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Sept. 27, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:17:56
Edition 313 - Mark O Connell and Dr J Allen Hynek

Disclosure advocate Steve Bassett in London... And Mark O Connell in the US on Dr J AllenHynek...

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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 all of your great response for the emails that keep tumbling into my inbox.
As I always say, and it remains true, I get to see all of your emails and I do act upon them.
And some of them I also respond directly by email to them, or I'll do them as shout-outs and messages here on the show.
And on the subject of that, I know I said last time round that we were going to do some shout-outs on this edition, but I wonder if it's okay with you, because we've got a lot to get in on this edition if I do the shout-outs in the next edition.
So please keep your emails coming.
I love to see them.
You know I do.
And when you email, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
It's just useful for me personally.
I'm not gathering data on you or anything like that.
I just like to know where you are and, you know, to know that we have a real human connection here between me here in London and you wherever in the world you are.
And recently I've had emails literally from every corner of the planet, from Canberra to Los Angeles to just about anywhere you can name and right across the UK, right across Europe as well as the US and Canada and Australasia.
So thank you very much.
You know how grateful I am.
And if you can make a donation, it is vital now more than at any other time to be able to help this show carry on.
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Theunexplained.tv is the website that has been running successfully now for how many years now?
11 years, more than 11 years, 11 and a half years.
We've been here.
So that's pretty much of an achievement.
I guess that makes us podcasting pioneers.
On this edition of the show, bearing in mind we're not doing shout-outs this time, we'll do them next time, two people, one of whom has been on the show before, the other is new to you.
Number one is an update from Steve Bassett from the Paradigm Research Group, a man who's given a big portion of the last 20 years of his life to chasing the prospect of disclosure.
And it's been a tough ride for him, as you will hear in this show.
Now, after the election in America of Donald Trump and not Hillary Clinton, Steve decided to come over to Europe here.
So he's been here for a big portion of this year and he'll be here into the beginning of 2018 to pursue the aims and raise funds for the campaign for disclosure internationally.
So he's basing himself in London for a while and he came into my radio show a couple of nights ago.
So you're going to hear that conversation here.
Plus, you'll hear a conversation about one of the godfathers, one of the founders of UFO Investigation.
Some people say he is the most important person that there's ever been in this field, Dr. J. Alan Hinek, a man who's written a biography, a fascinating book about him.
Mark O'Connell will be here in the second part of the show.
So two big names on this edition and two people who I think that you need to be hearing here.
Thank you very much for all of your support.
Let's get on with the show.
As they say, we'll start with Steve Bassett, and we're talking here about disclosure.
First of all, just to make sure we get the definitions right, what is disclosure?
There's 70 years of research that confirms an extraterrestrial presence is engaging the planet.
It's a vast.
The evidence is overwhelming.
And it comes in many, many forms.
There's also considerable evidence that confirms that governments, particularly the major developed nations, know this.
Now, when I say, I say elements within that government, usually within their military intelligence complex.
So there's an extraterrestrial presence.
The governments know it.
The governments have also chosen that they would classify it.
They would not provide that information to the public.
For many, many years, that was called the UFO cover-up.
I had a pretty substantial role in changing that terminology.
Activism is often about changing terminology if you want to succeed.
It's not a cover-up because it was legal policy of the United States government supported by its allies for national security reasons.
It was an embargo, a truth embargo.
And that's the situation.
And so the question at hand is, is it time for the world to be told by their governments the truth of an extraterrestrial presence?
And then I would assume after that, the fundamental truth, and after that, a great deal of more information.
All right.
Is it time?
During the Cold War was not the time.
Too many nuclear weapons pointed at too many different countries.
Too unstable, too unsure.
It was not going to happen.
But the Cold War ended 26 years ago.
And frankly, there was, I think, some plans to disclose early after the end of the Cold War that got thwarted somewhat.
It's slowing overdue.
And so that's what disclosure is, ending that disclosure.
Wind back, I think, some of the things that you just said, because you made a whole bunch of assumptions there, the biggest one of which is that this is happening and that governments know that it's happening.
How do you, Steve Bassett, know that?
20 years, right, of paying attention, reviewing the overall evidence, talking to scores of contactees, talking to military agency witnesses who worked in the government, talking to top researchers.
There's over 5,000 books, thousands of documents.
The actual amount of evidence, very few people really have an understanding of how much there is.
And the only reason they don't have that understanding is that the position of the United States, the preeminent superpower, is still, there is nothing to it at all.
There is no evidence for this at all.
And in fact, President Obama in 2011 put that statement out through his Office of Science and Technology Policy on his website in response to PRG's petition for disclosure.
Now this is of course a complete lie, and there's nothing else they could have done.
And so because of that embargo, naturally, people assume, well, there must not be anything to it.
Well, guess what?
Governments lie to you a lot, and they have a tendency to lie more about issues of great magnitude.
War, peace, survival, economics, extraterrestrials.
This is one of the major dysfunctions that is drawing down and confronting the modern world.
Distrust in government is collapsing, in media is collapsing, because when you lie to people, they stop trusting you.
Over time, though, and away from the UFO and ETSU, the truth has a habit of coming out.
The truth has a habit of coming out because people are inclined to tell it.
People who get up in years, who are perhaps on their deathbed, they want to confess.
They want to tell what they know.
Governments fall.
Members of governments disagree on the policy.
If there was a truth embargo, why has somebody not broken ranks now?
Well, to what degree and why aren't we reading about them every day in the papers?
If someone wants, they can go read witness testimony from people who have essentially come out on this issue for weeks.
It's on the internet.
The Disclosure Project has huge amounts of this type of witness testimony.
Paradigm Research Group brought...
Yeah, and the website, by the way, is paradigmresearchgroup.org, where you want to go because we'll be talking about a lot that's on that website.
We had 42 witnesses come in from 10 countries to testify for 30 hours in April of 2013.
It's all on the net, right?
Hundreds of reporters have seen that citizen hearing on disclosure testimony.
And we could go on and on and on.
However, for SAC-based officers who have come forward to testify about these craft coming down and turning off our missiles, our nuclear missiles, which has happened in the United States, Russia, in France.
In 1966, I think.
Well, 60s, in the 70s, in the UK, it's happened in France and in Russia.
That's significant.
But even though they're SAC base officers and Air Force officers with security clearances, the government's position is there is nothing to this.
And so that means that most of the media, almost all of the media, is going to step back.
All right.
Now, the problem here is that this embargo is now pretty much making fools out of everybody.
On many occasions, it's made fools out of the Army, the Air Force, the White House, the CIA.
It's made fools out of Air Force officers.
It's made fools out of the hoaxers that jump in to play their games.
And it's made fools out of the researchers who have been taken in by hoaxers or disinformation by the government.
It's a three-ring circus.
It's a fiasco.
It is a global massive lie.
And the information behind the presence of the extraterrestrials, the information regarding technologies that we have been researching and re-engineering since the 50s, is earth-changing.
And so this is a trivial matter.
Though, Steve, there are people who say it's all happening at Area 51, but there are credible people in and around the government of your country who will say there is nothing of the sort happening there, but the material that is being dealt with there is stuff that has to be classified just like any country has, material that is secret, that for reasons of national security and defense, it has to be put behind some very high barriers.
It just so happens that America is a very big country with very big interests, so we have to do it in a particularly large place that is particularly secret.
