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April 2, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
50:41
Edition 714 - Eric Ulis And Mack Maloney

Two guests from a recent tv show - Eric Ulis on the legal action he's taking about skyjacker D.B.Cooper's tie... And Mack Maloney on Secret Bases - their history, locations and purposes...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the Unexplained.
Well, it's very nearly Easter as I record these words.
I say very nearly.
It's about a week away, but you know what I'm saying.
And I hope that everything is good with you.
Normally, the Easter period marks a change in the weather here in England.
I'm hoping that that is going to happen.
I can remember being away around about this time for a couple of days in Devon last year.
And the weather changed dramatically in April.
And we had a few days of...
It was perfect.
And because there were so few people there, it was just a beautiful experience.
You know, later in the year, it all gets more packed, crowded, and not such a good experience.
But certainly last year in April, it was absolutely lovely.
So I'm living in hope that maybe something like that happens again.
Who knows?
Thank you for your emails and guest suggestions, communications.
Remember, if anything happens with any of my outlets, that's the podcast, which is independent, the radio show, or the television show, you can always find out the answers to your questions on my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
That is where I will have the answers to any questions you may have.
You know, that the media being the media, and I've worked in it for years, it's fickle and things can disappear overnight.
Programs can be cancelled.
Anything can happen.
That is the way that it works.
And, you know, should my show, for any reason, I'm not saying it's going to, but should it ever disappear, then you can always get the answers as to what's happened by going to my social media outlets, the Facebook page, mainly, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, and I will make sure that I tell you what's going on there, and I will also explain it here on this podcast at theunexplained.tv.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for even more hard work at the moment, for getting the shows out to you, maintaining the website and all that stuff that I can't do and that he is so valuable at.
That's about it, really.
What else?
Yeah, I'm into intensive guest planning at the moment, so I'm looking at the diary and schedule, trying to get in some guest names, trying to get some bookings done.
If you have any suggestions and contact details for people that you would like to hear, then do get in touch with me.
Go to theunexplained.tv, follow the email link, and send me an email from there with guest suggestion in the subject bar, and then I will hear it and see it and take it on board, like they say.
Now, this edition of The Unexplained, a catch-up with a couple of guests from my recent television show, Fascinating Stuff, Eric Ulis, Ace Investigator of the D.B. Cooper case, who is actually taking a legal action at the moment about D.B. Cooper's tie.
If you remember D.B. Cooper, who hijacked that 727 jet more than 50 years ago now, getting away with a huge chunk of money, the only thing that he left behind was his tie.
And that, with today's technology, could contain vital DNA evidence.
But for some reason, Eric Ulis says that the authorities who hold that tie are maybe dragging their feet about releasing the tie for further testing.
So we'll talk about that and what he's doing about it.
Plus, the truly fascinating Mac Maloney, who I will get back on this show.
He's been on before, but he was on the TV show, and we were talking about secret bases, not only secret bases as we understand them in different parts of the world now, what they're used for, but also the history of secret bases.
So Mac Maloney, the second item on this show.
Two items from the television show to bring you up to speed here and also to make sure that they are kept, as they say, for posterity here on the Home of the Unexplained.
Thank you very much for your communications.
Like I say, when you get in touch, as I always say, like a stock record, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
All right.
That, I think, is everything that has to be said for now.
Thank God you say.
Item number one, this is Eric Ulis and developments in the case of D.B. Cooper.
Now, Popular Mechanics wrote it this way, so I'm going to read it the way that they wrote it.
When it comes to cold cases, few continue to simmer, quite like the D.B. Cooper skyjacking of Thanksgiving Eve, 1971, the only unsolved commercial airline hijacking in American history.
But amateur sleuth Eric Ullis believes the Federal Bureau of Investigation is blocking possible breakthroughs related to Cooper's infamous hijacking, and he wants to see the FBI make sure important details don't get lost.
Ullis says further investigation of the notorious skyjackers left behind neck tie could yield additional DNA that may lead to a breakthrough in the unsolved case.
But since the FBI is blocking investigation of Cooper's tie, Ullis has no choice but to file a federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
Eric Ulis has been with us before here.
I'm delighted to have him on.
Eric, thank you for doing this.
My pleasure.
A lot hinges on the necktie, doesn't it?
Because with technology that they didn't have in 1971, we could perhaps finally go down the road of being able to identify who, perhaps, of a number of suspects over the years this might be.
Why do you think, since this man, when he, I mean, we have to say the way that this happened was that D.B. Cooper, or the man who called himself D.B. Cooper, requested a large sum of money and jumped out of the back of a Boeing 727 that had fold-down steps at the rear.
I think my viewers probably know this story.
It's a very famous story.
But he left behind a necktie.
And the question is, since we have the necktie and since we have DNA technology, why do you think, as this piece says, the FBI are not allowing full DNA investigation of this item?
