Bring the UFO phenomena. Here's your host, Alejandro Roja. Hello and welcome to Open Minds Radio. This is Alejandrojas and I am happy to be here and happy to be speaking to you. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have a good show today. This is going to be our twenty eleven year review essentially, and we have the best of the best to go over these
stories with us, and that is mister Lee Spiegel. He's a reporter for the Huffington Post, which of course is a big national online news organization and the only one to have a staff writer that is mostly dedicated to writing UFO stories. How cool is that? And that person is Lee Spiegel, and he will be talking to us very shortly about all the UFOs stories of the year. He's also going to be one of the speakers at the UFO Congress,
which is February twenty second to the twenty sixth. If you have not registered, do so now right now. I'm going to give you a moment. It's just UFO Congress. You can go google that already registering all right? Great, See how easy that was? Just click click bottom bom bottom beaming. You're registered. So uh, you're going to want to be there because we're going to have a lot of great speakers and it's going to be a lot of fun, and of course you can see more at ufocongress dot
com. However, I'm going to move right along because we have a lot to talk about, a full year jam packed with great UFO stories to talk about. We're also going to talk to Lee about his relationship with Robin Leech. They've been friends for a long time. The younger people might not know who Robyn leitch A is. Lifestyles of the Wretch and I miss which that's
a mediocre at best impersonation, but Lifestyles of the rich and famous. This guy, Robin LEAs has probably been one of the most mimicked people in history because people just like doing Robert lights for the Russian faments, just like I did. Well, at least he used to be in the nineties, in the eighties, but he hasn't been active, at least in the national level. We'll find out what he's been up to, how long he's been interested
in UFOs and the paranormal. And Lee's been buddies with him before he was famous himself and started meeting the famous and rich people, so it's going to
be a lot of fun. It's going to be a great interview. One of the things, of course we do here at Open Minds is that we cover UFO news all the time, every day, and because there's lots of stories out there, and we bring on this dude called Jason McLellan who has a cool haircut, kind of a short, little moak type of thing going on if you've seen the pictures online, and that he's extremely intelligent and he shares us at the great UFO news stories of the week, and he's here
to talk to us about some UFO news. Jason, it's a pleasure to have you. Pleasure to be here, Alejandro. Greetings everyone. This is your Open Minds News Brief for January sixteenth, twenty twelve. Well citing reports submitted to the Mutual UFO Network or MOFON in the first week of twenty twelve could indicate a busy year for UFOs. According to Les Bigel of Huffington Post, who happens to be our guest on the show today, twenty twelve has
already been or has already seen an increased in UFO activity. MUFFO International Director Clipper Cliff told Lutzpiegel, for the entire month of January twenty eleven, moufon recorded around five hundred reports, and we're already up to two hundred and thirty three after just the first week of twenty twelve. Mufon reported increased UFO sightings
in the late summer of twenty eleven. Citings in August twenty eleven doubled the number of sightings reported during other months, and if the first week of twenty twelve is any indication, this year's sighting reports could double the number of reports received in twenty eleven. Cliff explained to Spiegel. Quote, last year we averaged over six thousand total sightings, and if it continues at this pace, we'll be up fifty percent, with about ten percent of those reports ending up
as unexplained after our investigation end. Quote, so let the reporting commence. We're well into January. Yeah, and I don't know, you might have another interesting article to write after this year. You did a wonderful, wonderful
article about the twenty eleven sightings, at least the increasing summer activity. Yeah, and yeah, because the summer there was a big increase, and I did a lot of stories on that with graphs and everything, and we included some of that in our next magazine that's just coming out right now on UFO Hotspots and Fox News in Orlando, of all places. Also interviewed Peter Davenport
of new work. I don't know if you saw that National UFO Reporting Center, and I kind of combined the two stories at UFO Daily News dot Com and a story I put up yesterday. But Davenport had some really interesting things to say too. He said he's also seen a great big increase in sightings on his site. He's probably now the number two reporting center, although he's
been at it for a really long time. Also, but he said a couple of things that were kind of funny because he said, you know, everybody's trying to relate this to the twenty twelve my own prophecies into the world stuff, and he say, I don't really believe in any of that stuff. But one tonateman I thought he said was really funny was that I may be one of the few upologists out there though who doesn't have answers on what's
