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Sept. 19, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
45:45
Edition 756 - Kevin D. Randle
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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 very much for being part of my show.
Thank you for the ongoing tally of emails that come in.
Got a massive inbox to go through at the moment, but I do get to read and see all of the emails.
Remember, if you're telling me a story about something that's happened to you, then please try to keep it brief.
I know Art Bell in his day said keep it to a couple of paragraphs.
But if you could do something like that, that would just help me.
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But if your email requires a reply, then please remind me if you haven't had one yet.
I'm working back through a...
I've got a lot of emails to work back through.
And life has been a bit mad and manic lately for one reason or another, including the TV show.
There may be some news about the TV show at some point, but any news about anything I'm up to, if you ever turn on the TV, see I'm not there or something else happens, then you can always go to my official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Go to that, and you will see an update from me.
That is the one-stop shop for everything.
So remember, the TV show is controlled when I'm there by the TV station, and the podcast and everything to do with The Unexplained as what they would call these days a brand, although that makes it sound commercial, which it isn't really.
But everything to do with The Unexplained, everything else, is via my website, theunexplained.tv, and also my Facebook page, the official Facebook page with the logo on it of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Now the crews, very excited about that.
That is coming up from the 22nd of October.
It is going up across along the coast of North America.
So all the way from Florida, Port Canaveral, then all the way up that eastern seaboard, all the way across the Canadian border and all the way down again, calling it some marvelous places.
If you want to know more about the cruise, the people who will be guests speaking on it, my role in it, and the places that you will visit, it would be an experience of a lifetime, I can say that.
You can go to the podcast I did about the cruise.
There was a special edition a couple of editions ago, and if you go to the actual, what my grandmother would have called the writing on it, if you go to the web page that appears about that, you will see details of the cruise and also a link to a special micro-website that includes details of all of the speakers and their photographs and details crucially of the destination,
the pots of call that we go to, and also the route of the cruise and the experience of being on the cruise, which is marvelous.
And if you choose to book, which I hope that you do, then please do use the special discount code PODCAST100.
That is PODCAST100, one word without a space.
Then you get £100 per booking off the full cost of the cruise there.
Just because I've got a window open at the moment because of the heat, I think you probably heard somebody's very noisy motorbike going way too fast outside here.
But at least it's nice to have the sunshine and a little bit of a breeze rolling in.
So the cruise, an amazing experience.
Let me, if you haven't heard or if you need to be reminded, then these are the people who will be with us.
For one day in Boston, we have Andrea Perrin, the woman, of course, behind the books on The Conjuring, the woman, of course, featured in the movie, Her Family, The Perrin Family.
She will be making an appearance with us.
It is an exclusive to the cruise, so Andrea Perrin with us for one day.
Malcolm Robinson, of course, very famous paranormal writer, researcher in the United Kingdom, in Scotland.
Malcolm will be with us.
Scotland and other places, it has to be said.
Who else have we got?
We've got Dr. David Whitehouse again, author, astronomer, former BBC Space and Science editor.
We've got David Rolfe, the man who made the famous film about the Shroud of Turin.
He will tell you the whole story about that.
You will get to meet him and all of the guest speakers.
Ask him any questions that you want to.
He will also have with him a special replica of the Turin Shroud and, I believe, the positive and negative versions of that for you to see in person up close.
Liz Cormel will be joining us.
She was the last person to get on board the cruise.
She is a medium, psychic, and paranormal investigator of chilling ghost cases.
A really good guest.
Somebody quite new to the podcast and the television show, but you absolutely love Liz Cormel.
So check her out.
She will be with us.
So that's five people.
We have Andrea Perrin, Dr. David Whitehouse, Malcolm Robinson, David Rolfe, and Liz Cormel joining us.
It's all off the top of my head, you know.
On the Unexplained Live 2023, the cruise with Morella.
Now, Morella put on the holiday, so they arrange all of that.
And it is, of course, all-inclusive.
And I host the events.
That's the way the arrangement works.
It is starting on the 22nd of October and going until the 5th of November, all the way from Florida, up the coast and back down to Florida again.
An unforgettable, unmissable experience, I would say.
Okay.
Guest on this edition, Kevin D. Randall.
A remarkable man.
We've had him on this show a number of times before.
He's a prominent ufologist within the UFO community, often regarded as one of the greatest experts on the Roswell incident in 1947.
