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April 10, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:07:38
Edition 442 - Peter Davenport
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope in these deeply unusual and tragic, frightening circumstances we find ourselves in, I hope you're hunkered down and okay.
I know that many countries still have lockdowns.
As you will hear this, we do in the United Kingdom.
Some people adapt to it really well.
I do because, you know, I think I've said it before, you know, I've lived for years like a hermit anyway.
So I just kind of get on with things, plan for the future, plan how I'm going to change my life when all this is done.
But some people I know are climbing the walls, you know, so if that's you, then please try to take one day at a time because that's all that we can do, I think.
I think there was a song called That too.
You know, I sound like your grandfather advising you now, don't I?
But you know what I'm saying?
Please take care out there.
And I'm sure I have ultimate faith in human ingenuity and medical science to find a way through this.
I just have a feeling, I don't have any special knowledge or information, that we're going to find a way through this.
And let's see if we don't.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, a creative hotspot for getting the shows out to you and maintaining the website.
If you want to connect with me or with Adam, because there's a webmaster section on the website as well, you can send me a message through the website, theunexplained.tv.
And you can tell me anything, really, if you want to just check in.
If you want to tell me what you think of the shows, some guests that we might be able to get, anything you want to do, always gratefully received.
And if your communication requires a personal response, let me know and I'll do my very, very, very, very best to make sure that you get one.
We are indeed living in interesting times.
I went out to get some shopping again today and it's all planned like a military operation now.
I went at an off-peak time and fortunately was able to walk straight into the supermarket.
But it's always scary because you are dependent on whether people adhere to the social distancing rules.
And some of them did and a couple of them didn't quite.
And it always worries you.
Then, of course, if you buy a big shop, then I don't want to be going out too much.
So I've got a few things in.
And there are always things that you forget.
Like, I've got no tomatoes.
I wanted to get tomatoes and I'm not going out again for tomatoes.
I'll just have to do with that.
It's a very small thing, though, compared with what a lot of people are going through now.
But, you know, I had to use the keypad.
And you worry about doing the keypad.
So I key in my PIN number for my credit card at the end of it all.
And then I have to jail my hands afterwards.
You know, it's very, very scary.
And I hope that you're bearing up in the middle of all of this.
Like I say, my belief, and in these circumstances, all we have is belief, is that this will be over and obviously we'll never be the same.
You know, personally, and as nations, we're never going to be the same after this experience.
But I think we'll be able to move forward with our lives.
And if you have perhaps lost somebody that you know or close to you, then you have my deepest sympathy.
You know, so many people are going before their time and my thoughts are with them.
Some of the reports that you hear in the media are so upsetting.
So if you want to communicate with me, please do go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
If you want to leave a donation for the show to allow this work to continue, you can also follow a link on the website and do that there.
And if you have done that recently, thank you so very much.
The guest on this edition of the show is somebody who is one of my very favorite guests in the whole history of the unexplained, both online and on air.
Peter Davenport, the man who runs the National UFO Reporting Center in the U.S. He is a great man and keeps in his head details of so many different investigations.
He works relentlessly and tirelessly on all of this.
So Peter Davenport, coming right up.
Like I say, please get in touch if you'd like to.
Thank you very much to Keila in Papua New Guinea.
It may be Kyla, but I think it's Keila who sent me a lovely email today.
I think that's the first email that I've had from PNG, Papua New Guinea.
It means a lot to me to hear from you.
And if you sent me an email recently, thank you very much.
All of these emails, especially now when I turn off the equipment and I am on my own, they're very gratefully received and thank you.
All right, let's get to the U.S. then and let's get to Peter Davenport.
Peter, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
Oh, I'm delighted to be here and looking forward to finishing what we didn't finish the last time we were speaking, Howard.
And you know something?
I don't even think we'll finish it today because there's always so much to talk about.
You are such a diligent and intensive researcher of these things, if that's the right word, Peter.
I don't know how you have enough minutes in every day.
I need a 48-hour day to keep up with it all.
You're right.
Now, for people who are new to you, talk to me about you and your role in the National UFO Reporting Center.
I'm delighted to do that.
The National UFO Reporting Center was set up in October of 1974 by my predecessor as director of the center.
His name was Robert J. Gribble, a retired Seattle fireman who argued that what we needed in 1974 was a place where people who believed they might have seen a UFO could call where that information would be preserved and made available publicly.
I took over Reigns from Bob in 1994, 20 years after he'd started it, and I've been doing it ever since.
This is the most astonishing job I've ever had in my life, Howard.
And what is it that wanted you, or rather motivated you, to want to do that?
Because it's a big task and it's getting bigger as you've been telling me, you know, by the years.
It's a much bigger task than it was when I took over in 94.
I really did not want it.
I called Bob Gribble in July of 1994 to tell him that I was prepared to help him to keep the hotline running and keep it open.
And before I knew it, he said, Peter, it's yours.
And I've been saddled by it ever since.
I've done it for 26 years.
We have a phrase for that over here, and I think it probably works with this.
It's a gift that keeps on giving.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
And just remind again, my listener, we've been heard many times on the radio show, few times on the podcast.
Whereabouts strategically in the United States are you now?
Yeah, we're out in the eastern end of Washington state, about 200 miles east of Vancouver, B.C. and Seattle.
Right, so you're as far kind of northeast as you can go.
Yeah, just about.
It's a beautiful place to live.
we used to be in Seattle, but I bought a decommissioned ICBM missile site in 2006, and I moved out here to be closer to it to be able to work on it.
This is something about you I didn't know.
