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July 27, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:10:19
Edition 262 - Nick Pope & Dr Max Abrahms

UFO and paranormal expert Nick Pope - and world renowned terrorism researcher Dr MaxAbrahms...

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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.
Very nearly the end of July as I record these words, then we're staring down the barrel of August and then maybe six weeks or so of what we call summertime here, then it all moves south once again.
Very humid summer it's been here in London, sometimes very hard to function in the middle of it all, even days when the temperature has been only about 23 degrees.
Sometimes the humidity has been really high and that makes it very difficult to cope with it all, but you know, we've been getting through.
I once visited for work in my capital radio days, Hong Kong, and found that tremendously humid and wondered how people coped with it.
We've had a little taste of that in the last couple of months here.
Anyway, two guests on this show.
One of them, a man called Dr. Max Abrams.
We're going to be talking about the new threat from terrorism.
Max is from Northeastern University in the United States, and I think you'll find him interesting.
That was recorded in my facility.
And live on my radio show and recorded from it, Nick Pope, man who hasn't been on this show for a few years, the man who used to be the Ministry of Defense's official UFO investigator.
Now in America and now working for Hollywood and doing various things in paranormality.
Always a popular guest and good to catch up with Nick after so many years.
Some of your shout-outs coming first.
If you want to get in touch with me, the way to do it is to go to the website theunexplained.tv, the website designed, created and honed by Adam from Creative Hotspot.
Follow the link and then you can send me a message, a guest suggestion, whatever.
And if you possibly can, please send a donation to keep this show on the rails.
Okay, before the two guests then that we're going to hear, the first one will be Dr. Max Abrams talking about terrorism.
Then we'll get into Nick Pope.
Before all of that, some shout-outs.
Quite a few of them this time, so let's get through them.
David in Brisbane, the last guest, Chris Geritano, I've heard this guy, says David, on Coast Coast AM in America.
He was just as irritating and vague on your show as well.
He wants the listener, says David, to believe him, but claims nothing as truth.
Okay, well, a lot of people like that show, but I have had some of the alternative views.
One man criticized me for putting a disclaimer, saying there was nothing that shocking in the show.
I think what I said in the disclaimer was that the themes were shocking, which indeed they were disturbing.
And, you know, I think I was right to flag that up.
Michael says, greetings from Liverpool, New York.
Brian Wilson, he knows I'm a big Brian Wilson fan.
If you find yourself in upstate New York on the 29th of August, 8 p.m., Brian Wilson will be playing at the New York State Fair doing pet sounds.
Michael, I wish I could be there.
Boy, won't that be good.
Donald in Calgary says, just wanted to drop you a quick note thanking you for the wonderful series, The Unexplained.
I try and listen to every new one and I'm always impressed with your professionalism.
Thank you.
Aaron in Maryland, Aaron or Aaron, says, your recent show about the Montauk Project with Chris Geritano was both captivating and disturbing.
The horrible experiments Chris described reminded me of similar things that Whitley Striber talked about.
David Sandovitz wants to get a forum on the website, theunexplained.tv.
It is a work in progress, but it is something that will take some resourcing in the future, Dave.
Thank you for that.
Friend of the show, Claire Broad, got in touch.
Thank you very much, Claire.
Simon says, I've recently come across a new subject, the Mandela Effect.
Can you look into it?
Trying to, I've been trying for a while to get a guest about this.
The Mandela Effect is the idea that a lot of people have this vague memory that Nelson Mandela actually died in prison in Robin Island off Cape Town and never actually came out and the course of history was different.
So what's that all about?
It's not just one or two people who have that memory, but others have that memory, many of them.
And they call it the Mandela effect.
Now, is it nonsense?
Is there something to it?
I would like to investigate.
So I'm trying to find the right guest.
Somebody calling him or herself the verdict says literally listening to all of your podcasts all the way back to 2006.
Well, that is 262 shows.
So you got a lot of listening.
Pete says, it's been a long time since I emailed you.
I'm pleased you're back on talk radio.
I listen to you on my journeys around the country with my signal engineering job on the railways.
Please keep up the excellent work.
Thank you for that, Pete.
Stephen Spragg sent me a UFO video from the Daily Express.
Thank you, Stephen.
MJ Peter, author of Ghosty Leaks, says MJ Peter, says I've just started to listen in the last few months.
Lots of really interesting subjects.
Lee in Liverpool told me a UFO story about a cross-shaped UFO with a number of balls around it in the air, moving at speed and behaving oddly.
Lee, thank you for that.
I told your story on the radio last Sunday night.
Jim in the US says, I'm a brand new listener to your excellent program.
I'm in Riverside, Ohio, near Dayton.
I've heard you mention your tinnitus problem a couple of times on the program.
Have you thought about trying lucid dreaming as a healing method?
Well, you know, I would try anything.
Thank you, Jim.
Jill says that I'm listening doing the chores in California's Central Valley.
Nice to have you there, Jill.
I'm a bit behind in the shows and catching up now.
Last night I listened to the interview with James Offert.
Jason, actually, it is.
Jason Offert.
That's a man I'd like to sit down and have a couple of beers with.
Good stories told with great flair.
Absolutely.
Tommy says, thank you for your show, The Unexplained.
I used to love listening to Michael Parkinson, one of the great television interviewers in this country.
He's got one of those voices that no matter what the subject he was talking about, he made it interesting.
And you have the same gift, says Tommy.
Thanks, Tommy.
Jeremy says, I've got to say how much I enjoy and appreciate your work.
I live in a rural area that is all too quiet to be at peace easily at night, and that's when I listen.
Thank you.
Paul in Orpington emailed about the Paul McCartney conspiracy.
Now, I have tried to find for a long time a credible guest on this subject, and I will continue.
The idea that Paul McCartney actually died in 1966 and was replaced by somebody else that the people who believe in this call fall or fake Paul.
Now, I have to say, what I've seen and heard about this hasn't looked massively credible, but if I find the right guest, you'll hear about it here.
And finally, Dimitri says, I've been listening to your show for more than a year.
Love it.
Keep it up.
I had a thought about your show.
Have you considered offering swag for sale?
In otherwise, in other words, rather merchandise.
Coffee mugs, t-shirts, that kind of stuff.
