Somewhere in the Skies - Peter Robbins: Unplugged

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

On episode 258 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan heads to upstate New York to visit best-selling author, artist, and UFO researcher, Peter Robbins, at his home for an on-site interview. They nestle into Robbins' comfy office which is surrounded, floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, by shelves jam-packed with UFO books. It was the perfect setting for an impromptu conversation about UFOs past and present, and some of Robbins' thoughts on where the research field was when he first got involved and where it is today. We also hear about his direct work on a very controversial alien abduction case witnessed by dozens over the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, and then we hear about Robbins' involvement with the United Nations and UFOs. It's a wide-ranging discussion of master and apprentice as they both continue to search for answers somewhere in the skies. Follow Peter Robbins on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PeterRobbinsUFO Help the people of Ukraine: https://bit.ly/37ELIRS Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Somewhere in the Skies Coffee: CLICK HERE Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Follow Chrissy Newton on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/chrissynewton Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at: https://bit.ly/3rJpbd7 Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE Copyright © 2021 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. 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

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We are graveyard tales. Now, if you like ghost stories, hauntings, cryptic encounters, and the weird history behind them, then you should join us in the graveyard. You can find us on any of your favorite podcast providers. Check out our website at graveyardpodcast.com. And follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and on Twitter at GRV. I just go search graveyard tales.

That would be easier. Now we hope to see you in the graveyard. Today on the show, author and UFO researcher, Peter Robbins. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. I'm here with Peter Robbins in Ithaca, New York. I made the trek up north from New York City to finally come to this incredible... I want to almost call it a museum. I mean, the amount of artwork, the amount of history, the amount of books you have in this house is envious, to say the least. I don't think my library will ever reach the level that I'm looking at in your office right now. It's literally wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling books.

Well, if you had started collecting, as you should have, about 20 years before you were born, you wouldn't have had that issue. Oh, man. I will get there. I will get there. Well, Peter, I've been here for, gosh, less than 24 hours. It's a quick trip, but we... We said we would make the most of it. And we have. I'm working on a new book that I can't talk about just yet,

but you will be involved in the development process of this book. You will be featured in the book. And we had amazing conversations yesterday about your life outside of the world of UFOs, which was almost more rewarding and fascinating to me, because I got to know you outside of the UFO. world, which a lot of people entrenched in this topic, we look at one another as that's your life. That's everything you do. It drives every decision you make.

It's your identity. And a lot of people only know me as a UFO researcher, as they do you. But as we got to know each other more, we realized we had far more in common than just these things in the sky. And I got your origin story, which we will share in the book. We won't go into it here because it's a very fascinating story. But I guess let's just talk. This isn't an interview per se.

This isn't an inquisition. Question answer, question answer. But what drives you both in the world of art, in the world of UFOs? What keeps you going and has kept you going in both of these interests for your whole life? I guess about 30 years ago or so, I discovered the world of the world of the UFOs. I discovered the work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell was a mythologist, and maybe the most popular, ultimately, in the modern Western world.

And he wrote a series of remarkably popular books, and PBS, working with him, created a remarkable television series about it. And going back to, or even before, ancient Greek mythology, he talked about the hero's journey. And I use the word hero advisedly. We have kind of a cartoon image of that. You know, somebody winning in battle

or running into a house on fire or some feet of daring do. But there's that quiet hero that lives in all of us, potentially, to do right, to follow what we feel is the course we should be taking, to ideally leave this planet a little better than we find it.

And in Campbell's term, to follow your bliss. For me, I guess since I've been, you know, on and off, even in adolescence and teenagehood, I've had tastes of that. But when I was in my 20s, I experienced it in no uncertain terms. And it's like that interior divining rod that we have that sensitizes us for, I think I should go where I really want to go,

where I feel I can do the most use, where I feel the most needed, the area that I'm most fascinated by, however that comes together, and be involved and become in the process the hero in my own life, rather than looking to external forces.

For me, it's, been an interior journey in many ways. I am and always have been a big reader since I was a boy. Originally, in part, books helped me to go to places that I never thought I would go to and meet people who I never thought I would go to.

In part because I had poor wonderful grandparents, but my father's dad, Barney Robbins, who was a lifelong New Yorker, used to walk me around the city, parts of the city when I was a little boy, and make history come to life and recreate what Manhattan was like when he was a boy, which was quite electrifying for me. By the time I was five or six, I actually understood two fairly sophisticated adult concepts. One was what an imagination is and how it can be deployed to make for a life that's both more meaningful and valuable and enjoyable. And that

history is a living thing. Even the most boring, like junior high school experience of, you know, some generic history book of overwhelmingly dead white guys doing stuff that I was supposed to memorize was never tamped out because I knew better. And growing up in New York City and in a lovely village about 30 miles east, I came to realize I had the best of two worlds. And I, in Rockville Center, New York, I had more than I ever realized at the time, an idyllic village community experience to grow up in with good public schools and a lot of interesting friends, many of whom I still have, and state park a block away from I lived.

and, you know, my first seven years growing up in New York City, this was terribly exotic for me. And then less than an hour away, 45 minutes on the Long Island Railroad, I was in midtown Manhattan. And I had always, without even realizing it, been exposed to the world of culture as well as nature. My father's parents were absolutely sensational in taking me to museums. from before I can remember. And I think that's a terribly important thing if parents have access, even if you live in a rural area,

if everyone's in a way, you can get to an area where there are museums, take a kid's. For me, it didn't get any better. It was the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

But New York City, like many other places, is filled with ever so many kind of specialty museums off the beaten course. and from the time I can remember I loved museums. I go to any museum, you know, the museum of mechanical clocks or some goofy specialty thing. I'll check it out. I love that experience. And in fact, my parents used to joke with me that from the time we had their private house on Long Island,

I was given an area. It was on the front porch for a while and then in the basement where I created my own museum. Exhibits would include interesting rocks, feathers, stamps, and coins from foreign places. One of my greatest acquisitions is something that my mother was less than pleased by. Her father was delighted by because his wife wanted him to get rid of two taxidermid squirrels. they had in their parlor who had seen much better times and whose little glass eyes

disturbed some people. Mounted on branches, I had them. Then a wonderful world of fossils opened up to me, and so it went. But I was a very precocious kid in the arts. I was dyslexic terribly.

I didn't understand the world of numbers. I still wrestle with it. But when the world of reading opened up to me, you couldn't tear me away from it. And part of the drive mechanism for doing what I do is how does it feel? I think sometimes we forget if we're lucky enough to pursue a career path by choice, rather than, like most people, by necessity. And that was lost on me even as a kid,

thinking about where my relatives had come from, and especially my mom's side of the family, escaping from Zaris, Russia. that because of their hard work, I had enough means and support to have the audacity to think that I could be a professional artist, producing something that nobody needed to live in terms of eating and breathing, but something I found increasingly important. And I embraced the art world. It was wonderful going as a younger person with adults, but then being turned loose in the world and going. going to the museums and galleries by myself, falling in love with the world of architecture, just walking around Lower Manhattan, as I still do, and look up at buildings I've looked at 500 times on a street that I've walked down a thousand times trying to find a detail that I missed.

And then being able, without being corny about it, to let the world fall away and realize, unless a plane goes by, I'm looking at something that's been eternally there since 1908. and then in later life looking at some standing stones or temple in Greece or a pagoda in Nepal or

monument in India or whatever and to allow myself to just reembrace that flow of time I wish I did but I don't believe that we're on the edge

we have the technology to really travel in time. I think that's still very much in the realm of science fiction. Who knows about the future? I have tremendous respect for the lifework of Edgar Casey, who was a psychic who made me realize that people who call themselves psychics are not all shams, which I thought was the case. I mean, please.

I'll roll my eyes back in my head talking a funny voice and make believe I'm a disembodied $5,000-year-old spirit. There's an interesting Freudian slip. $5,000 spirit and collect my $5,000. And when the world of UFO study opened up to me by necessity, because of an experience I had that obsessed me, I was primed and ready to jump in because I had already been informally inquiring

about things that were outside of my realm from the time I was a kid. So part of why I do what I do, is because it continues to interest me profoundly. It's been many years since I would describe my involvement with the world of UFO studies as an obsession. At a certain point, it became an interest, a profound interest. And then at a certain point, I found with some irony that I had been involved deeply enough for long enough

and actually been contributing enough that other people thought that I was somebody in the field. You know, how did that happen? That I would now be mentioned in the same breath as somebody who I thought of as famous. And part of my secret is people don't know inside. I'm just me.

