All Episodes
Previous Next
April 6, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:10:32
Edition 440 - Kevin D Randle

Long-time UFO researcher Kevin D Randle on Project Blue Book and the many investigations and coverups of the UFO phenomenon...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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 the wonderful emails that you've been sending me lately.
You've said some really, really nice things that have kept me on track and have helped to keep my chin up as we say here in the UK, helped to keep me optimistic and smiling at times when I really haven't felt like smiling as I've been watching the news.
You know, sometimes even I, and I've been a news junkie all of my life, just have to turn everything off.
And then there is this astonishing silence we have in the part of London that I'm in.
No planes in the sky, very few trains on the railway track, the odd bus going past that's completely empty.
And most of us in lockdown, those who are not doing work that you have to turn up for, that is essential to everything then we are required to be in, apart from doing shopping trips.
I did one today.
And that's always a bit scary because you wonder where to go and you wonder which queue you should be getting in and who's there and who might have CV19.
My local supermarket have taken new precautions.
They put perspex guards up to protect the checkout staff, which is a great thing because it must give them much more of a feeling of security.
But these are strange times and we can only between us hope and pray that they are over soon and that we can resume normal life.
But I don't think life will ever be quite the same.
As I said on the last podcast, I think a lot of us are going to be rethinking the way that we've lived our lives.
I certainly am.
I'm giving it a great big think and I want to be different and I'm not going to I'm not going to live like I did.
Maybe this chimes with you.
Well, I get this feeling every morning when I wake up.
I think, I am not going to continue like this.
Because, you know, who knows how long any of us has got on this earth.
I'm not being maugling about it.
You've got to make the most of every moment.
So the trips I never took, the things I never did, the things I never said, I think I'm going to get doing them.
And that started yesterday.
You know?
Maybe you feel the same about it all.
Thank you very much to Adam, who's been doing some great work for me, getting the podcast out to you and maintaining the website, Adam at Creative Hotspot.
Great guest for you on this edition of The Unexplained, Kevin D. Randall, UFO investigator.
One of the best and best known in the world.
He is.
He's got a military background, as you'll hear, and is an amazing researcher.
He's got a new book out, published by Philip Mantle's Flying Disc Press.
It's called The Best of Blue Book.
It is an incredible podcast.
Thank you very much for the many emails that you've been sending me, the nice things you've been saying, like I say.
They mean a lot to me, and they keep me going.
So please keep them coming.
If you want to send me an email with a comment or a guest suggestion or just to tell me how you are, that's fine.
Theunexplained.tv is the website.
Please go there, put a hit on it, and you can follow the link and send me a message from there.
If you can and you're able to, then please send a donation if you can.
If you have recently, thank you very, very much for doing that.
Greatly appreciated.
And if you can't send a donation, that's okay.
Please, if you can, review the show on iTunes or wherever.
That would help me a great deal, too.
All right, let's get to the guest in the U.S. now.
Completely different time zone.
I think eight hours behind me.
I'm recording this early evening.
Kevin D. Randall.
Kevin, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Delighted to be here.
I always like London.
Have you been?
No, but I've seen it on a map.
Well, you know something.
I think an awful lot of us right now are making ourselves promises of the things that we are going to do when this coronavirus crisis that the world is gripped by at the moment ends.
One of mine is to go to America.
I think you need to make some kind of pledge to yourself, Kevin, that you come to London soon.
Well, I did a DNA test and found out 49% of my DNA comes from Great Britain, the potteries, I think is what they called it.
Yeah, no, sorry.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, I think you can.
Well, apparently I have cousins living there.
Do you know them?
You need to contact them.
No, but the DNA profile listed people who had similar DNA, and some of them are in the area, and they even have the same last name.
So I have relatives there in England still.
I may well be wrong, and my listener will tell me, I think the name Randall is a north of England name, but I could be wrong about that.
And I think it's spelt in different ways in different towns and cities.
Spelling it the way I do is the people I found that the DNA test showed was living in the potteries and what the Middlesex area of Great Britain, I think.
Well, you know, that is exactly where I am speaking to you from, which is in the London suburbs.
There you go.
Okay.
Now, we've got to talk about your book, which is an amazing book.
It's around 400 pages.
It is an astonishing thing.
Before we get stuck into it, though, and before we get stuck into some of these case studies and stories that you've documented so well, talk to me a little bit about you and your background.
I spent a long time in the American military.
I was a helicopter pilot, aircraft commander in Vietnam.
I was an intelligence officer for the Army in Iraq.
I spent some time in the United States Air Force as an intelligence officer.
I have a long military background.
I have a PhD in psychology and have written quite a few books on UFOs.
You have, and I'm really pleased to be talking with you now.
I should have talked to you before, really.
With a background like that, and a military background of that kind, why UFOs?
I blame my mother.
When I was a very young child, she took me to see a movie called Earth versus the Flying Saucers.
And I suspect that is what sparked my interest.
And she was always a big fan of science fiction.
She read a lot of science fiction books.
And science fiction, of course, is about alien visitation, life on other planets, interstellar flight, and all of those things are prevalent in the UFO field.
They are.
Did you come across in your military service anything that chimed with that UFO interest?
Well, there were people who knew about My interest, and they would sometimes point me to things or tell me their UFO encounters.
I came across nothing officially with one exception.
There used to be something in the Air Force called the Weekly Intelligence Brief, and it was mostly unclassified stuff, but some classified material that would be relevant to airlifter or military Air Force units.
And there was a UFO sighting in one of the issues, not a very good one, and it was unclassified.
It happened near Japan, and it was an air crew saw something in the distance.
It wasn't a very exciting sighting, but that was my only official encounter with UFOs in the military.
But unofficially, I collected any number of stories from colleagues.
Okay, I just want to ask you a quick question.
Are you connected wirelessly at the moment?
Every so often, your audio trips up, but it's not serious.
I'd rather continue like this.
But are you wireless?
Yes, I am.
Okay.
No, it's often better to be on a wired connection just for consistency.
But let's carry on because it's okay.
It's only the occasional glitch.
And, you know, your audio quality is good.
So that's the background.
Why did you choose to write about this and to research this?
I always had a desire to be a writer.
And back in the 1970s, there was any number of magazines that dealt with UFOs.
And I had written an article about a UFO physical evidence because that was what the publishers were looking for.
And I sent it off.
And I said, well, we really like that.
Can you take out the bad stuff, meaning the stuff that has been well publicized and bring us some new stuff?
So I got in contact with Coral Lorenzen at Apro, and they sent me some material, rewrote the story, made brief mention of these other sightings.
And they wrote back and said, yeah, we really like this, but could you elaborate on the other things, which is what I had taken out.
So I put all the stuff back in and they finally bought the story.
And from that, I was able to parley that into writing for a number of UFO magazines.
There were six or seven of them in the mid-1970s.
And so you could make a pretty good living on writing UFO stories for them.