Well, Area 51 is just a symbol.
I assure you, the government has enough facilities in the western part of the United States to run thousands of USAP and dark black programs.
They have underground facilities.
They have huge numbers of researchers.
Area 51, I don't care if there's anything there now or not, doesn't matter.
They move things around.
But the amount of money that's spent on black programs is staggering.
And the amount of work that's going on is staggering, and much of it is underground.
This is not exactly the kind of country that the original founders envisioned.
A vast military and complex with huge amounts of black programs, vast funding, research that's 50, 60 years ahead of what's in the public domain, which they constantly brag about, while we have people starving and countries being destroyed by weather changes and this technology is just not available.
It would be just as bad if the government had an absolute cure to cancer but had been keeping it for 50 years because they didn't want to overpopulate the planet.
I want to get on now a man who you know and I know.
He is the man behind UFO Truth magazine.
He started his work by representing people in uniforms, police, ambulance service workers, people who do that sort of thing, who frequently are on the front line of sightings and experiences because of the shifts they work, the work that they do, the locations they go to.
That organization called Proof Ask Gary Hesseltine is online to us from the north of England.
Gary, thank you for waiting so patiently while Steve set out his stall here.
I know you two know each other.
What do you make of what Steve has just said?
I back up everything that Steve has said there.
The problem that you've got is that the media don't want to look at the evidence because when the media turn up and they say, well, show me the evidence, what they really mean is show me the alien body and show me the piece of spaceship.
Now, in the public domain, which I suspect we only know 10% of what's really going on, the 90% secret world, well, the 90% secret world probably does have those things.
But because it's secret, we're never going to have the need to know.
So we're left with that 10%.
And in that 10%, we don't have the alien body.
We don't have the irrefutable piece of machinery.
But what we do have is the collective testimony of thousands of military witnesses, thousands of government documents from all around the world, pilots, galaw, who've gone on the record around the world.
You've got radar testimonies from all around the world.
You have got air traffic controllers from around the world.
You have got sonar operators from underwater who are reporting fast-moving objects under the sea, but nobody tells you about that.
UFOs for the last 70 years have been seen regularly going in and out of large bodies of water.
The thing is, you're just not directing through the media, which stems back to 1953, the Robertson panel, that says we've got to strip the aura of flying sources that the public have, and we're going to do that by engaging with the media.
So after 1953, everybody that's been born has been living in a world of secrecy.
And I guess, Steve and Gary, this is a question for both of you, really, whether it's Andover, UK or Anaheim, US, the people who report these things, who claim to have experienced these things, who claim maybe to have been military personnel involved in these things, they can't all be lying.
Of course not.
By the way, let me just happen to mention that Gary Hazeltine is easily the hardest working man in the United Kingdom on this subject.
The amount of work that he does, the magazine, the conferences, and on and on and on, and he needs to get a lot of credit for that.
The simple truth is this.
Here's one of the analogies that I like to make about how bizarre this situation is.
The United States, around 1962, about the same time that they started pulling black programs out from underneath the White House and the Congress, meaning they took them dark, meaning you don't have a need to know, which is a constitutional breach and illegal, embargoed Cuba.
And for the next 50-some years, there were many people that were advocating to end that embargo.
But during the Cold War, it wasn't going to happen, right?
You can understand why.
There was some irritation over those missiles.
After the Cold War was over, there was no need to continue to embargo Cuba, but it went on.
And so the activists did their best.
And recently, as you know, there was a rapprochement under Obama.
Trump would like to turn it around.
In which we've now opened up to Cuba.
Fine.
Now, imagine if you were an activist like I've been for the last 20 years trying to convince the United States government that they needed to end this embargo in Cuba.
And the government's formal stated position, which the media has accepted, was that what are you talking about?
There is no island named Cuba in the Caribbean.
Caribbean.
There's no island.
It doesn't exist.
But there's photographs.
They're fake.
People have been there.
They're lying.
Imagine how bizarre that would be.
That is the situation.
The ET issue was the most highly classified piece of information and everything around it in the United States government.
And that's true of the UK government, which I assure you knows about this.
And they are really serious about keeping it that way.
And so they are prepared to lie to anybody's face, to any media, any reporter, any producer, that there is nothing to this, but it is a lie.
Gary, come in.
Yeah, I kind of just want to illustrate a point, and it seems the appropriate time to do it.
As you know, you had me on just a couple of weeks ago to promote the conference that we, the magazine conference that we had last weekend.
Well, one of the guests that was speaking was a military guy called Robert Jacobs.
Well, his involvement pretty much goes like this, and it doesn't take long to tell the story, but it's an incredible story.
Basically, in 1964, he's now 80 years old, in 1964, he was a second lieutenant in the US Air Force, and he was a missile specialist that was tracking an Atlas ballistic missile that was on a launch test.
It had a dummy warhead on and it was being filmed with a high-powered optical piece of equipment.
Now, it went off over the horizon, he couldn't see anymore, and it was just a routine test as far as he was concerned.
Two days later, he's called in to his commanding officer's desk, office, and basically, Captain Mansman, who was his commanding officer, said, take a look at this projector film.
There were two other men in the background wearing suits who did not speak.
The film was played to him, and sure enough, he saw the missile that had taken off the launch, and it had been tracked by his optical cameras.
But then, a UFO flew into the frame as clear as day.
And he said on the screen, it would have still been about 12 to 14 inches wide on his projector screen.
A UFO flew into the frame that then pulled alongside the Atlas missile that was traveling at 8,000 miles an hour.
It then began to fire a beam at the ballistic missile.
It then circled the ballistic missile, hitting it with a beam on three or four occasions.
And guess what?
The weapon then, the ballistic missile then starts tumbling out.
And the commanding officer says, what do you think that was?
And he says, I think that was a UFO.
He's then ordered to never say anything about it.
Classic cover-up.
And then Captain Mansman, who actually went on the record to corroborate what Jacob said 17 years later, said that when he walked out of the room, the two guys that were in the corner, who were from the CIA, they said, thanks very much for the film.
You will never see it again.
You are never to talk about this again.
Now, how real do you want this to be?
And we know that there are many reports of that happening.
I guess if you want to bring it up to date, though, and Steve, this is for you, I think.
Then why are the ETs, if they are interested in our destructive capabilities, which they seem to have been by interrupting the ongoing process of having missiles on standby, which it seems it is claimed that has been done a number of times, including in that instance, why aren't they going to North Korea?
Why aren't they stopping Kim Jong-un and his development program?
Why would that be?
There seems no, you know, But why would they not do that, but interrupt missiles on standby during the Cold War?
First, that's a question for the extraterrestrials.
It is.
And if you can get one of them in here and ask that question.
That's a question that you're asking.
There must be a question that you're asking.
I can't speak for the extraterrestrials.
They turned off American missiles back in the 60s and 70s.
We were the leading world power.
They were clearly sending a message.
That's What most of the witnesses felt.
They could have melted the missiles in their silos.
Instead, they just turned them off, which is impossible.
And then we turned them back on.
And they've done the same thing in other countries.
What's important here is not why haven't they turned off Kim Jong-un's missiles?
What's important here is they turned off our missiles, and we have the witnesses, highly credible people, to it.
By the way, let me also add that there's an organization called NARCAP, that's the acronym, that controls one of the most important pieces of evidence in the world.
