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Nov. 2, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:32
Edition 493 - James Fox
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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 still the Unexplained.
Very many thanks for all of your nice interactions, the great emails that you've been sending me through my website, theunexplained.tv.
Please keep those coming and thank you very much for the suggestions for the 500th edition of the podcast.
I think there's a possibility.
See these fingers here?
Well, no, you can't, but they're crossed.
We might have something very special for you for edition 500 towards the end of this year.
It's a work in progress, as they say.
I'm not going to do too much talking on the introduction to this edition because we have a very special guest on this edition.
I'm very lucky, proud, and pleased to have this man on, James Fox, the man behind the exciting new documentary, The Phenomenon, about our history of interaction with UFOs and apparent ETs through the years, with amazing interviews, unique footage.
It is a superb presentation, and you will hear in the conversation that we're about to go through with James Fox here that I'm a massive admirer of this man's work and the way that he was able to pull this off.
It took blood, sweat, and tears to make this documentary, and I totally, completely recommend it.
So James Fox, the man behind the phenomenon, coming very soon.
Thank you very much for all of your emails, your communications.
Please keep in touch.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam, and you can send me an email from there.
And thank you if you have recently.
All right, let's get to the United States now, where this man is currently traveling, which gives us a couple of technical issues that won't affect the conversation too much.
But you will hear that I reference those here in the conversation that I recorded a couple of days ago with James Fox.
And we talk about the phenomenon.
James, thank you very much for doing this.
Oh, thank you.
It's a pleasure to be on your show.
Now, we have to say that we have a small technical issue here.
I have to keep fading you out.
Otherwise, you will keep returning to me.
But I have to say, James, that I watched the documentary twice.
It's just over an hour and a half long.
I watched it again today and made copious notes on it.
And I have to say that in my experience, I haven't seen a presentation as good as this one.
You really have covered off this subject.
Well, thank you for that introduction.
You know, this is my fourth attempt, actually sort of my fourth and a half attempt.
And I'd like to think that I did learn something the first few goes at it.
And my sole objective was to report with credibility, because as you are acutely aware, the phenomenon doesn't need any hyperbole or exaggeration.
It just needs credibility.
And so we tried to sort of have the phenomenon meet 60 minutes or frontline and treat it with the level of respect and seriousness we felt it deserves.
And the one thing that I respect you for avoiding was that you avoided the Gee Whiz approach.
You know, some people who perhaps haven't got as much material will flesh it out with crazy sound effects, intrusive music, extraneous pieces that don't really belong there.
You had the material and you resisted the temptation to turn it into a great big bang flash gee whiz production.
You actually did something that just told its own narrative.
I would literally say, gentlemen, when we were in the studio, it's credibility, credibility, credibility.
Because I'd be the first one to say that the vast majority of UFO reports can and have been explained in sort of conventional terms.
That said, there's a stubborn 10 to 12 percent of reports, encounters that after careful examination and thorough investigation appear to defy a sort of terrestrial explanation.
And those are the cases around the world that we focus on in the phenomenon.
And the fact that we managed to get high-level government and military officials to cooperate with us on this production, I think, is a reflection of our intent to put a serious spotlight on what's going on.
And the one thing that impressed me was that, you know, so often you see presentations like this, you'll see documentaries on television, and they only have a limited amount of time.
And sometimes you know that they don't have the resources to get the people who count.
And you do.
If those people are alive, you've mostly got them.
If they're not alive anymore, then you've got archive.
And if you can't get archive footage, either audio or video or film, you have the documents.
So you actually have made the effort to get the people, even if they are important people, they've all come on board.
I suppose before we get really stuck into it, I'm very impressed.
How were you able to do that?
Money and time.
We, we, you know, it was funny, actually.
I've always been told not to read the reviews, the comments on, but last night I got sort of sucked in and I wanted to respond, but I didn't.
People were saying, oh, you know, same rehashed history.
And I said, well, wait a minute.
I can't change the history of modern history of this phenomenon.
I mean, the things that occurred that are highlighted over the years are that's part of the history, and I can't change that.
But what I did do, I'll give you a couple of examples, is we went after never-before-seen archival interviews, newsreel footage, radio interviews from the 40s, 50s, 60s, and so forth, that's never seen the light of day.
I'll give you an example.
Everybody knows it's familiar with the phenomenon that Kenneth Arnold's First major UFO encounter that really splattered across the headlines all across the world, quite honestly.
Right, this was 1947.
Kenneth Arnold was flying and encountered what appeared to be fleets of UFOs.
Yeah, so that the phrase flying saucer was coined from that initial encounter.
And he described it as as though he'd thrown a saucer across the water, the way they skipped, the way they flew.
And right there on the spot, one of the reporters said, flying saucer.
And so we went after, obviously, archival footage of him, but we also went after his family.
And we managed to get, for the first time ever, his daughter, Kim Arnold, on camera.
And she had kept all the correspondence that had gone on between Mr. Arnold and the Air Force because he was a respected, he ran for lieutenant governor of Idaho.
He was a respected citizen.
He was a pilot.
And he had kept all the correspondence with the Air Force because the Air Force legitimately was just trying to get to the bottom of it at that point.
That was when, you know, Project Sign and then Project Grudge and eventually became Project Blue Book, which started in 1947.
So we revealed some of these documents and photographs and they even shared a photograph with him from 1947, which the family had kept with the writing from the military on the backside.
So there's new angles and new information, more depth to these previous encounters.
People know about William Nash and Fortenbury.
It's a very famous sighting of commercial airline pilots who flew over the top of nine discs.
Well, we managed to track down an interview with William Nash.
No one's ever seen an interview with William Nash.
