All Episodes
Previous Next
June 30, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:26
Edition 645 - Peter Robbins

A return visit to US Ufology legend Peter Robbins... We talk about all the current topics - plus the 75th Anniversaries of the 1947 Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting and - just weeks later - the Roswell case...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
I hope everything is good with you.
It feels in London very, very close and very, very hot.
And it feels like any moment now, maybe when I'm recording, there's going to be an almighty sky-ripping thunderstorm.
Getting a little dark, too, so I'm going to keep an eye out there.
Maybe I should be closing the curtains, I'm not sure, with electronic equipment near the window.
That's a whole other thing.
Thank you very much for your emails.
Remember, I get to see all of the emails as they come in.
If they need a response, they will be getting one.
Thank you to Mark, whose email came in today that worried me a bit.
Mark said that he loved the show, but didn't like the fact that, quotes, I grovel or I am groveling at the beginning of every show asking for donations.
I've never thought of it as groveling.
I've always said, and you can go back years, if you can make a donation to help this carry on, then please do.
It's very important.
But if not, you're not able to do it, which a lot of people aren't, you know, I know how tight money is at the moment, believe me.
You know, if you can't, then just enjoy the show.
And those are the words that I've used for years.
Other podcasts, they will ask you to sign up to their Patreon.
They will ask you for subscriptions and various other things specifically for the podcast, which I haven't up to now done.
I've tried to find ways to keep it free.
And, you know, it's kind of, I think, it could have been bigger, but it's kind of worked over the years to build a community.
But Mark says it's groveling and wants me to put that only on the website.
Problem with that, Mark, is that some people don't get the podcast, I wish they would, from the website, theunexplained.tv.
They get it through podcast aggregators.
So even if I have a little link on the website saying, please donate here, they are not going to see it.
So, you know, that's my situation.
If you have a thought about that, if you're listening to this now, then I would welcome your thoughts.
If you think it is groveling, then I've got to give it a great big rethink, I think.
But there we are.
Guest on this edition, a return visit to one of the Unexplained's most established guests, Peter Robbins.
I think he was on one of the very first shows that I did 16 and a half years ago.
American UFO author and researcher.
These are very interesting times.
And, you know, I think it's a good thing to be doing these podcasts about UFOs now, even though there are more of them.
If you've looked at the slew of news, it's changing every week.
I've never known a time like this in my life.
And if ever we were at a time, in an era, when perhaps we might be discovering something big, I think this is it.
I might be wrong.
People have been wrong in the past about this.
And the can has carried on being kicked down the road.
But I've got a feeling that something is coming.
But maybe it's all a distraction, and I'm wrong about that.
But let's see what happens.
But that's why we're doing this, because a lot of developments seem to be coming out each and every week.
So Peter Robbins in New York, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, please keep your emails coming, whatever they say.
You can always go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
And when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
All right, let's get to the United States now.
Peter Robbins is here.
Peter, thank you very much for coming back on the show.
I'm delighted to return.
Peter, I was telling my listener just a moment ago that you were one of the very first guests that I used to have on The Unexplained Show.
You came on a radio show that I had years ago because I'd heard you talking with Art Bell.
And then you started coming on my podcast and other things.
And yeah, I think it's been probably 16, 17 years, probably more, the thick end of two decades we've been talking.
So it's been a long time, Peter.
How are you bearing up?
All things considered, better than most, I think.
The pandemic has kind of created a BCAD kind of effect in many of our lives.
And I'm out here in rural America and central New York State, although my heart is always in New York City and faring quite well.
Thank you.
I hope you and your family are as well.
I'm doing all right.
Me, me and my little model of Tony the Tiger that I have in the corner of my little apartment.
And whenever I ask him how things are, he says they're great.
So what can we say about that?
I've just hoovered him.
I'm sorry, that's making me sound completely crazy.
But look, the reason that we're doing this is I happen to see your name on the roster of guests for a United Kingdom conference recently.
Tell me about that.
I didn't know you were coming here.
Yes, indeed.
It was the Outer Limits Magazine UFO conference put together by the wonderful and extremely, how can I say, essential member of the UFO research community, my dear friend Chris Evers, editor of that magazine.
And it had been scheduled like so many things for 2019.
And it happened and then it wasn't.
I had been invited for the following year and so for the past two years was waiting.
And lo and behold, it happened last month in the great city of Hull.
And it was the first time I had been back in the UK since 2017 after speaking at the Scottish UFO and Paranormal Conference in Glasgow.
And it was wonderful to return, not just because I have so many friends and feel so at home across the United Kingdom, but it was a chance to reconnect with people who I've known in some cases for decades and see yet one more part of England that I hadn't seen.
It's a brilliantly organized conference, and I salute Chris and all of the volunteers, and long may it wave, as they say.
I'll give him a shout out because he's often in touch with me by email.
Chris, if you're listening to this, I'm sure you will be.
