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Nov. 23, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
50:38
Edition 277 - Dr James Oberg

This time US space insider - ex NASA-man Dr James Oberg...

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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 Return of the Unexplained.
Many thanks for bearing with me.
I know these shows haven't been appearing quite on the schedule that we normally expect for them.
I think as I've explained recently, I've got a couple of issues, personal ones that I'm dealing with at the moment, so they're kind of holding me up.
I hope to have those things fixed and sorted quite soon, and then we'll be back to our normal selves.
On this edition, I'm going to bring you one of the best of the radio show guests.
I promised you that I would bring you the very best people we've had on the radio show in the UK, and I think the man you're about to hear from definitely fits that particular bill.
His name is Jim Oberg, Dr. James Oberg.
He is an American space expert.
What he doesn't know about space exploration and the space program, I don't think is worth knowing.
He was there at the birth of the space program, certainly there through the shuttle missions, their ups and downs, their changes of fortune, the bad times and the good times.
He is also uniquely placed to commentate about what America is doing now.
And of course, Mr. Trump wants to get more involved in space exploration, which many people will see as a very good thing.
He's uniquely placed to comment on other countries' space programs as well as the U.S. one.
So Jim Oberg coming up in a moment.
If you want to get in touch with me, no shout-outs on this edition, but I promise I will do some in the next edition.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and there you can leave me a message or a donation for the show.
And I promise you I will see and do see and have read every single email that comes in.
And if it's something urgent that needs to be personally dealt with by me, then I'll email you straight back.
And if you want a shout-out, you will get one on this show.
Thank you very much if you have been in touch recently.
And thank you also for his hard work to Adam, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for bearing with me recently.
Thank you, Adam, very much indeed.
Okay, from my radio show recently, a truly world-class, excellent guest.
His name is Jim Oberg, Dr. James Oberg.
And I think you're going to be interested in all that he knows about space.
...
Chinese space program.
He had a more than 20-year career as a space engineer with NASA, apparently specializing in orbital rendezvous.
Oberg is an author of 10 books and more than 1,000 articles, it says in this biography, on spaceflight.
And some of the things he talks about are things that are very core to this show, like the moon landing.
Did it happen?
UFOs, do they exist?
And particularly core to him at the moment are the space programs of nations like Russia and China.
We hear a lot about what America does, and we're hearing more and more about what the Russians and Chinese are doing.
Let's get him on.
Dr. Jim Oberg, thank you very much, Jim, for coming on The Unexplained.
kind of you.
How would you How would you describe yourself?
Well, I started out as a space nut, and I'm not even retired as a lifelong space nut.
I had the extreme good fortune to be born at the time when, as a kid, I got excited by all those comic books, and then it began to really happen, and got to just step onto a surfboard on that wave and went and did some incredible things in real spaceflight.
But I was always interested in public views of spaceflight, both pro and con, and a lot of times imaginary, the folklore of space.
That's one of my major interests.
And right now in retirement, I'm looking at a lot of stories that are widely talked about out on the internet and elsewhere that are based on, and I think are misinterpretations, a lot of things that happened, really amazing things, and sometimes stuff made up by people.
No names here right now, but a lot of these stories that are very popular and the videos on YouTube with the big hits are dubious is the kindest thing you can say about some of them.
Now, your knowledge is not third-party knowledge because, as I said, you spent more than two decades at NASA.
So the question for you, you were there right at the cutting edge of it all, with the birth of space exploration.
How in those days did you get a job at NASA?
Well, I got, NASA sent me to college, actually, to graduate school during the Apollo program.
So when I finished up that program, they actually had staffed up fully for Apollo.
I spent a couple of years doing spaceflight work in the U.S. Air Force and got them to loan me to NASA.
So I showed up down here in Houston just after the last Apollo flight, by a couple of days, actually.
Got on board for the first shuttle flights, worked through the beginning of the space station missions, and then we had a parting of the ways for reasons that might be more fascinating than why I was there, which was I saw them falling back into the old habits of safety or lack of safety, and went to Congress about 1997 and said that they're going to start blowing things up again if they don't reform and left.
So then a couple years later when they did blow something up again, killed more astronauts, I was in demand by the news media as the guy who saw it coming.
I got to work with NBC, had a wonderful 12-year time with them as their consultant.
We went to places around the world looking at spaceflight stuff, including Russia and North Korea and places.
And just finished that a couple years ago.
Now I'm doing some more books.
So I'm still real busy, and I enjoy watching the spaceflight, but also enjoy trying to explain things that are confusing because spaceflight is unearthly.
It's like nothing we've ever done before.