And that kind of sparked the interest or continued with the interest, I should say.
Right.
Of course, UFO material, and I remember this because that's when I was a kid and coming up in all of this, getting the magazines, finding the groups and stuff like that, it was much more difficult than it is today because it's all online.
Do you think that the quality of material is better today because we're all so interconnected?
No, but the research is much easier.
I think that most of the magazines, many of the magazines back in the 1970s, they tried to make sure the stuff was accurate.
They tried to make sure that the stories were legitimate, that people weren't making up the things.
And with the internet, you've got an awful lot of people making up stuff.
And you've got an awful lot of people who would like their 15 minutes of fame.
So they come forward and plug themselves into the story.
We found that with the Roswell case.
Don Schmidt and I did a, have been doing it for a number of years, investigating the Roswell UFO crash.
And we found a lot of people who've come forward and told us the stories.
And as we begin to check their backgrounds and we begin to check out the stories, we find out they're making it up.
And some of that is more easily done today because we have access to the internet and we can get information that wouldn't have been easily available to us back when we began the investigations in the 1990s, the early 1990s, late 1980s.
So the information is more prevalent, and there's a lot more of it, which is the same thing, I suppose.
But you have to be careful when you're looking at that information to make sure that it's accurate because people just will make stuff up to get their 15 minutes or get their clicks to their website.
So we have to be very careful in that respect.
I mean, you said it was about clicks to the website.
I've never asked anybody involved in serious UFO research this question.
Why do you think, psychologically, and that's part of your background too, why do you think that people make things up in this field?
Apart from clicks on a website, if they don't have a website, why would they do that?
It's not just this field.
It's prevalent throughout society.
People who never served in the military, never served in Vietnam, are claiming Vietnam service and telling horrific stories of combat.
And you check out their backgrounds and you learn that they're making the whole thing up or they're talking to you about what they'd seen in movies.
So it's not just that.
John Keel had said at one point, and this relates back to the UFOs, of course, that by the turn of the century, meaning the year 2000, and we were having this argument or this discussion in 1990, that he figured there'd be another thousand people who claimed to have been in Roswell in 1947 to be involved in this thing.
And he was absolutely correct.
The people are just coming out of the woodworks.
One guy's obituary said that he was the last surviving member to have handled the alien debris from Roswell.
And it turned out his story was completely and totally bogus.
So with so much duff, as we say in the UK, duff information around, how is it possible to do any kind of research that you can put your hand on your heart and stand by?
You have to go into depth.
You have to do your due diligence and look for everything that's available to you and cross-check it with everything.
Some guy comes to you with a story telling you about his involvement in Roswell.
The first thing we do is look in the yearbook.
Walter Haat, the information officer in Roswell in 1947, in 1947, they produced a yearbook of most of the people assigned to the base.
So we would look up the name in the yearbook.
If he's not there, that's a red flag.
We have also a telephone directory that was put out by the base.
And I mentioned this because a guy named Daryl Rasmussen was supposedly involved.
He's not in the yearbook.
Found his name in the telephone directory.
So clearly he was there.
So you do that sort of thing.
Was the person actually there?
Can they physically prove that he was there?
And then you look at the context of the story.
How does it fit with the other stories that we've been able to vet, that we've been able to understand?
Is it completely off the rails?
Or does it match what other people are telling us?
So we have to do all of that sort of thing.
A guy named Robert Willingham got a lot of track by saying that he had been involved in a UFO crash near Del Rio, Texas in 1950.
And everybody accepted him as being a retired Air Force colonel.
Nobody had checked the records.
Well, there's a big repository, archive in St. Louis, Missouri, where all military records end up.
And you can write to them, give them the proper information, and they will send you a fact sheet about the person.
Turned out that Robert Willingham had never been in the Air Force, had never been in Korea, as he claimed, was not a fighter pilot.
He had spent 13 months in the U.S. Army.
He was technically a veteran of World War II.
He had joined the Army in December of 1945.
The war was not officially declared over until 1946.
So technically, he was a veteran of World War II.
He spent 13 months in the military, raising to the rank of E-4, a very low-ranking enlisted person.
And that collapsed his entire story.
So that story had been circulated for years that he had been involved in this UFO crash.
And there was an affidavit that he had signed.
I actually mentioned it in a couple of books that I had done about it because everybody accepted it, but nobody had checked his background.
In today's world, it's much easier to do.
So you've got to do those sorts of things to make sure that people are telling you the truth.
And that was one of the points of doing the best of Project Blue Book is looking at the documentation that's in there and then seeing what I could verify from other sources and how the military might have manipulated the data to suggest that there was no real UFO involvement there when it turned out that, you know, here's this wonderful case with all these witnesses telling these wonderful things that the military just kind of ignored.
Yeah, we'll get into one of the cases a little bit later when we delve into the book, where I think the military report said this is a nine-inch baking tray, which was quite an interesting document if I read that right.
At the beginning of the book then, let me just quote here.
And you say the official public investigation into what would become known as UFOs began with Project Sign in 1948.
It lasted for 22 years and ended in 1969 after a study at the University of Colorado known as the Condon Committee and sponsored by the Air Force.
The Condon Committee concluded that there were no national security implications and there was nothing of scientific value that could be learned by continuing the study of UFO sightings.
We call those things cul-de-sax here.
You know, when you hit a dead end, that sounds like one.
The problem was when you take a look at the conduct committee and there was a letter from an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel named Robert Hipler to the conduct committee and says, here's what we'd like you to find when you take up this study.
We would like you to find that the Air Force did a good job.
We'd like you to find that there's no national security implications.
And we'd like you to find that there's nothing of scientific value to continue the investigation.
This is before they even began the study.
And the conduct committee people say, yeah, we can do that.
And then the study comes out after 18 months or two years and said basically those sorts of things.
And the Air Force says, well, we don't have to investigate UFOs anymore.
We're closing down the investigation.
The government didn't stop investigating UFOs at that point.
The public face of it was ended, but there was another project called Project Moondust, which had a UFO component.
That was compromised in 1985 when Robert Todd got documents from our Department of State that mentioned moondust.
I found files in the Project Blue Book files that were actually stamped Project Moondust.
So we saw the UFO component.
Once that was compromised, Todd wanted the name of the project as it existed after then, and they said, no, the name's properly classified.
So there's a continued study.
And then we have the Tic-Tac situation, the USS Nimitz sightings from 2004 that proves the study was going on.
And also shows, I'm sorry to interrupt, but also shows that the sort of footwork backwards and forwards of the military and, you know, the government, but the military particularly on this, nothing much has changed, has it?
Because we've had statements about ATIP that have said one thing and then implied another.
We've got that all sorts of times with the government.
Originally, they said, the original investigation was called Publicly Project Saucer.
It was officially Project Sign.
They concluded, they wrote a final report and said, sign has been closed.
We're not investigating UFOs.
And all they did was change the name to Project Grudge and continue on.
Same thing happened with Project Grudge.
