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Dec. 22, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
45:26
Edition 326 - *SPECIAL* Leslie Kean

Leslie Kean - one of the team behind the amazing New York Times report about a secret US UFOResearch programme...

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This is Howard Hughes at the Home of the Unexplained in London.
I hope you're enjoying either the run-up to the holiday season 2017 or perhaps you're in the middle of it right now.
Now, I know I said the previous edition of the show, 325, would be the last one for this year, and the next edition of the Unexplained would be coming to you at the beginning of 2018.
But because of something that's appeared in the news over the last few days and the interview that I've got connected with it, I felt you needed to hear this now.
So we don't have any of the bells and whistles with this show.
No theme music, no shout-outs, but this is important stuff.
If you're in America, or indeed if you're in the UK, anywhere in Europe, you will be aware of the New York Times story a few days ago by Helen Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and our friend here on The Unexplained, Leslie Kane, to do with the secret U.S. Department of Defense research program,
Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification, that ran for five years from 2007 to 2012 with a budget of 22 million US dollars.
The person behind this has decided to split from it and speak about it.
Now, this is where we come in.
It is an astonishing story here, a story that includes accounts of craft being chased by military jets and that kind of thing.
And there is apparently more to come out.
Now, because Leslie Kane, investigative researcher, author, is a friend of this show and has been on this show before, I actually contacted Leslie.
She's part of this New York Times story and asked if she would come on this show before Christmas.
It's been a really busy time for her, and I'm really pleased that she said yes.
This is an astonishing story.
You're about to hear pretty much all of it here, and as I say, it is likely more will come out as we cross over into 2018.
We may be looking at what could be the most important story ever.
This is a position that sometimes I wondered whether we'd ever find ourselves in.
But it seems that we are.
So let's speak with journalist, author, investigator Leslie Kane now about what appeared in the New York Times a few days ago and about this secret program that could turn out to be incredibly revealing.
Great to be with you, Howard.
So Leslie, this story that appeared very close to Christmas around the world has caused a certain amount of bafflement.
What's it all about?
Why is this coming out now?
Well, that's two different questions.
I mean, what it's about and why it's so important is because this is the first time that the U.S. government has actually acknowledged having an official program that investigates UFOs.
And the reason it happened now is because the head of that program, who worked inside the DOD, resigned in early October to protest the lack of resources and the lack of attention that the program has been given since 2012 when the funding dried up.
So that accounts for the timing of it.
And, you know, until he resigned, this program was completely secret.
And now it's not.
And that's really a big deal.
So has this caused a certain amount of embarrassment from what you can see?
You mean within the Department of Defense?
Within the DOD.
Well, we don't know, to tell you the truth.
I mean, they issued a statement, an official statement, when our Times reporter went to meet with them, acknowledging that the program does, in fact, has existed.
They said it closed down in 2012, which actually is not the case, but that is when the funding stopped for it.
And whether there's embarrassment within, I suspect there is a lot of feelings about it inside.
I don't know if embarrassment or if they're angry that Mr. Elizondo resigned and talked about it publicly, or some of the other people probably are glad this is happening because maybe this will help bring more attention to the program.
So I think there's probably a range of reactions, but I haven't spoken to anybody inside, so we don't know specifically, but that would be my guess.
The man who ran this program before he resigned, Luis Elizondo.
I mean, look, military intelligence is his background.
So, you know, by going public in this way, he will have known what he was doing.
Oh, he did this completely out of choice.
He understood the possible ramifications of it.
He was very nervous about it when he did it.
I mean, he was, you know, very, very nervous.
He didn't know how his colleagues were going to react.
He has the highest regard for the Department of Defense and for Secretary Jim Mattis, who he's known for a long time.
He served with him in combat situations.
He has the highest respect for all these people.
But on the other hand, he believes that this issue is so important that it cannot be managed properly within the system because they don't take it seriously enough.
And the only choice he felt he had to do to draw attention to that was to resign in the way he did.
And he wrote a very, very powerful letter to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis explaining that and making a statement about this, which is just extraordinary.
Nothing like that has ever happened before.
It is extraordinary, and I think it's perhaps been misinterpreted by some of the world's media who simply were not ready for this and didn't quite understand the import of it.
Why did he think it was so important then?
You know, what is it that he thinks about this that we need to know and needs to be continued?
Well, I mean, he has made the statements on the record, and he is not just him.
There are a lot of colleagues he has and contractors who have worked with the program that basically that there is a real phenomenon here.
There is a physical phenomenon that we can't explain.