I'm just me. I don't care how well-known you think I am or that you're just learning who I am. I don't live with any inflated sense of myself. and the things, uphology, which has now become kind of a dirty word, but continuing to study and teach and educate. And I don't see myself as some vanguardist breaking through the knowledge of these other intelligences and why they're here, the myriad of them and wherever they come from and whatever their motivations or whether they're in the realm of, hard metal machines of advanced technology or more in the

Jacques Valet Jean-Keele school of more ethereal creations and apparitions and what have you were dealing with a number of realities and I remember the first year when I was obsessed in a very unhealthy way in that I couldn't stop and I came to

kind of a culmination one late afternoon walking down East 23rd Street toward the School of Visual Arts Building between 2nd and 3rd where I taught the School of Continuing Education and being a film lover

and thinking filmatically sometimes my mind literally went into a split screen one screen was me walking down East 23rd Street thinking my thoughts and everything as it was the other was me at that moment just running out into East 23rd Street,

a la Kevin McCarthy at the end of the invasion of the body snatchers and stopping cars and screaming, they're here. They're here already. You're next. And I realized this is not good. I needed some assistance. In my case, I felt I needed a therapist who not only was capable of appreciating that what I was going through

was not based in some kind of delusion or mental apparition, but that it was real. And I found that person in the form of Dr. Ellsworth F. Baker, a brilliant psychotherapist, who I knew of for years because Baker had been, for 11 years, the first assistant to Dr. Wilhelm Reich, who many people hear that name, and they've heard things and they immediately, that crime or, you know, that crazy scientist or social thinker who thought he could change the weather and that flying sauces were real and, you know, cancer was related to this

and I was lucky enough to be introduced to his work, which you see a lot of here. Well, I've still a teenager and read it for 10 years before this period of time and realized that something that was sort of a footnote in my mind up until then, that then became a profound reality, was Dr. Reich became very interested in the world of UFOs and their reality in the last years of his life and wrote a very important

book called Contact with Space, which for readers who can locate it, good luck, only 500 copies who ever printed, and they, if you can get an original, we're talking in the low six, low four figures, but a good first-generation Xerox copy can be had from the Will Hale-Rike Museum for like 50 bucks or something. For people who want to learn more about Reich and maybe his connection to UFOs, I absolutely advise you to make it

definitely not the first book that you read of his because his work is all about the study of how energy functions. And so it touches on so many different areas of the natural world, but if you're an outsider just looking at it, disconnected weight. He was interested in human psychology. He's first assistant in the 20s. Then he gets interested in cancer formation, then in raising healthy children, then in social

pathology, then in the way that storm fronts are created and by extension the way that universes are created. And then in the world of life and space, he's a madman. But if you had the time and the inclination, read this work in order, more than 35 years span of more than 20 books that have been published, you see the workings of a great, with a capital G, mind, a millennial thinker who was so far beyond most people in his time that he was simply labeled a crank because it was too much contemplating. If he was right about any of it, then I've got to reconsider everything I know. Because in the last book, it basically opens with him considering the possibility that is he part non-human? Is he in some way

inflected with genetic material from out there? Why? Because he has been so set apart and has made such profound discoveries that many people have appreciated, others haven't, anyway, I'm going on here, is a long reading list. I hope some people will read his work because almost anyone you speak to who has an opinion has read something about him, but never anything by him. And to paraphrase with a wonderful quote of Mark Twain's that I use in a lot of unrelated ways, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning book. Anyway, I went to therapy with Dr. Baker, who had had two UFO sightings in his life, one with Reich,

during cloudbusting operation, weather modification in Maine, and the other over his own home in Red Bank, New Jersey. And he took it very seriously. And he helped me to understand that I wasn't crazy, neither was my sister. The world was kind of crazy. And that this was important work. And should I decide to continue to devote myself to it, that wasn't a bad thing. And that helped me put things into some kind of context where I could relax a little, continue to do the work and develop myself in the field,

but at the same time, stay rooted in the world of the visual arts, theater, architecture, film, history, nature-oriented studies, travel, which means a great deal to me, and continue to read. any damn thing that interests me in the moment and go off on a tangent for the next thing. So there's the long answer to short question. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV.

Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is our scene. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Termin, Theater 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100, and the X-Files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary.

Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. No, that is a maze to navigate. And we've all had iterations of what you experience, I think, when you start to find something that invigorates you, that piques your curiosity, that all, ultimately has such profound implication, if it's real, if it's true, that it would change humanity in so many ways. And a lot of us in the UFO field feel that way. And that's why we shout it from the rooftops.

Like, this is real. It's a legitimate phenomenon. It could be a potential threat. It might not be. It's probably a mixture of both. But this is real. Why is no one paying attention to this? So I think we find ourselves as kind of these outcasts who have found one another have created a community, whether we like it or not, and whether we think it's a healthy community or not. It's a community. And ultimately, it is a part of our identity. We deal with this topic on a daily basis where some people never give a single thought to it, which,

which is tough because it has such profound implication. And we seem to be getting closer here in the United States and in other countries as well, where people are starting to accept it as a possibility, which I think is huge. Within your lifetime, my lifetime, who knows where we're going to be in the next 10 years when it comes to this topic? I would say even five or six years ago, almost none of us in the field would have anticipated the change in the climate that we now experience. Last night, we looked at some footage that I had captured off of television in November of 1989, American broadcast coverage of the then-breaking story of the Voronos Russian UFO incident.

Vornos being a city in Russia about 300 miles south of Moscow, and a profoundly documented landing that occurred in a city park there and multiply witnessed. But so unusual, so like a number of cases that have come up in euphological history that are singular in terms of the MO or the beings and descriptions of. of them, they just, even in an area of study that's so fraught with rifts and controversy, it's rough enough saying, well, another case involving these apparitions we call grays, which are very well documented, as opposed to, what the fuck is that? You know, oh, you're 12 feet tall and you have a tiny head and three eyes? sure and again being a very different time the field day that the news readers were having at first

you know they're just reading a script but they're very uncomfortable with it but by the second day they're not only treating the subject with a lack of respect which is the most profound understatement I can think of they're having a great deal of fun making fun of it and any individuals that take it seriously by implication with what they're saying, with their body language,

with their facial expressions, with the exchanges, what do you think, news, man, you're out of looking at the sky, you know, well, and then a joke there, how profoundly things have changed in the way these things are reported.

And for me, as a political animal, and always looking between the lines as well as on the lines, that it's equally the phenomenon is happening on both sides of the aisle

that you have somebody like one of our state senators, Christian Gilliband who seemingly out of nowhere produces this remarkable remarkable proposal to Congress that I mean this is a smart woman. Whatever your politics and she's a reg a Democrat

but whatever your politics she is a smart legislator a smart woman but the wording and the detail and the the a prioris, she, and I don't mean this in any fair as a dark way, she consulted with people who understood this situation a lot more deeply than she did and produced this extraordinary

document. And then ideologically, if you could get any further away, you have one of the leading two senators from Florida, Marco Rubio, with an entirely different battery of politics and philosophical thinking, who absolutely is shoulder to shoulder with her on the necessity that the public learned more about this situation reflected equally on major media that most of us would associate with the left or the right. Fox News covers it with as much seriousness as CNBC does. And that ain't a bad thing. This is, for me, one of the healthiest changes in the history of formal UFO study, 75 years old this year, per se, that we have ever seen. And more power to it and to us

to deploy it in the service of educating others and ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. And let's, we'll stay recent for now with what's going on. I do want to rewind a little bit with you on some certain cases and things you've been involved with, but you mention, you know, the senators. And we've been, or it's been rumored, I should say, it might be confirmed at this point that Christopher Mellon, who a lot of our listeners are familiar with at this point, has held very prominent positions within government and intelligence and whatnot, that he was helping the senators draft the wording for these certain things and whatnot, and that, you know, this is one topic that seems to be bridging the aisle here in American politics, which is great. I wish we had more issues that they

could agree on. Yes. But Mellon, Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo, are two of the people really out front. They're sort of the, and they might disagree with this, the face of uphology right now. They are the face of one very specific aspect. Right. For every Chris Mellon and Lewis Elizondo, who are very analytical, who are nuts and bolts thinkers in this area, nothing ethereal. They're not looking at it from a spiritual point of view or from a consciousness point of view. They're looking at it in that methodical way. You have a Ray Hernandez, a good man doing important work in terms of documenting experiencers' experiences, reporting, and I think very ethically and accurately, that more and more people having contact experiences,

they are positive, they are transformative, and that there is a goodness and decency to the intelligences they are interacting with. Playing devil's advocate for a moment, I think in human affairs, even close human affairs, and very possibly affairs between human and non-human, there is always the potential of a threading of untruth, of deception. Jacques Valet wrote about this early on. And I remember at times in the years I work with Bud Hopkins, who is also very pragmatic in his approach and very Western in his approach

and very nuts and bolts, why should we trust them any more than we trust the United States Air Force? Even if they say X, they might mean Y. And then we get into the complexity and the layering of arguments of, are they good, are they bad? Wrong question. As we talked about before, they're doing what they're doing for reasons that are known to them.

They are involved in it as methodically as we are involved in certain scientific explorations and other types of explorations. They probably have an end goal that they are moving toward. The fact that we human beings either regard these events from a distance or from the experiencer level as I didn't like what happened to me or I liked what happened to me, I was scared or I felt love is almost immaterial. Plus, we may be dealing with, I think we are, a myriad of other intelligences, some of them corporeal to one degree or another.

And I think it's almost entertaining sometimes when I follow chats and discussions and arguments in the social networking realm where the extraterrestrial hyperbole is simply dismissed. You know, we're on to more sophisticated thinking here. And I think, isn't this funny that when I got involved in the later 70s, that was, I mean, that's about as far out as you could get. That's really challenging stuff. And not just to dismiss it, but not even to consider that although it's become, in a way,

the most conservative on a certain level of the unexplainable, truly anomalous. UFO aspects of study, that in dealing with a myriad of intelligences of beings, of life forms, of whatever's, that instead of dismissing it, they don't say, yes, this is one aspect of it. Some, and as Stanton Friedman used to say, some, I stress not all, things that are observed as UFOs are, essentially machines of advanced technology under intelligent control coming and going from the earth with impunity for reasons that we do not know for sure. End of story. And then the other stuff goes on. Again, the iconic X-Files poster, and this has in a way nothing to do with extraterrationality or interdimensionality or anything in our field, everybody wants to believe something. It doesn't matter whether you've grown up in a family of faith and are theologically inclined

or you are the biggest agnostic or non-believer in the world. We all want to believe certain things are, and we all want to believe certain things aren't. I think part of that is governed by what we can tolerate, what we can handle, what we can even begin to wrap our heads around without freaking out. And the other part of it is a worldview. were we brought up to see the world in a very narrow stricter, again, whether through theological or scientific pragmatism, or were we brought up to be, for lack of a better term, open-minded.

And even if something seems unlikely or even, you know, almost out of the realm of possibility, if there's a chance to at least cursory give some fair time to examining that possibility. I know for me, as life has gone on, I have gone from somebody who began in the classic. They're obviously from, as we say, outer space, they're real beings, they're all in machines, totally advanced.

We don't know whether they mean as well or not. and we all have to know this and power to the people and government release everything you know. Didn't work like that. And as time has passed, I guess one of the things that's happened to me is the more I've learned.

