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April 23, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
50:50
Edition 720 - Ralph/Deborah Blumenthal And Mike Godfrey
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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.
Thank you for being part of my show.
Thank you for all of the emails that come in.
Remember, if you want to communicate with me, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Weather report from London, some hopeful signs, but still an awful lot of rain about.
And still, a lot colder at night than I would quite like.
But you know that I'm a summer person, born in the summertime, and I'm at my best, really, in the summertime, around about my birthday, ideally.
But for some reason, did you find this, that there are particular times of year that are particularly good for you?
I tend to find that the best time of year for me is around about mid-summer, July, you know, early July, good times, good things happen.
And the worst time is like November, when the skies are grey, we're heading for winter.
That's not a good time for good happenings.
If I chart my life back, I don't want to sound like a mystic meg or some kind of predictor of things, but if I chart my life back, you know, those are the things that have tended to happen, which further reinforces my belief that really there is nothing random in this world.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work.
Don't forget you can check out the website, theunexplained.tv, where the 750 hours of podcasts reside.
And you can also check out my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
A couple of things from my radio show on this edition of The Unexplained.
Ralph and Deborah Blumenthal.
Ralph Blumenthal was on my show talking about John Mack a while back.
And he and his wife Deborah, both of whom write for The New York Times, are going to be on talking about their fascinating new book.
And I think, unless I'm wrong, it's the first of its kind.
It's a UFO book that is a simple guide for kids.
It doesn't sensationalize it.
It explains it.
There are beautiful illustrations.
And I think it's a great idea.
So we had that conversation with Ralph and Deborah Blumenthal in the US about that.
And also in England, the CEO of Insignia and cybersecurity expert, Mike Godfrey, a man I always turn to when we have stories about deep IT issues, maybe security issues.
He knows these things.
And Mike emailed me not long after I had my long conversation with Fevzi Turkhalp on the podcast recently and said that I would like to add, he said, a few things additional in the debate about artificial intelligence, AI, ChatGPT and all the rest of it.
So I had him on and we talked for upwards of 15 minutes or so.
And I thought you might like to hear that conversation here so it's preserved for posterity.
I am not going to say any more words now, lest I descend into rambling mode, which I certainly don't want to do.
So especially after my rapid start to the show.
So let's keep it up and bright.
Guests on this edition, as I say, it is Ralph and Deborah Blumenthal and Mike Godfrey talking about artificial intelligence and its consequences.
Okay, first up then, let's hear from Mike Godfrey and that conversation leading from the conversation that I had a few weeks ago on the podcast with Fevzi Turkalp about some other aspects of artificial intelligence.
Technology and security related matters, there are a few of them to get into.
And let's get on.
Mike Godfrey from Insinia.
He's the CEO of Insignia's Security System and a cybersecurity expert.
You should say so, I bet.
Mike, thank you very much indeed for coming on.
No problem.
My pleasure, Howard.
Mike, can you just give me a view on this story from the United States, which is all about cybersecurity and made international headlines at the top of the news here and everywhere?
Man of 21, U.S. airman, appeared in court in Boston on Friday in connection with a leak of highly classified military documents about the Ukraine war and other security issues.
Jack Tehera was arrested by the FBI at his family home in Dighton, Massachusetts, rather rural Massachusetts, on Thursday.
Mr. Tehera has been identified as the leader of an online chat group where the documents first emerged.
He is charged with the unauthorized removal and transmission of classified information.
Now, the specifics of that case and the way that that's going to play out, you know, they will play out in the fullness of time as they will.
But the question that arises from that is that in 2023, bearing in mind that the world is a very unstable place, we've got conflict in Ukraine and potential conflict in other places like Taiwan, how secure and secret is information that is as sensitive as that, that is military information that needs to be kept secret?
So I suppose the question is, how secret is secret today?
It's a good question.
So, look, I've worked in a lot of war zones over the years, and I'd like to think that what needs to be kept secret is kept secret.
And I think that that is the general basis of secrecy.
What I would say is that with a lot of this leak, and I've been through this quite extensively, a lot of it confirms things that we already knew.
So there's nothing really new or groundbreaking in there.
It's not great.
Don't get me wrong.
It's definitely not great at all.
But there's nothing I saw in there where I thought, oh, this is a major, major issue.
And we're just showing for our viewers, we're showing footage of Tehera's arrest.
Yeah, which was quite dramatic.
So, yeah, dramatic arrest.
Should he have been arrested?
Yes, in my view.
He's obviously lead-sensitive information, which isn't great.
The types of things that we found out, things like the involvement of Saudi Arabia, things like the involvement of Egypt, medical information on Cutin, all things that have been widely rumored in the press anyway.
So there were some big things where it came out about America spying on other five eyes and allied nation states.
It's obviously never good for them.
I suppose, look, I mean, that's deeply embarrassing at the very least, spying on members of your own core team.
The question is, are there systems that can be deployed that will make sure only the right people get to see those things and they don't get shared around and ultimately leaked?