I've had a couple of offers, and some very kind people have offered to help me with all of that.
I just haven't got the time or the resources to do it right now.
But yes, Dimitri, good idea.
If you want to get in touch with the show, go to the website theunexplained.tv and follow the link, send me an email.
And when you do, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
Always good to hear from you.
Okay, two items on this edition.
Coming up soon, Nick Pope, the man who used to be the official government MOD UFO investigator, then moved to America.
But first, in America, Dr. Max Abrams on the subject of terrorism.
Talk to me first about the institution you work at, Max, and the job that you do there.
Sure, I'm a professor of political science, and my focus is on terrorism stuff, almost anything related to terrorism.
I'm particularly interested in the outcomes of terrorism, the motives of terrorism, and the implications for counterterrorism strategy.
So I basically try to observe the behavior of terrorists and try to gain insight into their incentive structure, into what they're trying to achieve, and then try to come up with counterterrorism strategies that are sensible based on the nature of the terrorism threat.
More specifically, I study all sorts of things about terrorist groups, like when they attack, what are the odds that countries will make concessions?
What are the determinants of whether governments will negotiate with the terrorists?
Which kinds of targets will terrorists attack?
When and why?
Will they claim credit for their attacks?
If not, why not?
How well does terrorist propaganda predict the kinds of targets they will attack?
All sorts of things related to terrorist group dynamics.
And you've done this at a very high level.
I know that you've worked with the Council on Foreign Relations, which is a big gig, as they say.
You talked about a number of things here, the current threat from ISIS, Daesh, whatever you want to call it.
It's particularly interesting to address those things in the light of them and this new threat that they pose, because you were talking about what possible outcomes that they might want, how it might be possible to predict where they might strike.
Two things there in themselves, I think, that with ISIS-Daesh, they're very, very hard to compute into the model, aren't they?
Because it is almost impossible, it seems, from the likes of the attack in Nice, which tragically claimed 84 lives, and the Batta clan for just a couple of examples and what happened in Brussels.
And we can go on with the list.
It seems to be almost impossible to predict.
And it almost seems to me, but then I'm not you, to work out what it is that they want.
Sure.
In a way, I think that Islamic State is actually operating in accordance with my predictions.
What I find is that there's a lot of variety in terrorist groups in all sorts of ways.
And one sort of dimension in which they're different is the structure of the organization.
And what I find is that when terrorist organizations have more structure, when they're more hierarchical, when they're more centralized, when the leadership has more influence over the rank and file, the group tends to be much more selective and picky about the kinds of targets that it will attack compared to when a terrorist group does the opposite,
when the leader delegates tactical decision-making to lower level members.
When the organization becomes more diffuse, the violence tends to become more indiscriminate.
And so when Islamic State is an unusually decentralized terrorist group, the leader, Baghdadi, has essentially given the green light to people anywhere in the world, any person in the world, to attack virtually any target in the world at any time, and the group will happily claim credit for it.
So in a way, it's consistent with what I would predict, although it does make the group atypical relative to others, which do tend to be more centralized.
If you tell your supporters, your followers, whatever you want to call them, your disciples, that they can go and do whatever they want in pursuance of your aims, isn't it very hard for you to achieve those aims?
Because, you know, surely to achieve an aim, you have to be very specific about the way you go about prosecuting that campaign.
Well, I think that's a very good point.
A lot of people, a lot of analysts in the media, I really think have gotten Islamic State wrong.
They seem to imply that the more crazy and violent and horrible a terrorist group comes across, the more effective the group will be politically.
And my research indicates the opposite, that actually moderation pays even for militant groups.
And so I'll give you an example.
The United States was really not very gung-ho about taking on Islamic State until the group chopped off our journalist James Foley's head and then bragged about it over social media.
Once that happened, Obama made a big speech to the American public saying, you know, we couldn't remain idle in the face of this sort of threat to American citizens.
And so we're going to extend the campaign into Syria and build up a large anti-ISIS military coalition.
This has basically been the response of almost every country targeted by Islamic State as they've become more intensely anti-Islamic state.
For example, Islamic State executed about 1,500 unarmed Shia boys in the Spiker massacre in Iraq a couple years ago.
And ever since Islamic State did that, they've been outnumbered by a wave of Shia recruits who are more than happy to seek revenge against this group.
Today, the anti-Islamic State coalition is massive.
Islamic State doesn't receive any direct funds from any government in the world because pretty much every single government in the world has been repulsed by Islamic State.
And other groups on the ground, all these other militants, even other terrorist groups, they also think Islamic State has gone too far.
And so Islamic State doesn't play well with others.
It has very few friends, both in terms of governments, in terms of groups.
The local population can't stand it.
And so this group has really imploded because it has used violence in such an indiscriminate fashion and then had the stupidity to brag about it over social media.
And so what we're looking at is a disconnect where Islamic State is actually getting pummeled and getting weakened in its stronghold of Iraq and Syria.
The group is losing every battle it's in.
It's grossly outnumbered.
It's losing territory, revenues.
Salaries are down.
Propaganda output is down.
Defections are way up.
So we've taken out a large portion of their leaders.
So this group is really smarting.
And the group even admits, you know, in its propaganda, that the dream of the caliphate is really wrapping up.
It's really crumbling.
And so for that reason, foreign fighters should go elsewhere and fighters locally should commit violence in the name of Islamic State.
So is what Max is what we're seeing now in that terrible, heart-rending attack and the pictures that we all saw of what happened in Nice, is what we're seeing now the death throes or the beginning of the death throes of Islamic State?
Can we really say that?
I think that people are very confused because on the one hand, governments like the United States and in the UK, I think as well, are giving positive reports about our battle against Islamic State and its stronghold of Iraq and in Syria.
And yet, people are also seeing that there seems to be a rise in violence by Islamic State outside of that conflict zone, in Turkey, in Bangladesh, in the United States, in Germany, in France, etc.
I think that it's misleading to look at the amount of violence that Islamic State is perpetrating as a reliable indicator of the organization's military capability.
I think that there is going to be a lag.
I think that we should continue to pummel Islamic State and weaken it as a group, but we shouldn't expect that it will yield immediate results in terms of reducing the amount of short-term violence.
And that's because as the group gets weaker, its incentive for striking actually goes up.