That really brings that encounter to life.
And listen, I saw that.
I haven't seen any interviews with him.
I'm aware of the case, as I'm aware of most of these cases that you talk about, but I've never seen them covered in this way.
How were you able to get that encounter?
We extensive research.
We had Jacques Fallais on board at that point.
That brought a lot of weight and access.
Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have had.
And it was funny, actually, because I remember exactly where I was when we were reading online that these interviews existed.
And I thought, well, we have to go after this.
William Nash, and there was Al Schop, who was in the radar room the two consecutive nights when the White House and the Capitol building were buzzed in July of 1952.
And so we'd heard about this stuff.
A rare sort of find online.
And I reached out to this gentleman eventually after, I don't know, sort of a month.
And his name was Tom Tullian.
And he was doing this thing, Project Sign Archive.
He was, you know, picked up a nice camera and he'd been going around in the 80s getting a lot of these witnesses on camera, but he never did anything with it.
And I reached out to him and I said, you know, I gave a brief introduction and I said, hey, my name is, you know, James Fox and I'm working on this film.
And I understand you had these, you know, beta SP tapes of these rare interviews.
And he said, no, no, no, no, who you are.
I don't, no, it's complete disinformation.
There's nothing.
I have nothing.
So I went back to him and I said, well, I happen to be working with Dr. Jacques Valais.
And he said, okay, wait a minute.
No, I do have all that stuff.
Let's talk.
So look, Jacques Valais, and you told me at the beginning of this, and the proof is in watching the documentary that you were able to get all the principles, all the important people.
Jacques Valais, somebody absolutely at the core of all of this, physicist, ufologist, a man who was there right at the beginning.
He is still there now.
One of the most credible people, one of the most diligent researchers.
How did you get him on board?
So back in 1978, there was an event at the United Nations that was put on by a gentleman named Lee Spiegel.
And Lee was a young sort of journalist at the time who'd had an encounter.
And he was working with both Dr. Hynek and Jacques Valley, Sergeant Coyne, the helicopter pilot from that infamous early 70s UFO encounter, I think that Dr. Hynek investigated.
But in any case, he put this classic event on, the United Nations, and he had a relationship with Jacques Valley from 1978 and even prior.
So he, I started working with him, and then he brought Jacques on board.
And Jacques initially was extremely cautious and sort of, you know, made a few commitments to talk very limited on-camera participation on a few specific cases, one of which was the United Nations thing.
And then when we eventually got him to come into the studio, he saw that we had uncovered so many incredible rare archival material and that I was really doing a proper five-year investigation into the famous Socorro, New Mexico case, which he was intimately involved with, with Dr. Hynek.
And I think he felt an obligation at that point to get involved to make sure that the pieces of the puzzle were put together and told accurately.
And so he became very involved.
I mean, he would come out for marathon edits sessions in our studio.
It is so impressive, James, to actually see him, see him speaking now, see him speaking in archival footage then.
You know, I thought it gives a real stamp of credibility to this thing.
And I suppose it's the old journalistic thing.
I've been a journalist for years.
Once you get your foot through the door, you then have an opportunity to show that you are credible.
And once you do that, you've normally got the person you're trying to persuade eating out of your hand.
And it's clear to me that you've got that neck.
Well, you know, Jacques played a very key role.
The film wouldn't be what it is without his participation.
I'll give you another example.
I mean, we got archival footage because of him, but he also brought in Gary Nolan.
Gary Nolan is, those guys are doing real science in a lab in Silicon Valley.
He brought in former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon, which was three months of negotiations because of other obligations he had.
And Christopher Mellon jokingly said, well, when Jacques says jump, I say how high, you know.
Hey, well, listen, I've got to cut a clip of Christopher Mellon, former, as you say, Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense in the U.S., a man who's been in the media a lot, a man I can't get to interview.
You got him.
Let's just hear a few seconds of what he said.
We need to begin to prepare to accept and understand that we are not alone in the universe, have not been at all throughout this time.
And that says it all, really.
That's you setting out your stall right at the beginning with Christopher Mellon himself.
You know, we had a wonderful little discovery when I met with him in Washington.
And we found out that during his time under the Clinton administration as well as Bush administration, he, in an official capacity in the 90s, was going after some footage that was reported by Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper from Edwards Air Force Base,
circa 1957, of a filmed landing of a disc-shaped object on the dry lakebed.
Well, I had met with Colonel Cooper in 1997, 1998.
So I was interviewing him about this infamous footage, filmed footage that his camera crew had managed to capture of this landed disc.
And then I was sort of doing this whole interview with him back in the 90s.
Well, we found out that during that same time, Colonel Cooper had met with President Bill Clinton because President Bill Clinton administration was going after some UFO material and trying to undercover what the government knew.
And we have to say Clinton and his people didn't get that far.
Not too far.
No, they did not.
But Mellon went after the footage in an official capacity, eventually having an Air Force.
And if your audience wants me to go into the detail about the footage, I'm happy to do that.
But basically, he was going in an official capacity after this filmed footage that was taken in 1957 of a landed flying saucer on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base.
The object lifts off the ground and puts gear in the well and shoots off at a high rate of speed.
And it was all captured on film.
And I was interviewing Colonel Gordon Cooper about this, which I featured some of that in the movie.
And he was going after that footage in an official capacity and eventually got a high-ranking Air Force officer on the phone and that said, oh, yeah, well, we had to sort of make clear some space and we got rid of all that stuff.
And he, of course, had this incredulous look on his face, like, yeah, sure.
You're going to throw away perfectly good footage of a, you know, of a wingless disc-shaped object, origin unknown, landing at Edwards Air Force Base.