Yeah, look, so there is a lot of compartmentalization.
There's a lot of very bespoke documents.
So one of the really interesting things that nation states will do to keeping secret, and I think even Elon Musk deployed this, is they'll send the same email to everybody in an organization with the same amount of data, but they'll change six or seven words in it.
So if you and I call each other, then we'll say, have you seen the email that discusses this?
If we've break up clearance, and we'll both say, Yeah, did you see the bit about this?
And you'll say, Yeah.
So, as far as we know, we've received the exact same email.
But actually, if you print it off, you'll have six words different to one or 10 words or 20 words, etc., which makes yours completely unique.
So, there's some very good ways of tracking this.
And I think that shows really with how quickly he's been arrested, which was very quick, really, within 72 hours.
So, yeah, it's rare, I'd say, that dumps those come out.
And if we look at the background of it as well, it looks like he shared all this data purely for bragging rights on a Discord forum.
So not even really to harm the US government, but really just to prove that he could.
And that's what you find with a lot of leaks, a lot of spies.
And we've seen this from the 50s onwards, really, with people that are working for Russia.
Some of them have earned $10,000 over 20 years.
So it's not always about the finance.
Sometimes it's just about being involved.
So yeah, it's very difficult, but interesting nonetheless.
So Mike, forgive me for accessing my phone, which I was doing.
One of the things about doing this show is that you're always on camera, so there are no private moments.
It drives me nuts at times.
But I was just trying to access the email that you sent me this week because you sent me some reactions to a podcast that I did at length with Fevzi Turkup, the gadget detective here.
And we talked about the future of AI.
And we did, I must admit, because there are many of them and governments and others are becoming aware of them.
We talked a lot about the downsides of this and how AI might outpace us and might eventually have the whip hand over us.
God forbid that that may happen.
Hopefully we will stay in control.
And you emailed me to give me another perspective.
Can you tell my viewer, my listener, what that is?
Yeah, so look, I could easily argue this with both sides.
And I think I first gave a talk to an organization called CSAR in 2016, 2017, so a long time ago.
And I think that there's some really interesting points on both sides of it, really.
So is AI threat?
No, I'm 50% worried about it, definitely.
But also, on the flip side of it, when we talk about the progression of artificial intelligence, people often say, is this going to happen?
I can't see that it hasn't happened.
So if we look at Moore's Law, for example, where computing power doubles every two years, that changed very quickly.
And I sent a graphic over which I'm not sure if you can show you.
But when you look at the progression of transistors in technology over time, I'm told technically we can't show it, but we can hear what you say.
Yeah, no worries.
So it starts at 1,000 in the 70s.
We're now up to 10 trillion transistors.
So computers have to design the next phase of computers.
So if you look at that as a sine wave, for example, which you're probably familiar with, Howard, from audio, that starts quite wide.
So it starts as a wide wave.
And then as computers start generating the next generation computer, that wave kind of goes like this and dies off to the point where it's doubling computing power every minute or every second.
So do I think we can't have developed futuristic AI?
No, I think it must have happened already.
I can't see that it wouldn't because it becomes exponential very, very quickly.
And I always loved Bevs' work.
And one of the really interesting things that you spoke about, I think, on your podcast was the chessboard and exponential growth.
So yeah, when you get that exponential growth, we would go from doubling computer power every two years to every two seconds reasonably quickly.
So on that basis, I think, has it happened or hasn't it?
It must have done really.
And from what I know, working in technology is progressing very, very, very quickly.
So these computers have got IQ of millions now.
Don't forget, we're talking about systems that can memorize the works of Shakespeare in a split second, in an absolute millisecond.
They'd have a perceptible IQ of millions compared to us.
We're at a point now where they're charging all the, passing all the legal exams, the bar, medical exams, PhD degrees in seconds.
So it can't not have happened, really.
And for most, you know, Mike, for most people, this stuff has come out of a clear blue sky.
They read about it in the papers about two weeks ago.
They were not aware.
Yes, they probably heard the term chat GPT, but that's all they knew about it.
They just knew it was a chatbot.
Okay, fine.
You know, that'll be something new to play with.
I don't think anybody really, most ordinary people who are not involved, you know, deeply with technology, understood the pace at which this is progressing.
Yeah, and also it's progressing as a language model, which is in the public eye, but there's a bunch of different things that we could do.
So I saw a really, really interesting talk only a couple of weeks ago from a PhD professor who's a specialist in cancer treatment.
And he said that kids born today will not know what a tumor is because they just won't exist.
Similarly, I saw an AI-driven robot, which was carrying out a root canal, which was accurate to 0.001 of a millimeter.
So already we're at a point where these robots, and we've seen that for a while with robotic arms and operations, can carry them out much more efficiently than humans.
I've never thought about that root canal example.
You know, I had a number of root canals that were not done by humans that didn't quite go all the way kind of thing.
And they've got to go all the way.
So with automation, you can actually get the perfect root canal.
They're very hard things to do.
100%.