That's a very good question, because they actually did permit access to the tie to a group of private citizens twice, once in 2009, once in 2011, when the case was actually still open.
Since that point, in 2016, the case has been closed.
And specifically, I've identified a part of this tie.
It's important to note that this is not Just a standard necktie, it's a clip-on tie.
So there's a metal apparatus kind of built into the clip-on part of it.
And there's a part of that clip-on tie apparatus that I believe may hold a full DNA profile for D.B. Cooper for a variety of technical reasons.
And this isn't just my opinion.
I've actually talked with DNA experts about it.
I would think that given that the FBI would be interested in giving me access to the tie with the DNA expert to see if we can sequence that DNA in there.
But thus far, they've been unwilling.
As to the reasons why, I really don't know.
There is not a good reason for it.
There's absolutely no reason for it.
All I need with the DNA expert is really 30 minutes, maybe 60 minutes to access the tie while the tie is at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., so they can supervise the entire thing just to try to swab out some DNA.
Then we'll just rush it off and try to get it sequenced and go from there.
This could actually solve the mystery of who was D.B. Cooper.
One would think the FBI would be interested in that.
Because 1971 is an awful long time ago, and an awful lot of shoe leather by investigating authorities and an awful lot of videotape has been consumed by people making documentaries.
A lot of books have been written and a lot of theories have been theorized.
Do you think maybe there's a general feeling that it's time we put it to bed and we just let D.B. Cooper slide away into history?
Well, the FBI certainly feels that way.
Again, they closed the case in 2016 unsolved.
But that said, there is a significant community, not only in the United States, but also the UK, Australia, Canada, primarily these English-speaking countries, that are fascinated.
And the reality of the situation is, is that in 2023, the technology that we have to avail ourselves of, especially in the DNA testing arena, is light years ahead of what it was in 2001 when the FBI tried to procure a DNA profile and has even advanced significantly since 2016 when they closed it.
So for those of us in the private sector who have just an interest in this case, I think, no, we want to actually, you know, we believe we can actually crack this mystery.
We believe we can solve this mystery.
It's been close to 52 years.
And Howard, I believe when all is said and done, we actually will break this mystery sometime within the next seven, eight, nine years.
On previous shows, we've discussed the various possibilities for who this might be.
Do you believe that D.B. Cooper might still be alive, even though it's 52 years on?
I mean, D.B. Cooper, if D.B. Cooper was alive, bearing in mind the person whose sketch we saw there, that's the one that's been seen through the decades, is likely to be well into his 80s now.
But does your gut tell you that D.B. Cooper might still be alive somewhere?
Well, I'm looking at it actuarily.
I'm looking at just the facts.
The facts are that the witnesses pegged his age, the primary witnesses pegged his age between 45 and 50 years of age.
So this guy would be around 100 years of age.
So actuarily speaking, it's highly unlikely that the man is still alive.
That said, he could be.
Yep.
And of course, even if he isn't, and if he's 95 or 100, he may well not be, but he's likely to have family or relatives or people who would share some of that DNA profile and would lead you closer to the person.
That's absolutely right.
I mean, he doesn't have to be alive.
If we can get a full DNA profile for D.B. Cooper, even a solid DNA profile, as long as he has some living relatives, and that seems likely, we should be able to determine definitively whether or not this person was or was not D.B. Cooper.
Eric's important.
Remind me how much money D.B. Cooper got away with, because the plane landed, didn't it?
And then a certain sum of money was taken on board the plane, and then it took off again.
And that's when D.B. Cooper, with the money, made his exit.
How much did he get away with?
He ransomed the passengers for $200,000.
Again, this is November of 1971.
So in today's dollars, we're talking about $1.4 million.
It's about $1.4 million.
Now, having said that, $6,000 of the ransom was found buried in the sand in a beach along the Columbia River.
And we can see on our screen now, which you probably can't see, Eric, but we can see some notes that were found in a pretty doggied state, but we can tell that they're banknotes and presumably the numbers give them away as being part of that haul of notes.
That's correct, because all of the serial numbers were recorded in advance so that the $6,000 that was found buried in the sand, the serial numbers match.
So we know with absolute certainty that that was part of D.B. Cooper's ransom.
So that means there's $194,000 still outstanding out there somewhere that we've thus far been unable to locate.
And those notes, bearing in mind how they were found and where they were found, is it possible to dip those for DNA?
The buried notes, there's not going to be any kind of DNA that we can work with there because you can see they're obviously very rotted.
Actually, about on average, the average bill is about 75 to 80% gone, rotted away.
So you're just looking at the remaining 20%, which is indicative of a situation whereby those bills were buried for probably since the night of the skyjacking or close to it, you know, seven, eight years.
So any kind of DNA that would have been on those bills would not have survived at this point.
