Edition 240 - Peter Robbins
World famous UFO researcher Peter Robbins talks about his Rendlesham Forest investigationsand his lifetime of research...
World famous UFO researcher Peter Robbins talks about his Rendlesham Forest investigationsand his lifetime of research...
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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. | |
Recording this in the second week of February, when the weather is playing yet more tricks on us. | |
We haven't had any cold or any ice for quite a while. | |
We've had a lot of stormy weather here, and I mean really stormy weather. | |
Very unseasonably stormy weather, the kind of thing that you normally get in September-October in these parts, but boy, it's been unusual, and the temperatures are a lot like springtime. | |
So, you know, I've said it before, and I don't want to become a weather bore. | |
Last thing I want to do, but I think that there has been some kind of big change in our weather, because winter is not like winter. | |
Thank you very much indeed for your emails and your donations. | |
Please keep both of those coming if you can. | |
It's an interesting thing about shows like this. | |
Most people do not donate, and that's just a fact. | |
But if you have donated, thank you very much indeed. | |
You don't know how vital your donation is to what I do here and to allowing me to keep going. | |
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot for his hard work as ever. | |
Going to do a lot of shout-outs on this edition. | |
Tackle another couple of things that I need to deal with here. | |
A little bits of any other business that have appeared in the last week or so that I just need to talk briefly about. | |
Then we get into a very good guest on this edition, Peter Robbins, one of the world's foremost UFO investigators. | |
We'll be doing a whole hour with us here on The Unexplained. | |
Let's do those shout-outs ahead of Peter Robbins. | |
Karen in Florida would love to hear some of my radio stories. | |
Karen, I'm not sure whether we have the time. | |
There are so many of them. | |
You know, I'm going to write it all down one day. | |
I did write a feature for a magazine here every week for about a year and a half called Radio Days, which was just about my time in radio and the people that I've known and the changes that I've seen, but I need to expand on that. | |
Chris in Spokane, Washington says don't change a thing about the show. | |
Leonard here in the UK, Leonard, my thoughts are with you and your younger brother. | |
Please, please stay in touch. | |
Zoe in New York on the subject of interrupting guests. | |
She says sometimes Howard is too polite to do that. | |
That's actually true. | |
Sometimes I feel I should and I hold myself back these days. | |
Chris Troy and Ben Miller, both in North Carolina, nice to hear from you. | |
Lee in Stockton, UK, suggesting Barry King, not Larry King, as a guest. | |
Josh Smith and Andrew Journey from Baltimore, Maryland, say we love the show and listen to it while traveling and building ninja warrior obstacle courses. | |
I'd like to know more about those. | |
Craig listens on the long commute through the traffic of Minneapolis. | |
Scott in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, UK, good to hear from you. | |
James in Ely, East Anglia, very sorry to hear your news, James. | |
I have been through exactly the same thing and I do understand. | |
New listener, Mike in Yorkshire, been with us for four months now. | |
Thanks, Mike. | |
Ryan Paradise in Winnipeg, Canada. | |
My uncle Charlie went to Winnipeg when he retired. | |
My uncle Charlie worked for one of the big carpentry firms, big shipping firm. | |
He was a carpenter. | |
And this was, what was the shipping firm? | |
The Pacific Steam Navigation Company, based in Liverpool, but sending ships with cargo backwards and forwards to North America every single day of every single week. | |
And Uncle Charlie worked his whole life as a carpenter for them. | |
And as a gift at the very end of it, they allowed him to travel on one of their ships to Winnipeg. | |
Long story that I can't tell you about here, but Uncle Charlie, no longer with us. | |
Most of my relatives, Uncle Charlie and my grandparents, all gone now, but amazing people from an amazing time in Liverpool. | |
I'll talk more about them one day if we get time. | |
Andy Williamson in Alabama, nice to hear from you. | |
James in Waikaloa, Hawaii, disappointed by Courtney Brown and the remote viewing. | |
Jack in Laguna Hills, California, thanks for your email. | |
Ryan in Nova Scotia says, hi, Howard. | |
Just want to say that your episode with Courtney Brown was quite possibly one of your best. | |
Fascinating stuff. | |
Appreciate what you do. | |
Thank you. | |
Lovely, detailed, interesting email from Ronnie and Dana. | |
Don't get a lot of emails from Austria, so nice to hear from you. | |
Stephen in Telford, UK, on the border with Wales. | |
Apparently there's some strangeness involving orbs occurring there that we need to investigate, I think, Stephen. | |
Gordon in Fife, all of your points noted. | |
Jeff in Vancouver, British Columbia, nice to hear from you. | |
Dear Mr. Hughes, I have voraciously read and studied everything I could find about Operation High Jump. | |
I'd like for you to do a show about this strangeness. | |
Never heard of it. | |
Gotta check it out. | |
Thank you, Mike, in Pennsylvania. | |
Harlan Lang in California, thank you for your very nice and kind email. | |
Now, lots of response to the last guest, Mark Devlin, about the music business and the media and the nature thereof and the hidden agendas behind them. | |
Some of the emails positive and some of them negative. | |
A lot of email. | |
Representative, I'm not going to read all of the emails out here because it would take us for a very long time to do it. | |
But Daniel in Viesparten, Germany, said he thought that Mark Devlin had ill-informed arguments and a lack of supporting evidence, says Daniel. | |
But other emails, like one from a man I can't name at the moment, who said that Mark Devlin flagged up for him his own deep concerns about the music industry. | |
So you see, one guest polarizing the audience, and maybe that's a good thing. | |
Mark on his website has some things to say about me. | |
He says that I was mainstream in my approach to him and asked him some curveball questions. | |
I don't think I did. | |
I was just trying to get a handle on how Mark came to the beliefs that he's got. | |
And you've had a lot to say. | |
As I say, I'm not going to read all of those emails because it would take too long, but I was not coming at it from a mainstream perspective. | |
If I was, what on earth am I doing this show for? | |
is the only thing that I would say. | |
But let's leave that aside now. | |
Email from Pete says, do I read audiobooks? | |
Pete, tell me more about this project, will you? | |
Gabrielle in Iowa, USA says, when I read that you could have subbed for Art Bell, I was disappointed you didn't, but now I understand. | |
Which brings me to something else. | |
In the last week, Art has appeared on a podcast called Gabcast, which until last week I'd never heard of. | |
Very well produced. | |
It's basically about Art Bell, I think. | |
And Art appeared on this for about two hours, and I was surprised to hear myself mentioned on this edition. | |
And I just want to explain things from my side just so that it is completely clear what transpired, and then we can all move on. | |
Let me just say before I say anything about all of this, that I wish Art every success in everything that he does, and I think you know as my listener, that Art Bell has been my hero for nearly 20 years in radio. | |
He has been the guiding light for me. | |
If I could ever get the chance to work with him, I'd like to do that. | |
And Art, if you are listening, I mean that. | |
He described the events that happened last summer when he spoke to me about doing a show before him. | |
And I haven't talked about this in any detail before, so let's do this. | |
We'll only do it once, but I think it has to be done. | |
Yes, last summer, Art offered me a show live on Dark Matter Network three hours before him. | |
But I would have needed to have given up any other work that I've got, which is just about paying enough for me to eat and pay my bills at the moment, and got involved in this venture that I couldn't afford to set up and run. | |
And look, it's a great sadness to me. | |
I'll always be very sad about that, but there was absolutely nothing that I could do. | |
So Art said, Howard wasn't going for it. | |
But the explanation for that that I've got to give you here is the fact that I simply couldn't afford to go with it. | |
And yes, Art and I did speak. | |
But let me say again that Art has my very best wishes, and I hope that one day it will be possible for he and I to work together because I hold him, as you possibly do, in the highest esteem. | |
And that, I think, is all I have to say about this. | |