The COVID period, of course, was a period of introspection for an awful lot of people, but it does seem to me that we did make some progress in the field of ufology.
A lot of things seemed to come out and a lot of bits of new thought began to appear.
And I think that's a good thing because before COVID, you know, if COVID's done anything that might be even remotely useful, maybe this is it.
I don't know.
But before COVID, I think we were getting to the stage where there were a lot of events where the same people would often say the same things and there was nothing much new to say.
And now suddenly we're in this era where there is talk of disclosure, where there are hearings in Washington, and when people are getting very, very excited.
And a lot of people are breaking silence that they've kept for years.
So a lot, it seems to me.
But then, you know, I'm not the ufologist.
A lot seems to have happened.
Yes.
For nearly 70 years, those of us who live in what we'll call the Western world had been conditioned to have our minds wired up that anybody taking the subject of UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial visitations or any of the other likely explanations for truly anomalous UFOs,
be they interdimensional or, you know, there's a whole litany of possibilities, was immediately generally perceived to be a liar, a delusional person, a cultist, a con man or woman, or just a poor, lost, lonely soul that believed that science fiction was real.
In fact, at the Hall conference, I gave a talk on what I call the origins of UFO ridicule.
And it was not an accident.
It was dedicated hard work by the major American media, I think quietly supported by the Truman administration, to condition people.
And it worked brilliantly, Howard, as we all know.
The dam kind of broke in late 2017.
In the States here, the buoy, the marker that kind of signaled that change was a pair of newspaper articles in the Venerable New York Times written by Ralph Blumenthal, Leslie Kaine, and another outstanding American journalist.
I don't think they were the cause of it, but it seemed like overnight the major media stopped wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
I'm just reading this, folks, but I don't take it seriously that politicians, scientists, academics, astronomers kept away from this subject like the plague, because to have been caught taking it seriously could cost you your career, if not a tremendous amount of professional ridicule from colleagues.
And indeed, if you worked on news desks as I did, I can remember before 2017, probably 2016, 2015, apart from working on talk radio in the United Kingdom, I also worked for the BBC, sometimes one day a week, sometimes for other days.
And I would sit on news desks and I would be reading their news.
And my colleagues, I would tell them that I was also doing the unexplained and some of them had found it online.
And this is, we're talking six or seven years ago, and they would say, why are you doing that crazy stuff?
That was then, and I think you're right, there was a sea change.
And I don't think those articles and the work of the great Leslie Kane and others at that time, I don't think that changed it single-handedly, but I think there was a change.
Yes, it caught the spirit of the time.
Yes, yes.
And it spun on a particular incident, as we now pretty much all know, involving an American destroyer called the Princeton, which was involved in a UFO incident filmed by its pilots in 2004.
The story broke sometime after that, but it was like, all of a sudden, it's legitimate.
I can talk about this.
And for me, one of the most interesting, fascinating aspects of it is how quickly it filtered down to average folks.
There was a time, as we know, not too long ago, when if you were an individual or a couple, and this was something you did take seriously, perhaps it formed part of your reading or television or computer viewing or even going to a conference, it was not something you spoke to outside of a small group of friends or relatives or colleagues, but nothing you would want to be identified with.
The way I see it, more and more people care less and less now what other people think about what they think about the subject.
Again, without the power of that ridicule fueling people's reticence to discuss it, we are entering a new period of time and it is exciting.
At the same time, and we can get into this to some degree, I think now that the American government, for lack of a more descriptive term, the greatest secret keeper of all and where the secret keeping started, their hand has been forced, there is this kind of, for the past few years, kabuki play going on of, oh, look, we've issued a report and wow, what are these tic-tac things?
And, you know, certain legislators are starting to put forward arguments that we need to know more.
But it seems to me to be kind of stage-managed or like a puppet show.
There are areas of this subject they will never willingly discuss.
We'll call them the more exotic aspects of crash retrievals, alien visitations, UFO-related abductions, hybrid beings that they will keep away from to the greatest degree possible, again, unless a wild card comes up, unless something forces their hand.
Certainly, Jeremy Corbel came on my television show recently and made what I think was a revelation that certainly got us all into the newspapers in the United Kingdom.
And those newspapers, The Sun in particular, went around the world, picked up the story because he said that he'd been getting increasing reports.
And even as recently as weeks ago, this conversation was, I think, three weeks, four weeks ago, but he said weeks ago, up until then, he'd been hearing from people in and around the U.S. military saying that the U.S. military had been firing on UAPs.
Do you know anything about that?
I don't.
And I'm somebody who chooses not to have an opinion on subjects I'm not informed about.
Jeremy obviously is quite connected, has some sources that I certainly don't.
We do seem to be within the UFO research community, so to say, seeing a polarization of people who are on one side saying good for these people who have government connections or former government connections in the military or the intelligence community or in governance for coming forward and demanding more answers or supplying some answers to the best of their degree.
And on the other side of the aisle, people saying, we can't trust any of them just because they have these affiliations.