But I do believe that we should stick at what we're doing and that over time, especially as it becomes even more unrealistic to appeal to the ummah to create a caliphate, you know, as that dream becomes even more improbable, Islamic State will have a tougher and tougher time attracting recruits.
Okay.
Now, you will have seen, I'm sure, Donald Trump is now the Republican candidate for president of the U.S. this year.
It'll all be decided at the back end of this year, and we will see what we will see.
He is promising quick results on this front.
From what you've just said, he's promising something that he probably can't deliver.
I should just say that in terms of my political leanings, I'm very unhappy with the choices, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
So I don't want this to be interpreted as my promoting Donald Trump, but he does get trashed, especially in the American media, for pretty much every single thing that he says with respect to foreign policy.
And sometimes it's unfair, in my opinion, especially when you consider the fact that the alternative is Hillary Clinton, who herself has had an absolutely disastrous career in terms of picking the right policy positions, especially in the Middle East.
Well, in Libya, I know that a lot of the American talk show hosts talk about Hillary and that, but Donald Trump makes these big, bold statements, and we reflect them over here because that's all we can do.
Donald Trump, frankly, talks too much about himself.
The United States, of course, is a democracy.
And to get anything done, you need the support of the American public.
You need to work with Congress.
He literally says the word I constantly and makes it seem as if he single-handedly can resolve all sorts of problems, which are well bigger than the presidency, such as the international economy or the international terrorism threat.
So there's no question that he has an inflated idea of his capacity to make the world better.
Now, these examples are not really analogous.
You can't really compare these two things.
But the Irish Republican Army over here once said that the forces of law and order here only had to be successful, they had to be successful all the time, and they only had to be successful in their aims of terrorism and attacks once to get their impact.
Bearing that in mind, and bearing in mind the fact that the ISIS people are all over the world, aren't we facing something of an enormous magnitude that really nobody, whatever political stripe or hue they might be, whether they're Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, or whoever there might be, it's something that we haven't faced before.
And realistically, it is not possible to give any sort of easy, quick fix, short-term answer to.
Yeah, there's no question that that's true.
A good recent example is what happened in Nice, France.
What happened in Nice, France, as your listeners will know, is that an individual with no prior known record of radicalization took a truck and ran into a group of people.
Now, consider how hard it would be to prevent that sort of attack from happening.
I mean, consider the number of people with a driver's license in France.
France has some very, you know, congested areas.
I was just there a few weeks ago in Paris.
So, I mean, it's really very, very hard, maybe even impossible to prevent that sort of an attack.
And yet, that hasn't stopped the French public from criticizing Hollande for being soft on terrorism and for not preventing this attack in particular.
You know, take what happened in Germany just a few days ago.
You know, some guy on a train used some sort of a knife to attack some tourists.
I don't really see how these sorts of attacks are preventable.
I think that it's useful to look at the Islamic State threat as really two separate but related threats.
The first is Islamic State based in Iraq and in Syria, where we really are doing a good job.
The second threat is the one that we're seeing now more and more, which is the international component of lone wolves or smaller cells often being inspired by the group over the internet.
And we really don't know anything about them.
And for us here in Europe, and look, increasingly for you in the US, Max, those are the people that we've got to be worried about.
And those are the ones that we have to try and get a handle on their psychology, how they're recruited, how they're radicalized.
I mean, the guy in Nice, they said that, you know, he was got into the way of these things, briefed on these ideas very quickly.
Now, if it's happening fast and it's happening insidiously like this, how do we begin to deal with it?
You know, whenever a government says that somebody was radicalized very, very quickly, a red flag goes off.
I'm very suspicious when people say that.
I think what it usually means is that the evidence for the person's radicalization simply isn't very strong.
And so then they infer that it must have happened very, very quickly because otherwise there would be more evidence.
So when they don't find much evidence, they say, geez, this guy seems to be radicalized so quickly.
We talk to his friends.
We talk to his family.
They say that he didn't seem to be radicalized.
He didn't seem to go to the mosque.
He drank.
He was a womanizer, et cetera.
He didn't act in accordance with Sharia.
I think that what's happening now is that you often have people who just have the most tangential relationship to Islamic State.
They generally haven't trained their Islamic State, the organization, doesn't know who the guy is.
He may have gone online and seen some things by Islamic State, just like pretty much everybody else in the world with an internet.
Oftentimes, he suffers from some kind of a mental disorder.
He's mentally unstable.
And then he ends up using violence in the name of Islamic State.
And then Islamic State makes it seem as if that relationship is stronger by claiming credit for the attack, even though 24 hours prior, they didn't even know that this guy existed.
Sounds to me like then, Max, there's a beacon of hope in all of this.
Because if lone wolf operators are like this, and if there are signs that they are, you know, going off the rails, as we would say over here, and I know you say over there, then they may be easier to spot and stop because their communities, the people living in their apartment blocks, in this man's case, he had neighbors who saw what he was like.
Then if we encourage people to inform the authorities or tell somebody about this, then actually dealing with this situation and people like that might be easier than the minefield we thought it would be.
Yes and no.
I mean, in a way, it also makes counterterrorism more difficult because the implication that I'm making is that individuals don't have to have any prior demonstration of radicalization.
They may not even be practicing Muslims.
And yet these people, too, could very well end up using violence against civilians in the name of Islam or Islamic state.
And so in a way, that increases the noose in terms of who could become a future terrorist.
Dr. Max Abrams is here from the U.S. We're talking about terrorism and in particular, its current iteration, the one that we worry about most, Daesh, IS, whatever you want to call them today.
And we were talking about why this is possibly unique in terms of its threat to us.
And you were saying the last point that you made was a fascinating one.
And that was that there are going to be people, oddballs, who might be violent, who might be inclined to do bad things, who will, almost like a rolling stone gathering moss, will join themselves up with the ideology of IS when in fact they're nothing really that much to do with that organization.
Yeah, I've been trying to, I've coined a term which I think is useful to understand today's terrorism threat.
Everyone knows of the term a lone wolf.
And I have a play on lone wolf where I call them loon wolves, L-O-O-N.
And the reason why is because very often when there's a lone wolf attacker, we'll look and look to find his radical past or that he's a super devout Muslim.
And there's really just no evidence for it.