The more I'm glad I'm put together in a way that I can have allowed myself to realize the more that I've learned, the less difficult it is to push away the idea that I now know how little I really know. I know more than most people.

I've made a point of studying it for decades. I've interacted with hundreds of people who have alleged to have experiences. I've traveled the world occasionally to seek out new stories. I'm lucky to be blessed with wonderfully well-educated in their areas of expertise colleagues. I have networked with people who have interest in the subject around the world. I've examined alleged evidences of all kind. And what can I tell you for an absolute fact? And being that I'm not a religious person, but I do have a strong spiritual aspect.

But I have a streak of hyper-objectivity that one could say, does not allow me to vibrate on a higher frequency. That's the way I am, and hopefully as I continue to evolve, I will resonate on a higher frequency. But for now, my standard is, can I bring this into a court of law and prove it, which immediately excludes an awful lot of what people say,

especially in the world of UFO in consciousness, which I take very seriously and have fascination and respect for the work of colleagues, but it has never been my primary area of study. I've also, I accept absolutely that people who began in a very defensive posture, they are the unknown, the unknown is dangerous, therefore that's how I wired up to. Welcome, you know, you can't do any worse for us than we've done for ourselves. And I'm open to the possibility that you may want to be of assistance here.

or at least that you are not here to hurt me. We look at the current state of the world, and it is a mess, and that's putting it mildly, as we all know. Politically at this moment, I can just use the one word of Ukraine and say no more and go on. But when I say that, I am reminded that in doing so, I focus on an area that we're all concerned about, and by nature of not mentioning them, I'm excluding a dozen other areas of the world. Eritrea, Yemen, poor Afghanistan, Bangladesh, where people are hanging on and hundreds of thousands

of children may starve to death in the next months and for people who don't think that we are responsible for climate change. and I don't think we're responsible for it, but I think we have contributed to it in a very extensive way over the last several hundred years. Part of it is not just the toxification of Earth through fossil fuel technology and the like,

but one area of study that if you start to articulate it, people will accuse you sometimes being some kind of Nazi. And that has to do with what when I was a kid we used to call family planning. and now is population control. When I was a kid, I remember that it was a big news item.

The earth has reached almost a billion people population never happened before in the history of the world. Gosh, that's a lot of people. Is the earth equipped to feed that many? More than 8 million now, and I'm still alive. This is insane. And a lot of it has to do with the helplessness of ignorant, poverty,

desperation of the only thing I have to help me maybe make it a little bit longer into life is to breed and have as many kids as I can and hopefully the ones that don't die off will help take care of me when I'm an old person. That's a tragic point of view. But it's one that a lot of the world without saying as much subscribes to. And then there is the kind of theological imperative whereby biology is mystified

or mechanized. That first 12 hours of life when a sperm connects with an ovum and produces this tiny thing that is starting to grow

no bigger than a head of a pin. For some people, that entity has every right and protection and respect of a full-grown human being. Why, in part because of the miracle of creation, that, you know, God is there, and I will defend that pre-Zygot's ability to mature into a personhood with everything that I have. I get it, and I have to respect it on a certain philosophical level.

At the same time, when there's... that entity is 12 hours old, the thought of putting its rights ahead of the rights of the mother is absolutely unconscionable. That, again, I'm off on a tangent here, but for me, no man really has the right to tell a woman

what she should do with her body. And that's that. Except when we get into late-term development of fetuses, far more difficult area, and one where, yes, one can argue murder. But that blanket mystification of creation is not appropriate in my philosophy. And the subjugation of women, for starters, and how, you know, treated by chattel and the whole biblical interpretation, you're really an extension of property.

this doesn't work for me. Again, we're off on an extreme tangent here, but part of the problem with why we are where we are is in a capitalist society, we're all out for what we can get. In a so-called communist society, we are all devoted to the collective. The individual doesn't matter. neither one really is a good model fully to work forward on. For me, there are forms of capitalism that are much more enlightened, and they have to do with responsibility.

And what used to be called nobles oblige, if you are a successful person, even if you did it in the old-fashioned American way by yourself, you really didn't do it by yourself. You were on public roads, having certain advantages here. here and there, we're all connected on a certain level. And that if you reach a certain point, and in our ultra-uber capitalism, we have kind of mystified these creatures we call billionaires, who, for some people, are seen as ultimate winners.

You know, wow, it's like some cosmic sporting event. You are a billionaire. No, you're a multi-billionaire. Some of whom are very happy to, you know, guard what they got. And even if they can't take it with you, they're going to hold on to it for long as they can. Others who feel an obligation or a desire to give back and to say to society that buys their products or subscribe to their services or just set up a climate where they could do the hard work to create this extraordinary life and power for themselves, that they're now disconnected from it, as opposed to a retipede.

this morning on Elon Musk, you know, controversial figure, brilliant man, great industrialist, futurist, who's a total character, but who right now is devoting certain time and certainly money to doing what he can and his people can to essentially essentially screw things up for the Russians on a certain level in terms of communication and possibly. internet use and what have you and has like a lot of these billionaires given money to certain things that they believe in

whether we do or not I hear people sometimes say well you know that's his right but don't tell me I should do that I'm not telling you that I think some of it has to do what some of us call consciousness or conscience

and for others we were brought up in a way like I was, to be of service in the community, as well as to yourself and to the people you love and care for. They're not conflicting. You can do some good, either, you know, work in some area of non-profit, or as some people I know, regularly show up at homeless shelters and help feed people, or be involved in collecting for something or money raising for something else, as well as conduct all of your own affairs. with my parents, and they were very clear about this.

It's not that we both don't believe this. It's just that my mom was the activist in these things, and my dad, even for the period of time that my mom had our own career, was the primary earner who was working hard to pay our bills and cover our expenses so that me and my sisters could follow our dreams. and that my parents could have a good life and later life, and worked hard doing it. However it works out, fine.

But being a player, a participant, a member of the UFO-related community, either as an experiencer, an abductee, I think the two most important areas, or people like us who do the work to try to learn more for ourselves and for others, And in the course of doing so, educate the wider world community, at least to the degree that the walls of ridicule continue to drop as they have remarkably in the last few years. And that this is important and you should know about it.

And these are the reasons why I feel you should. Yeah. And, you know, we had some pretty existential conversations last night of kind of, you know, the means. meaning of life and what happens when you die. And we won't go into that for this conversation. We'll save it for the book. Hint, hint, tease, tease to everyone. But this idea of leaving the world a little bit better than it was when you were there. I think the same could be said for euphology. I'm sure the topic, if you want to call it a field of study, which it is, has changed a lot within your

experience with it. It has within mine, and I haven't been in it that long, but long enough to see an evolution of what's being asked, what it could be, how widely accepted it is. And I think you're right

as researchers, and this goes from, you know, someone like a Stanton Friedman to a Lyndon-Multon-How, to you, to me, to someone younger than me, let's say Christina Gomez, a new up-and-comer in the field. Everyone should feel a sense of,

I'm learning along the way, and I want to teach someone else what I learned and watch them build off of it. And I think that's the responsible thing to do, is leave the field a little bit better than it was before. So my big question for you is, what has changed the most for you in uphology, since you first got involved up until today.

I mean, we talk about the mainstream acceptance or what's happened in the past few years. That's great. Like, that's a huge step that we've made. But I guess on more of a personal level and, you know, variables, nuances, I guess, is a better word. What has really changed in uphology in the past 70-plus years? Has anything changed?

Or are we at the same point we were, same questions we were asking 70-plus years? ago. When I entered the field, it was, you know, people can argue philosophically. You chose it, but you just don't remember it, or it was always what you were destined to do, what have you. As far as I'm concerned, by circumstance, the life I was living, the priorities I had jumped the track, following a profoundly life-changing conversation I had with my sister Helen involving a return memory of childhood, of our childhood UFO sighting,

and that being the impetus for her to tell me about her conscious memories of her abduction experience. And everything changed around that. And I had no idea that there was something called euphology. I didn't know there was a world of people that study this or that had claimed experiences, it just was never anything that really entered into my life. And so I began at the absolute baseline

and at a time where we were still decades away from the Internet where print publication ruled and regular conventional television and radio broadcasts. And all I knew was that I was obsessed with what were these things that Helen and I had seen in the sky what did they represent how they were going to impact on the human race

or how they were impacting on the human race and what happened to my sister just while I think of it some years after maybe 15 years later Helen and I were sharing an apartment in New York and we watch the pilot episode of a new television show called the X-Files.

Fans of the X-Files or not, I highly recommend folks to find that pilot episode and watch it. If you are a television viewer, it's really quite a perfect pilot. We are introduced to our main characters, their motivations, the world in which they live in, and what they are about to embark on together.

And Fox Mulder, the FBI agent, obsessed, was obsessed with what happened to his sister. She was taken. In that case, though, for the sake of the drama, she was not returned. And this drove him to become this kind of outsider, FBI investigator, focused on paranormal and UFO-related events. and at the end of the episode, I remember poignantly, my sister turning to me and says, that character's you, except that I came back. How did I begin?

I didn't know there were UFO publications. I'm sure I would look at one on a newsstand and just not see it. It wasn't interesting to me. But there are a number of magazines out there at the time, which I started to buy. When I'd go to use bookstores, I wasn't just looking for art books now.