It's partly like exploration, partly like science, but it's beyond human experience.
And that's going to lead to lots and lots of misunderstandings.
And it does.
Now, you mentioned that you were with the Space Shuttle program for a while.
My first trip to America, I was very young, and I got myself a TWA ticket and went to stay with a relative, the guy who's no longer with us now, but my uncle Billy in New York.
Now, the reason I'm talking to you about this is that Billy had made his money on Wall Street, had a nice house in New Jersey, and I stayed there for a while.
And he had a little conservatory with a television in it, and the television was able to receive more TV channels than I'd ever seen in my life.
And one of them was CNN.
And on a cold January morning, I remember going down to that TV room, and the sky was as blue as it can only be in the United States.
We don't get blue skies like that.
It was a beautiful day.
And that day, I turned on CNN, which I was fascinated by.
It was 1986.
Like I say, I was just a boy, and I was in America.
It was fantastic.
And Billy came and said, you want to see what our nation can do, Howie?
Take a look at this.
And we sat and we watched the launch of the Challenger.
And we know what happened there.
You were part of all of that.
What was it like to be involved in an absolute, unprecedented at the time, disaster for the American space program?
What was it like to be on the inside?
The personal, outside of knowing the people, outside of having actually been personal friends with a couple of the crew members and their families, having been to their homes and goodbye parties and remembering the handshakes, Kirsten McCall that the teacher had a particularly firm and warm handshake.
And the physical sensation of that handshake is something that's with me all my life.
So you certainly, anyone who is a close person, die tragically, and as it turns out, unnecessarily, as it turned out, you're shocked by it, and then you're upset by it.
For us in the program, those of us who weren't on duty, and we realized somebody had blundered, and just as with the charge of the light brigade, only these people had charged up into space on a mission that had been sent with bad advice.
Now, were you aware, in the position that you were in, were you aware that people within NASA had misgivings about launching on that particular day?
No, no.
The reasons for launching that day, the misgivings that Roger Beajolais and the other engineers had in Florida were not known to us at the time.
But we had been seeing things over the previous six to twelve months in which things were getting more hectic and the shuttle was flying more and more and people were making mistakes, which people do because people are people.
But the reaction to the mistakes, people were laughing at the mistakes or thinking it was funny this happened, even though other people who were veterans of Apollo who knew how hard you had to try every day to keep danger at bay.
You couldn't ever make spaceflight safe, but you could reduce the level of hazard if you were aggressive about it, and they would be arguing with other people, other new folks who thought that these mistakes were, oh, geez, one of those things.
And there got to be a feeling that spaceflight was getting routine.
Plus, NASA itself was in a survival mode because there were a lot of, it wanted to take over the space launches for all of the U.S., including the military launches.
The military wanted to have its own rockets, and they didn't think the shuttle was reliable enough or reliable schedule enough.
So NASA decided to fly some congressmen to show off just how reliable the shuttle could be.
And these are congressmen who headed important committees.
The pressure was on the NASA people to deliver reliable on-schedule launches so that they could finish the job in Congress of having Congress kill off the military satellite launch program, the expendable rockets.
That was pressure.
And that pressure was felt by the people in Florida who made the decision that although they weren't sure that the seals would hold at that low temperature, they were going to assume it was okay unless someone else had evidence contrary that the seals would not work.
And that was such an absolute 180-degree betrayal of standard practices for safety that you can't keep getting away with doing that.
And in the end, seven people paid with their lives for those bad judgments.
And of course, it wasn't the only shuttle to end that way.
Yes, and what happened in the later years, of course, people, you're never more careful than the day after you've had a big accident or even the year after.
But as the years went by and people were following better rules and other pressures, other political pressures, in the case of the shuttle, it was a case of the desire for international participation at any cost for the diplomatic purposes.
And that wasn't necessarily bad, but that those reasons took precedence over flying safely.
And so again, as we approached the late 90s, managers were making decisions based upon the political expediency of the decision rather than the real safety issues.
And that's when, oh, a couple of those Mars probes, remember the one Mars probe that crashed because someone had mixed up English and metric units?
That's a real famous story.
Well, that was a cover story for the fact that the management had pushed the engineers too hard, and when they wanted to double check, because they were uncertain over the navigation, they could detect an error.
They weren't sure where it was coming from.
They're told by managers that you'll have to prove we're off course before we'll give you the extra hours, extra working hours to check it out more deeply.
And of course, they didn't, and they crashed into Mars.
And other things were happening at the time, which I detected as a reminder of the culture that led up to Challenger 15 years earlier.
And it was scary.
Just before we take a break to play some commercials, I just want to ask you this.