Back to the tie, Eric.
You filed this Freedom of Information lawsuit.
How does that work?
Well, on March 8th, I was in Washington, D.C. and filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
And the FBI and the Department of Justice were summoned.
So they have 30 days to respond to my lawsuit.
I'm sure that they were going To request that it just be thrown out.
That's just kind of the way they roll.
But that said, hopefully it doesn't just get thrown out.
And if they do ask that it be thrown out, they got to give or give a reason why.
So even if the judge agrees with the FBI initially, we can remedy that flaw in the case if the judge thinks there's a flaw and try to get, you know, refile and try to address that situation and once again, try to get access to the tie.
So the other thing is there's just the court of public opinion.
I mean, there's the legal part of it, which is, you know, technical and who knows whether the judge is in a good mind or not one day.
But the court of public opinion, I think, is overwhelming.
It's pretty obvious.
Anybody looking at this with an open mind is just asking, why not?
Why not give a DNA expert access to the TIE for an hour, see if they can come up with something.
What does it hurt?
The case is closed.
You're not going to be prosecuting anybody.
They did it twice before, again, 2009, 2011.
What is the downside?
We're not even asking them to pay for it.
We'll pay for it with private resources.
So there's absolutely no reason not to do it.
And again, I can't emphasize enough that this could actually be the silver bullet.
This could uncover the true identity of D.B. Cooper.
Because he didn't drop his pocketbook.
You know, he didn't leave a sock behind.
That's the one thing that had connection with him that we still have.
Does anything about the tie, a label on the tie or anything, I mean, I can see a kind of logo on the front of that, if that's what that is, or a tie pin.
Does anything about it indicate to you where that might have been obtained from and when and how?
Actually, there's quite a bit of information there because there are U.S. PAT numbers embedded in the tie on the back, on the label and so forth.
We know that the tie was purchased at JCPenney, and we know that the tie was manufactured and likely purchased the end of 1964 into 1965.
So somewhere around, let's just take a date, January 1st, 1965, was when that tie was purchased.
We're very fortunate because that tie was part of a very small lot, and there are a number of ways we can determine that, but it was a very small lot of these ties that were produced.
So we can pinpoint with great accuracy when the tie was purchased.
And by definition, all the particles, all the things that have been discovered on the tie in later years had to have accumulated, had to have come on the tie after the tie was obviously purchased.
So that is very helpful in terms of air and these types of things.
But of course, that DNA is a holy grail right there.
If we can get that full DNA profile or something close to it, we may be able to figure out who this guy is definitively.
I mean, that kind of tie is the kind of tie that would be used for corporate purposes.
I mean, I hesitate to say it, but it's almost like the kind of tie that I'm thinking that 1970s cabin crew might have worn or a pilot might have worn.
You know, you clip it on like that.
And there was always this belief that D.B. Cooper had some kind of connection with aviation, the aviation manufacturing industry, and or the military.
Are there clues connected with the tie along those lines?
There's been a fair amount that has been learned about D.B. Cooper from the tie.
Specifically, there were a series of unique metal particles that were discovered on the tie in later years.
And literally about four months ago, I discovered after combing through the data there that there was a very unique titanium and antimony allocific company, specialty metals company that worked with Boeing, ironically back then, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
So the prevailing thought is the evidence suggests that D.B. Cooper worked for this as a metallurgist for this specialty metals company in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, again, in the mid-1960s.
And this company does have or did have an established relationship with Boeing and other aerospace manufacturers, including the United States military.
Right.
So presumably another avenue of inquiry for you is to go back, if that's possible, through the employment records of companies involved in that kind of thing.
It's been a little difficult, but having said that, we actually have identified a small group of men that appear to be suitable D.B. Cooper suspects.
And I've got one person in particular, a gentleman named Vince Peterson, not to be confused with Sheridan Peterson, but a gentleman named Vince Peterson that checks an awful lot of the boxes.
Now, having said that, checking an awful lot of the boxes is a far cry from being able to prove definitively that the guy was D.B. Cooper.
This is where that DNA profile comes in because if we get that DNA profile, I can definitely see if it matches Vince Peterson's.
Yep, that's exactly it.
That's the Holy Grail right there.
That's the important piece right there.
Last question.
Where is the tie?
Who's got it?
Oh, I think we've got...
Yeah, the tie is in FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. right now.
And I actually saw it about a year and a half ago with my own eyes, so I know with certainty that it's in Washington, D.C. at the FBI headquarters locked away.
How tantalizing.
I think they've been intervening and interfering with the circuit between you and me, because we've had a little bit of difficulty at the end of that with the sound, but we got your drift completely.
Eric, thank you for helping me again.
We'll talk some more.
Thank you.
Eric Ulis, and I will keep you posted about that legal action that he's taking and what the results of it are.