How do you buy a decommissioned ICBM missile site?
How did you get hold of one of those?
Very carefully.
It had been constructed in the late 1950s, commissioned in April of 1961.
And because of the contract with the original landowner, it reverted to his possession after it was decommissioned.
So it went through a chain of owners before I purchased it 13 years ago.
Right.
And what sort of work have you had to do on this bunker to make it a place that you want to live?
You name it, I've done it.
Just the cleanup has been a major problem, major task, and getting rid of all sorts of things that are extraneous to the operation of the site or residents of the site.
I don't live there.
I only own it and am slave to it now.
Right.
Well, I'd love to see that one of these days.
And look, we are all enslaved to coronavirus at the moment, both sides of the Atlantic.
Different governments, including your own, taking different, sometimes very different approaches to it.
How are things there at the moment as we speak?
Well, I've been in shuttered-down condition for the last two weeks.
It's been rather simple for me because that's the way I live anyway, running the hotline.
But we live in an area which is pretty much free of the virus.
So as long as we don't go to a big city or host guests, we should be pretty safe here.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
You know, I'm hearing reports out of New York that is not a good place to be at the moment.
New York State, the whole of New York and greater New York.
It is very worrying, isn't it?
It is indeed.
My heart goes out to them, and my heart goes out to the British subjects.
I hope your Prime Minister is feeling better today.
Well, as we record this, you know, my listeners may be hearing this a number of days after we record it, so that situation is likely to have changed.
But the whole nation, even those who politically were not particularly aligned with Boris Johnson, everybody has been with him, and everybody wants him, as I'm recording these words now, to be out of that hospital and leading from the front.
So these are very concerning times.
I add my voice to that statement, Howard.
Now, look, two years ago, we lost the person who made it possible for me to discover you.
I used to hear you in the middle of the night, sometimes early in the morning in the UK, talking with Art Bell.
And it always appeared to me or occurred to me that you were one of Art's favourite guests.
You used to talk with him very naturally.
You had wonderful, very lengthy conversations with him.
And the reason I'm bringing the subject of art up now is, as we both know, it is roughly two years since we lost Art Bell.
I wonder if you have any particular, before we start talking about the UFOs, any particular memories of working with Art?
Oh, yes.
We had a very, very nice working rapport.
I never met Art, but he was very fun to work with on the radio.
And I'll tell just a very short story about how it came to be that I was one of his frequent guests.
I heard his program in October of 1994, shortly after I'd taken over the hotline, UFO Hotline.
And I said to myself, that's a program I think I could add to.
And I called him up one day, and we chatted for just a few minutes, and he said, okay, Peter, I'd like to have you on.
And that was the beginning of it.
I have made hundreds of appearances on Coast to Coast since that time and brought a lot of information to a lot of listeners, I believe.
Well, I had a few conversations with him towards the end of his life.
And I can just hear him saying to you, Buddy, after the first show, Buddy, this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
I suspect it was like that.
But, you know, he is much missed, and a lot of people have been contacting me about him because of this two-year anniversary.
And I wouldn't have made the decision to move away from mainstream news, which is what I was doing and did for years and had won awards for, to actually running my own ship and doing my own thing had it not been for him.
He showed me the way.
Uh-huh.
Well, good.
I was glad that happened.
Now, look, one of the things we talked about in a recent radio conversation, it was only a short one that we did recently.
I wondered whether you were getting more reports from people because these are uncertain times and sometimes people believe that things manifest in uncertain times.
Yeah.
Well, we've received more reports, but I can't say what the cause has been, of course, except to say that we've received many, many reports of these so-called star-length satellites.
In fact, I just received one this morning of a sighting on the 29th of November last year from a gentleman in Chichester, West Sussex.
He described in great detail a sighting of a string of objects passing overhead in the nighttime sky, and we're getting many, many such reports, but they are due to satellites, not UFOs.
Elon Musk, an entrepreneur here in the States, has launched, I think now, five clusters of these satellites, and people see a cluster of up to 60 objects moving overhead, and it gives rise to a report of the invasion of our planet.
But they are just satellites, not UFOs.
But my suspicion is we are getting more reports, but even more important than that is the quality of the reports.
It appears to me, and this is hard to Document, but it appears to me that over recent years the dramatic nature of UFO sightings has been on the increase.
People are seeing not just lights in the sky, but actual palpable ships, and that alarms me.
That tells me we're dealing with something that is very real and very strange.
Yes, there do seem to be more reports.
And of course, along with those extra reports, there are reports of people seeing things which are perfectly explicable.
But there are many reports, as I know you say, that just don't seem to be explainable by anything rational and normal.
Do you think that then it's just people who are more willing to report, people who've got better equipment and more time to look?
Or is there something else going on?
Probably a mix of all of the above.
I think one of the things that's contributed to it is the many, many programs like yours that have brought to the attention of their respective listeners the fact that the UFO phenomenon is really something quite real, quite serious-minded.
It's not just something out, if you will, something from outer space, but we are being visited on a routine basis by these objects that since 1947 we've called UFOs.
They appear to be quite real to me.
But why is it, do you think, and again, you may well tell me that I'm wrong, that we don't get the grand-scale reports of the aliens who land, walk down a street in South America, or abduct people for a while.
They seem to be very much phenomena of the 60s, 70s, and maybe 80s.
Or am I wrong?
Well, I'm hard put to say.
There were reports back in the decades ago that reported the presence of alien creatures.
To some degree, a limited degree, we still get those reports.
But I suspect that many of those early reports were just the product of confabulation, people making up stories.