Best-selling author, more than 100 books he's been behind.
Very well-known man, and perhaps, I don't know, most famously known, certainly one of the things he is most known for, is his book from 20 odd years ago about the famous sightings over Washington, D.C. in 1952.
He's updated the book in this last couple of months.
It's called The Washington Nationals.
There's a lot of new material in that.
It's published by Philip Mantle's Flying Disc Press.
So we will be talking about that.
This is an item from my television show that I'm putting here for posterity.
So there'll be no commercials or any other impediments to it.
It's all going to be right there for you to listen to now.
Kevin D. Randall will talk about The Washington Nationals.
He also has another book out, and we'll be discussing that in due course too.
a very good guest, somebody very popular with you and very popular with me.
So I think I've probably talked enough now.
I don't think there's any more to say.
The sun beats down on my shoulder, which is a very pleasant feeling.
I mustn't get used to it because I know the weather's going to change here.
All right, let's get to the United States.
From a recent television show, and here for posterity now, we're going to talk about the Washington Nationals.
This is Kevin D. Randall.
Not one, but two sets of unusual sights and contacts in and around Washington, D.C. in July of 1952.
And what I was fascinated by, because Kevin Randall wrote a book about this, which he's now released an updated version of, is the parallels between 1952 and the way people talked about whatever happened in the skies over Washington, D.C. and environs and further afield in the U.S., as you will hear.
There are great parallels, I think, between that era and this.
And one of the things that I was led to think, and I might be wrong because I've made a profession out of being wrong, that we have found it difficult to investigate these things.
Sometimes we put obstacles in the way.
And we haven't made a lot of progress, it seems to me.
Now, this updated book is called The Washington Nationals by Kevin D. Randall, who's coming on in just a moment.
There were other events in July of 1952 and around that time, which are also of interest and certainly play into this case.
So let's get Kevin D. Randall on now.
Kevin, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
How are you tonight?
Oh, enjoyed a trip to England in that respect.
I hate to correct the host of a show, but I have books.
Some of my books are under the name Eric Helm.
Okay.
That's just my name, but Eric Helm.
So why do you use a pseudonym for some of them then, Kevin?
It started out because they were action-adventure books, and there were two of us writing it, and the publisher only wanted one name on it.
So we invented the name Eric Helm to put on the books.
Now, you and I, I can't even remember when it was.
It is, I think, some years ago, spoke about the first version of this book, the first edition of this book, about what happened in the skies over Washington, D.C. in 1952.
And you have now decided to release an updated version of this.
How and why did you want to do that?
Because of the renewed interest in UFOs.
And I think that a lot of the discussion, at least here in the United States, focuses on things, more current things.
But these cases from the early, I guess the early era of UFOs, flying saucers, are important cases because they provide us a look of what was going on at that time.
And it warns us about what's going to be happening in this time.
We see the same things being done today that were done back in the 1950s, and they were unable to make any progress in their investigations.
And part of it was because the United States government and the Air Force particularly were influencing the news media and suggesting things that weren't true.
And the news media at that time was too sophisticated to believe in flying saucers.
So they accepted that information without bothering to check it out.
But the one thing that as I went through the book yesterday and today hit me like a freight train and I wasn't expecting were the parallels between exactly where we are now, 71 years later, and where they were then.
It seemed to me that in terms of the way we try and understand these things and whether we want to know the truth about them when we investigate them are crystal clear from this book.
And that's why it's interesting now.
I think the evidence is kind of overwhelming that what was going on over Washington, D.C. in 1952 was something that cannot be explained by natural phenomena or some sort of terrestrial craft flying over the city.
I talked to an awful lot of the people who were involved in these sorts of things.
I talked to two of the guys who were in the radar rooms when the objects were seen on radar flying over Washington, D.C. on the two consecutive Saturdays.
And what I found later on, especially in the press conference held by General Sanford, who was the chief of staff for intelligence back in 1952, and how he kind of manipulated the information and let it sort of grow, the explanation sort of grow out of this press conference that it was some sort of temperature inversion.
But that simply doesn't explain all the sightings by airline pilots, by military pilots, the attempted intercepts, the objects seen on radar, and all that other stuff.
And I think because of the way it was treated back in 1952, the general public didn't get a good idea of what was going on and accepted these nonsensical explanations.