It demonstrates very advanced technology.
And that technology is something that we need to understand because there's a potential threat there because of the fact that they don't understand what it is and how it operates.
And it's just something that the world has a right to know.
But they have made the statement, you know, these officials, these are government officials who have studied this thing for 10 years or more, making a statement that they're real and that they demonstrate technology and that they refer to them as craft.
I mean, there's no other way to explain.
And so we have to understand, too, that Mr. Elizondo had very high-level clearances.
He's been exposed to a lot more than he can ever talk about.
So we have to understand that for him to make a statement like that is based on a lot of information and a lot of knowledge that we don't even have access to.
Are you surprised then, bearing in mind what you've just said about the nature of this research and what it appears to have uncovered or indicated?
Are you surprised that this was not on the front page of every newspaper around the world then?
Because the way that you put it just then, that sounds like the big story that we've been waiting for for so many decades.
Well, I think it is.
And in fact, it was on the front page of the New York Times.
I was one of three reporters who broke the story, and we worked on it for months on the front page of the New York Times.
And I think a lot of other media have picked up on it.
I mean, it's been on the major media in the States all week, Howard.
It's been on all the mainstream TV news shows in prime time.
They've been covering it day after day after day.
All the print media have picked it up.
So I don't think that the other, usually when people follow up someone else's reporting, they don't necessarily put it on the front page.
But I can tell you that when the story broke with the New York Times, it was on the front page.
And it went inside the paper and took up a whole full page of the inside of the paper.
One of the things that I've seen, and tell me if I'm wrong about this, connected to this, is an interview that ABC did with a pilot, a military pilot who claimed to have pursued something that he did not believe was of this earth.
Right.
That's David Fraver.
We actually, he was part of our story that broke in the New York Times last Saturday.
We had a separate little article about him and his experience.
And so we also broke that story.
He was a pilot, a Navy pilot who was flying an F-18 off the battleship Nimitz off the coast of California in 2004.
And he and a number of other witnesses had these encounters with this object, this sort of an oblong object that people say looked like a Tic-Tac.
So yes, he's been out, he's been on the record describing that incident, describing what he saw.
I also interviewed another pilot who saw the same thing that he did.
It was flying a different plane.
And these objects were seen over a period of days and were picked up on radar, demonstrating absolutely extraordinary behaviors.
We also have a video of one of them, which was part of our story.
Our New York Times story released two videos along with it that you can see on the website of the New York Times that were a big part of the draw to that story.
And the pilot, the video with the pilot, just basically goes out there and says, we've heard this kind of thing before, of course, but never quite in this way.
You know, nothing that I've ever seen before can maneuver in that way.
This is astonishing material.
It's astonishing.
I mean, this is a guy who now works for the Black Aces.
He's an incredibly high-level, accomplished, highly trained Navy pilot at the very top.
And he has seen everything.
He's been trained to observe all things that fly.
And yeah, he described in detail what he saw and talked about the fact that he has never seen anything like it ever.
And he does not believe that this object could have been manufactured on planet Earth.
He has said that.
You were one of the three people to get a byline on this story because of your work on it, which instantly drew my attention because I know you.
What was it like to work on this story and to get people to talk about it?
Well, that's a good question.
It was a long and very difficult process, Howard.
I mean, because when you're working for a paper like the New York Times, which is absolutely the top, in my opinion, it's the paper of record.
It is the paper, the best paper I could ever want to be in in the whole world.
And so they are very, very rigorous.
And it's good that they're rigorous.
We were not allowed to have, for instance, any anonymous sources in the story, but we're very proud of the fact that we were able to have not only Louis Elizondo on the record, but also Senator Harry Reid, who funded the project and made it happen, the government project that we're dealing with here.
I mean, nobody else got an interview with Harry Reid, and we also spoke with Robert Bigelow on the record and a lot of other people that we weren't able to include in the story.
But it's a very long process.
You know, every time, I mean, even one paragraph in a newspaper article can involve days of work just to get the one line that you might have or the one quote that you might have from that source in that article can take days and days of work, you know, prepping for the article, talking to them multiple times at length, things like that.
So it's a very, very time-consuming prospect to write a story like this.
But it was incredibly rewarding, and I benefited so much from working with my colleagues at the New York Times.
They're great journalists, the two that I worked with, and I learned a lot from them.
And I was very honored to have been able, you know, that they took me in and brought me into the New York Times and we all worked together.
It was absolutely fantastic.
Now, the whole history of stories like this, going back all the way to Roswell, is of stonewalling, misleading, subterfuge.