I was looking for books on UFOs. And I had enough foresight to know if I was going to get involved in this field, I should have a working knowledge of what the parameters were. And that meant everything from a book like flying sauces from outer space by the great Donah Kehoe, a honorably retired United States Air Force Combat Pilot, who wrote a series of outstanding books in the early 60s. primarily on UFOs, from a very pragmatic point of view. That book was the first legitimate true American bestseller on the subject,

and he catapulted more to national attention by being a regular guest on one of the legendary talk shows back then, the host being Long John Nebel. Nebel's popularity as a broadcaster, and he never shied away from that subject, subject was then kind of picked up by Frank Edwards, who became an even more popular broadcaster and wrote several books on UFOs and The Paranormal and became even more famous. I listened to Long John Nebel shows a bit, and most of the press coverage on UFOs per se was relegated

to the tabloids. So immediately came with a caveat of, take this with the grain of salt. One of the ironies there is that we now know that some of the more sensational cases, for lack of a better term, covered by the famous National Inquirer, were in great part very accurate. But just by nature, they sounded off the wall in extreme. But, and especially in the context of the inquirers, you know, publishing policy, and then even more, well, more or less disciplined tabloids that just were goofy and, you know, were funny without meaning to be, and sometimes meaning to be, I'm sure, with famous headlines and silly doctored photographs of famous people interfacing with aliens and all that stuff. I knew that my sister and I were sane as well as I could

know it. And after she confirmed to me without my feeding her any lines, what I remembered, it was a validation for me of the reality of my memory. But I did start with the attitude that other, will laughingly call grownups who were involved in this field, probably had a screw loose. I mean, a grown-up who's devoting their life to studying flying saucers, give me a fucking break. This is just silly stuff. I had never been to a UFO conference, and it was years until I did go to one. But I, in the back of some magazine or somewhere I learned of this man named Komen von Kovetsky, who was a Hungarian emigray, who emigrated here in 1952, who before World War II had been a film director, and I'm sure living a very colorful life in Hungary,

who, because of his knowledge of optics and film, became a member of the general staff of the Hungarian army during World War II, charged with responsibility for audiovisual education, like manufacturing film strips for training and photo analysis. At the end of the war, he was able, thankfully, to surrender to the Americans rather than being caught and killed by the Russians. and for seven years worked in helping to repatriate, mostly survivors of the camps with existing relatives.

And the American government to, I guess in a sense, acknowledge his sincerity in having been an enemy, you know, certainly, or on the wrong side, allowed him and his young family to emigrate to America. several months before the Washington, D.C. over flights. And for Coleman, it was a matter of seeing those photos of these unknowns over the Capitol building that convinced him that there was something real and important here. And he began his involvement in the field.

He also was a strategic military thinker, a military scientist in a way, who I grew to greatly admire and really love as my first mentor in the world. work because like probably 99% of Hungarians, he was a practicing Catholic and, you know, went to Mass on Sundays, but he separated his religious beliefs from his study of the phenomenon and felt that that discipline was needed. This should not be the subject of theological thinking and imparted in me an understanding of basic

research methods, which he introduced me to Detective Sergeant Pete Mazzola of the New York City Police Department, who was a crack, police officer and police detective, very courageous, injured on a number of occasions in the course of his work, who also happened to be a really outstanding UFO investigator, and who died much too soon. but Pete reinforced that understanding of building triangulating evidence, building a case, so to say, in very real world terms on a combination of factors. It could be as diverse as photographic evidence, historic, multiple testimony, physiological changes in organic material, what we call trace cases, witness sightings, but all together, not building on one leg. And ultimately, while this was going on, I was building a friendship with a painter in New York,

like myself, who shared a very serious interest in the subject named Bud Hopkins. And Bud and I met five years before he published his first book on UFOs, A Missing Time, which was a game changer in the field. And our friendship mutated a bit into my being his, assistant as more and more letters came in and more and more cases were worked. So I was very fortunate in that sense of building that network. My first contemporary age colleague was about my age, maybe a little younger, a son of a Chilean diplomat with the UN, Antonio Huneis, who had studied journalism at the Sorbonne in Paris.

moved to New York to be a journalist and ended up specializing the subject of UFOs and quite brilliantly. And by then I was aware of other people in the area, Timothy Green Beckley, who introduced me to John Keel. I started to correspond with Gray Barker, who was very close to not Gray Barker, saucer smear. Oh, Jim Mooseley? Jim Mosley, who I learned about Gray Barker's work through, and

I gave my very first talk, which was pieced together, very much cut-and-paced stuff, oral presentation on the stage of the School of Visual Arts Auditorium, where I was a faculty member, with Bud Hopkins. We gave our first UFO talks together on the same stage at the same time with him bringing on that stage his first case witness, a man named George O'Barski,

who was involved in a profoundly important UFO sighting, very well documented in 1975, I believe, and my world started to expand a bit. I then gave a talk the next year in a rental hall, I worked with a public access New York City television station and put together a documentary. What do I mean by a documentary? Literally cutting and pasting pictures, showing them on screen, allowing my own voice to be a voiceover. It was very amateur, but they were looking for content, and I was looking for an audience, and so it went. In 1980 or 81, I gave my very first conference talk to an organization.

long gone, now the Scientific Bureau of Investigation, which was really primarily a lobby of police officers around the United States who had an interest in this subject and who more and more were getting UFO reports after the Air Force officially announced it was going out of the UFO business in 68. Of course they didn't, but then the University of Colorado report that essentially discounted all but a few cases. And I guess in 78 or so, I submitted a manuscript from my very first article, which primarily was an article about some of my travels in India. And then I was accepted, another article was accepted on synchronicity. I was quite fascinated with Jung's concept of it and kept the synchronicity journal.

then had my first UFO article accepted. And so I entered the field that way. But still, although my heart was not in it much as I wish it was, I was still showing my paintings and sculptures at galleries downtown, my core friends were still the artist community in New York City.

I was making part of my living teaching painting at the School of Visual Arts in their School of Continued Education, and working as one of many artists, journeyman, blue-collar construction people in the Soho building boom, myself mostly as a framing carpenter. And we worked hard doing jobs. It was like the gold rush. Money was coming into that formerly,

godforsaken 10 square blocks in New York that we call Soho that became alive with, galleries and, you know, trendy coffee shops and bars and pubs and, you know, upscale, habitashers and all that. By working on buildings, I remember at one point during a break because framing carpenters have to work with plumbers and electricians. You can't finish putting up the wallboard after you put up the studs until they run the pipes and wires through with one of the artist plumbers who happened to be a composer.

and just chatting with him over our sandwiches at a break. And then a year or two later, when he gave his first performance at the first really kind of counterculture, new wave of artists' institution, a place called The Kitchen, open performing space. It was like, wow, you know, Philip Lassus, as good as what he's doing there and wonderful if he'll ever make it. He's a good plumber.

And then, just getting deeper involved and meeting some of my contemporaries starting to develop the courage to reach out to the people who are really admired in the work Stanton Friedman Timothy Good Leonard Stringfield and meeting these people and developing work relationships and friendships with them developing opportunities to speak at different conferences occasionally being interviewed on a radio show, which was quite a big deal back then.

Then you see yourself occasionally quoted in something, and that's very exciting. Continuing to build my library. I've always been a library builder in that as a young person, once I embraced reading in earnest, once I had mastered it, there was really no stopping me. And our little public library in Rockville Center, New York, from maybe just a few weeks after we moved there, a very proud day from me was my mom taking me to the library and upstairs with the adult library and downstairs with the children's library and getting a library card. It was the first kind of grown-up identification I had. And not long after,

old enough, to take my bike to the library on my own and starting to, I could take books out of the real library too. My father gave me several books that affected me profoundly as a young person, brilliantly important books in my life, including 20,000 leagues under the sea in terms of, I guess, great science fiction,

and a book that is now back in the news because of this reanimation of this book banning mania that occasionally envelops the world of anti-intellectuals in America and people who just feel the need to control what other people are taking in.

Huckleberry Finn. of the most innocent sounding titles, but one still considered extremely controversial for repeated use of the word that electrifies it, which was totally appropriate to that book, and that story told in that time frame, and moves later that I learned about to remove that word from the book and reprint it. We're anathema to me. You either get it as it is or you don't. Anyway, At a certain point, I'm corresponding with people all over by mail, by letters. These files are filled with letters. Some of them handwritten.

Then I've got a typewriter, and you're back to that. This is all pre-computer. And occasionally a phone call, but, you know, long-distance call cost money. And I didn't know many people locally. so building my world in a very analog sense. And you see notebook after notebook there, some of them going back to the later 1970s, filled with cut and paste,

articles and pictures and documents that Coleman would give me that I'd carefully read and highlight and underline and then photograph. And at that time when I was first being invited to speak at a conference here or there, you would show up with a Kodak Carousel wheel of slides, depending on the wheel, it could have 80 or 120. And mine, like most of my colleagues, were photographs of stuff.

And that's 12 by 12 by like 3 inches or something that you're packing in your luggage or whatever, or if you're really daring that you just keep them in the little boxes and set them up, having to remember each one has to go in upside, down and backwards. And if you're lazy and stupid, that you say, sure, you can do that for me. And that first time that you push that first slide, and it is upside down and backwards, and you know they all are. And everybody's going like this and you feel like the fucking idiot you are. You learn, develop your craft. And then at a certain point, of course, it changed to more modern

technology and PowerPoint. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer.

Terms apply. Do you like stories of the strange, the way? in the unexplained, then we want you to check out Jim Harold's campfire. The concept is pretty simple. Jim talks to regular people about strange stuff that happens to them. And yes, that includes UFOs, along with cryptids, ghosts, and head scratchers. He doesn't exaggerate or play a lot of spooky music, kind of like I'm doing right now. The stories speak for themselves.

Ones like a ghost story involving serial killer Ted Bundy or the young man who encountered an eight-legged demon. Then there's the story of an alien abduction by what could be considered a reptilian. Now, not all the stories are horrifying. Some are actually pretty heartwarming, like a visit from a past loved one or a peaceful near-death experience. Regardless, these are true and fascinating stories. told by ordinary people who've had extraordinary experiences. Tune in to Jim Harold's Campfire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to Somewhere in the Skies. And remember, stay spooky.

Hey guys, Ryan here. The Somewhere in the Sky's podcast is a labor of love every week. And with that comes many different costs to keep the show running. That's where our Patreon campaign comes in. You give what you think the show is worth. There's different rewards available all the time, including shoutouts on the show, early editions of main episodes, bonus episodes and content, and very soon, monthly patron hangouts, where we sit back and chat all things UFOs.