And look, we have to be clear on the limitations of human performance.
I'm very lucky to be a qualified pilot.
And I've mentioned this before.
And one of the first things they teach you is the limitation of human performance.
And as humans, look, we're exceptional at some things.
We're sentient, which people argue that AI is maybe not, but we're also completely inefficient in some ways as well.
So we can only focus on something the size of a postage stamp.
Everything else is in the peripheral, which people don't really think about, but that's the truth of it.
We also know that we're surrounded by radio waves, by sound waves that we can't see or hear, infrasound, etc.
So in fact, we work on quite a small scale of what actually exists out there.
Whereas computers, so for example, if you look at a human driver compared to a Tesla vehicle, Tesla vehicle and a lot of autonomous vehicles is making billions of calculations a minute compared to humans that have to ingest data, go through that data, process it, and then make a decision.
So yeah, personally, and even when we look at doctors, computer-based, AI-based doctors are far more efficient than human doctors.
Yet people at the moment still gravitate towards humans.
But I think we're going to see a shift in that very, very quickly within the next three years, definitely.
So a lot of the things we talk about, and I don't want to be negative, I just need us to be aware of the possible downsides.
But we also need to play up these upsides, because if you read the newspapers on any day, you will know that the health service is having terrible problems meeting the needs of those who want to use its facilities.
You know, it's just there are too many people wanting too many things from too few resources.
So if you've got automation that will do that for you, and I've never really thought about that, then that's going to be a boon, a benefit.
And I guess as long as it doesn't take away any or too many jobs in the process, then that's a good thing.
Yeah, so look, what's very interesting is that the biggest trade union in the world used to be lift operators.
So back in the earlier 1900s, when skyscrapers started becoming a thing, and you may even remember this hard as well, my dad certainly did, where lifts used to have operators in.
So they pushed the button, go up in the lift, you get out.
So for all the menswear.
Yeah, that's it.
So in New York, for example, they were the biggest trade union.
And they went on strike.
So this trade union, lift operators went on strike and people were walking into lifts, seeing there was no operator and walking up.
They were petrified of lifts.
After a couple of days of that strike, they started pressing their own buttons.
And after that, that was the end of that trade union.
And everybody said the economy is going to collapse.
This is going to be a major, major issue.
Vernon Von Siemens started obviously putting a lot of automation into lifts where people didn't have to turn a handle.
They could just press a button.
And everybody said the world was going to end because this was the biggest trade union and they'd lost their jobs overnight.
And of course, the world didn't end.
And people adapted over car.
Now, this is quite different to that, I think.
We're definitely looking at a completely different period of time.
And I think that we're probably going to have a period of integration.
So, for example, self-driving cars, the main issue isn't with self-driving cars, with mixing them with cars that are being driven by humans and adding the human error into it.
So I think once we're over the next five or 10 years, we'll see a massive boom, a big boom in medical and scientific.
And then after that, that's when I think we're really in the danger zone because that's where these things are at risk of becoming sentient.
The power of them is absolutely phenomenal.
So just to give one more quick example is that if you remember seeing historical things in World War II, for example, when we were doing war games and strategies, you push soldiers around a map to try and work out the best strategies for that war zone.
Whereas before you could even lift the cane to do that, these AR algorithms could have looked at every single military race in the world, looked at their capability, looked at their stockpiles and worked out the best way to strike us before we've even began a war game.
So, yeah, it is scary stuff, which is really accelerated in our rate of knots.
And there's a huge lack of understanding in it.
I know Meta, for example, thinking that less than four people in their organization actually understand their algorithms.
Not even fully.
People at the cutting edge of all of this.
There's a news story here I wanted to run past you.
We've just got time to do this, if this is okay.
Free charging stations.
I don't know where this was reported, but it was probably a US source.
Free charging stations could leave phones filled with software that monitors their users, according to a warning this week from the FBI.
I think we've all seen these charging stations where you can kind of, you know, touch your phone on it, plug your phone into it in various places.
According to the FBI, it says users shouldn't charge their devices using free charging stations in public areas that offer a USB connection.
Do you know anything about that?
I do.
Yeah, I do know quite a lot.
So actually with this cable here that I can show you.
So this looks like an iPhone cable.
So it looks like a completely normal iPhone cable, but it's actually a cable called an OMG cable.
So with this, if you plug your phone into this and your phone's unlocked, then it can get all of your data.
It works on Wi-Fi.
It's got a Wi-Fi transceiver in here.
So you can send data out over that.
So yeah, it's a very, very nefarious lead.
And obviously I use it for security testing, but you wouldn't know if you plugged your phone into this.
So if you plug it into it and unlocked it, this can 100% take all your data.
They're not expensive.
You can buy them very cheaply.
I'm not selling anybody anything you can't find out of a quick Google search.
And yeah, it's a big problem, definitely.
So 100%, you cannot trust leads that are public.
I never trust my phone in airports anywhere that that lead isn't mine, really.
So yeah, I've seen this and it's 100% real, definitely.