What we're at least as likely to find is that the person suffers from some pre-existing mental instability.
And so this is a factual point: is that we know scientifically that indeed lone wolf actors disproportionately suffer from mental illness in comparison to terrorists who are members of a group.
And there's a causal explanation for why this is.
And that's because in most terrorist groups, the leaders vet out those who are seen as being unstable because they could pose a future risk for the organization in terms of operational security.
Whereas with lone wolf actors, there's no vetting, there's no screening process.
Absolutely anybody can do it.
And so that's why we're seeing some of these attackers don't seem particularly religious.
They don't have a strong relationship with Islamic State.
What they do exhibit is some sort of past of violent behavior, often related to, unrelated to ideology, and a perception by others that this person, even before the attack, had mental problems.
Okay, so this is where those who, and we've all heard them, haven't we, there are lots in the US, now lots in the UK who say this is a Muslim issue, a Muslim problem.
That's where they're wrong.
This is a problem to do with our mental health services and with society's ability to spot people who have issues.
Well, you know, it's really not black or white.
The role of religion is very complicated in terrorism.
When political scientists study terrorist groups, we always, always consider the role of religion as one factor which could be affecting the group's behavior.
But there are many people in the world who I think are Islamophobic and they think that essentially the only thing you need to understand about these terrorists is that they're Muslim.
And the religious explanation really only goes so far in terms of answering almost any real important question about terrorist groups.
So in some ways, religion does matter.
For instance, what we know statistically is that when a terrorist group is a religious group, it tends to kill more people with its attacks.
And that's often because the perpetrator may think that there's some sort of a theological imperative to kill others, or perhaps because the perpetrators aren't that worried about some sort of an earthly backlash because their audience is God.
So that's an example of how religion seems to matter.
Also, I would say that the vast majority of suicide terrorist attacks these days are perpetrated by Muslims as martyrdom operations.
So that's another example of how religion matters.
But, you know, let me just point out, say one other thing that I saw yesterday, a statistic that fully 35% of all ASIS suspects in the U.S. legal system right now had just recently converted to Islam.
And so I think that that undermines the religious argument because what it essentially says is that those who are newer to Islam, those who presumably know less about the religion, are actually more likely to use violence in the group's name than those who have a lot of experience and are much more knowledgeable about the religion.
So the enormous problem for society and for politicians in particular, isn't it?
Is how do we root out such people who may be planning or plotting such things and may execute them eventually whilst protecting the overwhelming majority of decent, law-abiding Muslim citizens in the UK, US, wherever, who would tell you very freely that none of what's been done has been done in their name?
I think that especially in the United States, we really need to cherish the Muslim population.
The American Muslim population is relatively happy.
They're relatively well integrated into society.
They're relatively well off socioeconomically.
There are a huge number of Muslim doctors in the United States.
And so the U.S., as a consequence, doesn't have the same sort of a radicalization problem as a country like France.
Not only are our Muslim communities in the U.S. less likely to produce radicals, but if somebody does seem to be becoming radical, we're much more likely to gain intelligence so we can act quickly against that person.
Whereas in France, the Muslim community is the opposite.
They're socioeconomically not well off, and they don't feel like they can ever really become French.
And so they're very much marginalized.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that the U.S. is experiencing less Islamist terrorism within our borders than France is within its borders.
And we need to really cherish the Muslim communities in our countries.
I mean, not just for security reasons, also because of their contributions to society, just like every other people, but they can really be helpers in counterterrorism and indeed are being helpers, especially in the United States.
How do we maintain the freedoms that we've all fought so hard for in the face of threats like this?
Well, I think that we need to have some context.
It's very easy to look at the fact that terrorism, especially in a country like France, which now has been hit repeatedly since last year.
And so we look at the baseline as what's normal in terms of the number of attacks, and we see that it appears to be rising.
And then whenever there's an attack, the media goes absolutely crazy.
CNN, 24 hours running stories about terrorism.
I myself am guilty of this as a terrorism analyst.
I'm talking about terrorism, you know, 24 hours a day.
And yet we should have context by comparing terrorism not just to itself, but to other maladies in our societies, which kill orders of magnitude more people.
So terrorism today may look scarier than terrorism yesterday, but in terms of the number of people killed, terrorism is a blip compared to the number of people who die from heart disease or cancer or common car incidents.
So I think that having perspective is important for us not to overreact.
Well, I guess it's also important for us all to keep our sanity by doing that, but it's such a hard thing to get into perspective.
If you were in London, as I told my listeners on 7-7, I was on air for more than half the day continuously.
And, you know, that was an experience that I have never been through in my life and never hope to go through again.
Yes, I visited Ground Zero a couple of times covering that story, but of course it wasn't at the time.
I was actually there and part of this.
And as much as you say, get it into perspective because other things are more of a risk when you're there in the situation on the ground.
It's incredibly difficult.
It's also interesting because the media focuses on certain attacks in certain countries more than other countries.
So the better the country is socioeconomically in terms of its GDP, the more likely it is that the media will focus on an attack in that country.
And I think it's important to point out that the vast majority of terrorist attacks around the world are actually concentrated in just a handful of countries.
Countries, I mean, it won't surprise your listeners, countries like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Nigeria, Libya, you know.
And so when we experience terrorism in the West, we should understand that we should look towards other countries and realize that we are relatively terrorism free compared to these other hotspots.
I think that too would help us put it in perspective.
Just finally, Max, and thank you for giving me this time.
And I just need to explain to listeners that there have been some brief data skips.
We've got a very good digital line here, but we've had just a couple of small data skips.
So you've heard a couple of very small interruptions.
I haven't stopped the recording here because I could understand everything that you were saying.
I want to ask you lastly, studying this as you do, do you think we will ever get to the stage where terrorism as a phenomenon will not be a part of our world?
Will we be able to deal with it?
No, what I like to say is that I think I have good job security.
I think terrorism is going to persist.
Terrorism, the study of terrorism is different than, say, the study of the Cold War or the study of the Soviet Union.
You know, the Soviet Union is no longer.
The Cold War is over.
Terrorism, though, is a tactic which began before recorded history even.
And it's only escalated now with the rise of the international media.
And I think that the tactic of terrorism will outlive almost anything else.