Now, Mac Maloney, and a subject that is of tremendous perennial fascination, secret bases.
Who owns them?
Where are they and what exactly are they for?
It's always a topic that you like me to talk about.
Very hard to find good people to speak about these things, but we've got one here, Mac Maloney from my recent television show, Here is Our Conversation.
Mac Maloney has had more than 50 books published, including the best-selling Wingman military science fiction series.
He's also written three non-fiction books, UFOs in Wartime, Beyond Area 51, and Mac Maloney's Haunted Universe.
Mac has a degree in journalism from Suffolk University Boston, graduate degree in filmmaking from Emerson College, the host of Mac Maloney's Military X-Files radio show and podcast, and is also a member of the EDM band Sky Club, a man of many parts, all of them fully functional.
Mac Maloney, thank you for coming back on.
How are you?
Thank you, Howard.
Glad to be back with you.
So, Mac, we're going to talk about a topic that listeners, you wouldn't, well, you probably would because you do this as I do.
I constantly get emails and requests for a discussion of so-called secret bases.
And when people ask me that, as they will be asking you that, I sometimes want to email them back and say, what specifically do you mean?
What's your definition of a secret base?
Well, it's a place where secrets are kept, you know.
And, you know, when you look at it from, let's say, the U.S. military's point of view, there's probably about 30 to 35 secret bases maybe on the continent of the United States.
Some of them we know about, some of them we don't.
But the whole idea is to, you know, hide whatever you want to keep secret from your enemy, hide it to the best of your capability.
So is this specifically a military thing, or do we encompass this?
Do we incorporate this with government, for example, and the places where politicians, the president may reside if there was a nuclear attack?
Right.
It does go into that area.
There's several mountains.
Weather Mountain near Washington, D.C. used to be the place where the U.S. government would go if a nuclear attack was going to happen.
It's top secret inside there.
It's inside a mountain, but supposedly there's a city there that could handle maybe about 5,000 or 6,000 people.
There's a lake.
There's swimming, but it's a place that you would go to be underground until the nuclear fallout dissipated.
How do you keep something of that scale secret?
Well, you don't, you know?
I mean, if I know where it is, lots of people don't.
It's what's inside.
What are they keeping inside there?
But there will be people, and we know that just as people have to sign the Official Secrets Act in the United Kingdom, I'm sure there will be a declaration that people have to sign that threatens them with all sorts of draconian penalties if they talk about what they do or where they've been.
Even having said that, you would expect more people to talk about these things than they do.
Well, that part, the part of the government hiding, you hear some about it, but not as much as secret bases where people always seem to want to connect secret bases where they test, let's say, new prototypes of aircraft.
They always want to kind of connect those with UFOs.
And a lot of secret bases do have kind of UFO histories to them, which are pretty interesting in most cases.
Well, of course, the mother, we'll get on to this, but the mother and father is Area 51, isn't it?
Everybody says, what goes on at Area 51?
It's got its own secret, unmarked airline that flies workers in and out.
Nobody knows anything about it.
Area 51 is the granddaddy.
Well, it's the most famous secret base in the world, right?
I mean, how secret it could be if everyone knows it, but it's true.
They have an airline called Janet Airlines that leaves Las Vegas, McKinnon Airport, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
And they fly employees to Area 51 and several other secret bases out in the Nevada desert and flies them back, you know, that night, too.
You get off the plane in Las Vegas, and you can see them, right?
They're parked right as planes that come in, people are getting off the planes.
Yeah, why would you need an airline shrouded in secrecy as this one is?
I've always wondered that.
What do you think goes on there?
I know that we're jumping ahead of ourselves here, and I will get into the history of these things.
But through your researchers, Mac, what do you think goes on at Area 51?
Well, you know, I don't want to be that guy, you know, but I can tell you that what happens there is all very terrestrial.
They test secret airplanes, you know, for the CIA, for the Air Force, and so on.
And just secret aircraft, let's say.
I'm sure a lot of drones now, but secret aircraft.
And that's what they've been doing there for years.
You know, the UFO connection came to it in the 80s.
Some people claim that they work there, that they saw crashed UFOs and everything.
But that gets into another story.
But I have a family member who was out there three times in the 80s and basically just said, you know, it's a very top secret test facility for top-secret airplanes.
Right.
You had a family member who was in the Air Force, yeah.
And one of the very few people to come and tell you a story of having actually been there and looked at it.
But, you know, there are all of these accounts that there are rooms there and there are hidden places where back engineering happens.
Maybe some of the Roswell stuff was taken there and they're still working on it.
You think that's all hoo-eye and in fact they're just working on super secret technology that emanates from us?
Yes.
Yes, they do.
And like I say, I know that, you know, might have some people think that, well, why is he even on here?
But, you know, if you really look at what goes on and how they test secret weapons in this country, I don't think, well, let's put it this way.