Gee, well, you know, I think some of the newspapers here need to get looking into that.
I don't know where I picked that up from, but it was an FBI alert this week.
Mike Godfrey, thank you very much for helping me again.
No problem, anytime.
Mike Godfrey, good friend to this show, probably listening to this right now, the CEO of Insinia Systems and a cybersecurity expert and an all-round good guy.
Now, Ralph and Deborah Blumenthal in the U.S. have come out with, in the last week or so, a brand new book for kids.
It's called UFOs, OH, as in O, UFOs.
It is a book specifically written to interpret ufology for children.
And I think it's a great idea.
So Ralph and Deborah came on the TV show, and we had a conversation about a few hot-button current UFO topics and also about their book.
Here is that conversation.
Ralph and Deborah Blumenthal, this hour.
Ralph Blumenthal was a New York Times reporter from 64 to 2009 and still contributes to the paper.
He's a distinguished lecturer at Baruch College and the University of City University, New York, and the author and co-author of eight non-fiction books.
He was a guest on my podcast, I think in the middle of last year.
We talked about ufological subjects and other things.
Deborah Blumenthal is the author of more than 25 books for children, middle graders and adults.
She is a former nutritional and beauty and health columnist for the New York Times and has written widely for other publications.
Put the two of them together and you'll get what we are going to discuss for part of this hour.
That is a book about UFOs for kids, which I don't think anybody else has done before, but I may be wrong.
Ralph and Deborah, thank you for coming on.
How are you both?
Thanks, Howard.
We're happy to be with you.
Great to see you.
Great.
You're a perfect two-shot there.
We've got you perfectly in widescreen.
Sharing screen.
Everything together.
Everything together.
So how are things going, Ralph?
Are you busy in this era of ufological disclosure and more hearings, as Steve Bassett was telling us at the top of this show, set for Wednesday this week?
It's a pretty busy time.
It is.
I mean, the question always is: what will these hearings really produce?
They're mostly notable for what's not discussed and what's not disclosed and what is.
But I do like to see the glasses as half full, and it's progress.
I mean, the government is now admitting that these things, these UFOs, are real.
They really exist.
They don't know where they're coming from, why they're here.
But it's a big leap forward from the days when they denied it completely.
So it is positive.
Was it difficult when you first started to write about these things, Rafael?
I will come to you in a second, Deborah, I promise.
But was it difficult when you first started writing these things to persuade the New York Times that this stuff is interesting and this stuff is relevant and this stuff may be real?
Well, it was unusual to bring it to the New York Times.
The Times is not really known for its UFO coverage.
They've covered UFOs in the past, but often in a kind of a snarky way.
We, Leslie Kane and I, my co-author of the series in the New York Times, really had nailed it down.
I mean, we had it chapter and verse.
We had the documentation.
We had the interviews on the record.
Everything was on the record.
There were no unnamed sources.
And the editors saw that.
The big story was that the government was really monitoring UFOs, contrary to what it was saying for many years, that the issue was resolved.
There's no such thing.
Don't worry about it.
So we had the proof that the Pentagon had a secret UFO unit.
So once we laid that out for the editors, it was not hard.
Right.
So we come to the subject of this new book.
And Deborah, you waited patiently here.
Thank you for doing this.
Are you a UFO person?
Are you interested in this stuff?
You're obviously now because you've done this book.
But before all of this, were you?
Actually, no, I was not.
I was an observer as my husband was giving interview after interview and I was in the background listening.
And as a children's book writer, I'm always searching for ideas for new projects.
And then it just occurred to me one day, gee, I don't think there's a picture book out there for kids explaining the basics of what we know and what we don't know and what questions we should be asking.
And so the two of us decided to collaborate on the book.
And it's a lovely book with lovely illustrations.
I think we've got the front cover that we can show.
I've taken a look at the whole thing, but there's the front.
That is.
No, that's not it.
No, that's a different one.
This is UFOH, which you kindly sent me.
Actually, I have the front cover.
I'm just going to check with my producer here.
Have we got the front cover of the book?
No, we'll get it.
Oh, you're holding it up.
Hold it up again, would you, Deborah?
There it is.
UFOs.
Okay.
Now, Deborah and Ralph, I think it's a great idea to introduce kids to this, but I don't know what ages you're aiming this at.
You know, from what I've seen of the book, I would say probably a median age would be like 10 or so, but whatever.
It's a difficult thing to discuss with kids, isn't it?
Because it's such a nuanced subject.
We're not telling them that these things actually exist, I guess.
We need to be telling them that there is a debate ongoing about this and what that debate is about.
Am I right when I say that?
It's a difficult subject.
And certainly the age limit is a bit higher on this one than most picture books.
You know, the book is being marketed to six, age six to nine.
And, you know, it could be marketed to older kids as well.
Yes, it is a difficult subject.
And we were very careful in the writing to just stick to the facts, you know, what we know, what has been observed, and where we have to go, you know, and what we want to find out.
What are these things that we see?
But we certainly were very bare bones in what we presented to kids.