They wrote a final report and said, we're done with this.
We don't investigate UFOs.
And it became Project Blue Book.
So there were periods where there was interest in the UFOs.
And there were periods where it said, well, we're done with it.
We're not investigating it.
But they never closed the projects.
They continued to investigate.
And the same thing with Project Blue Book.
Once it was closed, the investigation took a different avenue, but there was continued investigation in UFOs.
The other thing you have to say is the Air Force mission is to protect our skies from foreign invaders, whatever manifestation those foreign invaders take.
And so they say, well, we're not investigating UFOs.
Well, if you've got something in the sky that can't be identified, that is your mission to identify exactly what it was.
So you're obligated by your mission to investigate UFOs.
So saying you don't do it is a complete and total lie.
So it's an ongoing investigation, really.
You can give it a different name, but the interest continues.
But the desire to cover it all up is just as strong now as it was in 1947.
I think in 1947, they were justified in what they were doing because, as everybody knows, we'd just come out of a disastrous war and they have no idea what this is about.
Suddenly we're presented with these.
There was a guy named Howard McCoy, Colonel Howard McCoy.
During World War II, he investigated the Foo Fighters, which were the objects seen by the, mainly by flight crews, thinking they were some kind of access weapon.
Then there were the ghost rockets over Scandinavia and Northern Europe.
And then in 1947, we started with the flying saucers in the United States.
Howard McCoy was investigating all of that stuff all along.
They didn't have an answer.
And so at that point, they're trying to determine whether there's a national security implication.
Is there some kind of danger involved?
Is there something that we need to do?
And they wanted to do it without spreading panic.
After a period of time passed and They realized the flying saucers, the UFOs, weren't going to be landing and invading the world, the panic subsided, especially when they weren't getting any new kind of sightings.
It was the same sort of thing that they had gotten all along, the objects in the air, the objects on the ground, that sort of thing, but no sort of contact between our civilization and theirs other than accidental type contact.
So originally the secrecy is justified because they don't want to spread panic.
But after they realized that there was nothing dangerous involved, they continued their investigation in that manner.
So it persisted on through the end of Project Blue Book.
And I'm not sure why it persists today, but it does.
And we got into the Project Blue Book files.
And I say we, Robert Cornette and I think were the first civilians to actually get into the Project Blue Book files when they were declassified.
And we could look through this stuff, but there was so much of it that it took years to kind of get through it and see what was going on and what was happening.
And again, that kind of generated the reasons for the book as well, because we need to look at this stuff.
But I could bring in materials from long after the case was filed away.
I could investigate or interview people from those sightings in a different environment.
I could get other documentation.
I could bring more information into it and learn a little bit more about the case and give a much better solution for it.
And some of the explanations found by the military, the Air Force, were spot on.
They were absolutely correct.
Bob Cornett and I used to make fun of a sighting that was labeled as the moon, a joint military civilian observation of the moon.
And I was actually involved in an investigation.
I was standing in the police department in Wisconsin, and the sheriff's deputy said to me, the police officer said to me, there's a guy seeing a UFO landing out behind his house.
You want to go?
And I said, absolutely.
We drove out there, and he was looking at the damn moon.
There were low-hanging clouds, and they were moving fast because of the wind.
So it gave it an impression of motion, but he was looking at the moon.
And so these preposterous explanations sometimes turned out to be true.
But other times they just bungle the investigation.
Let's slap a label on it and move on.
Right.
And you talked about, I'm fascinated by the early history of all of this, which you do go into.
I mean, you go into all of the aspects of this, but you quote what happened in Scandinavia.
In 1946, less than a year after the end of the war, people living in Scandinavia began reporting what were eventually labeled, as you said, ghost rockets.
Ironically, the sightings were begun by a report by an American pilot, Jerome Clark, documented this American C-46 transport plane passing over France at 7,000 feet.
The pilot observed what he took to be a brilliant meteor 35 degrees above the eastern horizon.
The object fell and apparently was lost to view, but only momentarily because this thing, and we hear a lot of this in modern reports of UFOs, suddenly shot up.
It ascended again and made a sort of pirouette type of motion.
Now, that was 1946.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And then you had a long series of sightings in Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
But they ended because the Swedish military, for example, put an embargo on reporting of it.
And so people had been reporting their stories.
And once the embargo went into place and it didn't appear in the newspapers and it seemed to have ended, people stopped reporting.
But the sightings really didn't end.
There were a lot of people who thought it was the Soviet Union who was responsible for the ghost rockets.
But once the Soviet Union crumbled and researchers had an opportunity to review the records from the Soviet Union, they learned that the ghost rockets weren't Soviet manufacturers.
So you've got this bizarre thing, and everybody thought, well, it was the Soviet Union trying to intimidate the Scandinavian militaries.
And it turned out that wasn't true.
So you've got that sort of thing going on.
But the history, I think, the modern era starts with World War II and the Foo Fighters.
And we kind of overlooked that because once the war ended, there was no imperative to discover what the Foo Fighters were.
And they were no longer a threat.
Frequent sightings, sometimes by military pilots, sometimes, I think, by people on the ground of they didn't have a way to describe it.
And of course, the world was at war, the back end of a war.
Very, very strange, fiery objects.
Oftentimes that way, but there were also reports of disc-shaped objects or reports of solid objects or reports of, of course, air crews firing on these things and watching the bullets disappear into the glow of the object and not reappear on the other side or do any damage to it or bounce off.
So you've got an awful lot of interesting sightings of this, and that's why they were worrying about it being some kind of weapon being developed by the Axis.
And I say the Axis because there were similar sightings in the Pacific theater as well.
So they were worried about the Japanese having developed something like that.
But once the war ended, there was no imperative to discover what they were because there was no threat from them anymore.
The sightings continued, but they weren't reported in the way they had been during intelligence debriefings and that thing, that way during the war.
And that was why Howard McCoy becomes so important in the discussion of this is because he was involved with that at the highest levels during World War II.
I think he was stationed in Great Britain at the time, and then moved over to France as the war progressed, trying to determine what the Foo Fighters were.
And then he was involved because of his expertise with the Foo Fighters.
He was involved through the American Embassy with the Swedish Scandinavian ghost rockets.
And once things were starting in the United States, he was involved there.
Interestingly, it seems that he was told to begin an investigation unofficially in December of 1946, which is prior to Kenneth Arnold's sighting in June of 1947 when everything became official.
So there was a continued investigation of UFOs involving Howard McCoy from World War II through the beginnings Of Project Sign.
So Howard McCoy becomes a very important figure in all this and sort of one of the unnamed figures that led us into the way the investigations were conducted, especially after 1948.
Quote from the book, and this is very telling throughout all eras, really.
And you say Project Blue Book had become the public relations nightmare.
Nearly everybody, including much of the news media, were having trouble accepting Air Force solutions to the sightings.
