Somewhere in the Skies - Peter Robbins: Imagery, Reality, and UFOs: Sorting Truth From Fiction

Episode Date: August 7, 2017

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Jim Marrs (1943-2017) On episode 17 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan speaks briefly about the recent passing of conspiracy legend and author, Jim Marrs. Then, he sits down with Peter Robbins, UFO researcher and author for an in-studio discussion. After a few beers, Robbins runs us through a brand new lecture he's currently shaping and refining on the following:  The lecture begins with questioning why 'we' respond to the subject of UFOs the way we do and how society was conditioned to understand that UFOs are nonsense. What constitutes 'proof,' or at the least, UFO related images we should consider taking seriously? What about 'ancient aliens' type images? What about other historical imagery? What we can learn from pre-digital UFO photographs, and what marks the 'real' ones as authentic? How did UFO news coverage, that is print journalism, impact public thinking in the 1940s? And what was the legacy it implanted in the public's psyches? How will the truth ultimately manifest itself? Alternate theories are examined and considered in this episode. WARNING: This conversation relied heavily on images. For the best representation, It's highly suggested that you follow along at the following link while listening for the best experience. Guest Bio: Peter Robbins is an investigative writer, author, and lecturer, best known for his books, columns, articles, radio commentaries, interviews and conference talks He has appeared as a guest on and been a consultant to numerous television programs and documentaries. Peter was born in Queens New York and studied art, design, and theater at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. He received his BFA (painting, film history) from New York City’s School of Visual Arts (SVA) where he also taught painting for a dozen years. He was studio assistant to Abstract Expressionist painter Adolph Gotlieb, studio assistant to American primitive painter William Cply (correct spelling), and general assistant to pioneer kinetic light sculptor Stanley Landsman. He has also worked as a carpenter, art gallery assistant, the mid-1980s he became seriously involved in UFO research when his knowledge of classified data indicated to him the US government was not telling the public the truth about UFOs. He is coauthor of the British best-seller, Left at East Gate: A First-Hand Account of the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident, Its Cover-Up and Investigation, and author of Deliberate Deception: A Case of Disinformation in the UFO Research Community, and Halt In Woodbridge: An Air Force Colonel’s Thirty-Year Fight to Silence an Authentic UFO Whistle-Blower. Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Warning, if you like your UFO literature to confirm what you already know, this is not the book for you. From White Crow Books comes a brand new collection of essays. 14 authors. One goal. To shatter the UFO topic and pick up the pieces in a whole new light. Compiled and edited by Robbie Graham with a foreword by Professor Diana Walsh Pesolka. UFOs reframing the debate is a cold, hard slap in the face for uphology, delivered with love.

UFOs reframing the debate. Available now in paperback and e-book on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble, the book depository, and the iBookstore. For a complete list of contributors and to learn more, visit Robbiegram.uk. This is Somewhere in the Skies of Ryan Sprague. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. Before we get to this week's conversation, I want to take just a moment to send my condolences to the friends and family of Jim Mars, who passed away on August. second. For those who don't know, Jim was a journalist and a New York Times best-selling author

of numerous books and articles pertaining to cover-ups and conspiracies. His best-known book would have to be Crossfire, which was a main source for the Oliver Stone film, JFK. For over 30 years, Jim also taught a course at the University of Texas at Arlington on the JFK assassination. He wrote many other books on many other topics such as Secret Societies, 9-11, UFO, cover-ups, and everything in between. So when I was first starting out in the UFO field, I didn't know where to turn or who to talk to. It was a mess, but then Jim's book, Alien Agenda, came out,

and I happened to buy it at the local Wegman's grocery store. I reached out to Jim after reading the book as a complete nobody, and he actually wrote me back. Then I had the immense pleasure of interviewing him for an article I was writing at the time, and he couldn't have been more giving and professional. His work has been translated into many different languages and his books line the shelves of every bookstore and library across the globe.

We may have lost Jim, but his work and legacy will always live on. Rest in peace, my friend. Now, on a lighter note, for those who don't know today's guest, he is not only a colleague of mine, but my mentor. And for those who don't know me, my other passions beyond UFOs is theater. I work on Broadway here in New York City to pay the bill. and when I'm not writing or talking about UFOs, I am writing plays and movies. Today's guest has walked a similar path, having worked with some of the most prominent

theater companies here in New York City. He is also an artist and one hell of an investigative writer. I am talking about Peter Robbins. Now, Peter and I meet up at least once a month at our favorite diner in Midtown Manhattan and talk for hours and hours about everything under the sun. But this time, Peter came to my home turf in Queens, and we tip back a few people. beers, made our way to the recording studio and sat down for this conversation you're about to hear. Now, I have to warn you, this conversation centers around a new lecture Peter is presenting

around the world right now, and it relies heavy on images. So I decided to post all of those images on the website version of this episode. It will benefit you greatly to listen this way. Just go to somewhere in the skies.com, click on the podcast tab, then go to episode 17 with Peter Robbins, and stream the episode there. This is just a suggestion. If you're listening to this on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or YouTube, it may be a little different, but you won't lose that. All right, enough preampled this week.

Let's sit down with the one and only, Peter Robbins. Peter, thanks for joining me today. A pleasure and great being out here in Queens, my birthplace. Yes, yes, a lot of people don't know. We are one of few researchers out here on the East Coast. So whenever we get the opportunity to meet up, We always make that happen. Amen.

We just came from a wonderful Thai dinner, some drinks, and we're really going to run the gamut today. So I'm very excited. One of the things you and I have in common that many of the listeners might not know is our love for theater. We both grew up with very extensive theater backgrounds. And we started getting into a story at dinner that I thought would be perfect to start this conversation with. I agree. Something different from the usual euphological talk. So I want to see.

start with that tonight if you could. Tell us about this experience you had with some well-known people in the UFO field. Well, it's more than that. We love theater. We both worked in it professionally. You're a trained actor and a playwright. I am a trained actor, but I don't act. I still audit my dear friend John Strasbourg's acting classes when I'm able in New York and attended to this weekend. I find it inspiring to watch. as these extraordinary artists trained to make us feel the things we feel in live stage, in the theater, on-screen, television, good work. And for years, I worked in theater management, managing the theater for one of the premier repertory companies in history of New York City. got to work with Academy Award and Tony Award winning actors

and dozens and dozens of some of the finest actors in America, many of whom we all grew up knowing their faces, but if your life depended on it, you didn't know their names. Yes. You've seen them in so many television episodes and small parts and films. And over the course of the many years that I worked as Bud Hopkins assistant, for a good number of those years, I was in theater management as well. Bud, who, like most New Yorkers, loved theater, many other people that aren't New Yorkers as well,

I'd always make sure that he attended a preview, usually with a guest, or once a play was up and running. And Bud, from 1989, until he passed in 2011, we had a non-profit foundation called the Intruder's Foundation, which had a kind of a double-pronged mandate of, um, being there for people who were UFO abductees, had were experiences, had had these experiences to support them, to assist them. We ran support groups, but of course conducted hypnotic regressions at these individuals' requests, and I kept the records. But we also, as part of the intruders foundation, we felt we had a mandate to educate folks. We had various conferences, we had a regular publication. And usually for about two-thirds of every year, sometimes

three-quarters of every year, every six weeks or so, we would bring a speaker to New York, or sometimes from well out of town, other times from, you know, the general area. And it was at the A.R. the Edgar Casey Center. They have a loft in the West 30s. And on this one particular time, the person who was going to be speaking was Dr. Roger Lear. For many of your listeners, certainly the ones who are, you know, serious students of the UFO subject, Roger's name is probably not unknown to them. For anybody that is not familiar with it, Roger was a podiatric surgeon who became very involved in UFO studies focused on one of the most enigmatic, fascinating, disturbing, extremely attention-grabbing aspects of the abduction phenomena, namely implants these foreign bodies

that are put into our bodies. Now, make no mistake about it. We, human beings, have now long had this technology and use it. I've been following the story, human terms for I'm sure over 25 years. And the first time I heard a reference to implants in human terms beyond the ones that we were studying, learning about seeing showing up in x-rays and catscans of people with UFO-related histories, was, again, about 25 years ago or so when in a agricultural publication, an ad was forwarded to me for a thing, about the size of a quarter, an American quarter. It was a small, well, relatively small, electronic device that simply gave out a signal.

And it was made specifically to be placed subcutaneously into a slit made in a cows ear with local anesthetic. And the idea was if one of your cows in your herd wanders, off. You had a simple receiver where you could actually not just trace the cow, but you could see that it was a neighbor's pasture. You know, it had a limited range, a mile or whatever. Found it fascinating. Not surprisingly, over the decades, the technology has miniaturized, and now they're not much bigger in some cases. They're about the same size as the ones that are truly anomalous. They are usually more or less about the shape of a grain of rice or a BB. They are silicone-based or metallic-based. And this little digression is necessary for this charming little story first. Dr. Lear, as somebody who was a foot surgeon and a student of the UFO

subject, began to network with people like Hopkins and ultimately John Mack, other leading figures in abduction research, and ultimately began to agree, and I'm sure with a fair amount of and concern relative to his professional reputation, any possibility of legal blowback or something, to remove and examine these things where possible. I had seen a number of them, not that he removed, and I find them very enigmatic. We know there's only a limited amount of possibilities of why they're there, monitoring, control, perhaps even assistance, possibly darker scenarios, any way to cut to the chase. Dr. Lear was going to be our speaker for a particular event. I think it was a Saturday night, and on the Sunday, we did matinees on the weekends and on Wednesday.

