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April 5, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:35
Edition 624 - Foo Fighters - Dr David Hall

Dr David Hall, respected scientist, asks if all UAPs and UFOs really are what we think they might be - or whether some have another explanation - simple or, sometimes, complex...

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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.
Very many thanks for all of your messages.
Please keep them coming.
And please know that I see every single message that comes in either via the email through theunexplained.tv, my website designed and created by Adam.
Thank you, Adam.
Or indeed any other way if you want to message me through my Facebook page, but not through Facebook Messenger.
I don't use Facebook Messenger for the show.
But if you want to post, you know, in reply to something that I've posted, of course, please do that.
And I always get to see all of your messages.
Now, I'm not going to say very much this time.
I'm going to tell you what's on the show this time.
It is an extended version of a conversation I had recently for my radio show with Dr. David Hall.
And a man who is not a debunker, right?
But he is a man who looks with a seasoned scientific eye about those things that we experience, see maybe, or hear, that we believe might be UFOs.
He thinks we need to think once, twice, maybe once more, before we come to that conclusion.
And we'll talk about that in reference particularly to Foo Fighters, those phenomenon that were particularly reported during World War II, where pilots of military craft saw strange lights that appeared to follow them and behave in unusual and atypical ways.
Of course, this conversation was recorded just before the announcement of the death of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, a great tragedy.
And of course, our deepest sympathy to everybody around him, his family and everybody else.
Of course, the phenomenon gave the band its name, but I just need to make that point before you hear the conversation.
So fascinating conversation.
It is based on and around a documentary that aired on Blaze TV in the UK on the 28th and 29th of March.
So it's been on air now, but it will be on their catch-up portals as well.
And I think probably that's all I've got to say, really.
So let's hear the conversation with Dr. David Hall.
As I told you last week when we talked with Ross Coulthard in Australia, this currently is about to be UFO week again on Blaze TV.
It's always good.
You can find Blaze on Freeview, on Sky and also online, and catch up and all the other modes and methods you can do it.
UFO Week beginning tomorrow or today rather, the 28th.
See, I've gone and done it.
And 9 p.m. is the time until April the 3rd.
Ross Coulthard, we talked last week about the Westall incident in Australia.
200 plus witnesses of that incident in 1966 and more information, even though 56 years have elapsed since it, more information coming out all the time.
That, I think, is the way of ufology, as they call it.
We're going to talk now with Dr. David Hall about a twin documentary that will air on Blaze tonight and tomorrow night.
That's Monday and Tuesday in the from 9 p.m. slot as part of UFO Week.
It's called Foo Fighters, Then and Now.
Now, until very recently, I'm guessing that an awful lot of people associated the term Foo Fighters with the band and whether they're doing gigs in various cities, including my home city, Liverpool, I noticed recently.
But this is a term that goes back a very, very long time and is very much at the core and the beginnings and the dawnings of what we call the investigation of UFOs, so-called.
So that's what this does.
But this is a much more important documentary than simply looking at the cases of Foo fighters, because they've been talked about many times before.
You may well have seen some of the documentaries that have run in various places describing what various World War II American pilots in the Japanese theater of war and others say they witnessed on the wingtips and around their planes, flashing lights of various kinds, behaving in ways that they didn't understand.
Now, this documentary or these two twin documentaries do something very much more important than simply tell you a chronology of their history.
They talk about our experience and what we perceive to be UFOs and why we sometimes perceive things to be UFOs as opposed to something else, a plane, some kind of natural phenomenon, whatever.
Dr. David Hall, who we'll be speaking with, who is the man who's fronting these twin documentaries, just to tell you a little bit about him, he was educated as a natural sciences undergraduate at Cambridge, staying on to do a PhD in the engineering and deformation of metals.
David has held board-level positions in a number of engineering and forensic science companies and founded the Ideas Center in 2011, helping organizations understand why they get trapped in conventional thinking.
Very much going to be part of one of the things that we will discuss here, as you will discover.
Dave, thank you very much for coming on.
I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.
How are you?
Howard, I'm very well indeed.
An absolute pleasure to be involved.
So thank you for this.
This is a fascinating documentary.
And I thought when I saw in the listings, there's a documentary about Foo Fighters.
We are going to see the same old scratched and faded films and, you know, the same old bits of audio with pilots saying, I definitely saw something on my wing.
This is a very different approach.
So talk to me about how this has been done.
Well, I think the approach is, as you say, quite different because it's not coming from a position of speculating over the alien presence, if you like, giving rise to the sightings of UFOs.
And it's not driven from a position of expertise in UFOs, I have to say, as someone who's fronting the show, at times you feel like a fraud, because I'm not steeped in ufology, if you like, in my past and history.
I'm a scientist and engineer, for goodness sake, and I'm passionately enthusiastic about understanding how the mind operates in particular.
And so I came at this from a very different perspective.