The solution for this dilemma, which had been suggested for years, was to find an impartial organization, a university, for example, to study UFOs, then conclude it in the way the Air Force wanted it concluded, which is exactly what you said at the beginning of this conversation.
The way to do this, get yourself a third party.
But of course, that didn't always work, did it?
No, and the problem was there were people, civilians, throughout the world.
I focus on the United States simply because that's where I live, but I know the same thing was happening in Great Britain and in Australia and in France and other parts of the world, that the militaries would be involved in this.
They would, of course, cloak part of it in secrecy, but they also tried to downplay the importance of the research that was going on.
And if you look at the history in the United States, and we were able to find documents in the Project Blue Book files that illustrate this, that there had been a long time when they wanted to move the investigation of the UFOs out of the intelligence community into the public relations community because that would lessens its importance.
It's no longer an intelligence item.
It's now just public relations.
Who cares?
They also tried to make fun of it.
Ed Ruppelt in his book was talking about how they used the term flying saucer to ridicule it, but when they were talking officially with their superiors, it was UFO.
So they would say, oh, you don't believe in those flying saucers, do you?
As a way of ridiculing this.
There were newspaper headlines that we found, and I say we, all of us who have been doing this research, in 1947, for example, the one that I remember specifically was from Kansas.
And Kansas was a dry state, meaning alcohol was not publicly available there illegally.
Right, so that would never be a factor in sightings then.
And then what it said was sightings in 38 states except for Kansas.
Because it's a dry state.
So they're implying, you know, the only drunks see it.
And you get the idea of the guys who are seeing UFOs wearing bibbulats and have overalls and have three teeth.
You know, it's ridiculing the background of people.
But I think it was Alan Hynek who did a study of it and determined that the higher the level of education and the longer the object was visible, the less likely it was going to be resolved as some sort of a mundane object.
And so you had that sort of thing going on.
The other thing they would say is, well, astronomers don't see UFOs, which turns out to be patently false.
But if you're doing an observation through a telescope, you're looking at a very small part of the sky.
But Hynek did a survey in, I think, 1952 of 50-some astronomers and found that three or four of them had seen UFOs, including Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto.
Isn't that interesting?
Had a UFO sighting.
So what you find by studying the information is a lot of the mythology about it, which is who sees them and the educational level, turns out not to be true, and that there was an attempt to suppress the information to keep the public from talking about it.
In fact, in July of 1947, not long after the Roswell crash, there was an article in the newspapers, I think it was an Associated Press story, so it appeared throughout the United States, that the Army and Navy moved today to suppress stories of flying saucers whizzing through the atmosphere.
They were taking a lesson from the Swedish government in trying to stop the newspapers from publishing the stories.
And there was a precipitous drop-off in the number of newspaper reports at that point.
As it started to stop being reported in the newspapers, of course, people lost interest in the topic and they went on to other things.
But in 1947, nonetheless, your book quotes the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 1947, series of sightings over several northwestern states that Air Force officers labeled as either insufficient data for scientific analysis or as just unclassified.
Army investigators, Army Air Force investigators who took the report seriously in the summer of 47 failed to find a satisfactory explanation for these sightings.
So it's not possible.
It was never possible to make all of this stuff go away.
You could stop the reporting.
And once you stop the reporting, people might stop reporting them to you.
But they were still getting reports.
And of course, there was a requirement by the Air Force for their military personnel to report the sightings as well.
So the Blue Book, the Air Force investigation was getting sightings.
But what you see is once you've eliminated from the press, people no longer know where to report their sightings or they don't want to report their sightings or they see the ridicule factor being pointed at people who see UFOs.
And so they're hesitant to report their sightings.
And we also have had many, many reports from airline personnel and actually military pilots that they didn't want to report the sightings because they might lose their flying status, that they would become seen as not being a reliable person.
So they would be taken off flight status.
And there's any number of persons who have told us about that as well.
I myself, as an Army helicopter pilot, never had that problem.
And everybody knew about my interest in UFOs.
And that was how I would get a lot of these sorts of stories.
But there were other people whose careers were influenced by their observation of UFOs or their reporting of UFOs.
When you say influenced, what do you mean?
Well, people would look at them askance and they say, well, that's that guy that saw the UFOs.
Do we want to promote this guy?
Do we want to put him in charge of make him an aircraft commander, for example?
Is this guy reliable?
And so, or the other side of the coin is if we make an example of this guy, we can stop other people talking about the flying saucers.
Gee, yes, I've never thought of it that way.
And of course, in more modern times, I'm thinking about the Japan Airlines sighting where the crew there, you know, they paid a price for a period of reporting that.
Yes, the pilot who reported it was taken off flying status.
I think Richard Haynes here in the United States helped him get it back on flying Status, but yes, there was a very adverse effect for him reporting the sighting.
And other airline pilots know that.
I talked to a guy named John Calhoun, who was the FBI investigator on that sighting.
And he told me that they went in to brief the White House, and there were a couple of CIA guys there.
And he said, we were not here.
So there was a CIA interest in it, but they didn't want it known that the CIA interest was what the Japanese pilots had seen.
And there really is no good solution for what they saw.
It's a very good sighting, and it took place over a period of time, and there was radar confirmation of it.
And the Air Force, the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration who investigated it, were able to put together a good timeline with the radar track so they could see exactly how the pilots were reporting what had happened.
They could see on radar exactly what was going on.
So it was a very good sighting with a lot of good physical evidence involved.
Interesting, you should mention the CIA, because in your book, you say in January 53, the CIA sponsored a panel known as the Robertson panel to, quote, investigate UFOs.
After the five-day meeting, the members offered a number of suggestions, including that the, quotes, mystique of the UFO be stripped from them by, quotes, debunking.
Yes, yes.
And that all evolved out of the Washington National sightings, Washington National being the Washington National Airport.
And there were sightings over consecutive Saturday nights in July of 1952.
Things were seen on radar.
Airline pilots saw them.
There were attempted intercepts by the military pilots.
There were witnesses on the ground.
I mean, there were literally dozens and dozens of witnesses.
And on the second night, there were two guys in the radar room, Al Chop and Dewey Fournet.
Al Chop being the civilian UFO liaison at the Pentagon at the time, and Dewey Fournet being the military liaison for UFOs at the Pentagon.
And they were in the room, and I talked to both of those guys about what had happened and what they'd seen.
And they were mystified by it.
Although it came out later that what happened was, well, see, there were these temperature inversions over Washington, D.C., and this was bending the radar waves, and that was giving false returns.
Doesn't explain the sightings.
It doesn't explain the attempted intercept.
And I forget who it was.
One of Al Chop or Dewey Fournette told me one of the sightings got very hairy.
And I said, what do you mean?
He said, well, I'm not sure I'm cleared to talk about that.
So I was talking to the other guy, and I forget which one it was.
And I said, you know, Al Chop told me about this sighting that got very hairy.
And he says, yeah, one of the pilots got surrounded by these things.