And it is the pilot siting database amassed for decades by former NASA scientist Dr. Richard Haynes, who's still alive.
It has at least 3,500 pilot accounts in it.
Why are they amassed in that database?
Because many decades, several decades ago, both the airlines and the Air Force made it clear to their pilots that they could not and would not talk about anything they see of this nature or they would lose their ability to fly the planes.
And so they would then go to Haines and give them the report under, I guess, assurances that they would maintain anonymous.
And of course, it wasn't just the airlines saying, we don't want you to do this.
There was the whole thing about the US.
And the UK is a very important thing.
This is the idea, yes, across the Atlantic.
They can't have their military pilots.
It's the idea of ridicule from your peers.
So this database is filled with accounts of pilots and co-pilots seeing 40-foot discs maneuvering off their cockpit and around the plane and taking off at 5,000 miles an hour.
Now, I tried to get that database in front of Congress.
We didn't want to see it.
I would have liked to have gotten into the citizen area on disclosure.
But that's just another piece of massive evidence.
Let me be very clear with your very large audience around the world, and particularly in the UK.
And by the way, the UK papers, of which you have many, and they are what we don't call pure tabloids.
They're news tabloids, which means they do news, and some of them cover a lot of interesting things.
They pump out more articles on this subject than any other group of papers in the world.
And the British people have been receiving this information massively throughout this country for decades.
Secondly, I think most of the British people understand the little dance and the games that the UK government's been playing with this subject for 25 years.
The UK government absolutely knows about an extraterrestrial presence.
Take it to the bank.
And the principal reason that they do not tell us right now that Theresa May doesn't go out and make the disclosure announcement and go down in history.
Listen to Brexit at the moment.
Well, not only that, but as you know, the UK made a decision some time ago that it would follow the American elephant, trunk to tail, down through history.
If we go to war, UK follows us to war.
If we bomb a country, the UK bombs a country.
And if the American people, the American government wants a truth embargo, then the UK will follow it.
I believe the UK, it's time for them to break this bond.
Great ally, it's okay, but that doesn't mean that the UK and the Americans are twins.
It doesn't mean that the UK is obligated to pursue every policy the United States wants to pursue, no matter how absurd or ridiculous.
And May has the potential to do this.
One of the reasons I came here in April, after the election, and then came back again in August, and I'm going to be here for another five months, is I'm pursuing international options for disclosure.
I spent a week in Moscow.
I gave an extensive interview to one of their national radio, national television networks.
We're waiting to see what they do with that.
I hope to meet with some officials retired or active here in the United Kingdom, because right now the United States is out of the picture.
The President of the United States is almost zero likelihood he would disclose.
Well, again, he's dealing with Kim Jong-un.
He's dealing with internal opposition and stuff like this.
So I guess this is being pushed down the agenda.
You're here in the UK, and as you said, Stephen, it's nice to have you here.
You're going to be here for a period of months to promote this issue, to raise funds for this.
You say that you're going to be having some meetings with people who know stuff.
I would love to meet with anyone in the MOD who is currently active or retired or in your foreign office.
Anyone in the government that wants to sit down with somebody that can discuss this in an intelligent way, who has the courage to do so.
But there is a school of thought here.
And look, I am being as skeptical as some of my listeners are here when I say this.
That if those people are out there to be spoken to and if they have a story to tell you that will forward the work that you're doing, then they would have been in touch with you already.
They can use the internet.
They know how that works.
Your profile is very high.
Of course.
So, you know, they haven't done it up to now.
Why are they going to do it while you're here?
The reason that I would suggest that they take advantage of this or take action, take a look at the world.
Look at the status.
Look at the situation that's going on globally and geopolitically.
Things are breaking down.
So how would it help?
Let's just assume for a minute here.
We've got to take some commercials in just a moment, otherwise my producer is going to go into full meltdown rather than partial meltdown.
If we were apprised of this information at this time of great, we can agree that it's a time around the world of turbulence and instability, how is that going to help us?
That is a three-hour lecture.
Here's the best I can do.
If you look at the various threads that are operating globally and some internal threads, all of which are leading towards incredible destruction, possibly nuclear war, disclosure of the extraterrestrial presence would be the greatest game changer, topic changer, and paradigm shift in all of history.
It would allow us to step back and recalculate all of the equations that we're currently calculating every day that are taking us basically to hell in a handbasket.
In other words, once you know this, nothing else matters.
Recently, there was a major development in the United States, And that is that we came close to having disclosure.
And the reason was because Paradigm Research Group was able to finally break through to the media on the subject in a political context.
And the reason for that was because the leading candidate to be president, Senator Hillary Clinton, had a long-standing connection to the issue, as well as her husband, as well as her campaign chairman, and many other people in their immediate team.
You've said this to me before.
What is that connection?
It's the Rockefeller Initiative, 1993 to 1996.
Lawrence Rockefeller approached the Clinton administration.
He wanted disclosure right then because the Cold War was over.
He proposed to the president that they release all files in the government's hands, which would have been a pretty big deal, and also a grant amnesty.
He wanted to provide a letter and a report.
Researchers were brought in.
He had so much clout.
He was a major funder of the DNC.
And so consequently, this went on for three years.
But Clinton was blocked.
There was no way they were going to give him anything.
And so he was stonewalled.
They realized they're up against a constitutional breach, and it shut down in 96.
Now, and all the people in the Clinton administration at that time that knew about the Rockefeller Initiative all had big ambitions.
Al Gore, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, George Stephanoffless, and on and on.
And so they all just agreed, we'll just never speak of this, right?
We'll just never talk about it.
The media doesn't cover it.
And so they didn't talk about it until finally in January of 2016.
I'm sorry, 15, because PRG had finally gotten this issue in front of a lot of reporters, they started to get calls from reporters, what about this issue?
And they would not answer.
All right.
I want to pick this up after the news, Steve, because this is the story of how you say ahead of the last presidential election in the U.S., the one that did not go Hillary Clinton's way, as is described in her new book that is in all good bookshops right now, there was a glide path towards this thing that you're working towards, disclosure, and there are reasons why that did not happen.
Not just the election of Donald Trump and not Hillary Clinton.
And Steve, you've made quite a commitment by coming over here for a period of time to the UK.
Is that because things have stalled in the U.S.?
Absolutely.
Again, I didn't vote for either of the two main candidates.
Who I voted for is irrelevant.
The point is, is that had Hillary Clinton, if the debate moderators, who are all television journalists, hosts, multi-millionaires, all of them, had brought this subject up, which they should have in the debates, because over 400 articles were written about the connection of Clinton and her people to the ET issue.
Plus, she had addressed it 12 times during the campaign.
We all watched.
I was riveted by those presidential debates.
They were theater on every level that You can name.
How could you have got?
Did you try?
How could you have got inserted into one of those debates a question about this?
Impossible.
The way it works there is that the television news hosts, whether it's Megan Kelly or whether it's George Stephanophoulos or Mike Wallace, they have the control.
They decide what questions to ask.
And they can't be influenced even by their own network.
They give them enormous power.
Now, they're all multimillionaires.
And by and large, the television journalists are more controlled on this issue than the print journalists.
Again, 400 articles about the Clinton connection to the ET issue.
New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Times of London, right?
Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and magazines, the New Yorker, the New Republic.
And you can actually go see these articles if you go to this webpage.