going on here, but we'll have to keep looking. And what he's saying is of course a lot of people profess to know everything that's going on, whereas a lot of people like Lee or like us, we're ready to admit, who knows what the heck's going on, but we're observing to try to find out. Another good point that he made when people ask about pictures, and this kind of goes to the George Clooney statement from a few weeks ago where she said, well, everybody's got cell phone pictures, why aren't we
seeing more of these UFOs? But like he said, it's hard to get pictures on his cell phone. Davenport made this point that cell phone pictures are not that great, I mean rappy. Go try to take a picture of the stars right now or an airplane at night with your cell phone. You're you're not gonna be able to tell anything. And you know a lot of these, a lot of the smartphone cameras or yeah, the smartphone cameras they can be pretty high quality cameras, yeah, but still as cameras, they
suck. Yeah, they especially if you're trying to take take a night photo or a photo of a light moving through the sky, exactly awful. It's not going to happen. So Davenport made the point that a lot of these pictures are from cell phones, so they're not that great. So people, if you have a chance, you know, grab your better high quality actual camera to take a picture, sure and put it, stabilize it if possible when you take the picture. So, yeah, Devin, I thought had
a few good points there too. Yeah. Good for Peter, And I would like to point out that both Lee and least Bigel and Cliff and Cliff, who are are good friends, will both be speakers at the twenty twelve International UFO Congress. So that's exciting those both of them nice, It'll be fun to see them again. Going to be sweet. Here's some extremely exciting
news to me personally from last week. An exciting announcement was made that suggests there could be billions of extraterrestrial inhabited planets in our very own Solar system. According to MSNBC, a statistical analysis based on a survey of millions of stars suggests that there is at least one planet for every star in the sky, and probably more, adding up to approximately one hundred and sixty billion planets in
the Milky Way. The winner galaxy, not Solar System. Correct. Thank you for correcting that a team of international scientists recently concluded that stars are orbited by planets as a rule rather than the exception, and many of those are likely to be similar to Earth. The estimate is that one in ten planets is the right temperature to sustain life. Those findings were published recently in the journal Nature. Yeah, what's cool about that story? I saw another one.
Of course, people are probably familiar Trake's equation, which is an equation it has all these mathematical problems, mathematical statistics to try to demonstrate the probability
of extraterrestrial in this case, actual intelligent extraterrestrial life out there. And when that story came out, someone commented that we need to change those numbers and that actually that Drake's equation was much more conservative than what we're finding out about true, you know, possible planets to have the ability to host life. So it's just, of course, as we keep talking about weekly more and more at a very quick page, it's crazy, I mean, yeah,
number it every week. There was just a year ago that this number, this estimated number of those planets was fifty billion. Now we're up one year later to one hundred and sixty billion. Yeah, and really there's one of one hundred and sixty zillion gazillion and it will keep spiraling out of control from there. Yeah, but it's exciting just that they keep finding that they've underestimated
those figures and that more and more they're finding Wow. And I think you get more of these statements from people too, saying with these numbers and the more we're learning, the more that it's extremely likely that at any moment we're
going to find some at least basic form of life on another planet. Absolutely, but if they announced that, I think, you know, it's going to really change people's mindsets and they're going to think, wow, if we're finding so quickly, know this life on other planets, that makes it much more likely that there are intelligence civilizations out there. It's very cool, much smarter than us because we're not that smart, not that smart. That's something
that I'm happy to admit it as well. Yeah, pretty smart, but not that smart. Work work, fun, Yeah, but yeah, not that smart. Well, moving on to other news, social media channels like Twitter and Facebook have developed into valuable news delivering and receiving platforms, and social media services are accessible on a variety of hardware options like computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, even on televisions. Now and in this constantly connected
world, social media has become the fastest way to spread breaking news. It stands to reason, then, that social media will be used to broadcast news of extraterrestrial contact, and those who actively follow social media social media channels, like many of our listeners, you'll be the likely among the first to know about any such contact. The BBC recently reported that news of extraterrestrial contact quote
they reach most people via a tweet from a SETI astronomer. According to The Daily Mail, because of the instant nature of social media, you might know about EAT contact before a government agency does. And that's because SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Their astronomers recently explained that they quote have no obligation to report contact to an official body and can simply inform people what they have discovered and do not know of any formal procedure of how to deal with it.