So for everybody, for us living our daily lives and going about them and not changing our routines too much, and for the media not to blow these things way beyond or proportional to, you know, carry on talking about them way beyond perhaps when we should.
From what you're saying, that sounds like that's an important part of it, that we can beat this in our minds by just simply doing what the politicians keep telling us, and that is carrying on with our way of life.
Yeah, I mean, it's obviously much easier said than done.
You know, people all over the world, it's not a cultural thing, tend to really, you know, focus in on terrorism and to exaggerate the nature of the threat.
So threat sort of deflation when it comes to terrorism is important, but it's very hard to do, especially because of the adage, if it leads, it leads.
And so it gives us the appearance in the media that we're all, you know, terrorist targets when statistically, that's absurd.
Well, let's hope we all remain safe, Max.
And thank you very much indeed for your perspective on this.
Dr. Max Abrams from Northeastern University in the United States, thanks for joining us here on The Unexplained.
Max.
If people want to read about your work, is there a place online where they can?
Well, I would encourage them to follow me on Twitter.
It's at Max Abrams, M-A-X-A-B-R-A-H-M-S.
And I give a running commentary about terrorism as it happens around the world.
Dr. Max Abrams, really interesting man on this subject that, of course, is of such grave concern to all of us wherever we are in the world.
The subject of terrorism and its spread and the psychology of it.
We'll do that subject some more on this show too.
But let's hope that all of us can remain in this troubled and changing world safe.
Now, Nick Pope, a man who hasn't been on this show for a few years, the man who used to be the official Ministry of Defense, government in other words, UFO investigator.
He left the MOD.
He's now in the United States.
And courtesy of Talk Radio a few weeks ago, here's our conversation.
Yes, it's good to be back on the show.
And Nick, what do you call yourselves these days?
I am a little confused.
Well, I guess I do a whole range of things, consultancy for Hollywood film companies and some freelance broadcasting and journalism.
But I think one of the things that I enjoy most is my association with various sci-fi movies and TV shows.
And that's consultancy spokesperson work.
It's public relations.
And I've been involved in some of the biggest and most iconic shows and movies of the years.
And it's great fun.
And I've written a bit of sci-fi myself, of course.
So I come at it with two hats on, my mod ufo investigator hat and my sci-fi author hat now look we've all got to make a living and we all have to do what we have to do what would you say to those serious and hardened ufo people out there and you know that they have their say online about you and some of them love you and some of them don't who would say that you sold out the serious investigation to go to hollywood well i would say firstly you know get over yourself if you can't
have a little bit of fun in life.
You know, what's it all about?
But the other thing is, I think that what I do when I'm involved with some of these movies and TV shows is try to add some authenticity, some realism.
And people often complain and skeptics say, oh, you know, all these UFO sightings and alien abduction stories, they get it all from sci-fi.
Actually, no, it's as much the other way around.
If you look at shows like The X-Files, you find that people like Chris Carter, the creator and lead writer, does research so well.
He goes out into the UFO community.
He's been to conferences.
He's read all the stuff.
So when you see that kind of thing in shows like The X-Files, it's because the work's been done properly.
So in one respect, I would say that hopefully I am adding that authenticity.
I mean, this was my government job.
And if I can bring a flavor of that to some of the fiction, then I think that's a good thing.
Okay.
We'll talk a little bit more about that in a while.
But I want to talk about that government job because a lot of people today will be very surprised, possibly gobsmacked, at the fact that you were employed by our Ministry of Defense to do something that so many of us would love to have done for a living, and that is to collate reports from the public and members of the armed services, police and whatever, of strange and anomalous phenomena in our skies and around our nation.
Talk to me about that job.
Well, the job itself dated back to the 50s, and it seemed to the fact that people, often our own Air Force pilots, were seeing things, strange things in the sky that they couldn't identify, and sometimes tracking them on military radar too.
And we were not in the business, and nor should we have been, of ignoring those kind of high-quality reports.
Now, you know, that job ran for many years.
I did it for much of the early 90s.
I should say it was only one posting out of a much wider 21-year Ministry of Defense career, which saw me do all sorts of other weird and wonderful things too.
But I very much enjoyed the post.
As you say, it's a job that a lot of people would absolutely kill for, I'm sure.
It was by far in the way, I think, the most interesting and maybe in a sense, quirky job in the Ministry of Defense.
And, you know, although the MOD's UFO project was axed in 2009 as part of a series of defense cards, the actual additional to the taxpayer was never that much because all the things you need to investigate UFOs were already there.
Our military radar systems, our experts in analyzing photos and videos.
So this job was done really with existing resources, largely.
Did anybody ever tell you in the years, and you'll tell me how many years that was, that you did that job, what your remit was, what they wanted you to deliver?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, from day one, the terms of reference were very clear.
My job was to research and investigate the UFO phenomenon, and specifically the sightings that were reported to us on a daily basis, investigate them and determine whether there was evidence of anything, of any defense significance to the United Kingdom, either a potential threat or, indeed, a potential opportunity, I suppose.
So that suggests, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but that suggests, doesn't it, Nick, and this is a fascinating point, that somebody somewhere at some level believed, indeed, that these things may have been a threat or, indeed, as you say, an opportunity.
Somebody somewhere senior within the MOD believed that these things might well exist.
Absolutely.
Now, I think there's a counter-argument that says, yes, that would apply equally if these things were Russian as opposed to Martian, but you're absolutely right.
Over the years, there have been a whole string of people at a very senior level including defense ministers who have been believers, some have been skeptics, and some have been right in the middle.
One of the amusing stories that I like to tell is after I left the UFO job when I was in security, I got a call from one of the ministers, one of the defense ministers'outer offices, and I was told the minister wanted a briefing on UFOs.
I said, well, I don't do that anymore.
You should go to the directorate of air staff and they'll give you the official brief.
The private secretary said to me, no, no, no, minister doesn't want all that no defense significance since you trot out to parliament and the public.
Minister wants a proper briefing.
And in their terms, what was a proper briefing?
What did they want you to say?
How honest did they want you to be?
Well, proper briefing was doing more than, as I say, just trotting out this lazy, no defense significance soundbite that we peddled, I'm afraid, with apologies, to both parliament, the media, and the public.
We said, we significantly downplayed the true extent of our involvement in this and of our interest in it.