Do you think that as we look to bigger and even more ambitious goals like colonizing Mars and all of the things we're talking about now and also having way stations on the way to distant planets, having halfway houses or quarterway houses on the way, have we learned the lessons from the things that went wrong, do you think?
We have learned lessons.
The problem with NASA is not learning lessons.
The problem with NASA has been forgetting what they've already learned and having to pay the tuition again.
And so a lot of people are learning the lessons very well.
Some of the private companies have learned.
The Chinese in particular have learned all of our lessons, the mistakes we made, and they're not going to repeat any of them.
The Russians have forgotten all their lessons too and they're going back.
So different countries are having a different approach, but it's exactly like you said.
You learn these lessons.
The problem isn't learning them.
The problem is forgetting them once you've learned them.
Right.
Let's park it there.
We'll be back in a couple of minutes and we want to talk about the Chinese and the Russian space programs and also a couple of things that frequently get fired my way in emails.
The moon landing conspiracy, the idea that we never actually went there.
It was all done on a film set in Pasadena and UFOs which keep getting reported.
I know you've taken some interest in those things.
So hold that thought, Jim, and we'll come back to you in just a moment here, Dr. Jim Oberg, American space expert, former member of NASA.
And Jim, you've done a lot of research recently, and I know there's a lot on your website about the work that China and Russia are doing in space.
I was particularly impacted by the story last week about China unveiling this new massive telescope to look into space.
But they're not only looking at it, you know, they're getting out into space themselves.
The Chinese space program is something that's taken a lot of people by surprise, hasn't it?
Well, the Chinese have had a program for a long time, but it was fairly modest.
They began to recapitulate what the Russians and the Americans had done back in the 60s and with some of their first flights and their first dockings and some of their first spacewalks.
But they're at the point now where they're going to just break loose and head off in their own direction.
So I think we're bound to have some more surprises.
And the key element there is that they built a new launch site down on Hainan Island, which is off the southern coast of China.
You don't think about the basics when you're thinking when you build rockets and launch rockets.
Everyone thinks about them in the sky.
The key to running a rocket program is how do you build the rocket and then get it to the launch site.
And the Chinese had their launch sites deep in the desert, but their factories were there on the coast, and the only way to move their rockets was by train.
So that meant that the rocket had to fit through train tunnels.
And even though you could bring pieces of stratum together, they were still small boxcar-sized units.
They have finally broken out of that by building a new launch site on the coast, on the southern coast, and building a new rocket factory at Tian Sin on the Yellow Sea.
And now they have their transport ships and barges go right up to the factory and offload from the factory and down the coast, offload at the launch site and run it over by road, but it's a very short road, to their launch pad.
So now they can build and get them, and even better, get them to the launch site, much bigger rockets.
And they're starting to do that.
Now that's, with that bottleneck broken, just stand back.
Now, I had a fantastic geography teacher at school called Zarina Jones.
And Zarina, if you're listening, you know how much I owe you.
Zarina, and this is decades ago, right, when I was at school.
It has to be.
She was very keen that we all studied China.
She told us that China would be a huge power in the future.
Now, at that time, Jim, as we both know, the Chinese were famous for copying things.
You know, they would buy a John Deere or a Massey Ferguson tractor, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're talking.
They'd take the tractor back to China and they'd make a copy of it reasonably well.
It's going to surprise an awful lot of people now that they have reached a stage of sophistication with space technology that is streets ahead of anything like that.
They're not copying American technology, are they?
They're innovating themselves.
They're doing some very innovative, not just hardware, but innovative missions, an innovative strategy.
I went to a conference on the Chinese space program several years ago in a think tank outside of Washington, D.C., where they get together and talk and think.
I'm not sure what the results were because the results for me, though, were eye-opening because for the first two hours of this two-day seminar, we were instructed on the rules and strategies of the game of Go.
Now, that is something that Westerners don't even look at.
And I'm halfway through that lesson.
I'm thinking to myself, I'm a rocket scientist.
What am I doing learning about a Chinese game?
By the end of that two-hour talk, I had a whole new attitude toward the Chinese program.
Because the game of Go involves thinking and strategizing that is so different than Western gamesmanship and strategies that applies to the world.
It applies to operating a game with various forces and factors spread across the board that don't have any apparent relation until suddenly they gather strength together and crush your own side, or at least give success to the winning side.
So that strategy and the way that they approached spaceflight is fundamentally non-Western.
And they're not stuck with Aristotle and other kinds of thinking that has guided, in many ways restricted, Western thought.
An example of that is a recent moon probe they had called Chang'e 3, I believe, is a number, Chang'e 3, which mapped the moon.