Sure.
You know, so, but it was, we, we had a good laugh about it, you know, and I think I actually, yeah, I do feature that segment in the movie.
You do, and it's astonishing to see.
I mean, look, there are people who, you know, they will cry fake and all sorts of things, but it looks pretty damn credible to me.
You know, my father, I was born in England.
My father is British, Stephen Charles James Fox.
Our name goes back in England quite some time.
I was born in Exeter, and my father was struck with multiple sclerosis at a very early age and lost the use of his legs.
And so I became sort of his chauffeur, his nurse, his secretary.
And we would go out on assignment and we'd meet with the likes of Stephen Hawking, Gonville and Keys, physicist, the legendary race car drivers, Jackie Stewart and Dan Gurney, and we traveled the world together.
Wow.
And when I told my father that I was going to make a documentary on unidentified flying objects, I mean, he was profoundly concerned about it.
He said, you're wasting your life.
There's nowhere to go.
It's a dead-end road.
Please reconsider.
In fact, he went as far as having our family from Europe writing me letters and asking me to reconsider, which I was amazed because he'd been so supportive with everything else that I'd done.
And that, of course, being the Taurus I am, that drove me even further.
But I took my father to an interview with Gordon Cooper, that interview that I was just talking about.
And Gordon Cooper was an iconic figure of my father's generation.
He was the last American astronaut to go up in space alone.
He was part of the right stuff.
And my father listened to Cooper describe, A, an encounter he had while piloting fighter jets over Germany in the early 50s, describing these flight performances of these wingless craft that they would encounter at high altitude.
And they couldn't, you know, these things would fly rings around them and do 90-degree turns at high speed.
And then he spoke about this camera crew that coincidentally managed to capture just an unexpected event at Edwards Air Force Base.
They were filming something completely different, unrelated.
And my father thought to himself, you know, this man has everything to lose and nothing to gain by sharing this story.
Why on earth?
He's not getting paid?
Why on earth would he make this stuff up?
When you put that incident, if you just talk about that on a standalone incident, it sounds too out there to be believed.
I'd be the first one to admit, when I first heard about landing cases, I was just like, you've got to be kidding.
There's no way.
I always thought of UFO encounters as a blurry light off in the distance.
When you have an unambiguous encounter of a landing, that's a big difference, right?
But when you start to put these in context and you start looking at the pattern and the fact that these are happening all around the world in very well-documented cases, it doesn't come across that as that out there.
The one thing that struck me, if I may just dive in for a second here, and we've got this small audio issue that means I have to turn you down whenever I speak, but I think we're getting there.
The Gordon Cooper interview was one of a number of things, you know, in your production.
And I'm glad that Gordon Cooper convinced your father because he certainly convinced me.
But you mixed together footage of him more recently and footage of him in the past when you'd spoken with him.
And I found that incredibly moving.
And if we might, let's just play a tiny little bit of some of the sound and vision that you have of Gordon Cooper in this because it's worth hearing.
And within the next two to three days, we'd had practically all the fighters we could muster on the base up climbing as high as they would climb with guys with binoculars in them still trying to spot these strange devices flying overhead.
We never could get close enough really to pin them down, but they were round in shape and very metallic looking.
And that was Gordon Cooper talking about an encounter that he had when he was, I think, on a training exercise in Germany.
He was part of the American forces in Germany and encountered something in the sky.
Yes, that was incredible, you know, because people often say, you know, well, pilots aren't, you know, I've actually heard skeptics, and I think it's very healthy to be skeptical.
I really do.
But fighter pilots, I mean, they've got trained eyes.
They know how things are supposed to perform, how conventional aircraft operate.
And I think it's very important to make the distinction here because a lot of people are really quick to say, well, it's clearly just some sort of high technologically advanced super secret program.
The observed technology are objects that have no wings, no tails, no exhaust vents, no sound, no air disturbance.
They have the ability to hover, and they can accelerate from a standstill to out of sight in the blink of an eye.
They could perform right-angle turns at high speed.
They don't slow down at all.
And this observed technology dates back to the modern UFO wave.
Obviously, there's arguments that this goes back millennia.
And it's light years advanced from anything that we have even today.
When you listen to David Fraver, Commander Fraver, the Navy fighter pilot, he interacts with this object that he described as a tic-tac.
I mean, it's egg-shaped sort of thing.
Yeah, he was one of the guys on the Nimitz, wasn't he?
And this is a good point then.
I'm going to skip forward a bit here.
And just play a little bit, if it's okay, of David Fraver, because you spoke with him too.
I mean, you're speaking with all the people that I keep putting bids to get on my show and can't get them, which makes me respect you even more.
But this is David Fravor, the U.S. Nimitz famous Tic-Tac UFOs.
He was there.
He was in the cockpit.
Here's what he says.
This thing goes poof and it's gone that fast.
You know, and then there's a lot of, dude, what the?
Did you guys see that?
And they're like, it's gone.
Now I had to cut out the expletives on that, but I think the point is made pretty clear.
Yeah.
And, you know, I bookend that with a colonel in the Air Force, Colonel William T. Coleman, who has a dramatic nine-minute encounter while piloting a B-25 bomber with a couple of engineers from Lockheed and Boeing in 1955 over Alabama.
The encounter starts at elevation 9,000 feet and ends at treetop level at what he said to me was maximum continuous power.
And I said, Colonel, what does that mean?
He said, if I went any faster, the engines would blow up.
I said, wow, okay.
And he said, I thought I was going to, we thought we were going to hit this thing.
I mean, they literally had to take evasive action at treetop level.
He said, if he turned to the right or to the left, the wings would have hit the trees.