In the first instance, we set out some of the chronology, some of the threads that pull together to tell the UFO story, but then try and pick it apart and understand it to explore various explanations as to what might or might not give rise to these various sightings.
Never really reaching a conclusion, but presenting to the viewer an opportunity to weigh up the probabilities, if you like, of the various outcomes, because I think there are many different ways in which you can interpret the various sightings that have been made across the world.
And so what we're doing is analyzing those sightings from a forensic point of view, if you like, to then look at the probabilities of what their origin might be.
So I think quite different, as you say, Howard.
Are you a debunker?
Not necessarily a debunker.
What I'm trying to do is to analyze it and present the facts.
So at no point do I conclude from a personal point of view a particular view on the origin of the UFOs.
I think it's all down to probability.
And I think you end up with a scale of probability.
I think remotely possible is alien presence.
I think there are more logical explanations for a number of the sightings, a number of higher probability of the explanations being non-extraterrestrial, if you like.
And so rather than debunking, what I'm trying to do is present the facts to allow the viewer to then make a decision themselves as to what they view the likely origins to be.
And I think that's a very important thing.
I mean, I am inclined to the view that perhaps there are extraterrestrial sending things here, but I have no concrete evidence.
I merely have many, many years, many, many decades of stories and many, many interviews that I've done from sincere people who tell me that they've experienced these things.
But that's all I know.
And I think it's important, as you say, to add in a perspective that when people see something, maybe they should do just a quick double take, a pause for a moment and think, okay, what might this be?
Rationally, what might this be?
Now, the final answer may be, and I think you can see this point throughout the documentary, Dave, the final answer may be, well, it's something that may not be from here because it's too odd.
But it may also be this, that, or the other.
It may be a weather phenomenon or something else.
That's different, I think.
What do you think from debunking?
Absolutely so.
Absolutely so.
I mean, one of my major elements of focus within the idea center is we're trying to understand the way the mind operates.
And I always think it's like the brain can be imagined to be like an enormous virtual filing cabinet.
And inside that filing cabinet, we have beautifully filed, beautifully indexed patterns of everything we have ever made sense of through our entire lives.
So anything we've ever experienced, anything we've ever learnt, anything we've ever been through, where we rationalize it, we store it as a pattern inside that filing cabinet.
And what we're constantly doing is accessing the filing cabinet to make sense of what's going on around us.
And if we witness something that doesn't quite make sense to us, what it means is we're struggling to find a match inside that filing cabinet.
And way back in the, I guess you go back to 1947, I think it was, when Kenneth Arnold first effectively gave rise to the headline that coined the phrase flying saucer.
Once alien invasion came into our minds and War of the Worlds and Orson Welles radio program in the 1930s kind of launched a frenzy in the States with regard to this, all of a sudden, UFOs and flying saucers, very specifically, although Kenneth Arnold never said he saw a flying saucer, that imagery, those patterns sort of infused their way into our filing cabinets.
So we now think we have a logical explanation for facts that we can't otherwise explain.
And we reach to the UFO section of our filing cabinet and we say, well, that's for sure.
That's a file.
That's a UFO.
When we've got no real founding for that entry inside that filing cabinet, if that makes sense.
It's understanding the way the brain works, I think, that starts to shed some further light on our interpretations.
So all we have is what we are.
And I think I hinted in that when I talked about myself and the experience that I've had talking to people.
You know, I make judgments only on the basis of what I know.
If there were things that I didn't know, then of course, by definition, I would know a lot more.
So we reference everything to what we've experienced before.
We'll come back to that idea.
Just before we talk about the two documentaries, which will air on Blaze TV starting tonight and continuing tomorrow night from 9 p.m., let's just say this.
It seems to me, and look, I've been working in isolation pretty much for, it shocks me to discover this week, two years on these shows and my podcasts and various other things.
And I've had a lot of time to think, and I get a lot of communication from listeners now.
And of course, I scan the media every day.
And it seems to me, and I don't know whether you've monitored these things, I suspect you do, there's been a tremendous uptick in the number of people who say that they've seen lights in the sky, strange rockets, disks, things hiding behind clouds.
I've never known a period like this.
And I understand that there is less stigma attached to admitting these things now.
So that's good.
It means people can admit to seeing these things.
But if I tell you, for example, last week we had an enormous debate on this show, which we discussed again earlier in this edition, about some photographs that were sent to me by a listener in Kirby on Merseyside of an apparent rocket.
It's something that looks in the setting sun sky like a rocket.
It is going up at an angle of probably, I don't know what, I'm useless with these things, but probably 70 degrees or something.
It's a very steep angle this thing is going up at.
And it has a long, illuminated, fiery contrail almost behind it.
And we discovered that this had been reported and questioned and queried by people who simply didn't know what they had seen, some of whom felt that it might be something ufological.
But this was queried and questioned by people across the northwest of England.
And I heard from many of those people.
I was astonished at the number of engagements a Facebook post about it derived.