So I hope you'll consider becoming a Patreon subscriber today. To learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you for your support and keep looking up. When I entered the field, it was dominated. It still is, but to even more degree, by middle-aged white guys. And most of them for me, and this is probably unfair and a bit elitist, but they were so focused on what they were doing. I always liked to think I had a sense of style and appearing a certain way and, you know, looking sharp.

would wear, you know, sports jackets from 1950 with lapels out to here, polyester pants, you know, drip dry shirts, some tie that should have been burned years ago, brill-creamed hair, and often the ubiquitous giant hunk-and-flying saucer pin in lapels. And I thought, hmm, if I continue in this work, what should be my visual role model? And it evolved fairly quickly of spend money on a suit or two and look as close as you can to an investment banker.

And if a talk was videotaped, as they were often, to study that tape after. And, you know, you learn things. Hold your head like this and not like this. Don't wear this color. Wear this color. Bad hair day, good hair day. Um.

Um. Um. I say um. Learning to, not say um, and to allow myself to just have a moment of quiet, which I think is not a bad thing at all. It actually shows you maybe thinking for a moment before you say what you're going to say next rather than just saying what you're going to say next. And building your communication skills, mine were pretty good to start with, but certainly room for improvement. And then seeing

more and more clearly the schools, the factions that were emerging, that were always there, still there, slightly mutated. The kind of ethereal, more innocent, more I want to believe, welcome the Space Brothers, kind of contactees, and the more absolute pragmatic nuts and bolts, often never the twain shall meet, and not that one is all wrong or all right, but I certainly veered toward the latter. I just felt more comfortable and unlawful. I just felt more comfortable and honest, not speculating. I also learned early to make clear as well as I could to the audience I was dealing with. This is what I absolutely know and could literally present in a court of law. This is what I think I absolutely know but can't prove. This is what I strongly suspect but I'm not sure of.

This is what I think may be going on but I hope isn't going on and parsing everything. which irritated people on occasion, and it wasn't uncommon in a call-in show for somebody, especially they had a bit of an attitude. You know, you're famous enough to be on the radio and you've spoken at conferences and you're supposed to be an authority on this. How come you just don't know? Well, that's just the way it is. Also, in deploying language, something I still resent is when somebody, rather than say, this is the conclusion that I have come to and I am convinced is real. This is what is happening. My studies have shown me that this is what's going on. I know, as well as I can know, that this is the way it is, as opposed to this is.

once you say that something is and that you know it is in an area of study where there's no definitive proving or disproving. I don't have a carburetor or a spark plug or the equivalent from a craft. I don't have the thumb of a gray alien that we can analyze in a laboratory.

But I do know that I will never say what is just because I think it is, or just because I feel it is. I will make it clear with language that that's as good as it gets for me. And some people don't do that. And then what happens is there are people who are looking for an answer. And maybe they're looking for the answer that you say you're providing. so they become your followers and supporters. And if enough people begin to sign on,

you develop a following that can... It's almost the same as religion in that it is absolute belief, based on absolute faith, based on the figure in the work that has put the work forward, and you become a follower, has the potential of being a cult or operating in a cult-like manner, as opposed to being an individual or even a representative

or a member of an organization that's established and making it clear that you are not speaking for that organization, but I have the benefit of a training with this group or with networking with many other people who are seriously involved. Then we come into the digital era, and the advent of this thing called the Internet, which I am still completely dumbfounded by. You know, they talk about a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, typing for a thousand years, and just by the law of averages, sooner or later,

one of them is going to pop out the script to Hamlet. Maybe yes, maybe no. But the randomness of the universe suggests that, that things may be a certain way, when maybe they're not. And these absolute statements are almost always incorrect and almost always misleading and always polarizing. A well-known figure in the field some years ago, he gave a number, 57, whatever it was, this many alien races are visiting this planet.

And I thought to myself, fuck you. Are you kidding me? Even if you have the deep connections to the intelligence community, and let's even go further. Let's say that by some quirk of magic, you are the president of the United States, the head of the NSA, the head of every intelligence community in every country in the world, and just to make an interesting, throw in the supreme heads of two dozen alien races.

How can you say absolutely that it's not 56 or 58? by saying that number, you are doing tremendous damage to the work others of us are trying to do. You could say, my research and findings have made me conclude that this is it, as opposed to this is it. Same person at one point actually said, all aliens are good. And once again, I thought those same two words. How can you know that as an absolute? it's you can't and so you've gotten attention

and everybody that wants to believe that and who wouldn't is now potentially signed on to be a fan purchaser of your books and attender of your conferences your speaking engagements I'm going to listen to you

when you're interviewed on radio and watch you on TV I will continue to correct even to the point of embarrassing individuals sometimes and you know it's nothing personal. Yeah. And I have this wonderful mantra I work within my mind

that I ascribe to a mafia hitman before he shoots you in the back of the head twice with the silence 22. And the last thing he says is nothing personal, it's just business. Yeah. Thanks. We do our best to do our best.

Then there are those people who, they're pretty full. of themselves and more power to them, but they like the power and the attention. Nothing wrong with that. But it then becomes a game of one upmanship. And I've got this new lead. I can't tell you where it comes from, but here's this outrageous allegation that I'm sure is true. And if you don't like it, then you're part of the problem. I once actually heard William Cooper speak, who for me is kind of one of the godfathers of conspiracies, and for me, somebody who was highly irresponsible

and took a certain amount of truth and mixed it with legend, conjecture, paranoia, myth, self-aggrandizement, and actually say to an audience, who he had been really browbeating, after explaining his latest conspiracy theory, if you do not believe every word I've just said, you are part of the problem. I remember people walking out of there completely silent and many of them very sheepishly. And me thinking, this man potentially is a certain danger to people, very demagogic.

Other people feel that he was murdered by the man and not simply shot dead after shooting a duly appointed law officer serving a summons. Be that as it may. it has mutated to the point where now in the world of social networking and the internet and the ability to manipulate images to any degree where it's hard to know sometimes what to trust and who to trust. There are people out there who I really wasn't aware of beforehand who as a group manifest, you know, I'm living this. isolated a little life. I've always felt ineffectual. Nobody listened to me, but here,

the anonymousness of the internet. I can build myself up, create this alternate persona, and because I'm good at this thing called Photoshop, look at this great image I have of a UFO, or this footage, often never accompanied by the witness name, the location, the time of day, what kind of camera was used. Certainly no photo analysis applied to the image or to the moving footage. And at the same time, some people, what functions as evidence

and corroborating material to some people is not up to the level of other people. And so there is a generation of what I would call orphan documents that are sometimes put forward this is this above top secret leap top you know document it's got the right type right of face it's got rubber stamps on it and things and it came to somebody i know through and it contacted deep in the pentagon and what have you and i know it's serious and you may not as opposed to a legitimately declassified historically verifiable document either declassified before the freedom of information

Act, which came in under Carter, a great law, that, you know, had a home in the National Archives, not that something can't be, you know, the counter argument of, well, somebody typed that up and got it into the archives, et cetera, but it has a romance to it, you know, this somebody leaked this at, you know, great, great risk to their own personal safety and their families, peace of mind, and what courage they had in doing it, and I take it seriously. The other thing is what I would call infotainment, and it is now rampant on good old-fashioned television, the amazing world of cable, well, cable,

of all the golden age of television that we're in right now. Not that it can be a bad thing in certain circumstances. today about the Stephen Spielberg executive produced miniseries from about 20 years ago taken, which is very entertaining and is built to a degree on real information that we have acquired over the years about the cover-up and the world of experiencers and abductees. And it's filmed on a huge budget with great flourishes at time. and it's not meant to be anything more than an educational entertainment. But I remember before it came out, having been hired as a stringer,

somebody who was involved in helping to promote the series right before it came out for the Sci-Fi Channel, then owned by NBC, that part of the event that I created was the three top experts in one way or another. at certainly three of the top in the world on abduction, Bud Hopkins, Dr. David Jacobs, and Dr. John Mack, being interviewed by Morton, blanking on his last name, good old-fashioned newsman, Morton Dean, who I remember first when I was young on the ground in Vietnam, and who worked for Fox at a time, NPR, other stations.

And then the president or the CEO of Sci-Fi getting up there, a very obviously bright and sharp businesswoman, Bonnie, something, talking about these stations, the evolution of executives, business people, as they negotiated with the Spielberg organization, and then started to look at the footage and then begin to see the material that was really in the real world about it, and saying, for me, the biggest revelation was my mandate here, my main mandate is, this is a business. I'm here to provide what I hope is quality entertainment and good documentaries for the public and make money for our network and our stockholders.

But I have to tell you, I have come to absolutely understand that this UFO abduction phenomenon is real. It's real. It's happening to real people. and I hope more than anything that our 20-hour mini-series here will introduce the subject to people in an interesting and entertaining enough way but that what's really behind it is you need to know this this is happening anyway what's changed well the fact that now anybody with an interest can jump into the entire world that's open to us on the internet. They can access a thousand different sources without leaving their chair.

They don't have to build a physical library if they don't want to. They can immediately network with people all over the world on the subject. They can establish themselves as an information source themselves and either do it in a way that I am an involved researcher, investigator, and you've heard me, you know, on different podcasts and things, and this is what I have to say, or I'm going to have my own podcast or radio show, and I'm automatically a personality in the work. Or then there's another phenomena. I have come to call it the Oswald phenomena in that, allegorically or actually, if you want to become really well-known in this country really fast,

One of the best ways to do it is to shoot somebody famous, again, actually or allegorically. You can come out of nowhere and be a nobody and accuses somebody who has an established record as somebody who is involved, especially if they are high visibility experience or abductee, and say, no, you're a liar. And here's my alleged evidence to prove it when there really is no evidence. but most of the people are not going to check your evidence for accuracy. It's just, oh, boy, another sporting event. You know, somebody's going to take down that big guy, and, you know, it's the Roman Coliseum on a certain level.