This is the complete opposite.
This story, it appears, to all of that.
Yeah, I mean, this story is absolute facts.
First of all, there's no mythology.
There's nothing undefinitive about it.
It's, you know, everything we wrote can be documented.
What we'd like to do, you know, we didn't write a lot about what the program actually discovered, you know, but that's going to be coming down the road.
But yeah, I mean, it's very, to me, there's just no relationship between a story like this and something like the Roswell case or something, things that sort of dwell within the mythology of the UFO community world.
You know, this is about an official, a high-level official from the U.S. government coming forward and talking about an official program.
And that's just, irrespective of what they learned about the phenomenon, just the fact that this program exists at all is a bombshell.
And that's why the media has been so overwhelmed by this and so drawn to it, because our government has always told us that they're not interested in UFOs.
They don't study them.
Well, now we know for, and people speculate, of course, that that's not true, but now we know for sure that it's not true.
President Trump holds regular news conferences at which reporters put difficult questions To him, and sometimes he answers them.
Has he been questioned about this?
Actually, there's a clip that you can see online where one reporter did ask, but the silly thing is, Howard, she asked the wrong question.
He or she, I forget, I think it was a he.
He asked the silly question, which is: Does President Trump believe in UFOs?
Oh, God.
What question would you ask?
I would ask, has the president read the article in the New York Times and can he comment on it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You don't ask, I mean, whether somebody believes in something which is factually a reality to begin with is an absurd question.
That's a weird question.
That is, when you've got something that is in the public domain, like your piece in the New York Times, and it's out there and it's causing a stir, that's a bizarre question to ask.
And I think it's obviously because the reporter maybe hadn't read the article.
And, you know, that's part of what we're dealing in, we're trying to overcome here is sort of the stigma that the subject has.
And people think, oh, does he believe in UFOs?
You know, that's kind of weird.
They don't know anything about what they're talking about.
And it's not a matter of belief in anything.
So it was just the wrong question.
And I was very disappointed that that was the one that was asked.
But the response of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press person for Trump, was, oh, it's something we haven't discussed yet.
She sort of made it.
It was funny.
Everybody was laughing, too.
It just shows, you know, what we're trying to overcome here, Howard.
Hang on.
She said that they haven't discussed what was on the front page of the New York Times.
If that's so, that's going to be a first.
Well, they haven't discussed whether he believes in UFOs or not because the reporter didn't ask the right question.
So are you going to try and get to one of his news conferences and ask the right question?
Oh, I can't.
I think you have to be an official press, you know, you've got to be accredited.
Okay.
Yeah, you've got to be part of the press pool or whatever.
You know, but unfortunately, they asked the wrong question.
And then, you know, she said, well, and everybody in the press pool was laughing.
You know, it's the same old situation where everybody thinks this is a joke.
And then she goes, oh, well, that is not something, you know, we've been dealing with Syria and Korea and very important issues.
That's not something I've had a chance to talk to the president about.
Ha ha.
Well, I mean, this could turn out to be, if this is what it appears to be and isn't being put out there for another reason, but if this is what it appears to be, that's going to dwarf everything else, including Kim Jong-un.
Well, if you know, for a lot of media this week, it's done that.
And I'm telling you, I've been on a bunch of shows, Howard, and those people on those shows, those anchors and a lot of people that work on them would love to be doing this story more than anything.
But, you know, they can only do it with like five-minute interview or something.
And then they have to go on and talk about the tax bill or whatever.
You know, they're just not in a position to be able to do it, but they're enthralled with it.
They're absolutely enthralled with it.
And I think if it was up to them, they would spend a lot more time on it that they are.
But they have spent a lot of time on it this week.
You said that there is more material to come down the track.
What does that mean?
What is being sat on at the moment?
Well, I mean, I can't give away.
You know, we as reporters are going to dig into this deeper and try to get another story out as soon as we can.
We're not letting this thing drop with just the one story.
So we are trying to learn a lot more about some aspects of the program and what they've discovered and things like that.
And, you know, I'm not going to go into any more specifics about that, but there's some very interesting stuff we're digging into.
And I think another, the second story could be just as explosive, if not more explosive, than the first one.
You know, I've got to ask, is that going to be this side of the new year or the other side of the new year?
After.
It takes a long time to do a story for the New York Times.
Right.
So you haven't got it sitting there ready to go, but you've got a feeling for what it's going to be.
Exactly.
We have to do our reporting.
We have to do our interviews, our digging, getting our documents, you know, all that stuff.