But I may do them a disservice.
Maybe it was, in fact, taking place and we just weren't recording it or documenting it well enough.
Right.
So you think that many of the celebrated, famous abduction cases, or claimed abduction cases, may have actually been something else?
May have been, and I emphasize may because I just don't know.
Clearly there were well-substantiated abduction cases.
The one that comes to mind is the case of Travis Walton, November 5th of 1975 in the state of Arizona.
He was the forestry worker who was apparently shot with a beam of white light seen by six of his co-workers who was then he went missing for five days and he on the fifth day found himself lying on a highway tarmac.
Fortunately he came back in good condition, but that is a celebrated case.
I know Travis well and I've heard his story on many occasions.
It doesn't change one whit from telling to telling.
I've talked to him twice.
In fact, over in the corner of this little room that I'm recording this in, I've got his book.
Travis comes across as incredibly credible, if you pardon that way of putting it.
He comes across as somebody who has clearly been through something.
Yes, absolutely.
And the fact that he's been hypnotized and taken back to that event, and he recounts quite eloquently what went on during that hypnosis session and during his presence on the ship, it's a fantastic story, and I trust the word of Travis implicitly.
There's no doubt in my mind but what he's telling us all the truth.
You know, as much as some people down the years have come to talk about the people who are involved in that as maybe like a bunch of good old boys, you know, who are out in the forest and maybe leading us a merry dance, that description of it really doesn't fit what we know of the facts, I don't think.
I agree.
That was a solid case, and there have been many others.
The case of Mr. Todd Seas, who went missing for a day, and tragically, he did not survive.
His grossly mutilated remains were found hanging in a tree the day after his abduction, which had been observed allegedly by at least four people.
So we know that these things take place, and one isn't always safe in the presence of aliens.
Well, that's a fact which speaks to the fact that there may be different species and subspecies and whatever.
I interviewed recently, I think for about the fifth time, Paul Hellier.
You know Paul Hellier, the former Defense Minister of Canada.
Well, yes, but he's very forthright.
And he believes that the aliens are very much a part of where we're at now.
The prime directive, or an equivalent of the prime directive, means that they do not interfere, but they are there and very concerned about us.
Would you go that far?
I would address such.
I am hard put to say what's going on.
I just don't know.
All of the information I have notwithstanding, I'm not sure I can get my arms around it in a rational fashion to be able to say what it all means.
But I certainly listened to Paul Hellier's views on the matter very, very carefully because he's a very thoughtful, very pensive individual and very well experienced.
So I can't say I would disagree with his statement by any means.
Right.
And of course, he does seem to be very well connected, although not all the time does he name his sources, which makes it a little frustrating sometimes, but all the more intriguing.
Now, Peter, of all the reports that you've had recently, and you told me before we started recording this, that you've been rushed off your feet and there are not enough hours and minutes in each day for you to be able to collate all of these reports.
Have you had any that have really been solid reports that you think, yes, there is definitely something in that?
I'm talking about the recent spate of reports.
Yes, I recently received a report from an airline captain who was flying, I think this is late December.
I reported this on coast to coast, but he was flying from New York to Salt Lake City, flying to the west.
They were just about 50 nautical miles north of Kansas City in the heartland of the U.S. And he and his first officer, a young woman, looked out ahead of their aircraft and they saw a cluster of objects that were maneuvering, clearly maneuvering relative to one another.
And he thought that was very interesting.
He got on the radio and asked air traffic control whether they had anything on the radar and they said they did not.
But that captain was very clearly, he was shaken.
I spoke with him about the incident.
He was clearly quite shaken by the sighting of whatever it was.
And initially, I assumed that he might be looking at the cluster of satellites that is reported so frequently to our center.
And he assured me it was not.
The objects were stationary and visible for 15 minutes ahead of his aircraft.
So that's one very good sighting report.
Well, that is good.
Anything from like ordinary Joes individuals?
Because, you know, these reports, I don't know what the American newspapers are like, but the British newspapers this last six months or so have absolutely been full of them every week.
Yes, just before this program, in fact, I was speaking with a gentleman, this is minutes before you called, speaking with a gentleman here in central Washington state who just last night saw, I don't have the entire report yet, but he just saw a red light flitting around his farm near Ellensburg, Washington.
That's about 100 miles east of Seattle.
And he was very passionate about the fact that whatever he saw last night was very, very dramatic and very unnatural.
He said he's never seen anything like it.
So we get those reports on a routine basis.
What separates a good, really good, solid report from a report that is just another story is good photographic evidence.
And I don't yet know whether this gentleman has a photograph of the object.
I know one thing that you were keen to talk about, and we certainly should, and ties into what we've already said.
You say that you've had something like 20,000 to 30,000 reports of fireballs, orange and yellow orbs, that kind of thing that are intriguing and very hard to explain.
Yes, indeed.
This is, in my opinion, one of the most major developments in the field of ufology over the last decade.
It began in earnest in late May of 2012.
We started receiving reports from all across the country and, in fact, from around the world, from people who were alleging that they had just witnessed a cluster, not just one or two, but a cluster, meaning up to 100 or 150 red, orange, or yellow fireballs or orbs, call them what you will.
We don't know what they are, really.
It's hard to put a name to them.
And this phenomenon has continued since May of 2012.
The reports are very prominent on our site.
If people would like to see what I'm talking about, they can go to ufocenter.com.
And we over here in the colony spell center a bit strangely.
Yes, the wrong way around.
UFOC, C-E-N-P-E-R.
UFOcenter.com, and they can see what I'm talking about.