It's all a ploy to amp up and have a new golden age of weaponry because we're afraid of the unknown.
These other intelligences are good.
They don't mean us harm.
I think the answer lies somewhere between the two, but it is human nature to either come from love or fear.
And we're seeing it to a degree that's demonstratable within this community.
So it could all, even now, in 2022, do you think potentially be a ploy on behalf of some to get funding?
And we know that funding is at the root of all things, to get funding for a new generation of weaponry.
I think that's definitely a possibility.
And certainly there's a faction.
Let's call them more traditionally based.
These are unknowns.
We don't know that they mean us well.
So better safe than sorry, you know, a good solid traditional military mindset.
Where the other side is saying more rooted in the enlightened thinking of people like the great science fiction thinkers Gene Roddenberry, if we don't have the courage to get beyond our slaughtering each other over nothing, we have no chance of making a connection with these other intelligences.
Then there comes the wild card for me that's often ignored of we're probably, if it's as it has been demonstrated, even acknowledged by the most conservative astronomers, that there are tens of millions of possibilities out there of Earth-sized planets about the same distance from stars as we are from the sun,
which sets up the potential for, if you're a person of faith, the miracle of creation, if you're strictly speaking scientifically, for that one-celled creature to crawl out of the primordial ooze and become a two-celled creature and the race is on, that we're likely not dealing with one other group of intelligences.
There are probably myriads of them.
And that brings to the fore the possibility, even the likelihood, that they have very different takes on the primary ruling occupant of this particular planet, a planet that they may have a strong connection with going back before us or accompanying us, say, one dimension away.
Some who, in the great science fiction tradition, want us to advance, want to be there to help us solve some of the hideous problems that have brought us to this point in the Earth's evolution where we're all in trouble.
Others that maybe think that we are the infestation and better this planet go on without us and everything in between.
I'm just tossing things out here, but I think some folks simply get attached to a theory, a belief, a hope, a fear that governs their thinking on the subject overall, Howard.
You mentioned a phrase that I haven't heard for a little while mentioned, and we used to talk about these things all the time.
And I talked to some people who claim to have been directly connected with the most eyebrow-raising stories, but that was 15 years ago or more.
Human-alien hybrids.
You said there were certain subjects that were off-limits for the hearings and the Washington discussions.
I mean, do you believe that stuff is still going on?
Are they among us in that form?
Yeah.
I think I'd classify myself as one of those people who, although I've never had this experience, because of my fairly unique background of years and years as the assistant to a remarkable man and very courageous pioneering researcher named Bud Hopkins,
who was the, well, the pioneer researcher of the scientific investigation of so-called UFO-related abductions, and having had the privilege to kind of be at his shoulder through the investigation of accounts of several hundred, for me, very credible people out of more than 800 that he worked with in his career.
And I certainly believe this is a reality.
I can't show you the kind of proof you'd bring to court for it, but in the annals of his archive and the accounts of so many people, I think this is part of it.
And why would something like this exist?
Theoretically, perhaps they, and in this sense, the they, is that focused group of other intelligences that are involved in UFO-related abductions, which may be a very minor aspect of the pantheon of visitors,
who may be able to project the understanding that we are heading for a time where human beings in their present evolved form are going to be struggling more and more simply to keep physiological alive as this planet toxifies more and heats up more and overpopulates more, and that there may be a benefit to a being that's part us, part them, or a darker scenario.
I think there's another kind of pair of philosophies that are coming at each other.
When Bud started to do his research, there was very little cultural reference to abduction out there.
Now, of course, you can't escape it.
It's part of popular culture.
It's part of entertainment.
It's something that even if somebody has a problem with it, they've heard about it.
And people who were coming forward to him were more isolated, many of them quite traumatized from having every paradigm blown that they had known by having this kind of experience, where in our present culture, there are UFO support groups around the world.
There are better-known people, a writer like, say, Whitley Striber, who has made it more acceptable for folks to say, I guess this does happen.
And I know somebody who says it happened to them, and I trust and like this person.
My point is that 30 years ago, let's say two-thirds of people that were reporting these kind of experiences were reporting them as unpleasant, anxiety-provoking experiences.
Now, I think the statistics are kind of reversed, where two-thirds of the folks who are reporting these things are saying this was positive.
I learned something.
It opened me up spiritually.
It helped me feel more evolved as a person.
I feel part of a larger community.
Some argue that the old model was based on paranoia.
Others argue that those intelligences have simply gotten better at, how can I say, getting their act more perfected and taking in more people for their own nefarious purposes.
The ultimate expression in fiction is that classic Twilight Zone episode called To Serve Man that ends with the wonderful line, it's a cookbook.
I'm not suggesting that's the case, but I am saying I don't know.
We don't know, but there are people out there who are claiming louder and louder that they do know, and they are polarizing in two directions.
And, you know, the aliens, whatever they may be, if they exist, seem to target some people who have remarkably close relations with them, sometimes intimate relations with them, but the rest of us seem to be left behind.