We just hope to interest them and we hope to begin the conversation.
We don't obviously have all the answers.
We have more questions than answers, which is fine.
And that's what we just want to get the conversation between children and their parents going.
You know, and also Howard, I mean, kids are very sophisticated today, even the young ones.
They're picking up all kinds of stuff from TV and, you know, from school and their mates at school and, you know, social media even, you know, the little kids are on computers.
So this information is floating out there.
So what we wanted to do is give them some framework, a completely non-fiction framework, fact-based framework that they can discuss it with their parents and, you know, colleagues, school friends.
But, you know, kids are really sophisticated these days.
You know, we're not telling them something that they're not hearing elsewhere.
When I was a kid, and when maybe Ralph and Deborah, when you were both kids, the only material like this that we had access to, I think I'm right in saying this, was either stuff that was way science fiction.
But the stuff that was closer to what might be happening was on adult TV.
So for me, the only outlet for all of this stuff was a TV show called The Invaders, which used to be repeated endlessly on commercial television in the UK.
And that was Roy Finnis, the actor, a fine actor in that, playing David Vincent, driving along a man too long without sleep, a deserted diner.
And he parks up to get some sleep on a long drive in America.
Wakes up rubbing his eyes to see the lights.
You know this because you'll have seen this too.
Wakes up to see the lights of something landing in the greenery and the bushes.
And then he sees these beings, these aliens, these humanoids, get out and by a process of osmosis or whatever it was, realizes that we have been invaded and they look like us, which was the whole theme of the entire series.
But that was a series pitched mainly at adults.
So, you know, age seven or so, that was hard for me to take in on that level.
So what you're trying to do is to get kids to understand this stuff in a way that is more palatable for a child to take in, yeah?
There is a lot to take in, and we were very careful writing the book not to discuss aliens, not to discuss, you know, how these crafts are being piloted.
So we just stuck to the fact that these crafts are, you know, have been seen.
People are exploring what they may mean.
Children have seen them.
We begin the book with an account of two boys on a tennis court observing a UFO above them, above the lights, and they're bewildered by what they see.
And they're asking adults in the nearby court, do you know what that is?
Of course, the adults are baffled as well.
And that's a true story.
And then later on, we refer to children in Zimbabwe.
Aerial school.
Yes.
The craft.
And we don't go into detail there, but yes, they all drew pictures of what they saw, and all the pictures were similar.
So these children had no previous information on UFOs, but their accounts were so similar that, of course, you know, it makes you take notice.
So we were very careful in the book.
We wanted to fall into the science realm, not science fiction.
Right, right.
And the publishers had the same concerns, I must say.
You talked about the aerial school case in Zimbabwe.
There was a fine documentary released last year that had taken 15 years to make.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but included some original footage.
In fact, some of the raw news footage that the BBC shot there back in 1993, I think it was, which was incredible.
And there was another case in Australia Westall school in the 1960s.
So there have been two cases that directly involve kids at school and strange beings, strange craft, something completely out of the ordinary.
And I guess for you that those sorts of things are a peg to hang things on for kids.
Exactly, because you're writing a children's book.
You want to bring children into the book.
And kids, you know, kids are wonderful observers and recorders of things because they haven't been contaminated by, you know, social media yet.
They haven't, you know, seen movies.
They haven't read books.
So kids can be very, very good witnesses, as John Mack found, Harvard psychiatrist I wrote about previously, who studied UFOs and the whole context.
And he'd love to get accounts from kids, including the ones at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe, because he found them really uncontaminated witnesses.
And so kids can be really great truth tellers.
I suppose the danger of it with such young kids is that you may scare them.
Now, the illustrations are very benign and, you know, they're rather lovely, I have to say.
And the way that the text is worked in with the illustrations, it works.
I'm sorry that we can't show any of it here, but it works beautifully.
You're going to take my word for it.
I'm talking to my viewer here.
But the difficulty would be scaring them.
How do you avoid scaring or making uneasy the children?
Well, that's a very good question.
I think the first thing you do is to talk about the issue.
What's scary is to exclude children from the conversation.
You know, then it's suddenly, what are the parents talking about?
There are a lot of subjects that are scary to kids.
You know, you look at the extreme weather conditions and there are horrible tornadoes.
Does that mean you don't talk about them and pretend they don't exist?
You know, these things exist.
And so I think by starting the dialogue, you put kids at ease and you bring it down to the simplest level.
And, you know, they're very sophisticated.
They understand.
I think we just need to expose children to these conversations.
I'll hold up a couple of pictures from the book, actually.
Yeah, let's do that.
Since we can't do that, I'm just checking that we're okay for like any copyright issues, anything like that, talking to my parents.
Are we cool with that?
Since it's your book, I'm sure we're fine with that.
Exactly.
All right.
So I think we can get an idea.
That's what I said.
These are beautiful illustrations.
yeah i'll just um the um Obviously, Debbie's holding up, you know, more pictures.
And what's that?
That's the kid on the tennis court.