It's that mentality. And if they're able to hold on, they become a player in the work, even if they're just discontinued. Last year, there was an extraordinary series of attacks on the veracity of Travis Walton's claim, a very well-known apt to put it mildly. And as far as I'm concerned, having looked into it to a great degree, it was built on nothing. It was built on a complete misunderstanding of the fact that it was impossible for their allegations to have happened. Because the light source they claimed was not there.

It was almost four miles away. and in order to have even seen it. You couldn't from there because there was a rise in the terrain there and there was no way to coordinate the lie if you were going to try to

hoax your colleagues but for a period of time several months the three or four individuals putting this forward were players. They were on the radio they were doing podcasts, their voice was one people

we're listening to. There's a break in the routine. You know, who doesn't like a good argument as long as you've got a nice seat away from it. And they were completely disproven, as far as I'm concerned, and as far as I've seen or heard, they've completely disappeared from the dialogue.

It's the way it is. When I started, I had a sense of something that I am now sure of, which is no matter how much money or assets or assistance or access to laboratories, tools, libraries, archives, colleagues that you have, your best research tools are going to remain. Critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and common sense.

And you can be wrong, but if you stay with those things, you've got a good grounding. one of my inspirations in the work is a fictional character and who I was introduced to probably by the age of 10 to a series of old British movies about the legendary Arthur Conan Doyle detective Sherlock Holmes. These were the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce movies. The Holmes character has been played by a number of actors even going back to, I think, silent films.

And about 30 years ago, PBS had a home series with the wonderful late actor Jeremy Brett, one of the best homes that we've seen. And I really enjoyed the character, and that got me as a kid to start to read Arthur Conan Doyle's books, and then move on, but then have that stuff come back later. And with the Homesian character,

one of the things of deductive reasoning was, if you're presented with the genuine mystery, you first look at the most possible, mundane, boring, everyday rationalist explanations possible for whatever the mystery is. If none of them pan out, you then don't jump to the conclusion. You take one step to the second most boring, mundane possibilities, and you keep up that process until you've exhausted it. Now, this is sometimes really boring.

It's not sexy, it's not exotic. However, if you've gotten to that point and you haven't gotten any answers that answer the questions, then things get really interesting. And you pursue it at another level. Where, for many people in the field, especially in this age of short attention span theater,

and again wanting to feel special and wanting to shine because there's so many points of light in this work to jump to the conclusion and look at it from there possibly having missed a more rational everyday explanation

that you could care less about and you don't want it to be. You want this to be something special and you know truly paranormal So that's something that's been rock steady for me. There is now a whole new generation of people in the work. And probably starting from not that long before we met and started our relationship, I was really wondering, along with a number of colleagues,

where that next generation is going to come from. The way I saw it was 30-somethings and 20-somethings, had enough on their plate with just this inundation of information. You know, the digital world is something I couldn't have imagined at that age. Not to mention just wanting to find some security in the world, connect with somebody special, build a life, be able to earn a living. For me, the world of entertainment, when I was in my 20s, it was, you know, I had my favorite groups and singers, my favorite actors and plays,

I would go to concerts, I would listen to records, I would go to the theater. Now, in the world of downloading and a zillion bands, it's hard to even imagine a time where the concept of a rock and roll band being a group of people that were actually earning their living, playing music, and becoming famous for becoming popular because a lot of people liked it, was really an outsider thought. And then I remember, this is probably still in the late 60s, that some university somewhere was offering a course on band management

or the economics of being a professional musician. And I thought that was far out. That was really amazing. and the advent of coming out of the golden age of rock and roll, Motown, soul, beginnings of metal, duop, you know, you name it, all of a sudden things go through the looking glass of the 60s and come out the other sides, heavily influenced in some cases by the altered states of consciousness that some of these artists had experienced

with the use of psychedelics, myself included, and the excitement of being a young person and all of a sudden there's a new album called Yesterday and Today by the Beatles or Rubber Soul or Surrealistic Pillow by the Jefferson Airplane

or the the Mama's and Pappas or the first album by well you name it and each one being a revelation like we were a youth culture

we were together we were going to create something new in the world we were going to try and make things right you know love one another literally as well as allegorically and then of course the whole thing kind of being corrupted

by, well, misuse of drugs. Societies branding you as, you know, a counterculture and potentially dangerous in a Nixonian point of view. And the whole thing gently being pressed down or being integrated into the business system. if you are somebody who could make a lot of money, even if your music is somewhat mundane, we're behind you, and we will help you become famous and rich. I think within the world of UFO studies,

there are people who look to, how can I become, number one, I want everybody know who I am. I want to be well-known. I want to be famous. I want to be the one that presents this amazing piece of information, I'm going to learn to or network with filmmakers

and be part of that way of getting out the information. I'm going to find a way to create a product that people will buy and that horrible bugaboo, if you make money in their work in the uphology, you know, I think about some years where I make $500 or $1,000 doing this work and that I don't have a full-time job, this is what I do. and to have somebody say, oh, you make money at this, it's like once again, fuck you.

Yes, I do. Not as much as I would like to keep me alive, but yeah, I like to be paid for the work that I do, and I think I do good work. But you're in it for the money is hysterical. Anybody with rare exceptions who has been in the work knows that's the case. So we live in a very different world now,

than we did when I entered it in every respect, but also in the world of euphology. And at the same time, at the core, are lots of decent, interested people. Some of them obsessed. Some of them just wishing to advance their own body of knowledge or the world's body of knowledge who work in earnest and who are serious and take pride in the papers they write,

the broadcast that they do. and there's another generation coming up now of younger people who are not euthologists, who are not serious students of paranormal, but they're good communicators. And they want to be of value. And in our broadcast-oriented world, they've established some of the best podcasts and radio shows. And they don't claim to be experts. What they're good at is having people who are. acknowledge, come on to their programs, and have, ideally, intelligent, interesting, compelling

conversations with them. That's of real value, too. And I've heard those people put down, because, oh, well, you know, you've got a podcast, but you don't really know the subject. Well, I don't know as well as you do, and I want to learn more about it, and I know it's important. And I can be of some value here as a facilitator in being a go-between, in being the widget that allows this information source to go out to this audience. If I don't do this well, I'm not going to succeed. If I do do it well, I am going to succeed, and I'd like to. You know, and a story. Yeah. Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. Just in my time in this field, it's changed so much. And yeah, it's building off of others' work. I mean, that's,

That's what a research field is. You know, things don't just pop out of nowhere. They're built upon. And I think this topic is, that's what it is. You know, just the minute you think you have an answer, there's 10 more questions attached to it. And I love that. I love chasing that mystery.

And it's amazing. And I don't plan on stopping anytime soon, as I'm sure you're not. Well, I want to get your stuff. thoughts on a few things that you've been personally involved with in the field. And you mentioned the name Bud Hopkins. Any of our

listeners who are familiar with the abduction phenomenon know that name. But you were his personal assistant for a long time, and you saw hundreds of experiencers and acclaimed abductees come and go. There's one case that is always really stuck out to me.

And I saw the book here in your collection, Witness. And that's the case of Linda Cortille. Um, very controversial case. People, you know, are on either end of the spectrum with it or in that gray area, as most of us usually are. Um, could you maybe run us through the Linda Cortillo case, um, the best you can? And, uh, your involvement with that, your observations during Bud's investigation with that. And, um, yeah, maybe set that up for us as a case that a lot of our listeners may never even have heard of. Sure. In, I think the spring of 1989, Bud received a letter from a woman who was a lifelong New Yorker, lived downtown in the same neighborhood you grew up in, mother, married, high school education, Italian-American, who had had. enough thoughts and memories of what could be a presenting sign for abduction, not always, that Bud found really interesting. I read the letter first. I read and responded to thousands of pieces of mail over the years, and Bud was very old school, and this is 89. I'm trying to

remember, I don't know if the Internet existed yet. But he had simple pieces of stationery, and letters would be either from possible experiencers and abductees, fans, regular folks with questions, incarcerated people, journalists, what have you. And he worked out a very simple code for me of certain symbols, just. to put right on the envelope as I give him a batch of mail. And there was a series of simple symbols of stars or whatever that indicated that I strongly suspected that this was the real deal. And so I did with Linda on this. And it wasn't until around Thanksgiving of that year that she actually came and met with

Bud for the first time. and boy, you know, every light went off. Linda's feeling was, I have these memories, I have these feelings, I have these thoughts, but obviously this can't be on a certain level, so what I need to know is what's wrong with me and what medicine I should be taking or who I should be going to see. And Bud began to investigate it, and I have to say he was probably the best self-trained investigator I've ever met my life. And I used to joke with him occasionally

that rather than staying an artist that he had become an investigator, if he decides to go into law enforcement, rather than be a painter, God helped the criminal element in New York. He was extraordinary. And he began to really research

the subject with her. And we began to see things, some of them for the first time in terms of what became patterns. because we had never thought or knew to look at them. Like in the case of two adults who as children were brought together in a neutral space repeatedly as young kids and who later may have discovered each other in life, consciously not recognizing that that was the thing that drew them to each other. I think we only had one case before that of somebody who still remains a friend of mine who married a woman, a lovely woman.

for reasons they weren't fully sure of. And then what began to emerge between the two of the more conscious memories of being on board a craft together. And they found a way to verify it to their satisfaction. And the result of that was, although they still loved each other, realizing that an artificial situation, in a sense, had brought them together for its own reason,

and they amicably, I'm sure a certain amount of wistfulness, to put it mildly, separated and divorced. The Linda case that became known as the Brooklyn Bridge UFO abduction case, for me of the several hundred individuals that I met with over the years through Bud, not on my own, others, certainly plenty of others, but I had an extraordinary position of being kind of the bug on the wall or on his shoulder. as these people made their way to New York. Or I was the one who took the initial calls and did an entry-level interview. Or I was asked to sit in on an hypnotic regression. And I kept those regression records in a series of old-fashioned ledgers. Again, this is all, you know, pre-computer and, or digital, really.