And this is a problem we have with UFOs in general and any sort of extraterrestrial nature. There isn't really a formal body, you know. That's something that Leslie Kane has been bringing to the attention trying to bring to the attention of everybody is that there isn't an official body to report UFOs to to investigate, to look into what we have flying in our skies. But so the SETI astronomers have that same thing. They don't There isn't a formal procedure
of who they're supposed to report to. But once an extraterrestrial signal is detected, it'll be up to the man who heads up SETIES Post Detection Task Group, Arizona State University Professor Paul Davies, to respond. And we've mentioned this on the show before, and the type of response that Davies has in mind would be, as he told the BBC, UH would have something to do with something that humans and aliens could both understand, and in his mind that's
mathematics and physics. That you are going to say, Facebook, no, no, But that would have been a good, good one. Yeah, And he's not on Facebook or Twitter, I think so. I don't think he's yeah, but we are. So there's open Minds TV, Twitter, there's a paranormal RPTR reporter that's mine. UFO Daily News. I tweet on you tweet on eccentric. So go get on our Twitter and so many we have so many Facebook pages too. I mean O Mind's Radio has one, of Mind's magazine has one, You have one, I have one. But
really, I mean, I I strongly suggest Twitter. You know, we're very active on Twitter, and that's certainly if you're going to be following something, that is the key to finding out information as it happens. Yes, I mean, then as someone tweets a good picture or a story or this news that they've made contact and they have the proof, we're going to retweet
the hell out of that and people are going to know instantly. And wrote I wrote an article about just how valuable a tool social media is for you know, sharing specifically UFO information. I wrote that in the December January issue of Open Minds magazine, and in that I mentioned just how much attention the speed of Twitter got during that to earthquake that happened on the East Coast last
year. And they proudly pushed the tagline that the Twitter is faster than an earthquake tweet because because when the earthquake, when people felt the earthquake in Virginia and DC, they were tweeting about it right away, And people in New York saw those tweets before they felt the earthquake. So Twitter, that's where the news comes from at first. These days, that's one of our most valuable tools. Yeah. And when I wrote a story just about celebrities tweeting,
right they're UFO sidings. Half of them I think where jokes, but half of them were serious. They believe they saw UFOs. Well here's something that could be a joke perhaps, but for you tech people out there, you might enjoy this. A dating company is developing a smartphone application that could help Earthlanks find love among the stars. Local Sin is the name of the company. They describe themselves as a social network that uses location technology to help
you find hookups around you. The company may need to modify its description to read find hookups around the galaxy if it is successful and completes its plans with this app. According to the Metro, Local Sin is working on an allegedly NASA inspired app that will enable Love Secrets to transmit radio signals from Earth to other planets. According to Local Sin spokesperson, it will give normal, broad minded people the opportunity to commute, date with other life forms and could open
the doors to true universal dating. The company described their project as quote intergalactic dating application, but intergalactic maybe overstating a bit. It seems the radio signals will be confined to the Milky Way galaxy. According to the Metro quote, transmissions could reach as far as Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, both
of which scientists claim could support life potentially. But beaming messages into space is precisely what theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has been cautioning humans against, as we've mentioned many times on the show. But it appears Local Sin either didn't get the memo from him or they don't think his warning applies to space love letters. The app is reportedly planned to be offered for free, but development of the
app could take five years to complete. One thing is certain, the term long distance relationship will take on a new meeting if the company succeeds in developing their galactic love app, especially with dating. We could send out a message to let's say Europa, and there could be this mermaid merman society under the ice and the oceans, and they misinterpret and they get offended, and then they come blow the hell out of us, you know, at least thinking
in the way Stephen hawking. It's kind of hawking will go I am right, I was right, Run run and then sh would they take us out? Yeah? Hopefully that won't be the case. But I don't really think that they're going to get around to developing this. It seems like a lot of hurdles they would have to jump through, and a lot of technological accomplishments they'd have to make to be able to make an app, be able to
actually be messages into space. And really, you want to get your product out to people who can pay you, right, And unfortunately we don't have any trade relationships with anybody else, any other planets. Well, and as I said, I mean they plan. So they're claiming they're going to offer this app for free, but I imagine the development of something like this is pretty costly. So yeah, yeah, so they're getting their money from somewhere.
