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Oct. 5, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
58:49
Edition 271 - UFO FAQ

Author David J Hogan - who has written the "complete guide" to everything Ufological...

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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.
Thank you very much for being part of all of this.
I'm going to do some shout-outs on this edition, so thank you if you've been in touch.
If you would like to get in touch and make a suggestion about the show, tell me who you want to hear on it, give me some feedback about it, love to hear from you.
Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
You can email me through the website at theunexplained.tv, follow the link there, and you can send me an email.
And thank you to Adam for his hard work on the website.
We're going to be developing it very soon.
As we go into 2017, I think you'll see the website change somewhat.
But more information about that coming soon.
Thank you also for your support for my radio show in the United Kingdom at Talk Radio on Sunday nights.
We're developing that too.
So exciting and busy times.
None of this makes a great deal of money, though, as I always say, so we still need the donations if you possibly can to help us keep all of this going and to develop it so that it doesn't stay static.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and if you can make a donation to the show, please do.
And thank you if you have recently.
Very much indeed.
The guest on this edition, like we say, David J. Hogan, he's coming soon, but let's do some shout-outs.
First of all, to Joe White.
Now, Joe, I didn't know whether your email was criticism or praise, because it seems you listen to the show a lot, but you say that you don't think I'm awakened.
Well, I don't know what that means, but maybe I am, maybe I'm not.
But you say that I don't have the top guests.
So, Joe, if you know who the top guests are and how I can get them, please let me know.
Please email.
And, you know, we can get some of those people on.
I thought we were doing pretty well with guests, but there are always other people who we're not getting who we can have on here.
So that's your challenge, Joe, if you'd like to take it.
Get in touch.
Rakesh says, I didn't enjoy your last guest on edition 270, Maria Dandrea.
She sounded, let's find a nice way of putting this.
Rakesh says she sounded crazy.
Please get some decent guests on who have good stories to tell.
Now, I thought she was entertaining and interesting, and a lot of you did too, but I have had some adverse email as well.
At the moment, the positive email about Maria definitely outweighs the negative email, but Rakesh was the latest email about the last show I've had.
Aaron Wolf, thank you for your email.
You're at Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Jenny in Newcastle, Australia says, I do a lot of driving, and I've been indulging my love of all things weird and wonderful with your podcasts when I drive on these trips.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you, Jenny.
Denise in the US wants to hear Michiu Kaku, famous man of physics and science.
We're working on this.
He was on the radio show some years ago.
We're now pretty close to it, actually.
It's just a question of scheduling.
He wants to record at some point during the weekdays, so I'm going to try and make that happen.
Jewel on Vancouver Island.
Jewel, good to hear from you again.
Appreciate your hard work, says Jewel, and all that you share with us.
No more emails from me, says Jewel.
Please feel free to email if you want to, Jewel.
And I have read your last one.
Thank you for it.
Blair Neumann, thank you for the suggestion.
Ruggero Santilli, we're trying to make contact, and I'll let you know if we can.
Logan has been in touch and asks, I'm wondering if you'd be interested in interviewing somebody who spent a couple of centuries living as several grey subspecies.
Logan, having teased me like that, I think you've got to tell me more about this.
Hi, Howard.
I have a guest suggestion for you, says Michael.
Steph Young in the UK.
Yeah, I'm aware of Steph Young, and I've got some contact details for her, and we're probably going to have her on the radio show.
And, you know, if it all works out, I'll also put it on the podcast.
Toby, on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Now, I was on Maui doing a radio show years ago, and I loved it, and I'm sure the big island is just as nice.
Toby says, I want to say a big thank you for your amazing podcast.
I'm almost certain that I've listened to every episode, some of them twice.
As a deeply curious and spiritual person, you and your guests captivate me endlessly.
No other podcast I've tried holds my attention like yours.
Toby, thank you very much.
And Toby says, big aloha, blessings.
And the same to you, Toby.
If you want to get in touch, like I say, theunexplained.tv is the website.
Follow the link and you can do that and tell me who you are, where you are, and like Toby, how you use the show.
Right, let's get to David J. Hogan in the US, and we're going to talk about UFO FAQ, this great compendium.
Let me see how many pages there are.
400 pages.
It's quite a big book, beautifully illustrated, and it is basically, he says, everything you need to know about ufology.
David, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
I appreciate the invitation, Harold.