It was a repeat mission of the previous moon mapping mission.
And this mapped the moon, and when they were done, they had leftover gas, and so they pushed it out of orbit around the moon a little farther out from the sun in a very, very sophisticated flight path, and wound up falling into a gravity well, a gravity trap out way beyond the Earth called a Lagrange point.
And it was called a Sun-Earth Lagrange point, in fact, Sun-Earth Lagrange number two, about a million miles down Sun.
And they lurked around there for a few months, just flying around.
They were so far out, we couldn't track them.
The radar couldn't pick them up.
They were too far away and too small.
When they were done playing around there, and they were waiting for something, which again no one anticipated, the game would Go.
Suddenly, because they knew something was coming near the Earth, they pushed the probe further back out.
Actually, they flew back past the moon and Earth to get a boost and zipped out into interplanetary space and drifted away from the Earth about 10 million miles.
And WAMO, an asteroid they knew was coming, zips past them about five miles away, and they get close-up pictures.
They got themselves an asteroid mission using leftover rocket fuel from a moon mapping mission.
Mind-blowing in their originality and in the sophistication of their navigation and their strategy.
So they are more prepared to think out of the box than we are.
They are thinking out of the box.
That's exactly the right way to say it.
And they are done just replaying the Western Space Race playbook.
And, for example, this Tiangong space module, they launched a new one a few weeks ago.
They have an old one that's up there three years, and they finally had a short circuit, and it's going to fall out of orbit in a year or so.
But they were flying it for long duration to see what would break down first.
The reason you'd want to do that without advertising it is that you can use the module, this Kiangong kind of module, as the habitation or the habitat for a mission with two astronauts, one of their manned spacecraft, and a big new rocket, and push it way out into space to follow the pathway, for example, of that lunar probe.
Drift out a million miles and look into the Lagrange points and go into lunar orbit.
And they can do this sooner than we can even finish building our prototypes.
What about Mars?
Everybody's eyes are on the prize.
The Chinese are interested in Mars.
How differently are they looking at the challenge of Mars?
They don't appear to be looking very seriously at Mars because everyone else is.
So they would just be one of many and they'd be second rate for a long time there.
They wouldn't be getting robots down.
But that big antenna you talked about on top of the hour, that giant antenna that's staring up, well, not staring up, it's listening up to the universe.
It's 1,640 feet wide, I remember.
Yeah.
Well, it's good to talk to another country that still uses feet.
God knows what that is in meters, yeah.
They say, well, we know meters too, but they say that there's two kinds of countries in the world.
People who use the metric system and people who have walked on the moon.
I can't possibly comment.
And the Brits were certainly there alongside with.
So as far as we know, Jim, the Chinese are not as interested in Mars as we are?
I don't see it.
They have a program.
They certainly intend to have science.
Their recent launches are physics, are some of the frontiers of just cosmic physics.
They're doing experiments now that some of our scientists have dreamed about but never could get money for because they appeared to be pure science and they wouldn't apply toward a Mars mission.
Well, the Chinese got the money to do these pure science missions because they recognize the fact that it's these discoveries, these surprises that you get at the very edge of your knowledge of physics and other sciences, that open doors, not next year maybe, or even five, but they open doors 10, 20 years downstream, and it's good to be the first one to look through that door.
And they are definitely working on doing that.
So it's time to shake up Western strategizing about spaceflight and learn something from the Chinese.
It's well known that the Americans for years have had a covert military space program that runs in tandem with the one that we see reported in the papers, and I guess I can understand why that is.
Do the Chinese have something similar?
Well, they do as well.
Their interest, though, in terms of the military use of space is that both the U.S. and Russia, to a lesser degree and other countries, have now become so dependent on space assets as what they call force multipliers, that the communications and reconnaissance and all these actually are very valuable functions and services that space assets provide.
And navigation, for example, when the U.S. built its GPS system, its navigation system, one of the smartest things the Pentagon ever did was offer a lower accuracy version of the navigation system free to the world.
That basically made the rest of the world addicted to free U.S. navigation data, and that just ripped the bottom out of any plans to build competing networks, because why do so?
The Americans are doing it for free.
Well, of course, on the other hand, it gave the Americans the opportunity to turn it off whenever they wanted to.
This is why Europeans got smart and built their own system.
The Russians are building their own system, and so are India and China, because they realize that you can't take a free service too long without becoming addicted to it.
Those services are out there, and to deny those services or find a way to even threaten the services or to decrease trust in those services in one country's mind is an enormously valuable advantage.
And the Chinese, again, with their philosophy, the art of war, or they've written about war for thousands of years, is that the battles are fought in the mind of the enemy, not on the battlefield.