And we're getting some of that today.
I just saw this week in the Congress in the United States saying that they may have held the last of the meetings in the intelligence committee because it would make the DOD look bad.
So they don't want to do any more hearings.
I think, well, that's sort of where we were back in 1952.
We're going to talk about it.
It's going to surprise Kevin an awful lot of people, isn't it?
Because we were all being told that after July 26th, when we had the oversight committee and a lot of excitement with people like Congressman Tim Burchett and many others standing up there and Ryan Graves and David Fraver, the pilots and David Grush in the middle, we were told that there's going to be a big hearing in September.
That's just days away from now, that might be even more revelatory than that.
And you're saying that what you're hearing is perhaps not?
Well, first of all, there wasn't a great deal of revelation in the July 26th hearings.
I mean, everything had been pretty well talked about before they got to that point.
What was interesting was the seriousness with which some of the congressmen, congresswomen, looked at the information being held.
But now we're seeing that it's Comer and I forget who the other guy is talking about we may not want to do this.
It may be The wrong path to go down because of the negative influence to the DOD, Department of Defense.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
And this is one of the problems, isn't it, in America, is that there appear to be so many organizations with fingers in this pie, and they all have their say, and they all have their committees, and they all have their delegates and representatives.
There needs to be one organization, doesn't there?
There needs to be one set of people inquiring into this, not different groups of politicians and others vying for prominence, or not as the case may be.
The problem we have is if we had one specific committee, one specific investigation, we did that.
It was called the Condon Committee.
And what we found out decades later was that it was a setup job, the Condon Committee, to review the Air Force investigation of UFOs and the project.
And we found a letter, I shouldn't say we, others found a letter from an Air Force officer named Hipler to one of the leaders of the Condon Committee project to research this.
And he says, here's what we want to find.
We want you to find out that there was the Air Force did a good job of investigating UFOs.
There's nothing of scientific value to be discovered by further explanation or further investigation.
And the Air Force should get out of the business.
And that's exactly what they found.
That was before any investigation had taken place.
And for literally decades after that, we hear the scientific community saying, well, we took a scientific look at it and we couldn't find anything.
No, you didn't.
You did a, you participated in a propaganda exercise to stop the Air Force investigation.
And then we learned, well, it didn't stop.
It was continued on.
And then we find out that there were additional investigations that were going on at the same time.
So we look at all of that sort of thing going on.
And if we limit it to a single organization investigating UFOs, then we fall into the same trap.
But you're absolutely right.
We've got too many people with fingers in the pies with their own agendas going on.
And we need to have a good scientific investigation of this.
And I think based on the research I've done, there are very credible cases that lead specifically to the extraterrestrial.
There is no terrestrial explanation that I can find for some of these cases.
And the Washington Nationals is one of those events that there is no good terrestrial explanation.
And what you just said, I think, is what I fear.
We're coming to commercials right now, but we'll pick this up in a moment and get to that case in 1952, which is at the core of all of this, is that there are so many people now having their say, and there are people appearing to walk backwards or walk back from all of this at the moment, which is a little bit of a concern.
My fear about this is that we have this song in the United Kingdom, The Grand Old Duke of York, he had 10,000 men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill and then he marched them down again.
If we march the public of the world up to the top of this UAP-UFO hill now and we say, you want evidence, you're itching, you're champing for the truth, right?
We're going to give it to you.
We're going to bring out the truth now.
We're going to ask people to come and blow whistles.
You know, you can hear them blowing across the Atlantic.
This is going to be a stampede.
The information is going to come out.
Then it doesn't happen because maybe commitment to it, the process, isn't quite what we thought it was.
Or perhaps the evidence is not coming out in the way that some would hope it might.
I don't know, whatever.
This whole issue is just going to do that.
It's going to fall through the hole in the middle of it all.
And we're not going to be any the wiser.
And why is that important?
It's important in 2023 because if that happens, you who've been interested in all of this are going to be less interested in it.
And you will be more skeptical.
And we ain't going to get anywhere.
So whereas I was very, very excited and still am to an extent about this whole process, I'm getting worried about it now.
An important hour.
This is Kevin D. Randall is here, a case from 1952, Washington, D.C. and its environs that has amazing similarities, ringing down the decades to us and maybe lessons for us today.
The book that he's updated is The Washington Nationals Flying Saucers Over the Capitol.