So what I'm saying is you must have monitored this uptick.
And I wonder if, In reference to the research that you do, what do you make of it?
Well, I think there is an increasing number of people who are scanning the skies looking for artifacts that cannot be explained.
And remember, the clue is in the term UFO.
It's an unidentified flying object.
It's something in the skies that we can't identify.
There's an issue, really, because that unidentification, the lack of ability to identify what it is has become inextricably linked with extraterrestrial activity, when actually it's a factual explanation of what's happening.
It's something in the sky that you can't explain.
And I think if you look over the last couple of years, people have had more time to review what's happening around them and take in their surroundings.
And overlaid on top of that, there's a burgeoning number of people who are actively scanning the skies specifically for UFOs.
MUFON, the mutual group of people that are constantly, there's over 4,000 members across the world of MUFON as an organization that is actively scanning the skies looking for UFOs.
And the more you see, the more it fuels the interest.
Social media multiplies up the effect.
So more and more people become intrigued and pulled into the mystique, if you like.
And there's a romance associated with it, that you're becoming part of a movement looking to expose things that cannot be explained.
So it doesn't surprise me at all that there's this increase in interest.
I think social media has an impact.
I think the last two years in lockdown and people having time in a way they didn't previously must be a contributory factor as well.
If nothing else, people are more active on social media because they have the opportunity to do so.
They're filling time.
And again, we'll get back to this in the next segment probably after we've taken some commercials and probably beyond.
The very famous 2004 Tic Tac UFO case, the USS Nimitz and the Princeton involved in these things.
Now, the pilots, and I've spoken to at least one person on board the Princeton about this, somebody at a senior rank on board the ship, there was enormous bafflement about what they'd encountered.
And the pilots, and you will have heard the audio transcripts and probably heard the audio itself of David Fraver, one of the pilots, are genuinely bemused at what they are seeing and genuinely seem to believe that this cannot be from here.
Now, in those cases, it's what the Americans call a slam dunk, isn't it?
That's an open and shut case.
This is something that has to be from outside.
What else could it be?
Well, I would analyze that from an analytical point of view and say, split those two statements you made in half.
It's something they hadn't seen before, and therefore it must be something from out of this world.
And the logic does not link the two together.
It's basically something they've never seen before.
That does not mean that it's not terrestrial in nature.
It could be something that's been developed by some other military power, and they're testing out the US defenses to that alternative mode of transport, if you like, that vehicle they're developing might be being tested actively to see what the military response might be within the US.
And if I was developing such a thing and I found that the US were slightly spooked because they thought it was a UFO, quite frankly, I'd be delighted because that would really freak out the enemy forces potentially.
So I think you've got to be really careful that just because a highly qualified fighter aircraft pilot does not understand what they're seeing, it does not mean it's extraterrestrial in nature.
And again, military test.
Well, indeed.
Again, we'll get back to this.
But why were records, some records of what happened on that occasion, radar records, for example, taken away and disappeared?
If this was known about, if this was something that was being done as part of a military test, then why would you treat it like it was something that had to be closed down at all odds?
Or is that part of the drama?
I guess is what I'm saying.
Because you said some of this might be posturing to a potential enemy.
Look what we've got.
Is that part of the drama too, do you think?
Well, I think there are two angles to take on this.
It could be the US testing US developments on US military, or it could be, for example, Russian developments, Chinese developments from China, testing out the ability of the US to understand what's happening around them.
And if the US military cannot understand it, it then does not surprise me that they take some of the records and file them under some sort of covert operation and take them off to Area 51 for analysis or whatever it might be.
That doesn't surprise me at all because they can't explain it and they can't afford to have those documents in the public domain if they cannot understand and explain what the nature of the observations are.
Thinking of it in terms of maybe somebody else's military technology that you don't quite understand, if the likes of Putin had that, would he not be using it now in this terrible tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine?
We don't know.
And whether it might be Putin, but suppose it's not Putin, suppose it's some other military power.
And I think we don't know how well developed that technology is and what degree of readiness there is to actually deploy it.
So there are lots of things that we don't know.
It is then a massive leap to then say, therefore, it must be extraterrestrial.
And it goes back to my probabilities.
I think there is potentially, I'm not saying it's entirely logical, but there is a line of logic that says there is a possibility that it could be an alternative military power testing out their latest developments.
There is also a possibility that it could be some sort of alien presence.
But you have to assess which of those two probabilities is most likely.
Or we're inviting the viewers to assess which of those two probabilities is most likely.
And If what you say is true, Dave, and this has to be the final point before we do take those commercials, but if what you say is true, then the interim report that was released in Washington, the unclassified interim report that was released on a Friday last June, why would that have added so much to the mystery?
Why would that have not done more to close all of this down, do you think?
Because to close it all down, it presumes that there is an entirely rational U.S. explanation as to what the origin of all these sightings are.