And if you can affect by threatening or making the enemy fear that you're about to destroy a satellite or that the enemy won't be able to trust the satellite because the data is going to be interfered with at any time, then you have disarmed that enemy.
You have reduced them to a pre-space capability.
And for example, now the U.S. Navy is starting to teach its officers again how to navigate using sextets and shooting the stars because they're saying there could be a situation that arises someday when you can't turn your GPS on and your wristwatch or your computer because it might not be available or the data might be poisoned.
So the Chinese have already begun a shift in military power in space by raising the doubt in Western minds that the Western military support satellites may not be there when you think you need them.
Fascinating.
I've got a question from Hedi.
Now, Hedi is a regular tweeter and texter to this show.
Hedy is a scientist and wants to ask you this question.
What is the Western response to the leaps that the Chinese are making in space research?
What are we doing?
NASA has a plan that, although many of the people who want to go faster kind of sniff at it, they have a plan to build themselves a big new rocket, a Saturn V-class rocket, as well as a manned spacecraft that can ride on it into deep space.
It's only a partial program.
And so people are saying it's a rocket to nowhere.
Well, that's not a fair criticism because NASA can't afford to build all the new hardware together and have them all show up on the street at the same time.
It's got to build some things first.
And as with the Field of the Dreams movie, you build it and they will come.
You build a rocket of that capability and there'll be all sorts of capabilities and all sorts of both government and military and private users who will show up wanting to get launches on a big rocket.
And that's NASA's plan.
And I think it's the best they can do in the current budget situation.
So they're building this big rocket and it's going to make a lot of things possible toward the end of this decade.
Right.
So it follows on from that famous movie adage, build it and they will come.
Yep.
Okay.
They're out there in the cornfield.
Very excited about.
I'm sorry.
I've got to speak British.
It could be a cornfield.
We know those.
All right, Jim.
So China, we need to be very excited about, and we need to be watching them very carefully because they're doing things to do with space research in a completely different way, which actually, to my ears, sounds very refreshing and will keep us, and that's important, will keep us on our toes.
Yes.
Right.
Let's talk about Russia.
Now, for a long time, Russia was a bit of a pacemaker, pace setter, wasn't it?
I mean, the Russians were first to get a man in space with Uri Gagarin.
Where is Russia?
Satellite, all that.
They opened a space race, and it was just a marvelous era.
Now, I grew up at the time, so I'm still a brisk young 71.
So I was a kid when Sputnik went up.
And even before Sputnik, I was reading about spaceflight.
In fact, there were stories about the Russians getting the satellite up first.
That was not something that was total surprise, not to us kids, at least, maybe to the grown-ups.
But off they went.
And they ran that for about 10 years.
They had this lead.
And they milked it for all it was worth and got a whole lot of, well, they didn't get a whole lot of science out of it.
But what they got was what the U.S. slang is street cred.
They got credibility for their technology, for their science, and they got respect.
It also was a major benefit culturally in the Soviet Union because they were laboring under enforced and exaggerated paranoia from the government about foreign enemies.
And suddenly they became respected for something that wasn't weapons related.
They became respected for genuine scientific exploration.
And I think to a large degree that helped relax a lot of the paranoia that the Russians have paid for their paranoia with their own blood.
They've earned that paranoia with their own experience over the centuries.
And so it's not an irrational reaction.
But at the same time, the space program helped them out.
But it was a temporary surge.
It was a surge that once it got the U.S. annoyed and embarrassed enough to spend unlimited amounts of money, they couldn't maintain their lead.
Later on, when the country eventually went bankrupt and largely because they could not compete with American and Western space technology, we look back at the conditions that led to that wonderful, wonderful era of their surge and our counter-surge.
It was probably the best example in my lifetime of the old biblical proverb about swords into plowshares, where you build things originally as weapons, and then you find peaceful, not just peaceful, but darned progressive and helpful and good exploratory purposes.
Those rockets that were being used in the early days were designed for mass murder, partly because of the space program.
They never were used for that purpose.
Instead, they were used for the breakout of humanity from a home planet.
So that's, I think it's a plus.
But that couldn't last because the Russians had got a generation of their best engineers, given them privileges that average Russians didn't have, put them to work on projects that humanity had never done before.
And altogether they had this marvelous, think of it as a hothouse orchid, where you have all these very narrow ranges of conditions, and you have a half a dozen different conditions, all of which must be present for that orchid to bloom.
In this case, for their space program to bloom.
Since then, all those conditions have collapsed.
With the economy over there, with people emigrating, with other people being able to buy good hospital care and good services just for cash instead of because you're a member of the intelligentsia, there's no longer a reason for people to go into the space program.