I think we can probably see the front cover of that book.
It is out now.
This is an updated version with new testimony, new information in it.
Kevin D. Randall, 1952 then is the year.
It's July of that year.
And in the intro, you say the radar and visual sightings of UFOs over Washington, D.C.'s National Airport on two consecutive Saturday nights in July 52 have taken on, quotes, mythic proportions in the history of ufology.
These sightings made on separate radar sets in separate locations, verified visually by both military and civilian pilots, that's important, as well as military and civilian personnel on the ground, provide many clues about the nature of UFOs and the people who see and report them.
I'm going to ask you the most basic question that they taught us in journalism school.
What happened?
Well, as you said, it was a series of UFO sightings first spotted on radar.
The radar operators were, of course, tracking commercial airliners and talking to the pilots, the commercial airline pilots about what they were seeing on the radar and asking them, do you see anything in the distance?
Do you see anything around?
And the answer was, of course, we see the thing right where you said it was.
Eventually, they called for fighters to explore the situation.
The problem was Andrews Air Force Base, which is now, I think, Andrews Joint Forces Base, but it had been closed in July to have the runways repaired.
So the fighters had to come from farther away.
And one of the people in the radar room on the second Saturday night told me that as they were attempting the intercepts, once the fighters showed up, all the UFOs disappeared from the scopes, which, of course, kind of alleviates the problem of it being some kind of a temperature inversion.
When the fighters left, then the UFOs would come back, and they were on the scopes from later in the evening until around dawn.
They were seen at Washington National.
They were seen at other radar sites around the area.
The one thing we don't have that would make it current was any kind of film, any kind of footage of them.
In today's environment, the military aircraft all have ways of recording these sorts of things so you can see them and the pilots, I guess, are carrying their cell phones up in the fighter aircraft with them so they can do it with their cell phones and that sort of thing.
But back then, they didn't really do that.
There may have been gun camera films from some of the attempted intercepts, but I have not found any of those.
The Air Force, of course, basically they had a couple of different levels of the investigation, and some of the stuff went to Project Blue Book, but some of it didn't.
And the stuff that didn't go had national security implications.
And we have the evidence from a number of military officers who were involved in that saying, yes, that didn't happen.
In fact, there was a case from 1967 in which there was national security implications.
And part of these sightings we've learned about, but part of them were not in the blue book system.
So we know that sort of thing happened.
But it was just that sort of thing.
Graft over Washington, D.C., flying around unescorted, attempted intercepts by fighters, stuff seen on radar, tracked on radar, and multiple witnesses on the ground seeing things, airline pilots and military pilots.
There's a lot of sightings.
If you go to the Project Blue Book files and you take a look at the Washington timeframe of late July of 1952, you see sighting after sighting after sighting in Washington, D.C., Washington, D.C. It's like literally pages of this stuff.
And it's very rare to see that kind of thing in the Project Blue Book files.
So there's an awful lot of sightings that were going on.
It was a time where the started out the year with not a whole lot of sightings.
And then the numbers grew and the numbers grew and the numbers grew and they kind of peaked in July.
Ed Ruppelt in his book about that, and Ed Ruppelt being, of course, the man in charge of Project Blue Book at the time, said that he had subscribed to a clipping service and the clippings would come in just a regular business sightings envelope and then it came in a bigger envelope and then a bigger envelope and then it became started coming in shoebox shoeboxes as the number of sightings grew.
So there's an awful lot of activity going on at that time.
The other thing that's important to remember is oftentimes you get no UFO reports from people who see them because they were afraid of the ridicule and all of that and not knowing where to report them.
And as the news media gets involved and talks about this, people realize where they can report their sightings.
So you get a sort of a symbiotic relationship between what the news media says and the number of reports coming in.
So it was just that kind of stuff going on.
Lots of UFO sites, lots of military pilots all over the United States being involved in this thing and a lot of civilians being involved in it.
In 1952, there were some 1,500 sightings reported to Project Blue Book.
303 of them were unidentified.
They couldn't identify them.
The other thing they did in Project Blue Book, and I don't know if they were doing this so much during Ruppel's time there, but they had a category labeled insufficient data for scientific analysis.
And so they would dump sightings into that, saying, well, we just couldn't investigate it.
We didn't have enough information.
And you look at the entirety of Project Blue Book.