You go to paradigmresearchgroup.org and you click on quick links.
All right.
What sort of articles are these?
What do they say?
These are articles about the connection between Hillary Clinton, her husband, the Rockefeller Initiative, John Podesta, making these connections, which ultimately forced them to speak to the issue on 12 separate occasions during the campaign because they knew they couldn't stonewall the press indefinitely.
They were getting these calls from the reporters.
I know this because reporters told me that, and they would not return the calls.
They would not answer.
They knew they were running out of time.
And so they felt they had to say something, right?
And so they carefully orchestrated various comments.
And all of these comments and all of the interviews where she talks and her husband talks and Podesta talks about the E.T. issue are on this website.
I'm going to give you right now.
Just give me a flavor, because I did watch an awful lot of the coverage on all of the channels over here and a lot of the American channels.
And I listened to all of the American talk show hosts, the Hannity's, and all of those people.
I've got to say, I must have missed something because I didn't hear this issue raised.
It was 12 times.
News conference.
What sorts of questions?
More political coverage of this issue than ever before.
Of him.
How about this?
On December the 31st, while she's campaigning for what is considered the first primary in the campaign, in the New Hampshire primary, which in America is like the most important in a sense, she's campaigning in New Hampshire.
She gives a three-hour interview to the board of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.
They ask her all the tough questions.
But afterwards, she seeks out a reporter named Damon Steer, knowing that he is going to ask her about the ET question.
He does.
And in a 90-second response on the record, she says, if I'm elected, I'm going to get to the bottom of this issue.
We might set up a task force to investigate Area 51.
We may have already been visited.
We don't know.
What was his question?
The question was, are you going to engage the UFO issue?
What are your thoughts on that?
Because remember, her campaign chairman had called for the release of the files in 2002, 2003.
The connection was kind of known, but the Rockefeller Initiative had never been mentioned until an article in the Sarasota Herald Tribune by Billy Cox, I think in January of 2016, and the cat was out of the bag.
So she literally says these things.
It created a couple of hundred articles almost immediately.
And for you, it must have been your birthday, Christmas, New Year, all of those things.
I knew where this was going.
I knew that if any of those...
All right, we know that Hillary lost in the end, but this issue didn't make it to the final cut.
I mean, the final debates were a real bunfight between the two of them on all of the mainstream issues.
Why did it run out of steam?
By the time the debates were over, I was in a working source relationship with nearly 40 journalists, including two Pulitzer Prizes.
Now, let me explain that.
It's not like, oh, gee, I have an email for somebody and I send them an email.
I'm in a working relationship with them.
They're writing articles.
I'm giving them information on a real-time basis.
And they're doing to do what?
But they've been writing articles.
And these people are ready to just really jump on her, all right, or this story, right?
And the first, what I felt certain would happen is that some of these television journalist hosts were going to bring this question up because it was all of the New York Times for crying out loud and ask her about it during the debates.
When a single question was asked of any of the 28 candidates in 36 debates and forums on the ET issue, though it was all over the press, they didn't have the ability to jump.
So they backed away.
Fine.
And the Clintons knew that, and they shut up on June 12th, June the 2nd.
It was the last time anybody in the Clinton team mentioned this issue.
They thought they had the White House.
So it wasn't the failure of the candidate and her people.
It was the failure of the media to go in for the kill.
No, that was the first fit.
The failure was the media initially in the debates.
The print media had done their job.
Fantastic.
So you think they'd laid the groundwork.
Absolutely.
Right?
Then it was her failure.
She didn't win the election, right?
Because once she loses the election, there is no story.
And the media now is dealing with another massive new story, and that was it.
And so when that electron was over, I knew that the advocacy process was basically blown up.
Hillary's written the book.
Is it in the book?
No.
Why is it not in the book?
Well, Secretary Clinton, President Clinton, John Podesta, and any number of the Clinton people tomorrow could give an interview to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and blow this thing sky high.
Right?
And I got 40 journalists that will be on them.
I mean, literally, immediately.
Guess what?
If they do that, guess who gets to be the disclosure president?
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump.
And you think that's why they won't?
Absolutely.
Even though this issue, and I know how I've known you for a while, you are so passionate about it, even though it's so important, you think Hillary's got nothing to lose now, but you think they won't do this because it puts Trump in poll position to be the person who leads humanity in this direction.
He would be the disclosure president, and the irony of that was overwhelming.
But let me be very frank.
One of the absolute most important reasons why Senator Secretary, rather, Hillary Clinton did not win the presidency is that for most, almost all of her political life, When the chips are down, she always puts her own personal aspirations ahead of the truth and the public's interest.
And too many people finally saw that, and that's why she lost.
If she had engaged the extraterrestrial issue, and I sent this message to Podesta repeatedly, if she had engaged the ET issue, she would be president today, and we would be in the post-disclosure world.
It was one of the most colossal blunders any politician has ever done.
This leaves you a very disappointed man, and over here in the UK, trying to fire up this issue.
I want to take you back to 2009.
You and I met face to face for the first time in Liverpool.
You were part of a conference there that I was reporting on called the Beyond Knowledge Conference.
You hijacked me to a church.
I did.
There is a bombed-out church in Liverpool.
It was bombed, but not totally destroyed during World War II.
It's St. Luke's, and it has been left at the top of Bold Street, exactly in that state.
Still standing, the walls are still there, the altar is still there, but it has no roof, it has no windows, as a symbol to the people of Liverpool of what war means and how we must never be there again.
It's a lovely, tranquil place to visit, and that's where I took you in a break from this conference.
And we discussed Obama and whether Obama would be the disclosure president.
And at that point, you were massively enthusiastic about this.
Here's a little flavor of that conversation, the way that it went when we got to the subject of Barack Obama and possibly a new dawn for this issue.
Open, transparent government will be one of the hallmark phrases of the 21st century and where we have to go.
But is he in train and on side with this?
That's what I mean, Richard.
We don't know, but it doesn't matter.
What matters is that Obama is probably acceptable to military intelligence committees that run this issue.
We think he is acceptable.
I don't think Clinton was.
We don't think that George W. Bush was.
Do we think that Bush wasn't part of this because people thought he was too stupid?
Let me put it this way.
The military intelligence community was very unhappy with George Bush, not only because they didn't feel he had the skills to deal with extremely complex issues, but also because he broke with his own father with respect to the policy in Iraq, and they were very unhappy.
And then he also tried to scapegoat them on the issue.
And so Bush was not going to be a player.
It just wasn't going to happen unless another nation forced it, which could happen at any time.
Obama is acceptable.
He's quite intelligent.
He has shown that he is willing to play ball with the military intelligence issues and not be too left of center.
I think that is, we're going to play four minutes or so, but I think that basically in 90 seconds or so is the flavor of where we were at back in 2009.
It seems to me that it was a much more optimistic era than now.
Well, what is not mentioned there is what was driving my thinking, is that Obama made very interesting decisions.
The key people in the Rockefeller initiative were Hillary Clinton.
He made her Secretary of State.
John Podesta, he made him the chairman of his transition team.
Leon Panetta, chief of staff to President Clinton, he made him Secretary of Defense.
Do you think it was anywhere on his radar?
I believe that once Hillary Clinton lost that election to Obama, another election that she was overwhelmingly ahead and thought to win, she probably felt, and her husband also felt, that the truth embargo might not last through eight more years.