And so he thought I knew the whole story because I just said, Al, you know, either Al Chopper Dewey Fournette had told me about the sighting, and he gave me the rest of the details.
And so you've got a fighter pilot who's surrounded by these things, and it's being picked up on his onboard radar.
Very good sightings.
And yet what the Air Force did and the Robertson panel did after this, the Robertson panel obviously was put together prior to the conclusions.
The report was written obviously prior to the actual formation of the panel because they had their meetings over five days.
And like that night, Robertson's got the final report written up.
And by the next morning, he's talking to people and they've already reviewed the darn thing.
And they want to debunk the UFO sightings, take the mystique out of them, get people uninterested in them.
Tell teachers, don't accept reports about UFOs from your students.
Don't accept research projects.
If there's a sighting that seems mysterious and we find a good solution, publicize that immediately.
But if we don't have a solution, don't tell anybody about it.
The Air Force regulation actually says that, that the investigating officers at the local Air Force Base, if they've got a solution, they're free to talk to the press.
If they don't have a solution, they are required to put the press in contact with the Public Affairs Office at the Pentagon to get the information.
So clearly there's an attempt to suppress the really good information.
And when I was looking at the book, I was looking for the cases that looked really, really good.
The other thing I discovered, and I should point this out, 700 cases are labeled unidentified out of the 12,000 the Air Force investigated.
But if you look at the conclusions, some 4,000 or 5,000 are listed as insufficient data for a scientific analysis.
Means there's no solution, but they're not in that unidentified category.
So nearly half the sightings they investigated don't have a good solution.
And some of the solutions are patently, obviously false.
So that's misclassification on the grand scale.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I was stunned that other people haven't pointed that sort of thing out, this classification of insufficient data for scientific analysis was used as a catch-all to just eliminate sightings from that dreaded unidentified category.
One of the sightings, and I do talk about in the book, it's a short sighting.
It's not that impressive in and of itself, although the pilots said that they had been talked to by mysterious men in the days after, people in civilian suits talking to them in a military type environment.
But the sighting was labeled in the condom committee as a sighting that was a natural phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since.
That's their solution.
A natural phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since.
I'm thinking this then tells me there's something of scientific value to the continued study of UFOs, even if you're looking for atmospheric phenomenon.
And they concluded there was nothing to it.
So I detailed some of the stuff in the book and I think Jenny Randalls, who is a British researcher, talked about it.
And in her book, The UFO Conspiracy at one point, I was able to find some newspaper articles about it.
And I was able to look at the Project Blue Book file on it as well, which gave me some additional information.
Okay, is this the Red Bluff incident?
No, this is the...
Right.
And this isn't the June 30th, 1954, this is the British airline crew, isn't it?
Yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I didn't actually write down the name of the plane, but I remember thinking they gave planes wonderful names in Those days, which they don't now.
They just give them numbers.
This was an, as you say, this wasn't a convoluted sighting, but it was an amazing one, wasn't it?
This was on a transatlantic flight.
Yes, and they saw the object for quite a long period of time.
The problem is there was a ship in the area, I think it was a Navy vessel, who also had a sighting.
And they came up with this idea that it was something just beyond the horizon being reflected up into the atmosphere.
And I mean, that's a phenomenon we all understand.
But the airline crews above that, and they're looking down, and they shouldn't have had that problem.
But the Air Force glommed on to this idea that it was a natural phenomenon as a way of writing it off.
And yet you still have the investigation, the civilians investigating, talking to the airline crew, just the pilots, not just the whole crew, but the pilots about that.
And I think one of the other crew members saw one of the pilots sometime later and asked him, I said, well, I can't tell you about that.
And so you've got that sort of thing going on in that time frame when we still have it going on today.
So you've got a separation of the crew members to tell their stories and then not to talk about it amongst themselves because they don't want them comparing notes.
Wow.
And that is very similar.
It struck me when I was reading it today.
It reminded me of the Channel Islands sighting here, the Orini Airlines pilot who I've interviewed a couple of times.
I've spoken with him.
He had a long period of not really speaking about it and then he started speaking about it again, flying to the Channel Islands and seeing something huge in front of him that I think actually reflected on the sea.
You know, it was reflecting back from the sea.
This reminded me of that.
So this stuff is still going on.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And the ATIP program shows this stuff is still going on, even though the sightings were now, what, 16 years ago.
But we've still got that sort of thing going on.
The sightings are still being made.
They're still being reviewed by the military for various reasons.
I think part of the ATIP program was inspired to funnel funds to Robert Bigelow for his space adventures in Nevada.
But you've got these sorts of things going on, but still people are reluctant to talk about it because of the negative influences it can have on their careers and the ridicule factor that still is somewhat in effect.
We used to point out this all the time on the news media, how the news readers, the anchors, would report the stories tongue-in-cheek, but they would always try to give a hint that they really didn't believe this stuff.
They were too sophisticated to it.
But here was a story that was of interest.
And the one that really annoyed me was that two guys in New Jersey had launched a railroad flare attached to balloons because they wanted to prove how credulous UFO investigators were and how bad the witnesses were.
And what they actually ended up proving was the UFO investigators were very good because within hours of the sightings being reported, I think Mark D'Antonio from MUFON declared that it was artificial light source, either Chinese lanterns or flares.
Police officer reported that it was flares.
The witnesses, one of the witnesses was interviewed, I think, on Fox television, and they were showing the video and the host said, look how it's flashing.
And he said, oh, no, it's passing behind trees.
So they understood that the lights weren't flashing.
And then one of the reporters interviewed a little girl with a lollipop and asked her what she thought of the aliens.
That was the only time anybody mentioned aliens.
It was brought into it by the news reporter.
Kind of interjecting the aliens into it.
But what these guys proved was not that the UFO investigators were credulous because it was identified almost immediately what it was.
The police officers identified what it was.
The witnesses reported exactly what they had seen without interjecting alien intervention or interstellar flight into it.
And it was the news media that began injecting the aliens in it.
And then the two guys who originated the experiment began injecting themselves into it as well because it wasn't proving what they wanted it to prove.
In other words, it was showing that the investigations were very good, the witnesses were very good.
And so they had to change the parameters of the experiment to get the UFOs and the flying saucers into it.
Talk to me about the Red Bluff case in 1960, August of that year.
This was something that was pursuing an aircraft, wasn't it, for two hours and 15 minutes, or rather was pursued by.
Well, you've got, there's any number of cases exactly like that where the objects are seen and people in their cars are followed by the aircraft or by the by the object or they're chasing the object as well in their cars to see where it goes.
And you had any number of police officers in the Red Buff, California area involved in this.
And they were, that's exactly what they were doing, trying to get an idea of what exactly it was.
You had witnesses on the ground seeing the thing and reporting it to police.
You had the police officers reporting it.
And it took place over several hours.
Right.
So it wasn't an aviation sighting.
This was one that was from the ground.
People were pursuing whatever it was from the ground.