I don't remember whether it was a matinee or the evening, but I had gotten tickets for the play, which was a comedy, for Bud and for Roger. Again, Dr. Lear was a very outgoing guy, and you speak to anybody that knew him. As I say about him and Bud and Dr. Mack, they were. were not only great men, they were great guys. They were a lot of fun. They were very involved in living life to the fullest, as well as doing important, serious, sometimes nerve-wracking work. And essentially, the main thing I remember was they came to the play. I invited them backstage. They got to meet some of the actors. Again, whether or not it was a matinee or an evening

performance, we went out, had a drink or two. And just for me, pulling back in one of those moments where you remember these people would have never met in a thousand years if it weren't for this quirky little connection here. But what fun they both had and what fun my colleagues, my friends in the theater had with these two extremely brilliant, very funny guys who what they knew from my brief introduction was that they were involved in UFO studies like I was. but I thought, you know, why even bother to tell them all of the nomenclature? I will add one thing, and it's something we were talking about as we were heading toward dinner. It was Dr. Lear, who established something that we didn't know about the implants, although deductive reasoning suggested that this would have been logical. You don't have to be a medical person to know that if you get a splinter or some foreign body

large lodged in your body be it a biological entity or you know some little thing that doesn't belong there the white blood cells will essentially you know declare a riot and head for the site we can see it we've all had times where we've had a infection on the surface of our body again a splinter is a classic thing everything gets red white there may be pulsation there may be pain once it's removed and cleaned, everything goes away. So how is it that this history of these non-human, seemingly little things, these we assume are technological devices inserted under the skin that the body doesn't seem to recognize them? What's that about? And what Dr. Lear established, and it was it certainly didn't make the major media,

but it certainly raised eyebrows and answered some questions in our immediate circle of scholarship and research that he was working with one that was elongated, like a piece of rice, and it had what amounted to a hyper-thin skin on it, that he could not dislodge

with an absolutely new surgical scalpel. and this skin under careful cover observation magnification, whether it was biological or chemical, I don't remember. I don't think a sample could be removed for analysis, and I don't know how it resolved. It's a bunch of years ago. But what it did, like the dead black kind of paint that they use on our B-1s and so. spy planes, it created it kind of a stealth situation where the body simply doesn't recognize that there is this intruder, that there is this thing that doesn't belong there. Again, we're off on a tangent here and a mixed memory of a very wonderful funny night of being in the theater,

which I love, having the pride of sharing it with two very distinguished people in my life, and, you know, ultimately that it comes down to a very early connection with us, this obsession, this passion with the subject of UFOs and their implications for humanity, and a love of the performing arts. Yeah. And there's many stories to be had in both those facets. And I think that's what attracted me to your work. I knew from the first time I heard you speak, I could tell this guy, he is, he knows what he's

He's not only a good public speaker. He knows how to tell a story. And we see that mirrored in many of these UFO events as well. While they may not happen as linear as the experiencer would hope, there is that whole idea that the human is what matters most. We can always look at this as a very alien topic or find the UFO sighting, tantalizing or exciting. But when it comes down to it, it's the person having the experience. And I think someone like you, who I've learned from, is to have compassion for these people.

For someone who has one of those implants, I can't even imagine going day to day thinking, I want to rip this thing out of my body. Or what if I do? What if it completely, you know? There for a reason that. It's there for a reason. Yep. And like you said, either monitoring or if it's taken out, will it affect them? it's scary. It's scary to even think about it.

It is. Especially not knowing where it came from. Yeah. And as I've said to you one way or the other over the years, even after decades of work in this field, we have colleagues, a number of whom I consider real friends. And they are considered authorities in their area of study, and they've certainly earned the right. I still wince when I hear somebody referred to as a UFO expert. It seems like kind of an existential oxymoron. We're talking about the absolutely bloody, absolute unknown. And to be an expert in the unknown is I don't even know how to complete the sentence.

As we'll discuss a little bit later, for me, one of the guiding principles among people that do the work, among people that follow the work, among people that make fun of the work, among people who can care less about it, but love the whole hyperbole and hype and drama as captured in science fiction, good and bad. The wording of the iconic poster that helped define one of the most popular television shows in modern history

and certainly one of the most successful when it comes to looking at the paranormal and UFO research kicked in in the early 90s, and I'm sure everybody has seen episodes of it or seen them all, which is the X-Files. And in the very first episode, which either is a fan of the show, as a serious student of UFOs wanting to see how a fictional show hit the ground running to deal with the subject of UFOs in the unknown very well,

or as somebody whose life revolves around theater, film, creative arts, that first episode is as good a pilot as you will ever see for any show. Chris Carter and his writers were no slouches and they hit the ground running. My point being that in the first episode, among other things we meet, not an individual but an iconic poster that is up on the wall of Fox Mulders, office in the basement and the writers could have created any text they wanted and what did they use i want to believe and doesn't that define so much about all of us that are in the work one way or the other even if what you want to believe is that this is all nonsense and you wish it would go away

or or or yeah that's such a wonderful way to look at it there's such a delineation between want to believe and to believe, which we'll definitely touch on. Well, in terms of The X-Files, such a pop culture, boom, it changed television, in my opinion. It did. We're getting 10 new episodes from what I've learned this week with our original stars again. Nothing could excites me more that this mythos of investigating the unknown and the UFO topic continues to live on. In the mainstream, in pop culture. Real investigation.

Real investigation. In terms of pop culture, I know the reason you're here in New York this time is you gave, well, we're going to give two talks because of the attentiveness of your audience. You were only able to give one, which is astounding to say the least. One of them touched on the idea of UFOs in pop culture and how it's influenced culture in general. Could you sort of touch on that for us, Peter, what you spoke about? I'll do more than that. Cool. The very quick backstory was I had spoken early this month at the New Life Expo, which,

as some of your listeners know, is a very big franchise kind of conference. They happen in Los Angeles, New York, Palm Beach, and it's like a template. They bring in a lot of great presenters in UFOs are the least of things. it, paranormal studies, alternate healing, mystical topics, radical nutrition, mysteries and history, all of that stuff. And being a part of the one in New York City, I found really fascinating and doubly enjoyable because being that it's in Manhattan, the audience visually is not like your average generic UFO conference audience. You have everybody. in the planet there. Every race, every look possible. Very young people, very old people,

every manner of dress from street clothing to the beyond outrageous, and thousands of people, thousands of people coming and going over the four days so that it ran. Anyway, I connected or reconnected there with a gentleman who, in my life, as an investigative writer, and a public presence, I have a number of real friends who began as readers, or who heard me speak on a radio show like this, or at a conference, or, you know, saw me in a documentary, what have you, either sent me an email or made contact with me on Facebook. We became Facebook friends, and sometimes these things mutate into genuine, real friendships. And with my friend William here, we had met.

in 2013 in Washington, D.C., when I had the honor of being one of the witnesses who gave testimony before the Congressional Committee of Retired Congressional Representatives and one senator that the great Steve Bassett had created as a disclosure event at the National Press Club. And William came to my talk, my two talks and my discussion panel I was on in New York early this month. One thing led to another and he said that he had a large apartment in New York as a professional musician. He had used it for, you know, small concerts and things in kind of a salon atmosphere. And I like that tremendously, the idea that 30 or 40 people could come together in a very informal atmosphere in a home that was large enough to accommodate them where the owner had that

many folding chairs and a nice white wall. And so our plan was for this past Saturday that we would both invite guests. And I would give a version of a talk that on a subject that has fascinated me for decades that I've been developing on and off for years. And that this summer in early July, I will give a version of a talk. It, the, the, a big conference in Roswell, New Mexico. In fact, this summer is the 70th anniversary of the Roswell crash. So it will be a big special conference.

And the talk that I'm giving revolves around a subject that I can almost guarantee has crossed the mind of anyone who has seriously gone through that first door of, gosh, maybe there is something to this whole UFO phenomena, and maybe some of them are from other places, and why are they here and what's it all about. I call the talk, more or less, the origins of the UFO ridicule factor.

And the more I thought about it and began to develop it into a format, kind of a modular format that could be longer or shorter as a presentation, depending on what the sponsor wanted, was it's so counterintuitive when you look at the reality. The best example I can give is,

let's just say you and I are the friends we are through the theater, but we live in a world where the whole UFO phenomenon simply never came up. Everything else is the same. One afternoon, I run into you on the street and I say, hi, Ryan, how you doing? Good. Peter, how are you doing? Well, funny you ask. The damnedest thing happened to me last night or yesterday afternoon. I was in the yard playing with the kids.

I was on the other side of the block walking the dog. I looked up and I saw this thing or things in the sky. It was, or they were, the size of a star, zigzagging around, stopping, pulsating, changing color. It was disc-shaped. It moved erratically. It stopped. It hovered.

It came down. It landed on the neighbor's lawn. When it took off, I saw that there was kind of a burn mark there. It was oval. It was rectangular. It was as big as two battleships. It was as small as a star. They made no noise.