So he had to pull up first, which he lost momentarily sight of this object, and then dip the wing to the right and get and maneuver around this thing.
But his description of the observed technology in 1955 is so identical to what Fraver talks about off the west coast of California in 2004 and the encounters they're having off the east coast in 2015.
Look, this is not just anecdotal evidence.
We're talking about the United States military releasing official Department of Defense cockpit recordings of these devices.
Radar confirmation, ground radar confirmation, visual confirmation, and recorded.
I mean, the only thing we don't have is the object in our possession.
So these are not anecdotal sightings, and the observed technology is light years advanced from anything we have today, and certainly 75 years ago.
James, is it true if we want to talk about the more recent cases, the Nimitz case, that 2004 case that I think was also replicated in 2015?
I understood that some of the tapes and recordings, maybe some of the radar recordings, actually were taken away and they haven't been released.
Is that so?
Well, that's a great point.
You know, I got to meet with former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, which is one of the most powerful men in the Senate.
And that was thanks to a gentleman, George Knapp, months of negotiations for that.
And he confirmed, and I can't emphasize his credibility level, someone of his stature, what many of us had suspected for decades.
And that is the very few bits of evidence that have been released is literally, according to Senator Reid, on camera, the tip of the iceberg.
There's so much solid evidence that has yet to see the light of day.
So why do you think that the powers that be in Washington and at the Pentagon will allow or have allowed a certain amount of this to get out?
Then teasing us, really.
That's what they're doing.
They've teased us because we know there's going to be more, and you've just said there is more.
Why have they walked so far towards this, but not all the way?
Okay, so I'll give you an example.
We think as civilians, citizens, of the philosophical implications of, hey, we might not be alone.
And that's just, you know, something that we've been contemplating forever, right?
They don't look at it that way.
Put your mind into the Air Force.
Their sole objective is secure the skies, have control.
For any governing body to come forward and say, hey, general public, we have structured craft of unknown origin whizzing around with impunity, in some cases over extremely sensitive nuclear weapons facilities.
We don't know who they are, where they come from, or what they want, and they fly rings around our fastest jets.
Thank you and good night.
So my point is, you have to look at it through their eyes.
To them, it's a problem.
And you can't expose or reveal what you know without exposing your own vulnerabilities.
There are people within the intelligence communities that feel that we are entitled to know what's going on.
There are others that feel that they're not prepared for the floodgate opening of inquiries of which they might not have answers to.
Like, give you an example.
Jacques Vallet, the intellectual heavyweight in the world on this topic, had said to me, James, you have to look at the secrecy like this.
And I said, what's that, Jacques?
He said, think of it more as a question of what the government doesn't know than what they do know.
I totally understand that.
This means that if they admit too much that there is a whole pile of stuff that they don't really understand, then they show their vulnerability and that in a way destabilizes the populace.
Because if you start telling people, we're not on top of this, they start to worry.
I don't think we have anything to worry about per se, because, look, every witness I've interviewed, and I've interviewed a lot, and I've interviewed military and government officials all around the world.
I've been to China, Australia, Africa, South America, all across the United States, all of Europe, Russia.
And they all say to me, look, if these things were here to do us harm, it would have been a fait de compli because there is nothing we can do to stop these things.
I mean, they are just flying rings around us.
I mean, look, Fraver talks about the fastest fighter jet at the time, certainly one of the top fighter jets.
And this thing was flying rings around him.
I mean, it was a joke.
Yep.
And, you know, there's no, you've only got to look into these people's eyes.
I mean, I was very moved by the footage with Gordon Cooper.
Gordon Cooper as a younger man, Gordon Cooper more recently as an older man.
And the credibility of what he is saying is there in his eyes.
Same with David Fraver, in a much more matter-of-fact way.
I mean, this guy is a pilot.
He's clearly seen it all.
But in his eyes is, geez, we saw this.
All of us saw it.
We don't know what the hell it is, but it's not from here.
You know, when you listen to these accounts, I mean, I was in China twice recently, just a couple of years ago, and you hear these encounters in China and them describing the observed technology exactly like they describe it in Russia, exactly like they describe it in Australia, exactly like they describe it in South America.
You know, the phenomenon is global.
It's happening everywhere.
Yep.
And you describe very powerfully, and it's an impression that I came away with.
It's something that I've known about.
Of course I have, because I've read into this and I've been interested in this stuff all my life.
I've never seen it more powerfully portrayed, though, than in the phenomenon.
You talk about the invasion, so-called, of Washington.
This was in the 50s when objects appeared and danced through restricted airspace around the Capitol, the White House.
Air Force F-94 jets could do nothing to stop these things.
In fact, the second time this happened, I think which was the second weekend of this activity over Washington, the pilot simply radioed back and said, they're closing in on me.
What do I do?
That's a pilot saying, what do I do?
Apparently, the order was to shoot them down, and that's not what they were going to do.
Of course not.
But this was a terrifying encounter.
And it's very hard, isn't it, when there are investigations that happen into these things for the officials to confirm it, which they're not doing.
There was subsequently an investigation.
There was subsequently a news conference.
And if you're okay with this, James, I'm just going to play you a little bit of this news conference About a subsequent investigation, and here's what was said.
There have been a certain percentage of this volume of reports that have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things.
We can say that the recent sightings are in no way connected with any secret development by any department of the United States.
Right.
Okay, so that's going part of the way, again, towards confirming these things.
But that's the two-step, I think it is, that the authorities everywhere, but America particularly, seem to be dancing with all of us.
They'll let you know a little bit, but they won't go, they daren't go all the way.
You know, that was a second largest, first largest press conference since the ending of World War II.