The due diligence that's required to do a story for the New York Times is massive.
And all the editors have to review it and you have to pass, you know, it goes through a lot of edits and stuff like that.
So it's a long process.
So no way could we do it before the New Year's.
Plus, I think we all deserve a vacation if we're going to.
I think after this, I think you do.
There are two sides to the UFO equation, the craft and the creatures.
Are we going to find anything, do you think, do you sense, do you know about creatures?
We know about craft.
We've heard about craft here.
No, nothing about creatures.
I mean, that's something that certainly the program that, and what we're focusing on now, Howard, is writing about what the program has done and what they've learned, this official program.
They have absolutely nothing to do with that aspect of it because they have no data on it.
I mean, they have a tremendous amount of data on the craft themselves.
And they're very interested in putting scientists, and scientists have been working on this already, a physicist trying to understand the physics behind the maneuvers that they observe in the craft.
And they're able to explain how it might be that a physical craft could jump from one point in space to another in a split second, you know, something that people observe all the time.
Things like that are being analyzed, and the goal is to try to understand the technology behind these maneuvers and maybe even to reproduce that technology.
But the data that they have does not involve anything about any beings or what the intelligence is behind the objects or anything like that.
All they have is what they've observed and been able to collect data on.
And that doesn't involve any kind of beings or intelligence or anything like that.
But they have certainty, do they, that whatever they've encountered does not come from the Russians, the Chinese, or some other terrestrial power.
Yeah, I mean, they absolutely believe that.
Now, of course, they can't, you know, you could always say that's only 99.99% sure because it's, you know, you can't, I guess, ever rule that out entirely.
But these guys, I mean, this is technology that they call beyond next generation technology.
I mean, they can state for a fact, we do not have this kind of technology on planet Earth.
And if the Russians or the Chinese had it, it would be, you know, just really hard to imagine.
Plus, you know, why would it be, it's been seen and it's been encountered all over the globe for, you know, since the 40s.
What kind of technology did we have back then?
So there is no way that you push.
They have colleagues in these other countries.
They have colleagues that are working On this topic in other countries.
And there's a sense of competition, but also I really do think that if it's just inconceivable that they would be that far ahead of us in terms of trying to understand this technology and duplicate it, that they would have beyond next generation technology and we wouldn't have it.
So there is no way you put millions of dollars into a research program like this and you conclude it after five years.
It must, as you say, still be ongoing in some form.
Absolutely.
And there's no question that it is ongoing because what happened was the program received $22 million, which was allocated between the years of 2008 and 2012.
And when the funding dried up, what that meant is that the contractors who had been hired out, that's what most of that money went to.
It was to hire contractors from a range of disciplines that could do work in various areas, you know, and study various aspects of this.
So when that dried up, they didn't have the funds to keep the contractors on.
But the individuals inside the DOD who were involved with the program just kept doing it.
They just kept dealing with the cases that came in as part of their regular jobs.
And there were some contractors that continued to work with them, even though there wasn't a budget for it.
So the program definitely became much more scaled down after 2012.
It became probably more hidden to people within the DOD because it didn't have a budget.
But there's no question that it did continue.
And I have spoken to many people on the, you know, people who have been to meetings and so on that can verify that.
And we also have documents that show its continuity past 2012.
But it seems to, it's understandable to me that the DOD, as they said in their statement, they said it closed in 2012.
It makes sense that they might think that because that's when the funds dried up and the program has been so hidden in the department that even the people giving that statement just may not even know that it continued.
So I don't think they're necessarily trying to be deceptive.
I think they just really didn't understand that the people involved continue to work on it.
Okay, so there were wheels within wheels and there was plausible deniability because there were so many different facets of the program.
Yeah, I mean, there were, you know, it's a small group of people.
I mean, you know, and they all had very, very demanding, high-level jobs within the DOD.
I mean, managing all kinds of special access programs and secret government programs and, you know, working very close to the Secretary of Defense.
So our man Elizondo and his colleagues didn't, you know, it was only a small percentage of their time that was spent on this program, which we call ATIF, the program to investigate these things.
So it was just done as they did it as best they could within their jobs, but it was only a small percentage of the time that they had that they could allot to this.
And that is why Elizondo resigned and wrote that powerful letter to Secretary Mattis, because he became so frustrated with that situation and didn't believe that it should be that way.
He thought this is extremely important.
So eventually they just kind of got so frustrated with having to do it like that that that's why he made the move that he made.
Big, brave thing to do.
How did he get recruited for that?