I wonder what it was. now in a otherwise sane, non-judgmental, logically thinking world, you would either say to me or think. I'm making an educated guess here, but I think it would probably be something like, gee, that's interesting. I wonder what it was too. Instead, we live in a world where, in most cases, if somebody says that to a neighbor, the neighbor will look at them. They'll be too polite to say. but they will think what's wrong with Peter

has he become mentally ill is he delusional does he want to fool me for some reason does he want to create a hoax to you know make people feel foolish does he want my favorite

does he want to feel special is he gone mystical or something it reminds me of a wonderful phrase of Dr. Wilhelm Reich's evasion of the obvious. Hello, I'm right here. You know, why don't you ask that other question? I wonder what it was, too.

Why? Because there is so much ridicule attached to taking UFOs seriously and their implications for humanity. And when I say UFOs, I mean that percentage of unidentified flying objects that are genuinely and truly anomalous that are not explainable in any conventional terms. you and I know that most, if not the great majority of UFOs in modern times, are very possibly explainable in conventional terms, even if they're radical conventional terms. Everything from freaky weather conditions to classified machines in the sky of things that we have that are extraordinary, you know, go down the list. And so I began to develop this paper.

and I thought, hmm, nice, if I have an opportunity to run it by an informal audience and ask for their comments on things that can strengthen it, also I thought this is a doubly interesting opportunity because if we invite an assortment of people, we can ensure that there are some people in the audience

who are very hip to UFO studies, who read the books, who go to the lectures, who know me, who are well-versed, and a whole bunch of other people that have never read a UFO book, that have never been to a UFO conference, who could care less about the subject, but the opportunity to have a friend invite them,

who they know is interested in the subject, but has only invited them in past for like a music recital. Overall, these are fairly hip, well-educated Manhattanites, and we got a wonderful mix of people over 20. So I had a secondary concern, which was, how do I breach this highly specific topic? Because it involves an awful lot of quotations from previously classified documents to newspaper articles.

And I realized for some years I've wanted to create a whole new talk. And at any given time, I'm ready to go on a dozen or 15. different subjects. Usually about half of them at different levels of development. Other ones that are kind of stock talks that I'm always updating or expanding. And other ones that occasionally a commission, another one that is taking something that I was interested in years ago and seeing if there's anything new to really radically change it over. But again, every once in a while, an entirely new idea. And the new idea I was wrestling with was some kind of UFO 101. talk with a certain caveat. Something that would be informal that would not only not be intimidating,

but that fair amount of the imagery that I was using would be rather lighthearted, but to make serious points. The history of science fiction doesn't go back to the 50s. It goes back hundreds of years. And for people that think of pulp publications in the 1950s and things, well, they had the equivalent in the 20s and 30s. And, you know, 150 years ago, you had Jules Verne. You had H.G. Wells 120 years ago. So I wanted to create a talk that would be as good an introduction to the sweep of the subject for newbies as I could. But the caveat was that not only would it not be something that would put more learned people to sleep, but that it would be as engaging for them in its own way.

The original plan was going to be, again, the first talk I had never given, I'd never even timed. I just had my PowerPoint, I had my bullet points, and I was ready to go. I thought I'll take an hour. Well into the hour and beyond, I realized, hmm, I'm still rolling on this. We have a very engaged audience. Nobody is getting bored. checking their phone.

Everybody seems absolutely right there with me, all good. And by the time we took our break, we realized, let's just stick with this. And William was pleased enough with the turnout and with the dynamics that we decided, well, we'll keep doing this. So right now, to jump ahead for a moment, it looks like we'll have another event probably late summer, maybe in August, which I will promote on my Facebook page. these things will have to unfortunately we do have a limit

in terms of the number of people and the potential audience is huge so it will be a RSVP kind of situation and you know if you're on my Facebook page great if not contact me and get on it I will always post it

on your Facebook page as well yes please etc so what we did what I did and I'd like to kind of walk you guys through it because if you want to contact Ryan or through him me and put in your two sense whether or not you've wanted to hear a talk like this or bring somebody to a talk like

this because you're interested and they're not necessarily but you'd like them to either appreciate why you are interested and why you feel it's important or to have the bug bite them and in this case it was particularly gratifying for me there are quite a number of people there that I had never met and lovely people. There were people who I knew well and who know me well, some of whom have come to my lectures for years and read what I write and, you know, follow my work, other ones who have known me for years and have never read a UFO book, never tended to lecture of mine, have no interest in the subject that I'm aware of outside of gee, my friend Peter is involved in it. So what we did was I simply began

with a series of vintage science fiction images. Some of them going back to the 1920s and 30s, showing how the subject was depicted. Right now, Ryan and I are looking at a great image from the 1920s. And it is a fully articulated flying saucer in space, disc-shaped object with the earth in the background, but it's from like 1928.

Oh, wow. And I just want to mention, we will post, these photos for the listeners to see in the show notes. So they'll be able to follow along. That would be very cruel not to. Because the thing of this, especially as New Yorkers, is that the craft has all these wiry tentacles holding on to for the uninformed person is just a big city building.

What it is, in fact, is the Woolworth building. Okay. I was wondering. It finished in 1913 and at the time the tallest building in the world. So there's your premise. They've hauled it out into space. And again, as I go through talking about the way we in the field thought about these things, it's a machine, it's made out of metal. You've got the equivalent of a dashboard, a console, and instead of people with a steering wheel, you've got aliens and suits, you know, with a little stick or something.

But to ask the questions, why are they visiting Earth? Are there only one kind visiting Earth? Are they good or are they bad? What do they want from us? What's their relationship with us? Do they mean us well or don't they? At this point, I opened up to a degree and said, I can't say definitively,

but based on decades of careful observation, interview my own limited times I've seen something that seems to be truly anomalous and my experiences are nothing in number or intensity to those of many people, simply that you interviewed among others. But I have come to an understanding, at least with myself, I'm as convinced as I can be number one, that we are dealing with a myriad of thems,

that there isn't just one kind of alien, a term I've never been comfortable with in this context, although it's the one that people understand and use the most, I usually refer to them as other intelligences. But that they come and go with impunity, but from where? Well, where do you think? Wherever you guess, it's probably a possibility that it's true. Another planet, another galaxy, another universe, another dimension,

from someplace deep in the earth to one dimension away from where we are in this room right now. but vibrating on a different frequency or what have you, or all the above, with observation posts on the moon, colonies on the back of the moon, on Mars, in the rings of Saturn, who knows?

Your guess is as good as mine. They're all valid. I think, again, based on observation, critical thinking, deductive reasoning, my many years of working with Bud Hopkins, that we can assume

that, they all have the ability to deceive us, that their technology or their consciousnesses are such that they can mess with the imagery, that they can create what we call screen memories. Yeah. That what we see may be so shocking, and they understand this, that they put in our minds instead something less shocking, although, dissonant and disturbing. Then there's a factor that a lot of our colleagues don't factor in. For me, I became more focused on it years ago when I worked as a volunteer for a wonderful

organization called the Samaritans International. And for eight years, with some very needed breaks, I worked out of their New York office where I was a crisis intervention volunteer. Oh, wow. And for four years, I worked strictly on the phones once a week. and one night a month straight through the night. And then for the second four years, I continued that job, but was also a shift supervisor because you go through a workday like this and you can be very disturbed at the end of it. In a nutshell, I worked for eight years on the busiest suicide hotline in America.

Wow. And again, crisis intervention. We were not trained to be fake mental health professionals. we were trained to be very good listeners, steer toward the pain, and do the best we could without telling people what they should do to assist them from stepping back from the ledge. I mentioned it for several reasons. One is once I really got involved, I spoke to the director discreetly and said, this is what I do. Can you let me know between you and I, if anybody ever calls the hotline because of an issue,

who related to the UFO subject, that they've been abducted and they're scared out of their wits, that they've had contact experiences, etc. It never, ever happened. The ridicule factor, even if you're calling

a suicide hotline and you're anonymous. In the busiest city in North America. Exactly. In the world. It says something about something. Are they here to help us? Are they here to hurt us? Two weeks

ago, Travis Walton, a name known to a lot of your listeners, gave a terrific talk in not far from your hometown, the city of Rochester, New York, and upstate New York after a screening of the documentary film that I had the honor of being an associate producer on, and the producer, executive producer, Jennifer Stein and I were there for Travis's screening and talk. And when asked about motivation, et cetera, one of the things that he said, I thought, well, that's well said, and I can get behind that, is if the worst scenario were in fact true, that they not only did not have our best interests at heart, but that they really did want to hurt us, conquer us, take us over, eradicate us, we wouldn't be here. or we'd all be working in the salt mines with little metal caps on our heads, staring straight ahead with blank looks on our faces. The good news is, if they're not crazy with us about us,

we are still under the illusion that we have free will and we're carrying on doing our thing, living our lives, having our dreams, that's good. I feel that in this group of different ones of them, they're the ones that were glorified to some degree or their sensibility popularized in the 1950s and early 60s

by the so-called contactees. Individuals who almost predated the hippie movement of the 60s not so much with love and peace, but that they are here in peace and it's all about love. And, you know, they want us to evolve spiritually.