If they had crashed UFOs, I don't think they would have met Area 51 because once again, everyone knows where it is.
It's so famous that the Russians would constantly, repeatedly, regularly fly their satellites over Area 51.
So in the 80s, the CIA started this disinformation campaign that there was actually a more secret base about 40 miles southwest of Area 51 called S-4, Apoose Mountain.
And they leaked out information that we had crashed sources there, that we had secret weapons there testing.
And so the Russians actually changed the flight path of their satellites to go over S-4 instead of Area 51 so many times.
And the only reason they did it is because every time they knew Russian satellites were coming over Area 51, they'd have to take the secret airplane off the runway, put it in their hangar, wait for the Russian satellite to go over, and then slap it back out again.
They just didn't want to do that.
So cleverly solved the problem.
Of course, we know that sometimes subterfuge of that kind is used by governments and certainly has been used by the U.S. and UK governments.
Do you think that there is another place?
You know, maybe it's up in Maine somewhere, close to the Canadian border.
Maybe it's down in the wilds of Florida.
Who knows?
Do you think there's another place where they really are back engineering crashed craft?
Once again, I don't think that there are any crashed UFOs because I think if we had, if mankind, humankind had access to UFO technology, we'd be living in a different world.
But, you know, that said, there's actually a much more secret place in Nevada called the Tonopah Test Range.
And that's up near Marino.
It's about halfway up, right in the middle of Nevada.
It's where they flew the stealth fighter for 10 years at night, and no one ever knew it.
They've had other secret planes there developed, flown, test flown.
And then the stealth fighters moved out of there many years ago.
So what they have testing there now, no one knows.
But if you're going to test something like really, really secret, I mean, really, really, that you don't want anyone to see, Tonipah Test Range is the place to do it.
We're going to surprise people tonight because the history of so-called secret bases is much older than I certainly was aware, and I think most people.
You've been kind enough to give me a long list of secret bases to talk about.
Megiddo.
Now, the only thing I know about Megiddo is in the film The Omen, Megiddo was a place that was referenced by the priest who was trying to alert everybody to the presence of the Antichrist.
So it's a place in the Middle East that has a ton of history.
But you say there was a secret base there years ago.
Right.
It's located where northern Israel is now.
And about 3,000 years ago, this was a very important trade route, crossroads or trade route of the Middle East.
So what they did was they put a fort there to kind of protect their interests in these very important crossroads, trade routes.
And over the years, what they did was they kept building it up and up and up the walls and the fort itself.
So it kind of rose as a mountain.
And inside there, at one point, the Israelites had more than 1,000 horses hidden and 600 chariots.
And what they would do is, you know, if anyone came near them, you know, gave them any brief or they're going to try to take over this trade route, these crossroads, they would just open up the gates and a literal army would come out at these people.
So that's a secret base hiding in plain sight.
That's Ben-Hur on steroids, isn't it?
Right, exactly.
The interesting thing about that is, Megiddo, is that the Hebrew name for hill is Ha.
And they built this fort up so high that it became a hill.
So it was Ha, Megiddo.
And if you keep saying that, it turns out to be Armageddon.
And that's the place in the Bible where they say the last battle is going to be fought.
So the first secret place is where the last battle is going to be fought.
One of the things on your list here is Autech.
And I'd heard references to it.
I wasn't sure what it was.
I knew it was connected with the Navy, and that's it.
The Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center, popularly called by some people, the Navy's Area 51.
Talk to me about Autech.
Well, it's a place where the U.S. Navy tests its new submarines, also its new submarine captains, and also new weapons and technology that they have on their fleet of nuclear subs.
And the strange thing about very, very highly top-secret place, the strange thing about it is it's not in the United States.
It's literally in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.
It's on the island of Andros in the Bahamas.
And that's right next to a trench between continental United States and the Bahamas.
And this is the place where they have all kinds of sensing equipment, sonar equipment for testing, and radar equipment.
So sensitive they can hear Russian bombers coming over Norway and they're in the Bahamas.
That's how sensitive this stuff is.
However, it has a long history of UFO sightings around there, long history of USO sightings, lots of people seeing UFOs come out of the ocean and go into the ocean there.
It's a popular place.
There's lots of people.
It's the Bahamas, you know?
So, yeah, interesting place.
Artec, right in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.
Couldn't pick a better place.
And you think that they sighted it there not necessarily because weird stuff happens there and it's a confluence of all sorts of strange ley lines or whatever they might be.
You think that it's there just simply because it's a deep trench.
If you're going to hide stuff and test stuff, that's where you're going to do it.
Right.
It's on the eastern border of a very deep trench, literally off the coast of Florida.
And the idea that there are such things, and I haven't talked about them on this show nearly enough, but such things as USOs, you know, the undersea equivalent of UFOs that emerge from the sea, as was described in the case of the Tic-Tac UFOs that were much in the news five years or so ago and are still being talked about now.