and, you know, entering dual logs of how many times basic synopsies of what had happened. And at a certain point, Bud sat down with Linda and laid out why he was convinced that this thing had happened to her, the most pronounced aspect being the center of the case, that on a particular night, she and it's not a non-standard abduction scenario floated above her bed and in her case

along with the number of the grays that were in the room with her through the plate glass window of her downtown apartment I think on the 11th floor ironically with windows looking out both on the Brooklyn Bridge here and the World Trade Center there

into a craft a glowing craft hovering above the building as you know New York City never fully sleeps and even if it's 2 o'clock in the morning downtown there are still many people awake and working

you know night shift at one of the big newspaper printers or coming and going etc and many people saw this happen they saw it and by then Bud was a well-known personality in the work

and they started started to write to him. For me, one of the most compelling pieces of evidence around the case, and for anybody thinking this could have been a well-organized fabrication, no matter how complex, it's easy to buy that than this whole abduction thing. A woman on the Brooklyn Bridge, driving home from a retirement party of a friend, observing this glowing light and seeing

this and wondering obviously it's a movie being made but how are they creating this special effect somebody on the west side highway I think he must have received at least a dozen letters with carefully done drawings and for but and I as trained artists

there was and for me remained something special about witness drawings overall they are done by people who are not trained draftsman they come from a deep desire to recreate for somebody else to validate what they saw or experienced. Some of them are childlike and labored. Others are fairly simple and elegant. But what struck us the most about these was they all were almost all exactly the same shape

and had the same lighting configuration. And downtown at the time, with two security people was a very important diplomat. Once Bud had established who it was, it seemed so outrageous that the book does not mention who it was. It became an open secret and now is pretty much public knowledge, that it was Perez de Quayor, who at the time was the Secretary General of the United Nations. So one reason the case is considered controversial is, yeah, right. Please give me a break.

The Secretary General of the United Nations was downtown at two in the morning. Why? Well, he may have had a romantic liaison. He's a married man. He was in a very important diplomatic, internationally diplomatic position. He was Catholic. We were able to deduce that his prelate, the man who he went to for confession of mass, was Cardinal John O'Connor, and Cardinal O'Connor was not just the Cardinal of New York.

He was one of the most powerful and influential Catholic pellets in America. Cardinal O'Connor was connected to a lot of major players in the political world in the United States and in the Beltway, and certainly in New York City. And I can't prove this. but we did learn, well, you know what, I'm about to say something I'm not authorized to say, so I won't yet. But be that as it may, Bud ultimately met with Perez-Dequayor. It was in an executive lounge at O'Hare Airport in Chicago that was pre-arranged through De Quayar's office, who obviously wanted to meet with Bud, but gave him a certain amount.

amount of information, but asked him a series of questions, none of which he denied, because he was involved in an abduction that Linda was. And the two security men who were with them, one of these men became obsessed with Linda, obsessed. And that obsession was rooted in what Linda was, had to acknowledge at a certain point as we developed the material, oh my God, this reoccurring memory from early childhood, five, seven years old, finding myself in this room, this kind of undefined white space with a boy a little bit older than me. And as Linda said, I was, you know, a passionate Yankees fan. I went to sleep with my Yankees hat on.

And there I was as a little kid. And one of the things that he used to do, you know, two little kids in this weird space to decrease the tension, was he'd take the bill and he'd turn it like that on my hat. And I didn't like that and I'd turn it back. And when he was confronted with that, he remembered that very well. The other security man ultimately became completely unwound emotionally. And he disappeared off any ability to trace him.

whether he was institutionalized or just removed from the case and disallowed to communicate or not alive, I have no idea, and I won't speculate. The case took six years to research, and far in a way more than any involvement that I had with any of other buds cases, this was the one that I was involved in two for six years. That's a long time. During that time, I met regularly with Linda, who became a good friend, as well as somebody who I felt somewhat protective of, and who I was convinced had gone through what she alleged she had gone through.

And by the time the book was published, I had been privy to a great deal of information around it as it was coming in. The book, I think in part because of the claims of some. somebody famous and unlikely, being involved, stirred up a great deal of controversy in the UFO research community, which I got and understood. I mean, we wish, was somebody unknown or whatever, that, you know, sometimes there's an impulse you'd like to change a detail. in the service of the greater truth, it's a white lie. It's a small thing. I wish I could sign on to that ethic. I can't. You lie or a liar. And if you're caught, you have a problem.

And the work you're doing is understandably now more open to questioning. It doesn't matter what your motivation was. I think it still stands for me aside from my sister's case to use the most dispassionate word, as the most memorable, the most complex, the most mind-blowing and challenging of any I've ever been involved in investigating. And at this point in my life, I don't know how many dozens of books I receive a credit or a thank you in, and in one case of dedication. But I'm particularly proud of that acknowledgement in the acknowledgments of witnessed. And I still stay in touch with Linda, who, you know, still stands absolutely rock solid on everything that happened to her. I think Bud had one regret about the case and how he handled it, which was maybe two years in, which would have been like four years before the book was published.

He was so enthused with some of what these findings were and this pattern of children being brought together and then reconnected later in life and recognizing each other, which again, we only had one incident of that beforehand, and we now, now that we knew it was something that we could look for, have quite a number of them, within the greater field archive of UFO abduction-related studies, that he wrote several monographs, and they made their way out into the research community, and in one particular case, three kind of skeptical inquirers in a neighboring state latched onto it, and, and and used it, I think in part, as an opportunity in their minds to address what they felt was an accuracy, a correction, an exaggeration in the work of somebody well-known in the field,

or, you know, on a slightly baser motivation, possibly get the attention that they could not have gotten otherwise. And that became a subject of discussion where had he waited and never published anything around it until he's ready to publish. That would have been short-circuited and not happened, and all the evidence would have been presented at once. So it became something, you know, those kind of regrets where it's not the worst thing in the world, but I wish I had handled that differently. And just been allowed to proceed in this,

but it was that level of enthusiasm, and I felt it too. It was amazing. And the desire to get it out there. into the research community, I think, was noble, but it was used in a way that was counterproductive. And that's the way it is sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. Live and learn.

I would just close by saying, I encourage everybody to read that book, witnessed the true story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO abductions, and then come to their own best conclusions. Right, yeah. That's, you know, that's another thing in this field is, people will criticize and comment on things that they haven't even read, especially in today's world of headlines online,

where you don't even read the article. You just base everything solely on the often biased headlines, and that's an issue for sure. Sadly, in our culture, we have a phenomenon, and it's very human, of I don't have much in this world, but I have a right to have an opinion on anything I want. I couldn't agree more. Where I differ with that philosophy is I feel I have a right to an informed opinion.

And occasionally when I'm asked about a case or a question about the UFO phenomenon or whatever in a Q&A at a conference setting or more often in a radio or podcast in call-in shows, I will say, I don't have an opinion on that. What do you mean you don't have an opinion? Well, I don't know enough about the subject to speak with any intelligence or knowledge. I think I probably should learn more about it so that I can't express an opinion. But for somebody to say, you know, I am entitled to have an opinion on anything that I want as an American. Sure you are.

But maybe you ought to know what the hell you're talking about before you have an opinion. opinion on it. And a lot of people take that personally. Go figure. Exactly. Exactly. There's consequences for putting your opinions out there. And people need to realize that. I came across in your binders here in the office, a very interesting binder about the UN in UFOs. You know, for some of our listeners may be familiar with the work that New York City journalist Lee Spiegel was a part of when it comes to the UN, but you also tangentially were involved with something to do with the UN and UFOs. And I found that binder fascinating when I was flipping through it. Could you tell us about your involvement with the UN when it comes to this?

And also the House of Lords debate as well. It wasn't just, you know, the UN. But yeah, tell us about your involvement with those things, if you don't mind. Well, number one, let's talk about somebody far more important in that question. than I am, and you mentioned him already, and that is the distinguished journalist Lee Spiegel, who is one of our most highly regarded UFO-related investigative writers, and worked for years as the UFO journalist for the Huffington Post organization, and happens to be one of my best friends and one of the greatest guys I know.

Lee, as a 20-something, who had had what really was an historic UFO experience, somehow managed to connect with the Prime Minister of one of the smallest countries in the UN and one of the most least powerful, the island of Grenada in the Caribbean. And that was Sir Eric Gary. Gary took the subject of UFO seriously. He had had a UFO siding, but he was also a believer in paranormal stuff that for a lot of the diplomatic corps

reduced his believability. And he is understandably credited with bringing this to the attention of the UFO and creating the situation we were going to discuss, but it was Lee Spiegel who prevailed on him to do it. and then prevailed on him again to do it. It was this guy, a regular guy, you know, a young guy,

who was the whole impetus for this, and Lee deserves incredible credit for this. This is historic. But ultimately, Gary was able, after a number of unsuccessful tries, to put on the docket a series of committee meetings to discuss the possibility of creating a UFO study committee within the auspices of the United Nations. Not too spectacular, but certainly nothing that had ever been done. With a very simple mandate that countries contribute what they knew or thought they knew

or information they had to a central database, and that that be studied and learned from, and then decisions made about any position the United Nations might have on this phenomenon. A lot of the members were not keen on this, and in great part, could it be the simple? Yes, it can't. Fear of ridicule. So many of these individuals, you know, they had risen to a point and good for them in their countries, where they were nominated and nomination was approved or however it works, to be the representative to the United Nations from their country. And that came with almost always a nice apartment,

a life maybe than the one better than the one they had, connections with a whole different world, you know, living in New York City rather than wherever the hell they came from, and the idea of, you're saying by implication, you want me to go back to the head of my government and say, I think UFOs are real enough that we should vote for this amendment and create this committee with the possibility of the ridicule that we all know

has a good chance of accompanying it toward our country and toward me as an individual and by extension you for allowing me to make that vote a number of the seats well anyway finally it was put on the docket and it was going to happen and this was amazing Coleman von Kovetsky, who I mentioned earlier, had been close to an earlier Secretary General Uthant, who he had presented with documents well before the Freedom of Information Act that he had gotten from sources in the Pentagon

that ultimately, with the passage of time, proved to be authentic, about the reality of UFOs. and at some point in the 60s, as America was getting more deeply involved, maybe 67, in the war in Vietnam, Thaunt took it so seriously that he made a statement that went out on wire services all over the world. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was basically next to the war in Vietnam. The most pressing subject that we need to deal with is that of UFOs. That was intolerable to certain people in the intelligence community, who, and I have this firsthand, and I take it very seriously, showed up one afternoon to gentlemen in suits at Coleman's apartment and asked to chat with him. Very respectful the whole way, but essentially said, we know who you are, and we know what you have done.