Thank you very much.
Well, my pleasure.
I haven't really seen, and maybe I just haven't been looking, a book on the shelves over here that does what this one claims to do.
In other words, it's a compendium.
I said it in the introduction to this, which you wouldn't have heard, that it is a compendium of all that you need to know about ufology.
It would be a great introduction.
What did you mean it to be?
Well, I meant it to be a single-volume handbook.
If anyone is interested in the subject of UFOs, I'm in flying saucers, I'm in hard science, in astronomy, and in popular culture, it's in this book.
In the book's introduction, I actually wrote that to attempt a single-volume guide on a subject as vast as this is probably a fool's errand.
And yet I did it anyway.
It is my seventh book under my own name.
And it was probably the most difficult to write.
I can usually actually finish a book in nine or ten months.
And then this one took 18 months.
And that is a suggestion, I think, of the multi-varied aspect of this topic.
And the fact that there will always be somebody who will say, when you've completed a book like this, will you miss this, that, or the other out.
Yes, and I do address that as well in the book's introduction.
And I write that if you would like to write to the publisher and say, I missed this or that, feel free.
You know, I'm probably already aware of that particular thing.
And I simply had to leave it out.
I only had 400 book pages to work with here.
And if I were going to do this topic full justice, I could probably fill up a 20-volume encyclopedia.
And so I did have to pick and choose here.
And a lot of what I did select, I felt was simply emblematic or representative of other similar stories.
True issues.
You know, I've got to give you kudos for the fact that you start right at the very basics of this thing by asking the question that, you know, it sounds simple on the face of it, but a lot of people have tried to answer it.
What is a UFO?
And you start from that point.
So what do you think a UFO, having done this research, what do you think a UFO is?
At its most basic, Howard, it's a flying object that is not immediately identifiable.
And so, it could be a large bird or a weather balloon.
It could be anything.
The term UFO isn't automatically a signaler of something fantastic.
It's simply something in the sky that is, at least for the moment, unidentifiable.
And of course, having popular use, especially since the late 1940s, it has come to mean extraterrestrial or a government conspiracy or Nazis from the dark side of the moon.
It's expanded like a voracious amoeba all over the place.
And it does mean a lot of different things, I think, to different people.
True.
But there are some common features.
And I think it's good for even those of us who've been researching these things for a long time to remind ourselves of what those common features are.
And you list them here.
You say relatively flat bottom with extreme light reflecting ability, absence of sound, extreme maneuverability, a planned form approximating that of an oval or a disc with a dome shape on the top of the surface, the absence of an exhaust trail.
Some of the common features that people have reported over the generations.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think the word common is vital here in that it is suggestive of a commonality.
And of course, skeptics say that it is a commonality only because people are fanciful and hopeful about what they would like to see and that they are suggestible and that this the flat-bottom domed craft is part of the popular culture and the general mindset, then that is what people see.
But on the other hand, many, many of these witnesses have no agenda and they prove not to be interested in publicity, and they have simply reported what they've seen.
And so, yes, there is a commonality.
It's up to the individual observer, I think, to decide if it's a group mind commonality or if it's an individual sighting commonality.
Okay.
Now, it's good to have the terminology defined and the basics defined, I think.
And certainly if you're new to the subject, it's absolutely vital.
You also explore the various eras of experiencing UFOs and certainly in the modern era.
You take a little look at the early 1900s, which, you know, not many people that I've read into have actually done that.
That was an era of eyewitness sightings, not of necessarily photography, certainly not of video, but this was the eyewitness era.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, interestingly enough, in 1897, all across the United States and even a bit in Europe and elsewhere, media excited itself terribly over the great airship craze.
And it was the age of lighter-than-air craft.
And there were hundreds of incidents, well reported, of unusual, oblong, often cigar-shaped craft appearing where they really shouldn't be appearing.
And it was particularly prevalent in the spring and summer of 1897.
I think it's partly a reflection of growing industrialization and of the public's fresh awareness of this new phenomenon of human flight.
Now, this is before many powered flight, of course.
But I think that what happened that summer and then what people saw in that summer of 1897 established a template for what has come after.
Right.
So you're saying that people were looking skyward and they saw things, some of which may have been explicable, and some of which may not have been.
I mean, there are so many cases here in 1897, Baltimore, Bethany, Missouri, Galesburg, Michigan, Nebraska, and so it goes, Conroe, Texas, and other places.