There's like 4,500 sightings in that category.
So literally half the sightings reported at Project Blue Book didn't have any sort of explanation.
And we have to say that Blue Book was probably the most famous investigation into all of these things in history.
I'm just quoting from the book here, airline pilots, now we're talking about civilian pilots, not military pilots, were spotting strange lights and various other things.
You quote, as typical of one of the sightings were sightings made by Captain Casey Pierman on Capitol Airlines Flight 807.
He was on a flight between Washington and Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Not a long flight, 1.15 a.m.
July 20th.
Remember, the first set of sightings was 19th, 20th.
He and the rest of the crew saw seven objects flash across the sky in front of them.
Pierman said they were like falling stars but without trails.
So, you know, that was a brave thing for him to do to come forward and talk about this.
But what they saw was nothing within their experience.
Well, absolutely.
And there were other airline pilots involved as well.
There was an Air Force captain at one of the bases, and there was something on the radar, and he went outside to look for it, and he saw the object.
He came back and reported it.
And then days later, he said, well, it was really just a star.
And so you can see there was pressure put on some of the military people to explain their sightings in a little bit more terrestrial terms, I suppose we could say.
Pressure to really kind of reverse what they were saying.
But you've got Pierman.
There's military pilots.
A guy named Patterson talked about how his craft was surrounded by these lights.
He didn't know what they were.
The sighting got very hairy, according to, very gory, I think is the word that was used by Dewey Fornay.
He was an Air Force major.
He was a liaison between Blue Book and the Pentagon in 1952.
He was in the radar room when the sightings took place on the second Saturday night.
He and Al Chop, who was the Air Force or the military spokesman or PR guy for the UFOs and the Pentagon, they were both in the room.
And one of them, and I forget which one, wouldn't tell me what it was that they had seen.
And I was talking to the other guy.
He says, you know, he said there was a sighting that got really gory.
And the other one filled me on the details.
It was this pilot was surrounded by the objects.
And they eventually all took off.
But they had him on the cockpit radar.
They were on the radar on the ground.
They watched the whole intercept taking place in Washington, D.C., over Washington, D.C. You say that the first night of the Washington Nationals, the name given to these sightings, had ended with the controllers, that's the air traffic controllers, frustrated by the lack of response by the military.
Not just the military.
It seems to me that reading the account, and I'm trying to find a nice way of saying this, and I know Mark, my producer, will bleep this or dump it if we're not allowed to say this, but I think we probably can at this time of night.
The response, even by the standards of 1952, was half-assed.
Well, one of the problems is when the controllers, who were civilians, started talking about the flying saucers over Washington, D.C. and talking to the people at the Pentagon, it had to work its way up the chain of command.
It had to find the sufficiently high-ranking officer who could authorize the intercepts.
So it took a while to get that done on the first night of the sightings.
On the second night, they were a little bit more active in the intercepts.
But the first night, it was dealing with the various chain of commands that were involved and trying to get the fighters out to see if they could intercept any of these sightings.
But isn't it true that some of the military people only found out about this, and this had happened from Saturday across that weekend, when they read about it in the papers on Monday?
Ed Rupel, in fact, was in Washington, D.C. And he wanted to get there, didn't he?
He wanted to be there.
No, he didn't think anything was going on until he got to Washington, D.C. on what was scheduled a day of some kind of briefings in the Pentagon.
And he wanted to stay over another night to engage in some of the investigation.
They said, no, your orders are you need to go home.
And if you don't go home, you'll be considered railwall.
So he didn't know about them until he got to Washington, D.C., read about it in the newspaper, picked it up at the newsstand, and saw about all these sightings in Washington, D.C., and could not get permission from his chain of command to remain in Washington to investigate these sightings.
And he was sent home.
And his presence at the press conference was extraordinary.
He wasn't involved in that either.
General Ramey, one of the guys involved in the Roswell case, the commanding general of the 8th Air Force in 1947, was the guy that trotted out the weather balloon explanation.
He's there with General Samford talking about the UFOs.
Of course, Roswell didn't come up and it was irrelevant to that case.
But you had the high-ranking people there and they manipulated the situation so they could kind of blow off what was going on.
Well, it wasn't important.
It was just temperature inversions.
People misidentified stuff and they got caught up in the excitement of the day.
The news conference, the press conference, is fascinating.