They want us to not to spoil the earth. They want us to, you know, in harmony, like the other creatures in the universe. A lovely idea, I hope it's true, and some of them may actually, you know, embody that thought. I went through images relative to contact T-Movement and the Welcome the Space Brothers. Oh, I love this poster. We'll definitely post this one. This used to hang on my wall. It woke up to it every day. What the picture we're talking about is a iconic book cover from a book published in 1956, by a UFO writer named Gray Barker,

who is kind of the godfather of paranoid conspiracies in UFO studies and the legendary ubiquitous and now pop culture icons, the men in black. Yes, yes. And he had the best ever book title for a book, you know, to make you look over your shoulder. They knew too much about flying the saucers. That's right. You laugh, but wait till the men in black come for you, Ryan.

Yes, it's only a matter of time, I would assume. And from this, moving on to the work of Jacques Valet, a marvelous contributor to the field and truly independent thinker who broke the mold distressing the hardcore, they're from outer space, and they're in hard machines of advanced technology, to theorize about other aspects of what they were about, where they might be from, what their modus operandi was, one of his earliest books had a title that summed it up in terms of something that Bud believed very strongly, and I agree, messengers of deception.

Whatever else it is about them, there are secrets behind what's being said that whatever the truth is is not the primary thing that's being put forward. Right. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I talked about the fact that in this one, work where you're struggling with the unknown and trying to wrap your head around what would look like miracles and magic if we weren't in the scientific era, although some people are not in that era, even though they live here with us, that I am able to draw from and learn from are not from UFO studies. They're from science fiction. Gene Roddenberry, for example, wasn't just a great science fiction writer, the creator of Star Trek, of course. He was a real visionary like H.G. Wells, like Jules Verne.

And as anybody knows who has watched episodes, he often used his television serieses, because they mutated over the years, to talk about important social observations, human interactions. I never really got beyond the initial two years. I'm pure Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. And I remember in one of the themes dealt with, in one of them, or it came up fairly regularly, actually, has to do with one of the set pieces. The Federation, which is the one more old government of the earth, I think 300 years in the future. And another tangent we went off on was 300 years in the future, I think not.

We are dealing with the possibilities of 3,000, 30,000, 300,000, 3,000. 3 million, 30 million years in the future, we don't know. But to assume for the sake of familiarity or trying to, you know, keep a contact with them, that it's such a short distance is, I think, kind of naive. In this, in the world of Roddenberry and the Federation, there was something called the prime directive. And what it was was when you interface with a culture that is less evolved than you. Never play all your cards. Never allow them to understand or see how much advanced you are than they are. Why? Because their cultural collapse. Now, that wasn't just some science fiction premise. I remember reading Carl Young on this subject years ago interviewing somebody we might

call a witch doctor. The interview might have taken place in the 20s, referring back to something that it happened, say, 30 years before in Central Africa, when British troops penetrated into an area where the natives had never, ever seen an outsider and certainly not a white person, and certainly not a whole bunch of white people in red jackets with these long sticks and these weird hats. And one question leading to another,

he said, what was the impact on your culture and your society? And I believe the quote, very poignant was, oh well our dreams died I mean were they gods were they ghosts were they devils were they you know we all we knew is that everything we thought we knew was in the gutter

and maybe that is a core of what we would call the threat of deception that runs through however if they don't mean us well there'd be other reasons why they would certainly want to deceive us moving on the idea

that they are violent and that we have to build our defenses against them. Reagan's whole strategic shield, missile shield, that we are now unbelievably, once again, trotting out under the Trump administration, in so many words, to create a protection of the zone. I think originally was all about this mechanical hope that we could fight off this exotic threat

when it's just something that is the ultimate picnic for the military industrial complex and everybody knows its nonsense and it won't work. But the macho aggressiveness of human beings being what it is, I pointed out with pop culture images like bad aliens and comic books, then going back to academic reading of the time Harold Wilkins' book Flying Saucers on the Attack that there was and remains this school of being in the field

that does feel we have to be wary about it. I feel we do, and I also feel we can be open to other ones because we're dealing like we're dealing with people. Some mean us well, some don't. And when it comes to bad aliens, of course, my favorites are the Martians from the great Tim Burton's Mars attacks. Terrifying. The only film series or the only film ever made based entirely on a set of bubble gum cards. And I wish I had the whole series. Be worth some money today, I bet.

Interestingly, and I was able to insert into the talk, that Stephen Hawking in 2010 or 11 made a very provocative statement that he felt that we should probably not even be trying to contact them because if they get our message, they're probably well in advance of us, that it's just too risky and that like Jung and the tribal elder, granted that there may be life forms that are so different than us that might not even recognize them because they live in, you know, an atmosphere and thrive on ammonia and other horrible gases that, you know, at 380 degrees that would emulate us. But his feeling was that they might well come to us in the spirit that the first Europeans came to North and South America, and that didn't work out very well for the locals. The other thing is to

think of the point of view. It's sort of a counter-reaction to the contactee movement that we have become the bad guys. Well, we certainly have in terms of taking care of our host organism, namely the Earth, and some of them may really value this planet. Maybe it's a lot rarer than we imagine or as rare as we imagine. Maybe it is a way station partway between here and someplace else, but that it is important to them. And we, the host organisms,

are toxifying at such a rate that we may kill it for all of us. And that makes us look bad and it should. Talked about a couple of famous nonsensical aspects of it, cults that utilize the whole UFO thing like the Rayleigh and in Canada, others that are more vicious.

And then we jump cut. And I took the audience back 6,000 years, 6,500 years. Whiplash. To images, absolutely bona fide images from ancient Sumeria. Ones that were kind of kicked off in the 60s by a Swiss German journalist who had an idea for a book looking at the possibility of visitations from UFO occupants going back to Time and Memorial.

And he published a book called Chariots of the Gods. And at this point, I believe Eric von Daniken has sold eight squadrillion copies in 40 languages. And it's still kicking ass. Exactly. You got your copy. I've got my copy right here. And it's just a publishing phenomenon.

Ten years later, a genuine antiquarian scholar named Zachariah Sitchin, who was a specialist in, Sumerian texts picked up the thread along with other ancient scholars and wrote what I felt was an important book, The 12th Planet, that brings us back to ancient Samaria, understanding from his first generation transcriptions from the original cuneiform, which some scholars have called into question, others except a day-to-day life in the world of an ancient Sumerian. But then interesting, usage of terms and words to more than suggest that it was a society of human beings with some non-human beings who had sexual relations with real women and created

beings who are half us and half them referred to as God's plural small g and who flew in these apparatus is coming and going the first epic poem we have Gilgamesh there are parts that can be read to suggest that Gilgamesh was taken in a fiery chariot to another kingdom off the earth returned having learned certain lessons and showing the images

and while saying that I feel they're provocative they're interesting they don't prove anything moving on from there to 3,000 BC and taking us to remote parts of what's now modern Australia

and looking at cave paintings, some of which have been utilized to suggest that they are off-world beings. Went off on a tangent here about the very popular American television show Ancient Aliens, hosted by Dear Georgio and his famous hair. A very nice guy, by the way,

who I'm very happy with his success. I knew him back in the day. And not as crazy as people. people would think. He's a very grounded, normal person. It's television people. Exactly. And again, a very nice guy. For me, ancient aliens,

which is one of the most popular shows ever, on the theme of extraterrestrials, etc. The title that they chose is a very double-edged sword. It's obviously been successful not just in viewership, but in selling commercial time, being a moneymaker for its network,

for producers, for hosts, etc. And after an initial season or two of seizing on what I felt overall were very good examples of what if like the Zacharias Sitchin's books. Each successive book took us a little bit further out into the land of

I'm asking you to take a greater leap of faith with my interpretation. When you look at these cave paintings that for me have the vitality of modern art, I love them for what they are, but oh, they've got big black eyes and they've got what can be interpreted as radiating lines coming off of their heads and only a suggestion of a nose and no mouth.

Oh my God, they're gray aliens. No. My first thought, applying deductive reasoning. Here was a chance with the audience to talk a little about my investigative method. Deductive reasoning is something I learned through a character created by a British writer in the 19th century, the writer being Arthur Conan Doyle, the character being Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I became enamored by the Holmes character at about 11 or 12 years old, specifically from watching this series of black and white films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce,

beloved representatives, wonderful British actors, and one of the things that the Holmes character practiced was deductive reasoning. Essentially, my investigative method is built on, here's the mystery presented to me. I am going to assume that it can be solved with the most mundane every day down-to-earth explanation. It's like when you put something down and you don't remember where you put it, deductive reasoning suggests that you retrace all of your steps, that you don't go into an exotic explanation, that it dematerialized that the cat ate it, that it has gone through a fourth-dimensional thing, that an alien stole it,

you look where you might have left it. If it doesn't pan out, you take one step up to the second most everyday explanation, and you repeat the process. Now, what I don't like about it is that it's boring and hell and time consuming. It's not at all sexy. It's not fun to write about because there's nothing to really tell. It's the grunt work of investigative work. However, the trap for somebody like you or I, you do this work long enough,

you see what amounts to a preponderance of evidence that you could take into court, that could put somebody in jail for years, that convict somebody of murder and have them lose their life. We have that kind of evidence. And there are some of us who, after a certain period of time, my phrase for us, is that we no longer have the luxury of disbelief. Anybody who has ever been taken? Who the hell cares what intellectual point of view they may have about a certain book, they know because they've lived it. But we do have colleagues who because they know these things happen. If presented with evidence that's fairly exotic, oh my God, that probably is an alien, you know, and that an aborigine did so that their culture would remember it. Well,