Behind closed doors, I think, we were much more open-minded and doing much more on this, you know, classified intelligence studies, that sort of thing, than we ever let on to parliament and the media.
I don't think I've ever heard you say that in one of our many conversations together when you were in the UK.
That's fascinating.
Did anybody in all of that time ever say to you, Nick, you've been working for us here, collating these reports, doing a great job, are you a believer?
Oh yes, absolutely.
People came up to me in the corridors all the time and it was a widely known job in the department everyone knew we had this kind of X-Files job.
And indeed, the X-Files started showing pretty much when I was in the middle of that tour of duty.
So the parallels were quite obvious.
And people would come up and start whistling the theme tune to me in the corridor.
And they would say, come on, Nick, you know, what's going on?
What do you believe?
what's really going on?
What's going on in room...
Right.
Okay, well, that's interesting.
And to be on at the same time, or to be doing your job at the same time as the X-Files, can't have been the easiest of experiences.
As we wrap up this first segment, I just want you to revisit something that you told me a long time ago.
There was a percentage that you used to use for the number of reports that you felt were credible versus the ones you felt really could be explained in a rational way.
It's an interesting figure.
Can you remember it?
The one that I think I quoted was, 80% of UFO sightings can be explained as misidentifications, hoaxes or delusions.
15% of cases, there's insufficient data to make a proper determination, a definitive assessment.
And 5% unknown.
Okay, and even if the 5%, even if 5% turned out to be something that maybe came from somewhere far away from here, and the other 95% were complete garbage, we are still looking at something that could change our perception of everything we know.
Absolutely.
And you don't even need the 5%.
The believers only need to be right once.
I want to ask you about a couple of things that are very current.
One is the increasing groundswell momentum this year of 2016 for this thing called disclosure.
So first of all, what is disclosure?
How likely is it that we're going to get it?
And if we get it, what will we do about it?
Disclosure, kind of spelt by the UFO community with the capital D, is basically that archetypal, stereotypical view.
The president goes on TV, my fellow Americans, people of the world, we are not alone.
Actually, there's no problem with any president or prime minister saying that.
The constitutional problem would arise with the unstated postscript, which would be, by the way, we've lied to you about this for 70 years.
So I'm not sure that's going to happen.
I think it depends, of course, self-evidently, on what there is to disclose.
Is there literally, as some people believe, a spaceship in a hangar?
Or is it just a little bit more nebulous than that?
Is it the fact that, yes, we have these unexplained sightings, and no, we don't necessarily know what they are, but we can't, even within government, quite put our finger on it.
So that's one issue.
Now, the second issue is this is becoming something of an election issue here in the United States.
Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, President Obama's former chief of staff, John Podesta, have made quite a lot of surprising statements about wanting to reopen UFO investigations, wanting to know what's going on at Area 51.
And Donald Trump has yet to say anything about this, or he won't hold back.
So it could be an interesting election campaign.
Now, do you think, as some people that I'm hearing out of the United States saying at the moment, that Hillary Clinton is beginning to backpedal a little bit on this?
Well, I think she'd be very wise to, actually.
I think it's a mistake to try and make this an election issue.
Americans don't really, you know, for all the kind of talk about this in the media, the real issue I think that people are always interested in is the economy, jobs, the terror threat, taxes, those sorts of things.
And I think a candidate runs a huge risk by talking about this because it's very easy to see that somebody like Donald Trump could say, well, I am interested in jobs and the economy and taxes, and my opponent is interested in space aliens.
Right, so there's a clear and present political reason for not being quite as interested.
Yes, I think she'd be advised to back off it and, if asked, to say that her interest in this is really just a commitment to open government and freedom of information.
Right.
If we look back at the history of recent presidents, though, Hillary's husband, Bill, it was rumored for a very long time, my memory goes back that far, that he was going to be the one who would disclose, and he didn't really.
They said when Obama came in, this is the man who's going to do it.
Now they're saying that Hillary Clinton might be a little bit more open.
You know, as members of the public and interested individuals who read the popular press, what are we to believe?
Well, I think this just goes to show that disclosure is a bit like tomorrow.
Maybe it never comes.
President Carter saw a UFO.
Ronald Reagan saw a UFO and spoke about his belief in a famous speech at the United Nations where he said, I occasionally think how quickly we would set aside our differences if we faced a threat from beyond this earth.
Bill Clinton reportedly, when he first became president, said, I want to know two things.
What's going on at Area 51?
Are there aliens?
And did JFK really die as the result of a lone gunman or a conspiracy?
And apparently, he didn't get definitive answers on either issue.
Because it seems to work there like it works here, that you have a civil service and you have vested interests who keep the lid on these things.
And as much as a politician may go into a campaign saying, I am going to be the one who does this, the practicalities begin to bite you on the bottom when you actually get in the office.
Indeed, they do.
Okay, there is a great groundswell, though, still building.
People like Steve Bassett, who I know you will know and have done conferences with.
He is saying that they're going to lobby Washington even more intensively than they have in the past, and they are going to get disclosure.
Do you think that him and people like him have any great hope?
Well, I'd like to think so.
But again, I think there are bigger issues that really affect most people.
And earlier, you said, you know, and we haven't gotten onto this.
You said, well, what would happen if there was disclosure.
And in a sense, yes, it would be, I suppose, the most astounding and amazing announcement of all time.
We'd still all have to go to work the next day.
We would still all have to pay our mortgages, pay our taxes and things.
So, you know, you ask what would change.
The answer, I think, is everything and yet nothing.
Once you told me that you felt the Rendlesham Forrest case, which of course is Britain's most famous UFO case, and I think, were you in post in 1980 when that happened or was it before your time?
It was before my time, but in 1993 I did a cold case review of it.
So I absolutely know all about that one.
Well, I don't think I'm being unfair to you if I say that you always thought that if anything was likely to have been the real deal, and we still don't know what it was, even after all this time with people still coming out of the woodwork and talking about it, if anything was likely to have been the real deal, this was it.
Do you still feel that way?
Yes, I do.
And I think Roswell's a fascinating case, but it's now almost 70 years in the past, and pretty much all the living, all the original witnesses have passed on.
So Rendlesham Forest is perhaps our best case.
And the witnesses are alive and well and talking through the internet, through social media in a way that the Roswell witnesses never really could or did.