He was asked back in, I think in 2007, he just kind of got involved with the group because he knew people involved.
And then in 2009, the previous director of the program moved on to something else and he was asked to take over, basically, I think it was in 2009, to actually run it.
He just sort of become involved because he knew people involved.
It's not like he was some kind of a UFO believer or anything like that.
He just became involved with the program and took it very seriously and stayed with it.
Have you and your colleagues of the New York Times been talking to many of the people that you and I have been familiar with for a very long time in the so-called ufology field, people like Stan Friedman and all the others who we've all spoken with over the years, because this is, isn't this pay dirt for them?
Yeah, I mean, they're thrilled with it.
We haven't actually, we didn't talk to them in relationship to our story because there was no way they could really help us because the story was, you know, we had what we needed.
We were reporting specifically on this one aspect, which is that particular government program, which nobody knew anything about except for us.
So, you know, I'm certainly in touch with the people in the UFO community.
I haven't had a lot of time to be in touch with them, but I think they're very, very happy with this because this story has the potential to create a real shift in the way people look at the topic.
I think it could be sort of a tipping point that shifts attitudes, that shifts the whole perspective as the official world has.
And if we're going to have anything change and have resources devoted to this as they should be, this is what it takes to do it.
And I think our future stories are going to have even more of an effect.
And gradually, we're hoping that we'll see a shift in the whole thing.
Maybe we'll get over the ridicule finally.
And it must be good news for some of those people who've campaigned and spoken for so many years and faced a certain amount of ridicule.
Because it seemed to some people, some of the people who email me say that, you know, the disclosure movement may be beginning to run out of steam.
And, you know, where is this going?
And where are the new stories?
And who's doing the investigating?
Finally, we get something big and something new.
Exactly right.
And I think if you want disclosure, which would be, I guess, how they define that as an official announcement about this, the reality of this, well, this is as close as we've ever gotten to that, as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, this official was inside the government, except for, you know, two months ago, October, he left.
So as of very recently, he's not part of it anymore, but he is an official who just came out and is making this statement.
So it's pretty close to what they might call disclosure, and hopefully it's going to lead us further along that path.
And more and more government officials are going to come out and talk about this.
Is Mr. Elizabeth going to be saying any more, do we think, or has he had his say now?
Well, yeah, he'll be because he's going to work with us on our next story.
So I'm sure he's not going away anytime soon.
He really wants to see this through.
He wants to see the change happen that we all want.
And he's definitely going to be continuing to work with us at the times.
And when He started this.
Was it a kind of professional challenge for him?
Was he a skeptic who's become a convert?
What was his mindset?
Good question.
You know, I don't think I ever asked him that.
I don't think he was particularly involved in any way, though.
I mean, he was a career intelligence official with a lot of responsibility, and he just sort of got somehow got involved with this program because he knew somebody involved.
But I don't think he ever had any expectation that it would be what it was.
So, but it's an interesting question.
I haven't asked him that much about what his perspective was before he started, actually.
But as we've said, as you've said, he clearly regards this as being enormously important.
And it sounds like it's the tip of an iceberg to me.
Exactly.
I mean, enormously important.
He wrote that in his letter to the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America.
I mean, that's where that message went.
And he believes it's very, very important.
And that's why he's going to continue.
He's hoping that he will be able to accomplish more now outside of the Department of Defense, accomplish more now than he could before.
He's not giving up on anything.
I don't think we've ever had, I mean, I don't know whether I can, he probably isn't a maverick, but we haven't had somebody like that before, have we?
Who's outside looking in now?
I think this is historic for that reason.
Absolutely.
This has never happened before.
I mean, we did have Project Blue Book.
We had an official program which closed in 1970, but that was more of a public relations campaign.
I mean, it wasn't a secret program like this just dealing with very, very high-level military cases.
You know, Project Blue Book dealt with public reports of anything.
You know, you see a light in the sky, you send it to Project Blue Book, and they were ridiculing things right and left.
So you can barely compare these two programs.
But since Blue Book has closed, nobody has known what the government's been doing.
It's just been all speculation.
And yeah, it's extremely important that now somebody has come out of the government and said, hey, we've been studying this officially since 2007.
So it makes you wonder, doesn't it?
What did they know?
What was happening that made this program come about?
This is, I mean, it's a big and important program.
As you said, Robert Bigelow, entrepreneur, man who's very well known in space engineering circles and other circles, he's involved in this.
You know, what did they know that made them want to start this program?
You know, they couldn't have just, you know, thought, hey, here's a great idea, guys.