Yeah, they might have some intergalactic deals going on. Yeah maybe. Well all one hundred that is all the news for today. Remember, guys, you can check out all these stories and so many more. Open Minds dot tv your source for UFO related news. I'm Jason McLellan, your Open
Minds News correspondent, and you've been briefed back to you one hundred. All right, thank you, Jason. Yeah, I want to remind you of about a couple other news stories and well, one in particular that I wanted to mention was this one that just came up today on these guys who are flying around remote control planes with a bunch of LED lights on them. We've
talked about that a little bit before. But what's great about this story is it actually shows the pictures of these planes and kind of talks more in depth about these guys and what they're doing. And the whole warning here is just you know, as technology improves, plane remote control planes have lights on them, kites have lights on them. LEDs these days are really small, and unfortunately it means we have to be even more careful searching for UFOs to find
the real thing and not be tricked ourselves. So there's that story up. You can find my tweet that I talked about the UFO Daily News tweet. But also I'll have a story on UFO Daily News tonight about that you might want to check out. However, we've got a lot to talk to mister Lee Spiegel about and he's always a lot of fun and has a lot of interesting things to say. So I want to move on and get on to give Lee plenty of time to talk about all the stories of twenty eleven.
So let's go ahead and talk to Lee Spiegel. I am always ecstatic. I always use the word excited. Today I came up with a new word, ecstatic to talk with Huffington postwriter Lee Spiegel, and we've got him on the line. Lee. Are you there always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend. Yep, it's always a lot of fun. And we know ever run out of things to talk about, and this is going to
be our year and review. So we'll talk about twenty eleven and then also, because you've written already about it, even though we're only a couple of weeks into it, we'll talk about twenty twelve and the exciting UFO news in twenty two and you will be surprised maybe of how how much amazing stuff there already is happening in twenty twelve. After now it's just the end of the
second week of the year. It's amazing. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about it because I want to hear some more insights that you have on that. However, one of the first things I want to talk about is is plucked myself. No. I wrote a story about celebrities and twenty eleven because
there was a lot of celebrities talking about UFOs. And one of the more exciting interviews I think out there was yours with Robin Leech because we found out that you were friends and you have a relationship going back years and he's really into UFOs. That was a really fun interview. He's I guess you had a relationship with him for decades and it started because of your mutual interest in
UFOs. Huh. Well, he he originally before Robin for those listeners who don't really know the name Robin Leech, because you know he's He became more famous when his show Lifestyles of the Rich and Favorites came on in the eighties, but prior to that he was on Entertainment Tonight, and then before that he was an independent freelance writer from Great Britain and we met in New York when he was a writer, and the way we met was pretty funny.
I had just finished putting together a UFO documentary record for CBS back in nineteen seventy five called UFOs The Credibility Factor, and I had gathered voices of people like astronomer Jay on High, Nick stan Friedman, astronaut Gordon Cooper, Betty Hill. And this was one of the first times of real what I'd like to consider UFO disclosure, of a real attempt to get information out about UFOs.