And so they've lost the best people, and they've lost the government support.
They've lost the cultural support.
They're struggling along with some tricks they've known how to do pretty well, and they can still do them.
Right.
So that is why if you wanted to launch a satellite, if you want to launch a private communications satellite, the people who have the nuts and bolts basic technology to do that reasonably inexpensively are the Russians.
Exactly.
But launching services are only about 3% of the market for space services on the planet.
The other services, such as navigation or science or medicine, or observation and imagery, that's where the money is.
Launch services, the Russians dominate launch services, not dominate, but almost half of the commercial launch services.
So they have half of the 3%.
And the rest of the world has all the rest.
Their own people have recognized the fact that they have painted themselves into a corner, quite literally, and they're not sure how to get out.
And it may well be that they can't get out because they won't ever get the same team.
They won't get the band back together again, ever again.
And they won't get the support.
And they've grabbed all the low-hanging fruit of space first.
But they still carry people into space.
But they see themselves now as basically rickshaw haulers for other people's payloads.
It's not an enviable position, not at all.
Could they save themselves?
Could they get back into the driving seat if they partnered with another nation, maybe Japan or India?
Certainly other nations contribute.
Although international partnerships are always a good selling point to local governments, they never provide the cost savings or the schedule savings that's promised.
It costs more to integrate the systems, and it takes longer to sit down for the extra meetings.
But there are other good reasons to tie people together.
Building the International Space Station the way we did as a kludge, as just a lash together a bunch of Russian and American and European segments that didn't originally start out even being designed to be together.
They resulted in a system that may be uglier than you imagined, but it's also more robust than we had first hoped.
It's proven to be just barely robust enough that when things break down on either side, the other side has got the resources to hang in there until the first side fixes.
We've had a number of emergencies in the early years of the station program that had it been an all-American program or an all-Russian program, they'd have to abandon it.
They would have had to abandon it and start over.
They didn't because of the way the station wound up being thrown together.
And it's one of these marvelous, wonderful surprises you get when you go out exploring things.
You trip across things that are always much more valuable than what you were originally looking for.
Think about most of the exploration, the great age of exploration in the 1600s.
We looked for things, so we looked for a Northwest Passage, we looked for gold.
Spanish found the gold, but didn't do that much good.
And other things we were looking for, the Fountain of Youth, never found them, but we found other things that were much more useful.
One thing I'd like to ask you about, we've got about five minutes or so to our next commercial break here, and I'm not sure whether it's enough time to be able to talk about this, but one thing I found on your great website today was the story of a cosmonaut who was somehow erased from history at the very dawn of the Russian space program.
Oh, yeah.
This man who was there with Uri Gagarin, trained with him, but was airbrushed out of history.
I think his name was Nurilaev.
Well, no, U-Boff is one of them, but there are several of them.
There are many lessons here.
The biggest lesson is that there is still plenty of opportunity for amateur historians and people who are just regular people.
And Britain has such a wonderful history of brilliant amateurs who have contributed enormously to science and history over the centuries.
And keep it up because you can find these things by looking over the literature.
I found those things by reading the Russian books and finding the before and after pictures of some of the group photographs in which people like this man Nel Yubov, we didn't know his name at the time, but he was erased from our picture, and the picture was republished in Moscow, but they didn't realize that the original picture had been published in the New York edition of a different Russian book.
And putting them side by side, it was just wonderful to see that they had clearly faked it.
Now, why they did it took a little longer to figure out.
But it's something you work at, and something that people can work at, and there's still need for it.
The British Interplanetary Society in London does a lot of that kind of private research, and they're a wonderful group to be involved in.
But one of these people you talked about seemed to be a bit of a wayward character.
He was a bit of a joker.
I think he didn't play by the rules.
And eventually, maybe I only speed read this piece about it, but I thought it was, I'd never seen anything about this before.
This particular person, it was argued, perhaps got canned from the program and airbrushed from history because he wasn't playing ball.
He wasn't with the program.
The story, and in fact, nowadays, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the story came out much, much more, much fuller.
In fact, his widow helped the current Russian space agency do a biography about him and what happened to him.
So we're now, new Russia has all sorts of concerns we have in terms of regimes and so forth.
But it's not the Soviet Union.
And thank God for that.
And one of the things is that they still try to control the news, but they're much less stringent about it.
And they're not very good at it.
And these kind of stories show that.
The story about the cosmonaut, this particular cosmonaut, was that he had gotten involved in a brawl off-site with several other cosmonauts and guards trying to stop them because their passes had expired, and they had.
And so they got arrested.