So yes, it's a perfect storm of a UFO case.
Multiple witnesses, three different nights, radar, physical traces on the ground, including landing marks and radioactivity levels assessed by the MOD's defense intelligence staff as being significantly higher than background.
Almost everything you could want for in a case that makes it interesting and compelling is in that one case, Rendlesham.
You're in the U.S. It's harder for them if they were inclined to to get you, so you can tell me this now.
This year it is being claimed, I think one, maybe two radar operatives have come out and given their testimony to various people.
It is claimed that there were nuclear weapons being stored at RAF Bentwater's Rendlesham Forest, and that is what NEET contact may have been about.
Can you confirm tonight that there were nuclear weapons there?
I can neither confirm nor deny that.
I am still bound by the Official Secrets Act.
I'm not a whistleblower.
I'm somebody who commentates on this issue legitimately, just as, say, a retired military officer would go on a radio or TV show and talk about Afghanistan and Iraq.
But I'm not in the business of divulging classified information, and that's still, I'm afraid, a neither confirm nor deny.
You know I had to ask, and I have before.
But I'm sure you can agree with me that it would be an interesting motivation if anybody from outer space were to come down here to find out what was going on.
I'm sure you've heard the reports of various American nuclear missile bases being stopped in their tracks and effectively taken offline by strange presences.
So, you know, it follows a long line of these things.
Were that to have been the case?
Absolutely.
And there's no getting away from the fact that if we were visited, I'm sure our weapons of mass destruction, for whatever reason, would be something of particular interest.
Just as if we were visiting other civilizations, I'm sure we'd want to know what's the biggest threat that you pose and what's the cutting edge of your technology.
All that work you did with the MOD, Nick, and I want to move on from this in our next segment, but just to close out this one, all those years of work with the MOD, do you feel it was worthwhile as you look back on it?
Yes, absolutely.
It was, I think, the most fascinating job that I did in my wider 21-year career, and hopefully I took forward our understanding of this, even if not necessarily in terms of anything for public consumption.
But all that research and investigation I did is out there, and indeed some of it is now being declassified and released by the government itself.
Let's continue with this, Nick.
I don't know whether you check out the British newspapers if you get a chance to on a Sunday.
Do you get to see them there?
No, but I look online when I can, so I try to keep up to date.
Well, fascinating thing in the Sunday Express today, you may have seen it, you may not, that seems to be exclusive to them.
A former soldier in a new book apparently claims that he was repeatedly abducted by aliens and even subjected to mind control experiments that involved the British Army.
Astonishing claims, says the paper, made in a new book about the life of a man called Bill Brooks.
He's 66 now.
The book is called 44.
That was the age he was when he had his first abduction experience.
It is alleged.
Mr. Brooks apparently claims in the book, a ghost written by an alien abduction expert called Joanna Summer Scales, who I'm going to try and get on this show at some point, you may be aware of.
Apparently, he first began being taken onto spaceships as a child.
I'm not expecting you to have seen this, but what do you make of it?
I did actually see the headline.
I glanced at the story.
I confess that I haven't looked at it in any detail yet.
I mean, you know, there's a slight, I suppose, smile and rolling of the eyes when I get to stuff like this, and there's an old saying in the intelligence analysis community.
Interesting if true.
And I honestly think that's about all I can say with something like that.
What I can just briefly confirm, I guess, is that the name of the individual and the story is not known to me from any Defense or Army files.
So maybe he is a veteran, but even if he is, I'm not aware of any of his stories ever having found their way into the MOD's UFO project files.
Of course, he may just be somebody who's only come out and talked about it now.
That's what we're being told.
But I quite understand what you say.
Ms. Somerscales, quoted in the paper, says, Bill's memory has, quotes, been compromised to a great degree, which he believes is due to the many abduction events and mind control methods used by not only ET, but the military.
The MOD denies the claims, says the paper, and says it has no involvement in mind control or aliens.
I'm guessing that would be the kind of response you would have expected and might even have issued yourself.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think there's no getting away from the fact that the Americans did dabble briefly in mind control back in the 60s.
You know, there were programs looking at, for example, LSD.
There was a program known as MKUltra.
And various governments have had so-called remote viewing projects, flash flies.
And the flip side of that is remote influencing.
But I do not believe the British government has got involved in any of this.
We had a remote viewing project or study a few years ago.
That's been declassified now.
But all these stories of the military themselves abducting people and doing things like this, I'm afraid that sounds to me more like science fiction than science fact.
I've interviewed over the years of doing this show in various places a lot of people who claim that they have been abducted.
Some of their stories have remarkable similarities.
Some of them go off at all kinds of tangents.
One of the people that I have talked to who seems to have his feet very firmly nailed to the ground is a counsellor in Yorkshire, in Whitby, called Simon Parks.
I did a whole hour with him.
I'm sure you're aware of him.
He says he's been abducted his whole life.
His claims are truly extraordinary, the extent to which they in Inverted Commas have had contact with him, he says.
What do you make of stories like that?
Again, I'm afraid it's the old interesting if true thing.
You know, I would say, and I'm not being entirely tongue-in-cheek here.
I'm saying all these people who claim to have been abducted and taken on spaceships, you know, just next time you're up there, just take one little artifact.
You know, all we need is some little widget that says made in Alpha Centauri or something, get it to the scientific community, have it analyzed, and then we can stop debating about this.
We'll know.
You are so well connected.
You're in the United States now.
You know a lot of people.
You and I have talked both off and on air about all of the things that you know and the people that you come into contact with.
Are you frustrated that in all of these years of being interested in all of this?
Nobody said, Nick, as long as you keep quiet about it, maybe this has happened and maybe you can't tell me.
But anyway, as long as you keep quiet about it, Nick, come to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
And in here, we've got a hangar that has all of the exotic materials that we have been collecting since the 1940s.
If that hasn't happened, it must frustrate you.
If it has happened, please tell me tonight.
Well, it hasn't happened.
That, as I said earlier in the show, might just reflect the fact that there really isn't a spaceship in a hangar at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
But yeah, if there is, I would love to get that call.
And if Hillary Clinton is elected president and does find that there is truth in any of this, well, I would love to, I'm sure, become some sort of special advisor on the subject.