And, you know, you've got a general, John Sanford, in uniform addressing the nation.
After two consecutive weekends, people say, well, if UFOs were real, they would land on the why don't they land on the White House long?
Well, they just about did.
That made major news.
And let me tell you what happened after that, because it's a very interesting story.
I'll be quick.
The Air Force is saying, how do we deal with this problem?
They had all sorts of concerns.
They brought together a think tank of highly intelligent scientists.
It was called the Robertson Panel, intellectual heavyweights, reviewed the evidence, reviewed what was going on, what was known, what wasn't known.
This was in early 1953.
And what came out of that was basically a policy of ridicule and denial.
They said, look, we can't deny that these things exist, but we could adopt a policy by the Air Force of ridicule.
And that would discourage people from coming forward and sharing their stories.
You just associate these people as wackos.
Basically, it was a policy that stuck and it was very effective all these years later.
That's kind of one of the reasons why people laugh when a pilot says, hey, this is what I saw.
But the policy of ridicule has real human effects, doesn't it, James?
You talk a lot about the Sokoro incident and police officer Lonnie Zamora.
And maybe you can tell me about this in more detail, but it was the 1960s.
It was a very clear and a very chilling encounter, this one.
But Lonnie Zamora, poor man, seemed to pay a terrible price for being willing at the beginning to talk about this.
That's, you know, it was a police officer.
It was April 24th, 1964.
He was on pursuit.
You know, he was on duty.
He was chasing a speeding car when something caught his eye and he had what many consider to be the most well-documented close encounter of the third kind.
That's when witnesses claim to see occupants associated with the craft.
This is, like I said, one of the most well-documented cases.
The military was on scene within an hour, roped off the area, and there were so many ground traces left, including the footprints of the entities, burn marks, whatever type of propulsion this device was using, as well as four landing gear imprints in the ground that it was quite heavy.
The officers just told the truth.
I mean, this is what I saw.
You know, the military came in, of course, they took it very seriously.
I mean, I've got all the diagrams.
I went into the National Archives and got the original records from Project Blue Book Files, which I don't think has ever been done.
The originals were microfilm, yeah, but we got the originals.
And it ruined his life.
He ended up losing his job as a police officer.
He quit because of the attention he was getting.
And people would say, oh, you're the same police officer that, you know, don't you see little green men kind of thing?
And he realized his career was over.
He ended up working out at the dump.
I got to know his family.
I got to know his wife.
I got to know his daughter, his son Michael, his coworkers, the local sheriff.
The impact of him just telling the truth about his encounter, I mean, changed his life forever and his career was over.
I'm really glad that he's in the documentary because my heart bled for Lonnie.
My heart bleeds for his family who've got to bear this today because all the guy did was do his job as any police officer would.
And he suffered terrible ridicule.
I mean, admittedly, he was on the front page of many newspapers.
His story was told around the world.
He got thousands of letters from people.
There were no emails in those days who wanted to tell him their stories.
But he was put in an impossible position, it seems to me.
You know, when we brought together witnesses from Africa, from a 1994 landing case, another close encounter.
This is the famous Aerial School Zimbabwe case, yeah.
Exactly.
And to my astonishment, we discovered that many of the witnesses 20 years later hadn't told their partners, their husbands.
And I said, you got to be kidding me.
She'd said, no, honestly, James, I've got two kids with this man, and I just, I was tired of defending my story.
I just didn't want to engage.
I'd rather just not talk about it.
You know, the Ariel School case moves me enormously.
Funnily enough, you know, I was doing, you know, big-time radio in London at that time.
I was on, you know, morning drive show, and I didn't remember the case at all.
It was reported here.
It didn't have any impact on me, and I'm interested in these things.
But looking at it now, let's just remind our listener here, I've done programs about this before, but it was a schoolyard and something landed near that schoolyard.
This is a rural area of Zimbabwe, so not the hustle and bustle of the big cities at all.
Something landed and a silver creature stood by the fence, I think it was, or the wall of this school and telepathically communicated with the kids.
And the accounts of the kids then, which you have, you have the footage which I've never seen before, and the accounts of the now adults absolutely moved me to near tears because here was absolute sincerity of people whose lives had been changed, you know, irretrievably, well, not irretrievably, that's the wrong word, but changed immeasurably is the word by that incident.
You know, when I first heard about this case, and I've learned over the years to suspend judgment because I just wrote it off immediately.
I had heard about the case in the 90s during production of my first film, UFO's 50 Years of Denial.
And I thought I was just naive enough.
It was about 1997 that I could get an interview with Steven Spielberg.
We had a mutual friend in Commons, woman Janet Yang.
And of course, you know, within a week or two, I think she got back to me and she said, well, yeah, Stephen's not going to meet with you, but he does want you to know that there was a landing case outside Harare in Zimbabwe at a school that he thinks you should look into.
And I dismissed it immediately because my whole philosophy was there's no way that an incident of that magnitude with the sheer volume of eyewitness testimony in broad daylight could occur and the whole world not know about it.
So I dismissed it right away.
In fact, I didn't look, I never looked back.
It took 10 years before I started looking into that case again.
A gentleman named Randall Nickerson has been working on a film, I think, for 15 years on that specific case.
I think it's coming out fairly soon, an aerial phenomenon.
I think it's probably going to be out next year.
I mean, that's been a huge effort for Randall Nickerson.
I spoke to him about two years ago, so I'm glad to know that that is still ongoing.
Yeah, he's almost wrapping it up.
He's got a new producer on the project, this guy, Dan Farrow, who produced Ready Player 1 with Spielberg.
But in any case, I started to look at it.
And when I saw the archival interviews on camera with Dr. John Mack and his children, Dr. John Mack was a Harvard psychiatrist who'd flown to Rua, or flew to Harare and drove into Rua, aerial school, back in, I mean, literally within a week or so of the encounter.
And he interviewed roughly 66 out of the 100 children on camera.
And when I saw that archival footage, to say that I was profoundly moved would be the world's biggest understatement.
There's just not a shred of doubt that these children are telling the truth when you look at it.
In fact, I'll go, when I was reviewing it years after that, my partner, Rebecca, and we never, we have a child together and we never ever talk about UFOs.
I mean, it's just one of those things where it's just not part of our relationship and it suits me fine.
But when she saw the children as well, she was deeply, I mean, she literally stopped in her tracks.
She was bringing me coffee or something in the studio and she said, those children are not lying.
I think it was the way that John Mack was questioning the children.
In fact, I spoke to one of them as an adult very recently when I spoke to Randall Nickerson.
But when you look at that archive footage of them in the 90s and you look at their eyes, you can see that something absolutely profound had happened to them all.
Yeah, and of course you listen to it 20 years later and it's as though the incident happened last night.
I mean, it's like, you know, they remember every detail.
And of course, being adults, you know, they're able to sort of process their whole, you know, they've had time to think about it and process what had happened and better articulate and think about the whole thing.
You know what I mean?
And so it's just absolutely astonishing to me that that memory is if it happened yesterday.
I'm just profoundly moved by that entire case.
I was.
In fact, we went to Africa and we went to the landing site and met with the then teacher, who's now headmistress, Judy Bates, and for her unexpected cameo appearance on camera out in the field and what she says.
And if you listen very carefully at the end of the film, she has sort of the last word, she's confirming that she too had confirmation of what happened.
You just got to listen very carefully and kind of read between the lines.
She apologizes to the children, basically admits that she'd lied about it because she was more concerned about her career and what was going on in her personal experiences.
It was a deeply moving segment of the program.
And I think it was an absolute genius thing to do to put that at the end of the documentary because it leaves you with something that moves you, that makes you wonder who else in this world has had encounters like that.
And it makes you wonder what it is actually like, and you've had the chance to meet these people personally, what it was actually like to go through it and then carry that through your life.
You know, when I'm in the edit room putting this stuff together, and we spent the better part of four years editing this film and nearly eight years making it, I have a deep connection with all the way.
I personally went and met and personally traveled to these locations myself and interviewed these people myself.
And, you know, it's obviously one thing to see them on camera and see the sheer preponderance of testimony and evidence around the world.
But meeting with these people and really personalize who they are and listen to the human element of the whole thing and the effects it's had on their lives and feeling uncomfortable to even share it because they're fearful of how the general public's going to respond.
You really hold that dear in the edit room and keep those things in mind and to treat the topic fairly.
I mean, look, we don't one time, and you probably noticed this, we don't say who these people are or where they come from.
We have no idea.
We don't even say aliens.
We don't say any of that because we can't.
We just report on the encounters, primarily by those who experienced it, and allow the audience to make up their own minds.
Which I think is the only way to do it.
One aspect of the aerial school Zimbabwe case, though, was that some of the kids reported that whatever this creature was gave them a message.
And part of that message was ecological, I seem to remember.
It was about what we were doing to this planet.
I know.
I mean, look, if you walk down the street and you tapped the average stranger on the shoulder, no matter where you were, and you said, hey, have you heard about the UFO landing case in Africa back in 1994 when the alleged beings got out of the UFO and interacted telepathically about environmental destruction on the planet?
People would look at you like, excuse me, what are you smoking, mate?
No one's going to believe that.
I mean, I didn't.
But when you put it in context and you look at the, you know, I find the interactions with shutting our nukes off in these highly secret, secure nuclear weapons facilities all around the world.
I mean, in Russia as well.
And you have footage of Robert Salas, who I've had on my show, who was actually at one of these bases where something shut down the nukes.
It doesn't get more serious than that.
His interpretation of that is taking matches out of the hands of a baby.
And you listen to the testimony of these high-level military officers who's, I mean, this is the highest level.
I mean, these guys are in charge of the security of our nuclear weapons.
I mean, think about that.
These guys are saying it, and then you've got confirmation from Senator Harry Reid after this 10-year investigation at the Pentagon of this UFO program, ATIP, and then you've got children at schools telling us about these messages of environmental destruction.
I mean, my God, if that doesn't explore the potential intelligence behind the phenomenon, I don't know what does.
You mentioned ATIP, and I'm glad that you did.
It always frustrates me, and it's partly because, you know, here I am in the UK trying to get interviews with these people.
But Luis Elizondo, who allegedly was a big part of the ATIP thing and went public in that revelatory piece that Leslie Kane and her colleagues were behind in 2017.
But Luis Elizondo does not make himself more public, and I wish he did.
You know, I was shocked to see the tweet that he did a couple of weeks ago regarding this film.
Here's a guy who, in an official capacity, directed the very secret UFO Pentagon program that ended up on the front page of the New York Times in late 2017, publicly endorsing a UFO film.
And he said, I had to pinch myself when I read it because I had no idea it was coming.
And he said that everything in this film is accurate.
There are things said in this film that I was unable to say.
And it was an amazing moment for me.
I mean, it was, you know, it was very encouraging to see the level of interest, but also willingness among very public officials and quite honestly, like people in the entertainment industry that are publicly endorsing this movie.
And I think it's very encouraging.
People are, I think, thinking that this is potentially we're at a tipping point and that this information is really coming out.
And it's exciting.
You know, among the six pages of notes that I've got here for this conversation, James, one of the phrases that I wrote and underlined was tipping point.