Yeah, that's the opening.
Those are the opening pages.
But, you know, kids pick up these vibes very quickly.
I mean, look, they're going to school and they're having active shooter drills in school.
You know, how do you avoid getting killed at school?
So the kids, you know.
That's a very good point, Gila.
We need to be explaining this complex world to kids better.
Yeah, this is going to be part of their world.
I mean, if a kid is now, you know, six or seven or ten and grows up to an adult, this is going to be part of his or her world for many, many decades to come.
And there'll be a lot of disclosures and a lot of, you know, fascinating things coming out.
So we're giving them at least a grounding for this issue, which they're going to be hearing a lot more about.
Howard, the whole field of children's books has gotten much more sophisticated.
You know, they're talking about things they never would have spoken about years ago.
You know, children have parents who have cancer and they're terrified.
But, you know, what do you do?
Pretend it's not happening?
No, you talk about it.
You sit down with them.
And it's calming if we can give children the facts, what they have to deal with.
And as you say, it's a very fact-based thing.
It's not an opinion-based thing.
And look, I trained as a journalist, and I was lucky enough to be sent to a place where before they let me in front of a microphone, I had to learn to write for newspapers.
So I had, you know, six months of intensive newspaper writing training.
And the thing that I took away from that, apart from the fact that I went there with lots of clever academic words in my head, which they kicked out, and they said you find the shortest word for everything.
And if you have to use a long word, then use the long word.
But we can assure you that there's a shorter word for most things than the one that you were planning to use.
Anyway, the upshot of that was, it is harder to write for children or a tabloid newspaper where everything has to be short and snappy than it is to write something for the New York Times or The Guardian in the UK or The Times in the United Kingdom.
It's harder to do that brief stuff than it is to do the complicated stuff.
I don't know whether you would concur with me about that.
It is.
You know, I teamed up with Deborah because she is really an expert in children's book writing.
And I did learn the long words for the New York Times.
My training in journalism sort of worked against me.
But Deborah was able to boil it down to its essence for kids.
And I think very successfully in this book.
But you're absolutely right.
You do have to reduce it to a very basic level if you're going to bring this to kids.
Now, we can talk around it all night, but I've got a quote from the book here.
And I think the best example is Roswell.
It is the crucible of so-called ufology.
It was brought back into prominence by Stanton T. Friedman, who resurrected the case in the 80s, 90s, and right up to his death very recently.
The Roswell case, of course, is the touchstone of so much.
And you write about it like this, if I may quote.
Years ago in Roswell, New Mexico, something fell from the sky onto a ranch.
The rancher didn't have a camera, but he stored the pieces until he was able to get in touch with the local sheriff.
Now, that is a beautiful summation of what happened in July 1947.
That says it all.
If I was going to write that, and I've been trained to write, I don't think I would write it that well.
And in just two quick, well, is it two or three, two short sentences?
That is the essence of what you're trying to do here.
Yeah, I mean, Roswell is a great case study because it is so mythologized and so encumbered with conflicting versions of history that to this day, nobody knows what happened, really.
There's a lot of suspicion, but we wanted to keep it very basic for kids.
And clearly, something fell from the sky.
What it was, you know, remains open to discussion.
And, you know, what we do here, we call it the subtitle of the book is mysteries in the sky, because as Deborah said, we don't come down on this as if we've solved this mystery.
It remains a mystery and it will probably be a mystery for a long time to come.
But that doesn't mean you can't write about it or introduce kids to it.
So as we said, I mean, there are more questions than answers, but the questions are very important.
True enough.
Now, we had Steve Bassett, who I'm sure you know, Ralph and Deborah.
I'm sure you know him too, from the Paradigm Research Group at the top of this show tonight.
Steve is an old friend of mine in this show.
And he's very excited about the prospects for disclosure, so-called.
You know, that's the holy grail, the thing that we've all been trying to get towards for all of this time.
The fact that if there is a big truth about what we're being visited by, if we're being visited by anything, we could, he thinks, be months away from that kind of announcement.
So just in this segment, we've got some commercials to take in a minute or two, but just to close out this segment, if we get that, and if Steve is right and we get a form of disclosure perhaps within months, maybe this year, maybe beginning of next year, who knows?
But if we get it, how do we explain that to kids?
Well, that'll be the next book.
Maybe we need to do a sequel.
But, you know, I think it's important, as you say, to begin the discussion.
And I think writing a book like that is a good thing.
How long has it been out?
Actually, pub date was yesterday.
And have you had a lot of interest?
We have.
We have.
People are very interested in it.
And we're doing a number of book fairs and other interesting podcasts.
So sure, there's a lot of interest.
It seems to have hit a nerve because there are no books.
We found that there are no nonfiction books of this level, picture books, for children.
There's a lot of science fiction out there, speculation and fantasy.
But if you're sticking to hard facts for this age group, there's very little out there.
I love America.
It's a country of infinite variety.
And all kinds of viewpoints are accepted, fostered, tolerated in the United States.