And this is causing real problems. What we need you to do is go back to the Secretary General, and we, choose your own wording and rationale, but make it clear to him that now you are not so sure of the prominence of these documents, that you don't want to risk him embarrassing himself further, and that he needs to make a retraction to this statement. It is a concern of the president, Linda Johnson, and we'd really appreciate that. We know that you make your living and a good living as an expert on optics. and that you are a consultant to Agfa, to Kodak, to this phone company, to this camera company.

And nothing will change about that. In fact, we will wish you well and hope you have more work. But if you do not do what we're asking, we will make sure that every single consulting job you have dries up and that no more come at you. And you will live for the rest of your life on your social security and what you will make sure. you make selling your UFO little booklets at UFO conferences. And Coleman, who was already 70 or so, and a very, I mean, a bigger-than-life guy in some ways, and very old school, not what Americans are used to. And I think his passion put people off here to a degree where in Europe he was very popular appropriately. He was a table-pounder. I mean, he would raise his voice

and he would put his hand down on the podium. And he spoke English well, but not great. And where I got involved was a year or two into my friendship with him. He asked me if I would, along with Antonio Haneus, work on helping to edit for grammatic purposes, a paper that he had written at the request of the then Secretary of John. General Kurt Voltaunt, who was interested in this subject. And what I mean by the subject was, again, Coleman was a strategic military thinker. And this has come up since, and now with much

more out knowledge about UFOs and nukes. Coleman was almost prophetic. He's had a tremendous concern that at some point, truly legitimate anomalous UFOs would come into American or Soviet airspace. They would not acknowledge when contacted, and that would be taken as a sign of hostility. And if they did not acknowledge again, jets would be scrambled, and it could set off or, you know, B-52 is deployed. It had the potential of igniting a nuclear conflagration. Very scary stuff. And that we needed some kind of clearinghouse of information. The United Nations was the most likely place, noble. I was terribly flattered and took it as, you know,

this is my first real involvement beyond my own little researches. And I was very proud and went over all the material he had given me as Antonio did. And the content and the backing, the grounding and thinking was really first rate. The grammar was deplorable. Antonio and I used to joke that, Coleman spoke and wrote something we called Colemanese. You know, forget about sentence structure and prepositions and just spins and flourishes. And, you know, I remember the hours that we spent marking up these documents, he thanked us

profusely and ignored them all. And so it became an anomaly in terms of the information's good, but holy shit, you know, is this serious? and I'll show you some of them. Also the same thing with the House of Lords debate in 1980. It was Coleman who had been asked by

the Earl of Clanchety Brimsley-Laport Trench, who was a passionate student of the UFO subject, wrote several good books on it, to contribute a paper to the House of Lords debate, which I also helped to edit unsuccessfully,

but I have a credit in both of these published papers, I'm very proud of it for what it's worth. Anyway, the event finally came around. It was going to be three days of hearings. And although Antonio and I weren't paid for it, which I didn't expect, we were invited to attend the hearings. And that was an extraordinary experience for me.

I remember the first day. First, there had been a terrible blizzard, a day or two before, which was directly responsible for, a flight from Texas being canceled, which precluded the bringing in of an important witness who was going to testify, a man named Gordon Cooper, a very outspoken astronaut who took it seriously, had sightings, etc. But I remember, you know, I had one suit, looks sharp, leave my loft in Chinatown, take the subway, no, I'm probably, just to the number of 15 bus, it was on First Avenue, Zing, right up to the UN, where I met my parents. Both of them worked, but the snow

had made it a problem for mom to get out to Garden City, to her job, and dad simply closed the office for the day, and they met me there, but they were curious and the whole idea that I was involved in something like this, and we sat in the gallery, and we watched. And one of the ironies there is that we may have been sitting right next to Lee Spiegel's parents. Lee and I, we might have passed in the hallway, but it was another 10 years before we actually met. When he was a syndicated radio show host on NBC out of New York with a huge audience, and I was a guest, and at a certain point we put this together, and it was like so ironic to both of us. And they're on the floor of the United Nations.

They debated the subject. The first thing I noticed was how many empty seats there were in the delegate section. I'm sure a lot of them was, gee, it's really snowy. I can't get out of my apartment. Yeah, right. Other ones just didn't want to be there. But those who were there, you know, were all pretty grim-faced. Nobody wanted to be there.

This was not something anybody wanted to do except for Sir Eric. And right there sitting on the floor was Stanton T. Friedman, Dr. J. Allen Heineck, Dr. Jacques Valet. Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Coyne, who had been involved not that long before in a very important UFO incident in a helicopter, I believe over Ohio, where they encountered a fully articulated UFO that literally, by whatever technology, as they were trying to dive and get away from it, it pulled them up 15. feet. Everybody on it and made statements. There was no way to keep the story secret. And Coyne was a very impressive military witness, although Gordon Cooper was not there. His statement, which is a powerhouse, was read into the record. But that was the first time I had encountered any of these individuals as real people. And it was amazing. Ultimately, the United Nations

delegates, oh, at one point, if you do the timeline, I'm not sure how long, but very shortly before this, maybe six weeks or so, a 21-year-old Australian private pilot named Volentich, Frederick Volentich, whose father was also a private pilot, was flying off the coast of Australia and started to radio in encountering a UFO. And he started to panic in the communications. and it's not a plane, and it's tremendous, and at a certain point, we have the recording, of course, there is a sound of a number of seconds of metal on metal, and then he goes off radar.

Well, he disappeared without a trace. Never heard from again. Immediately the skeptical community said, well, he crashed and, you know, there was no oil slick, and nobody noticed, and they didn't find. the body or the craft. But one of our presenters, I do not remember

whether it was Stan or Dr. Heinek or Valet, they basically turned to the Australian ambassador who was there and said in so many words, Mr. Ambassador, a citizen of your country has been kidnapped, possibly killed, rights violated, and yet how can your government just sit by and not come? I remember the look on that man,

face. It was, it was, how dare you single me out and humiliate me in this manner over such a flying saucers. The vote was taken and they passed the resolution and then allowed it to die quietly in committee and end of story. I think back on the opportunity there that had it happened. Again, it wasn't this giant advance, but the idea have a permanent committee in the United Nations set up to study UFO phenomena with countries sharing the knowledge as they had, building a database, networking, which would have ultimately, probably resulted in some kind of public statements. Maybe we wouldn't be where we are now, maybe it would be at a more advanced place had that been

allowed to happen. And I remember going back home that night and being really disappointed it's not seeing any television coverage on it. And then that period of waiting, of the possibility that it was going to happen, and then finding out through channels that it had, again, been allowed to die in committee. Meanwhile, the long arm of those who really wish this hadn't happened and wanted to get back at somebody on his next trip to New York City for diplomatic purposes, Prime Minister Gary's government was overthrown, and a communist government was installed, and that gave President Reagan an excuse to, I think, create an action.

I have to re-look that up, but I'm trying to remember the disposition of Gary after that, whether he became kind of a refugee or was allowed to return, but I do remember that there was news items that in going into, you know, the prime minister's residence, finding objects and things associated with voodoo and, you know, books on the occult. And obviously this guy was, you know, a wacko. And able to hurt his reputation after the fact, you know, it was not just mean it was effective. And kind of a warning to, you know, this guy's a nobody in the world of world leaders, but he rattled the cage. And he got some results that embarrassed the forces that be. So let's sicken to him. And they did. And they did. Wow. That is fascinating.

Peter, wrapping things up, where can we find everything you're up to? I am, embarrassingly, one of the least online individuals with my level experience. It has to do, I think, partly with being a technophobe, being dyslexic, having so many knowledgeable friends who are standing there waiting to help me, developing a presence on YouTube, on Patreon, helping me try to find a way to monetize my weekly radio show, and I keep not doing it. I'm hoping this year I will push myself over the edge

with the help of a number of people and make that happen. In the meantime, the website that I have is so woefully out of date that I won't even direct it to you, but I will say you can find me regularly, weekly, live on Mondays,

7 o'clock to 9 o'clock in the evening Eastern Standard Time, hosting my radio program, meanwhile, here on Earth, on KGRA digital broadcasting, KGRADB.com. Once the show is over, the show is archived, you can access it for three months at no cost. The audio goes to speaker.com at no cost. If you subscribe to KDRA, either monthly or yearly, and you use my first name as your subscription code, you get 30% off, which makes it come to about $5 a month or $50 a year. And that also entitles you to access the hundreds and hundreds, and maybe hundreds and hundreds of other great shows by other hosts. in the KGRA going back to its inception. Not a bad deal.

Also, I am in the world of social networking. I am on Twitter at Peter Robbins, UFO. The other thing is I'm fairly regular on Facebook. And my Facebook address is Facebook.com slash Peter Robbins and why slash. it's actually that simple rather than some esoteric code there, where I post whatever I'm doing, and immediately following each broadcaster no later than the next day, there is a link to the show that I've just done. So you can reach me through Twitter, through Facebook,

and my email address is my first initial and last name in Home State, P-R-O-B-B-I-N-S-E-N-S, NY at Yahoo.com. Hopefully later this year, I can actually say, go here. Yes, it's on the horizon. Finally, conferences are happening again. Peter, this is absolutely fascinating. Thank you for sharing all of your stories with me. But more importantly, thank you for allowing me into your home. It's been an incredible experience that I'll never forget. And one of the first of many to come. So thank you. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions

in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network.