I did offer to go to the United States and meet and talk with Art, but for one reason or another, that didn't happen. | |
At Christmas time, I was offered some fill-in shifts for art on Midnight in the Desert. | |
And then, of course, Art ceased to do the show and life took a different turn. | |
So that explains everything from my side. | |
And I wanted to tell you my experience of it, which just adds to the story that Art told you on Gabcast. | |
So now we have all the facts out there and all of us can move on with things. | |
And as I say, maybe one day I will work with the great art. | |
That would be nice to think that that might happen one of these days. | |
Let's get to America now for the guest this week, Peter Robbins, ufologist, a man with a background of more than a quarter of a century in all of this. | |
And I think you're going to find him very interesting. | |
Peter, thank you very much for coming on the show. | |
Howard, it's an absolute delight for me to be on the show. | |
Now, we've got to say that we've done some test recordings and one or two of them, the digital liners, dropped out mysteriously, Peter, because we've got a great connection between us. | |
So I'm not entirely sure why that happened. | |
Maybe we ought not to speculate, but just in case we get some interruptions or some difficulties with the sound, I just want to explain to my listener that that happened. | |
And we're both a little baffled by that, but sometimes, as we both know, Peter, these things happen. | |
Now, look, as I said, huge pleasure to have you on here and to do this transatlantic link up. | |
I'm just going to read one paragraph that was written about you in the biography section of a conference website. | |
You do so many conferences and lecture tours, stuff like that, because it explains to listeners who haven't heard you before who you are and what you do. | |
It says, Peter Robbins is an investigative writer, author, and activist best known for his UFO-related papers, columns, articles, editorials, commentaries, conferences, lectures, and media appearances. | |
Deep breath. | |
He is a regular fixture on American radio shows and has appeared a guest on them and been consultant to numerous television shows and documentaries. | |
Now, look, that has saved me about half an hour of speaking there because that kind of encapsulates the whole lot. | |
You have done so much. | |
If you can encapsulate your own life, how would you sum up what you are and what you do? | |
Yeah. | |
Well, as far as what we'll laughingly call a career, my career track from the time I was a young child was only to be an artist. | |
I was a very precocious youngster as far as the visual arts went. | |
I had special studies in oil painting. | |
I went to, graduated from, and was on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts for many years, I think the finest art school in America, and really was on my way to a career as a gallery artist here in New York when a memory returned from childhood of a profound UFO sighting that I had with one of my sisters. | |
And after speaking with her, I got the shock of my life. | |
This is 40 years ago, Howard, when she shared with me what we would now call absolutely archetypical UFO abduction-related memories. | |
I adored my sister. | |
She was a phenomenal human being. | |
We lost her in 2000. | |
But she went on to become a very well-known singer-songwriter here in the States. | |
And I drifted very quickly into becoming a researcher of this subject purely for my own edification. | |
And, you know, like the pilot episode of The X-Files to find out what had happened to my sister. | |
And although I maintained my work in the arts and ultimately went on to theater management off-Broadway, worked with some of the grandest American and British actors imaginable, I became an investigative writer. | |
And in a field like the one that we are here, there's no regulating, governing body to keep us on track. | |
In America, if I was a physician and I wandered off track, the American Medical Association would get me. | |
If I was a lawyer, the Bar Association might remove my license. | |
But if you are a UFO researcher, a ufologist, so to say, and you simply start going off on, I know that the Pleiadians have been coming here for 487,000 years. | |
They eat mice, dust, and glass. | |
This is the reason that they're coming. | |
These are what their ships are like. | |
And I state it as empirical fact, but I refuse to give my Sources because it might compromise their safety or something. | |
Who's going to hold me to any standard? | |
That's the difficulty, isn't it? | |
I mean, you have this tremendous latitude to say what you want and research how you wish. | |
But also, it opens the door to every weirdo and strange person who really believes they have a connection with something up there to say whatever they want. | |
Well, just so. | |
And for me, there's a wonderful Mark Twain quote, which is the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. | |
To say something like I just said and said, this is what I believe, this is what I think, this is my opinion, as opposed to this is, is that kind of difference. | |
I realized early on that as somebody who was a good communicator, who was passionate about the subject, who was equally comfortable in the world of basic like library and archive research, but also being out in the field and working with experiencers, | |
abductees and the like, or being on a location and supervising analysis of physiological material, that I could probably be of most value, not taking an extreme position, but as an educator. | |
And I worked as a teacher from every level from first grade to postgraduate as a painting instructor. | |
So I know how to work a classroom, so to say, but to couch most of my research solidly in post-war history. | |
And that, for me, is about the best way to get regular folks who might have an interest in this, but are so conditioned by the ridicule factor, as I call it, which goes back to 1947 and, | |
you know, flying sauces and little green men, haha, that I, if I could get people through that first door into the lobby, open that first lid of Pandora's box to begin to take in, process, go through that dynamic of being overwhelmed, concerned. | |
I knew this would happen. | |
Okay, we're going to try and reconnect, Peter. | |
So, Peter, just as I explained at the top of this, we've now reconnected. | |
It took a minute or so, cut that bit out. | |
Something's going on with this connection, but let's persevere and we'll go to phone if this digital connection drops out again. | |
So, you said you want to lead people and open the door. | |
Yeah, for me, after 40 years in this work, I do not consider myself an expert in anything. | |
It's more a variation of that definition of a Zen beginner, knowing that you know nothing and having it be all right. | |
Now, I know a lot more than nothing about the subject of UFOs. | |
I know quite a bit. | |
But when it all comes down to it, what I know and could empirically prove in a court of law is very different than what I'm certain is true, what I believe to be true, what I'm fearful or, you know, wonder. | |
And I parse each one. | |
We are not alone in the universe. | |
That I think we can establish by empirical fact for anybody who is interested in taking the time to actually review the scientific and historical evidence out there. | |
And you said, and we glanced over this quickly, and we need to just fill in a little bit of the detail, that the catalyst for you was a remembered abduction experience. | |
Talk to me about that. | |
Well, it was a remembered sighting experience. | |
And in the years that have followed, I have undergone regressive hypnosis three times with three different individuals. | |
Two of them, in fact, one of them being Bud Hopkins, one of my great mentors, dear friends, and who I worked as assistant to for many years. | |
And for the listeners that are not familiar with that name, Bud Hopkins is really the father of scientific study of the UFO-related abduction phenomena, which for me is the most important and the most troubling aspect of the whole UFO phenomenon. | |
And what an amazing guest he used to be on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell back in the day. | |
And he was one of those people. | |
Well, exactly. | |
He was one of those people you thought that he would go on forever. | |
Bud was a dear friend of 35 years. | |
But not to digress from your question, actually. | |
What happened with me was in my 20s, again, on an absolute career track on being an artist in New York City and being a part of the New York scene and working on getting into good galleries and making contact with better known painters. | |
This giant safe was dropped on my head in a way by having a memory of childhood return. | |