They were turned loose the following morning by an order from the cosmonaut commander who called them in and said that that behavior was not one you would expect of future heroes and the three of them were fired.
He tried for several years, Neil Uboff, to get back in the graces, and he had friends.
He was a good pilot.
He was arrogant, but then that was the kind of husser attitude that East Europeans like in their officers is arrogance, confidence, overconfidence.
But he had friends who were trying to get him back.
And when the last friend died in 1966, and he realized that he'd been flying jets now in exile for several years in Siberia.
And he was never going to become a cosmonaut again.
And he killed himself.
Boy, what a story.
But what a fascinating story.
And of course, in those days, in the Soviet days, America, these people were heroes.
But in the Soviet Union, you had to be a hero and stay a hero.
And if you weren't a hero and seem to be a hero, then you would disappeared.
Jim, stay right there.
We're going to come back and tie up some loose ends.
We're going to talk about the moon landings.
And if we can fit it in, the minutes are ticking down.
I guess we'll talk about UFOs as well with a great guest.
I'm so pleased we got on tonight, Dr. Jim Oberg.
More from him in just a moment.
Jim, we've talked about the Chinese, the Russians.
We've talked about the state of space exploration as it stands now.
A couple of the other things that you've been involved in have been UFOs and the moon landing conspiracy.
Now, I get a lot of email from people regularly.
I'll get at least several per month.
Well, actually, several per fortnight.
People saying, when are you going to talk about the faking of the moon landings?
You've investigated this.
What do you have to say to people who believe that the moon landings never happen?
And they have various bits of what they say are evidence that prove it.
Well, Howard, the story's been around since the landings first began occurring.
And there are people who didn't think it was possible or that it was a hoax.
Later on, looking at those pictures, they do look unearthly, and they do look really weird.
It's because largely they are unearthly.
They're taken on the moon.
The shadowing is wrong, for example.
The shadowing is not what you expect in taking a picture out on a sunny day on Earth, even in a desert, even in a studio.
And where are the stars?
People say, where are the stars in the background?
Well, that's the easy one.
Look at a night football game with a team out in the field with the black sky above.
You'll never see stars in those photographs.
Go look in the sports pages of these pictures of stadiums at night.
And the reason you wouldn't see stars is that the cameras are stopped down to bright light, the bright light illuminating the stands and the fields.
And you never get stars.
They're just too dim.
Same thing is true in the daylight on the moon, except the moon sky is black, which kind of confuses people looking at the page.
It confuses people because on this planet we've evolved.
Our ancestors evolved with vision under one atmosphere and gravity and air.
And then each individual is trained during their lifetime to recognize certain things and by seeing things make judgments and make quick judgments.
You have to make quick judgments.
Think about it in terms of evolutionary terms.
You have to make judgments based upon what's potentially most hazardous to you and don't wait too long to make up your mind because if you think you see a saber-toothed tiger tail or whisker and you want to look twice, you might wind up a saber-toothed tiger poop in the morning.
Or if you're trying to eat something, it might get away from you.
You better react quickly to things that remind you of things that you know are hazardous or things you need to grab to eat.
You're not a dispassionate observer.
This is why people, when they see strange lights or strange things, they will interpret them maybe as erroneous in terms of what they're looking at, but it's proper.
It's the way our sensory system was, I wouldn't say designed, but evolved to do it.
And that's the way it's trained to do it.
I see that a lot with people who look at these videos from either from the moon landing or videos from the shuttle or the space station where they are interpreting things as if these images were back on Earth.
But they're not on Earth.
These are space images with different lighting and different shadowing and different motion and things that are not normal.
And once you get to watch these like I have for hundreds of hours on the control center screen and look at them again and again, you stop realizing how unusual they are.
And this is why I enjoy this, because it's not something anyone starts out knowing how to do, but when you learn it, most people are happy for you to share it.
But we can do a whole hour on that later on.
I'd love to, and I want to have you back on if you'll come back on.
But look, there are people who say that we couldn't have gone to the moon in the first place or anywhere in space because any human being sent out there would be fried pretty quickly by the radiation.
What do you say to that?
Well, the radiation has been a boogeyman from the time of the first A-bombs.
People have this, it might as well be some kind of death ray or a death spell from the Middle Ages.
We know what the power of radiation is.
We know that when the Russians sent their unmanned probes around the moon with animals and with photographic film in them, they didn't fog and the animals didn't die.
So the radiation is not fatal.
If you're out there in space for a particularly bad solar storm, it can get to the point where your cancer chances are going to go way up.
It's going to knock years off your life expectancy, but it's not going to shrivel you up.
And they do say that that has happened to some of the Apollo team.