A couple reports that come to mind immediately are from very responsible person.
One of them is a former U.S. astronaut.
His name is Byron K. Lichtenberg, and I can share that name because he's gone public with this.
On the 5th of July 2013, he was standing outside his house near Athens, Texas, which is southeast, I believe, of the little ways southeast of Dallas and Fort Worth.
And he was standing outside.
His wife was behind him, and she said, honey, look at this.
And he wheeled around to face the east just in time to see two red objects just streak over his head.
And as he was processing that information, they went to the western horizon from his vantage point.
While he was processing that information, his wife said, here come some more, honey.
All told, I think he saw eight or ten red objects for which he had no ready explanation.
He and I talked on three or four occasions, and during one of our conversations, he said, Peter, I don't know what those things were, but the one thing I can guarantee you is they were not manufactured on this planet.
And that's a U.S. retired U.S. astronaut speaking.
Yeah, I was going to say that, you know, here is somebody who's a trained observer and is used to being up in space.
So if anybody knows what is anomalous and what isn't, Mr. Lichtenberg would.
Exactly.
And he was a very sane and sober person over the telephone, and I'm sure his word can be relied on implicitly.
I'll tell another story that happened just a few months after that.
This is, and people can find these reports on our website.
September 28th of 2013, a retired Arizona Highway Patrol officer called and described an event that had just occurred to him, just minutes earlier.
He was standing in his living room in Glendale, Arizona, just northwest of Phoenix ways, And he was flabbergasted to see a small cluster of orange lights go streaking from west to east, from his left to right, just outside his house.
He raced outside, hoping to see them as they disappeared in the eastern sky, and they were gone by the time he got outside.
But as he stood there scanning the night sky, another cluster went by, and another, and another.
All told, according to this gentleman's report, he saw, he estimates, 150 orange lights go streaking by his house.
How distant they were, he doesn't know how big they were is difficult to calculate.
But he said he estimates they were doing many hundreds of miles an hour as they went by his house.
Those two reports can be accessed readily on our website.
And this is a phenomenon that first appeared in 2012, which makes you wonder, if you're looking for, which you've got to look for first, rational explanations for this.
What was going on around 2012?
And I can't really think of anything that it might have been because the International Space Station is a constant.
We didn't have people launching internet satellites as far as I'm aware at that point.
There wasn't the great private space effort that there is now.
It was NASA and governments doing these things, so we had more of a handle on it.
2012 is a strange date for something like that to start.
Yeah, you summarize it well, I feel.
What these things are, we have no idea, but one of the states that is most well represented by this phenomenon, for reasons that are totally unclear to me, is the state of South Carolina on the east coast of the United States.
If I get such a report, it is usually from South Carolina.
People on the eastern coast of that state frequently report seeing traditionally yellow or orange lights out to the east of the state.
For a long time, I wondered whether they might be part of a military training exercise or something along those lines.
But these events, to my eye, cannot be ascribed to that kind of prosaic explanation.
There's something very strange going on there.
How utterly bizarre.
And, you know, these, because you've got all these years, 26 years or more of experience in all of this, you know, it becomes easier to deduce which are the ones which are going to have a rational explanation and which of the ones you've got to park in the unexplained file.
Absolutely.
Irrespective of whether they come over the telephone hotline or whether it's a report submitted using our online report form.
You're absolutely correct.
One develops a knack or a talent, and I don't think I'm deceiving myself on this, a knack or a talent to detect which reports are serious-minded reports and which reports are maybe some attempt to deceive us in some way.
Do you get many hoaxes?
Oh, it's the biggest problem of all.
In fact, almost three years ago, a young woman put a video on YouTube encouraging her million and a half followers to call the hotline and make themselves absolutely as obnoxious as they possibly can.
And so tragically, as a result of that video, upwards of 90 or 95% of the time that the hotline rings, it is a young, rude, impudent, oftentimes foul-mouthed young American.
It breaks my heart, Howard.
Well, it breaks my heart, too.
That's very sad.
Is there any way that you can intercept that kind of thing?
I've tried for almost three years.
It started on the 27th of August, 2017, and it's been going strong ever since.
And I'm sorry to waste time talking about one of the less interesting aspects of my work, but it's a very real consideration for me.
But I guess it's the real ones, it's the genuine people, it's the true unexplained cases that are the ones that keep you motivated.
Absolutely.
If it were not for those, I don't think I would have been able to continue at this job for the last 25 years, as has been the case.
The sheer fascination of it.
Something that we talked about on my radio show recently.
We didn't have a lot of time to do it.
You know, you're constantly getting to commercial breaks and news bulletins and all the other things, all of the furniture, as we call it in radio.
So we didn't have time to talk about this much.
But I wonder if you've had any more of these in this uncertain period that we're in, this uncertain, topsy-turvy year, reports from people who've been woken up from a sound sleep by lights apparently being shone through their bedroom windows.
Absolutely.
It's a category of report that has started relatively recently.
I would say over the last six months or at most a year.
People describing quite eloquently and apparently quite seriously that they've been awakened by shafts of light or illumination that fills their bedroom with light and awakens them from a sound sleep.
I've probably taken on the order of dozens of such reports.
I have no explanation for them, but they're very interesting and the people seem to be quite serious in describing and confused by what they've experienced.
They go to the window and oftentimes they see a very strange craft outside their home, their residence.
So I have no explanation for these, but these reports are happening with an alarming regularity, I'm afraid.
One of the questions that would apply to those reports, and all of the reports really, is why those particular people?
Exactly.
We have no way of knowing what their purpose may be in waking people from a sound sleep and showing themselves overtly.