And if they don't have those logical explanations, because they don't know what is behind them, then they can't close those down.
Right.
And of course, they have to bear in mind public perception because they're paid to know.
And if they don't know, that's a bit of a worry for your electorate.
Well, it is.
And sort of building on that, if the logical explanation is that other military powers have technologies way beyond our own, then that's a message that needs to be managed very carefully.
And it's very unlikely that any military power will come out and state that as coldly, in such cold terms.
Dr. David Hall, Foo Fighters Then and Now, airing tonight and tomorrow on Base TV, we're talking about the whole phenomenology, if that's the right word, of foo fighters, but also using that as a guide to how we perceive the stuff that we think may be UFOs, and maybe, but also maybe not.
Dr. David Hall, back to you.
You say that the notion of UFOs at the very beginning, I think, of the documentaries is etched into our brains, that it is something that from the War of the Worlds, Orson Welles and that period, popular culture burned this idea into our brains.
So we now have that in our brains as a permanent reference template.
Absolutely.
And I think you can go back further than that, go back to biblical times.
The Bible is littered with examples of sightings in the skies that are then explained by very mysterious, in very mysterious terms.
And it kind of runs through our cultural development as a world.
I think all the populations have developed explanations for what they're seeing in the sky.
I think in the 1930s with Orson Welles, with the idea of alien invasion, with Kenneth Arnold and 1947 and the reference to a flying saucer, then you start to etch this into the head.
And I think then building from there, if I think back to my, I'm a man of a certain age, if I go back to the 1960s when I was a very young boy watching TV, the cartoons were littered with flying saucers.
So it's in my psyche that flying saucers exist in one form or another, because from a very, very early age, I was exposed to the concept and it's reinforced throughout my growing years, as it is with all of us.
So when I ask, as I have asked, many of my guests over 16 years of podcasting and many years of doing radio shows, were you a UFO person before this?
Did you read magazines about these things?
Watch movies about them?
And they say, no, I wasn't an enthusiast.
Actually, that's a redundant question, you would say, because it's in all of our experience, even if we don't consciously register it.
Absolutely.
And again, just refer back to the term UFO.
It's an unidentified flying object.
So it's not something happening in the skies that we can't explain.
And that is riddled through our psyche.
We're constantly being exposed to things, curious sightings that we try and rationalize.
And so it's within every single one of us.
The observation of things that we don't understand, that'll be unidentified.
The fact it's in the sky makes it into flying object.
So I think we are all exposed to things in the sky that we can't explain.
Well, those will be UFOs.
It's then a step to take it a bit further because as soon as you use the term UFO, people start thinking about presence of aliens, spaceships, etc.
Right.
And how would you explain or attempt to discourse around the images that are recorded in the pyramids, for example, ancient Egypt, other civilizations who've represented very tall creatures who look like space people with helmets on, things that look like planes when the civilization clearly did not have aeroplanes of any kind, flying saucer representations.
Now that's going back thousands of years.
How can you explain that?
I think it's that rationalization of what we don't understand.
And we tend to fill in the gaps.
So if I go back to that model of the brain as containing an enormous virtual filing cabinet, and in that filing cabinet, we have patterns for everything we've ever been exposed to as individuals.
And we share those experiences.
So we build each other's filing cabinets.
Anything we've ever made sense of, anything we've ever logically analyzed and understood is stored inside our heads as a pattern.
If we then make an observation, we instantly dip into that filing cabinet subconsciously.
We're effectively fingering our way through that filing cabinet to find a pattern to help us understand what's happening around us.
I understand that, David, and I'm sorry to jump in, but if you're an ancient Egyptian or a Mayan, then you won't have seen War of the Worlds or heard it.
You won't have read magazines about these things.
There won't have been anything that will have affected what's in your head, will there?
No, but if you spot something that you can't understand, you then try and find the pattern from inside your head, inside that filing cabinet, that is the closest match.
So you find a close match based on practical experience.
So based on your practical experience, you find the closest pattern match that you can to something you've seen before.
What we then tend to do is to airbrush out anything that disagrees with the pattern inside your filing cabinet, and you become increasingly convinced that your pattern match is perfect.
So you become convinced that what you're seeing is a flying object in the sky.
You become convinced that you've got enormous creatures that are invading because it's the only explanation you Can find.
And people become passionate about it because the more they analyze it, the more convinced they are that their pattern match is perfect, because they gradually fade out any information they're being presented with that disagrees with that pattern match.
And you end up with people passionate about the fact that what they're seeing is some sort of unexplained object that they've never seen before, and they dress it up in terms that they can relate to.
So that'll be a giant invasion, or it'll be something, a flying object in the sky.
We're being invaded from the gods or whatever that might be.
So we have patterns that we try to interpret everything through.
It's the lens we look at everything through that then leads us to rationalize it.
Foo fighters, specifically referenced in the title, of course, of the documentaries.
I didn't know where that term went back to.