I certainly could go into the details of why I feel the memory returned when it did, 14 years after the fact, I might add, but it left me very shaken because what had been the most shattering moment of my very innocent and rather happy childhood of looking up and seeing five disc-shaped metallic structures in a precise V-type formation coming | |
in at a high rate of speed and hanging over our neighbor's house. | |
And this being about 30 miles east of Manhattan on Long Island in a lovely residential village with my sister and watching and watching and watching and being so overwhelmed by what I was seeing. | |
And I need to state here that at 14 years old, I was in the height of my life was being run by my hormones like any adolescent. | |
And I was so concerned about, you know, being liked by other kids. | |
And I had enough problems being short, wear glasses, bookish, not into sports, that I understood intuitively there was this ridicule that attached itself to this subject. | |
And I made myself forget it. | |
It seems impossible to me now that we can do things like this. | |
And when the memory returned 40 years ago, I wondered if I wasn't going insane. | |
I had never, I don't think that phrase repressed memory syndrome was in the lexicon at all. | |
But I do know that I was so overwhelmed that I just sat on my floor and I started to cry. | |
I could not believe this was happening. | |
And for people who don't believe these things happen, Peter, I think they do in my own life. | |
And this is just a very small example, but it's exactly the same thing. | |
I had a dog. | |
I believed that in my childhood I had one dog. | |
My sister told me quite recently there were two. | |
And something bad happened to the second one. | |
And I was probably about seven or eight, maybe nine, but probably more like eight. | |
Let's say eight. | |
I have no recollection of the dog. | |
I had buried the memory. | |
But I don't know. | |
Well, I subsequently found out that we lost the dog and it was too traumatic for me because I love the dog. | |
So I just blanked it out. | |
So look, these things happen. | |
Yeah, exactly. | |
And as I sat there, really overwhelmed by this and the memory from that moment for minutes thereafter became like a tape loop. | |
I couldn't get it out of my mind. | |
And it was, I remembered the dynamics of pushing it away. | |
I remember my sister asking me later that afternoon if I had wanted to talk about what we had seen and saying no and realizing there was only one thing I could do. | |
At the time, I had a loft where I painted and lived down in New York's Chinatown. | |
My sister was about an hour, an hour, about a mile north of me in the East Village, a struggling poet about to break in as a vanguardist in the early whole punk music scene here in New York. | |
And she lived in, you know, a tenement walk up, poor as a church mouse. | |
And I thought, I have to call Helen. | |
And I did. | |
I had the foresight in my mind to at least not just blurt out what I had remembered, but to say, I have remembered something from childhood. | |
And I need to know if you remember the same thing. | |
And I am concerned that if I simply tell you, you'll say yes or no. | |
And I won't know in my heart, blah, blah, blah. | |
And she said, right, go. | |
And what I did, Howard, was I began to describe all of the stuff around it about the time of day, the weather, where we were standing in the front yard goofing around as kids do. | |
And she stopped me mid-sentence and she said, stop, I know what you're talking about. | |
At which point she related the memory that I had had. | |
And I had a moment of, I would have to say it was one of the more schizophrenic moments I've ever had in my life. | |
Namely, that it was the exaltation of going, oh my God, they're real. | |
And, oh my God, they're real. | |
And then she said, but there's more. | |
And she went on to tell me what now, for me, I have heard hundreds of times, even to the exact phrasing, even to the descriptions of these other intelligences, even to the experience of details of being on board, so to say. | |
And I was overwhelmed. | |
It was just one of the most shattering moments of my life. | |
And I tried to tell myself for a moment my sister had gone crazy and then had to admit, ah, five seconds ago, it was perfectly okay, though, to have five flying saucers hanging over the Parker's house across the street, close enough to see little windows on them. | |
And they were. | |
It was absolutely clear as a bell day, no clouds, anything. | |
And that moment in my life, people say my life changed overnight. | |
Mine changed in about 60 seconds. | |
And I have to tell you, by the end of that call, I was in a place I had never been, namely that my childhood dream was being superseded by something that I could not deny was more important. | |
Is this real? | |
What happened to my sister? | |
What's this about? | |
And I resented it tremendously because it took the heart out of playing the real life artist that I wanted to become. | |
And right on the cusp of beginning to make a living as a gallery artist, I was furious. | |
And at the same time, it became a major obsession. | |
I started to buy books, read them. | |
For a year or so, I didn't even want to meet anybody else who said that they had believed in UFOs because they were obviously crazy. | |
Helen and I were fine. | |
I was very fortunate, however, that the three mentors that I was able to connect with who had a tremendous influence, I feel, in my becoming good and ethical at what I do. | |
One was Bud, who was also a painter, who had become very interested in this. | |
And he was still Bud Hopkins, the painter. | |
This was five years before his first book. | |
We connected, we became friends. | |
And after his life exploded around the publication of Missing Time and then Intruders, I began to work for him on a regular basis for many years on and off out of our 35-year friendship. | |
Helen told me in that initial phone call that she had never forgotten what had happened to her. | |
Every day she'd reflect on it to some degree. | |
What an amazing situation for her to be in because there must have been times when she'd wanted to discuss it with you. | |
Yes. | |
And why didn't she? | |
And that was, of course, a question I asked in that initial phone call. | |
And she said, do you remember that afternoon when I said to you, do you want to talk about this? | |
You said no, and you were adamant. | |
And I, you know, you're my brother. | |
I love you. | |
I respect you. | |
One day led to the next week, next month, next year, and here we are. | |
And I thought, good God, this is the way it can happen sometimes. | |
I have to say, looking back on it now, you know, people have, in American politics, it's become more and more acceptable on the right to have no sense of circumspection, be kind of the Bush-Cheney tough guy, and I do it all the same way over again, and I have no regrets about anything. | |
I don't know. | |
I remember my mother many years later and my parents, our parents were wonderful about accepting the reality of what we said and doing their best to learn what they could. | |
My dad still reads the books, still watches the documentaries, spent time with Bud, my dear friend and colleague, Rich Dolan, who doesn't live that far away, comes over here fairly regularly and he and my dad have the most wonderful chats. | |
Rich, of course, being a historian, my dad being history. | |
He's almost 96. | |
And the, how can I say, the fact that this happened, would I rather have had a career as a gallery artist and maybe become famous or highly regarded for my work or gotten to travel to different countries where my exhibits were, or do what I do now, which is about the dumbest career choice anybody could make. | |
I am one of those people that actually aspire to try to pay my bills doing this. | |
I don't have a career I retired from or an annuity or some kind of pension or something. | |
I don't know about it being the dumbest career choice, Peter. | |
I think it's not an easy career choice. | |
Yeah, well, look, one quick question that's an important question at this point. | |
Do you believe that that experience that you recalled and that your sister never forgot, do you believe that that was put there for you to go on this path, that some intelligence decided that we're going to select Peter Robbins and his sister to have this experience for a reason? | |
Or do you believe you have to look up at the right time? | |
Okay, you've answered it. | |
Yes. | |
Terribly important question. | |
If you had asked me that for the majority of the time that I've done this work, I would have just pushed it away as a silly notion of, oh boy, there are people that actually think they're chosen for this and they get to feel special and it's all mystical stuff for them, as opposed to the randomness. | |
My mom, I'm going to say, once said to me rather wistfully some years before she passed, I wonder how different your and Helen's life might have turned out if you were in the backyard playing rather than the front yard playing. | |