I've been reading some sci-fi, watching some Star Trek.
Let's do this.
There must have been a spark.
Exactly.
Well, I think part of that spark was Robert Bigelow, because Bigelow had been involved with this thing for a long, long, long time, and he knew a lot.
And he had invested his own private funds in assisting researchers and giving money to projects that involved research and so on.
He had an organization called the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, which went on for years and years with a whole team of scientists investigating these things.
So Bigelow certainly knew that the phenomenon was real, and he knew a lot more than that.
So what happened was he was friends with Senator Harry Reid.
They both lived in Nevada.
And Harry Reid just, you know, he invited Harry Reid to come see his research at a ranch he was working at, and they were friends.
And he kind of had an influence on Reed, as Reed explained it to our Times reporter.
And that's what motivated Harry Reid to want to get a program going and to work with a couple of colleagues in the Senate to get funding for it.
So that's how it all started.
And I think, I don't know how much they actually knew.
I mean, I know that Robert Bigelow knows a lot, but I think with Reed, it was more of an impetus to want to find out more, to recognize that it was interesting, it was important, it had defense implications, it was something that the Defense Department needs to understand.
So he went through initially through the Defense Intelligence Agency to create the program basically because he was able to get the funding for it.
And that's sort of how it all started.
$22 million is not a huge amount of money, is it?
Not at all by the Defense Department budget standards, which I think is like $600 billion or something per year.
It's tiny, absolutely tiny.
But when you think back to what you can do, you know, it was over a period of about three years, you can do a lot with $22 million.
So they did a lot.
They accomplished a huge amount.
They wrote many, many research reports and studied all kinds of different aspects of this and really got a lot done in those three years.
Because that's a significant amount of money, even though in terms of the percentage of the defense budget, it's absolutely nothing.
So the public's got to know about this by happenstance almost, by chance, a confluence of circumstances.
Do you think it's likely we're going to get that lucky again?
You know, if there are other programs and projects that are going on, perhaps in parallel with this, it may be those things may stay secret, unless, of course, this starts an avalanche effect.
Right.
And Howard, we certainly are hoping that that will happen.
And I think it could happen.
I think that now, because there are programs in other agencies, we know that.
They may not be formal programs, but there are people working in other agencies on this issue.
And some of them have worked in cooperation with the program that we wrote about.
So it seems to me it could just be a matter of time before we start hearing about from those people, too.
There's still a lot of concern.
I mean, there's still a lot of very sensitive information, and some of it's classified, and some of it will have to stay that way.
But I also think that we can expect that more people are going to sort of come out of the woodwork now and going to feel safe to do that.
And we've got our eyes and ears open for that to happen.
But the whole history of ufology has involved stories of people being shut up, being silenced, being sidelined and silenced.
Do you think that you might encounter some of that down the track?
Has anybody tried to put the squeeze on you?
No, and I think we're really not part of ufology.
I mean, we're journalists, we're reporters, and the Times is such a serious, highly credible, and very sophisticated newspaper.
So I don't think anybody would sort of consider this whole endeavor as part of ufology.
It's really just journalism.
And maybe that's the difference.
And I think, you know, a lot of the stories we hear out of the ufology world are, in my mind, kind of questionable.
So unless you can Document the claims you're making.
They're really, they're not, you know, who's to know whether they're true or not.
But I think this doesn't really, in some ways, it doesn't even intersect with that world, the way I look at it.
I'm a great believer, having studied politics in the art of news management.
Sometimes things happen because somebody's decided it's their time.
Do you have any feeling anywhere that perhaps there is some, I won't say manipulation, that's maybe the wrong word, but there is some news management going on here and somebody wants to squeeze this story bit by bit out there to prepare us for something else?
Yeah, I mean, I know that there's a lot of people in the UFO world that speculate about that, and they could be right, but all I can tell you is I have had no evidence of that.
Now, they would argue, well, it's not something that would ever be, there would ever be evidence for because it's all secret and it's all managed behind the scenes.
I just, you know, I have seen no evidence of that.
That's all I can say.
I've never encountered anything in all the work that I've done.
And when I look at the reasons why certain things have happened, the timing that things have happened, I can't relate it to some kind of grand controlling puppet master who's manipulating everything.
I just have, I have never come up against anything to suggest that to me.
That being said, I can't say whether that's going on or not.
So that's, that's, you know, maybe it is, maybe it's not, but I haven't never encountered it.
Still astonishes me now having talked with you, and I'm just, I'm glad I looked carefully at the byline on the story and realized that you were involved in this.