And it's interesting to discover, as you explain, that all of this goes back to a cartoonist in the 1930s who was talking about fire and using the French word for fire.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so it goes back to Bill Holman, who was a press cartoonist in the 1930s, very high profile, across the States.
And he had a number of curious characters that were kind of an eclectic mix of characters that were always slightly surreal in various elements of what they did.
And he had a particular character called Smokey Stover, the fireman.
And Smokey Stover used to refer to fires that he was putting out as f, by the word ph, which is the French word for fire.
And during World War II, a number of the aircraft squadrons used nose artwork effectively, painted characters on the nose, as they do today.
If you look at aircraft today, if you look at Virgin Airlines today, you have characters painted on the nose cone.
It goes back to World War II, the 415th Night Ops Squadron from the States chose to use Smokey Stover as the character painted on the nose of their aircraft, as just general nose art.
And when they started to see these various lights or globes or orbs of light kind of playing at their wingtips, they started referring to them as foo fighters, because Smokey Stover talked of himself as being a foo fighter rather than a firefighter.
So foo is a distortion of the French word foo, which then is the French word for fire.
So the foo fighters is a direct link to Smokey Stover firemen by Bill Holman.
Fast forward to 1944, we're in the teeth of World War II, a crucial stage, and the 415th USAF squadron seeing light spheres, discs, etc.
at their wingtips.
We kind of assume that there is a mystery here because that's what we've been told.
But you, through this documentary, you unpick various explanations, including possibly ball lightning and that kind of thing.
How likely do you think is there to be a physical explanation, something that actually we do have sort of in our experience, but we don't instantly dive to when we experience something that we don't understand, if you know what I'm saying?
Well, I think there's a high probability, and we all know it, because we all see various optical effects when we look out at curious angles under curious lighting conditions.
You get distortions of the light that produce flares at the corners of various objects and what have you.
You know, if you take a picture via your phone or via a camera in days gone by, I guess, you end up with light distortions that are picked up by the photographs.
So we know that these things exist.
And if you consider the stress that these airmen will have been under, they'll have been doing night raids, they'll have been under attack, the enormous stress that they're going to be under when they're potentially making these sightings of lights at the wingtips.
They're not necessarily going to sit down and rationally say, well, actually, if I think about refraction and diffraction of light, then maybe that's just a logical explanation that I can get because there's reflection off.
And if I work out the angles, I can do it.
Or they're more likely to say in extreme conditions of fear and stress, if you like, their worry might well be that there's some sort of secret weapon that's been developed by the Nazis.
And if they don't take them seriously, it could lead to a major problem.
So under those stressful conditions, do you dismiss it as being a trick of the light?
Or do you worry about it threatening your life?
And I guess the default setting is likely to be the worry about it being a threat to your life.
The probability might be low, but the impact is enormous.
You know, there's a higher probability of a trick of the light, but under the stressful conditions, you're going to fear for your life first.
So why not worry about it being a secret weapon?
You talk about Nazi secret weapons, and I think we tend to forget that it is commonly believed that the Nazis were developing all kinds of things.
We know, certainly in London, we know only painfully too well that they were ahead in rocketry.
The V1 and V2 were a problem for a time, as many, many people know, and people that I had in my family suffered in that way.
But there's also the suggestion, isn't there, and always has been, that the Nazis were developing all kinds of other advanced things, like, for example, anti-gravity technology.
We do know that.
And there's deep suspicions that there were technologies being developed under what will become the Fourth Reich that involved all sorts of occult and deception techniques around the place.
We know for certain that the Horton brothers developed what was effectively a flying saucer towards the latter days of World War II.
If you look at the drawings, if you look at the examples of it around the place, it is a saucer.
It's a classic flying saucer.
That's what it is.
And we know that at vertical ascent, it reached Mach 3, which is extraordinary, given the technology that was commonplace at that moment in time.
So we know for certain that developments were taking place.
It was known by the West, so much so that post-World War II, there was an explicit operation to try and recruit the engineers that might have been behind those various Nazi developments under Operation Paperclip.
And they were trying to bring that German expertise into the States in order that they could glean whatever information they could to give them a competitive advantage from a military point of view.
Would this be technology that we've had through Operation Paperclip and denazification and all the rest of it, developed over the decades, but have never really talked about?
And we've had little smatterings and scintillas and inklings of these things in things like the stealth aircraft.
But basically, a lot of this stuff that was being developed has continued to be developed, and it's all been kept under Black Ops projects and secret.
I have to say that in my mind, it would be extraordinary if there were not covert operations developing weapons that weren't exposed to the outer world.
From a military point of view, it makes eminent good sense in exactly the same way as you say, whether it's the U-2 or the A-12, the Blackbird, whatever it might be, these high-altitude stealth vehicles where agility and speed are key as well.
Why would these things not be kept under wraps?