Yes, yes.
Wow.
The police officers falling.
If you remember the movie Close Encounters, this was actually Portage County in Ohio, not Red Bluff.
But at the beginning of the movie, you had the police officers chasing the lights across Ohio into Pennsylvania.
And you've got the same thing here, chasing the lights from town to town involving several different police agencies and several different police cars as they tried to identify what these objects were.
But you've also got people on the ground seeing it.
So you've got a large number of witnesses to it from all kinds of different angles and many of them independently seeing the thing.
So you can put together a really good analysis of the sighting if you wish to do it, which the Air Force kind of avoided doing.
And what is it that they were seeing?
What did they think they were seeing?
We were seeing some kind of, they believed they were seeing some kind of alien craft, obviously.
There was nothing that was in our inventory.
And when I say our, I mean the United States inventory, aviation inventory.
Wasn't an experimental craft of any kind.
There was actually no explanation for what this thing they were seeing was.
And it involved, like I said, it involved any number of people.
What always astonishes me, especially in today's society, but back then, the police cars were usually equipped with cameras.
People had cameras on the ground.
Nobody gets pictures of these darn things.
If you could get a number of people at separate locations independently photographing the thing with good directions on where they were and the elevation above the horizon they saw it, you could triangulate this thing and get an idea of the size, the height, and the speed of it, which would be wonderful information to have.
But we never seem to get quite to that point.
And in today's environment, I've always said, you know, everybody's got a camera in their pocket.
But the problem with that, everybody's looking down at their phone instead of looking up at the sky.
So we aren't seeing this thing.
That's part of the modern world.
I've always been fascinated by the 1964 Socaro, New Mexico sighting.
This is something that apparently landed, and it wasn't just stuff that people saw.
There were actual landing, you know, the landing, what do they call those things, the pods that touch down on the surface.
Well, landing traces.
Yeah, there were indentations, rather like the ones that the lunar module made on the moon.
Absolutely.
And this is a fascinating sighting because for the longest time, everybody said, well, a single witness.
There's one police officer see the thing on the ground.
And of course, there were landing traces left behind.
But what we found out was I was interviewing Ben Moss and Tony Angiola on my radio program.
And they told me that there had been people who'd called the police station, the Socorro police station, prior to Lonnie Zamora, the police officer who saw the landed object, about something in the sky.
And they didn't record the phone calls.
They didn't take the names or anything else because they thought it was nonsense.
And I said to Ben and Tony, did you check the police records?
Did you check the police log to see if the calls were logged?
And I never got a satisfactory answer out of them.
So I started looking into the case myself and I came across a report written by Captain Richard Holder.
He was an Army officer who was involved on the very first night interviewing Lonnie Zamora.
And he wrote a report that very night that went to the Pentagon.
And in it, he said there had been three phone calls to the police station prior to Lonnie Zamora's sighting later in the day.
And I'm thinking there is the corroboration for other witnesses.
The thing that is stunning about this, nobody bothered to try to find those guys back in 1964.
So Lani Zamora sees this object on the ground.
He gets a very good look at it.
He sees this trained symbol on it, and he sees two beings standing near it.
When they noticed him, they suddenly look like they're startled or seem to react startled.
They run around behind the craft.
They crawl up into the back.
He hears a bang like a vault door closing, not really a bang, but a closing.
There's a roar underneath, a flame, and it takes off and disappears.
Within seconds, Zamora's friend, a state policeman, Sam Shavish, shows up.
They see, they find the landing traces.
They find a bush that is still smoking from the chemical reaction.
They take samples of this stuff, and there's never any evidence of any kind of chemical on the bush to suggest that it was a chemically based engine that created the flame.
I mean, no residue of anything like that.
The landing traces remained there for literally weeks because they protected them with rocks.
There's photographs of them.
The Air Force investigated.
It's one of only three cases in the Project Blue Book files labeled unidentified in which there was occupants, creatures involved as well.
I think Hector Quintanella, who was the chief of Project Blue Book at the time, in his memoirs wrote it was the only sighting that he came across, he just could not come up with a real good explanation for.
And he said that he thought the explanation resided in Lani Zamora's head, meaning Bonnie Zamora had some information that had he communicated it properly would have given him the answer.
Not that Zamora was hiding anything, but there was something there that the Air Force investigators didn't get.
But you've got the landing traces.
And then you've got other sightings taking place shortly after that in New Mexico.
And the next day there's a landing in La Madeira, New Mexico.
And I think it was Jalen Hynek wanted to go investigate it.
He was in New Mexico within 48 hours, 72 hours of the landing.
Learns of this other sighting.
He wants to go investigate that.
And the Air Force says, no, you can't do that.
Come on home.
So that's, he went back months later, but he didn't get there at the time he could have.
So you've got all these sightings taking place.
The Lad Madeira sighting, I think the Air Force wrote off as a fire in a dump or rags being set on fire.
I mean, absolutely preposterous.
And when you talk to the people or you get the records from the people who were interviewed at the time, you realize that's not true.
But there's no explanation, no solid explanation for the Zamora sighting.
It's a very strong sighting and one that suggests really sort of an extraterrestrial hypothesis simply because there's no explanation for where the craft went, what it was.
It clearly was nothing in our inventory, although the landing gear, I think, looks somewhat less similar to what they used for the lunar lander, but there was no test being conducted in New Mexico at the time that would account for the sighting.
And the test would have been conducted on the White Sands Missile Range and not landing off-range in Socorro, New Mexico.
Yeah, no, they'd have been on some kind of military site, you know, when the Apollo 11 astronauts were testing the lunar module, then that was very carefully monitored.
It wasn't just sort of random anywhere.
Why do you think New Mexico is such a hot spot for these things?
I think beginning originally, it's because the first atomic bomb was dropped on New Mexico in 1945.
I mean, that was where they tested the first one.
In 1947, you had an awful lot of rocketry, and you still do testing being going on at White Sands Missile Range.
The Los Alamos laboratories are in New Mexico.
And so you've got all this high-level research that if you're an alien race and you're worried about we warlike Terrans leaving the planet's surface and carrying our warlike ways to their home world, that's going to be one of the first places you want to go to monitor our research to see how good we are about it.
we haven't been able to get off the planet except to the moon with any kind of human crew.
Although I think we've now got the Voyager is now outside the limits of the solar system after all that flight, but it's just barely outside the solar system and it's going to take, I think they said, 80,000 years to get to the nearest star system or to a star system.
So we're not a real threat.
But I think in the beginning that all of the research that was going on in New Mexico was one of the reasons you had a lot of stuff going in New Mexico.
And I think that once you've located that kind of place that you're going to continue to monitor it.
So I think that's one of the reasons.
And you've got a lot of people out in New Mexico looking up into the sky.
True enough, because there's a big, big sky to look up into.
That's a factor.
That has to be a factor.
Paul Hellier, I interviewed Paul Hellier for, I think, the fifth time a couple of days ago.