I've always wondered, and I guess you've pondered too, why it is that some people seem to be picked out for these things.
And if you talk with Kathleen Marden about Betty and Barney Hill, why are Betty and Barney Hill singled out?
Well, there are reasons that have been suggested through history.
But, you know, they were very special people to have been.
If it happened to them, I personally think it did in some form.
You know, there are varying accounts of it.
If it happened to them, why?
And all of those people, because, look, it doesn't happen to me.
I would love it to.
I would have the greatest story ever told.
But, you know, it doesn't.
I think for starters, back in the 1970s, when this subject was almost completely ignored by the so-called UFO research community, in part because they wanted to be taken seriously.
It was okay to discuss lights in the night sky, radar cases, what we call trace cases, where an anomalous object touches the ground and transforms in some way the organic material that it touches on.
But as Dr. David Jacobs once said to me, in a very dry sense of humor, we were paying attention to the cars and not the drivers.
Again, once you start to talk about aliens, well, then you're, you know, you're loopy.
But okay, UFO phenomena, maybe there's something to it.
I think ultimately, what they thought was if such a thing could happen, it would be as unlikely as being hit by lightning.
So if it happened to you, it certainly would never happen again.
And then as pioneer researchers like Bud Hopkins, Dr. Jacobs, Dr. John Mack continued to dig deeper and lesser known but respectable investigators, what they saw was just the opposite.
These other intelligences follow overwhelmingly bloodlines.
And if it happened to you, the likelihood is fairly overwhelming that it happened to one of your parents.
I've spoken to people and documented within families meeting with a granddaughter, a mother, and a grandmother, all having had the same experiences, often with the same small scar, sometimes in the same place over half a century.
This is the way it seems to be, and we're stuck with it.
Now, why they are interested in following certain familial lines and not others, we're basically left to make educated guesses about.
I don't know why that is.
So there are so many, as the great man said, known unknowns.
Look, you talked about ridicule, and I'm delighted that you did a presentation here in the UK.
I wish I'd been able to hear it about ridicule in this field, because I've thought a lot over the last weeks.
I did a conversation with the maker of a new documentary about the aerial school case in Zimbabwe.
Oh, yeah.
Dear Randall Mickerson.
Yes, in fact, we've been close friends for over 30 years, and I am so proud of him after 14 years of hard work.
Well, you know, and then the realities of dealing with the industry and trying to get it up and running.
I have gigantic respect for him.
I think it's a brilliant documentary and a case that everybody should know about and watch it.
I think it's beautifully produced.
It's one of the nicest things I've ever seen.
He's such a humble guy.
He doesn't enjoy doing interviews.
I can tell that.
But he's a guy who enjoys doing the work, not doing the interviews about it.
But the reason I raised this in relation to your work on ridicule is, of course, John Mack went to Ariel School, talked to the kids on that documentary, as you know.
We saw and heard the kids, both then and as adults now, talk about what they experienced, tell their consistent stories.
Now, John Mack went back to Harvard, didn't he?
And he was, by some of his colleagues, ridiculed for having got involved in that.
Yes.
John, God rest his good soul, one of the most courageous people who had more to lose than most.
John was not just a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Harvard, he was a very respected clinician himself.
He was also a Pulitzer Prize winner.
In fact, for a psychiatric biography on T.E. Lawrence, he was brilliant, and I loved the guy.
And I considered him a good friend, and I'm very proud that he considered me one.
I spoke at Cambridge Hospital in Boston at his request.
That said, John brought great humanity to the subject.
Randy, who experienced repeated childhood abductions with his sister, and in fact, you're familiar with the American talk show host, not very active now, but a major entertainment force, so to say, and pseudo-investigator in the 80s, Geraldo Rivera.
Oh, he did a very popular television show.
And in the early 90s, Randy and his sister had the courage to go on there and talk about their experience with their mother in the audience who stood up to validate it in many respects.
My sister and I, my sister Helen, who was an abductee, we did that show with Bud Hopkins a few years before.
And with Randy, he went with John on that first trip.
In fact, he had worked with John hypnotically and with Bud.
And he was so taken by what he saw as well that he dedicated essentially the next 20 years of his life to this subject.
And how can I say, he kept going back.
You see these kids, black kids, white kids, each one absolutely self-possessed, talking about their experiences.
It's another wonderfully moving thing that we see them in film footage from that period of time shortly thereafter.
And then we meet a number of them again in present day, not a single one of whom backs down to any degree from what they remember about this landing and about their direct interfacing with these beings.
The impact it had on a filmmaker who was involved, it's what a documentary should be all about.
I think it's a great public service and a great educational service.
And I think the one thing that struck me more than anything else, and can I just ask you one thing before I ask you this?
Sure.
I think you're knocking or banging your table or your microphone and the bass frequencies are coming through.
So I just, I wonder if you would just kind of It's one of those.