It's a broad geographical spread.
And I think an interesting aspect of that is that this is 1897.
And information was expressed At that time, most quickly by telegraph, and yet most people had no access to that.
And then there were newspapers.
And even they are a bit slow and their capacity to report.
And so the fact that sightings happened thick and fast, boom, boom, boom, suggests to me a certain legitimacy.
You talk about a case in 1901 in a yard at Bournbrook here in England, a boy of 10, and I hadn't heard this story.
A boy of 10 discovers a small craft about five feet across and a living humanoid.
How did you find out about that?
Well, as I mentioned, I spent about 18 months on this book and I probably devoted at least 12, maybe 13 months, I'm in pure research.
I started the project with a fair-sized available home library.
And I amassed a lot of other books as I went along.
And I spoke with people, and I scoured the internet.
And it's just fascinating the stories that are out there.
And of course, humanoids are in biblical accounts.
And yet, in the modern age, I thought that the 1901 account out of Britain was especially unusual.
And it is a quite early instance of a humanoid sighting.
And in the research that you did, I mean, you've got so many, you have thousands of details about hundreds of cases in the book.
So I don't expect you to remember all of it.
But this living humanoid, how was that reflected?
Was it reported by the newspapers?
How was that documented by the media, such as it was over here, and the popular culture of the time?
It was a local newspaper.
And as is often the case, an unusual tale in a local newspaper often is picked up and run in a larger newspaper.
And it's often embellished along the way.
And I don't know if that was the case in this 1901 story.
But I guess it would have been, certainly knowing what I know of the newspapers of the time that I have studied, it would have been reported in the same way as a circus freak and a photograph of a circus freak might have been put in the paper.
It's one of those Gee Whiz things.
Yes, it's a Gee Whiz story, but they always depended on the veracity and the conviction of the witness.
And as I studied this particular incident, I did get the impression that this boy had a certain maturity about him.
And so that, yes, it's a Gee Whiz note in a newspaper.
And yet it was not completely discounted out of hand.
And it was picked up elsewhere.
And it did become fairly well known.
And so the issue, again, of the conviction and the veracity of witnesses has always been vital.
And we tend to think of the modern UFO era starting around Roswell time.
But looking at these accounts, there are so many of them.
In the United States, three red blindingly bright objects pass over the USS supply, actually in the Pacific off San Francisco.
You say the dominant object is egg-shaped.
The other two are smaller and spherical.
After being discovered by crew members for a full two minutes, the objects suddenly ascend into the clouds.
Now, you know, this is 1904.
These kind of accounts you could expect to see in 1954.
But to read this happening in 1904, I think is something special.
And it's something that a lot of us tend to forget that these things were reported before the modern UFO era, so-called.
Yes, and it is stories of that sort that I think lend a lot of credence and seriousness to the whole study.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
In fact, that was exactly what I was about to say.
That's precisely the point, isn't it?
That account of one large object and it's flanked by two others and moving in an abnormal way, that's the kind of thing that you read about in newspapers today.
But in 1904, they'd have known nothing of such things.
No, none at all.
And so one is inclined to take an account of that sort pretty seriously.
I mean, incidentally, it's a pretty classic instance of a mothership and scout ships, isn't it?
Well, that's it.
And it's the kind of thing that you would certainly see today.
I've had people, just ordinary members of the public, report that kind of thing to me in England in this era.
But this is 1904, and that's a time when people, there wasn't the mass media.
No.
People were not as interested.
They didn't know as much.
They weren't as savvy as they are today.
So it's interesting to read what we would take today to be a classic UFO sighting and case, but to see it planted in an era so far before the modern UFO era, the Roswell Times and the Rendlesham Forest Times.
Interesting to me.
But there are lots of these.
October 31st, 1908, some men at Bridgewater, Massachusetts see a black spherical shape fly over and then hover to scan the ground with a brilliant beam of light.
We've heard that before, but not in 1908.
1909, June 16th that year, Dong Hoi, Vietnam, fishermen observe an illuminated cylinder hover again above a village before it disappears into the sea, the ocean, whatever it might be there.
Now, that's interesting to see a report of that kind in that era in another country.
So this is a more widespread phenomenon than Many people today would be aware.
It's absolutely worldwide, Howard, yes.
And then you mentioned that this is an age of pre-mass media.