And you have it there in complete transcript.
And I've got some of it here.
You had General Samford, Air Force Director of Intelligence, Raimi, who you talk about, the man who was there at Roswell, Director of Operations.
Samford, quote, I'd like to say that the difficulty with disposing of these reports, interesting word, is largely based upon the lack of any standard measurement or any ability to measure these things, which have been reported briefly by some, more elaborately by others, but with no measuring devices that can convert the manageable material for any kind of analysis that we know.
Now, that hit me right between the eyes, because that's exactly what they're saying today, isn't it?
That, you know, we need to be able to understand the material, but we haven't really got the stuff at the moment that allows us to understand the material.
And according to this news conference, press conference, they were saying that in 1952.
And part of the problem there is they actually did have the capability.
They had them on radar.
They could make measurements on the radar based on what was observed there.
They had the instrumentality involved in that.
Now we move into today's environment and we're getting the same thing.
Well, we didn't get it recorded properly.
Some of the stuff might be glitches in the new electronic equipment we're using and this, that, and the other thing.
But they're doing everything to avoid any sort of investigation.
And we have the capability in today's environment, much better capability to gather data independently of human observation.
Avi Lowell, who was the Harvard astronomer, who made headlines and become sort of the spokesman for the extraterrestrial.
Well, the man behind the Galileo project at the moment.
Yes, yes.
When I talked to him, he wanted to take the human observations out of ufology and reduce it to just instrumentality.
And I thought at the time, you know, Fran Ridge of the MADAR project, and this is a project that's becoming worldwide where they have all kinds of instruments available to measure changes in the atmosphere and the magnetic resonance around those sites.
And then they try to, they look for UFO sightings that correspond to some of that.
And a lot of times it's not that great, but they've got some wonderful synchronicity between the UFO sightings and the instrumentality.
So we've done that thing.
And I mentioned to Fran Ridge, I said, you know, your node operators at the MADAR system should have a camera so they could run outside and photograph this stuff, or a series of people they could call and have them run outside and look at it.
And we can get triangulation and that sort of thing.
Gathering the data, he said, well, we've already tried to do that.
And it's just, it's getting up to the point where they're gathering an awful lot of data and they're getting an awful lot of synchronicity between what these MADAR nodes record and UFO sightings.
There's some very interesting stuff going on.
But of course, they're not academics.
They're not military.
They're a bunch of UFO people who've put this object together to gather the kind of data that scientists want.
And so we're looking to do all that thing.
And we had the same thing back in 1952.
Rupel wanted to set a series of cameras out in New Mexico during the Green Fireball sightings of the late 1940s to capture image of this.
He could never get permission to do that.
I think he eventually got one camera.
But anytime somebody came up with a way of gathering additional data, somehow that never got implemented.
All right.
Last question for this segment then, and it's interesting to hear all of that background, Kevin.
Do you think, does it look like what we're seeing here is, I mean, if you watched, I don't know, going all the way back to comedy shows like Sgt. Bilco and MASH, that the military could be extraordinarily bureaucratized and incompetent.
So is what we're looking at in 1952 bureaucratization and incompetence on the grand scale?
I think there is some of that.
Or is there a definite impetus to clamp down on this stuff before too many people get to Know about it.
What do you think?
One of the problems we have is the national security implications.
And we have some sightings that have been classified because of national security.
And I mentioned the Minot sightings from Belt, Montana from 1967, where national security was a very real concern.
So there is some of that.
But I think part of it is the lower ranking officers taking their cues from the higher ranking officers.
And if they don't believe that UFOs are real or they're extraterrestrial, that becomes the explanation.
And once Rupel left, they hired, they brought officers into Project Blue Book who were rapidly anti-saucer.
They didn't believe it, and they worked very hard to downplay what was going on.
Boy.
And we see echoes washing down the decades right up to those hearings today.
Hold that thought.
Kevin D. Randall is here.
The Washington Nationals flying saucers over the Capitol.
This happened in 1952.
71 years later, are we any further on?
We'll talk more in just a moment.
Stay here.
Kevin D. Randall, his new book, The Washington Nationals, 1952.
There were two consecutive sets of sightings.
The first and maybe most important on 19th and 20th of July of that year across a weekend.
And the subsequent investigation into those sightings and others around them.
The reports of military pilots, military radar, civilian radar, civilian pilots, observers on the ground.