It is a great mix of all things.
However, there must be parts of the United States, even today, I suspect, but I may be wrong, where the general view among educators and people like that might be, why are you promoting and propounding this to our kids?
This is the devil's work.
You're going to get that.
How are you going to come back to it?
We're going to get that.
You know what?
There's just, there is a significant population that just thinks this is nonsense and it's crazy.
Worse than nonsense.
Diabolical.
Call it what you will.
And you just have to accept that.
I mean, I hope these people will be reading the newspapers and I hope they'll be looking at videos that pilots have presented.
And if they don't, well, all we can do is present the facts and hope that eventually they'll read them and accept them.
Otherwise, they have to do what you and I had to do when we were kids.
You turn on the news that's meant for adults and the newscaster sits there and says, tonight, a story that's been seven decades in the making.
We can tell you exclusively, UFOs are real and aliens have visited this earth.
More in a moment.
You know, that's it, isn't it?
And, you know, better that kids have started to, in my view, and your view too, I'm sure, better that kids begin to appreciate these things and start asking the questions before we turn on the news and hear and see that.
It is going to be their world.
And one of my big quarrels with, you know, with the Pentagon over the years, the American government, is that they were shielding the American people from these facts.
I'm not talking about secret defense information or things that legitimately were secrets, but the truth of this phenomenon was obfuscated for many years by the government because they were afraid the American people couldn't handle it.
Now, we can handle a lot.
We, the people and the people of the world can handle a lot.
They've already handled a lot.
So this information deserves to be entrusted to the people.
And I don't know whether disclosure will be as imminent as Steve hopes or predicts, but I think eventually it's moving in the right direction.
Let's put it that way.
I think so too.
But time, as they say, will tell.
Howard Hughes coming at you in the nighttime.
Ralph and Deborah Blumenthal, both New York Times writers, they put together a great book for kids about UFOs.
It's called UFOs, as in O-H-O, UFOs.
And this is the cover of the book.
Let's make sure we get the right one.
Yeah.
There it is.
UFOs, subtitle Mystery in the Sky.
So this is out today or was out yesterday.
Is it obtainable in the UK?
That's a good question.
If not yet, it will be soon.
And plus, bookselling is international these days.
So Amazon has it.
So hopefully it'll be worldwide.
And I want to say, Howard, this is a worldwide phenomenon.
This is not restricted to the U.S. I'm often asked, why is this only happening in the U.S.?
It's not only happening in the U.S. It just so happens that you have more media, you have more people, and there have been more reports over the years, but that's not to say that this is not happening in Australia and Singapore and certainly Russia, although we haven't heard all the reports from there.
And the French have a UFO agency.
They've got a ton of reports that are in another language.
So yeah, you're dead right.
This is an international phenomenon and that's why it's important.
Absolutely.
So, Deborah, you talked about a follow-up.
And just as we wrap up on the book here, how would you envisage the follow-up working?
Have we got to wait for disclosure?
Or are there other topics you might want to include in a volume?
I have to confess, it's a subject I haven't even dealt with.
You know, I never start a book until I have a lot of information in front of me.
And I don't feel at this point that I could go there.
Really, we're obsessed with just what we know at this point.
So I'm not even ready to begin to get it.
Well, you know, but often things will come from an unexpected direction.
Howard, as you mentioned, hearings are coming up in Congress next week.
I don't know where they're going to go.
Generally, the hearings have been pretty unnewsworthy.
They haven't produced great breakthroughs, but who knows?
And the universe has a strange way of popping out with information and unexpected things.
So who knows?
I think you've absolutely hit the nail on the head there.
Who knows what's coming next?
What I fear about it all is exactly what you hinted, though, Ralph.
Quite often, we've been, you know, we have this rhyme in the United Kingdom.
I don't know if you've heard it.
The Grand Earl Duke of York.
The Grand Earl Duke of York, he had 10,000 men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill and he marched them down again.
We have been marched to the top of the disclosure hill so many times and then marched down again.
So part of me is very excited about these hearings next week and what may transpire.
And, you know, Steve Bassett's enthusiasm for it is massively infectious and I've known him for years.
But I've got a terrible gut rumbling that says maybe we're going to be disappointed again.
Well, you've heard the expression, the truth is out there.
And I think this genie cannot be put back in the bottle.
I mean, really, first of all, we're in an era now where everybody has a cell phone and you don't have to run in the house and grab a camera if you see something outside.
So there's a lot more videos out there.
They're pretty hard to authenticate.
I've seen a lot of them and they all, you know, they're vague, they're blurry, they're mysterious.
But sooner or later, you know, plus the Pentagon has advanced technology.
They're taking wonderful pictures.
We haven't seen almost all of them we haven't seen.
We've seen a tiny fraction.
We put some in the New York Times, some videos, but the bulk of them remain classified.
So there are great images out there yet to come.
And maybe that'll be our sequel.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, it would be a good one if it was.