maybe yes, maybe no, but I'm far from convinced. And we go through some of these examples that I felt they're provocative, even ones that are even more provocative. One we're looking at right now that you should post is two beings, rock paintings. What makes these beings different, they're radiating lines coming off their head. Don't start at the head. They start

at another line that's drawn around the head. Now, if this was a medieval kind of painting, we would see, you know, we would reference it, to the kind of halo, you know, that Mary might have or Jesus is something. But in this particular thing, we see these two beings, and they almost seem to be floating. They're interacting. They have things in their hand. They have this line drawn around their head, which might be interpreted as a protective,

clear thing that they're wearing, and lines coming off it that might be energy. Right, maybe. I look at it, and I think to myself, this partly based, again, on critical thinking, deductive reasoning, a knowledge of the ancient arts to a degree. I have a BFA in painting. I've taught painting for years. I spent part of today in the ancient Central American exhibits in the Museum of Natural History looking at masks,

partly just thinking about some of this stuff, that that line surrounding the head might be a piece of wood, a branch, a fresh branch that could be bent, that could be attached to a wooden armature that is part of, I have a small collection of tribal masks, that then had sticks stuck into it. If I have to choose between that, even though that sounds a little off the beaten path,

or that this is a Aboriginal painting of two ancient aliens, I think the odds are better that it's two guys with some kind of ceremonial apparatus on their head. But we don't know. where it gets interesting we show some well-known fakes is

at this point I brought my audience to Naska Peru and we talked about the fact that this is one of the remote areas in the Andes that there is a plateau where

by dint of probably laying out lines with strings that ran hundreds and hundreds of feet. Working with a master plan, they created a sophisticated series of lines that suggest the kind of lines you might find or think about in terms of a runway, but pictures of beings that could only be observed from the air. And the way the images were created was this plateau is covered with pebbles. And so maybe for a width of several inches, for hundreds of feet in one direction,

the people who executed this art project, let's call it, simply removed the pebbles within that area. This is a very conscious act, and it suggests that the people who oversaw it, who created the project, were working with an understanding that it could be appreciated from only above. Right.

Now, this is interesting. Does that mean? They saw UFOs. They knew there were beings in the sky, obviously gods or advanced beings or whatever, and we would make these drawings for them. A logical idea. I showed a number of pictures of how sophisticated they were

and how huge they were. Mass. Everything from a being kind of funky, but basically humanoid, you know, two legs, head, eyes, that kind of thing, to a monkey. Is that a monkey? Yep.

to a hummingbird, to a spider, drawn with the efficiency and the grace of a modern art drawing. It's one thing that as a devotee of the arts that I love about, certain aspects of the ancient arts and the whole modernist movement. There is a vitality that is reflected in each other, and don't think for a second that people like Picasso and Matisse and that whole generation of early modernists did not know about, appreciate, and enjoy

ancient tribal arts. However, I guess I dashed everybody's dreams with this, not to say that it wasn't done with a credible possibility of beings in the sky, et cetera. But years ago, National Geographic did a documentary addressing Naska Plains in the mystery. I love National Geographic. I grew up with it.

It's a wonderful publication. They've done ever so much good work in popularizing exploration, mysteries in the world, natural habitats. They've done wonderful work in everything except for the area of UFO studies. They're debunkers. And they treat it with the sarcasm, with the causticness, with the silliness, with the pseudoscience that the worst, you know, pioneers of the original cover-up did. And what they did, though, was brilliant. they had a premise which was, was it possible that this kind of imagery was created because the rulers of this culture, whether it was not the royalty or the high priests, that they were able to create hundreds of years before the French mastered lighter than air flight, some kind of balloon that could take them up, that they could then observe the green. ground. And what they did, son of a gun, with things that even though not on the plane itself,

because it's barren, but in the surrounding area, wicker to create a basket, animal skins that were thin enough and connected enough that they could create a balloon type shape, using, you know, hemp, raffia to create ropes to connect a basket to the balloon. And then with an understanding gained, watching nature or how fires work, that they could create a fire, not have the whole apparatus catch on fire, but that the heat could fill the balloon and that it would float up a couple hundred feet and that the king or the high priest could look down and say, I'm pretty special. Look at that. They created it. I can see it. They know conceptually because they've seen the drawings. This is cool. It's good to be king.

Now, once again, we can't prove it. We can't disprove it. This is very interesting to me, though. It is a viable explanation for any true believer or anyone who wants to believe that it was aliens that predicated these wonderful drawings on the Naskapal planes. I have, unfortunately, put a damper on that dream. And they may be right. But this is where we are. At a certain point, though, there came a tipping point for me.

And it happens, well, it starts in the Bible. I grew up in my religious tradition in Reform Judaism with the understanding that the Bible, the Old Testament, was a combination of things, among which included myths, legends, morality tales, true stories, stories to create a lesson that you could learn from, taking myths from earlier cultures and recreating them for your new Judeo-Christian situation. And there are, for me, as not a terribly religious person, spiritual, yes, religious no, a number of areas in the Old Testament that literally jump out at us and suggest, I'm a little different.

I might just be somebody's attempt back in the day to, to capture and articulate a person trying to express as well as they can their appreciation that they're witnessing something totally paradigm shifting for them, totally life-changing, that in reality is a genuine anomalous event involving advanced technology and beings from off-earth or off dimension or off whatever. Ezekiel's wheel is the one that I find the most intriguing. And maybe 20 years ago, because this is the way I'm wired up, I decided to do a little study of it. I had my own version of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Union one, a little book that I was given when I was bar mitzvah.

I went to our local library, and I took out several versions of the Old Testament. I have friends who are different kinds of Christians, and I borrowed Bibles from them. and I ended up with like seven different versions of the Old Testament. I went to Ezekiel and I read each Bible's translation of Ezekiel from beginning to end. My surprise was how little they differed from each other. Only in minutiae. Essentially it's Ezekiel's minding his own business and low in the heavens come with something, a wheel within a wheel of the appearance of burnished beryllium, i.e. metal.

It comes down. We know it's round. It has eyes all about. I wonder what they could have meant by eyes all about. Maybe windows, like on a modern craft or something. But it's metallic. It comes down. It kicks up the sand. And out of it low, emerges an angel. Number one, the word angel. We think of it. I mean, we hear it, and we immediately apply it to the world of theology to religious and mystical image. to that positive ethereal spirit with the big wings that help save people and are God's messengers, etc. The first use we have of the word angel that we can identify is in Sumerian. Even if there are cultures on this earth that thrived 40,000 years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40 million years ago, the earliest language form we have and can begin to wrap our heads around as Sumerian. the word angel had nothing to do with religion. And where it would have been as comfortable as any other word would have been in the halls of power. In Washington, in Parliament, in the United Nations, it means emissary or go between.

But the angel cometh from the wheel within a wheel with the eyes all around, and it is encased in burnished beryllium, i.e. a suit that seems metallic. It has a head, but on one side of the head is a lion. On the other side is another animal. Well, here we are. We're landing on this planet of simple beings. Let's just say that we have a mission, that we want to affect their culture in a way that will help them to evolve intellectually and morally. And we're going to impart some thoughts to them, again, like a Star Trek episode. And I'm out, I may be, some people may think I'm at outrageously inappropriate here in making this suggestion. But a lot of people would also disagree with me. In the 1970s, somebody who was very interested in this idea, had read the seminal book that woke a lot of folks up relative to this at the time. Eric von Danikin's chariots of the gods was talking about Ezekiel and his feelings about it with a friend of his who could have cared less. Joseph Blumberich was a NASA

system designer who had worked on the lunar landing module, who was an engineer who could give two S's about the whole idea of ancient astros. and things and was ready to dismiss it, but as I recall, kind of on partly a dare, partly a whim, re-read Ezekiel or read Ezekiel, and was shocked to see with just a little bit of latitude that he could allow himself as an engineer, that what he was reading about was a module. It was a machine made to land, made to take off. And he worked up a schematic of it. And he published a book that's a minor classic.

Anybody interested in the UFO subject should have it in their library. And like many good books that are out of print, you can find it online for a couple of bucks. Yeah. Paperback copy, occasionally a hardcover. It's called The Spaceships of Ezekiel by Joseph Blomrich, B-L-U-M-R-I-C-H, as I remember. Again, I am working an audience on Saturday of folks that have never, thought about some of this stuff, along with people who have thought about it a lot. You know as a public speaker, you and I both have had training as actors.