Of course, I think that wouldn't have mattered in the long run, but you know what? | |
I'm at a point in my life where I can honestly say to you, I don't know. | |
I don't know. | |
It is not out of the question. | |
Okay. | |
So you had confirmation of this experience and possibly, apart from the fire under your feet, quite a warm feeling that something very special had happened to you and that your sister, this must have strengthened the bond, which sounds like it was pretty strong anyway between the two of you. | |
But what did you decide to do about it then? | |
It's one thing to say I've had this thing confirmed and this thing happened to me and I'm amazed that I've remembered it. | |
What an incredible thing. | |
And it's another thing to say I want the world to know. | |
Yes. | |
That's another terrific question. | |
The first decision that I made was I need to learn everything I can about this. | |
In the mid-70s, the later 70s, there was certainly a lot out there in terms of books and articles. | |
Of course, it was not the stuff of regular television specials or radio chat shows. | |
As far as the abduction phenomena went, culturally, you could not have grown up in America in the 60s and 70s and so on without knowing or at least have heard of Betty and Barney Hill and their abduction experience in the state of New Hampshire in 1961. | |
But it couldn't have mattered less to me. | |
I think I might have seen, like every American, the special issue of Life magazine that dealt with it when I was a kid. | |
It went in one ear and out the other. | |
But as I continued to educate myself about it, I did feel that it was incumbent on me as somebody that took a serious phenomena seriously, that the world seemed to laugh at, to get in the face of the world. | |
And coming from my training as an artist, which was lifelong, and thinking out of the box and always seeing myself as something of an outsider and not worrying about losing a potential government job or being disdained in my profession, | |
I charged into it and I gave my first talk actually at the School of Visual Arts with a brand new colleague who also was just beginning this work, my new friend, Bud Hopkins. | |
We gave our very first UFO talks together in New York City. | |
I spoke at my first conference in 1981. | |
I took pride, as I still do, in my abilities to communicate clearly, to separate what I believe from what I know, to present the best actual real-world proof I could for any allegation I made, or to inform it with the best critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and educated background on it. | |
People occasionally on a Q ⁇ A after, you know, if you took, if this was a show where we were taking questions from callers and somebody asked me a question that I did not know the answer to, I'm very good at saying, I don't know. | |
Or I don't know enough about that to have an educated, informed opinion. | |
And frankly, every Yahoo in the world, especially the most powerless and impotent feeling people, do feel they're entitled to have an opinion about anything. | |
And I guess they are. | |
But if you don't know what the hell you're talking about, it might be better to wait on expressing that opinion. | |
You are so right. | |
The number of people that over the years I've interviewed for this show and the one that I used to do on the radio and other things that I've done. | |
And you can easily spot the difference between the two kinds of people. | |
There is the guy like you who will stop himself when he gets beyond the realms of fact and starts to opine rather too much. | |
And there is the one who is so caught up in the drama and theater of the whole thing that he just, he or she wants to tell you anything you want to hear. | |
And that's where we start running into problems, I find. | |
Yes, I agree. | |
I agree. | |
And it is one, I think that the internet, of course, for me, it's as a non-technical thinking person, it's like God of the universe. | |
It's beyond comprehension. | |
And how it works, you know, even if somebody explained it to me, I don't think I'd get it. | |
It is both a blessing and a curse. | |
It is the double-edge sword. | |
And anything posted on the internet that looks professional, and I include visual images as well as allegations, as well as purported documents, if they're not legitimately backed up as being authentically declassified, | |
I call them orphan documents, which means they can fall into the category of being a legitimately leaked actual piece of information or disinformation generated from a high source or in somebody's basement. | |
And for more and more people who are interested in this, go to the internet. | |
If they see something parroted often enough, they'll get behind it. | |
It is that great concept of the big lie that was so brilliantly wielded under Joseph Goebbels' Minister of Propaganda. | |
If you say something, and I'm paraphrasing, of course, loud enough and authoritative enough and often enough, people will begin to believe it. | |
For me, in this country, especially, and probably sadly in the UK as well, young people are being educated more to be good cogs in the machine rather than to be critical thinkers. | |
And that's a deeply depressing trend, isn't it? | |
And it's fostered, I think, by popular entertainment, the music business, just about everything that they see, everything that comes to them electronically, steers them to being conformists. | |
I don't know what, you know, I think we're a similar kind of vintage. | |
And in my era, you know, I went to university first in Liverpool, and I used to walk up and down the hill to the university, and there were people there who would be screaming about the political situation, asking questions. | |
People don't ask questions anymore. | |
No. | |
And because of, I understand the impulse, the thoughtful impulse that has created this, what we will call the anti-politically correct, the politically correct movement. | |
But it is, you know, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. | |
I think if you and I, having a sense of you and having heard some of your shows and just feeling a connection with you and being of similar vintage, I think if we had been of university age now, on a certain level, we would have intellectually withered and died. | |
At the halcyon days of the 60s and 70s, you argued things out. | |
You used the best words you could. | |
You didn't worry about stepping on somebody's feet. | |
You simply discussed it until you got the answer. | |
And now, you know, if you're feeling anxious because there's a depiction of something that represents something to you, you can go to a special office in the university and, you know, get them to stop it or give you a quiet room to be in while you nurse your anxiety about blah, blah, blah. | |
This for me is it's frightening, it's infuriating, and it is leading more and more toward the oligarchies, toward the national security states, and the pretense of republic or democracy is becoming more and more just that. | |
And to wax political for 30 seconds, for me, the American dream for what it is at its best, and Lord knows there's a lot to criticize as well, has never been more threatened than it is right now with these right-wing Yahoos who are, | |
you know, and I will say at the top of the list, I'm talking about Donald Trump and Mr. Cruz, who are embodying this charge against rationality, far left, too. | |
Extremes are just that. | |
It's fascinating, though, isn't it, with the presidential contest of the moment you've got Mr. Trump on one side and Bernie Sanders on the other. | |
Yeah, it's very, well, of course, we've never seen a pre-election cycle like this. | |
And today will make a difference. | |
Right now, as we're speaking, is the first primaries in the state of New Hampshire. | |
And we will know tonight who won that. | |
And by the time this podcast is heard, then the answer to that we will have. | |
What do you make? | |
Just on a tangential subject to all of this, I was reading online, and I didn't have time to go into it any more deeply, that Hillary apparently appears to have suggested that she, I think Bill did this too in his time, that he was going to and that she is going to try and find the answers about aliens and UFOs. | |
What do you make of that? | |
Yeah. | |
Well, what I make of it is this, being fairly knowledgeable on how this all came about and the so-called Rockefeller Initiative, I knew Lawrence Rockefeller to a degree before he was involved in this and in fact was asked to prepare a resume on the subject, | |
present him with authentic documents, a quality cover letter for him to begin to wrap his head around it by a close mutual friend. | |
And I've discussed that in detail and published around it in the past. | |
Hillary and Bill Clinton, Lord knows, they're inside insiders. | |
And they are aware to a degree of the reality and the seriousness of this subject. | |
They're both extremely savvy politicians and they know how to dangle something that may be tantalizing to a particular segment of voters. | |