Just because the Nazis were investigating anti-gravity machines and whatever you were or various other kind of mysterious technologies does not mean they developed them, of course.
It means they were endeavoring to develop them.
So the fact we don't see all these things around the place in common application does not mean that developments are not taking place under wraps.
And logically, that would be an explanation as to what's happening in the States in Area 51, for example, where you've got that kind of covert development space, complete blackout on any communications.
That would be the perfect place to be developing this weaponry.
And from time to time, the public will see potentially glimpses of that because you have to test this capability that you're developing in some form or another.
And you can't guarantee in the skies that someone won't get a glimpse of it.
And if they get a glimpse of something that they don't understand, then the first cry will be, that's going to be a UFO then, which of course then draws attention to it, which then is not what the military are looking for.
So the military are now caught because they don't want attention being drawn to it, but they prefer it to be potentially viewed as a UFO rather than something that's being developed covertly by the operation, the military operations.
And you think that explanation may also apply to the daddy of them all 75 years ago this year, Roswell?
I think it could do.
I think Roswell is an interesting one.
There are a number of, and we've got to be careful that we don't try and find a single universal explanation for UFOs, because UFOs are simply things in the sky that we do not understand.
And a large category of those, a large subsection of those, could surely be explained by very logical means if only we understood the science and technology associated with the public understood the science and technology behind it.
Roswell's a curious one.
There's a fascinating theory that Roswell is effectively a massive misinformation campaign run by the Soviets post-World War II.
That effectively what they were looking to do was to sow mistrust of the US government, to freak out the military, to divert their attention away from the development of their atomic weapons.
Remember, post-World War II, the West had nuclear weaponry, whereas the East did not.
So Stalin was massively disadvantaged in terms of military capability.
So the idea of using some sort of exercise to divert attention and also to demonstrate to the US that they could reach them from afar would be to their advantage.
I mean, if you cut all the way through to the current day, we know for certain that misinformation is used as a massive tool in the East compared with the West, or at least the West would like to think so, I guess.
But we know that social media and what have you is hugely influential when it comes to conditioning the way people are thinking.
And it may well be that Roswell is an example of that.
And do you think realistically that that might have happened involving the then Soviets?
And even through Glasnost and through the rebuilding of Russia, sadly, to what it's become now, but there was a period when it was starting to look very democratic and very open.
Do you think that that could have been kept secret for that long?
I think there is evidence to suggest there was massive pressure applied to maintain very high levels of secrecy around area 51, actually, where it is reported that whatever craft were located at Roswell were taken for further investigations.
So I think, again, looking at the balance of probability, do I think that it will be of interest to the U.S. to maintain secrecy around the fact that the Russians were effectively invading U.S. space?
Then yes, I think secrecy, I think it is a probability that the U.S. would try their utmost to maintain the highest levels of secrecy around that particular incursion.
And what about the reports that America has frozen or preserved somewhere alien bodies?
Those reports given to me from my recollection by people like Uri Geller, who for a different reason is in your documentary.
I mean, Uri Geller, I seem to recall, told me a year or so ago in one of the conversations I had with him that Werner von Braun took him to a building and although he didn't see anything, he kind of, through context, got the impression that that might be the place where those things were kept.
What about that?
Well, I think you can take that analysis at face value.
If Yuri Geller got a feeling that something mysterious might be happening in that space, then that's a fact.
Yuri had that feeling.
Now, whether or not that's true, because We haven't seen the evidence for that, and you have to look at again at the balance of probabilities associated with that.
He didn't, he's not saying he's seen alien forms.
People like Bob Lazar have referred to the fact that they saw a spacecraft of some sort in Area 51, which logically could be explained that if there was some sort of incursion into US airspace at Roswell, that that aircraft might be taken to Area 51 for investigation.
If Bob Lazar was in Area 51, then potentially he could see it.
I can see a logical line of probability that would back that up.
Or it could be alien incursion, of course.
And that makes sense, and we're going to have to break again in just a second, but that makes sense, certainly as regards Bob Lazar, because if you worked, if you worked at Area 51, then the chances are you would be employed on a need-to-know basis.
In other words, you would know your little bit of what you were doing, but you wouldn't know the whole story.
So the rest of it, you would have to fill in the blanks for yourself through conversations with colleagues or stuff that you'd somehow divined.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So you start filling it in and you're filling it in on snippets of conversations and you're building a pattern in that filing cabinet again, which you then apply to your understanding.
And then you convince yourself, convince yourself that you have a full understanding of what the origin of this observation is.
And you've got no justification for that other than you feel certain in the same way that Jurich felt certain that there was something odd going on.
Dr. David Hall is here.
We're talking about, well, foo fighters and similar phenomena and more really about our perception when it comes to the question of UFOs.
Nobody is saying that there is no such thing as a UFO not from this planet, although we could do with a bit more concrete proof, couldn't we?