You've used it. I have never used it to act, but I've used it to know enough as a public speaker that if I chose to act up there, it would be a disastrous decision. I know to keep out of my own way in terms of the emotion that comes up in my voice. if I'm feeling something, I never sit on it. That audience knows it. I don't play tough guy and pose that I'm above this. But you let the passion come through and you understand that form as important as content. You can be dealing with the most interesting subject matter, but remembering, you know, a teacher that you had, one teacher in elementary school, middle school, high school, college,

that made a difference. Part of the reason was they got to you with the information that they wanted to impress on you. But in order to do that, they did it with a certain style or a little humor or real passion. And it's incumbent on people like us. If we want to help people step through that door into, I didn't believe it, it's not that I believe it now, I am open to take it. taking it seriously. And that's a huge change for me. Yeah. Went over other Bible stories, but then we come to the year 776 or 766, and I show the audience of Fresco from like the Norman invasion times. It is a soldier, a Saxon, and his arms are raised and in the sky above him.

in a very simple form is something that for me is a game changer. It could be a satellite. It could be a ship. It's encased in lines that show it's going in one direction. Propulsion. Yeah. It's like a modern art depiction. But for me, and again, that's what I'm trying to get the audience here. I'm a free thinker. Don't believe me.

think for yourself, but this is why this is impelling to me. This is different. Then you say to yourself, again, you don't have to be some kind of scholar. You simply need to be a human being that can self-perceive and try to put yourself in the spot of another human being. This impacted on somebody to such a degree that they felt they had to commit it to paper or parchment or what have you. Now, The other thing to always keep in mind, especially in this period on here, is the preponderance of religious imagery. Almost all visual arts for hundreds of years through this period of time into the 18th century was in the service of the church or commissions for wealthy people. This is not that. So at this point we go to 1350, a large religious fresco of the crucifixion on the wall of a Yugoslavian monastery, except in the upper right and the upper left, we have two craft, one in each corner, and craft is what they are, and they have beings in them.

Oh, geez. Now, is there a way that we can look at this and say, oh, it's an allegorical image that they thought there were people in comments piloting them? Absolutely possible. Why not? And we're going to make it into a stylized thing like this. This is not that much different than a very famous image from it's either Inkin or Mayan culture of what looks like a native Central American in a capital. with a lot of technology with their foot on a pedal, with the hand on and tiller. This is simpler.

But these two things, for me, are very provocative. Again, they don't push me over the edge, but like that previous one from 766, they do take me to the edge. Unlike the much more theoretical ho-hum, it's not a guy with charcoal under his eyes and sticks coming out of his hair. It's definitely an alien. Then we come to the one that everything changes around for me. 15th century credited to a master painter named Lippi, L-I-P-P-I. It's a Madonna and Child, Tundo, in other words, with a circular framing device, and whether it's baby Jesus and one of the early followers as a child or not is open to speculation.

It's a classic mid-1400s depiction of Mary with her hands in prayer, except in the upper right up in the sky is something. And just below it, there's something on earth. When we look closer, what we see is that the something ain't an image of a religious being. It isn't a comet. it isn't a depiction of an angel. It's an oval-shaped thing with radiating lines coming off of it. Then, for me, as somebody who painted passionately for 10 years,

if it hadn't been for my obsession with this crazy subject, I'd like to think I'd be a successful painter somewhere in Lower Manhattan, with homes in Paris, Nice, and wherever else I wanted. It's never too late. Right. But bearing in mind that before the 1830s, if you were a painter, you were a realistic painter. People didn't paint hamstracks. And whatever you did, if you were in Europe, you may well have had a made-a-living doing commissions for the church, at that same time taking commissions from wealthy people to do their portraits.

Let's just say, you, like a modern, one of the many people that you interviewed for your book, had had a profoundly unambiguous UFO sighting. And you couldn't stop thinking about it. You were out with your dog when it happened. And you thought about it enough and you realized it was important enough and that you, as a social chronicler, you were the camera, that it was important enough that you felt you had to put it in an image that would move into the future.

And so you painted yourself where you were on the hillside in the background of this Madonna and child with your dog. And you're both looking up at it. Your hand is over here, shading your eyes. You can't believe what you're seeing. Because you've never seen anything like it. It's something. It's real.

It's advanced. You don't know what a machine is on a certain level, but this is not natural. This, for me, is one of the most important paintings ever made in history. It was considered so important 20 years ago when Lawrence Rockefeller obsessed with the subject, was working with a small group of equally committed individuals, to try to create an awareness and a groundswell among our highest, elected and appointed officials to take the subject seriously. And Lawrence paid for the production of a really elegant volume, I think 500 copies were printed, called UFOs the best evidence.

It's possible to find a paperback copy. I forget what it came out as a paperback, but Don Berliner of the Fund for UFO Research and Antonio Hunais put it together, and they're both to be credited for that. But it went out to the president, the vice president, joint chiefs of staff, the cabinet members, every member of Congress and the Senate, key people and military industrial complex, world leaders around the world, it made no difference. But featured prominently in this beautifully bound, beautifully printed book, was a full color painting of the painting, a picture of the painting we're looking at now. For me, this is a game changer. And we moved on from here to talk about the overflights in Germany in 1599 that they created broadsides of to show something that was so

important to people at the time that they felt it should be committed. Broad sides, basically, were single sheets with an image printed on them. It might have text, you know, to tell you about an important event, or it might just be a picture. And the most famous one, the one that we're looking at now that you, listeners will see on Ryan's website for the show, is a famous one in UFO studies. There are written accounts, monasteries, kept the best written accounts throughout the dark ages and the Middle Ages, and a number of credible descriptions of what we'll have to call UFO events have come to us from those scholarly sources.

For me, there's another great pair, one in a fresco that I don't have my notes with me here. I think it was in Central Europe. And it shows, credibly, not just a disk-shaped object, hovering over a building, but one that is articulated in a way where you can see it's either panels or striations. In other words, it's not just a disk-shaped object. it's a certain model of a flying machine or it's a design you know this is interesting it's early 1600s then we I was lucky enough and this bit of research was turned up by our friends at open minds some years ago in an article on you know ancient possibilities and what they had

on earthed I mean floating around I had seen images but they produced a good one was a medallion that was struck in France, I think in I don't know, 1680, but in the 17th century, and it shows the same goddamn thing. Oh my gosh. It's absolutely the identical model to the one from the monastery, years earlier, in another country.

For me, once again, this is the real deal. This is exciting. This is provocative. This can convince me of a visitation. Again, I can't prove it, but I could see

that my audience not only got the point, but that people I knew who were well-versed in the general subject and people that this was, I'd like to think, an evening that they won't soon forget, that opened their minds to the possibilities, that they were all reacting

the same. This one does push it over the edge, and that's exciting. Then what I did was I made a jump cut, basically, from a rather beautiful and poignant 17th century painting of it's sort of a religious scene on the ground. I'm going to say that it's Jesus with a woman who is kind of bowing down

and there is a beatific light shining down on them from above. But the source of the light is not an opening in the clouds or the sun. It is a fully articulated disc-shaped object At this point, I introduced to the audience the notion that if you grew up Catholic, you'd know this is just part of your litany education as a Catholic. If not, it was such an important cultural event in the early 20th century that it transcended religious constrictions, namely the miracle of Fatima.

In, I think, 1918 and 19, several sheep herders children, illiterate, observed what they called a vision of the Virgin Mary in the sky, and they fell to their knees, and they prayed to her, and they felt that, you know, that something important had happened. When we look at the actual description, because they spoke to a number of people who took, they became world famous, this was seen as certainly one of the greatest Catholic miracles of the previous several, hundred years, the miracle of Fatima, you know, is the real deal. Absolutely. But what did they actually see?

Yeah. And when you read those accounts, period accounts direct from the kids, what they saw was not a beautiful image of Mary in the sky. What they saw was a large, glowing disc light. Yeah. And this is a version of that. So partly for, again, I'm doing this with you. you guys on this radio show. I'm doing it with you, Ryan, but this is unusual for me to put together

a brand new talk and to try to think it through and how is this going to be most effective. One thing that you find out as an investigative writer is a writer is you can put the same information down in, you know, a brief summation of a paragraph, in a page, in a chapter, an entire book. But there is an art to what order you put what. If you put something incredibly provocative and challenging too early before you've given your readers a chance to acquire the tools to wrap their heads around what you're going to present, it will blow their fuses and you're not going to make your point. It may even develop some resentment and you lost a very important opportunity because you're not going to get it again. So I'm thinking to myself, I want to now

continue the role of my narrative, which obviously is fairly freewheeling, but do it in a way with a little bit of drama, but not hype. And so what I do, what I did on Saturday was I jumped from the painting I just described, I think early 18th century painting, to a photograph taken in Brazil in 1952 of a brilliantly articulated disc-shaped object. At this point, I explained briefly to the audience that if you want to see images of UFOs just go online type

flying saucers or UFO pictures, photographs and you'll get 80 quadrillion of them. The problem being that almost all of them come without any provenance, any photographer,

any knowledge of their character, the circumstances where it was taken, the time, the date, the witnesses, if any, blah, blah, blah. Any schnook who knows basic Photoshop can create an image that is compelling. And that's cool, and that's a shame. Because unless you know a professional photo analyst or R1 yourself, you can be hard-pressed to go anywhere with the image.

So I often rely on black and white pre-digital 1950s, 1960s, 1960s photographs to make my photographic points. When I move into the world of color film and digital photographs, I try to know my source, who the photographer was, if possible, know something about the photographer, the circumstances, the character, etc. In the old days, and I began, you know, looking at the subject in the 1970s, I, you know, was looking at black and white and color photos, but they were all analog. chemical print photos. One thing that I learned early on, on my own, reinforced by one of my early

mentors, Coleman von Kovetsky, who was a retired colonel staff officer of the Royal Hungarian Army, and during World War II in charge of photo analysis, photo reconnaissance, photo education, very knowledgeable man about photography and was a consultant for many years in the States. If this was a fake and what we had done would create this wonderful image of a UFO either photographed a model, very good, or done a really nice, effective drawing, then cut it out with a scissor, then glued it down.