Well, there are some questions about whether or not radiation has affected them or not.
It's too small a sample to tell.
We've got to send more people to the moon, I guess, or other animals.
But the other thing about the health effects is that other things affect you on space flight.
Isolation affects you.
Like if you were isolated in a small station back on Earth, your immune system would tend to suffer as well.
If you're not exercising and are lying in bed for a year, your heart and muscles are going to atrophy.
So those kind of things happen.
That's why this year-long flight with the twin astronauts last year and other flights like that are important because we need to know those kind of things on a flight to Mars.
But radiation that can hit you, there are occasionally solar storms that are serious enough that you're going to suffer from them, but you're going to suffer a couple years of life expectancy loss.
What about the idea That I keep reading about online, and it seems to get rather than less currency year by year, it seems to get more currency year by year.
That the Apollo astronauts, the ones who went to the moon, encountered UFOs while they were there, but those images were suppressed.
That's a very common idea.
It also began appearing in grocery store tabloid, in the newspapers, weekly papers in the States within a few months of the Apollo landing.
Actually, some of those trace back to actual comments that people heard and imagine what they must mean.
One in particular that I tracked back years ago, but I did a much more detailed study.
It's on my website, it was that while the first crew was walking on the moon, there was a comment made about seeing a suspiciously small white object on a crater rim.
Well, that's become the idea that the astronauts, Armstrong and Aldrin, saw objects on a crater rim in front of them.
That's an imaginary exaggeration of the comet, but the comment itself was real.
It turns out the comet was made not by the men on the moon, but the guy up in the cabin, the command module, Mike Collins, and he was looking for the men on the moon.
He was looking for their spacecraft on the surface through a telescope.
And the section he was looking at, on a crater he was looking at, there was a white object on the edge of that crater.
And he referred to that as a small white object.
And it turned out that was a boulder.
And he kept looking.
He never did see the lunar module.
But it was a comet that did occur when he was passing overhead at the same time as the men were outside.
And that made a lot of people imagine or remember it in a much more exciting way.
And I think that's where the story came from.
And once you have the story going, you know what happens with the story.
They roll down the hill and they gather more and more snow.
Now, you met a lot of people in the space program.
I'm guessing you've met astronauts over the years.
And if you have, I've only ever been able to interview one of them.
Maybe you can connect me with Buzz Aldrin if you can.
But I interviewed Edgar Mitchell, who I found charming and fascinating and thought-provoking.
Of all of the people you met, who's the best?
Who's the most interesting?
Well, I think Neil Armstrong probably would be the most interesting, but I didn't ever get to know him in any way.
I worked with Aldrin on subsequent space mission design, and I was a correspondent with Mitchell for many, many years.
With Mitchell, I told him I was happy he was pushing the frontier because you need people of his intelligence trying to see where the edge of knowledge is, even though I pointed out the track record is pretty dismal in terms of success.
As a rule, although our history books only record the success stories, most people who are coming up with new theories get debunked and discredited pretty quickly.
Mitchell had various theories about ESP that he was trying to promote, and he had stories people told him about other UFO cases, which he tended to believe.
But he never had any of his himself, and he was quite clear that nobody he knew in the asteroid program had UFO experiences on space flights.
So he wasn't ever going out and making things up.
He may have been more credulous, but that's a question of judgment.
And again, people need to be out there.
People need to be looking at pictures of cosmonauts and finding missing people.
People need to be looking at things in the sky, and something strange appears.
Write them down and report them.
There's good things happen when you do that.
Jim, fascinating, wonderful hour.
Would love to have you back on the show.
Only fair for me to give you the chance to plug your website.
I've enjoyed your website today, so for everybody else listening to this, what's the name of your website?
How do you get to it?
The site is just my name, James Oberg.
J-A-M-E-S-O-B-E-R-G.
It's jamesoberg.com.
And it's just a wandering trip through many of the recent work and old work I've done at the edge of knowledge of space history.
And I had a lot of fun doing it.
And I invite people to come join me on that job.
It's something amateurs can get involved in and dig into.
Thank you all.
Very good questions.
Thank you so much.
And have a great Texas afternoon.
Jim Oberg will come back on this show, I promise you.
Jim Oberg, Dr. James Oberg, I will put a link to his website on my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
And I think I was right when I said at the beginning of this show that he is indeed a world-class guest.
More of those coming soon.
I'm going to be catching up with some of the radio show guests here, so you will get to hear that we've had some great people on the radio show and on the podcast as well.
And we have more great guests in the pipeline.
Thank you very much for being my friend and for bearing with me during this year of 2016.
So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained Online.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I'm in London.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
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