And so given that, the notion of suggestibility, he saw this, and so I guess I'm seeing this.
I saw it on television.
It just doesn't work in 1904.
And not a lot of people were aware of other stories.
So again, if there is a lack of mass media, I think it's incumbent on us to take early reports with a fair amount of seriousness.
I think you're right.
Moving forward, August 1922, again, before the modern UFO era, two silver hemispheres divided by a rotating ring are seen above Warsaw in Poland.
The object releases, here we go again, a beam of light and then rapidly ascends.
We've heard that so many times before.
Before that, in February of that year, 1922, in the U.S., a man living in Lincoln, Nebraska is startled when a spherical object lands near his house and releases a humanoid standing almost eight feet tall.
What a fascinating case.
It's interesting also in that this, if it's out of Lincoln, Nebraska, and it's a rural area.
It's flat, a lot of vast empty space.
The natures of the people in Nebraska, at that time especially, is very no nonsense and straightforward.
And then some might even say uncharitably that it's unimaginative.
And yet this man saw an eight-foot humanoid.
And I don't know anything about this particular person.
But my guess is that he was a straightforward, plain-spoken fellow, probably not given to wild flights of fancy.
And yet this is what he saw.
And I think it's important to document these cases in this way, because people are going to forget.
That's a fact, isn't it?
They're going to forget everything before 1947 if we're not very careful.
Yes, I think that's quite true.
I'm obviously of the modern UFO era.
It does date out of 1947, Kenneth Arnold, and then Roswell.
But it's a rich and varied history.
I love these stories that you've collated.
You know, I can just kind of see the sort of Bonnie and Clyde era.
1927 near Tam...
Tamil Peak.
California.
An Irish poet and folklorist, Ellie Young, observes a cigar-shaped craft making its way through the sky by alternatively contracting and elongating its body.
That's a story that we've heard in later eras.
What else?
There was one here.
Yeah, Delivery Boy, 1927, in West Frankfurt, Illinois, sees a revolving metallic sphere approach and then hover above a house about 100 feet away.
The sphere is 40 feet in diameter with a gondola-like structure.
After a minute or two, a wire-like filament is extended from the sphere towards the house, as if somehow probing the structure.
The gondola's windows close before the sphere aspends, ascends, and disappears.
Now, you know, in later technology, we could do that kind of thing.
This was 1927.
Yeah, and the specificity of that particular incident struck me.
It's very sophisticated, and yet there's something subtle about it as well.
It's not about noise and violence or bright colors.
It's a wire-like filament, and there's something awfully believable about that.
But as time goes on, we get into a more savvy, a more sophisticated era.
And I'm glad to see that you note on page 109, October 30th, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds, which changed a lot of people's perceptions.
It did, yeah.
I'm in a popular memory.
The effect of the Wells broadcast has been exaggerated.
It did not cause mass panic, but it did create small pockets of panic.
I'm in New Jersey and in New York State.
This is October 1938, and in Europe, Hitler had held power almost six years at that point.
And there was the rumble of war all across Europe.
And in Asia, Imperial Japan had been at war since 1932 or 33.
And so there was a lot of unease in the backs of people's minds.
And I'm sure that Orson Welles understood that and exploited it very cleverly and in a very timely way.
And I think it suggests a couple of things, that by 1938, the unease had become a pretty important part of American life and of international life, the tail end of the Great Depression.
And then the other aspect of it is simply technology.
And I do talk in the book at some length about futurism and the modernist movement expressed in science and technology, I mean industrial design, even in comic books and in pulp magazines.
And so the public around the world, along with this new one, had an awareness of this new tech.
And in that regard, the late 1930s are a lot like 2016.
It's about this blossoming high-tech and the question, what will it bring?
that was an era like this one, as you say, where we do think of ourselves as being very smart.
Oh, yes.
Yes, I think all of us are awfully good at congratulating ourselves on our smartness.
Just before we leave behind this early Twilight era, and I do totally agree with you, and there are more cases than we can ever begin to account for here just in this interview, this conversation.
1930, a little pink creature about two foot tall walks into a rough-hewn camp shelter in Mandurah, Western Australia, and alarms a girl of 15.
Oversized head, the humanoid had a slit of a mouth and oversized eyes.
The skin appears to be wet or oily.
The girl's father scoops the creature in a net and puts it outside.
And you have a note here.