Now, when the phone goes in Nick Pope Towers in the United States these days, and you get a call from Mr. Ratzenberg, Katzenberg, Matzenberg, whatever in Hollywood wanting to book you for a big movie project, how does that go?
How does that conversation work?
What do they ask you for?
Well, basically, it could be a couple of things.
It could be a consultancy in terms of what sorts of things do people report, shapes of UFOs, types of aliens, so plot development stories, that sort of thing.
Or it could just be being a spokesperson for the movie, going on various TV radio shows and talking about it, talking about how true it is to real life in terms of what people see and report.
Do you find that the information that you're able to give appears in the form that you delivered it to them?
In other words, if you tell them the average UFO shape is this, does that translate into what appears in the movie or the TV show?
Do they listen to you?
They do, but sometimes, obviously, you know, people want to go down their own path and sometimes things do get fictionalized to slightly beyond the point that I would recognize.
But I think that's, you know, if you're making a documentary, and I've made plenty of those, that's fine.
You expect people to stick to the facts.
But if somebody is simply doing sci-fi, then that's a creative process and all you can ever do is feed something in and be a part of it.
You wouldn't expect it to be faithfully reproduced.
After all, people have got to entertain as well as inform.
We said at the top of this that there are some people in the UK who see you as a merchant of disinformation.
Do you find the Americans have a more open-minded attitude to you?
I think so, but there's no getting away from one's past.
And I think to some people, I will always be the bad guy.
I will always be the person that did this for the government.
And to some people in the UFO and conspiracy theory community, I'm part of the cover-up.
I'm part of the conspiracy.
I'm one of the real-life men in black.
There's nothing I can do to stop people believing that, I'm afraid.
Are there men in black, Nick?
I say this for a reason, and I may have told you this story before, and it's a true story.
It's something that happened when I was doing this show on our sister station Talksport about 12 years ago.
I spoke to the former Defense Minister of Canada, a man who believes that UFOs are more than we've been told.
A very, very interesting man, this guy.
And, you know, we ran the interview, and the following week, I was leaving this building with my producer, Dave, and we walked down the steps in Hatfields here in London, a very quiet place on a Saturday night as it was.
And Dave said, you ain't going to believe this.
And he pointed across the road to what was normally an empty street.
And there was a black limousine, as we would call it, a jaguar, a jaguar, as they call it in America, and two guys in the front who looked like the Blues brothers with black suits, white shirts and black ties.
Anchored to the front of this car's dashboard was a camera that was following us.
Literally, the lens was pointed at the pair of us as we walked down the street.
Now, either that was the world's greatest hoax and joke by somebody, and I've never found out about it since, or perhaps we do have men in black here.
What do you think?
Well, it's possible, but on the other hand, if you were really wanting to conduct covert surveillance, I don't think it would be done in such an obvious way, in a way that conforms absolutely to the stereotypical view of this.
I mean, I think if it was real-life surveillance, it would just be a battered old forward, you know, and you wouldn't even see the camera.
So I'm afraid for something like that, I do suspect either it was a practical joke or people on their way to a costume party or somebody shooting a movie or any one of a number of different possibilities.
But in one way, drawing attention to yourself is the last thing that you would do in genuine covert surveillance.
And the name of that Defence Minister, of course, Paul Hellier, it's just come to me.
When you left the MOD, did they allow you to take the files with you?
No, absolutely not.
Having said that, the Ministry of Defence is pretty much coming to the end now of what will be an eight-year program to declassify and release this material and publish it at the National Archives.
I've been involved in that process as a spokesperson.
I've written feature articles in the media every time some of these files are released.
So, yeah, I didn't get to keep them, but I am now getting to see them again, which is something of an interesting blast from the past.
As they're being released, presumably.
Yes, indeed.
Or just a little bit before so that I can preview them.
Really?
So you do get a chance, you do have a little bit of special access.
Of all those cases in all those box files, which is the one that in the years that you worked for the MOD was truly unexplained for you?
Well, I think one called the Cosford incident from 1993, where we had, over a period of about six hours, sightings up and down the country, multiple police witnesses, and two Air Force bases, RAF Cosford and RAF Shawbury, were overflown by a huge triangular-shaped craft, which was virtually hovering on occasion and then shot off to the horizon at immense speed.
And we never explained that one, needless to say.
And presumably you talked to witnesses, and if you did, what did they tell you?
I interviewed all the witnesses, as I say, lots of police, lots of military.
One civilian who said that at first all he saw was the stars just appearing to go out one by one.
And then he gasped in shock and horror as he realized that they were going out because a huge object the size of a football field was just silently passing over his head at a height of maybe no more than 200 feet.
These seem to be like common factors in these cases.
And a number of people that I've spoken to who say that they saw something of enormous size, you know, the size of a football field or something of that order, often moving at enormous speed or moving slowly and silently.
These all seem to be common factors.
But even after all of these years of similar reports in the United Kingdom, certainly, we're still no closer really to knowing what these things are.
We're not.
It's a genuine mystery.
You know, we might never get an answer or we might get an answer tomorrow.
And that's one of the fascinating things about this.
And that's one of the reasons why I stay involved and interested.
Right.
And what do you plan to do next, Nick?
What's the next project?
Is it a work of fiction, another movie?
I'm working on a couple of fictional ideas, actually unrelated to UFOs.
My last job was in security, so I'm thinking of writing a sort of terrorist-based techno-thriller.
But I'm also doing plenty of TV work here in the US, Ancient Aliens, NASA's Unexplained Files, and working on a couple of ideas for my own show, a sort of Nick Pope Investigates.
Right.
I'm surprised actually you haven't done that already.
The time will come, Nick.
You know.
Absolutely.
And when it does, if you need a narrator, here I am.
Nick Pope, lovely to talk with you again.
We'll catch up again in the future.
Thanks very much for being here and enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
Thank you very much.
You too.
Nick Pope, a guest I know you always enjoy.
Please send me your thoughts about that.
And of course, before him, Dr. Max Abrams from Northeastern University in the United States on the growing threat of terrorism in this world.
Wherever you are, I hope that you stay calm and stay safe.
These are troubling times for all of us, especially us here in Europe.
Please keep your messages coming and your donations if you can.
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My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, wherever you are, stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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