A lot of information.
And I want to bring you, Kevin, if I can, just back to this news conference, because you give us the transcript of the press conference that was attended by the military top brass, and very skeptical, it seems to me, journalists on this subject.
But one point here that was made that again has ramifications and reflections down the decades to now.
Reporter, question.
Isn't it true, sir, that these show a definite grouping, the sightings around atomic bomb plants or areas?
Doesn't your map at Wright Field show that?
Now, we started hearing in the 1960s, and we're hearing right up to this day, that UFOs, UAPs, as we now call them, seem to have some kind of interest in nuclear power plants, but more particularly, those places where atomic weapons, nuclear weapons are siloed.
So here we have a question about that in this news conference in 1952.
And there were a lot of sightings around the nuclear facilities in that timeframe.
Robert Hastings did a book called UFOs and Nukes, and he did a survey and found an awful lot of that stuff going on around our missile sites and where the atomic weapons are stored.
And I've mentioned the Belt, Montana thing a couple of times, and I mentioned that because a UFO was seen and one flight of missiles was shut down from outside, which supposedly was impossible.
You couldn't do that.
And because it happened, that became an issue of national security.
So they kind of buried that sighting.
And if you go and look at the information from there, you've got a lot of sightings in Belt, Montana.
But the Air Force said, well, we didn't really have any UFO sightings near the facilities.
And yet Hastings and others have come forward and talked about sightings over those kinds of facilities.
So it's something that's going on.
And it was something that seemed to suggest an interest in that.
To go back to the 1947 case, you know, what was going on in New Mexico that would interest the UFOs?
Well, you had the rocketry at White Sands firing rockets into the atmosphere, which could pose a threat to an extraterrestrial civilization.
Or the first atomic bomb was exploded in New Mexico, and that kind of research was going on.
So that would be one of the first places you want to go to look to see what was happening.
And then looking at the storage facilities for atomic weapons and things like that, what is our capabilities dealing with atomic power, that would be something of very interest to them as well.
And so, yes, we see an awful lot of that sort of thing.
And we continue to see it today.
There was a number of sightings just recently in the around Cheyenne, Wyoming, Warren Air Force Base, which has a missile fields in northern Colorado, an awful lot of sightings around there a couple of years ago that were inexplicable.
So it was a great concern to the government.
So it's an ongoing thing.
Just one more thing from the news conference.
Reporter says, General, I presume this is aimed at General Ramey, of course, who was the Roswell guy, Director of Operations for the Air Force who was there.
General, you mentioned that 8% of the reports come from airline pilots.
Some of these men, quotes, have as much as 20 years flying time, 20 years experience flying.
What's the reaction of the Air Force to creditable observers like that who give you a detailed description?
Actually, that was asked of General Sanford, the Air Force Director of Intelligence.
Sanford replies, it's very high.
Reporter, do you classify that, some of those things as phenomena?
Sanford, well, what else can we call it?
So, saying they're in two statements.
Number one, the airline pilots, the civilians who made their reports, we classify their material as being of high interest, right?
You know, high credibility.
Also, we regard whatever they report as phenomena, in other words, as unexplained.
Two, I think, unless I'm completely wrong about that, very revelatory things.
We've known for a long time that the Air Force took pilot reports more seriously than they did with other observers.
We also know that they gave more credence to Air Force pilots than they did with civilian pilots.
But a lot of the airline pilots flying in that timeframe, especially, had literally tens of thousands of hours of flight time.
Much of the training they had received was from the military during the Second World War.
So these guys got out of the service and went into working with the airlines.
But there was among the investigators of the UFOs, there was a reason to accept their sightings as more credible, assuming that they were more familiar with what was in the night sky or the sky around them as they flew.
So They went out of their way to collect those sorts of sightings.
In fact, we look back prior to June of 1947 when the whole thing flashed worldwide.
There were a number of sightings that had taken place prior to that.
They were gathering the data, but it was coming from military pilots and that sort of thing.
They were gathering data as early as June and July of 1946, and unofficially after December of 1946, and they were looking for sightings by the military.
And it suggests some kind of a collection effort by the military prior to the Ken Arnold sighting in 1947.
Page 125 of the book, Air Force Files, also revealed that a report was submitted by the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Wing.
According to that report, three different amber-edged white flashing objects were observed traveling at approximately the speed of sound.
So I think we just have to bring out that in the book, you have reports from pilots and observers of things, just as today with the Tic-Tac UFOs, you know, the Limits case, we have reports of things that are traveling at speeds that are difficult, stroke impossible for us to maintain.
As we have that in 1952.
We also had the reports of the objects accelerating extremely fast in a way that would have crushed any human inside the descending really quickly.
Yes, and we have sightings.
I think at one point they calculated the object flying at 7,000 miles an hour, which of course I was going to say that we can't do now, but we don't know exactly what some of the military craft can do.
We still don't know what the operating parameters of the SR-71 was and it's like 1950s technology.
But at the time, there was nothing that we knew of that could fly that fast.
And we have those sorts of sightings going on in that timeframe as well.
We have the extraordinary maneuvers that they talked about with the Nimitz sightings and that sort of thing.
So what we're seeing today is the same thing we saw in 1952.
We just haven't advanced any further in our investigations.
And there has been a real prohibition to report these things.
And airline pilots report a flying sauce and the next thing you know, they're grounded.
They can't fly anymore.
Military pilots are reluctant to report it because they don't want to look like idiots.
So they carefully, they don't mention these sorts of things except to other pilots.
Because of my position as an intelligence officer, first in the Air Force and later in the Army, I was able to talk to some of these people and get their reports on sort of an anonymous venue.
They would tell me these things, but please don't tell anybody I told you this sort of thing.
One of the cases was the Kinross case where the F-94 disappeared.
On radar, it merged with the UFO and the blips never separated and they never found any wreckage from the airplane.
And I talked to a pilot who was there at that timeframe and he said, well, there were two schools of thought.
One of them is that the plane flew into the lake and we just never found it.
And the other is they took it.
And he was telling me that he was flying with a wingman and they saw an orange light off to their off to the side.
And he says, well, I'm going to call the brake and we're going to turn toward it and see what happens, which I thought was an incredibly brave thing to do, given that they'd lost one airplane to it.
And they did that and the thing just accelerated away.
And the only reason he told me that is because he knew I wouldn't be mentioning his name to anybody.
And it was quite a number of years ago that he told me that sort of thing.
So there was this reluctance by the pilots, both military, civilian, both airline and general aviation pilots, not to report these things because it would reflect poorly upon them.
Okay, we've talked about the similarities of sightings to what has been seen in recent years.
We've talked about the response to this, which was not great.
We've talked about the fact that this amazing UFO flap or outbreak, it wasn't just Washington, D.C., there were other places affected by this, and you detail some of those in the book.
It all went away.
Now, the parallels with today are very similar, except for the fact that the Pentagon has asked in the last six weeks, two months, for anybody who might have sightings or information or anything important to come forward.
To be, you know, not to feel intimidated, not to feel afraid, but to come forward and, you know, blow your whistle.
Let us know.
Tell us all about this stuff.
That's the difference maybe between 2023 and 1952.
I don't know.
But that's probably the only difference.
So reading through your book, which I found fascinating, and I'm glad that you updated the book because it's worth seeing.
It's worth reading.
But I got a bit depressed because we've been, and a lot of people who do UFO podcasts and stuff like that are getting really, really excited that something amazing is going to happen and be revealed.
And I was swept away by it too, still am really.
I'm quite excited by where we're at.
But I've got this creeping feeling that history is going to repeat itself.
We've only got two minutes left, unfortunately, Kevin.
But your thought?
I agree with you.
When it began, I thought, well, finally, we're moving toward disclosure.
And I've sat through the various hearings that were broadcast.
I've watched all of this sort of thing.
And just in the last week, they were talking about how maybe it's not a good idea to be publicizing this because it could reflect poorly on the Department of Defense.
I've seen the chairman of the Oversight Committee suggesting that, that maybe there should be no more hearings.
And so we're moving backwards.
I was very disturbed in the beginning.
I said, we're going to have this report on June 25th of 2020 or 2021 about this.
And of course, it looked like they didn't do anything.
They had six months to do it.
It looked like they hadn't done anything.
And suddenly they said, you know, we've got this press conference coming up.
You've got to do something by the end of June.
And they threw something together, but we didn't learn anything.
What a wonderful guest, Kevin D. Randall.
Your thoughts, welcome as ever.
You can always go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and send me an email from there.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So, until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
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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