The unidentified witness related this story in 1982 after looking at a picture of Steven Spielberg's E.T. How fascinating is that?
And that was 90.
Let's remind ourselves this was 1920.
It's 1930, as you said.
Sorry, 1930.
That's my eyesight, 1930.
I like that one.
It's a pretty early instance of the classic gray, isn't it?
It is.
And it's in an era when, again, we've got to make this point again, we didn't know too much of this stuff, the big eyes, the little stick for a mouth, the slightly reptilian-looking skin.
No, no, no, our daily mass media in 1930 was newspapers and radio.
And of course, newspapers had almost no interest in extraterrestrials in 1930.
I find it difficult to imagine that a child might be able to imagine a gray in 1930.
And then you do mention the note I appended to this.
And there is a certain amount of suspicion here in that this witness, a lot older, of course, he is 52 years later, has a look at the title character of E.T. of the film and is moved by that to make a description of this gray.
And yet even at that, the Spielberg E.T. and this witness's description don't match.
And again, I do find on this particular 1930 sighting awfully interesting as a seminal gray.
And as a side note, Gray's appeared on the covers of science fiction pulp magazines a little bit after 1930, 32, 33, 34.
And so it's a novel sighting as early as this.
And obviously the gray is probably the overriding alien image in the popular imagination now.
But not then, and certainly not in Western Australia, where they wouldn't have had quite, you know, this is not to diss the people of that place at that time, but they were slightly, in terms of media and that sort of stuff, I would imagine they were slightly somewhat behind us in the UK and you in the U.S. Oh, absolutely.
Yes, yes.
And so again, it is difficult to dismiss a report like this out of hand.
Now, we move into another era completely when we enter the Second World War, because not only do we have this growing understanding of things, more of a mass media, more of an appreciation of technology, but we also have the fog of war, as they call it.
So during the war, you get reports of things that may well have been classified craft or some kind of missed sighting of some kind of warplane, something like that.
You get the reports of the Foo fighters and all the rest of it.
So it's a very mixed-up era that comes next, isn't it?
Yes, at the beginning of that chapter, I note that Air Forces of the World actually fielded 640 individual models of fighter planes alone and 144 trainer craft.
All told, the United States alone manufactured over 275,000 aircraft of all sorts.
And so, yes, the skies were filled at that time in that bombing had perfected itself in the 1930s, especially after Mussolini's unhappy attack on Ethiopia in 1935.
I think people were inclined to look at the skies and they worried about machines actually dropping things on their heads.
And it's a little comical something to us now, but at the time, it was a very real prospect.
And I think just as modernism and futurism helped to predispose people in the 1930s, in the late 30s and all throughout the 40s, it was, as you said, the fog of war.
And odd and fearsome things are in the skies.
But there were weird reports around that era, weren't there?
I mean, there was one that I'm just recording.
I beg your pardon?
I said many, many.
Many, many.
And a lot of them came out of military pilots, experienced flyers, and they witnessed anomalous things, often accompanying their craft in the sky.
And, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And I know a certain proportion of that is explainable in scientific terms.
You know, it could be static electricity, St. Almost fire, it could be light reflected off the underside of a cloud.
But a professional military flyer understands all of those things.
And if he or she in that Russia actually fielded many female fighter pilots, if a pilot sees a thing that's truly anomalous, it is worth investigating.
And also we get the first sense of something or someone being interested in the conflict that we humans are staging down here.
And that is reflected in later incidents that happened at nuclear missile bases and that kind of thing.
You know, we get the first sense that maybe the eyes of something are upon the conflicts and the acrimonies and disputes that we have here on Earth.
Yes, it's a lengthy series of sightings above Air Force bases, I mean other military installations, I mean, even above atomic manufacturing plants, I'm in the States.
And in combat as well, I'm the Foo Fighter phenomenon.
Odd, intelligent, seeming orbs of light that would follow bombers and fighter planes and even often seem to play games of tag and catch up.
And at least out of our perspective, there is a certain apparent curiosity on the part of these visitors.
I want to get into the story of Kenneth Arnold, because I was obliquely aware of this, but you write it so beautifully.
Kenneth Arnold, the eyewitness, he saw what he saw when he saw it, is the title of the chapter.
There's a lovely illustration of this man's plane.
Idaho businessman, private pilot, saw flying crescent near Washington State's Cascade Range on June 24th, 1947.