Then they had to consider the possibility that Obama would be the disclosure president.
But understand, if that's the case.
Now, I'm going back to 2009 now, right?
Yeah, he would be the disclosure president, but she and her husband would get grandfathered in because of their efforts back in 93, 96.
And of course, the Democratic Party would get the glory.
And so it's not that bad a situation.
And so I know that Podesta tipped him off during the transition period.
Whatever he didn't know, he learned at that point.
And then the question was, could they advance it?
Well, what happened was the Republicans took all the money and threw us into a major crisis.
And Obama was attacked by everybody, left, right, I mean, by everybody in Washington that wasn't a Democrat.
And he was shut down.
So it didn't happen.
And she finally got another.
But it was that, it was bringing in those particular people that told me that they were preparing possibly to do disclosure under Obama.
And then as the administration moved forward, I realized, no, I think he's going to be boxed up.
We have a great old song, old rhyme here about the grand old Duke of York.
Have you heard this?
The grand old Duke of York, he had 10,000 men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill and he marched them down again.
In your account of the way things have been happening, looking back to Obama, but maybe before him too, certainly before him too, and now with Hillary Clinton, it seems that America has been getting to the top of that hill.
The top of that hill is the place where we get the sunlight, we get the disclosure.
But unfortunately, every time the troops get marched back down again, how long do you think can those journalists who you are in contact with, the ones who were in poll position to be part of this whole process, how long do you think they can wait?
How long do you think they can maintain their enthusiasm for this, for it to happen someday?
Well, the extraterrestrials haven't gone away.
Witnesses keep coming forward.
Well, how do we know they're here?
Because sightings keep taking place.
Crop circles keep put down in the same fields in the UK year after year.
Doug and Dave are dead, right?
And by the way, that whole thing was a joke.
They made maybe a couple of circles, but they hardly did anything, whatever.
The point is that the issue hasn't gone away.
It's more important than ever, right?
Particularly because of the sequestered technology and the re-engineering of E.T. craft technology.
So at this point in time, there are 10 heads of state that could end this embargo tomorrow.
One of them is out of the game, and that is the President of the United States.
The others are, in order of likelihood, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Theresa May of the UK, Macron of France, Modi of India, the current Prime Minister of Australia, Trudeau of Canada, that's virtually everybody who matters.
It's the ten what I consider most appropriate nations that could pull it off.
There are some nations, if the president of Somalia were to announce ET presidence tomorrow, it's not going anywhere, right?
These are the ten nations that can do it in that order.
And the one who I believe now is the most likely, more likely than the U.S., this is the first time I could say that it's more likely that a non-U.S.
president is going to be the first to disclose, is Vladimir Putin.
He is the one that when you do all the math, the answer is Vladimir Putin.
And why would he want to do that?
Vladimir Putin, well, it's complicated, but let me give a simplified answer, and that is this.
Vladimir Putin, if anything, wants to see Russia return to the kind of status and glory that it had when it was the Soviet Empire.
He's not going to get the 14 republics back, but he wants that prestige.
Well, making the announcement will be a great thing, but announcing to the world that there's a bigger power than him or any of us, that's not going to give him prestige, is it?
That's going to give the ETs prestige.
You think that's going to put him in?
The ETs have all the prestige they want.
I wouldn't worry about them.
The point is, is that Putin knows full well that a huge portion of the world's people now already know there's an extraterrestrial presence.
The polling already shows that, right?
Half of Britain, if you were to hold a poll in Britain tomorrow, at least half of the British people would say, yeah, this phenomenon is extraterrestrial.
Polls tend to show that people are prepared to accept the possibility.
No, they show that they believe it's extraterrestrial, right?
They did a poll of the world.
Ipsos, which is a major polling operation, did a world poll.
In other words, 36 countries to represent the entire 7 billion people.
And you know what the question was?
Do you think there's extraterrestrials living on Earth?
20% of the world's people said yes.
The truth embargo is no longer...
The people know the government's lying.
The government knows the people know the government's lying.
And it's all becoming ridiculous.
And Putin breaks that open.
He gets the greatest political legacy in history.
He elevates himself and his country to the front of the world stage.
That's why he would do it.
You've been interviewed in Moscow.
You know that, and I know that they have a great interest in these things over there.
They have their own events that can be put in the calendar of strange happenings that may be inspired in this way, like Tunguska and various other things that are bizarre.
Missile shutdowns, turning on the title.
Missing shutdowns just like America, just like the UK.
So they're interested.
They're on side.
You need to be able to speak with Putin or his people.
Are you trying to do that?
Let's say this.
When I was there in April, in addition to giving an extensive interview, I met with six groups over three days.
Each group had between two and five people, and almost all of them were former military or political people from the Soviet or Russian government.
People with Putin's ear?
I don't know.
I know one of them had his ear for sure.
And they had all been working with this issue when in government, and then once they got out, they're still into it.
And so this issue was quite there.
So all I can say is if, look, I would love to meet with representatives of the MOD at any time in the UK, and I sure as hell would be happy to meet with any officials in the Kremlin to discuss this issue.
Not that I can't tell them something they don't already know.
Steve Bassett is here.
Steve, are you in the UK for five months, did you say?
I'll be here through the end of February.
I mean, the end of January.
I'd like to get a report back from you maybe around Christmas time.
We'll see how it's all going with this.
I think a useful thing to do would be to talk or to get the views of, I spoke with him earlier tonight, Nick Pope, the man who used to investigate UFO and anomalous reports for the Ministry of Defense.
Now, the Ministry of Defense stopped funding him and this work a few years ago, so now Nick is working very successfully as somebody commenting on these fields and helping to develop media perceptions of these fields in the United States.
He's very happily living there.
He's a good friend of mine and this show.
I asked him to give both of us, Steve, an overview of where he thinks the disclosure movement and disclosure as a topic, those things are at as of this date in 2017.
Let's hear what he said.
Well, I think it's admirable.
I just am a little skeptical that it's actually going to achieve anything.
I think, first of all, it depends what's out there to be disclosed.
I know we've discussed this before.
I've used the phrase disclosure with a big D versus disclosure with a little D. Disclosure with a big D is clearly what Steve and various others in the UFO community want.
They want to force the government to reveal what they think that they're hiding, i.e.
an alien presence.
And they have this kind of view that one evening the president's going to come on television.
My fellow Americans, people of the world, we're not alone.
As I say, I think it's admirable.
They're lobbying hard.
But I doubt the real world is like that.
And I don't think this movement, which isn't actually very big, to be honest, compared to something like the civil rights movement, is going to achieve it.
Quite.
I understand where you're coming from on that.
There was a great deal of optimism for Obama when he came in on a whole variety of levels.
But one of those levels was that Obama would be the man who got the briefings and would go public on what the government down the years knew.
And of course, Obama didn't do it.
Hillary Clinton, there were great hopes for her, but of course she wasn't elected, and it is believed it wasn't on her agenda anyway.
So we now wonder whether Donald Trump will do anything.
And it seems he's so preoccupied with Kim Jong-un and domestic issues that he's not going to be able to do it either.
Indeed, I think the disclosure movement has been talking for years about as each successive president comes in, is this going to be the disclosure president?
Are we just around the corner now?
And I always joke, I'm afraid, that disclosure is like tomorrow, it just never seems to come.