Do you believe that those reports are all technology that is simply secret, is kept in a place like the one that we're talking about, or indeed that place, and emerges from time to time?
And because people have never seen it before, they say, oh, that's a USO.
That's some kind of unidentified submarine object?
It would be hard for us to match the technology of some of the things that have been seen flying around and coming out of the water, down there, and really out of the water around the world.
I believe that there were UFOs.
I mean, obviously, there were UFOs.
People see them all the time.
I just don't think any military, any government around the world has them, knows what they are.
I think they're just in the dark as much as we are.
But going back to your question, as I say, you know, and the waters down off of between Bahamas and Florida, filled with people and boats and so on.
And there's just so many reports of seeing USOs coming out of the water and landing and doing just like fantastic things.
You know, like they see them flying under the water, going at very, very high speed on the water.
And you, you can't do that and still, you know, stay under the law of physics.
But now we've seen the Tic Tac videos, you know, and they're flying in ways that defy the laws of physics too.
So maybe flying underwater isn't that big of a deal for them.
But just in that part of the world, there is just a very, very long, well-documented UFO history.
So the picture that I'm getting is that you think, as I think, there are such things as UFOs, and they may not come from here.
We don't understand what they are.
But the idea that we're collaborating with the people who created that technology and working back that technology into our own, you don't think that's happening?
No, because I think we would live in a different world.
And for instance, if we had the secret of anti-gravity or however these UFOs fly, whether it's the Tic Tac video or people seeing UFOs 500 years ago, they fly in such a way that it's not up to our understanding of aerodynamics.
So if secretly the U.S. government or the British government have the secret of anti-gravity, why would you go through all the billions and millions of dollars of launching the space shuttle or any satellite into space ballistically?
How expensive it is and how just to put a little capsule into space takes a huge rocket, millions of dollars.
If it's a smokescreen, it's a bloody expensive one.
Yep.
And why has no one talked?
There'd be thousands of people involved in this huge conspiracy to keep that hidden.
And I just don't think that anyone can keep their mouth shut these days.
Mac Maloney, fascinating.
Thank you very much.
We'll talk some more with Mac.
And we're talking about secret bases.
Mac, you've given me a couple in the United Kingdom.
I think it's RAF Boscombe Down.
I think you've given me Bascombe Down.
It might be Bascombe, but I think it's Boscombe Down.
And a peculiar event happened there in 1994 that I'd never heard about.
Right.
A friend of ours who we have our own podcast.
He's on the show frequently, worked with U.S. Air Force intelligence in the 80s and the 90s.
And just one night there, something either crashed there or crashed on takeoff.
But there was some kind of an emergency there, some kind of secret aircraft.
The whole base and the countryside, more or less, was cordoned off for a day until a C-5, U.S. Air Force cargo plane, which is a huge cargo plane, arrived, put the wreckage of whatever it was into the back of the plane and flew off.
I have to say, I was doing news on a huge London radio station in 1994.
I don't remember that story.
Was it kept that secret?
Well, they tried their best to keep it secret, but, you know, again, we know about it now.
But it happened.
And then ever since then, the place has had kind of like a vibe of secret testing going on there and kind of that kind of stuff.
There's another one here that you've given me, and it sounds like the kind of place that I need to check into for seven days.
It sounds like a health spa, Rudlow Manor.
Nice.
In the book that we did called Beyond Area 51, what we do with England is, because England is such a small place, relatively speaking, it's hard to hide a secret base.
So we did a countdown of about eight possibilities and we arrive at Rudlow Manor as being Britain's Area 51.
And here's the main reason, the foundation of it is that it's a very stately manor, I'm told, but it has a caravan underneath it where they used to build Spitfires during World War II.
And they have an underground secret rail line into London.
And that's how they would transport them into London to keep them away from German bombers.
The Germans never knew that this was going on.
That's a hell of a distance, isn't it, to transport the Spitfires underground.
Okay, I have no idea how far it is from London, but this is what they did, just to get as many Spitfires into the wire as possible without them being destroyed before they're able to join the battle.
So after that, even though the British government said this place is shut down, there's been a whole lot of secrecy, really deep secrecy going on.
What's going on up top and down the bottom?
So if there's a British Area 51, I think it might be at Rutlow Manor.
Right.
I'm just looking it up here on my phone.
I'm told it's near Corsham.
Rutloe Manor, formerly RAF Box, was a Royal Air Force station located in the northeast, located northeast of Bath.
Okay, right.
So, I mean, Bath is, for us here, that's West Country.
That's near Bristol.
That's about 90 miles from London, probably.
So if they transported Spitfires on an underground railway from there, that's an astonishing feat of engineering that we don't know about.