But you clearly did a lot of research about this one, and it's a lovely piece of writing.
Can you briefly tell me the story?
Well, yes.
Arnold owned a business in Idaho.
It was a fire prevention business, and he was a private pilot, and he covered over four or five state area, and he was in the air often, on sales calls and on maintenance and advisory calls.
And it was in the summer of 47, June 24th, over the Cascade Range in Washington State.
And Arnold, in his single-engine plane, saw nine rather precisely formed up flying crescents.
And crescent is Arnold's word.
The term flying saucer was invented shortly after by an Oregon newspaper reporter.
And he tracked them for a while and estimated that they were achieving unheard of speeds and also that they were extraordinarily maneuverable.
And he eventually lost sight of them and then landed as soon as he was able and he made a report.
And I'm in the book, I talk a lot about Kenneth Arnold as a man.
And of all of the notable witnesses, I think Arnold is possibly the most marvelous because he was an absolute upright citizen.
I'm an Eagle Scout at age 14, a successful businessman.
I'm extraordinarily well-liked at home, a proper family man.
And he was not somebody who was given to leaping off and saying, okay, I've seen something from another galaxy.
You say, page 134, you say his first thought was camouflaged American bombers or a phalanx of wholly experimental aircraft.
So he didn't automatically leap to the idea that this was something beyond this sphere.
And in fact, Kenneth Arnold always held that the craft he had witnessed had earthly origins.
I know in the text that if he had been a Hollywood actor registered at Central Casting, everybody would have cast him as a sober businessman or an Army major, a person like that.
Husky, handsome, even temperament, and there was just no nonsense about this man.
And although he did publish a pamphlet about what he saw and also collaborated with the famous science fiction editor Ray Palmer.
He was not interested in publicity or in self-aggrandizement.
It just didn't mean anything to him.
But you also say that what he was part of, and in later years, we come to see clusters like this and agglomerations of sightings.
You say, in the meanwhile, sorcery sightings in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest blossomed like dandelions, giving local authorities and the FBI still more to think about.
So this was an era when it was a snapshot in time when a lot of this stuff was happening.
Yes, yeah.
And of course, the dandelion aspect of all this brings us around again, I think, to this notion of suggestibility and also of opportunism, frankly.
Not every witness is credible.
Not every witness is honest.
And almost against his will, Arnold ended up with a lot of press coverage.
And so his adventure had been widely covered and widely read.
I don't doubt that a certain proportion of these follow-on witnesses have either fabricated it out of whole cloth or simply looked to the skies full of wishful thinking and thought they saw something.
But understanding that does not allow us to automatically dismiss every sighting after Arnold.
And you say, rightly, when we get up to which chapter is this?
Well, it's page 164.
You say, Project Blue Book or How UFOs Took Over American Culture.
And you say that Arnold was a gateway to this sort of thing, as was Roswell.
You said the United States government and the military were naturally disposed to be curious about such things as the Arnold sighting and Roswell.
The September 1947 Twining Memorandum noted the peculiar avionics of unidentified flying objects and the knowledge that not every question about them would be resolved easily.
So this was a time of tremendous curiosity, as you say.
And I've often wondered why there was such interest.
It was clear that certain tiers and echelons of government believed or could be inclined to believe that these things were what they appeared to be.
In other words, otherworldly.
Yeah, and I think a lot of that is a simple outgrowth of wartime technology, particularly out of Nazi Germany.
Late in the war, American fighter pilots were astounded by the Mescherschmidt ME-262, a twin-engine jet fighter, absolutely.
Which looks like a flying disc, doesn't it?
It looks like a UFO.
It was extraordinarily sleek and streamlined, extraordinarily quick, and it was simply the good luck of the Allies that the Germans had had a dearth of pilots and materials at that late date.
But other fascinating avionic experiments came out of Germany.
I'm in the 40s.
I'm including ideas about flying disks.
And of course, Washington was well aware of that.
It had already imported a clutch of German aviation and rocket scientists under Operation Paperclip in 47, 48.
And so the understanding of this real technology was very keen.
And it is for that reason, I think, that at least at that early post-war interlude, Washington was disinclined to ignore all of these reports.
But then we get into the 1950s, and then somebody somewhere decides some of this is alarming to the general population who may not understand.
So you have a little section here, page 175.
We're talking about 1953, and it's called Putting on the Brakes.