And we're always tantalizingly told we're nearly there, we're nearly there.
And actually, there is a certain logic that said if there ever was to be a disclosure president, Trump would be it.
Because in one sense, you would think, looking at him, he's probably the one who would care least about various cautious officials in the intelligence community saying we shouldn't be disclosing this.
If Trump as president was briefed on an alien presence, you could see him tweeting it.
Well, no, exactly.
That will be a 3.30 a.m. tweet without a doubt.
But it doesn't look like because of his other considerations he's going to do it.
Having said all of that, then, is there any point in this kind of pressure for disclosure when the likelihood is that disclosure won't happen?
And I wonder, as a secondary point to that, whether the problem is with the public, because the public is interested but not interested enough to push for this, whether it's with governments who really want to keep the lid on something they know, or whether it's with security services.
It seems to me there are three levels to this issue.
Well, there's a disconnect here.
In one sense, Steve and the disclosure campaign is very, very small.
And why I say there's a disconnect is that opinion polls conversely show that belief in an extraterrestrial presence, belief in government hiding this, is actually, well, 50% or higher.
So Steve is somehow not managing to leverage that interest that is out there into concrete action.
And that is a key point.
Nick Pope, a man who knows about these things.
I mean, look, we sat around at a lunch table, didn't we, in Liverpool with Richard C. Hoagland, who's often on this program, with Nick Pope, myself, and Robin Richard Hoagland's partner.
We all sat around having a nice Chinese meal in Chinatown in Liverpool, where you get some of the finest Chinese food there is.
And we talked about these issues back then.
Nick Pope makes the point that you haven't as yet leveraged the degree of support that you will need to make this happen.
That's a fair point, isn't it?
That's obviously a self-evident truth.
The principal reason that we've not been able to leverage it is that we can't get enough funding.
There's just no funding for this advocacy.
One of the reasons you're here, isn't it?
You're trying to kickstart the funding.
I'm always trying to get funding, but after the election of November the 8th, it virtually completely dried up.
If I was able to write you, you know, if I was as rich as my namesake, Howard Hughes, if I was able to write you a check for a million dollars right now, how would you use it?
I mean, look, at the end of the show, you hit me with that one.
Well, you know, I think if your dreams came true and you got the money that you need, where would you run first?
Where would you go?
Well, there is a documentary that needs to be done, which is on my list, which could be extremely powerful, very important.
That would immediately come into play.
No, no, it needs to be made, and I know exactly what to do.
I would open up an office on K Street in downtown Washington and put some bells and whistles in there to try to make a formal presence.
I would then use the ability to function at that level to re-engage the Congress to start talking again about hearings.
But more importantly, I would be doing a lot of traveling.
Remember I told you about those 10 countries?
Well, you know, it's even more expensive if you're trying to engage other countries than working from the United States.
And so you'd see more international.
I would probably hold another X conference in Washington, D.C., and so forth and so forth and so forth.
There is a long list of things that could be done, but this issue has been the most hardest probably advocacy movement to fund in history of the United States because unlike every other activist movement that you can possibly think of, this is the only one where the United States government is committed to the position that the issue that you are advocating does not exist at all.
This is government propaganda at the highest level.
This is manipulating reality at the highest level.
This is what the Nazis did and what the Soviets did.
When countries operate in that way, when they virtually deny reality, very bad things can happen.
And one of the advantages of the United States is we're not a totalitarian state.
The government has had to really jump through some hoops to make this truth embargo work.
But the effect of the embargo is that people who have real funds are reluctant to engage it.
They're reluctant to fund it.
And that is one of the chief reasons it continues to exist, the truth embargo.
You are facing multiple hurdles and obstacles.
You have to have a level of fortitude and stamina in all of this that is quite remarkable.
And, you know, up to now, you've more than managed that.
You always deliver.
Are there ever times when you think this is clearly going to be a task that is too big for any one person?
And maybe I'm going to have to, as we say in the United Kingdom, pack it in one day.
Not a chance.
I've studied the lives of a number of the great activists of the 20th century.
Gandhi, of course, Martin Luther King.
You put that on a par with Mahatma Gandhi.
I put the issue on a par with any other activist issue you can pick.
The civil rights movement, the anti-colonialism movements, gay rights movements, women's empowerment movement, all of them.
None of them are as important as the extraterrestrial issue.
But the reason I've, you know, Nels Mandela, when you look at the lives of these people and what they had to go through to achieve the goal of their advocacy, what I've gone through is nothing.
So you're in for the long haul.
I've got it easy.
Very quick question.
I'm not sure whether you can answer this in a couple of minutes or a minute if ideally.
But Aaron, I didn't forget you.
Aaron tweeted in a question.
He said, can you ask Steve what he thinks of Tom DeLong's revelations earlier in the year And if you agree, first of all, tell me what they were and do you agree?
Very significant.
Tom DeLong engaged this issue all the way back in the 90s.
He was a supporter of Stephen Geary.
He's always been interested.
Then he kind of got away from it.
And then suddenly he appears in the middle of 2016, around April, May, June, and has some serious announcement to make.
He goes on and does a radio interview with George Knapp.
What is this announcement?
Well, in the middle of that year, when Hillary Clinton was clearly going to win the presidency, the Pentagon approaches DeLong, who they know is interested in the subject, and says, we'd like you to help us get some information out.
And so he then announces that they have discussed about getting information out on this subject in ways that millennials can digest, books, fiction, nonfiction books, documentaries.
And he's going to be doing that.
And that the Pentagon put together a 10-person panel to advise him.
Now, understand, the Pentagon at that point is thinking that Hillary Clinton is going to win, which means that disclosure is coming.
And so they make a move with DeLong.
Now, when this first came out, I said, this cannot possibly be true, right?
And yet I knew DeLong's history, and I listened to him, and I'm saying, he doesn't sound like, and it would have been an extraordinary mistake for him to come up with a hoax like this.
So I gave it its due.
And then, of course, when Wikileaks released the 50,000 emails out of the Podesta files, Tom DeLong was all over it.
He was in touch with Podesta.
They had a meeting.
Podesta was participating in the documentary.
He was introducing him to people in the scientific realm and also from the Pentagon.
It actually happened.
All right.
And so DeLong is a player now.
But guess what?
When Trump was elected, his situation also collapsed.
But he's a multimillionaire, so I'm not worried about him being in the game.
But he's a player, and I expect more from Tom, and I appreciate what he's doing, and I would love to know more about that connection to the Pentagon.
Aaron, I hope that's the answer that you were looking for.
Thank you for that.
Steve Bassett, good to see you in the flesh here.
Where are you headed next anyway?
In the UK?
I'm staying in London.
If the opportunity to speak arises, I will speak.
I'm also prepared to speak in Europe.
If people want to contact you, no phone numbers, but can they get you through that website, through the Paradigm?
ParadigmResearch Group.org has the email right there, PRG at ParadigmResearchgroup.org.
We'll check in with you nearer Christmas.
And Steve, very good to see you again.
Thanks for coming in.
It's been great.
Steve Bassett, your thoughts about him?
I would gratefully receive them, and so would he.
If you want to contact him, you can do it through that website.
And I will put the link to his website on my website, theunexplained.tv.
Disclosure is not here.
Opinions vary as to whether it will ever be here.
But your thoughts on this, welcome.