With the standard 10-powered glass, you could see the edge of the paper where it had been cut. When the fakers started to realize that, they might hold it and then work at the edge with the graphite pencil. so it was now dark instead of light, but you'd still see slightly rays off the surface. Of course, this doesn't come into play

when we have a digital image. So what I did was go through some of the finest, you know, not the sexiest, but some of the finest authentic images that we have. I talked a bit about Dr. Bruce McAbee, who for decades was the go-to guy, informally, I guess still, in photo analysis,

Bruce being an optical physicist who worked for over 30 years as a consultant to the United States Navy. Many of these photos of the classics that I showed had been through hundreds of hours of authentic photo analysis and had the real stories attached. We knew about the photographers. We knew about the situations. We knew how many witnesses and where and that they were the real deal. Some of them, the famous Washington, D.C. overflight. I hear made a point of telling the audience, you need to know that this is a colorized photo.

I'm a film lover. I really hate colorization in the old black and white movies. I'm not crazy about it in photographs, unless it's sort of for an art reason. But there came a time in 1952 when a fleet of unidentified, truly anomalous objects came down over Washington, D.C. and hung over the Capitol building.

Thousands of people saw them. they were photographed and refotographed. It was hours before the Air Force got a plane up and this was the excuse. This should have changed the world. It didn't. I'm showing you this photograph colorized because the famous version of it is black and white, of course, so that you can think for a minute I could have been one of those people or my grandfather could have been one of those people and seen that.

That would have changed the way they thought about this subject forever. How come something didn't happen? again remembering that in my imagination, this talk was going to be fairly succinct and brief, and then I was going to go into the origin of the ridicule factor. But it's on its own, I realize at the end it stands up for itself. Once I completed going through what I considered some of the finest, most authentic UFO photos ever taken and where possible, talking about the photographers, at least briefly, and the circumstances that I was aware of, We looked at a couple of the possibilities of things that have been mistaken for UFOs.

And I always try to stress to my audiences if it comes up that I'm convinced, long convinced, that some most, perhaps at this point, the great majority of things that are seen, where people go, oh, my God, it's an unidentified flying object, are likely, more likely explainable in conventional terms. To quote, our friend and mentor, the senior guy. in the world on UFOs right now and an inspiration to me. Stanton M. Friedman, a lecturer, writer, author, retired nuclear physicist. The question is not, are UFOs advanced technology from other planets? The question is, has one ever been? And of course, more than one has ever been.

but lenticular clouds, reflections off of the low, you know, weather system, so many different things. I point out one specific of physical evidence associated with the famous case and then move on to kind of some things up, using a series of old political cartoons from the 1950s where the media was somewhat obsessed with the subject. but doing anything they could to put it down. At the same time, it was like a scab that they couldn't not pick. It was used as an allegory of the soaring cost of living, you know, a disc flying into the air, or the soaring cost of coffee where your saucer also had a cup, get it, ha-ha. And my favorite, a political cartoon of three aliens in a saucer, well, in the cup, in a saucer,

and below them in the distance is the earth. And the caption of one of them is saying to the other two is I did too see a flying ball. And this was the Chicago newspaper. Right, Chicago Sun that had originally published it. Where we go from there, as I summed up, was how seriously government agencies have taken this over the decades, while demeaning it, making fun of it, putting forward their pseudoscience, I showed a picture of a poster that won a monthly contested Defense Intelligence Agency of a little flying saucer with a dome with an alien in the dome crashing into a filing cabinet.

Text being security is no accident and has to be practiced. I want to believe. Official government schematics in this case. one, how do you report, you know, a missile, an incoming missile, an enemy ship, an enemy plane? And when we look, also, how do you report a spaceship or a flying saucer? Is it hostile? Is it sufficient, unidentified? And it's classed right in there with submarines and enemy aircraft. Right. I then show a few documents, legally declassified from different agencies and talk about how they should have Had they, we lived in a world that was reflexive, when this was declassified.

One we're looking at here is a very famous July, early July, 1947 FBI document. It was declassified technically before we had a Freedom of Information Act that we did get under President Carter, wonderful contribution, although they've tightened up on it tremendously. But what we have here is a document in which a special agent is talking about the disclositive, phenomena and that the army, you know, has been looking into it and that there have been fakes and, you know, should we look. The second in command, Clyde Tolson, who probably was Jayette Hoover's lover, a whole other story there. He felt at the time that they shouldn't look into it because of the

ridicule factor, because people were already making fun of it that early on. The fact is, Tolson was wrong. there was maybe one fabrication that we knew of. All of the other reports seemed to be authentic. But where this document goes completely off the rails in the most amazing way possible is in the written statement in his inimitable handwriting. Jay Edgar Hoover, who says, you know, I would do it. But before agreeing to it, we must insist upon full access to discs recovered. What the F?

Full access to discs recovered? What? the head of the FBI in the first week of July of 1947, a week after Roswell, and then saying, for instance, in the LA or SA case, the Army grabbed it and wouldn't let us have it for cursory examination. This document, which the FBI has never denied is real, was declassified quietly, I believe in the 1970s, found its place in the National Archives, was on earth by UFO researchers, just publishing this, it's real, it's factual. Jay Edgar Hoover here is talking about getting access to these crashed UFOs.

And in fact, a week or so later, in the reference to General Shuligan, which comes earlier in this document, who is an Army General very involved at the beginning of the cover-up, we have an equally bona fide document, a communication from Shuligan to Hoover. saying within a matter of a week or two or so, that the FBI would be given full access to discs recovered. Now, whether or not that remained over the decades we can only question, but early on in that summer of 47, a week, two weeks, three weeks after Roswell, we have this exchange.

This should have blown the lid. This would have been the ultimate WikiLeaks thing. What happened? Nothing happened. Then talk about Project. Sign. And here's where we're really getting into the end of the talk. Project Sign was the first actual full report conducted by the then brand new United States Air Force, their Air Material Command Division report about the UFO phenomenon. If there was another one, it was so highly classified

that we don't even know it existed. I tend to doubt it. It would have taken some months to do this. It was issued that summer of 49, I think. I have to blow that up. I forget. at 48 or 49. It looks like 48. Yeah, I think February 48. And what we have here is 40 pages, mostly a bureaucratic government going on and on, of what it isn't and what it couldn't be and why it couldn't be. And then about 30-odd pages in, well, 25 pages in,

we get a page and then a few other references on a few following pages that looked like they were lifted from the original working script of the day the earth stood still. We have some personnel who emerges and says something so jaw-dropping to me that it is. It's one of the most important statements

ever made. It's made in the winter of 1948 and it goes like this. Spaceships, the following considerations pertain. And they talk about if there is an extraterrestrial civilization that, you know, its probability is it's more advanced

than ours. Then quote on quote, such a civilization might observe that on earth we now have atomic bombs and are fast developing rockets. In view of the past history of mankind, they should be alarmed. We should therefore expect at this time above all to behold such visitations. It's mind-blowing. I remember how excited I was when I got this document in my library, 30 years ago. ago, I thought I'm sitting on something really important here. I'm doing important work. Surely, in the next years, somebody in major media is going to discover this and this is going

to bust it over. Yeah, yeah. Never happened. Talked about the mania of cover-up and one of my favorite anecdotes that Stanton Friedman, who probably sued the government for more documents than anybody in history that at the NSA the folks who are involved in keeping some of these secrets it began to dawn on them

that blacking out huge tracts of pages made it look like they were hiding something and it looks kind of well repressive you know we're looking at a page here that has like four words and a lot of big hunkin

blackouts and what they started to do, and I think in their minds, living in their own little insular world, they may well have believed that it would make a difference. They started using whiteout. Yeah. And so you have pages that look like snow. Just blank

paper. Yeah, but they're... Beautiful snowflakes. They're nicer. They're less nasty than the obvious blackouts. Then I close on this note. In the late 70s, I was into the subject for a few years.

NASA had put out a catalog. I think it could buy it for a buck. It had hundreds of little numbers that corresponded to a line of text about where a certain photo was taken. Essentially what they did was they drew from the thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of photos that had been taken over the preceding years

with passes around the moon and as close as they could get to Mars of the surface. And you could order a photo from NASA. They were a dollar each, but it wasn't a print. I mean, it was an old-fashioned, eight-by-ten glossy chemical print photograph. They used Hasselblatt equipment on all of their space shots, state-of-the-art, certainly right up there with Lika and Nikon,

the best optics in the world. And they made these available to space buffs, a word I don't understand. and always seems condescending. But anybody who was interested could order some of these pictures and look at the surface of the moon. Pretty close up from 300 miles up. I grew up with a father who was a jeweler,

and from the time I was a little boy, I had my own 10-power loop, like another kid would have a magnifying glass. And at the time, myself, Pete Mazzola, a tough, no-nonsense New York City police detective, who was one of my mentors and a great UFO investigator, Antonio Huneas, early scholar, 70s, 80s and on from there. And one or two other friends, together, we ordered, I don't know, a dozen or, you know, 20 prints.