And you say that a continuation of high-profile UFO research might, it was thought, spark hysterical mass behavior and threaten the general order.
In other words, maybe it's time to put all of this on the back burner.
Yeah, and I think that was a fairly legitimate concern.
It is also quite possible that Washington, I'm in the Pentagon, had been exploring their own advanced avionics that they wished to keep under wraps.
And so let's not encourage the public to think too much along those lines.
After 1950, it's the peak of the Cold War, right?
And it's a very, very tense world.
And a lot of people felt that another hot war is a very real possibility.
And in order to defend against that, new technology has to be developed, new avionics have to be developed.
And so let's put a bit of a shroud over all of this and throttle back on our investigation of flying saucers.
Yeah, but even so, through the 1950s, and I've got the list here, I mean, your research Is impeccable.
The list of cases goes on.
The list of reports goes on.
1952, 53, 55, 58.
In 1955, you've got a sketch of a frightening-looking creature.
During the long night of August 21st, 22nd, 1955, people inside a house near rural Hopkinsville, Kentucky marshaled a rifle and a shotgun to battle aggressive aliens that scampered across the roof, flew between trees, and repeatedly popped up in windows.
And then you give a 1962 illustration showing how scary this thing looks with its great big bug eyes and its extremely pointed ears.
I mean, they make Mr. Spock's ears look very tame.
It's a quite famous story, and it is a very spooky one.
Hopkinsville, Kentucky is an isolated part of that state, and Aminen is now.
There are no street lamps, you know, out on the outskirts.
And the long night at that time was very, very dark and awfully, awfully long.
And this farmhouse, it was a battle zone.
And the men inside, attempting to protect women and children inside, shot round after round through windows, inadvertently right through walls at these creatures that were awfully persistent and just simply would not go away.
If you look at contemporaneous photographs of the house, it really was all shot to heck.
It was in pieces.
And I don't think that a confabulator is apt to ruin his own house.
Well, no, not just to get a couple of lines in a newspaper.
You wouldn't have thought it.
Yeah, I mean, so something inexplicable happened outside that country house on that long night in 55.
Yes.
It's a very, very lively and unnerving story.
April 18th, 1961.
I mean, I'm skipping forward here.
There are so many stories.
Three humanoids inside a flying disc hovering inches above the ground at Eagle River, Wisconsin, a chicken farm there, ask the farmers for water and then reward him with pancakes cooking on a grill.
The men are about five foot tall, attired in dark blue knit uniforms, some latter-day accounts say black, with turtlenecks and knit caps.
I mean, they kind of sound like commandos, but five foot tall?
Yes, it's interesting, isn't it?
And the net witness was a gentleman named Joe Simonton.
I mean, he also published a pamphlet of the one like Kenneth Arnold.
Mr. Simonton was all about attention seeking.
And he made a fairly good living at saucer conventions in the 1950s as a speaker and as a huckster of his little pamphlet.
And he would talk about the extraterrestrial pancakes.
And as I recall, he even had a photograph of a pancake.
And it did look a lot like a misshapen, kind of stunted little pancake.
Skipping forward even further, I mean, you go into great detail, of course, about the famous Betty and Barney Hill case.
But you also give us some of the small change here.
Again, a story that I was not aware of, and it happened in my own country, apparently.
1973, Somerset, England, a robot stalled a woman's car, allegedly took her into a spacecraft.
She was stripped naked and examined by three male humanoids who looked like surgeons.
I mean, that is a story I hadn't heard.
And you go into detail about cases like that.
Yeah, and it's at this point, after the Barney and Betty Hill case of 1961, that the abduction theme really, really gains a lot of steam.
Can I just tell my listeners, I think you have somebody outside with a ride-on MOA, unless it's a UFO outside.
And if you can hear a noise in the background, I think that's what it is, isn't it?
Yeah, it's a gardener next door.
That's fine.
I'm sure it's a beautiful day for it.
And we can hear you perfectly well.
Sorry, you were saying.
It's the abduction theme.
And on the one hand, it's all about a forced loss of freedom.
I'm essentially kidnapping.
And that alone is a pretty terrifying thing, isn't it?
And yet on top of that, as is suggested by the 1973 case that you just noted, there is that unwholesome sexual element as well.
Well, they seem, in many of these cases, and this one I haven't heard of, I have to say, they seem to be interested in our reproductive system and our biology.