But won't actually happen because I remember, you know, I've got a memory longer than five minutes. | |
And I remember when Obama came in, people were saying, Obama's in. | |
It's an era of openness and Obama is going to open the UFO files. | |
We're going to get all the Secrets out, and it never happened. | |
No, and some years ago, Howard, I published a paper called, oh God, it was that many years ago. | |
Basically, it deals with religion, politics, UFOs, and the human condition. | |
And I'll send you a copy later today, and you're welcome to post it. | |
It deals in highly specific terms with the history of American politicians, many of them, who were either vying for the presidency or did become president, whether how deep the sincerity was, where they hit the wall, where they went into public denial about it. | |
Bernie Sanders was asked only this past week what his opinion on the subject was, and he brushed it off, which I felt was exactly the right thing to do. | |
Because if he had opened his mouth and says, yes, I'll look into this, it might be a serious subject, that's what they would have focused on for the rest of the damn campaign. | |
I think it was a very savvy move to just ignore it. | |
We've seen in this country how it can destroy the reputation of the most beloved, distinguished politicians that we have. | |
The ridicule factor is equally virulent, whether you are a powerful billionaire like Lawrence Rockefeller was, who got out of the work. | |
And I can tell you, because I know through a very, again, a dear mutual friend of ours, because he didn't like being ridiculed by his set about the fact that he took it seriously. | |
And when he left the work, he left it for good. | |
But I think that Hillary is just being cagey here. | |
If she had real courage, and it would also be courage slash absolute self-destructive recklessness, she would say what she knows. | |
Or, and if she is elected, and I'm not saying that's going to be a good thing if it happens, she'll never come forward about this any more than any of these bums will if they are elected and put on the spot about it. | |
And of course, there are a zillion million conspiracy theories, and you will have heard the ones that I've heard about JFK threatening to spill the beans about it, and that's one of the reasons that he was assassinated. | |
Goes the theory. | |
And, you know, who knows? | |
I resent those of my colleagues, even if I like them personally, who will say that is why he was murdered. | |
How the hell do you know that? | |
How can you possibly even establish that beyond reasonable doubt? | |
Now, I feel it may have been a contributing factor, but that's the extent of it. | |
There's no way I can get any deeper into the subject than I am. | |
There's no way I'm going to be able to access papers around that unless they're declassified. | |
And that doesn't seem to be happening very quickly, needless to say. | |
It's now more than 50 years since our president was murdered and a very brilliant coup d'état took place with that as the centerpiece. | |
And I believe that. | |
I am not a conspiracist per se, but I'm not stupid. | |
I know that history literally has been defined by the conspiracies that have governed it. | |
And let's face it, Howard, the definition of conspiracy is essentially two or more people plotting in private with a nefarious aim, as a rule. | |
And that is the story of mankind on earth to a degree, certainly the history of the 20th century. | |
I think a more marked example was the tragic death of dear Dr. John Mack, John, who I knew from the time he became involved in this subject. | |
And again, for listeners that are not familiar with his name, John Mack was a distinguished psychiatrist. | |
He was a professor of psychiatry at the distinguished Harvard College in Massachusetts. | |
He was co-founder of the psychiatric wing of the Cambridge Hospital outside of Boston. | |
And he also happened to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for his psychiatric biography on T.E. Lawrence. | |
He was articulate, he was brilliant, he was courageous. | |
And if there was one person in the ufological establishment worldwide to bring down, because they might actually get more and more attention from the, we'll laughingly call the straight world here with no sexual innuendo, it would have been him. | |
Now, I happened to be in England when he was killed, and I was only about 50 miles away. | |
I was in Suffolk. | |
And I learned because I was coming into London the next day, and I was going to be staying with my old friend then, Nick Pope. | |
And I gave Nick a call just to give him a heads up that I would be coming in. | |
And I remember, because Nick has a good sense of humor, and I always enjoyed the banter with him taking the Mickey out. | |
Very, very dry sense of humor. | |
Yes, and it's one of the things I always, always will remember kindly about Nick. | |
But his voice was very flat when he picked up the phone. | |
And I said some wise guy remark, and he responded by saying, you haven't heard. | |
And he told me John Mack had been killed by a drunk, by a driver. | |
And my first thought was, good God, whether or not he was murdered, there are people who will understandably and rationally think that he was. | |
And what I did when I got back to the States was I set about doing my own investigation of the dynamics, the circumstances of everything surrounding this tragic event. | |
I even got hold of the court records, the background of the driver who, God, I think it was his fifth suspended license. | |
He was more than twice the legal limit. | |
He came roaring around that corner. | |
And when all was said and done, what I feel happened, and I think even if, let's say this was some high-level NSA, CIA, take this bastard out op with a triangulated team on the roofs and an earpiece and this guy having him totally Manchurian candidated out and liquored up and just saying, hit the gas pedal now, it would have been near impossible to engineer, I think, very tragically what happened. | |
And as an American who has visited England 20, 25 times, I don't know, I still have to be very careful my first few days to look the other way when I cross the street. | |
That's a very fair point. | |
I've known a lot of Americans here, and it goes the other way. | |
When I go to America, I can remember, you know, Boston is a very busy city, and I can remember doing precisely that in Boston. | |
And, you know, New York is a little easier because a lot of people walk in New York, but Boston is a city full of cars. | |
Yes. | |
And especially as you get towards the bridge by Cambridge there, you can, because it looks so English as well, you can forget. | |
So it's perfectly plausible, but conspiracy theorists will say the things that conspiracy theorists do. | |
And sometimes I wonder whether if there was anybody who wanted to suppress what may be the truth of aliens, abduction, extraterrestrials, and all the rest of it, then perhaps I would want to foster as many way out conspiracy theories as I possibly could because it all muddies the water. | |
Well, not only that, for me, one, and I was about to say case, but when we're dealing with the lives of actual people, it is such a dispassionate term to use. | |
Somebody in the work who I became friends with, gosh, 25 years ago or so, who became a dear friend, who I really loved, and I'm still close to his family, is the late and very great Graham Birdsall. | |
There has never been anyone like Graham in the work before since as far as I'm concerned. | |
He was in your face. | |
He was a hard charger. | |
He was a brilliant researcher, type A driven. | |
He was one of the few people in the history of ufology who was able to actually create an organization that offered quality information. | |
His wonderful series of leads and other conferences under Quest International for many years. | |
His brilliant magazine, which I still feel was the finest UFO magazine for the general public in the English language that we will ever see in print. | |
And his name keeps coming up on this show, Graham Birdzel, all the time. | |
Yeah. | |
If there was one person, if you wanted to gut the British and essentially the European, if there was one person to take out to really slow things down or screw things up, it would have been Graham. | |
And of course, when he died, a lot of people absolutely assumed he was murdered. | |
My God, he was 49 years old. | |
However, I also, again, I was concerned and at the same time had been a house guest with him, still stay in touch with his daughter, Helen, who is a dear friend, lives in the States, married an American, his widow, Christine, to a degree. | |
I knew that because Graham had told me that his uncles, his father, and I believe his grandfathers had all passed by the time they were 50. | |
Also, anybody that knew Graham knew that he was a chain smoker. | |
He ate any damn thing you put in front of him. | |
He was a drinker. | |
He was type A behavior. | |
So you add those things together with the right DNA, and unfortunately, you may pass early. | |
I think that's really the thing. | |
I miss him like Bud every single day. | |
Graham was nobody you wanted to cross. | |
If he thought you were full of bollocks, he would let you know and he would let everybody know. | |
If he liked you and he respected you, he'd cut off his arm for you. | |
And I am always proud to remember how much he, well, the tremendous support that he gave Larry Warren and I upon publication of Left It East Skate, how he never backed down as a friend, always a good heart, always a good soul. | |
But once again, there are folks that want to see monsters behind every tree. | |
Not that there aren't monsters behind a number of the trees, but it's all not some conspiracy. | |
I would have thought the best way to, were I to be in some official position, were I to be a person in an official position in government who knew the truth of all of this, if there is a truth of all of this, ridicule is the best way to do it, isn't it? | |
To put out disinformation, to make it all look stupid. | |
That's the best way. | |
I'm glad that you mentioned Larry Warren. | |
Larry, I met in Liverpool. | |
You may know this already. | |
And we had a fantastic conversation. | |
He arrived in a leather jacket and he looked as if he'd just got off a Harley somewhere in California. | |
That's Larry. | |
And we just got on, we say here in the UK, like a house on fire. | |
You know, I absolutely love the guy. | |
I love the guy. | |
And the summation of the whole race, I want to talk with you. | |
If you are willing to do a couple more shows with me, I'd love to talk with you about other stuff. | |
This is just an introduction for my audience, but we'll get into the Rendlesham Forest thing because listeners love it. | |
And it's the nearest thing to Roswell that we had in the UK, I think. | |
Yes. | |
There's no more important case. | |
He was involved in it. | |
He was there. | |
He says he was lent on and told to keep quiet or otherwise there would be very severe consequences and we can guess what they might be. | |
I looked in his eye right the way through that. | |
And, you know, people who are telling you lies, you can usually work it out if you fix their gaze and you watch their body language. | |
And I have to say, what I believe to this day was that there was a man who was telling me the truth. | |
So I'm interested in the collaboration with him. | |
Yes. | |
Larry, for me, is, you know, there's so many overused words in our language. | |
The word love, the word heroic, you know, legend, we toss them around like they're popcorn. | |
Larry Warren made a decision when he was still a teenager. | |
He was 19 years old. | |
He had gone through this experience. | |
He was still in the Air Force, and he made the decision That he was going to go forward with what he knew and go really fly in the face of the United States Air Force, the American government, the National Security Agency, and stick to his guns. | |
It's now 35 years later. | |
There is no one in the history of this field who has taken more crap, been the subject of more specious nonsense, who has been attacked and reattacked for decades now than Larry Warren. | |
And he still stands tall on this. | |
Now, I first met him less than a year after he had come forward. | |
For your listeners who seriously follow the UFO subject and are good students of it, the American Westchester, New York overflights of triangular aircraft in the early 1980s was a very serious case. | |
And it actually resulted in a huge town hall meeting in this county, in a high school, not just north of New York City. | |
J. Allen Hynek was there, Bud was there, a lot of the leading workers and a lot of people who had had the sightings at the beginning of the video revolution had shot the footage. | |
And at a break, I went out onto the lawn. | |
It was a nice afternoon and I saw a knot of people standing around something or somebody. | |
And I walked over to it, as curious folks do. | |
And in the middle was, you know, kind of a young guy speaking well and doing his best to answer the questions that were being thrown about him. | |
And I thought, oh my gosh, this is that guy who we heard about last October in America. | |
Well, in America, my first inkling of the story breaking, which had, of course, happened in early October through the news of the world and through Larry supplying the information ultimately that caused the case to break. | |
He is the whistleblower. | |
And I stood there and I listened to him and I thought, boy, like you, if this guy is lying, he is as good as they get. | |
If he's telling the truth, he is either one of the most courageous people I've met or maybe kind of naive because he doesn't know. | |
He doesn't get what he might be bringing on himself or both. | |
And it's funny the way memory works. | |
At a certain point, somebody came out the door and said that the program was starting again and everybody drifted back in. | |
I waited till everyone was gone. | |
And here we were, two guys standing on the lawn of a high school in America. | |
I looked at him. | |
He looked at me. | |
I smiled, stuck out my hand and said, good luck. | |
And he took my hand. | |
He shook it. | |
He said, thanks, man. | |
When we actually met and connected with each other almost four years later in Washington, D.C. at a major conference at American University, we both remembered that moment. | |
And I heard him speak. | |
And let's face it, in this field, there is a history of individuals coming forward who said, when I was in the military or working in the government, this happened to me or I was privy to this information. | |
And I'm coming forward saying this at great risk to my life. | |
And I'm a pretty great guy because I've got lots of courage. | |
And, you know, you can't prove that I'm wrong. | |
Real, authentic, credible, backuppable military UFO witnesses are rather rare. | |
And all I knew was that I wanted to do an extensive interview with this guy. | |
And I was already a dozen years or so into the work. | |
And I was looking for a book-length project at that point. | |
I had quite a number of articles published given my conference talks. | |
Larry had heard me speak on a panel discussion about abduction that Dr. David Jacobs was chairing. | |
Whitley was on it, Whitley Streeber, a number of other well-known people in the field. | |
And he heard me on that panel. | |
And I was there specifically in my role as Bud Hopkins assistant and having grown up with an abductee in the family. | |
No other way to say it. | |
And he had decided, that's the guy I want to ask to write my book with me, which I had no idea of. | |
We ran into each other in the hall on the last day of the conference. | |
I asked him if he'd be to do an interview. | |
He said, when? | |
I said, well, when's good for you? | |
He said, how about next weekend? | |
And the next weekend, he moved into my apartment for two days, slept on the couch, and I got the interview of my life. | |
And by the end of the weekend, I basically asked him, you know, you've told me things that you have not put on the record earlier. | |
You've given me the most wonderful interview I've ever had. | |
You've told me I can publish it. | |
If I make money on it, I can keep it. | |
What's your angle? | |
And he said, I think you're the guy to write a book with. | |
And I was very flattered, but I suggested to him, not without some humor, that maybe he should look for an author or somebody who had actually written a book. | |
He said, no, you're the guy. | |
And I know you've got all the compassion in the world. | |
I get how close you are to your sister. | |
I know who your sister is, because Larry, of course, has worked for years on and off in the music business, has known everybody who has ever tread on a stage of some worth. | |
Well, of course, that's an exaggeration, but has so much history in the music business. | |
And he made his proposal, which was, let's write this book together. | |
I will give you everything I have collected. | |
I'll give you all my paperwork, my mother's address, contact with people I knew growing up. | |
You can interview me all you want. | |
And if we can get this thing done, we'll split whatever we make. | |
If you feel that I am lying or a disinformation agent or a psycho, prove that I am wrong and publish that. | |
Of course, the book will be rather split, but do it. | |
That's a pretty cast iron guarantee, isn't it? | |
Well, yeah. | |
And I thought, unless this guy is really Machiavellian in his thinking, that is not the way you expect or anticipate somebody who has something to hide to come forward. | |
Well, I mean, look, let's summarize it this way. | |
When I looked at him, I just thought, you got style. | |
And we hit it off, and clearly you and he hit it off. | |
This is just a limited time introduction to you. | |
It almost sounds like an offer in a supermarket, doesn't it? | |
So I want to go back over lots of the themes that we've talked about in future shows. | |
I've really, really enjoyed this. | |
But When you revisited Rendlesham Forest, this incident where a U.S. airbase in the United Kingdom had something, land appear, change the nature of the ground, cause everybody to panic, and then everybody was told to keep quiet about it. | |
When you revisited it, was there anything that spoke to you that absolutely confirmed that this happened? | |
What new did you uncover? | |
Because I think that was the thing that we were all waiting for with the 30th anniversary. | |
We all thought, okay, people are getting up in years now. | |
If anybody is going to speak out and say, I had to keep quiet for all these years, but now I'm older, I'm going to say this. | |
That was the time. | |
And it didn't appear to happen. | |
Well, when you say return to Rendlesham Forest, I've returned to Rendlesham Forest without exaggeration 50 times over 50. | |
Oh, yeah. | |
Since 1988, I've gone back every year or so. | |
And after my first visit, which was so shattering to me that I thought, if I ever go to England again, which is questionable, I will never come within 50 miles of Suffolk. | |
It scared the hell out of me. | |
It has become a second home to me. | |
And I am obsessed that forest is not a standard part of real estate. | |
But to get to your specifics, when we first walked out to the location, and this is recreated both in Left at Eastgate and in greater detail with even more corroborated physical evidence in my new book, which is called Halt in Woodbridge, and which your Kindle listeners can download for about three pounds. | |
Not that the paper version is expensive, but it's a very modest price, I think, for the research involved. | |
It was Larry's very first trip, visit to the farmer's field in the Rendlesham Forest called Capel Green that he had made since that night. | |
He had never actually returned to the field. | |
And when we were doing our work, I was so diligent as an investigative writer who really wanted to do the best justice I could. | |
I, for years, never went anywhere relative to this research without a loaded microcassette recorder in each pocket with fresh batteries. | |
And on that final leg of the walk out through the forest, before we got to the field, it was rather tense. | |
Larry was very much in his own thoughts. | |
I wasn't going to disturb him. | |
I knew where we were going, as well as you know where you're going if you're taking a trip to Paris and you've seen pictures of the Eiffel Tower all your life and read the manuals. | |
When the forest started to break away, Howard, and you could see the field. | |
I knew exactly where I was. | |
There's the stand of trees. | |
There's the farmhouse. | |
This would be about the spot. | |
And this is all audiotaped. | |
As the clearing opened up, Larry's right arm shot out reflexively and he pointed out in the field, 100 feet or so, not far. | |
And he said, that's where it's at. | |
And then there's several seconds of quiet. | |
And he says, we're both looking at this spot. | |
He says, and if I'm off, it's by a word or two. | |
But of course, that's a coincidence that the precise area where it sat is kind of, there's a discolored oval there. | |
Now, there is such a thing, of course, in the specialty area of UFO research, we call trace cases, which, of course, involve physiological changes to organic and inorganic material that has come in close contact with some anomalous thing. | |
And because I had trained myself the way that I had, my reaction was not, oh my God, you know, there's a mark in the soil where a flying saucer sat. | |
It was, yeah, that is a coincidence. | |
And you know what? | |
There are a number of things that can explain a coincidence like that. | |
It's February. | |
It's overcast. | |
It's a farmer's field. | |
The soil is tilled. | |
We don't know whether that's slightly convex or slightly concave or how it's catching the light. | |
Lightning could have hit it a year ago. | |
A ton of fertilizer could have been dumped on it six months ago and not properly graded out. | |
But we stayed in that field for several hours and we kept coming and going from what we'll call the affected area. | |
Finally, I was shooting 35 millimeter at the time. | |
It was a thousand years ago. | |
And the little plastic containers that the film used to come in, I scooped some up from the center of this area, walked a couple hundred feet out into the field, filled another container, marked them with the actually being fairly resourceful because I had not anticipated this. | |
The little sticky labels that they give you to stick on your micro cassettes, I used them, stuck them on these canisters. | |
The soil looked different. | |
The soil felt different. | |
It was intriguing. | |
We got back to the bed and breakfast we were staying at. | |
We did a very simple scientific test. | |
I asked our hosts for two identically sized jar lids that you'd screw on a jar and a tablespoon. | |
Into each jar lid, I put one sample from the area where the thing had sat and another sample, a control sample from out in the field. | |
I added the exact amount of water to each. | |
I stirred up the control sample and within moments it became good English mud. | |
The other one, I couldn't get it to reconstitute with water no matter what I did. | |
I started to work the soil with the back of the spoon like an apothecary in a mortar and pestle. | |
It either sank to the bottom or floated to the top. | |
Well, this was very exciting, but it proved nothing. | |
And at the same time, even before we had arrived there, Larry had done a drawing for me. | |
He'd given me a map with a mark on it. | |
This is where it sat. | |
That was supporting evidence on a certain level. | |
I returned to that field. | |
Well, I take that back. | |
I found a laboratory in America. | |
I made some calls that did soil analysis, something I had never done before. | |
And I had a nice lady on the phone and told her that I wanted soil analysis done. | |
And she said, how much soil do you have, sir? | |
And I very proudly told her that I had six film canisters. | |
And she very nicely told me, oh, sir, we need 15 to 20 pounds. | |
And I thought, that's not good. | |
I went back in June of 1990 and saw something that completely blew my mind, which photographic evidence supports. | |
And I'll send you all this, Howard, And you're welcome to post it. | |
The exact same spot where that discoloration had been in the soil, the whole field was now yellow with hay, except for that large elliptical spot. | |
It was bright green. | |
And I thought, well, now I have to do this, something about this. | |
It's now. | |
And you're sure that nothing else had sat there like a fuel. | |
Sometimes, you know, on farms, they use remarkable, horrible chemicals, or they used to. | |
Let's put it that way. | |
You're sure that a fuel tank didn't sit there once or something like that and change the constitution of the soil? | |
That's the kind of questions I like. | |
Of course, I can't know that. | |
And let's keep that as a variable for the moment. | |
When I returned to the States on this trip, I found a laboratory in Massachusetts that specialized in soil analysis. | |
They connected me up with one of their chemists who sent me, it was either three or four very large heavy gauge plastic containers and instructions on how and where to collect affected and control samples. | |
You know, take X number of pounds from the center of what seems to be the spot where this happened. | |
Take a sample from the edge, take control samples from 100, 500 feet out in the field, sent it to him when I got back. | |
Getting it back through American customs was hysterical. | |
They'll save that for another time over a drink. | |
And the results of that soil analysis constitute the very best physical evidence of not just a genuinely anomalous, unexplainable in any conventional terms, event that took place on that exact spot. | |
It's still the best physical evidence in the entire Rendlesham case. | |
And let's also remind your listeners that when we talk about the Rendlesham UFO Forest incident, we are actually talking about a series of events that occurred over three consecutive nights in late December 1980 involving different locations and different individuals. | |
Not knowing that is the key to getting yourself confused right off the bat. | |
And if you've ever heard the recordings of, well, the purported recordings of radio traffic that night, you can hear fear and confusion in people's voices. | |
And people have said to me, you think that recording of Charles Halt, who was the deputy base commander, who had his event with the half a dozen or so men who he was with, only, I don't know, half a mile, quarter mile away, it all happened very close earlier that evening on the third evening. | |
Of course it's authentic. | |
Those men are known. | |
Those men's voices are on that tape. | |
The stress in their voices could easily be scientifically verified by voice stress analysis. | |
You could be the best Lee Strasberg-strained actor and never be able to create the actual stress in the voice as opposed to the theatricalized stress in the voice. | |
Anyway, very hitting it as bullet points, the results of that soil analysis bore out the following. | |
Number one, that the actual physical soil looked different under a scanning electron microscope. | |
The color was very different. | |
Now, that was explained to us by our soil analyst, who, by the way, is a very real person who is accessible, who stands by all of his findings, who is still a respected chemist named Matthew Moniz. | |
He lives in Massachusetts. | |
He's a real person, folks. | |
That that's not uncommon. | |
In a big farmer's field, you can have soil of different colors. | |
However, when they did seed germination tests in the affected sample compared with the control sample, in the control samples, the seeds that they used, which were indigenous crops that, you know, wheat rye, other grains that might be grown in that field anyway, or other seeds, everything was normal. | |
When they tried to grow them in the affected sample, it took considerably longer for them to mature. | |
And it was always, and this is Mr. Moniz's words, always a mutant strain. | |
Yes, the word mutant. | |
In other words, scientifically, very quickly, when I looked at that field on my second visit and saw an entirely yellow field with a bright green oval, it was because I happened to get out there at that moment before that had turned to hay, but it had taken that spot longer to mature. | |
Now, everybody knows that, you know, sand has sand, soil has different components in different areas. | |
And in that part of England, there's iron fragments in the soil. | |
That's the way it is. | |
In the control samples, it was absolutely normal. | |
In the affected sample, it was more than four times the amount of iron particles as the surrounding areas. | |
When I asked what that represented, our analyst said there's only one thing that he could deduce that it possibly represented, which was something sat on that spot and exerted such a powerful electromagnetic effect that it pulled those little particles. | |
And he said, you know, visualize. | |
You're about as big as a piece of sand and you're fighting your way through soil to get into this area. | |
That was impressive. | |
Then we talked the, let's see, the other, there were one or two other results, but I'll cut to the mind blower, which was, as you know, that part of Suffolk is only five or six miles from the sea. | |
And one would expect to find a respectable component of sand in the soil. | |
Control samples, absolutely what they would expect and what is published in the literature that they compare it with. | |
The affected sample, there wasn't any sand. | |
It had been reduced to an interim form of glass. | |
It was silica. | |
Wow. | |
And you can only do that with extreme heat. | |
Well, not only that, Matt said they were not able to reproduce it in the laboratory. | |
Now, you know, people say to me, do you think this was a psyops thing? | |
You know, the guys' minds were affected. | |
Well, hell yes, that entered into a part of what was done to them, not by them, but by us, so to say. | |
But even the greatest psyops operations do not melt sand. | |
And again, I invite anyone who wants to see this information in verifiable Terms that you could present in a court of law, spend three pounds, download Halt in Woodbridge, or buy a copy of the book for £10. | |
See for yourself. | |
Wow. | |
Peter, just very finally, because we have to wrap this up, but we will be returning to all of these subjects again. | |
Thank you so much for being a gracious and a fascinating guest. | |
As far as Rendlesham goes, do you plan to do anything else about this or are you done now? | |
Boy, you do ask good questions. | |
Well, when Larry and I finished the book in 1996 and we found an awful publisher in America that picked it up, did a terrible job promoting it, but we had a good and decent publisher in the UK, Michael O'Mara Books, Small Press, but they worked very hard and helped us make it a bestseller in the UK. | |
The next year, when it was printed and we did our 15 city speaking tour, our last talk was at the Royal College of Science and Is It Technology in London, thousand person audience, huge banquet after that Graham had sponsored. | |
I thought, this is it. | |
This is great. | |
I've established myself as somebody fairly credible in the work. | |
I fought hard to give Larry the respect and the proof that he is entitled to, and I can now move on to become more of a generalist in the work. | |
I kept needing to readdress it because the wags were always, you know, biting at our ankles. | |
And then last year, once, two years ago, when the, well, no, last year when Encounter in Rendlesham Forest came out by Nick and by the two best-known first night witnesses, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, Nick had written stuff in the book that I found absolutely objectionable. | |
And it doubly hurt because I thought we were friends. | |
And I'd like to think that maybe that friendship at some point in the future can be recaptured. | |
But I published a book that I made available for free called Deliberate Deception, a case of disinformation in the UFO research community. | |
I am nothing if not hyper-specific in my responses to attacks, never generalize. | |
I got that out there. | |
And then last year, everything exploded again with after 30 years of trying to discredit Larry Warren in asides and statements that simply were not true, the former deputy base commander Charles Halt gave a talk in Woodbridge, Suffolk, where he spent half an hour saying things that simply were not true about Larry's involvement, about my research, about the quality of our book. | |
And I thought, enough already. | |
That is why I published a second book. | |
I feel like Al Pacino sometimes in Godfather 3. | |
Every time I try to get out, they pull me back in. | |
In the words of Roger Moore, never say never. | |
No, it wasn't Roger Moore, was it? | |
Sean Connery who said, never say never again. | |
Yeah, I would like to go on with my life. | |
But you know what? | |
I stand ready to address attacks as they come up. | |
Otherwise, I wish all goodwill on this. | |
I'm proud of Larry's contributions. | |
I'm proud of my contributions to the work on this case. | |
It will keep revealing. | |
This one is not done. | |
And this is the one that could unravel everything. | |
I think it's one of the reasons why it's been the subject of consistent attacks since it was first released due to Larry Warren's courage. | |
Right. | |
We have much more to talk about. | |
If people want to know about you and your work, assuming that there are people who hadn't heard of you before this, where do they go? | |
One-stop shop? | |
I will actually, good coincidence, have a new website up and running in about a week. | |
And in the meantime, I post everything on Facebook. | |
For friends in the UK, please consider joining Larry and I at the Scottish UFO and Paranormal Conference this coming June 25th in the great city of Glasgow. | |
Be love to meet you. | |
I might even be there for reasons that I will explain to you another time myself. | |
The website, now, by the time I put this show out, your website will probably be a couple of days from launch, okay? | |
So what's the name of the website when it appears? | |
I'm embarrassed to say I'm waiting for my webmaster to let me know. | |
All right, well, we'll listen to the pros. | |
I will email it to you. | |
Excellent. | |
Let me know and we'll put it out there. | |
And Peter Robbins, thank you so much. | |
Thank you to Roger Sanders in California for bringing us together. | |
And thank you for Larry Warren in Liverpool for being part of this, even though he didn't know. | |
Thanks very much, Peter. | |
Yes. | |
Again, yes. | |
Thank you, Roger, for getting Howard and I together. | |
Thank you, Larry. | |
Love you, brother. | |
And Howard, a real pleasure. | |
Looking forward to our next go-to. | |
I can't wait. | |
Thanks so much. | |
You bet. | |
Peter Robbins. | |
And of course, I will put a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv. | |
The website designed, created, honed, and maintained by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool. | |
Thank you very much indeed for keeping the faith with me. | |
If you can make a donation for the show or you would like to send me any kind of message or guest suggestion, please tell me where you are, who you are, and how you're using the show, because I always love to hear those stories. | |
Just go to the website theunexplained.tv. | |
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More great guests in the pipeline till next we meet here on The Unexplained. | |
Please stay safe, please stay calm, and please stay in touch. | |
Thank you very much. | |
Take care. |