This is a category of report that leads me to believe that, as I said earlier in this program, that there's been a qualitative change in the nature of Sightings.
It's not just distant lights in the sky anymore.
It's actually the ships that people can see.
Very sophisticated-looking ships that cannot be ascribed to any kind of terrestrial technology, I'm afraid.
And what about people who believe that they have been either psychologically or even medically or physically changed by encounters?
Yes.
Well, I mentioned one case earlier, the case of Todd Seas in August of 2002, who tragically did not survive his experience.
But one of the very interesting aspects of the UFO phenomenon is the reports that people claim they've been communicated with telepathically.
And if those reports have any merit to them whatsoever, that tells me that none of us is safe from being influenced by telepathic induction, if you will.
So these cases clearly appear to be taking place from my vantage point anyway, and I suspect that some of them at least are true.
I know you were keen to talk about a technique for perhaps detecting more concretely UFOs of the possible use of passive radar.
Exactly.
And for those listeners who are not highly trained in radar, passive radar means capitalizing upon commercial radio and television stations that radiate their signals.
And those signals will bounce off of satellites, of airplanes, and perhaps off of UFOs.
We know from some cases that UFOs reflect radar signals.
And in fact, it's appropriate I should be speaking with an audience in the UK on this subject because the first patent for the use of passive radar is from the UK.
It was applied for in 1927.
And it was, in fact, used during the Blitz.
The BBC radio signal was used to target or to position, to locate aircraft.
And all I've done is borrowed that concept.
I have proposed that we could build a system that would reflect commercial radio and television station signals.
And it would allow us to pinpoint the location and therefore calculate the velocity of UFOs.
The day I made that proposal, or the day my article to MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, was published, I got a call from a gentleman who identified himself as a senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency.
And in fact, he is.
He and I have maintained a correspondence ever since his first telephone call to me.
I will never forget what he had to say.
He said, Peter, he said, I can't tell you whether you'll detect UFOs or not, but if you build the system you describe in your paper, you will be successful in resolving whether UFOs are real or not.
So he phrased his statement very carefully, I feel.
Well, that sounds to me like it was a message of encouragement.
I'm just really surprised that that came from, you say, a member of the CIA.
Yes, in fact, this gentleman is very well known in the U.S. UFO community.
He's apparently very interested in the UFOs.
He has a PhD in electrical engineering, and he suggested to me, he stated to me that his first 20 years in the CIA were dedicated to building passive radar systems for clandestine detection of targets.
He didn't say UFOs targets.
So he knows the technology like the back of his hand.
And when my paper was published, it caught his attention immediately, he said.
So the mechanics of this, let me just make sure that I got this straight.
Back in the day when we had UHF or VHF television in Europe, the signals, the analog signals, were sometimes disturbed by aircraft passing.
You get ghosting and that kind of thing.
Certainly here in London near Heathrow Airport, sometimes the picture would flutter on UHF because of the volume of air traffic, the number of 747s going at quite a low height.
So you would be using that effect.
Precisely.
You've explained it perfectly, Howard.
The signals, just like radar signals at airports, are reflected off the skin of the craft that they're intended to detect, the same principle applies to UFOs.
And if we build the proper system and they're relatively inexpensive, we could detect UFOs on a routine basis if they're there.
Now, I have to say that I don't have Art Bell's electrical knowledge or electronic knowledge.
You know, I can solder plugs for mixers and broadcasts, but that's about it.
You know, I don't know nearly as much as he knew.
But I presume the quality of reflection and disturbance would give you a clue as to the kind of material that was passing through.
That's a possibility.
It would possibly give some idea as to the size of the object being detected.
But most of all, if you calculate its position five or ten times a second, you're in a position to be able to calculate its velocity.
And if you're looking at something that is, for example, 50 miles above the surface of the Earth and is doing 20,000 kilometers a minute, you know that it's not a Canadian goose.
It's not United Airlines Flight 263 headed to New York City, for example.
So you can discriminate very readily given what computers are able to do.
And if people would like to know more about my proposal, They can read my paper that is posted to my homepage at UFOcenter.com.
Now, to be able to do this, would you need to get permission from the FCC in the US and Ofcom in the UK?
Absolutely not.
And that's one of the many attractive features of passive radar because all you're doing is looking to detect the reflected signal from a commercial radio or television station.
You're not actually broadcasting your own signal.
You're relying on somebody else's signal.
And that is the beauty of the system.
No government would be able to say you should not have that passive radar system under your control any more than they could control whether you have a radio receiver in your automobile.
So it would be quite powerful, actually, in resolving the question of the UFO phenomenon.
And your friend in the CIA virtually said, I mean, you don't have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to read this into it, that if you go and do this, you're going to get some results.
Yes.
He didn't say, he was very careful in how he phrased it.
I realized in retrospect, he said, you will be successful in answering the question of whether UFOs are real or not, leaving the door open to the possibility that we might not detect anything.
So he was in a position of not having violated any kind of security oath that he might have made up to that point.
And if any one sentence or phrase gave away the fact that he is what he says he is, that method of phraseology, which is what a politician or a military person or somebody in government would use, that's the kind of thing that gives it away precisely.
Yes, exactly.
I agree.
Now, before we move on to, if you don't mind, because you are remarkable, you have these cases in your head.
Let's do some celebrated cases from your files.
But before you do, is there anything else that is topical and up-to-date that we need to talk about?
Well, I'm getting a torrent of reports and emails, and it's like trying to get a sip of a teaspoon of water out of a fire hose.