And then we all looked at them, you know, I'm finished with these, you look at these. I went over every millimeter I could with my little loop, and I discovered a couple of things that made my jaw drop. What we all quickly realized before the catalog was withdrawn from circulation and the program stopped was that when NASA, as a public service, put this idea together and got it out there, there was no way they had the manpower or maybe even thought through. Maybe we better have somebody or several people look at every square micron of each one of these photos to make sure there's nothing that might be embarrassing. Well, there was some stuff that was very embarrassing.

It was not a fractal. It was not, you know, the old man in the mountain. It was not Jesus in the tortilla chip. It was not a face in a branch. All that stuff is real, and it happens. And sometimes shockingly so. But there are things, configurations. structures on the surface of Mars and the moon that are not natural.

I don't know what happened to those photos. I don't remember which ones I had. Maybe before I die, there's a box I haven't opened. I'll find them. I've seen teasing references to them over the years. David Childress, Hatcher Childress has a book out for years now called ancient archaeology. it doesn't have copies of the photos, but it has copies of a handful of what seemed to be

second and third generation copies so the grain is breaking down a bit, but they're real copies of allegedly real photos. And I have a few. You can find them. I would suggest to your listeners who are interested build a file the same way that you can download sections of video

of anomalies happening, photograph, from the state station, just put anomalies in space, structures on the moon, structures on Mars. One that completely blew my mind that not only is not any chance that it's natural, but reminded me only of maybe what a really big, multifaceted terminal would look like from the air at an international airport.

I mean, really off the map, then the thing's on the moon. often clearer, often more provocative. There are craters all over the moon, of course. Every once in a way, come on a crater that's so perfect that you have to wonder. Or something that if you look at it, you see, and we're looking now at an amazing thing, which is actually a dome on the surface of the moon. And it's got to be huge. I don't know how many miles across.

But it is absolutely dead on perfect circle. it is not a crater. It is not concave. It is convex. And it seems to, it's too perfect. It's too perfect. It's not natural. One of my favorite moon anomalies is a crater that is so perfect that it's hard to believe that it is natural.

But it may be. Who am I to say? However, it has a shape next to it. It's almost half a crater, but it's not quite. the thing is there is an area in shadow that would be you know convex but the shadow is created by a dead-on straight line that runs over 20 miles and that is impossible to have formed in nature from everything we understand and know about the history of how the surface of the moon formed and we're stuck with this now if and then Snowden

or a Julian Assange got to be in their bonnet about this stuff and was given a pile of it, if they broke it, it might go viral and major media and governments might have to respond as well as the astronomical community. As far as I'm concerned, the astronomers of the world, who along with other people in science, politicians and mental health professionals, seem to be the most sensitive people relative to being associated with flying saucers and little green men, which is just, you know, you're crazy if you believe in this stuff. And I'm a busy person.

Even if somebody I know and like and respect thinks there's something to it, I only have so much time. I'm not going to be bothered reading any of these books. God knows if I was caught reading one, the impact on my career would be terrible. And surely there's something better to do. Anyway, in my heart of hearts, if it is true, I don't even really want to know it because that means everything that I thought is true might be open to question. This is radical.

But one thing we can say for sure is that astronomers are looking in the wrong place. Or if they're seeing some movement in space, they're not letting us know. So I'm going to continue to refine this talk, but I was so glad that you were interested in it for the show because it's so germane at this moment for me, Again, it's exciting period for me. I've got some great situations coming up and presentations and research projects. But this, again, is kind of a pet project.

It's brand new. I'd like to have it worked out and in my bag, so to say, that I could tailor it to any non-UFO audience, whether it was a high school group or a technical group, whether it was. It was, you know, as a fundraiser for a fraternal organization or a talk at a conference that was not UFO-oriented, but that they wanted a speaker on the subject to speak to their audience that was not informed and give them a sweep across. Yeah. So, again, it's a work in progress, but I'm glad that I could share it with you and your listeners tonight. It's a fascinating talk and presentation.

I mean, like you said, it spreads across so many different facets. I mean, art history comes to mind and how these images have been overlooked by art historians throughout. And you have to wonder again, that ridicule factor. Oh, we're going to ignore that. Why would I want to bring this to the attention to the head of my department? Why? The talk, I'll be giving two talks in. in Roswell, New Mexico, that will be the main one because Roswell, the events of late June or early July,

were so integral to creating the backlash of not taking the subject seriously. Immediately. The other talk I'm giving is on a pet subject that I've kicked around for years. Many of our colleagues feel and understandably that there is a program called disclosure that's been going on for decades, that it's a slow process of inculturating the people of earth with popular culture, popular imagery,

Hollywood movies, advertisements, news stories to get them ready over the course of 50 or 60 years for, you know, the other shooter drop, whatever. And that as part of it, there is a wonderful idea that the world of advertising, wherever you see an ad

that uses actual images of UFOs, flying saucers, aliens in an ad, whether it's to sell ice cream to kids or computers to adults, whether it's based on a total confabulation and a charming little silly image or that it refers directly to back-engineering or abduction, which some of them do, that it's part of the master plan and that movers and shakers whose names we never know interact with leaders of the advertising industry, blah, blah, blah. So I gave that a lot of thought. And where it sprang from was over the years, you may have a similar file.

Many people in the work, you know, you develop files that go off on tangents of any aspect. And anytime I saw an ad that had some UFO image in it, I pulled it out of the magazine or newspaper and put it in a file. And at a certain point, I thought, hmm, I wonder if there is anything to this idea and whether it would make an interesting talk. At that point, I began to solicit colleagues and got images from different countries. Then I broke them down into topic headings of the audience that they were aimed at. What the unifying subject was, you'd be surprised how many insurance companies in America and Great Britain and South America have used an image of a UFO in the sky lifting a vehicle off the ground to sell insurance. It's quite extraordinary. Yeah.

Computer companies and high-tech companies alluding to back engineering, et cetera, et cetera. And the second talk that I'll be doing in Roswell will be advertising imagery, alien and UFOs in advertising, and whether or not it is part of a grand plan or purely based on the reality that pictures of beings from other planets and machines from other planets sell products. Yeah. And I'm not going to tell you what I think the answer is. I have to come to the talk to find out. Well, I mean, speaking of that, you have Roswell. I know you're going to be going to Athens again.

Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. Last year, myself and our dear friend and colleague Richard Dolan were invited to speak at a conference that I had something to do with the organization of and a very unusual theme in the world of UFO studies. Dr. Wilhelm Reich, somebody whose work I've been involved in a lot longer than I've been involved in UFO studies, since I was a teenager, in fact, observed UFOs in the last years of his life and published around it,

and that publics around it in the 1950s and having the courage to stand by your observations and conclusions was one of the kiss of death for his international scientific reputation, which was already under attack for all the wrong reasons. And this conference is rooted in Reich's observations about UFOs. Nobody had ever done a conference like it before. It's called the Contact with Space Conference. And it is a two-day conference in Athens, I think, on the 17th and 18th of June. If anybody is interested in going, they should contact me directly.

Because not only will I give them all the details, but if it's possible, if you're going to come from the States or Europe, Richard and I will stay around after it's a peer review conference. We're trading a salary for a small holiday and looking forward to it. It's a wonderful country with an awful lot of historic problems, but I'll actually be staying there right through the period until it's time to fly to New Mexico. Richard and his wonderful fiancé Tracy will be going back home for a couple of days and then we'll meet up in New Mexico after.

I can't thank you enough. This has been a fascinating conversation. I'm so happy we were able to do it in person. I think it makes all the difference in the world. And we're going to have to have you come back on next time you're in the city to tell us about the next salon that's going to be going on. Absolutely. And, of course, I'll keep you posted and your listeners posted by listing the particulars and where to RSVP to when we do have a plan late this summer or later this summer on your page as well as mine and other pages that might be interested.

Absolutely. Please look Peter up on Facebook. He's very, very open to that, very personable, and my hero and mentor in this field. So again, it was a true honor having you here, Peter. My pleasure. All right, guys, that is it for this week's episode. Thanks again to Peter for coming on, for coming all the way to Queens to talk to me. It was an immense pleasure. Hope everyone enjoyed that. Now, for next week, guys, I am actually going to be in Liverpool, Nova Scotia giving a talk at the East Coast Paracom. So I'm not quite sure what the internet access is going to be like out there and if I'm going to be able to release on time.

So I will keep you posted on that. The episode might be coming out earlier next week or it might be coming out later depending on how remote this area actually is. I have a feeling everything will be okay, but either way, I'm going to be there with a few friends of the show, Greg Bishop, Paul Kim, Michael Hanks, a couple other people, Tim Benal. So it's going to be a blast.

I am sure we will sit down and record some stuff. So I'll be able to share that with you. Other than that, guys, you can always find all past episodes at Somewhere in the skies.com on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, YouTube. Please rate and review the show, wherever applicable, it really helps us gain new listeners. We're on Twitter at Somewhere Skies. and if you want to email me with any questions, concerns, guest suggestions, or you want to tell your own UFO story, you can reach me at Sprag 51 at Hotmail.com.

Yes, that is Hotmail. We're having issues with the Somewhere in the Sky's email. So please, hit me up. You can always contact me on the website as well. That is it, guys. I hope to see you next Monday. Again, I'll keep you posted. Other than that, remember, keep your feet on the ground,

but never stop searching somewhere in the skies. Kind Production. To learn more, visit thirdkind productions.com.