I'm just waiting for you to get away from it.
Yeah, they try to keep it secret.
But, you know, we have a bunch of sources since then who have revealed that's what they do there.
And the fact that they went on the record says we don't do any more stuff like that there.
But when I guess obviously they do.
Well, I hear what you say.
Further afield, the M triangle, that sounds like something straight out of a 1960s bond film.
Located in the Ural Mountains in western Russia, 40 square miles of open fields and woodlands.
What's this?
Well, it was this place That during the Soviet Union era, they wouldn't let any civilians into the place.
It's lots of fields, mountains, woods, idyllic.
Only the KGB and the Russian military were allowed in there.
So then, when there was a little bit of an unfreezing of the relations, when Gorbachev was in there and they lifted some of these restrictions, they let people go in there, scientists, journalists, and tourists.
And a lot of these people started coming out of there saying that their lives felt different.
They felt different spiritually.
Some people had terminal diseases that were suddenly gone.
Come right up to you.
Lots of UFOs seen, lots of kind of strange creatures seen.
But the whole thing, the odd thing is, is that many of the people who come out come out changed, you know, for the better.
So a lot of people call it heaven and earth.
Yeah.
I mean, you say in the description that you kindly sent me, becoming enlightened in spiritual ways and generally free of all concerns and fears.
My God, I need to book into this place.
I think Putin might give me a problem getting in there.
What's happening there now, though?
Do you know anything about it at all?
It has to be, I'm going to say that it's probably sealed up again.
But if I can tell you one very quick story to prove how strange a place this is.
So in the 80s, when they finally opened it up, they let a People magazine reporter go in one of the first kind of exhibitions.
And it's a camp trip.
It's a camping trip for two weeks, basically.
One of the people who went in with him was this guy who had been drummed out of the Soviet army, became a journalist in Moscow.
He's 22 years old.
He goes to the M Triangle.
Now, he's not the brightest bulb in the bunch.
And he's the first to admit it.
He goes to the M Triangle.
He goes back to Moscow.
He writes his story.
Suddenly has a knowledge of astrophysics.
And this guy is a cosmonaut two years later.
Okay, no formal training, nothing.
And this People Magazine reporter kind of, you know, told his story in the article.
That to me is fascinating.
How does that happen?
I mean, I need to do more research on that.
That is really astonishing.
And you're sure that this is more than just what we would call an urban myth?
Well, yeah, only because, you know, People Magazine kind of put their stamp of approval on it, and there's a lot of documentation there.
And the fact that they used to bar any civilians from going there in the first place, you know, why?
You know, so they knew something was odd about this place.
Exactly what it is, you know, no one knows.
Wow, the M Triangle, an area of 40 square miles of open fields and woodlands.
And the KGB kept people out of there for years.
And people who go there claim that they come out changed.
Now, I wonder.
Do you know, and there's no reason why you should, but do you know anything about the composition of the geology around there?
Could it be something to do with the rock strata?
There is stories that, there are stories, that this is where the Russians would get their uranium to build their bombs, that there might be some kind of uranium mine there nearby.
And, you know, and a lot of people can speculate that if there's uranium in the ground, that, you know, it's going to cause all these different kind of effects that we're not aware of, you know.
But even, you know, I think it goes back three or four hundred years that there are villages there that have totem poles.
And the totem poles, you know, show things like aliens and so on.
And so this has got a hell of a history to it.
Right.
Whatever's been happening there has been happening there for quite a while.
That's one of the most astonishing stories that I've heard on this show in all the years that I've been doing it.
Thank you for it.
Another place in Russia that is deeply secret, for perhaps more mundane reasons, I don't know.
Kapustinyar, a highly secret base in southern Russia.
Kapustinya.
Now, so if you can imagine a combination of Cape Canaveral and Area 51, so launching lots of spacecraft into orbit and beyond, military stuff, civilian stuff, but also a place where secret research is done, a lot of nuclear weapons are kept, and has a very long history, well-documented history, of dogfights between Soviet airplanes and UFOs.
Now, in the history of these dogfights, they're referred to as the Russian translation of UFOs.
If you read it, you might want to think, well, you know, these might be just American airplanes or something, but this is pretty deep into Russia.
There's a woman whose name I can't pronounce right now, but she's kind of like the female Chuck Gaeger of the Soviet Union, and she's written books about having dogfights at UFOs over Kapustinia.
So anyway, in the 90s, they had a UFO incident there where a UFO came down and hovered over the nuclear storage facilities and also the launch facilities.
It stayed in sight for more than 30 minutes.
About 40 people saw it.
Those 40 people were interrogated by the KGB.
So you got to assume they're telling the truth.
And then was so well documented that one of the brothers of Nelson Rockefeller was vice president of the United States at one time, very rich guy, Rockefeller family, actually put money into studying this particular UFO sighting because so many people.