This is nineteen seventy five, Alejandro. So I put this thing together for CBS, and when I was getting ready to promote it at the end of nineteen seventy five, I was invited to come on the radio station in New York WNBC to promote the album on an all night show where they were going to play portions of the album while I described what was going on and
who the people were. So little did I know that while I was on this all night show, Robin Leach was driving to his home in Connecticut and he was listening to me on the radio and he left what he heard. A few days later, he apparently tracked me down because that's what he did as an invent negative journalist. And my phone rang in my apartment in New York City and there was a British man on the other end of the phone, and he said, are you Lee Spiegel? And I said, yes,
who are you? He said, my name is Robin Leach and I'm a writer. And I heard you onto the UNBC radio the other night, and I think there's a story in you somewhere. Can I come over and interview you? I said sure, why not? Because I was looking to promote my album, of course, So he came to my apartment and it was like two long loved brothers finding themselves after eons. He thought I was
cool. I thought he had astounding voice, and I love the fact that what he did was he was running around Manhattan chasing celebrities and doing celebrity interviews, and we just kind of both hit it off and we became friends. And maybe within a couple of months months of our getting together, I had a chance to go up to Maine to interview some people who had had some interesting UFO sightings, and including a dying, very elderly former Navy officer who
wanted to talk about what he knew about UFOs literally on his deathbed. I mean, it was an amazing experience for me to go talk to this man and so Robin wanted to come with me, and we went to New Hampshire together first because that's where my family was and they wanted to meet him. And then we drove. We read to the car and drove from New Hampshire
to Maine. And by the time of the sunset and we were done interviewing the various people that I had gone there to see, we were driving back to New Hampshire in a driving rainstorm and Robin was behind the wheel and he spent most of the drive on these country roads looking up at the sky hoping to see light coming through. I had to keep telling him, Robin, keep your eyes on the road. That is really funny. Now has he ever had his own sighting? No? No, never, But how did
yeah, how did he get interested? He just has met a lot of people. One of his friends is Apaulo eleven astronaut buzz aldron oh wow. And so Robin has met over the years many celebrities and he's had occasion once in a while to ask them if they've ever seen anything strange, But most of the time she shies away from even asking them about it because he feels like it's almost an intrusion to ask these people something about something like that that
could be potentially very personal to them. Has he so? Has he talked to buzz Aldrin, because, of course, but buzz Aldrin has kind of waffled back and forth. I know, I know he is a UFO possible UFO sighting. What what he told mean that we used for our Huffington Post interview, He said that buzz had talked with him about how he knew that
many astronauts had spotted UFOs that were unexplained. And I already knew that because I had already interviewed one of America's original right stuff astronauts, Gordon Cooper, and I also interviewed Gemini astronaut Jim mcdiffott, who had photographed the UFO during one of his overtal flights. And in both cases of both astronauts, both mcdiffott and Cooper, who had films of UFOs, they were both ordered to send the films back to Washington, where they were never seen again, at
least by those two astronauts. Interesting stuff. Yeah, that is really interesting. So when so you knew Robin Leach before he really got famous, when he started doing the television show, did you ever lose titra. Have you always been communicating back? And we've always We've always communicated. In fact, a few months ago when he turned seventy years old, and many people say, well, where's Robin Leech now? Well, he is right now probably
the biggest, most popular celebrity journalist living and working in Las Vegas. And he will go to four sometimes five different celebrity events every day and every night where he gets the energy for this. Everybody knows him, everybody wants to talk to him. He has an amazing blog called Biggest Deluxe that people can just go to and read about all the celebrity things that are happening in Las
Vegas. And he recently turned seventy years old and he invited his two hundred of his closest friend from around the world to share in his seventieth birthday party, a three day event in Las Vegas. I was there and during which time the the former and current mayors of Las Vegas presented Robin with the key to the city and they declared h September tenth as Robin Leech Day in Sin City. You're kidding, No, I'm not so. Who were some of
the big celebrities there. I'm sure there were some. Huh, there were a few, most notable Sick Freed of Sigfreed and Ry was there because they're they're very good friends. Michael Chout, really well known New York City based the Magician, was there to pull a few rabbits out of his hat. Mostly local celebrities too, some that I didn't recognize because there were so many
people and I didn't actually see the guest list. I was, I was, you're supposed to go steal it. I know, I know, well, you know, I was so involved with the fact that all of the odeus, that the cocktail party, and every single piece an item of food at all seven special buffet stations within the building where we were, Uh, everything was made and created by Wolfgang Buck because Wolfgang and Robin are very old friends. It was it was and the building where we were was the called
the Keep Memory Alive. Building. It's a very special place in Las Vegas that Robin helped to to in fundraising events to pull in millions of dollars to create it is. It's a building that is helping to do research for people who have the degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Robin was among the many people who brought all the money together to create this amazing research center. And people can go look at your story on the Huffington Post and there's actually a video
where you're interviewing Robin and you show pictures of this incredible building. Incredible building, yeah, I mean really yeah. It was created by architect Frank Garry, I believe. And when you when you see the building, you think, well, what is this? Yeah, it looks like the building is falling apart, but it's a magnificent structure. And it was just amazing to just to kind of be there to celebrate with Robin. Well, I know someone who is one of the parties, Trillian Carrot Talk showed up money.