And he's always fascinating to talk about.
He's not talking so much about this subject as he was because he's got other things, you know, to talk about, other fish to fry, as they say.
But he believes that there is a galactic federation.
And they literally are observing our Earth, as the carpenters once sang.
What do you think of the work of Paul Hellia and the thoughts of Paul Hellia?
I'm not sure that there's a galactic society kind of monitoring it.
There may be one or two individual races doing it.
But there's also something that came out in Star Trek called the Prime Directive.
And it's kind of an anthropological way of looking at the world too.
Observe, but don't interact.
Don't contaminate.
Although the very act of observation can create the contamination.
There was a marvelous story in the anthropological journals about this guy who was observing a society.
And people who needed to use an axe had to go to the headmen of the tribe to get permission to use it.
And these were stone axes.
Well, the anthropologist shows up, and he's handing out steel axes as an inducement for people to talk to him.
He's just undercut one of these societal ways of working because he's handing out a steel axe, which is much better than a stone axe.
He's kind of undercut the lines of communication in the tribe, not realizing what he was doing.
So you've got to be careful about this.
So is there some kind of a prime directive and some kind of an agreement?
And if there is a galactic society, that we're going to observe Earth until we, as the Terrans, are able to get out of our planet and make contact with them outside our solar system?
I don't know.
It makes some sense, and it explains some of the ways the UFOs are operating.
But then there's the thing that Philip Klass said, which I always thought was kind of hilarious.
If the UFOs don't want to be seen, then they should turn off the damn lights.
Yeah, which if they have such advanced technology, then surely they can make themselves completely invisible all of the time, not just most of the time.
I would have thought, but then I don't know very much at all.
And we've developed some technologies, and there's a big deal now.
One of the car companies here, their rearview cameras can eliminate the trailer if you're pulling a trailer behind you so you can see what's behind the trailer.
It kind of eliminates the trailer as a way of, I mean, the cameras are all hooked up, so it's done digitally.
But the point simply is they've been able to, you're sitting in your car, you look at the dashboard where the camera is, and the trailer is not there, so you can see behind the trailer.
I don't know if there's talking about cloaking technology, which would bend the light around your object so you're not really seeing it.
And I think there's experiments taking place at Sanford, Stanford.
There are active, I've talked about it on my radio show.
There are active experiments on this sort of thing, and it apparently can be done.
Yes, yes.
So if we can do it now, then they must have been doing it for a long time, one might assume.
They would have the technology would be far superior to ours, and they've demonstrated, if they can get here from there, they've demonstrated a technology we simply don't have.
We can't get there from here, but they can get here from there.
There's all kinds of problems with interstellar flight, and I'm sure you're well aware of it.
The distance is just so vast, and we do not have the capability to move toward the speed of light.
I talked, I get the name drop here, I talked to James Van Allen about this.
It was funny that he was willing to talk to me.
But we talked about UFOs, and he said one of the problems he had is as you move toward relativistic speeds, the speed of light, you're bombarding your spacecraft with hydrogen atoms because I guess the universe is filled with free hydrogen all over the place.
And so you'd be irradiating the crew.
And so there has to be some mechanism to protect the crew from the hazards of the radiation as you move to relativistic speeds.
But even at those speeds, you've got the problem of accelerating to it and slowing down from it.
It's just not like, I guess the best example is a train moving down the railroad track at 60 miles an hour.
It cannot stop on a dime the way a car can because of all the dynamics of it.
So you've got all of those problems to deal with.
The nearest star system to Earth is the Alpha Centauri system, which is 4.1 light years away.
And at the speed of light, if we could get instantaneous to the speed of light, we could get there in four years, which we can't do.
And then you have time dilation to deal with and all these other ancillary aspects.
So they found a way, apparently, of defeating all of that.
And wormholes may be the answer or some time of warping space to bend it so that we're not really traveling the huge distances.
So they're demonstrating a technology that is just literally got to be hundreds, if not thousands of years ahead of us so they can do interstellar flight.
And we're just beginning to make those steps and we're not doing very well at it at the moment.
What do you think of those who say excitedly, and there are many of them, that we are pretty close to some kind of announcement about the fact that we are not alone in the universe and maybe we've been visited and all that sort of stuff?
Are you as optimistic as they are?
I was at one point, especially after the ATIP program was announced and we were getting some of the information from the Navy about what they were doing and the investigations they were conducting.
I thought that maybe we're moving closer to disclosure.
But I think in today's environment, that's way on the back burner now.
Nobody cares about disclosure or UFOs or any of that stuff because of what's going on worldwide.
We're dealing with the pandemic now, and I think that's kind of moved it off the back burner.
But even before that, I was becoming somewhat discouraged about it because it seemed like they were moving away from it.
We'd approached it, and they were moving away from it.
I was just looking at the Jimmy Carter administration here in the United States, his presidential administration, where he made a campaign promise he was going to release UFO information.
And he had a sighting, didn't he?
Yes, he did.
I think he probably saw Venus, but that's a whole nother argument.
But he was going to disclose it.
And even before he was inaugurated, after he was elected, the president-elect, he tried to get the information.
And he went to George W. H.W. Bush, who was the director of the CIA, and he said, I want to know everything you've got about UFOs.
And Bush said, well, you know, I'd like to be the director of the CIA after you become president.
And Carter said, well, I've got my own guy coming in.
And Bush says, well, I'm sorry.
You don't have a need to know.
And he could get away with it.
But he could get away with it because technically Carter wasn't the president.
And he wasn't going to lose his job by saying that because Carter just told him, I'm not going to bring your, I'm not going to, you're not going to survive my presidency.
You're going to be out and my guy's coming in.
So he told Carter, no.
So you would assume when Carter's guy came in, you'd say, okay, tell me what you know.
But it never happened.
It's amazing that personal politics and wranglings and enmities would enter into this field, but of course they do.
Let's dive back into the book.
Just one more case I think we'll do.
There are so many in them.
I totally, thoroughly recommend this book.
And Kevin, we have to speak again because there's much more to talk about.
The Michigan sightings, March 1966.
Talk to me about those.
Those are the famous swamp gas sightings.
And again, it was a series of sightings.
That's just one sighting.
It's a series of sightings.
And it began earlier than Frank Manor, who was a farmer in the Ann Arbor area of Michigan.
See, these were the sightings, just to interject, these were ones that Hynek was particularly interested in, I think.
Well, Heineken got hammered on this because after he got into the area, well, let me backtrack.
So there was a number of sightings going on.
Then Frank Manor saw things in the swampy area down near his farm, and he went out to take a look with his son.
And the next night, I think it was a number of the students at Hillsdale College saw sightings in another swampy area.
So Hynek, when he got there, and he hadn't really investigated, he hadn't really done much, but there was a press conference called by the Air Force, and he was there, and they asked him what was going on.
And he said, well, it sounds like swamp gas to me.
And that makes perfect sense given the information he had.