Now, Dr. J. Alan Hynek was a man who is often referenced by guests on this show and has been many, many times over the years.
So I thought it was about time we found out something more about him.
Mark O'Connell has written a really good biography of the man and has many stories about him.
And I had him on my radio show recently.
And he was, I think it is not unreasonable to say, the man who laid the groundwork and foundations for the way that we investigate UFO and ET reports today.
He was a very important man who did this at a very high level.
And he was no pushover, as you're about to hear.
Mark O'Connell, thank you so much for waiting while Steve Bassett was here.
That was very kind of you.
We don't have a whole lot of time, but I would like to pick this up at a later date as well.
So as I say, thank you for being so patient.
Thank you for coming on, too.
No problem.
I'm glad to be here, Howard.
Jay Alan Hynek, a name that comes up in so many interviews and conversations I have.
For listeners who won't have heard the name, how would you sum him up?
Who is he?
What was he?
Well, I guess I would point to two major parts of his career.
The first is the fact that for approximately 20 years, Dr. Hynek was a paid consultant for the United States Air Force, and his job as a consultant was to help the Air Force to explain away UFO cases.
Of course, during those 20 years, Dr. Hynek changed his mind about those UFO cases.
At the beginning of that period, he was a very, very happy debunker.
He was very pleased to be able to dispense of what he thought was crazy, crazy science.
And we have a British phrase here that I don't know whether you have it in the U.S. as well, but we poacher turned gamekeeper.
He was a guy who started on one side of the fence and he ended up on the other.
That is a very apt description.
That really describes him to a T, I think.
Yeah, he famously changed his mind about UFOs and turned from being a skeptic to being not necessarily a true believer, because that term is a little hard to nail down, but evolved into an open thinker, let's say, about the reality of the UFO phenomenon and the causes of the UFO phenomenon.
So that's the first part of his story that I found so interesting.
The second part, and this is probably what most people would know him from, is that he developed the close encounters categorization system for UFO events.
And those are close encounter of the first kind, which simply involves visual contact with an object within about 500 yards, which is, Dr. Hynek felt that's close enough for the witness to make out physical details such as size and shape and solid outline.
Close encounter of the second kind adds physical interaction between the UFO and the environment.
So say landing pad imprints or scorched earth where a UFO has landed.
Close encounter of the third kind involves the presence of occupants, entities that are associated with the UFO.
And in some cases, the witness actually interacts with those entities.
And he devised, I think I'm right in saying, the first way of systematically interrogating, is not too heavy a way of putting it, people who claimed to have had contact of various orders, yeah?
Yeah, I think that's fair to say.
Before he developed the close encounter schematic, he was working on ways to categorize UFO witnesses and events.
And his first attempt at that in the late 1960s was to categorize witnesses according to their credibility.
So he would look at the Cases in terms of their strangeness factor, which means the ability or inability to explain them with known physical laws.
But he would also look at the social standing and the character of the witness to try to determine the credibility of that witness.
So he would combine high strangeness with high credibility.
That would be a case that was deserving of intense research, in his opinion.
Right.
He was involved in some very, very important cases.
I mean, he was, I think one of the ones that I've heard you talk about in interviews that you've done was one that I'd never heard of before, I have to say.
I don't know where I've been, but there was one in 1955 near Kelly and Hopkinsville in Kentucky.
It's supposed to be a very significant and well-documented case.
I know it's one that didn't make it to your book, but it was a case that he was interested in and involved in to some extent.
Yes, and it's possible that you've never heard of it because it's a case that's so hard to categorize.
It doesn't fall in with any known pattern of UFO cases, honestly.
And so it doesn't always get talked about because it's a little embarrassing that we don't have any good way to categorize or to explain it.
But yeah, there was an extended farm family on a Sunday night playing cards on a hot summer night when they suddenly find their house besieged by these odd little creatures that are sort of a cross between a troll and an alien and a chimpanzee, perhaps.
They have long arms that drag on the ground.
They're three or four feet tall.
They're glowing.
They have gigantic yellow eyes and huge pointed goblin ears.
And this farm family, they take up arms.
These are people who take care of themselves.
When they're in trouble, they don't go to the law.
They grab their gun and they take care of themselves.
And this is one of the very, very rare cases in all of ufology where people actually do shoot back.
They weren't shooting, but they were shooting at the ETs.
Yes, and they're terrified by these ETs because these ETs would keep coming up to the windows and looking inside the house.
And so the men folk in the family, the ones who were armed, they would take shots at the aliens.
And as far as they could tell, they were hitting these aliens.
But what would happen was they'd see an alien up in a tree.
They'd shoot it.
And the alien would, it wouldn't fall from the tree.
It would float down from the tree and then run off into the woods.
It's an extremely strange case.
Why was Hynek so captivated with this one?
Well, because two investigators in whom he had a great deal of faith investigated this case and came away convinced that something very real had happened.
So Hynek took their word for it.
He never had a chance to directly interview the witnesses himself.
But based on the work of these two investigators who he knew very well and had a lot of respect for, he just thought, well, there's got to be something there.
Plus the fact that the Air Force went to such great pains to pretend that they weren't interested in the case because, of course, it was too absurd for them to even consider.
Heinektik that is a red flag, a sort of a sign that, ah, the Air Force is protesting too much.
They're putting too much energy into saying this is a stupid case.
Well, it turns out the Air Force was actually paying quite a bit of attention to this case.
The Air Force's explanation of it was bizarre, to say the least.
Yes.
One of the explanations was that perhaps this was a chimpanzee that had escaped from a circus and happened to be painted silver.
That was one of the theories.
But as he rightly said, and I'm sorry I interrupted, if it was such a stupid case, why did they pour the Air Force?
Why did they pour such great resources into investigating it?
Well, because they didn't have any better explanation, basically.
This was a position the Air Force often found themselves in.
They would debunk a popular explanation for an event, but they wouldn't have any better explanation of their own.
And I think that was the case with Kelly Hopkinsville.
They couldn't come up with a story any better than anybody else could come up with.
One of the breakthroughs, maybe, that Hynek's era and the way of thinking about these things that he inspired was that he allowed for the fact, and I know that in your research, because in your time you've been a MUFON field investigator, you've investigated these cases yourself, Mark, so you know a lot about these things.
He allowed for the prospect of, or the possibility that what he was being told may not be right, that there is no black and no white in these things.
And you've got to accept that some of the accounts may be garbage and some of them may be credible.
You have to have an open mind, in other words.
Yes, and you might have to go through a mountain of ridiculous reports until you come to one report that actually sticks out as being somewhat more credible.
So, yeah, Hynek was very much a student of the human factor where UFO cases were concerned.
He didn't start out that way.
To begin with, in his work for the Air Force in the late 1940s, early 1950s, he was desk bound.
He would simply sit at a desk and go through printed reports and decide whether this was a misidentification of the planet Venus or a meteor or a comet.
But later on, when he started going out into the field, when the Air Force started sending him out into the field to investigate cases on his own, then he came in contact with the human factor.
He was face to face with witnesses and really started to gain an appreciation for how this event was perceived by the witness and how this witness would try to explain the event to someone else.
And he was very struck by the fact that people were trying to explain a very strange event with words that don't exist yet in our vocabulary.
There were no words to really describe what these people had seen.