Yeah, he's busy out there. Every time I go to La there's Carrot Top here and there, and he's a big deal out there. And Teller formerly uh been and Teller formerly. I heard a couple of months ago that they broke up, and I don't know if they're back together again, the big skeptics I know, yes, I know. Wow. I wonder if they ever have heated debates with Robin. I'm not sure, although tell he
never talks anyway, so it's hard to debate him. Yeah, you always win, although I will tell you I saw him talking on the night of one of the birthday parties, so I can I can confirm that he does speak. Yes, he does have a voice, Yes he does. Only
few have heard so. So Robin has been very interested in all things unexplained because he knows that whenever I write a story, I will always send him a story is as soon as it's published, so he can put it on his on his Twitter site, on his uh so he can share it with
all of his readers. How cool. That's really cool. And it's kind of funny that you mentioned the astronaut thing, because that was certainly a highlight for me, and it's really one of the places where we got to first meet was the press conference at the mouf On Symposium where Story Musgrave was But unfortunately, I think we both asked some questions of him. But he is a big skeptic. He doesn't believe we're being visited by anything or that there
is anything to the UFO phenomena. Well, well, he has said. And I did a couple of stories with Story last year, and I was a little surprised at first with his attitude, but he basically said that he thinks that we are absolutely living in a galaxy in the universe that's teeming with life. But he says absolutely no evidence that they've ever come here, and
I was surprised to hear him say that. And he claims that he has interviewed many many astronauts who have claimed to see UFOs and he's never heard any piece of evidence from any of them that would change his mind. I just think he's asking the wrong astronauts. Well, we asked him, or I asked him specifically Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell, and he said, yes, I talked to them too, and again, I don't think there was anything
that anybody told me. And it's surprising because Gordon Cooper's stories especially are very compelling. I know, you know, one of the first people I interviewed in nineteen seventy five was Gordon Cooper, and he had not yet at that
point told the story of when he was before he became an astronaut. And he was out at Edward's Air Force Base in California, and he had a film crew that was out doing some work on one of the dry lake beds, and while they were out there with their photographic equipment, a disc shaped object came down from the sky, three tripod like legs. I came out slowly, and the thing landed right in front of their cameras, and they
rolled cameras on the thing. And Gordon told me that the thing very slowly lifted up and shot away, and he was told by his commanding officer at the base, you know, bring the film to us, And then he said it was sent to Washington, where I never saw it again. And as far as you know, that interview you did for your records was the first time he shared that story publicly. Huh it was, Yeah, it
absolutely was. That's incredible and we and we became friends after that, and that's why he wanted to be involved with my United Nations presentation three years later, and and so he you know, I always I always felt that Gordon got got a raw deal from from skeptics because they kept saying, well, he didn't know what he was talking about. He was always a maverick astronaut. Well you know what, gee, that's not that's not really skepticism.
That's just giving a guy a bum rap when he when he was compelled to want to talk about something that he really believed in, right, and he seemed like a very grounded person. He was. I like Gordon a lot. I'll never forget the day that I was in California to do one of my interviews with him, and and he had me meet him at the Disney Company. He was vice president for web Enterprises, Walter E. Disney Enterprises.