And of course, the answer is, well, it wasn't swamp gas.
When you go down and you look at the Frank Manor sighting, it's not talking about a wisp of light near the ground, which swamp gas would be in a short life.
He was seeing something that persisted for quite a while and was quite high above the tree lines.
And he saw a disc-shaped object with what he called a waffle-like pattern on it.
Well, that's not swamp gas.
And he and his son got very close.
Well, they didn't get all that close, but they got closer to it.
Other people saw it.
Police officers came and saw it.
You've had the same thing you've had in a number of sightings where the police get involved and they're witnesses to it.
And then you had the sightings at Hillsdale.
And those were complicated by students trying to fake the sightings.
But what the first sightings there at Hillsdale College clearly wasn't their fakery.
It was something that took place afterwards.
You've got the civil defense director involved in it, and he said, no, that had nothing to do with it.
So you've got a series of very good sightings on multiple nights by multiple witnesses in multiple locations, seeing something that's not described as a glowing blob of light in the distance, but seen something that is more solid, that has got a distinctive shape to it.
And it inspired Gerald Ford, who at the time was a congressman from Michigan and other Michigan House of Representatives wanting to get involved in congressional investigations and congressional hearings on that, which is what happened.
And I think this is one of the reasons that the Air Force began to push at that time to find an independent third party to investigate the UFO sightings because the Air Force is getting pretty well hammered.
And after Hynek had made his statement about it being swamp gas, he was taken out of the loop of doing press conferences because of this off-the-cuff statement that he made.
And so you've got then the congressional hearings take place.
You've got the Air Force searching for a university to make a study of UFOs and conclude it the way they wanted.
So I think this sighting sort of precipitated all of that in an indirect fashion.
You've got a whole section in the book, just finally here, about the end of Project Blue Book.
Talk to me about that.
Well, after the investigation began with the University of Colorado, the sighting reports were going to them as opposed to Blue Book in Ohio.
But you go through the record, you find out, and I talked to the last officer who was in charge of Blue Book, and he inherited strictly because everybody else was gone and he was closing down.
He had been with Blue Book for a while and he was closing down the operation.
And I talked to him and I asked about that.
And he said, well, most of our sightings were coming from the Ohio area, right around the Dayton, Ohio area.
And you look at the Blue Book records and you see that's true.
They were getting sightings from Michigan and Pennsylvania and Illinois, but not from a lot of around the rest of the country.
So those were being handled by either the local Air Force base or the information was going to the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado.
So you've got them not doing investigations and they're going through the files getting rid of an awful lot of that stuff.
I think it was Wendy Connor told me that a lot of the blue book, the good blue book stuff, was buried under the golf course at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base because they destroyed it.
Carmen Murano, who was the officer that I talked to, said that he saw a lot of that stuff and he didn't think it should be destroyed, but it was now no longer classified.
So he took a lot of it home with him.
And he was going to study it later, but he never got around to it.
And a guy named Rob Mercer, who periodically looks at Craiglist, which is one of these online selling places.
I'm not sure how familiar Craigslist was in England.
And he was looking for UFO stuff, and somebody had a box of UFO stuff.
So he sent the guy $100 and he sent him this box of UFO stuff.
And it turned out to be some of the Project Blue Book files.
And Mercer, through a wonderful piece of investigation, found out who the owner of the house had been.
And he'd left this box behind.
And he was able to track the guy down and found Carmen Murano.
And he said, well, I got more stuff if you want it.
And he shipped it to him.
Marcer's got all this wonderful stuff from Blue Book that was saved by Carmen Murano.
So one of the things they did at Blue Book was when they released it publicly, they took all the names out.
They went through and took all the names out.
They didn't do a very good job, and you can get it.
Bob Cornett and I were there before it was released publicly.
And the first thing we did was go through all the identified cases, write down all the names of the people so we could put all the names back in.
Mercer's got an index of all 12,000 cases with all the names in them.
So a wonderful piece of material that he was able to save.
So just finally then, kind of sounds like you're going to say absolutely to this question, but let's not preempt that.
It sounds like the probability is that there is an awful lot of material that is in people's lofts, in their garages, in their basements, still to be discovered.
Yes, yes.
One of the things that we've discovered, I shouldn't say we, the Marcel family, Jesse Marcel being the air intelligence officer in Roswell in 1947, he kept a journal for 1947.
And the family just discovered it not all that long ago, and they're going through it to see if there's anything of importance in that journal.
We have looked for any kind of letter, journal, diary, anybody kept in 1947 that would talk about this event.
The closest we came was Barney Barnett's wife, Ruth.
Barney Barnett was on the plains of San Augustine and allegedly saw a crashed UFO there in 1947.
I don't think he did, but that's a whole other argument.
She kept a journal for 1947.
The only year she did that, and we were able to get our hands on it.
Unfortunately, there's nothing in there to suggest anything unusual.
But we're looking for that stuff.
And yeah, there's got to be people with letters that the family have saved or journals or diaries or for crying out loud, material they took home because it was no longer classified that might be of great help to us.
Or indeed exotic material, if you know what I mean.
Yes, and we've chased some of those stories down too.
In fact, one guy told us that a fellow in Roswell had taken pictures of the craft and he still had the pictures.
And he told me the guy's first name, which was very unusual.
So I went to the, and I should say I, Don Schmidt, and I went to the city assessor's office in Roswell and he said, can you sort by first names?
And they said, sure.
And I gave them the name and they came up with three.
Two of them were businesses.
And we went and visited the guy in his house.
We didn't want to tell him what we were looking for because we didn't want to contaminate.
We wanted spontaneous information, but it appeared that he didn't have any photographs of the alien craft from Roswell.
But I mean, that's the kind of things that we, and I need to mention, you know, Tom Kerry, Don Schmidt, Stan Friedman, Bill Moore, any of us who spent a lot of time investigating the Roswell case have done an awful lot of that kind of searching for the material.
We've come up with very little.
But that's just for the Roswell case.
Other cases we found people with letters and documentation that has been very helpful in resolving some of the cases and learning exactly what people had seen.
Kevin, I've really thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
It's one of the most enjoyable conversations that I've had and one of the most intriguing.
But I've got a feeling that we can do another two or three one of these days.
So I would love to speak with you again if you've enjoyed this.
We've got to say the book is called The Best of Blue Book, isn't it?
It's published by Philip Mantle, Flying Disc Press, my friend doing a great job in this field.
And I can only say, as we say over here in the UK, more power to your elbow.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
As the Randalls say in Stoke-on-Trent, trust me, they will.
And as we say in this country, Adios Mutschacho.
Hooray.
Kevin Adiosen, thank you so much.
Thank you.
I think you'll agree, Kevin D. Randall, a gift who keeps on giving.
We'll have him back on the show, both on the podcast and we've got to get him on the radio show.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London in the silence and the quiet here.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay home, stay healthy, stay calm, and stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection