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Jan. 17, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
35:09
Edition 604 - Avi Loeb And Sean Cahill

*Slightly shorter edition* An update from Harvard astrophysicist Professor Avi Loeb on his growing Galileo Project searching for UFO prof and truth. And Sean Cahill - UFO campaigner and former Master at Arms on the USS Princeton when the "tic tac" UFOs were sighted...

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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.
And we're still in deep midwinter here in the United Kingdom, looking out of the window.
A little bit misty, a little bit romantic looking, but damp and cold with it that sort of dampens any sense of romance I think that the actual visuals might engender, if that is the right word.
Hope everything is okay with you wherever in the world you happen to be.
Thank you very much for keeping in touch with me and for all of the emails and communications that you send to me.
If you want to communicate with me, remember I get to see each and every email that comes in.
Theunexplained.tv is the website, and you can follow the link and send me an email from there.
This edition of the show, what I thought I would do is bring you a couple of conversations from recent radio shows that haven't made it to the podcast.
One of them is a conversation with Professor Arvi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who, of course, made international headlines around the time of Umua Mua, if you remember that.
He's constantly in the newspapers to do with his work with the Galileo project, which is a scientific way, and it's going to be an international scientific way, of trying to get behind the scientific truth which underlies UFOs, UAPs, and maybe aliens beyond this planet, whatever they might be.
So he's very much involved in that.
They are raising funds for it at the moment, as you will hear.
And I spoke with him on my radio show just a week ago, less than a week ago, about the recent spate of revelations or recent spate of sightings of UFOs, including one that happened supposedly over Santiago, Chile, which is said to be these days the international UFO hotspot capital.
So we talk about that.
Also, progress on the Galileo project and also a conversation with Sean Carhill.
You will remember Sean Carhill is now very much involved in ufology, very much involved in the search and the quest for the truth.
Sean Carhill was master-at-arms on board the USS Princeton when the Tic-Tac UFO revelations happened.
Sean Carhill, based in San Diego, the home of the US Navy, we will speak with him on this edition to a conversation from, I think, just under two weeks ago that I thought I'd like to hear or you would like to hear here.
So those are the two things.
Thank you as ever to Adam, my webmaster, for his ongoing hard work on The Unexplained.
Very good of him to keep giving me time for the website and getting the shows out to you.
Okay, I'm not going to hang about.
First conversation then is the one with Professor Arvi Loeb from my radio show.
Arvi, there's a variety of things I want to ask you about, including a very, very good piece that you wrote for The Hill, respected political website.
But first of all, there are a couple of UFO stories.
There seem to be more and more of them.
There's one from the Daily Record in Scotland.
A baffled Ryan air passenger believes he spotted a UFO flying in the sky on his way to a Scottish airport.
Martin Grivens is his name, took this picture.
He was heading to Edinburgh.
And then one that made headlines all over the world this week.
Video of bright flashing lights emitting from a cigar-shaped object hovering in the sky over Santiago, Chile.
This video was taken by a man called Hugo Franzani.
He's 81 and looks astonishingly in the newspaper like Dustin Hoffman.
He caught the mysterious object on camera, said he'd never seen anything like that before that could emit such a powerful light.
He told the Daily Mail the light was way too bright.
A drone cannot give a light like that.
And my father said you couldn't hear a thing.
That was his son who was talking about what his father had videoed.
So I think the point that we're making, Avi, is that people seem to be reporting these things in increasing numbers and they're making the media.
What do you make of this?
Well, part of it is now it's a time when people feel more secure in discussing it with less stigma.
And partly that's because even the US government now plans to establish an office that will assemble data from different sections of government and treat the data seriously.
And, you know, we probably lost a lot of possible reports because people were afraid speaking out.
But the important point to keep in mind is these are intriguing when they are reported by citizens, but of course, in order to be more confident of the nature of these objects, one has to obtain much higher level data.
And that's what we intend to do in the Galileo project.
And in fact, we're discussing the possibility of getting reports, but then deploying our telescope systems in the same locations so that we can get much better data.
Because after all, you know, what we want is a high-resolution image.
We want to track the object.
We want to observe it at different wavelengths in the infrared or the visible light, in the radio or the audio.
And all together get high-quality data that will help us interpret the nature of such objects.
That's really the spirit of the Galileo project, to listen to people and pay respect to those who see unusual things and then study them very carefully and methodically using the scientific method.
And the goal is to figure out the nature of these objects.
Well, indeed, and I'll move on to the article that you wrote for The Hill, which I read before I came on air in just a second.
But I think the fact, I wonder what you think, the fact that people keep sending me these reports and images that I'm not a professional and can't analyze them, but I'm fascinated to see, like Stephen, who sent me an image of a red light in the sky, and many others that I get personally every week.
Do you think, I guess the way that I need to turn this around is that do you think, Arvi, that this indicates people have a thirst for whatever the truth may be and for more investigation now?
Yeah, I mean, obviously there are objects in the sky.
Some of them might have mundane explanations, like, for example, birds or other natural phenomena in the atmosphere.
Others may be human-made, like drones that those that report about them are not aware of their senders.
And of course, the question is: if you remove those, is there anything else left?
And if so, could it be from an extraterrestrial origin?
And that's really the key.
I mean, it's like a fishing expedition, and it's possible that a lot of the fish that one finds are not particularly exciting.
But it's enough to have one unusual extraterrestrial object for this entire fishing expedition to be worthwhile.
And, you know, I'm completely agnostic.
I think it's intriguing that private citizens see unusual things and even more intriguing that the government cannot fully understand some of the objects in the sky.
And really, the key to making progress is getting undisputable evidence, evidence beyond the reasonable doubt, that is obtained by instruments that we have full control over.
And that would resolve once and forever what we are dealing with.
Your piece in the Hill, respected political website, is written in the shadow of the recent death of Senator Harry Reid, who died recently, of course, and drove the whole UFO issue in Washington.
We owe a great deal to him.
Just to quote very briefly from the piece that you wrote, you say by now the Galileo research team includes more than 100 scientists who plan to assemble the first telescope system on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in spring 2022.
That's just months away.
And at the very end of the piece, you say this.
The expectation by some scientists to usher discoveries out of maintaining the mainstream status quo implies lack of imagination.
In other words, at the very end of this, and I know we've covered a lot of ground there, Arvi, is that you think it is time, and that's what you're doing, to think out of the box.
Definitely.
I mean, if you just think about it, President Biden recently signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022.
And the defense budget is basically representing the amount of money that the nation allocates to defending itself against the threat from other nations.
And for 2022, it is $768 billion, about 100 times more than the budget of the largest scientific projects, like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope.
And given that these projects took decades to accomplish and involved multiple nations, one concludes that the priority of defense-related concerns is thousands of times higher than the largest science projects.
And if the Galileo project, for example, will find beyond any doubt some extraterrestrial equipment, then it's interesting to ask what will be the response of the political system.
If they decide that it's the same priority as national security, then you might imagine them allocating a trillion dollars a year for studying what it means.
And of course, one can do much better than the Galileo project is doing by building bigger telescopes.
One can send probes into space that will tell us more about our cosmic environment.
And one can think about reorganizing our society so that it conforms to this new knowledge that we have.
So I think it could be a major, major event in the history of humanity if we were to discover even one extraterrestrial piece of equipment.
And that's why it's so important.
That's why it's important to get it funded and to pursue it and see what we find.
I think so too, Arvi.
So what is the next mile marker on your road?
Is it the establishment of that observatory on the roof of, or rather the establishment of the telescope on the roof of your observatory?
Right.
It's not just one telescope.
It's a telescope system.
So we will basically take a video of the sky in the infrared so that we can look at night at the heat coming off objects.
We don't need sunlight to be reflected off them.
And also during the day, we look at the visible light that is reflected off objects and basically take a continuous video of the sky, both in the infrared and the optical, of the entire sky.
So it's not a tracking telescope where we find an object of interest and then track it.
It's actually we are monitoring the entire sky all the time.
And then on top of that, we'll have a radio sensor and an audio sensor and a magnetometer.
And all of these will be combined with an artificial intelligence computer system that will try to identify objects of interest.
And then if the system operates as we want it to by the summer of 2022, we'll start making copies of it and putting them in different locations.
And the number of copies that we make will depend on the funding level that we have.
So currently we have $2 million and the goal is to get, I mean, if we want to get a comprehensive study of this phenomena, we need about $100 million.
So the hope is that some wealthy individuals will come forward and provide us with $100 million, which, by the way, is not an unusual sum of money for a medium-sized scientific project.
Indeed, and if you look at the billions the space program internationally eats, it's chicken feet.
I wish you luck with that.
I hope some millionaires and billionaires are listening to this, Avi, and we will speak again.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Good friend to the unexplained over many years, Professor Arvi Loeb from Harvard, talking about the Galileo project.
And as he says, there will be more to reveal and more to look at on my show in the coming months here as we go through 2022.
Now the conversation with Sean Carhill.
Just to remind you, Sean Carhill was the master at arms on board the USS Princeton when the Tic-Tac UFO revelations happened.
We've spoken with him before on this show, and he is an update conversation with him.
It was master-at-arms.
It's actually a term that crosses over to our Coast Guard, and we took it from the Royal Navy.
My dad used to, he was in the police in Liverpool, and of course, you know, Liverpool's a major port.
So as a kid, I got the great privilege of being taken on board a lot of ships, a lot of civilian ships, but a lot of naval ships.
And I would always be, the person who would always relate to my father would be the master at arms, the sergeant-at-arms, because that person would be in charge effectively of policing the ship.
That was your job.
Yes, that's correct.
Whether an aircraft carrier or at the time a guided missile cruiser like the Princeton, I was either part of the police force or the sheriff himself.
So that was what I did for a living.
Remind my listener how you were drawn into all of this.
What happened on board the Princeton?
Well, there I was in 2004 just doing that job of being the sheriff when Senior Chief Kevin Day gave me a call on the bridge where I was standing watch and stated that we had these unidentified objects coming up on radar.
And over the course of a week, he and I and many other people coordinated efforts with the ship and with the battle group to try to track down whether these were real or not, which culminated in a F-18 sortie with quite a few pilots, most notably Alex Dietrich is very outspoken lately about her memories of the event, as well as Commander Fraver.
But those became what are now known as the Tic-Tac event.
And so I was there to see it from a unique perspective on board the bridge and was actually able to witness a few lights in the sky that were probably commensurate with what we were seeing on radar and with the F-18 footage as well.
And of course, as we discussed it during this last year, some of the records of those events were taken away.
That's correct.
Petty Officer Gary Voorhees, among others, state that unknown personnel, which I believe at this point have been confirmed to be Air Force personnel of some type, arrived on board the various ships and took various pieces of data, whether it was classified data from the Electronic Warfare Division or whether it was radar recordings and other tapes from the Combat Information Center.
That data was taken away and we still have not seen it to this day.
Do you think that that data, bearing in mind, and we'll talk about this in the next hour because we're going across the 11 o'clock news with this, but just in these couple of minutes, do you think that that data will ever see the light of day, perhaps assisted by this new equivalent of ATIP that's being apparently established in Washington now?
I think that would be wholly dependent upon what the state of the art is with certain technology, because in some of these cases, it's the inability to scrub means and systems that are classified.
It's not the data per se, it's what the data would tell our adversaries.
So if this office is given its mandate and does its job properly, we could see more of that declassified, yes.
And is there anything that, now that you're a campaigner, anything you can do to speed that process, to make that happen?
Well, from my side, it's really about getting the right people to talk to the right people.
And in a lot of ways, I help people understand that this is a serious subject.
I help introduce them to people who are taking it seriously.
I'm very optimistic about the future, quite optimistic about what we can get done if the right people are placed in front of this data and we fight any obfuscation that we've seen in the past.
We can't let the same old folks run this that have always run this.
Carl Encumbria.
Now that's a very good question that I'm going to fire at Sean Cahill, who's back with us now.
So let's get to him.
Sean, listen, thank you very much for doing this.
I've got a number of things to ask you.
Maybe I should start since we were talking about the Tic-Tac UFOs and the encounters with military jets.
This comes from Carl Encumbria.
He says, why didn't the Navy fit high-definition cameras to the planes to get clear, detailed images of the Tic-Tacs as the target tracing cameras are not designed for showing high-quality images?
That's a technical question.
What do you think?
Well, I think first it indicates a motive on the U.S. Navy's part.
These things were not publicly discussed, immediately taken seriously.
It was something that someone came in, took care of, and made it not a problem for the rest of us in the regular Navy, as we would call it.
That's a question for big Navy later on down the road.
But it doesn't seem that up until this point, we have gotten the Department of Defense's attention up until now, that this was truly exotic enough and happening as often in our areas of engagement as it was.
We finally reached that area that enough of our leadership within the military has populated the idea that this is not a hoax, that it's not just simply drones from a foreign adversary.
So these ideas have finally gotten far enough in that solutions like that may now finally be applied.
But at the time, I don't believe that was part of the budgetary concern.
Now, with the apparent, and I say apparent, increased willingness of Washington to get to the bottom of this issue, if that is so and if we will see movement on that as it appears we should, do you think that the Navy in particular and the rest of the military in general will be re-equipping to allow itself to image these things, which you've told me before and many people say appear on a regular basis to be able to get better pictures of them?
I think that we can expect very much so that we will see more sensor suites applied to this problem.
I can see that in the public and private sector more development of different sensor suites or different ideas of how to sample or attack the electromagnetic spectrum to really get a picture of what these objects are.
Because if they're here in our reality, then they should return some kind of signature that we should be able to track and identify.
So I do think that we can expect to see that, but I think that we're Going to need to see more development from our industry and science really putting their heads together and saying, okay, now that we know this is real, how are we going to find these things?
Are you hearing positive signs as we go into this new year that this replacement for ATIP that is apparently being created, this replacement for the advanced aerial threat identification program, are you hearing positive signs about the work and the establishment of this thing?
I am hearing very positive signs.
I'm hearing that we will probably see more military witnesses come forward in the next couple of years due to these efforts.
Now, what Congress has set up is an ongoing effort that they have oversight of.
They've tasked the Secretary of Defense with establishment and certain deliverables that have to come back to them.
So even if there is pushback from some of the old guard, I really wouldn't rule out building bridges with any effort at this point.
There is an increased interest by academic and scientific communities on the topic that is really blowing the roof off of this, and it can be overwhelming at times.
I think we can look to the Galileo project at Harvard with Professor Avi Loeb as an excellent example of that.
But I'm very positive that we've been given the infrastructure to do this right, even if not everyone who has to play may agree with doing it at all.
Do you have any thoughts, Sean, about the sad death of the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid?
Now, he was a man who was in the forefront of all of this.
He had some ill health in latter years, but very much in the forefront of driving this issue forward.
Do you think that it will lose some momentum without him?
You know, I don't.
And I think that's in great part to Senator Reed's braveness, his courage, and the way that he empowered so many people through his example of taking this seriously, of being willing to take the risks to professional or public perception of his sanity early on.
I mean, he empowered so many people after him to go forward in this subject that I don't think that we'll see it stall out after his unfortunate passing.
But we can all look to Senator Reed really to gain a great deal of inspiration, I think, going forward.
And I think that that would be something that he would want us to do.
I think he would want us to look upon his legacy as something to bolster this subject and not let it take the wind out of our sails.
We both know this.
One of the kernels of this whole issue is whether there are people out there, and traditionally there always have been, who know things, who've been sitting on information, and whether those people might decide that 2022 might be the year to come out with it.
Are you optimistic on that front?
I am.
I'm not one to blow smoke where there's no fire, but I do believe that we're seeing the rumblings of confidence in areas that we didn't see it before, and a willingness of people to come forward and to help and to put their boots on and go back to work.
And I think that what a lot of people consider to be secrets per se, it's funny because we talk about secrets, but we ask for conclusions.
And I think what we need to do is find a middle ground in between those two things where we have shared conclusions, where we're not just waiting for a mouthpiece or an expert to tell us what's going on, but where we all take an active participation and understanding that this is something that's going to, that really takes all of us.
It's not a single observation kind of topic.
I digress a little there.
I'm sorry.
I understand.
You're saying that it will have, if I read you right here, that it will have a momentum of its own.
If people start to move in this direction, inevitably information that we need to hear will come out.
I think that you've summed that up perfectly.
I think that this, in a lot of ways, there's confidence scaffolding that needs to continue, where groups are empowered by other groups to come out and speak and to combine research and add synergy to a topic that's been very niche and that's been very confusing for those that have a professional stake in this and not just an entertainment stake.
So I'm very optimistic.
I think it will be tricky.
I think that people have to separate their emotions from their goals when it comes to this topic.
And that's a very hard thing to do.
But it's a very important thing to do because I think if we don't allow our emotions to, or pardon me, if we don't allow our emotions to overtake logic in this sense, I think that we can all get where we want to be together.
I asked you this question on the podcast, and I remember you answering in the affirmative.
The Tic-Tac UFOs, the events of 04, and indeed the subsequent events that were similar, that were reported.
I asked you, does this stuff go on all the time, and are you hearing about it?
So I'll ask you that question again.
Do you think that that's the case?
It has only increased in frequency of report and response and rumor, etc., whether we're discussing that as a retired chief petty officer who lives in a fleet concentration area like San Diego.
So I hear the rumors.
I know why ships have returned, whether it was supposed to have been hushed up or not.
And the rumor, Mill, is that they're still off the coast here and we're still bumping into them.
So I would imagine that those rumors are the same on the East Coast.
In my personal experience, just by watching the Internet and the various social media platforms, et cetera, and just a little bit of data analysis, has said that the...
I'm sure there's a factor in there that's going to be linked directly to our ability to create fake videos at the drop of a hat and post them to social media and things like that.
But there does seem to be an increase in data, most certainly, to the point where it's confusing, where we spend a lot of time just ignoring some data that comes in because we just don't have time to vet it.
So we need more important, excuse me, not more important, we need established offices, established projects, and established data collection efforts to start looking at these things, to even to be combing social media and things like that to find, you know, as you said, hidden kernels in there that are really, you know, the data speaks for itself, if I can sum up what I'm saying.
So there's enough data now that my memory of being on the coast there near San Diego, which is a place that I particularly love, down close to the Mexican border there with a beautiful view of the ocean, but it is a naval area and ships are going back and forth, you know, 365, 24-7.
That's just the way that it is.
It was always a huge naval presence there, and it is continuing to be so.
You said that you were hearing things.
Now, I don't expect you to betray any confidences here.
You couldn't do that, I know.
But do you think, does your gut tell you that we might be expecting sometime this year some more revelations of the kind that you were involved in?
My gut would lean towards that because it's the rumors that are coming back amongst just the chats on family chats and naval group chats and things like that, even setting operational security aside.
The regular rumor mill knows that ships are coming back early from some exercises because the exercises are being canceled due to the range being fouled, as we would say, by unidentified aerial phenomena.
Now, that's the rumor mill, and the rumor mill seems to lean in the direction of some of the semi-official reports that I've seen.
So I'm not giving too much away when I say that these things have continued, and I think that what we're seeing now is a very genuine effort to establish an office to give us really solid answers on what's happening.
One of my listeners, Gren, hello, Gren, has just sent me a tweet that I think contains the kernel of a very good question here.
Gren asks, and I'm going to ask it you in a slightly different way, but this is Gren's question.
Why didn't the ships launch rockets and shoot down the Tic-Tacs?
Now, that is a very tough question, right?
I guess we could remold that one.
We can answer that question.
We can also remold it to say in what circumstances might the naval ships who were there have been forced to take action.
So there's the first question from Gren.
Why didn't they do that?
And I think you'll have a clear answer for that.
But also the other one, what would they have to do in order for us to engage them militarily?
Well, I'm a little out of practice with my naval law and maritime law lingo, but I will say this, that number one, American forces, when not in a theater of war, when not in an area of established conflict, have rules of engagement.
And one of the first of many of those is we don't shoot first.
And so if you had unidentified aerial phenomena that was loitering around a battle group, safety comes first.
So we would immediately shut down aircraft operations, radiating certain radar if we thought that there were human beings or life forms.
Pardon me for saying life forms.
That's going to get people riled up.
In the military, we just assume they're human beings.
But we wouldn't want to radiate those human beings, etc.
So we don't just shoot people that come close to us.
And if we're in a training area, we're most certainly not going to do that because you do end up with civilian mariners and shipping, you know, container ships and other things that do go afoul of the range.
But if we were, now to move to the second portion, what would it take for an American asset to fire back?
It would have to be a show of opportunity, intent, and capability of harm against that American asset.
So whether they fired upon us, whether we had a perception of weapons locking onto us, whether the, I mean, a pilot, just as a law enforcement officer, has an inherent right to self-defense.
So we could have had an incident if some of the rumors we've heard and some of the reports are true that some of these objects can shut down an aircraft's targeting systems or weapon systems.
But in most cases, we're not going to choose the destructive path when we're going to choose to gain more information.
If there's a non-destructive means, there's no reason to shoot at them.
So they would have to shoot at us.
They would have to really go after us.
They would have to destroy our property, our people, kill our people, or attempt to to have us immediately fire upon them.
And that has not been their modus operandi.
And in fact, if we ever got to that, it would be fairly scary because we wouldn't know whether we would be shooting back at them with pea shooters compared with their huge artillery.
Absolutely.
We are unaware of the capability of these craft other than the five observables.
And those observables tell us that they are woefully past either our understanding or our technological ability.
Sean, thank you for doing this.
Last question is about Luis Elizondo, the former head of ATIP, man who I know that you work closely with and know well.
What's he up to at the moment?
Well, I know that Lou is taking a much-needed rest over the holidays, as little as he may get.
He has an excellent perch right now.
And I say that because he has the ear of many important people.
He has the ability to communicate on his own.
And a lot of us are really looking to what he has to say next.
I don't want to give away too much.
I know he's working on a few things about getting more of his story and his understanding and some of his conclusions out there where we can all share them together.
And I really look forward to that.
I think that's going to open a lot of new doors and shed a lot of light on things that people haven't quite understood up at this point.
So you think that in 2022 we'll be hearing a lot more from him?
I do.
I think right now Lou is the kind of person that knows that the battle that we just won was very important.
The war is most certainly not over.
So I would not be surprised if he's making sure that everything we need for the next phase is lined up.
He's an incredible man to work with.
He's a very good friend.
But his level of tenacity and his level of dedication to the people that are involved in this and the people that are following this topic, whether it be the general public or other military service members or government personnel, is unheard of in my perception.
And I support Luis with my full arsenal.
As far as you know, and there's no need to answer this question if you don't want to, but what happened to the To the Stars Academy?
Because now we have the Galileo project that involves a lot of important people in science like Harvey Loeb.
Lou is involved in that.
What happened to the To the Stars Academy during this last year?
Well, if, you know, I've always followed the data, and that's one of the reasons I still work with Lou is because he's data-centric.
From what I saw, there was an interest in entertainment that outstripped the interest in data and deliverables for some folks.
I wouldn't want to go past that.
That would be close to how I feel.
Now, that's not to say that there's not a lot of great things still being done by To the Stars Academy as far as communicating and helping people understand things.
But I'm more of a meat and potatoes kind of guy when it comes to the subject.
Interesting.
We'll talk about those meat and potatoes again during this year, Sean.
Happy New Year and thank you so much in lovely San Diego for giving me your time.
Thank you very much, Howard.
It was a pleasure once again.
I look forward to talking to you.
And you just heard Sean Carhill.
My thanks to Sean from San Diego for coming on my show, talking about the latest developments in ufology and disclosure and what's going on in Washington right now.
We'll bring you all of the developments in those things as they happen here on The Unexplained.
Before that, Professor Arvey Loeb, Harvard Professor of Astrophysics and his work on the Galileo project.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained, so until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained 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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