Back to the documentary and to John Mack, because that's what I was interested in.
You know, he was, and there was, as you know, footage in that documentary of people over in the United States saying, I don't know what this, essentially saying, I don't know what this intelligent man is getting involved in this hooey for.
So he paid a price for this.
Not only did he, I met John the day that he presented himself at Bud Hopkins' studio, as he told me with great humor later, in so many words, to meet this crazy person who thought that aliens were abducting people.
And he left that studio that day after Bud opened his files to him, showed him all kinds of evidence, and began a remarkable friendship and colleagueship.
John, again, as a respected academic at one of America's most prestigious and oldest universities, had the courage to put forward that he took this seriously and then was censored by the forces that be at Harvard,
the first time a professor had been called on the carpet, so to say, since the 60s when Timothy Leary was castigated by Harvard for his support for the use of lysergic acid, and in his case, was let go.
John got a lawyer, and not just a lawyer, but a remarkable legendary lawyer here and a good friend, Daniel Sheehan, who represented him before the Harvard board.
And basically, with the evidence presented, John was completely vindicated.
And as John told me not long after, he had a wonderful sense of humor and he could be very frustrated about what was happening, but could be very philosophic.
He said, you know, people who I know were talking about me behind my back, who of course questioned my stability or my thesis here, were the first to come up to me and pump my hand and say, I always believed in you, John, and welcome back.
And so he was.
As you know, we lost John much too early.
Well, in fact, you know, the sad irony of the whole thing is that he was the victim of a road traffic accident in London, wasn't he?
I think about 15 years ago.
It was in 2004 at the time I was actually on that day in Suffolk, finishing up either a talk or some research or visiting colleagues.
And the next night, I was scheduled to be a house guest of Nick Pope.
And I called Nick the day before.
And at the time, when our friendship Was quite active.
It was based on a certain amount of giving stick, as the British say.
And I heard his voice, you know, very proper London accent.
And I said something jokingly, and he was absolutely dead quiet.
And he said, You haven't heard.
And apparently the news had just broken an hour or so before that Dr. Mack had been killed by a drunken lorry driver.
And I thought, good God, you know, I'm the last one to get paranoid or get, you know, all kinds of romantic about the death of somebody and immediately see it as a conspiracy of darker forces.
But I thought, this one's not out of the question.
And if indeed he was taken out, that is scary.
And I made it my business to conduct an investigation on my own, even got hold of hospital records and the court records.
Ultimately, I think what happened, John had just given a talk at the T.E. Lawrence Society and had been so well received that they asked if he would continue to the discussion after a meal break.
I think he looked the wrong way, as some of us Americans do, as he was about to cross the street.
And this drunken driver just sent him flying.
And that was that.
Awful, an awful tragedy.
And yes, there were.
I remember people talking darkly about conspiracy theories.
But it appears that this was a sad road traffic accident and it was a confluence of circumstances.
And there he was, as you say, giving a presentation about Lawrence of Arabia in London in 2004.
And we lost him.
Do you know if he left behind any research documents that perhaps have not yet been released?
I'm not sure.
His organization, which was called PEEER, P-E-E-R, the Program for Exceptional Experience Something, became the John Mack Foundation, which one can contact Google.
They have a website.
Whatever records he had are maintained there, and I don't know what degree they've been made public.
I would suggest to anybody who is interested in learning more about this seminal figure who brought academia, the respected aspect of professional psychiatry, and the very real focus on UFO-related abduction together, that they read a book that was published earlier this year, which I actually happen to have a copy of right here.
It's called The Believer, Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack.
It's by Ralph Blumenthal, a remarkably distinguished American journalist of more than 50 years experience who he himself is as interesting as John Mack is.
I did an interview with him on my radio show, meanwhile, here on Earth a few months back.
I was hanging on every word.
You know how it is sometimes with certain guests, you just become completely enamored.
You lose your focus on the questions you're going to ask.
You're completely caught up in their account.
I think he was a remarkable man, and I would like to know more.
In fact, I would love to do that interview that you did on my show sometime, because I think there are lots of things that my listeners would love to be aware of.
I'll let Ralph know.
Thank you.
That would be great because it would be a very useful addition to my catalogue here.
But look, fast forward to 2022, and yes, there is still a certain amount of ridicule and skepticism about academics who get involved in these things.
Yet and yet and yet, it seems to me that the study of ufology and the quest for answers is moving more towards the hard scientific aspect.
And you now have people like Professor Avi Loeb at Harvard, who I had on my TV show only days ago, who are willing to step forward.
And he's launched the Galileo Project.
He's got many luminaries in this field involved in it.
People like Lou Elizondo are involved in this and many, many others.
And I think Nick Pope is an associate with it.
So all of those people are involved in this thing and they are going to go for it in a scientific way and try and get answers.
And they're getting funding together and that's happening.
And yes, there has been a little bit of looking askance by the papers, but nothing, nothing, nothing like there would have been 30 years ago.