He was one of the people that he was involved with the whole idea of putting Epcot together in Florida. Really yeah, Gordon was part of that initial that early design team. And so I met him at his office in Burbank and we went to play tennis. And I was so delighted when we got out to the tennis court and they opened up a fresh new cannon balls and the three balls that came out were yellow balls. But they all had
pictures of Mickey Mouse on them. Oh, how funny. Oh. I wanted to get into then some of your other favorite stories of the year.
I know you have a piece set just so people know another on Huffington Post called twenty eleven's Top UFO Sidings and News, where people can see your top eleven or stories I think, yeah, you know, you know, I over the year, Alejandro, I actually because I didn't always just write about UFOs, right, But when I was looking back at everything that I did write during the year, it turned off that I wrote I'd written more than fifty stories about now and and I was looking through them again as I was
putting my year end story together, and and you know, firstly I had to whittle it down to like my top eleven of twenty eleven. And it turned out that each of the eleven stories that I picked, they represented all of the months of the year. Oh really, that is and that was just by chance, totally by chance, because I was just kind of going through it and I went, oh, yeah, this is a big one.
Oh this was really cool. And then when I finally cut the eleven that I wanted and I was putting them in like a chronological votter, I realized every single month was represented. That is interesting. So what were some of the more were exciting ones or eye opening or to you we had like starting from like number eleven. This is like my my own personal top ten
lists, although in my case it's my top eleven lists all right. At number eleven, the the FBI created a special website last year called the Vault, and this pretty much gave the public an opportunity to look at documents in what they called an online electronic reeving Room. And there were there were more than two thousand documents that were that were part of this whole collection, and
some of them were about UFOs. Now, as you know, and most people who are interested in UFOs, the United States government has always maintained that UFOs don't warrant any kind of serious investigation. But some of the documents that the FBI released indicate that FBI Director j Ed Gohover in the late eineteen forties was very interested in UFOs and there were documents that related this, and so that just because of that very thing, because it was part of the FBI's
Vault, that became my number eleven story of the year. Some people with all these stories, people said, well, I should have been number four, number five. R you know what they get better? Yeah, exactly, And I yeah, I felt the same way as you. And because some of the or most of these files. You know, although some researchers wouldn't know that Bruce mcabee had done some work and found and wrote a book about a lot of these, But really they wouldn't have known that unless they
were kind of in the UFO research kind of arena. So, yeah, the FBI had to put this on their vault. Really lends more credibility to them. Yeah, and they didn't. They didn't make a big deal about it, right, They just kind of quietly released it. And if you know, they did put out a small press release and say, hey, we've got this thing called the vault, you know, go enjoy it.
But they didn't they didn't go out of their way and say, oh, by the way, some of the documents were releasing are all about UFOs, all right, you know, because they don't have to say that. My number ten was also about some UFO documents that I thought was very fascinating.
There's been this whole interesting JFK. John F. Kennedy UFO connection that has never really totally been solved, to my satisfaction and to a lot of other people satisfaction, and several people have used the Freedom of Information Act to get some documents that clearly show that President Kennedy was very interested in UFOs. Not only was he interested in them, but he wrote two very intriguing memos.
One of them asked the CIA to have all UFO files and the other one was sent to NASA expressing a desire to cooperate with the Soviet Union of Out of Space Activities, and Kennedy asked for all UFO files to be put on his desk. Both memos were written on November twelfth, nineteen sixty three, ten days before he was assassinated. Now people say, well, what an interesting coincidence that is, you know, or it wasn't a coincidence, But
now what about the provenan on the CIA UFO memo. Isn't that in question? Well, there was. There have been several memos involving the CIA that involved something called the Majestic twelve documents, where people say that the CIA was involved, had been involved with UFO research since the days of Eisenhower, and that there was one one document that came out basically said that, in referring to Kennedy, that he was asking too many questions and that we can't allow
this to happen. I mean things phrases like that in documents, and it's been very hard to prove we had the documents. The documents are real. In fact, you know what, doctor Robert Wood, who's with the move on on the board of directors. Doctor Wood used to work for McDonald douglas Aircraft and back then and in the fifties and sixties he was actually involved with
a McDonald douglas investigation of UFOs. They were trying to see if there's anything about UFO technology which companies like McDonald douglas or any aerospace companies could duplicate because any company that could learn how to do UFO technology, well, that would be a boon for our flight industry. But doctor Wood was able to get a hold of certain documents, government documents, and he determined through various analysis.
