
Many, many different types of science.
Phenomenological qualitative investigation, psychology is considered science, as well as dissecting amoebas in a laboratory.
There's many, many, it's a wide discipline of science, and there's always going to be room for skepticism and criticism of any research process.
This happens on an ongoing daily basis.
But I can understand what you're doing.
It's almost like closing the, what is it, the aperture on a camera.
You know, you're starting with a wide aperture and you're zeroing down.
So in the next phase, you're going to get very specific with the people you pick.
There has to be, Bob, though, maybe a top 10 of people that you've seen in all of those respondents who you're really itching to get out to right now and talk to first.
There must be some real gems that have rung some bells with you.
Oh, indeed, there are.
And however, I can't cross the line and say this person is smoking gun because we don't have enough information about that individual along the lines you just have to know how high profile a case that really is.
Although tentatively, it does sound extremely interesting.
But we hope certainly to follow up on those high-profile cases, and we will.
But it gets back to that, you know, what is science?
You know, John Mack was a psychiatrist, Nobel Prize winner, and what did he do?
He did interviews with people who were reported to have been abducted.
Well, is that science?
And he's a Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist from Harvard.
You know, some people will be skeptical of that.
The point is, we're doing, I think, what needs to be done.
Are there inherent problems, Loopholes, disadvantages associated with the study?
Of course, any study is, but we're going to try to close that as much as possible.
All right, you're going to start presenting this evidence at UFO events and conferences next year.
Who is going to be on the platform when you're doing that?
Is Edgar Mitchell going to be there?
He was there via Skype last year, and this was in Joshua Tree, California.
Contact in the Desert, I think is the name of the conference, as well as sort of MUFON groups, so we hope to present that.
But he was via Skype.
I will be presenting the results along with John Climo.
Dr. Climo is a noted psychologist who did research for over 40 years.
He's on the board of directors and the research team.
He's an expert in qualitative phenomenology research.
I have great respect for Dr. Climo, and he's written books on the topic as well as on the afterlife.
So he and I, and possibly Mary Rodwell, will also be on our presentation team.
For those interested about her, they can find her website at ACERN.
She is a noted authority in the area of UFO contact, so to speak, encounters and has done tremendous work in that area.
So we do point is we have a diverse field of scientists, physicists, psychologists, counselors across a wide range of disciplines, obviously.
So when will the first event be, Bob?
As far as you know, will it be January, February?
When will it be?
No, I think the contact in the desert is scheduled for sometime in June.
There are actually two conferences we have lined up for June.
And certainly before then, we'll have sufficient qualitative evidence to complement the quantitative data.
And hopefully by then, we'll be in a position to provide tentative, stress tentative conclusions.
Not enforcing anybody, but just listen and do with this information as you wish.
Right.
Well, I have to commend you for your methodology and for the fact that you're very calm about this and for the fact that you are not leaping and jumping to conclusions, which some people would do.
As you say, this is a work in progress, so there is more to hear.
I think we have to talk again.
Hopefully the next time we talk, the connection between us will be better.
And I just want to emphasize to my listeners that Bob and I were very long-suffering with this.
We tried for about 30 or 40 minutes to get a good connection by Skype and digital means.
We couldn't.
We tried everything else, and we ended up on a cell phone.
So that's why the audio was quite clear, I thought, but not absolutely perfect.
So Bob, in the U.S., I thank you very much indeed, and I know that you and I have to talk again.
People are going to want to know about you.
By all means, tell me the website that you're on.
My website is theufophenomenon.com.
And my book, if they're interested in reading it, is The UFO Phenomenon, Should I Believe, which is available on Amazon.
All right, no, see this.
If you were selling the book, okay, The UFO Phenomenon, you've had some good reviews.
I saw five good reviews on Amazon last night, and that was, you know, there were more I could have read.
But I saw five good reviews.
People saying that you've made a very valuable contribution to the debate.
If you were selling the book and you had to do it in a line or two, just as we conclude this, how would you do that?
What would you say?
I attempted to provide an objective approach to the study of the phenomenon to allow the readers to view in an unbiased fashion the collective evidence to make their own minds up as to the nature of the phenomenon.
And I think that's essentially it.
Again, I don't on twist them one way or another.
Bob Davis.
Here's the collective information.
Yeah.
And what steps are necessary to take to help us resolve the issue?
That's an also important component of the book.
Thank you for persevering with almost one hour on a cell phone, Bob.
And the next time, I'm sure the sound quality of what we do will be better.
Please keep in touch.
Well, thank you so much for inviting me on your extraordinary show.
You're a fantastic host, and it's been my pleasure to discuss this issue with you and your listeners.
That's very kind of you, Bob.
And I wish you well in your work.
Thank you.
Bob Davis, and his book is called The UFO Phenomenon.
He does some very interesting work, and I will put a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much for supporting me in this show.
Please keep your emails coming.
Go to theunexplained.tv.
That's the way you can send me an email comment or a guest suggestion to tell me about yourself and where you are.
I'd love to hear your stories and make a donation if you can.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work and support on this show.
And as I said, we're going to leave this edition with something slightly different.
Dan Pettit, musician from Yorkshire, and here's a track called Roswell.
So until next we meet here on The Unexplained, my name is Howard Hughes.
And please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
In the sleeping men.
We are.
It's bum-ba-da-bum-ba all the way to Rio Vancho.
I got a dream, it's bad.
I'm changing gear.
I'm trying not to talk my vehicle.
I got my hands on the wheel.
I'm not making a big deal.
Something strong, even when it's about to go.
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