So on that level, coming back to your presentation about people being ridiculed and people being taken seriously when they're telling you honestly what they're researching or what they've experienced, that indicates that things have changed.
It does indeed.
And Avi Loeb, who I interviewed in part some months ago, is a perfect example of this new breed of already respected and distinguished academic.
He's at Harvard, Israeli originally, who, damn the torpedoes.
He could care less what colleagues may be saying.
He is involved in serious scientific research.
He makes no bones about the fact that, for example, he has no interest, certainly at this point and certainly publicly, in any way having his name associated with Dr. Mack, which I made the mistake of kind of bringing up at one point in the interview.
It was like, don't attach my name with alien abduction.
I'm doing my best to come in in the most normal, so to say.
I understand.
He's keen to stick to one specific subject area rather than scatter out into all the other subject areas that he's just going to dilute.
Yes, I mean, and again, but nevertheless worthwhile.
But, you know, somebody's got to make a start somewhere.
So the idea of training your telescopes in a particular direction and doing proper scientific analysis, I think, is a good place to start.
And like you, I'm very impressed by the courage, the determination, and the skill of Professor Arvilovan.
He's been a great friend to me on my show.
Let me ask you this.
Secrecy has Always been an aspect of all of this: the idea that things that come out get covered up and some stuff never gets out at all.
I don't know if you're familiar with John Greenwald from the Black Vault, I'm sure you are.
Since he was a teenager, well, funny you should say that because that was when he started making freedom of information requests.
I think he's now 45, 46 or so.
He's been doing it for 30 years, and he's still only 45, 46.
I looked at his, I always have a little look at his website, you know, at least once a week.
And today there's something on there to do with the Black Vault filing a freedom of information request a couple of years ago to the National Reconnaissance Office for all UFO-UAP-related information.
And the case was given a reference number F20200092.
It took about two years to process, and they've now done that.
And at the end result, it appears that he's not going to get anything very much out of them.
So, you know, secrecy is, or rather, the inability to make everything public seems to be still with us.
Very much so.
And again, I think we're dealing with a kind of begrudging, partial disclosure because you can't get the toothpaste back in the tube.
The whole ridicule, the power of ridicule has dissipated so much in the past few years that the secret keepers can no longer rely on it as their best built-in tool.
You're not going to say anything because you want to keep your job, because you don't want your fellow professionals to make fun of you.
At the same time, John's efforts don't surprise me.
One of the things that I've observed in all of the flurry of activity within Congress right now is what's not being discussed, that there's really no reference, no dialogue on anything prior to 2004.
That Congress doesn't even mention satellite detections, Department of Energy reports, NORAD unknowns.
It's like they're being kept because these are all novices.
It's okay now to be a major elected American official and to have a public interest in this.
And even more so, and I think this is a very healthy trend, is former individuals in American Congress who are at political absolute loggerheads and at opposite ends of the spectrum are coming together in terms of their public interest on this.
The best examples I can give is a conservative right American congressman from Florida, a senator from Florida named Marco Rubio, who has been pushing very hard and very publicly for more information to come out.
At the other polar end is one of my congressional representatives from New York State here, Kirsten Gillibrand, who seems to have given herself with some remarkably knowledgeable advisors a crash courses on the particulars and presented a proposal in extraordinary detail.
I think it runs about 140 pages for setting up a permanent UFO-UAP-related study committee.
Secrecy, again, fear of the unknown governs human behavior.
And in the world that inherited where this began, the Truman administration, 1947, July of 1947, literally the year, the month that the so-called Cold War was acknowledged as such, that America that had helped make the world free from fascism now faced a new, possibly deadlier enemy.
Right at that moment, the modern age of UFOs was born, this moment that we're kind of in right now.
And I think there will always be reticence.
We can't tell you because we're anxious about it.
And because at the highest levels, if we were to say how little we really do know or how little we've advanced in our ability to confront these unknowns, it would diminish our image of ourselves in the public realm.
So it's a very, very difficult soft shoe shuffle these people are doing.
Yeah.
I mean, you can kind of feel for these power brokering secret keepers at the same time.
How do you create disclosure, which a lot of people that you and I deal with are ready for, or so they say.
But we and they represent a rather modest proportion of humanity, of the population of the UK, of the US.
And I think sometimes friends and colleagues forget that, and they just want disclosure, power to the people, everything now.
But how do you protect people from the shock?
How do you manage introducing information in a way that is humane, for lack of a better term?
This is going to upset a lot of people more than it needs to if it's not done in a certain manner, in a certain spirit.
I see one of the great ironies for me is certainly the best organized religion in the world in terms of control of belief has been the Roman Catholic Church, which up until 25 years ago or so took a hard line on anything remotely perceived as extraterrestrial was demonic.
And now they literally lead the world of organized religion in acknowledging, in fact, accepting the very real possibilities that we are being visited.