But we need for our own health's sake and for the truth's sake to allow for other explanations and to know what those other explanations might be and to have an understanding of how this piece of meat between our ears that works such miracles actually processes information and how that plays into all of this.
And Dave, I think that we have to come to this.
If, and I don't doubt there is a big element of this at play, and I know that partly through something that somebody once told me.
This person has a relative who works around aerospace and some of that is military.
And the subject of UFOs came up and this person said, and I can't say anything that would identify him, but said, how do you know they're not ours?
So I don't doubt that there is all kinds of secret stuff that we're probably never going to know about and that we're paying for through black ops projects.
So you'll never see what they are in the budgets.
You might think they're paperclips or staples or photocopiers, but they're not.
So I don't doubt that this goes on.
But if it does go on, and if it is in the interests of authorities to allow the UFO stories to play out and for people to speculate as they will, why bother spending millions of dollars, billions of dollars over the decades, really, having investigations, committees such as one that was empaneled in 1953, but they've been doing them for years and Project Blue Book, all the other things that we've done over the years.
Why go to that trouble?
Why have investigations?
So I think it's a communications tool, a PR tool.
Once these issues air in the public domain, the authorities need to be seen to be taking appropriate action.
So I think you see it even today in a political arena, that where there are issues that blow up out of proportion, very, very reluctantly, governments will engage in formal reviews.
But I have to believe there's an element of trudgery associated with those formal reviews because they kind of know what the answer is before they start the review.
But they need a public-facing vehicle that will demonstrate that they are addressing the public concerns.
And it's interesting because I think it even happens within governments that the departments start investigating other departments.
Clinton, for example, spent a lot of time trying to dig behind the black ops in the states, which sounds extraordinary that a president of the United States should have difficulty, which he did, digging beneath the black ops of the military in the US, because on a need-to-know basis, it was viewed that the president did not need to know.
So it then doesn't surprise me that considerable efforts might be triggered to undertake investigations, partially to satisfy the public, but also to address those internal political issues.
And I think the internal ones are the ones that really matter.
The public ones are a communication exercise to allay fears, to manage expectations.
Yeah, I can quite understand the logic and the rationale behind that.
You reference presidents.
Obama had an interest, perhaps more than some presidents, in UFOs.
And John Greenwald at the Black Vault has been trying to access, I think, 3,000 odd documents that Obama has in his library.
Apparently, the documentary references Nixon had a letter saying the U.S. had an ET being.
Eisenhower was claimed to have met aliens a number of times.
Reagan and Carter both saw UFOs, it's reported.
And Clinton, as you said, was denied access to the information that he said that he wanted to get.
So U.S. presidents have built into the mythology or the story or the narrative here.
They have indeed.
And let me go back to the possible explanation that the obsession with UFOs is a satisfactory diversion for other military powers on a global basis.
How powerful is it if you know that the President of the United States has their attention split between economic issues in country, military issues across the globe, but also the potential of extraterrestrial presence.
I think as a mind control exercise, if that was the outcome, that would be a very successful mind control exercise.
Really?
So in other words, Dave, what you're saying is that if the president is all-powerful, or if the president is the person of capability that you've elected, you will be very happy to know that not only are they dealing with unemployment lines and getting food to people who can't afford it and putting shoes on the feet of those who can't afford to buy them and the space race and our defenses, but also has his or her eyes on the skies.
Well, I would if I was, as a population, I was excited or aggravated by the fact that there might be extraterrestrial presence.
The fact that some other global military force had planted that idea in my mind would be an issue to me if I knew that I was being manipulated in that way.
You're looking at election of Trump and the potential involvement of Russian forces in manipulating the voting public in the states.
If the election of Trump met with the approval of Putin, for example, then by manipulating the masses in the states that they got the result they were looking for, then that was a hugely successful campaign.
If it's possible that the West has attention diverted into investigating UFOs and planting a UFO presence on a regular basis in the public domain aggravated that belief, then that will be a great mind control technique or mind influencing technique.
The Rendlesham Forest case in the UK, 1980, three, I think it was, consecutive nights of very strange activity, twin air bases involving the USAF and the British made the newspapers.
People are still talking about it 40-odd years on.
You're pretty hard on that case in this documentary, in both of them, in fact, it seems to me.
And you suggest that there are many signs in the reports that a lot of people have missed, you think, that this was some kind of exercise being played out.
Well, I think kind of more globally, and I'll focus on Rendlesham in a second.
It's curious, is it not, that so many of these significant UFO sightings are directly associated with some sort of military base or military activity?
So we talk about Nimitz, we talk about Rendlesham, we talk about, if you talk about Roswell, you talk about many of these examples are very close to US air bases in one form or another.
And Rendlesham, although it's in the UK at the time, had a US presence there as well.
And there is a record, there is missing tape that is some play, which indicates that the security officers that were doing a patrol the night of the Rendlesham Forest incident, one of the officers turned to the other and said, has it arrived yet?