It still astonishes me that this story, I know it was front page of the New York Times, but was not the biggest story ongoing everywhere.
And it wasn't here because, you know, in the UK, we're tied down with Brexit and all the other things that we're dealing with.
So it wasn't quite that big here, I don't think.
And because you have to strike while the iron's hot if you're breaking a news story, things go off the boil if they don't find their right moment and they're not treated in the right way.
And I think in this country, certainly in Europe, I think the story hasn't really had the prominence it deserved by the sounds of it.
Yeah, I mean, maybe it takes more time.
I don't know.
I can tell you that in America, it was absolutely massive, as I mentioned earlier, and it got huge play on all the major media.
I know that The Independent and The Guardian both covered it.
No, they did.
They did.
BBC has done some interviews.
I know that there was one long one that I think they did with Mr. Elizondo.
I haven't heard it yet.
So there's been some coverage.
But I guess, you know, when it happens in your own country, it's going to get more than when it happens in another country.
But it got a lot here.
But of course, we too, there's always other things going on.
Like, you know, Trump takes up a lot of airtime in this country.
And we had the tax bill that was just, you know, it's been a big story all week.
But even in spite of all of that, this was really huge.
I mean, this story was number one most viewed on the New York Times website for days.
Not just the days.
Yeah.
Even in the light of some pretty radical reshaping of the tax system that Mr. Trump is currently doing, it still made its mark.
It made number one most viewed, and it's had over the last I heard, I think it was yesterday morning or something, it had 3.5 million views on the website.
And I think that's still growing.
So yeah, it was about as big as it could get, given the limitations that the other media have in covering it.
I mean, I think they all covered it as much as they possibly could because they were all fascinated by it, you know?
As journalists, we all understand that feeling you get in your stomach when you've got a great story and you just want to get it out there.
How has this been feeling for you as somebody involved in this?
You know, you still as fired up and excited by this as you were when you started working on it?
Yeah, I mean, I would say in a way I'm more so now because this is sort of the moment that I've been hoping for and working towards for about 15 years.
I mean, you know, I've always been focused on the importance of the official world when it comes to the UFO issue, the importance of just either establishing a government agency or finding out if there is one.
And now not only is that news coming out, but I'm able to help bring that out in the New York Times of all places.
So it's really taking my whole, my work to another level, Howard.
And it's something, yeah, that it's thrilling beyond anything else I've done before.
I mean, when I published my book in 2010, it was really a big deal for me.
But this is even more.
It's absolutely thrilling.
And it's very, very hard work.
And I'm really kind of exhausted from it.
I'm ready to go to step two now.
So I can't tell you how exciting it is to feel the possibility of an actual change, an actual paradigm shift that we might be entering into now.
This is the first time I've seen that possibility since I started working on this.
There has to be a United Nations dimension to this, surely, doesn't it?
Because if this turns into the biggest story ever told, and it certainly has the simmering beginnings of that, then that's time for international policy, isn't it?
Yeah, I mean, that makes, I haven't even thought about that, but I think you're absolutely right.
It's certainly, you know, if it does become something that is internationally recognized as, you know, meaning that these, if it's established that these objects are indeed extraterrestrial and that's officially acknowledged, yeah, I mean, that's going to have a huge effect.
And I would think the United Nations would be involved.
But so far, they have a unit that deals with planetary issues or something like that, space issues.
They've been approached before and have been completely unreceptive to this issue.
But I think if, you know, if it broke in the way that we're talking about and we actually had that kind of official acknowledgement around the world, yeah, there's got to be some unifying body to bring everybody together.
And maybe the United Nations would be the place for that.
It's a good thing.
Interesting thing to think about.
And will you be trying to look into this once you've had a bit of a break for Christmas, which you deserve and the new year?
Will you be trying to approach politicians and ask them, okay, this is ongoing.
There's more of this coming out.
What are you going to do about this?
Because just as the United Nations needs to have a policy on this, your politicians, Our politicians, all politicians need to work together now if this develops into what it might be.
Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question, and I absolutely agree.
And I'm sure that we will.
You know, once we get digging into our next story, we might get wind of who some of the politicians are that might be open to this.
Or maybe even Senator Harry Reid, who we have a good relationship with, has some friends in the Senate that he might say, well, why don't you talk to so-and-so?
So we have no idea.
That's all speculation on my part.
But bringing other government officials into the newspaper, the way Senator Harry Reid was brought in, is very, very important to us at the Times.
And we will definitely be pursuing that.
And I think it's very likely that we will get some other voices.