And indeed, there was that pronouncement, wasn't there, from the Vatican that essentially said that you had to love and respect, or words to that effect, your brother, even if your brother was somewhere not on this planet.
It's true.
And even before our present Pope, there was a legendary member of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Balducci, who was their spokesperson working out of the Vatican University and did talk shows,
did UFO conferences, accepting the reality of these things in no uncertain terms with no attempt to see it as a symbol of or misinterpretation of.
For me, that's gigantic.
And other, well, I think Buddhists and Hindus, there's ingrained within the religions is a certain level of acceptance of the unknown that probably makes it easier to accept this, where, well, the tradition I was brought up in, in Judaism to a degree, certainly in Islam, this is a problem.
And for many different kinds of Protestants as well, there needs to be education within these realms for people of faith to understand that this in no way conflicts with their belief in God, to put it that simply.
Actually, it's more of a problem, isn't it, for governments?
Because as I have mentioned many, many times on this show, and I'm not the first and I won't be the last, governments would suddenly have to come to terms with the potential, the possibility that there is a greater power than them.
Yes.
The great, late, great Stanton T. Friedman, a good friend of ufology and one of the legendary figures who we lost a few years ago, one of his observations was that governments, i.e.
intelligence, government, military, their goal is to get the hardware.
Whoever can crack the code first and weaponizes it wins.
That is very scary.
Also, that, God forbid, people in terms of governments wanting to keep a hold and the support of their citizens, if we overwhelmingly began to understand and accept that we have more in common with each other here on this earth,
no matter what differences keep us apart, than we do with them, it might create a climate of more human cohesion.
And that might break down the walls of what we'll call nationalism, that I'm not thinking of myself first as an American, a Canadian, a Brazilian, a Norwegian.
I'm thinking of myself first as a human being, even before my religion, my gender, whatever.
That's dangerous to governments.
A human being under the firmament, part of the cosmos, part of something much bigger.
It's a fascinating thought that I know we've talked on this show a zillion times about, and we will surely continue to.
This is a very special anniversary today.
We're recording this, and it won't be heard for a couple of days yet, but we're recording this on the 24th of June.
Now, everybody at the moment is getting excited and talking about the anniversary of Roswell, which is in a couple of weeks from now.
And they overlook the Kenneth Arnold case, which was June 24th, 1947, same year as Roswell.
Kenneth Arnold said that he saw nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that he estimated of being something like 1,200 miles an hour.
And, you know, apparently this was the thing that kicked off so-called modern ufology.
It was not Roswell.
Correct.
In fact, on Monday, I had on as my guests on Meanwhile Here on Earth, Kenneth Arnold's granddaughter and Major Jesse Marcel's grandson to discuss their paradigm shifting grandfathers.
A good friend of ufology and one of the most respected figures in it, Donald Schmidt, joined us for the second half of the show.
But yes, 20, well, 20, 75 years ago today, a private pilot and independent businessman named Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane in the Cascade Mountain Range area of Washington State.
An aircraft had gone down, and he was one of a number of independent pilots looking for the crash in this wilderness area.
And he observed these nine craft, 1947.
They weren't flying saucers per se.
They kind of had a cutout in the back that he observed.
And he calculated their speed, as pilots would, how long it took them to get from point A to the, I'm forgetting the name of the mountain, Mount Rainier.
Mount Rainier.
Yeah.
And landed and made the report.
And when the reporters were asking him, how can you describe them?
He, I think it came around him saying like skipping a stone or a saucer over the water.
And not that it was an unfortunate choice of words or an inaccurate one, but immediately newsmen and the wags, you know, and reporters flying saucers.
Well, that's funny.
Flying cups and saucers.
There were quite a number of goofy political cartoons at the time around that idea.
And so it didn't help.
But he always stood his ground on it.
He was the real, he was the person whose event set it in motion.
There had been UFO reports before then, but then they really kicked in.
For whatever reasons, they were seen by many credible witnesses in accelerating numbers.
And less than a week later, a week later on July 2nd, something of undetermined origin crashed some several dozen miles from the then small town of Roswell, New Mexico, which Was the home of the Roswell Army Airfield, which was the home of the 509th Bomb Wing, the only nuclear strike force in the world.
Many of us, I think, properly theorize that the interest of these unknowns was focused on this new human aspect of discovery.
You could certainly observe or measure the nuclear blast from the sky.
There had been, I believe, three at that point, Hiroshima, Nakasaki, and the test blast in New Mexico first.
Also, for your listeners, a bit of history here goes beyond American history.
Hangar 4, the only remaining hangar from the original World War II days on the base, which still exists in its original form, is where the alleged craft debris and the bodies were brought before being flown out to 8th Army Headquarters in Texas.
It's also the hangar that less than two years before, in August of 1945, on a classified, highly classified mission, a American bomber called the Enola Gay left from.
The hangar where the Roswell debris was brought was where the nuclear mission started that ended World War II.