And he was always very struck by the fact that people had such difficulty in really getting across exactly what it was they had experienced.
What did he make of abductions?
Because we had the Betty and Barney Hill case.
If you are to read many accounts, there have been alien abductions for hundreds of years, not just decades.
But what did he make of people who claimed to have been abducted, taken to a craft, maybe shown bits of the galaxy that we as yet did not know?
Did he buy into any of that?
Well, he had a complicated relationship with those types of cases.
He was never thoroughly at ease with abduction cases.
But he also had a chance to meet Barney and Betty Hill several years after their experience, and he had a chance to interrogate them while they were under hypnosis.
And he came out of that very convinced that they had had a real experience.
Same thing with the 1973 Pascagoula, Mississippi abduction, where these two fishermen, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, were abducted by beings that seemed to be robots and taken onto a glowing blue craft and examined.
Hynek was extremely uncomfortable with stories like that, but he investigated that case.
He interviewed the witnesses.
He was there when an attempt was made to put them under hypnosis, and he found their report very, very credible.
So he would often find himself in a situation where he believed that the witnesses were being truthful and sincere, and he believed that they had had a very real experience, but he would always hold back on trying to explain what that experience was.
And was he still in 73 when that happened?
Was he still in receipt of a government paycheck?
Was he still in the government's employee?
No, this was about, this was probably four or more years after he had left the government's employ.
So he was much freer to say what he really felt about these cases.
I should also add that just before that 1973 abduction case in Mississippi, Hynek had just come back from a trip to Australia and New Guinea, in which he interviewed Father William Gill and several of the witnesses of a very famous 1959 close encounter of the third kind that took place in Boyanai,
New Guinea, in which an Anglican minister named William Gill and several of his staff and several members of his parish stood out on the beach for two nights in a row and watched as humanoid, giant, glowing, humanoid figures worked at some sort of project on the upper deck of a floating disc that was hovering out over the ocean.
It's a crazy case, but what makes this case so special is that on the second night, Father Gil tried to communicate with these beings by waving his arm, and the beings waved back, and then the people on the beach started waving both their arms over their head, and the aliens or these beings on the ship waved both their arms over their heads back.
So it's a case that sort of could never die because it couldn't just be brushed away.
There were too many credible witnesses.
There was too much consistency in the stories.
And even though Hynek was uncomfortable with these cases, he came back from that trip reconsidering his position on alien encounters.
In his lifetime, during his research, the Roswell incident and the industry that's grown up around it started.
What did he make of Roswell and all of the kerfuffle, the flap, the hoo-ha around it?
Well, in five years of research, I never found a single reference to Roswell specifically in any of Hynek's notes or papers or writings.
But I did find several quotes of his in which he expressed disdain for saucer crash stories.
He didn't put much stock in them.
He thought they were kind of silly and a distraction.
And he never really wanted to talk about them.
Do you think he missed out?
No, no.
I think there was never any credible proof of a saucer crash story.
And the fact that there are so many, I mean, it's not just Roswell.
Saucer crash stories go all the way back to 1897 in Aurora, Texas.
There are, you know, there are, I wouldn't even hazard a guess as to how many UFO saucer crash stories there are in the annals of UFO lore.
But the fact that there were so many and none of them could be proven in any way, shape, or form, I think really, really weighed heavily with Dr. Hynek.
He had a good and cordial relationship with another well-known researcher, Jacques Vallée.
They were great friends, but from what I've read and heard, they didn't always entirely see eye to eye.
Well, Dr. Valley, yes, they were very close friends for a very long time.
I've had a wonderful correspondence with Dr. Valley since the book has come out.
He's been very complimentary towards the book, which I really, really appreciate.
But if you read through Dr. Valley's published journals, which I would recommend, it's wonderful reading for anyone who wants to know more about the history of the UFO phenomenon.
He would get frustrated with Dr. Hynek because he felt that Hynek wasn't always being forceful enough in getting his opinions across.
He felt that Hynek tended to be a little too timid when it came to making his case, especially in situations where Hynek would be, say, on a television show and he was one of several people being interviewed.
Valet often felt that Hynek was not standing his ground strongly enough.
So there was definitely some frustration and disappointment, but the friendship survived all of that and lasted right up until Dr. Hynek's passing in 1986.
You kindly sat through a good half hour or so of me talking with Steve Bassett here, leading ET disclosure advocate campaigner.
What do you make of the disclosure movement?
Is it going in the right direction?
Do you think it's got mileage in it?
Do you think it will achieve its aim?
I am much more in line with Nick Pope's thinking than I am with Stephen Bassett's thinking.
To me, this capital D disclosure concept is kind of silly and simplistic.
It seems to me that if there's any truth to the fact that world governments are aware of aliens and are, in fact, interacting with alien races, it seems to me that the announcement would come from the aliens, not from any one world government or group of world governments.
Why would the aliens leave that To us, to our leaders.
I don't think they would.
I think they hold the cards.
If this is a true scenario, then it's the aliens who hold all the cards.
And I think it's entirely up to them when and how they lay those cards on the table.
Last question for you is from your biography, Mark.
And we must talk at more length about not only about the book, but about you in another edition of this show.
But your biography starts with the words.
Mark O'Connor has written several episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation and Star Trek Deep Space Nine.
I mean, if that biography is correct, and I'm assuming it is, isn't that the coolest thing in the world to do?
I appreciate you bringing it up, and I appreciate you saying that.
Especially with the new Star Trek premiering later this evening on American TV, at least.
Yeah, I'm very proud to be one small part of the Star Trek mythos.
It is exciting to be a part of it.
I feel like in my own way, I've made my own small contribution to Star Trek lore, and it's a very nice feeling.
And how do you get a gig like that?
Do they phone you up?
How does that happen?
Well, at the time, when Star Trek the Next Generation came on the air in the late 1980s, they brought on a showrunner named Michael Piller, who had a very open-minded and a very Gene Roddenberry-type attitude towards the way things should work.
Star Trek essentially threw open their doors to any and all writers who wanted to try to write for the show.
So I was one of the writers who took the bait and wrote a spec script and submitted it to them.
It caught the eye of the producers.
They invited me into pitch stories.
It took me two years of trying and failing, to be perfectly honest.
And then you got there.
And then I got there.
Well, that is fabulous.
You and I must talk again.
If people want to read more about you, your work, and this book, very quickly, where do they go?
My blog is called High Strangeness, and it is at HighStrangenessUFO, all one word, highstrangenessufo.com.
Mark O'Connell, the amazing story of Dr. Hineck, without whom we may not be talking here on this program right now.
Your thoughts on that, gratefully received.
And ditto for Steve Bassett, who was the guest before.
Steve will return.
We'll get an update from him and see how he's done and see whether he's been able to make any contacts here in the UK or in Russia or in Europe generally with people who may be able to help him further the cause.
It is a difficult and uphill task sometimes, as you heard in that conversation with Steve.
But we wish him well in his work.
Whether you believe that the aliens are about to reveal themselves or not, it is fascinating and worthwhile research.
More great guests coming up in future shows here on The Unexplained as we enter October.
Thank you very much for your support.
Keep the emails coming.
Keep your donations coming if you can.
If you have made a donation recently, thank you very much indeed.
The address for correspondence and for donations is my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created and maintained by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
That is the one-stop shop to go.
Thank you very much.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London.
And until next we meet here, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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