I wonder what 2021 will bring us.
Do you think that with the help of people like Harry Reid and others who are involved in these things, we might actually get hearings?
I know there have been hearings before, but we might get more enlightened 2021-style hearings come this new year.
I think that there, in fact, I know through my contacts that there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes.
There's an assessment that's due any day now that'll be made public regarding the phenomenon.
What's sort of known.
I don't know how sanitized it's going to be, but that's definitely coming down the pike.
There's been an acknowledgement for the first time, certainly that I can recall in many, many, many decades of, you know, basically these things are real.
No one's saying where they come from.
We don't know.
But they're releasing the evidence, some of the evidence.
They're saying it's legitimate.
The unidentified aerial phenomenon is real.
And they're just not, you know, it's very encouraging to see what's happening.
So there are people on the inside that really think it's time.
The old guard is dying off and that the new people on board think that it's time for more government transparency.
And I really think it's going to continue in 2021.
I'm very excited about it.
Yeah, me too.
I think maybe this could, I mean, we've been disappointed before, but I think this might be it.
And I want to be around for it.
You also talk, we talked about the aerial school.
You also, earlier in the documentary, bring up the case of the Westall School in Australia.
This was an object hovering near that school.
You interviewed the witnesses who were deeply affected, again, like the kids at the Aerial School in Zimbabwe, by the sighting of this disc.
Quotes, like a disc with a rise in the middle, radiating heat, blue-purple lights around it, no windows, then it turned on its side and zoomed straight up.
You get an interview with, and he wants to remain anonymous for reasons that I can understand, a teacher who was effectively intimidated after this and told to keep quiet about it.
So again, if it's all right with you, James, I want to just play a tiny little bit of this teacher and what he had to say about what transpired at the Westall School.
I was then told that I hadn't seen anything, but I'd made it all up, possibly because I was drunk and that they would have to report that fact to the Education Department and I would lose my job.
So he was basically told this poor guy to shut up, otherwise they would A, discredit him and B, possibly prosecute him.
You know, one of the most poignant moments for me, listening to his testimony, and it was a miracle we got him on camera.
And if I told your audience what it took, we'd be here for an hour or two.
Suffice to say, we did it for the first time in 50 years.
But for me, what was said to him 50 years ago by these military personnel that showed up at his doorstep, he says he didn't understand why he couldn't share what he saw.
He just said, that was so puzzling to me.
Why couldn't I talk about it?
Why?
And he described the encounter as well as being told to keep quiet about it as though it happened yesterday and it had been 50 years.
It's amazing.
And the witnesses at the school, I mean, people just want answers, you know, and how animated and excited they were about, you know, as adults now in their 50s and 60s describing an incident as if it happened yesterday.
You know, it is astonishing, and I've never seen any of this presented in this way.
I know I sound like I'm a trumpet blower for you, but I don't mind being that because I think this is a remarkable piece of work.
Socorro, we talked about Blonny Zamora, the Socorro incident, the beings and all the rest of it, and all of that information that was taken away and then put behind closed doors somewhere.
You were telling me before we started recording that you were at Socorro yesterday, literally, as we record this.
I was.
You know, I spent the better part of five years as an outsider coming in to a tight-knit town community.
It takes time to people to warm up to you.
And I got to know, like I said, Lonnie's wife, Mary.
Unfortunately, she passed a couple of months ago.
Got her on camera for the first time.
His daughter, Diane, his son, Michael, his coworkers, people that he'd worked with for 25 years out of the dump when he left his job as police officer.
You know, seeing the impact that this case had on his family, had on the community, how the military stepped in and one of the aspects of the encounter that the Air Force desperately wanted to tamp down was the fact it was a close encounter of the third kind.
Because obviously it's one thing to say, well, he clearly misidentified aircraft, but it's another thing when you describe beings on the ground.
So that was an aspect publicly that they downplayed as much as they possibly could.
But behind the scenes, they were doing detailed diagrams of the landing site.
And even you'll see in the film outline on multiple occasions, where the footprints of these alleged beings were and directly corresponding to where Lonning had described them walking around the bottom of the landed spaceship or whatever you want to call it.
There were footprints and they found those footprints and they were clearly outlined in these diagrams and it's quite amazing.
So on the one hand, in the public, they're downplaying.
In fact, they're not even talking about that at all, but behind the scenes, that's not the case.
And another thing I found rather interesting, his family helped me uncover an audio interview that had been done with him right after the incident.
And he talks about how the military, and it's funny, his wife Mary went on the record with me.
And that, again, was a miracle to get her on camera.
I won't bore your audience again with the details, but it happened.
We did it.
She said, when he came home that night, it was about one o'clock in the morning.
He was white as a ghost.
And she said, where have you been?
It's so late.
Where have you been?
Nothing.
I just had to work late.
I don't want to talk.
I just work late.
She's like, well, God, everything okay?
She told me, she goes, he didn't look right.
I mean, there was really, she's like, I don't know what happened, but he didn't look right.
And he didn't want to talk about it.
The next morning, of course, the news of the incident was just everywhere.
And she confronted him again.
And she said, you know, Lonnie, what happened?
And all he said to her was, what you see in the newspapers is what happened.
And she said that whatever he saw, it changed him.
He was never the same after that.
The Air Force took him in and interrogated him.
The military did, until the wee hours of the morning.
And he said that they shared with him other cases that were happening in and around the area.
And is he the one that they sent him away with a photograph of another similar encounter?
They brought the same, they had a book that they shared with Lonnie.
It's the same Air Force similar description of which happened in Australia when I talked to the gentleman, James.