And many years later, thanks to people like Stanton T. Friedman, we started asking questions about whether there is, if we assume, and I know it's a big leap to assume, but if we assume that there is some intelligence keeping an eye on us, that perhaps it all started there, where they were getting concerned that we had the power for the first time to cause destruction on a scale unimaginable before, and that was demonstrated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as you said.
And then later, the supposed claims that nuclear missile silos were shut down in the 60s and the 70s, and apparently right up to this day, and right up to the Tic-Tac UFOs, which, of course, were found and discovered and seen and reported and logged around American military vessels in this modern era.
All of that indicating that maybe something is very interested in the technology that we have.
Or if you want to reverse that back again, you could say that maybe what we're seeing, what we're experiencing is a manifestation of some technology that we have anyway and that we are trying to keep secret.
I tend to go for the former explanation, but, you know, in the absence of solid, firm scientific evidence, I only have a hunch.
I think they're both true, Howard.
I think we're dealing with in any aspect of UFO studies a myriad of possibilities.
And it seems to be human nature that one seeks out an aspect of an area of philosophy or study that one, it's like, you know, the mantra on the original X-Files poster, I want to believe.
We all want to believe something, and we also all want to believe that things are not something.
That belief gets ingrained.
It becomes faith.
And so the faith in your belief, reinforced by other people that share it with you, makes some aspects of UFO and paranormal study akin to the way religion functions, which for me is problematic.
It simply makes belief systems and on a certain level, the potential of cults.
Certainly there have been that within the world of UFO reality.
The Roswell anniversary, 75 years.
How significant, we know 75 is a significant number, but in global terms, how significant is it going to be?
How much coverage do you think it's going to get?
Remembering what happened in 1997, both in the UK and America on the 50th anniversary of Roswell, I think it's going to be quite massive.
I was in the UK for a good part of that summer, left at East Gate had just come out, did like a 13-city speaking tour, and then returned at the end of the summer to speak at a Bufora conference.
And as I recall, again, we are kind of exiting the area of print magazines now, but there were so many glossy one-offs here and in the United Kingdom.
Every UFO documentary that had ever been made was trotted out and shown on television.
It was the subject of numerous chat shows.
Bookstores had special displays of UFO-related books in the windows.
I think we're going to be seeing something like that, again informed by the fact that the ridicule factor has dissipated to such a degree.
And I know in Roswell itself, coming up on the long 4th of July weekend, we're going to see, as we do every 4th of July weekend for many years now, a very well-organized UFO conference and festival where some of the finest and most qualified researchers, investigators, experiencers, authors give talks.
And it's kind of counterbalanced as it is in a growing number of municipalities that have a legitimate UFO event in their background with a festival, something that I should say, I'm pleased to say, they're never mocking or mean-spirited.
They simply are celebrations of how deeply the UFO and alien subject matter have entered into the world of popular culture and often with many things for children and families.
I spoke at one most recently in Edinburgh, Texas, southern Texas, in April.
A few weeks ago, there was one in a small town with kind of as high an incidence of credible UFO sightings and events as Bonnybridge called Pinebush in New York State.
There's a big one In McMinnville, Oregon.
But I expect this one this year in Roswell is going to be major.
That once again, this is talk media, visual media, and print media are always looking for content.
And we will see in major and minor publications, once again, did it really happen?
What evidence do we have?
Let's interview this person.
Let's take a look at this book.
What are your comments on this?
Again, I think the climate is as good as it has been to help to educate people on what we actually do know about this.
And it is certainly, certainly not all anecdotal or witness-driven.
There is real evidence.
So it could be a chance to give this topic some impetus.
And that's always a good thing.
And hopefully, maybe if there's anybody still alive who maybe had a relative who told them something around that time, who hasn't told it before, this would be a good time for that to come out.
I think we're out of time now, Peter.
It's always good to speak with you.
Are you working on anything specifically at the moment that my listener might be interested in?
I am.
A number of things.
Right now, I'm refining another presentation on the origins of UFO ridicule, working out some bugs that I had in the talk I gave last month in the UK for presentation on the weekend of July 9th in Denver, Colorado at the International MUFON Symposium.
I am, like you, perennially busy lining up the most interesting and compelling guests I can for my weekly radio show, meanwhile, here on Earth.
And I will say here that I am at work on a book with a very different co-author than the one I had last time.
And I will say no more about it, but it will be out next year.
Oh, boy.
Well, you've definitely hooked me in there.
I'm going to have to talk with you again about that.
Peter Robbins, lovely to speak with you again.
And you too, Howard.
Always a pleasure.
There is, as they say, only one Peter Robbins, and my grateful thanks to him for coming back on the show.
Please don't forget to check out the special edition of The Unexplained that went up recently on various podcast portals.
And more importantly, on my website, theunexplained.tv, it explains details of the cruise that this show is involved in.
But more about that on my social media, on that special edition, and also on forthcoming podcasts.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of The Unexplained.
So, until next we meet, 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.
▲
Export Selection