I'm about four weeks in arrears and updating our website, but suffice it to say that there are many, many reports coming into me that address alleged sightings of very dramatic craft.
One type of report, we talked about people being awakened from sound sleep a few minutes ago.
Another type of report that I'm receiving is blue or green disks that allegedly are being seen by people streaking through the night sky.
In fact, we just had one of those last night from Boca Raton, Florida.
In fact, there were a number of sightings, a cluster of sightings in that area just less than 24 hours ago.
And we should have those posted to our website within 24 to 48 hours.
But that's another type of report that I'm intrigued by because people insist that they were not meteors.
They were not terrestrial aircraft.
They covered the entire sky in a matter of a few seconds.
And that raises the question, just what were these objects?
We have no ready explanation, I feel, for what these objects are.
Bougaroton, is that somewhere where the USAF is based?
There's so many Air Force bases and military bases in Florida, I'm hard put to say for sure, but could well be.
Perhaps I allow for the possibility, Howard, that we are receiving reports of just advanced military hardware that people are witnessing.
But it invites the question of whether the military would test these objects over people's backyards in Boca Rapon.
They would be more inclined, I feel, to go out to Area 51 or other expansive areas where there are few witnesses and test the equipment there.
And also, why would they be doing it at a time when all military resources have to be deployed on or around coronavirus?
I agree.
So that makes it even more intriguing.
I feel the same way.
And that's the principal reason I mention these cases.
And most of all, if our listeners experience a phenomenon like that or have seen a UFO at any time in their lives, I would like to encourage them to submit reports to our website and we will post them and let people know about it.
One of the greatest frustrations of my job is trying to get people to actually write down the details of their sighting.
Most people who call the hotline want to talk and talk and talk and talk, but that doesn't serve to capture the information.
And I'm trying to capture the information so it can be shared with people.
One statistic that you might find very surprising is my estimate after 25 years of work in this field is that out of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Americans who believe they've just been witness to a UFO,
an Anastagali bona fide flying alien spacecraft, only one of those people will ever be motivated enough to contact a hotline like mine and most of all to write it down and record the information surrounding the sighting.
It's the most difficult and frustrating aspect of my job.
Right, so you get the idiots calling with hoaxes, but maybe some people are sitting on fantastic reports that may be game changers and they're just not telling.
Exactly.
And for what reason they don't do that, I don't know.
It might just be sloth and lethargy that induces them not to want to write a report.
But in order for me to be able to do my job, I've Got to receive detailed information about the sighting.
And for another person to be able to understand what the author of that report is saying, he's got to write it down and write it lucidly and eloquently so another person can understand the details of what the witness actually experienced.
I guess it's, you look, my father was a police officer.
I'm a journalist.
And the principles of getting information from people are the same whether you're a police officer, journalist, or taking UFO reports, I think.
It's where was this?
When was this?
What did you see?
Exactly.
And those are the types of facts that I am most interested in collecting.
Just the bare facts that can be compressed into a short paragraph is a good beginning to a UFO report.
And if people would like to add more to that, more detail, some of the finer points of what the object looked like, we welcome that as well, of course.
We have now about 125,000 reports on our database.
And when I multiply that by the 10,000 or 20,000 number that I alluded to a few moments ago, it makes me realize just how much work there is to be done in the UFO field.
Does it make you worry that the great investigators of our time, you know, people like Stanton Friedman, who died sadly last year, a lot of the greats are getting up in years or they've left us, and these were people, of course, who can trace their lineage and their heritage back to, you know, 1947, Roswell, those kinds of things.
We're losing those people, aren't we?
We are indeed.
And I'm getting up there myself at the age of 72.
What we really need is a pulse of younger folks to come into the field and do this work to continue it and make sure it's not lost to eternity.
And it's going to be very difficult, I think, to find somebody, for example, in my case, find somebody who's willing to work two shifts a day, seven days a week, to try to convince people to submit reports to a website.
That's not the kind of gratifying work that most young people are aspiring to have in their lives.
And yet somebody's got to collate these reports.
I mean, look, people send me their reports.
So there are reports coming into people like me and you and others all the time.
And somebody's got to be able to, you know, data crunch them and file them properly.
So I hope that there's a generation coming up now.
Or maybe this generation needs to do something to promote the cause and get them on board.
Yeah.
Well, I'm not sure we can do anything more than what we've done over the last 70 years, and that is just to educate people, apprise them of what is truly happening, as opposed to what our governments would like us to believe is happening or not happening.
So it's going to be very difficult.
MUFON has done a very good job of collecting a lot of people, recruiting people to do the work, volunteer work it takes.
But it's going to take more than that, I'm afraid, to keep this study of UFOs moving forward in a rational fashion.
What do you think of the work of Tom DeLong and to the Stars Academy?
How do you think they're doing?
It's an interesting effort.
I don't know Tom DeLong.
I've never met.
I haven't met Mr. Elizondo as well.
They appear to have taken a very brave stance, but I don't know enough about the finer points of their effort to be able to comment intelligently, so I think I'll decline that.
Well, I keep kind of expecting some kind of revelation, and hopefully that's coming soon, because I would like to very much report that.
We've got about a quarter of an hour or so, so let's do some of the great cases.
People love these every time we do them from your files.
Can I start in January 1995?
This is a place called McMinnville, Tennessee.
It is multiple witnesses on the ground report a fleet of peculiar-looking objects allegedly seen descending slowly and vertically.
One of the objects appears to blow up.
Yes, that was a fascinating case.
And I had just taken over the hotline the preceding August of 94.