Why would he do that?
How fascinating.
Yeah, why already put his name on the line?
And he gave the report to Clinton.
Clinton was president at the time, and Clinton thanked him, and that's the last we heard of him.
Oh, boy.
Well, it sounds to me like it's going to be hard to do now with relations as they are, but more research needs to be done about that.
A really weird case.
And we don't have too many minutes left, Mac, but this is astonishing.
And something else I haven't heard about.
This is in China, and it's called the Hung Yang Scale Model.
It's 500 miles west of Beijing, and it's a secret base that has a 1 500 scale model of another secret mysterious place somewhere else in China.
What's that all about?
Right.
I mean, this was discovered by German scientists on Google Maps, I guess, and then people looked into it.
And at this place, as you say, 500 miles west of Beijing, kind of in a desert setting, the Chinese military has built a 1 slash 500 scale model of this other place called Asaya Chin, which is in the Himalayas, which is about another thousand miles west.
Now, Asaya Chin is right on the border of China and India, and they actually fought a war there in October of 1962.
Not many people might remember it because it was during the October Missile Crisis between Russia and the United States when everyone thought we were going to, you know, just be blown to bits.
But they did fight a war there over the most isolated, God-forsaken mountains, Himalayas.
Why are you fighting over this?
Okay, more people in that war died of phosphorite and wounds than the actual fighting.
Anyway, and why would you have a model of it somewhere else indicating that you might be practicing for something there?
Or putting some kind of a military force there.
The strange thing where it intersects what we've been talking about is that the people there see UFOs on a daily basis.
And one of the ways that they determine this is that they went to one of the villages there that have no, this is at the time, have no TV, nothing.
And they asked the kids to draw, young kids, give us a drawing of what you see every day.
And like a number of them draw UFOs.
It's just like a daily occurrence out there.
So you have a place where UFOs, quote unquote, are a common daily occurrence, and you have the Chinese military building a scale model of this place.
It looks like an advancement of putting some kind of a military force up on top of the Himalayas, if you can believe it.
Right.
And that model is for gaming scenarios, presumably.
Wow.
This is all mind-blowing stuff.
And we've only got a couple of minutes.
I wonder if we can talk quickly about Pine Gap.
I know about Pine Gap.
It's in the very middle of Australia.
It's literally in the geographic center of Australia, in the desert.
What it is, it's a huge listening base.
It has these enormous antennas there, and it's run by the American NSA National Security Agency, which is the biggest and most secret security agency, really, in the United States.
And sorry.
And the Australian government.
And basically what they do there, they can intercept about half the world's emails there every day.
But they have also all kinds of sensing equipment between Earth and space.
Also, a huge, huge UFO history.
Once again, well documented, seeing UFOs leaving and landing at the place.
There's a village nearby where the residents have been startled out of their sleep with the noises and UFOs going over their village, people missing and showing up later with no memory, stories of UFOs coming right out of the mouth.
And now a lot of it, I'm sure, is just noise, okay?
But something out there is going on and seems to be more than just this listening post that they have out there.
And a very isolated place, the kind of place that...
And before I turn up my toes, I hope that maybe the Lord allows me somehow to do that.
But the place is in between, in the middle there in Australia, fascinating country.
I've only seen the cities and the Great Barrier Reef.
But in the middle there, it's mysterious.
And if you want to put something secret there and if weird stuff is happening, that's the place to put it.
That's the place to put it.
You got that right.
Mac Maloney, I've loved this conversation.
It's been very good of you to give me your time tonight here in the United Kingdom.
If people want to check out your work, your various books, and we haven't talked about the half of it, as we say here, how do they do that?
Just really go on MacMaloney.com or go to Amazon.
My publisher doesn't really like me to say that, but the quickest place is to get books these days.
Mac Maloney Books is on Amazon.
Mac Maloney, thank you very much.
I hope we talk again.
And like I say, it was good of you to give me so much of your time.
And thank you very much for giving me what I told my producer was the most comprehensive list of stuff we can talk about.
It always helps when you have mile markers.
And boy, did you do that for me.
Thank you, Mac.
Thank you, Howard.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Mac Maloney, check him out online.
That's just amazing, isn't it?
If you have built, I'm talking about that Chinese example, a scale model of a place where you are gaming or trying out something that you're going to perhaps use in a sensitive place that's miles away on the border with India, where peculiar things are happening, and you want to get it right, then you do build a scale model of it and you try it out before you go up there and do it.
Question is, what is it that's happening there?
We'll be definitely having him back on this podcast for a more leisurely conversation at greater length.
The subject of secret bases never fails to fascinate.
We've got some of them here in the United Kingdom, and I know in the US you definitely have, and in other parts of the world too, including Australia.
Okay, more great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained Online.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been the Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
Happy Easter.
Take care.
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