I will leave his last name out, who goes on the record again for the first time in 50 years, who describes that Polaroid photo that he'd taken.
His encounter in 1966 is identical with the Air Force or the military as Lonnie's.
And basically, they shared a book.
They talked about other cases.
They talked, in fact, with this guy, James, in Australia, they said that there were other objects and that basically what he'd seen was a legitimate UFO.
I mean, it's what it was.
And they said the same thing to Lonnie.
And then they said, Lonnie, it's best you don't talk about this.
It's just, it's better that way if you just don't talk about it.
It's what they said to him.
And he was somebody who I said earlier that my heart bled for Lonnie because the guy Was doing his job and he was trying to do his best.
I would love to have been able to meet him and I feel sorry for his family.
But of course, the other person that we have to be sympathetic to is, you know, is the guy from Roswell, Jesse Marcel.
Jesse Marcel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, we went to great lengths to find that footage.
I don't know there are people out there in the, even Kevin Randall and Don Schmidt.
I mean, they're, wow, that's the rarest footage interview of him.
He's out of the debris field.
This is Major Jesse Marcel.
He was the first military officer, part of the 509th Bombing Wing, which is the most elite squadron at the time, exclusively responsible for the deployment of atomic weapons back in 1947.
So, you know, you've got, he was the first one on the scene, the debris field.
Him and one other officer as well, and the rancher, Mac Brazil, he came across this incredibly exotic material that was, I mean, it was like, you know, football field after football field after football field.
I mean, it was massive debris field.
And then he describes the metal and then he describes the cover-up all on camera.
I mean, it's just amazing.
And, you know, think about having to live with that.
Think about the discovery that was made and what they found and then the massive cover-up that ensued and having to live with that and the courage it took people like him to go on the record and say, you know what?
That was not of this earth.
And I was the first one on the scene.
And this is what we saw.
And this is what happened.
I have to really, I'm forever grateful for the people willing to come forward and risk ridicule and everything else to tell us what really happened.
And I interviewed Jesse Marcel's grandson and his grandson told me stories about going fishing with his granddad and the quiet understanding between them that, you know, what happened at Roswell was profound, and indeed it was real.
Yeah, it's an incredible story.
You know, Jacques Vallet would sit there because, look, Roswell is, you know, it could be easily said it's, you know, sort of been there, done that, it's been beaten to death.
But, you know, we came across it during the so-called Rockefeller initiative during the Clinton administration.
And so I feel that if we transcended the UFO community and penetrated a much broader audience, which was our objective with this film, not just to preach to the choir, that we would have to cover Roswell a little bit, just a snapshot history of it.
And Jock would sit in the back of the edit room and he would say, just the facts, ma'am.
Just the facts.
Keep all the speculation and conjecture out of it, you know, which is what we did.
And anyway, it's an astonishing, astonishing story.
I mean, look, we haven't covered everything that's in it.
I recommend anybody who is even remotely interested in this that they have to get to see this because you'll come out of it with a different view.
And I think parts of it will move you.
And I'll tell you something, James, I have never been moved to tears by anything.
You know, I think the last thing that moved me to tears was E.T., and that was fiction.
Well, you know, the end of the film was sort of an accident.
I don't want to give it away to your audience, but I had created a lovely little montage of the children as when they were interviewed in 1994, sort of contemplative moments of trying to process what they'd seen and what had happened.
And, you know, the adults were just sort of extracting information, but not really helping them process what had happened and provide answers.
And when we brought them together as adults 20 years later, I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to kind of put them as adults under their images as children talking about the incident and reflecting back on it and the impact that it had and what it all meant and that sort of thing.
And then I accidentally, three months later, I deleted the audio underneath it and ended up just with the children's faces with nothing underneath it.
And I thought, there's no place to go from here.
So look, this work that you've done, and you can tell from everything that I've said, I've been enormously impressed by it.
Is it a work in progress?
Are you going to go back to it and update it?
Or I know that you put blood, sweat, tears, and years into this thing.
So maybe you don't want to go back to it.
But do you think you're going to return to this topic and maybe do a part two?
And maybe do a part two.
Yeah, so what I've, I'll give you an example.
I mean, there was so much stuff that ended up on the edit room floor.
I mean, we spent a month in Australia, and I think, I don't know, maybe five minutes of that case, maybe seven or eight.
I spent five years investigating Socorro case.
I went to South America, the Roswell of Brazil, Vargenia, 1996.
None of that ended up in the film.
So what, you know, I don't want to sound melodramatic, but I do have a little taste of PTSD from having gotten this film out into the world.
And I have a sort of visceral reaction when someone says, what's your next project?
It's like, well, let me recover from this one, please.
But no, I think a miniseries is on the horizon, a bigger project, but that's about as far as I'll go with it at this point.
Well, I have to congratulate you on it, James.
I can't think of anything about it that I didn't like.
It wasn't gee whiz.
It wasn't full of whooshes and flashes and visual effects and weird sounds.
You didn't do that.
You just let people tell their story.
The commentary was beautifully written.
And I say that as a journalist.
I appreciate writing.
It was fabulously delivered.
It was pretty damn great.
So, you know, from this little guy in England, congratulations.
Oh, well, I appreciate that.
I really do.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I mean, it's one of the first projects that I've been part of that I sort of patted myself on the back and said, good job, mate.
I think we might have done it this time.
James, a pleasure to talk with you.
I hope it isn't the last time.
Oh, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it, and I'd love to be on your show again.
The remarkable James Fox, and I'm really looking forward to speaking with him again.
He will go down in the pantheon of great guests on this show, I think you will find.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
More great guests in the pipeline as we head towards edition 500.
And until we do, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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