This event, alleged event, occurred on the 7th of January, I believe.
And people were reporting, as you said correctly, a fleet of objects that were seen allegedly descending quite slowly above the McMinnville, Tennessee airport.
Suddenly, there was an immense blue flash of light, and one of the objects appeared to have disintegrated, and it sent huge chunks of blue-burning material up into the sky, and they cascaded down in a veil of falling parts.
Well, the interesting part of that is later that night or in the early morning hours after the incident, people were awakened by knocking on their front doors, and those people who were brave enough to go to the door and open it were greeted by people who said that they were from the government.
They never specified what branch of government.
From the government.
From the government.
And these people from the government were requesting permission to go on people's land to look for fragments of an aircraft that had blown up.
Well, clearly they were not terrestrial aircraft because they were seen at great length hovering motionless above the airport.
That's not characteristic of an aircraft, of a terrestrial aircraft anyway.
And the one thing I was successful in obtaining was the four-page written, handwritten notes by a detective, sheriff detective of the local county sheriff's office Who went out and interviewed those people and quickly wrote up a report which was forwarded to my center by a sympathetic party?
It's very, very interesting reading, and it documents everything that you and I have just said about this case.
Can I just say that I'm always impressed by you, Peter?
I was always impressed when I first heard you on our bell show in the 1990s.
But I just want to tell my listener that you sent me a list of celebrated cases going way back to the 30s, and I think there are probably something like 150 of these.
And I just picked one at random there, and you gave me a ton of detail about that.
This stuff is all in your head.
I seem to be monomaniacal on the subject, if you follow me.
I'm not sure what it says about my mental health, Howard.
Well, thank God there are people like you.
Every time I see the word Oklahoma, I want to sing like Howard Keele, but I'll resist the temptation.
Oklahoma, August 11th, 2000.
A law enforcement officer becomes lost at night on a rural road in Oklahoma, approached by strange creatures, and fires his service revolver.
Witness found by police in Roadway.
That sounds intriguing because it's not often that shots are loosed off in these cases.
That's exactly correct.
Although the one case I alluded to earlier in this program, the case of Todd Seas, who's tragically whose remains were found suspended in a high tree after he'd been seen abducted, the one question I did not ask the coroner during our brief conversation was whether Mr. Seas had taken a hunting rifle with him up on his property on this mountain in Pennsylvania.
I wish I'd been quicker on my feet to ask him that question.
But the Oklahoma case was a very interesting one, and the only reason I included in that list is because the individual I spoke with sounded very, very sane and sober-minded.
He was a serious-minded individual, and he told a very unnerving story that ordinarily I would be quite skeptical about, save for the fact that he was a law enforcement officer.
And the fact that he drew his service revolver tells me that he was quite alarmed by what he was looking at there.
Well, the discipline of police work, wherever you are in the world, I think, is you only do that if you're under threat.
Exactly.
Strange creatures, you describe them.
What exactly, how did they look?
It's been many, many years since I've addressed that case.
I've forgotten the details that he provided, but it was at night, as I recall.
You could confirm that from the sheet in front of you.
It was at night, yep.
I'm not sure he got a good look at them.
I hope he did.
If he fired his service revolver, he should have positively identified the intended target before he pulled the trigger, of course.
But I'm not quite as capable of addressing that case as I am some other cases.
You can't keep it.
There's one here.
Try this one.
This is again in 2000.
Chalice, Idaho.
Now, this to me, I'm seeing images like a Budweiser ad in my head.
You know, this is very graphic.
You could make a movie out of this.
This is a bunch of outdoorsmen, four hunters, people who know the outdoors, know what they're doing, know what they're seeing.
They see a gigantic, this is a great one, a gigantic unlighted triangular craft pass over their campsite.
Yes, they were out there.
All four of them were from the state of Oregon.
And they had gone to this area in Chalice, Idaho, northern Idaho, or central Idaho anyway, every year for the past 20 years.
So they knew the lay of the land quite well.
They were quite familiar with the ambiance.
And one night, after a day of scouting out populations of deer in the area, they were looking at the video that they had taken of animals.
And come 9 or 10 o'clock, it became time to start preparing a dinner.
So one of the men went out to his truck where they kept the food so the bears didn't come into their residences looking for food.
And he swung up on the bed of his pickup truck.
And as he swung up, the flashlight he was holding in his hand swung across the sky above his head.
And his peripheral vision told him immediately there was something solid above him.
He looked up, and whatever it was he saw caused him to fall backwards off the tire of his truck, and he started screaming for the others to come out.
There was an immense triangular craft, all unlighted, all entirely dark, hovering motionless above their camp.
And the others came out just in time to see all the lights on this triangular craft come on.
And they stood there in awe as this object slowly accelerated towards a nearby range of mountains.
It tipped its nose up and went up a narrow valley in the side of the mountain range and disappeared over the crest of the mountain.
But it was not moving rapidly at all.
It was not aerodynamic forces that were keeping it in the sky.
It was some other force, apparently, that allowed it to remain suspended in the atmosphere.
The next, or later that night, I should say, two of those men who were brothers decided they did not want to spend the night in that camp.
Well, listen, I'm with them on that.
I would have done the same.
And they loaded their deer rifles and jumped in their pickup truck and abandoned their other two hunting mates up there and went into the nearby town and rented a motel room.
The next morning, one of them, who was a pilot, went to the local FAA Federal Aviation Administration office and told them this story.
It Gave them all the information during which they were given our telephone number at the UFO hotline.
And they drove back, then drove back to their camp during daylight hours.