The problem with it all is the mind-bender, the difficulty that in the past, the way things have been done is that occurrences have happened, like on the Nimitz, the Tic-Tac UFOs, and then some guys who the crew have never seen before come on board and take away a lot of the tapes, you know, the videos, the recordings, the signatures, the, you know, the various, the black boxes, whatever they might be, and they disappear.
They go into a vortex.
So there is a dichotomy here, isn't there?
You've got an agency that is now involved in these hearings taking away and filing away vital evidence for years and years and years that nobody gets to see or hear about, not only in that case, but in many others.
And now we've got these hearings that may bring us to disclosure.
The two things seem to be pulling in opposite directions, don't they?
The secrecy and this.
But now, as part of the new defense legislation, there is a whistleblower provision that allows people with information to come forward without suffering consequences.
It actually encourages people with information to come forward.
And that is going to be very, very interesting because there are a lot of people with information out there who we understand would like to come forward, have already started to come forward.
And this is going to change the dynamic for sure.
I got a news release, Ralph, this last week about a documentary that you're involved in, I understand.
It's called Accidental Truth UFO Revelations.
And the news release says it offers groundbreaking insights, never before shared information about the presence of an advanced intelligence operating around us.
Colonel John Alexander, Luis Elizondo, who we've had on this show, Christopher Mellon, who I'm still trying to get on this show, my good friend Nick Pope, yourself, Tim Burchett, who we've had on this show, are all part of this documentary.
Why should we watch it?
It does give out new information.
I mean, the boundaries are being pushed every day.
I mean, with new documentaries, new information in the papers.
As I said, you can't put this genie back in the bottle.
So the boundaries are continually expanding.
And the government has changed its tune.
I mean, they're much more forthcoming than they were.
They're not fully forthcoming.
But you got to be patient.
It's a slow business.
But little by think of where we were a few years ago when the government wasn't even acknowledging that these things existed.
It called these people mentally ill who reported sightings.
So we've come a long way.
You talked about, and we've talked about, didn't we, last year, John Mack and the research that you did on the great John Mack, a man who came from an academic background, Harvard, wasn't it?
You know, psychiatrist, psychologist, a man who was respected by his colleagues, is still respected by his colleagues, but got a tremendous amount of fleck for going to the aerial school and talking to the kids, for getting involved in these things, for entertaining the prospect that this stuff may be real.
Do you think we've got people like that today?
What I fear is that maybe there aren't people like that.
There were people like that in a previous generation.
There are.
They're out there.
I mean, Mac was unique.
I mean, really.
He was fearless.
He was knowledgeable.
He was a wonderful psychiatrist.
Unfortunately, he lost his life in London.
As you know, he was run over by a drunk driver.
Tragic accident, yeah.
Yeah, 75 years old.
He was there for a conference on Lawrence of Arabia.
He wrote the groundbreaking, want a pull of surprise, a groundbreaking biography of T.E. Lawrence.
So there are people out there.
I think his story, I like to think his story gives courage to other people.
And by the way, I should tell you that the two little boys who start the story in our book, UFOs, are real characters who I encountered in my research for the Believer.
And two little kids who saw a UFO at the tennis courts in Florida when they were little and reported it.
So it's kind of come full circle.
But there are other Macs out there.
We won't know them until they appear.
But, you know, as I said, this has gone too far to be contained now.
Well, maybe the book that you have both written, Deborah, I include you now in this.
I'm sorry, I was only talking to Ralph there.
I hope you didn't feel too left out by all of that.
But, you know, hopefully it will encourage kids to think about this.
And maybe even, as you said, both of you said, kids are great witnesses, are very honest witnesses.
That shines through that documentary about the Ariel school case.
The testimony that the kids gave was given from a position of complete honesty.
had tears in my eyes when I was watching the footage of the kids talking about what they'd experienced, because it was clear they were being honest.
You know, there wasn't...
They all told an honest story of something extraordinary that they had experienced at this school in Zimbabwe back in the early 1990s.
It was astonishing.
So if we can encourage a new generation of kids like that to be honest and forthcoming about the stuff that they see and maybe even teach them how to observe, you know, how to look.
And I also think that the book lends itself to almost art therapy or art projects so that children who aren't very vocal in terms of asking questions can draw pictures of what they imagined UFOs to look like.
And perhaps their fears and their uncertainties can be expressed through their pictures, if not their words.
Ralph and Deborah, thank you so much.
And I'm sorry that we've had that digital delay thing that means sometimes I'm cutting across you when you talk, but I think you coped brilliantly with it.
I wish you every success, both of you with the book.
It is called UFOs, OHS, as in I don't know whether we can show the book cover one more time.
It doesn't matter if we can't.
It's available in the United States and is bound.
There it is.
Bound to be coming this way very soon.
Ralph and Deborah Blumenthal.
And before that, you heard Mike Godfrey from Insignia, the cybersecurity expert and good friend of the show.
Thank you very much to them.
Thank you to you for being part of The Unexplained.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of The Unexplained Online.
So until we meet again, my name, the last time I checked is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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