Well, the very phrase, has it arrived yet, makes it look like they were expecting something to happen.
So that smacks of a security exercise.
Now, do I know for certain that that's what it was?
No, I don't.
So it goes back to the probabilities, but it's curious to me that so many of these incidents happen close to military installations of one form or another.
And certainly there is a suggestion that the Roswell exercise could just have been an exercise to understand how best to react under extreme circumstances.
But I've spoken with Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt, as you may have done, deputy base commander, investigated this.
I've spoken with Laurie Rayfeld, who was in the military police.
I've spoken with Larry Warren, who worked there.
All of them convinced that something happened there.
Well, and I think your phrasing might well be right, that something might have happened there.
But we don't know what it was.
Was it an alien landing?
That's, well, we don't know whether it was or it wasn't.
All we can do is look at the probabilities.
We can look at the evidence that was there, look at the fact that the Orwell lighthouse is referred to in terms of flashing lights and what have you.
You know, the last time I mentioned the lighthouse, I was roundly shot down by at least one listener who said that the beams of the lighthouse would not come in land like that.
Well, maybe normally they wouldn't.
But this is an abnormal event.
So maybe there was an abnormal situation.
And I'm not saying there was.
All I can say is if there were an abnormal event with the lighthouse and the beams did come in land, then would that surprise people?
Well, yes, it would.
It would surprise the listener that got in contact with you and said that wouldn't happen.
But if it did happen, it will be a logical explanation as to why some of the lights might have been seen.
And what about the one from recollection member of the service personnel who came into contact with some kind of object?
That's a big part of the story.
I mean, we have to say accounts of Rendlesham from people who were there vary greatly, but that is one aspect of the story that I'm sure you will know.
Well, and I think the fact that these stories vary so widely should cast a question mark over their validity, whether or not they are accurate reflections of what actually happened.
And that's all I am not, as you asked the question earlier, am I a myth buster?
Am I trying to bust the theory?
I'm not doing that at all.
All I'm doing is saying you have to look at the probabilities and weigh those up and then form an assessment.
And what's your assessment?
My assessment is that I believe from a balance of probabilities, the more logical Earth-based explanations carry more weight than the probability of some alien planet developing technology that will travel over vast distances to allow a spacecraft to arrive here at
this moment in time when we're having these discussions and what have you.
Just the balance of probabilities, that seems less probable than the more logical explanations.
Okay.
I'm not saying it's definitive by any stretch.
And that's what makes it all the more fascinating.
And I think people need to build in some questions and not just accept all the reports that they see, hear, and read.
Absolutely.
Okay, last point.
We're going to have to make this one very quick.
But it imprinted itself very powerfully on me, especially in the second documentary for Tuesday, tomorrow night, that we must accept that there is secret technology out there.
And some of that secret technology could be so powerful that it would shock you.
And in particular, you talk about the propulsion systems.
You talk about the Aurora program, which has been ongoing.
Well, we think it's ongoing.
It's been on for years.
Could be responsible for sonic booms that people perceive maybe as UFOs.
Well, that's debatable, isn't it?
But the technology that we might well have is technology that would go at 5,000 miles an hour.
Absolutely.
And do we know what the state of development of that technology is?
No, we don't.
And the reason we don't know is because it's covert.
But we should anticipate getting glimpses of the impact of that technology because that technology has to be aired and has to be exercised in order to develop it fully, to be able to deploy it.
So it should not surprise us that ahead of its announcement, ahead of its launch, we should see glimpses of the effect of the development of that technology.
And that just, that explanation has a very high probability associated with it, if you like, just from a U-2 point of view, the fact that the development of the U-2 was a stealth issue because they were looking, they developed the technology to take high altitude, high quality aerial photographs of what was happening in the east.
But they needed to do it undetected, hence the height.
Why would they go public with that development until they had to?
But we saw, because they were flying so high, the public could see glimpses of flashing lights as the sun reflected off the silver surface of the U-2 at high altitude that was just inconceivable that it could be an aircraft because aircraft didn't fly anywhere near 60,000 feet.
So we are bound to get glimpses of the technology as it is being developed ahead of its readiness for deployment.
Right.
So first principle of science, it pays to be open-minded.
Absolutely.
And I think if we can leave our listener with that thought, we're not debunking.
We're just merely encouraging the asking of questions.
And, you know, through my career, I think that's always been a good thing.
Dr. David Hall, thank you very much indeed.
I wish you every success with the documentary airing on Blaze tonight and tomorrow night.
Thank you.
Thank you very much indeed.
It's been a pleasure.
And the guest on this edition, Dr. David Hall, an extended version of my radio conversation with him.
And I think an interesting guest and a different perspective, I think.
It's always good to have a different view of things that we might in some ways take for granted, especially on a show like this one.
What do you think?
Your comments and suggestions, always welcome.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can message me from there.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I've just checked.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, in the spring sunshine in the northern hemisphere, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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