And just before they got to their camp, they were greeted by an F-16 Air Force fighter that came across the very mountains across which the triangle had departed at very high speed and very low and went right over their hunting camp.
So the FAA apparently had communicated the information those two hunters had imparted to their office.
They had given that information to the U.S. Air Force as the, I think, the only logical conclusion one can make from the facts.
Geez, it was a very, very good case.
They were taking it seriously.
I'm glad I picked that one.
And once again, there's a case that you have the details in your head.
See how you do with this one then.
October 23rd, 2002, Mobile, Alabama, a Cessna 208B, a caravan aircraft, apparently is the word, collided with another object and crashes.
The interesting part is after the crash, they analyze the wreckage and they find unusual marks inside the aircraft and the engine somehow sliced in half.
Yes, you've picked another good report, Howard.
That is a tragic case.
Cessna 208B cargo liner is a single-engine turboprop with a fixed landing gear and a high wing on it.
A gentleman who had been an instructor pilot for the New York Highway Patrol in that type of aircraft took off from Mobile, Alabama.
He took off to the southwest, I believe.
He turned to his left.
He was headed east.
He was carrying cargo.
And he was just climbing out of the Mobile airspace.
And suddenly he was called on the radio and apprised that there was something ahead of him, another aircraft, well above him, 2,000 feet above him, as I recall.
And he acknowledged visual contact with it.
So that was obviously not the object that he collided with.
But a few seconds after that radio communication, he broke in on the frequency again and said, I had to divert, I had to divert, I had to, at which point his radio communication stops.
They found the wreckage, and here's where it's peculiar.
I have a photograph of the wreckage in shallow water in a body of water called the Big Bateau to the east of Mobile.
And the object had been, the airplane rather, had been compressed in all dimensions, dorso ventrally, nose to tail.
It had just been compressed into a box.
And it had on it all sorts of very strange, peculiar orange streaks, not only on the outside of the aircraft, but on the inside of the cabin, on the insides of the tires.
And tragically, the pilot in that accident perished.
But the family ultimately sued the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board, for them to come up with a conclusion as to what had happened.
And the NTSB never made a statement as to what they thought the cause of that accident had been.
Right, but that's highly irregular, isn't it?
They should have logged it as something.
I would say it's maybe even unique.
It's so highly irregular.
I know of no other case in which that is the conclusion of the leading safety investigative body.
Well, I think, you know, I picked a good one, and you remembered it fantastically.
What a story.
Let's end with the mummy and daddy of all of them.
Whatever happened November 7, 2006, O'Hare Airport, Chicago.
Witnessed by so many people.
Deeply, deeply weird.
That was a very interesting case.
Was that 2007 or 2006?
I've got November 07, 2006.
Yes, 2006.
A gentleman who, a ramp worker, person who worked on the outside of aircraft at O'Hare Airport in Chicago was communicating with the crew of an airliner that he was just preparing to push back.
It was headed to Charlotte, North Carolina from Chicago.
And he just happened to look up above him, and he saw a disc hovering above his aircraft directly above him.
He called the matter to the attention of the crew, and they opened their windows and stuck their heads out and looked up at it.
One of them took a photograph.
And I suspect that photograph ended up in the possession of the federal government.
But many people actually saw this, and when it accelerated, when it departed, it accelerated vertically, and it punched a clear hole in solid overcast as it went straight up.
You're right, it's a very dramatic case and very interesting case.
And the FAA, they were interviewed by Dr. Richard Haynes, who runs the NARCAP, an aviation-related UFO body.
And he declared that it was a very interesting case, very well documented.
Many witnesses were interviewed, and they all attested to the same thing.
So that's another good one.
I agree.
And this one proves that these things don't only happen in the middle of nowhere.
Absolutely.
Many people feel that UFOs occur only in rural areas where there are few people to observe them.
Not the case at all.
There was a very celebrated case November of 1997, I believe.
I'm going on memory now, in which an object streaked down the Atlantic coast and the eastern coast of the United States.
It was seen over Boston, New York, Providence, Rhode Island.
And so it disputes the theory that these objects are seen only in rural areas.
If this is the one you're talking about, this is November 14, 97.
There were reports from places as far afield as Oregon, California, and Mexico.
May well be.
So not all of them are concentrated in one area, and they're not only in places that are inaccessible where people aren't.
Sometimes these things happen where people are.
Peter, you are a deeply impressive individual, and I'm delighted that you give me time, and I'm delighted that we could have spoken about Art Bell as well.
You know, he's a sad loss to all of us.
Yeah, well, the delight is mine.
I've enjoyed it tremendously as I've enjoyed all of the opportunities we've had to work together.
And I'm very pleased and flattered to be able to share all this information with our listeners.
I hope they found it interesting.
And if they've ever had a UFO sighting in their lives, irrespective of whether it's eight minutes ago or eight decades ago, I hope they will consider submitting a detailed written report using our online report form.
What's the website?
ufocenter.com.
That's E-R and not R-E.
Center.
Exactly.
Please stay safe where you are.
Stay healthy.
And, you know, the advice the government's given us here in London is stay indoors, Peter, and you know that we will talk again.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
Peter Davenport, and please help Peter if you can if you've seen something.
You know, maybe you saw it yesterday, maybe you saw it three months ago, whatever.
As long as you can give him some details of where it happened, what you think you saw, describe what you saw, then he would be very grateful.
Like I say, he's a tireless researcher on all of these things.
And thank you very much for being part of my show and for being my friend over these years.
So it's time to go.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And until next we meet, please stay safe.
Please stay healthy.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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