Yes.
If extraterrestrials are visiting us, I think that their interest is certainly understandable.
But it's a violation, though, isn't it?
Well, it's a bodily violation.
It's a psychological violation.
It is.
And, you know, one of the theories put forward is that somewhere, somehow, and there's some evidence of this claimed by some people, that they are gathering this information in order that they can somehow take something from us to enhance their own species, because maybe their own species has evolved to the point where it's lacking something, missing something that we have that they want.
I mean, that's part of the mythology of it all, isn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
And it also entered the popular mythology Pretty early on.
If you look at a Hollywood film like I Married a Monster from Outer Space, it's about a dying alien race, and its males have traveled to Earth.
And if they're going to preserve themselves, they have to mate with human women.
And a bit later, around 1965, a picture with a pretty emphatic title, Mars Needs Women, showed up.
And this sort of thing, it became a quickly well-worn trope of B-science fiction films.
I think it gets at a pretty primal fear, don't you?
I do, completely.
And it's something that is at the very core of all of us in so many ways.
It's scary.
It's where your nightmares meet some kind of weird reality, I think.
Just before we conclude this, you give a long list and a very good biographical list of the main players in ufology over the years.
You even include people like Art Bell, but also Stephen Greer and Stanton Friedman and people of that ilk.
Of all of the people that you researched and whose biographies you look out and put in the book, who do you think has been the most influential person in this field over the last, say, 100 years?
I would say that there's two of them, and the only one of them was a scientist.
And that scientist is J. Alan Hyneck, highly trained scientist, who actually conceived the close encounters classification table of the first kind, of the second kind, of the third kind.
He examined multitudinous witness sightings and he collated them and he saw patterns in them.
And it was Hynek, I think, who really helped to bring a lot of scientific discipline to ufology, which is a field that needs a lot more discipline, unfortunately.
And then the nine scientist is Ray Palmer, a magazine editor often referred to as the man who invented flying saucers.
He edited science fiction magazines, amazing stories, most notably.
And he also forged an early connection with Kenneth Arnold.
I think a neat thing about Ray Palmer is that he was two people, a quite skilled professional magazine editor all about the commercial opportunities involved in fantastic stories, and a man with a sincere and honest interest in these things.
And he just pushed it ceaselessly for decades.
And I note in the book that who wouldn't gamble 35 or 50 cents for a magazine peek at the saucer phenomenon.
In that regard, Palmer brought flying saucers into America's homes, barbershops, and beauty parlors.
And from what we've said about the influence of popular culture getting into people's minds and making them think they've seen things they haven't seen, was that a good thing?
You think that's a good thing that he popularized it to that extent?
Oh, I think a general awareness of almost anything is always a good thing.
It's up to us as institutions and as individuals to turn that awareness into something useful and honest.
But the awareness factor is enormous.
And in that regard, I think that Ray Palmer and other people of a similar bent had an enormous and quite beneficial influence on UFO studies.
Sure.
If aliens do exist, they do come from some far-flung planet that we have not yet discovered.
Would you like to meet one?
Oh, yes, I'd love to meet one.
Yeah, I'm at the back of the book.
I have a UFO spotter's checklist, and I do emphasize the safety factor.
You know, don't get too close.
If a creature extends its hands, don't take that hand.
But I'm afraid that I would disregard all of my own advice.
And I don't know how that might turn out.
Well, look, if it happens.
Well or not so well.
I don't know.
If it happens and you're able to tell me, please do.
David, thank you very much.
I hope this has been an okay experience for you.
I think the book is fantastic, and I don't even think I've begun to do it justice.
It's a fabulous compendium, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it.
You know, it is a marvelous book, and there's so much more in it than we've been able to discuss.
So thank you very much indeed, David.
I enjoyed chatting with you, Howard.
Thank you so much for having me.
David J. Hogan, the book is called UFO FAQ, and it's one of those books I think would make a great Christmas present for somebody who was into all of these things and perhaps just discovering them now, or even somebody who's known about them for a while, because I discovered there are things I'd heard about but had forgotten, and they're here in some detail in this book, so I liked it.
Let me know what you think about David J. Hogan and what he had to say.
More great guests coming up in the pipeline.
Thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot for his hard work getting the show out to you and maintaining the website.
Thank you to you for all of your communications.
Please keep those and your donations coming.
And until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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