For instance, Senator John McCain is an example.
He was in office during the Phoenix Lights incident, the very, very famous incident over Arizona where these objects were flying over the state for a couple of hours.
I think it was in 1997.
He's aware of what happened there.
He was questioned about it at the time.
He's a very open-minded person.
So unfortunately, he's suffering now with brain cancer.
But there are people in Washington who have been exposed to this over the years.
They're in office currently.
And hopefully, I'm sure we will be approaching some of those people.
But even right back to Roswell and Phoenix Lights and all of these stories, all of them had their moment.
They had their detractors.
They had their proponents.
And over the years, they've all ebbed and flowed and they've gone away for long periods.
By the sounds of it, this may be, and I don't want to put words into your mouth, this may be the story that will not go away.
Well, I like to think that, Howard, and I think it has that potential.
I mean, or at least the story that begins a kind of a progression of stories that are all linked together, with this one being the first step with a whole group of stories that will not go away.
I think, I mean, I've never seen any UFO story have the effect that this one has had.
And that's been, you know, I've been involved for over 15 years.
I've never seen anything like this.
So in that sense, I think it is here to stay.
And I think anything else that comes out is just going to have a similar effect.
And we're going to see a progression of greater and greater openness and greater discovery about what this is all about.
There are people like Steve Bassett, who we both know.
He's in Europe currently.
I'm just wondering, you know, tonight what he would make of that.
And people like Stanton Friedman, the father of modern ufology, and people like Paul Hellier in Canada, the former defense minister there, who's been very big on these issues for a very long time.
I think he's over 80 years of age now.
It is an astonishing thing we're looking down the barrel of as we start 2018.
And, you know, I can't wait to hear more, Leslie.
Well, thanks, Howard.
I think that everybody's very excited about it, all the people you mentioned and everybody else.
And I just am ready to take a little break and then go on the ride for step two.
And you will be seeing more, I guarantee you of that.
This is just the beginning.
This is just the beginning.
There's a lot more to come.
Are your colleagues envious of what you're working on, do you think?
Depends.
Well, I don't know who you mean by my colleagues.
In the journalistic profession.
I have no idea.
I don't have a lot of colleagues in the journalistic profession.
My colleagues right now are the two that I wrote the story with, my colleagues who cooperated on the story.
We work together and we get along beautifully.
It's all of our stories.
But I don't have a lot of colleagues other than that in the journalistic world.
Because I'm so independent and I just sort of focus on this topic.
And then I have this book out about consciousness and evidence for life after death and all of that.
And there aren't that many journalists that are interested in these topics.
Look, I come from a mainstream news background.
I'm not going to bore my listener again with all the stuff that I did over the years, but I was on a peak time radio show in London.
It was an entertainment show, but I was the guy who did the news.
And we did some big stuff there and sometimes talked about these things.
But, you know, I was mainstream news, but I was always interested in these subjects, which is why I've gone in the direction that I've gone and you've gone in the direction that you've gone.
Maybe, and, you know, maybe is a big word and maybe always sets you up for disappointment, but maybe this is our time.
Who knows?
I hope it is.
I hope more journalists get in on this.
On the other hand, you know, I think the Times is going to be able to do a very good job with it now that they're on it.
So I'm not worried about it if other people don't get involved because I know we're going to do the job.
So that's all that I, you know, that's fine with me.
Well, I'm holding the piece in my hand.
There it is.
It's a fine piece of work, Leslie, and thank you very much.
Have a great holiday time, and I hope you come back to it all refreshed.
And I hope that we get to talk again pretty soon in 2018.
Wait until the next one comes out, Howard, and then we'll talk again.
Thanks, Leslie.
Okay, take care.
Have a good holiday.
Happy holidays.
Leslie Kane, and as they used to say on Patent Place, and all of those dramas over the years, to be continued.
So, this has been a special edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being part of all of this, and please visit my website if you can.
Theunexplained.tv is it.
Designed, created, and honed over this last year and over many years by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thank you very much for being part of this.
Please stay in touch with me.
Let me know what you thought about this show.
And if you have guest suggestions, any thoughts about the show, please keep those coming.
But until we meet again here, it'll be in 2018 here on The Unexplained.
I'd just like to say to you and those close to you, have a wonderful holiday season.
And I hope that the dreams and wishes and hopes that you have for 2018 are fulfilled for you in that year.
It certainly sounds like it's going to be an interesting ride.
And that's all I'm going to say.
Until we meet again here on The Unexplained, I'm Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thanks.
Take care.
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