He hired people to do analysis on the paper that the documents were written on, the kind of inks that were used, the fonts that were used in the documents, and he determined to his satisfaction that these were legitimate documents. And so it's still kind of an ongoing mystery and we may never know the answer to that. But because of the connection to JFK, I put
that as my number ten. Yeah, Jeff K was cool. Yeah, you know, follow followed right behind number ten has a soft spot in my heart because you know, we're now talking about New Hampshire and my trip up
there with Robin. I grew up in New Hampshire, and last year the state of New Hampshire put up an official highway marker commemorating the nineteen sixty one UFO sighting by Betty and Barney Hill, and the marker was placed near the site of where they claimed that they had been kidnapped onto a strange circular craft in the White Mountains coincidentally where I went to college, and they claimed that they were physically examined by UFO creatures and their story was the first story in
the United States, and every other UFO abduction story is measured against it because of the credibility of the people. And so it's just amazing that New Hampshire put up this highway marker commemorating it. Yeah, that was a great story and a lot of fun because I'm a big fan of Kathleen Martin to Betty Hill's niece, who Yeah, she in fact graded my test when I became
a Moofon investigator because she used to do that for Moufon. Oh uh huh so, and it was her work along with that well, and started by another gentleman out there in New Hampshire. So I think it is important. It lent to credibility that the state. You know, it's a very pretty nice marker with the state seal on it. I think that's significant that the state was willing to do that. It's amazing and no one has ever and many people have tried, no one has ever been able to discredit Betty and
Barney Hill for the story that they told. And a mutual colleague of you, as a buying Hollywood producer, Bryce is Abel has brought the rights to the book that Kathy Martin and Stan Freedman wrote called Kidnapped the bet and Barney Hill Story, and he's going to turn that into a major motion picture. That's going to be great. There was an old one that's kind of funny. It's very with Edward or the guy who played at Darth Vader's voice.
That's right. I like that. The guy who played that, Well, the younger people will know that then like, oh, but James Earl Jones, that's to think. James Earl Jones played Barney Hill and Estelle Parsons played Betty and it was a made for TV movie in nineteen seventy five that NBC put together, and I think people can catch it on YouTube. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's easy to find. And they did a really good job, you know, very limited, low budget special effects, but
the emotion of the experience comes through. And I remember very very vividly that when NBC was about to premiere the movie nationwide, Betty was invited to come down to New York to see a screening of it at NBC, and she invited me to join her because I was already living in New York. Oh cool. So Betty and I saw the UFO incident privately. It was amazing just to be sitting there with her, to watch her reacting to how they put Rader on screen. So yeah, the Betty and Barney Hill New Hampshire
marker definitely number nine. Again, I could have put that up closer to the top, but I had other one. Yeah, I know, you're right. There was so much my list. When I tried to narrow it down, I was going to do ten, came up with twenty. I had like thirty five that I thought were just so significant. It's hard to
do, all right. Well, my number eight story kind of happened in August when the History Channel presented a very provocative, well done two hour UFO special, and it was based on Leslie Kane's best selling book UFOs Generals, pilots and government officials Go on the Record. The vice president of the History Channel told me that if it wasn't for Leslie's book, they never would have done this special. It was just because of how well her book had done.
It was a New York Times bestseller and it featured The show featured so many very credible people from the Federal Aviation Administration CIA. Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington. From your backyard, right, he describing his own dramatic UFO sighting from the famous Phoenix lights. I believe it was nineteen seventy, nineteen ninety. Well, I'm getting the dates, no arms. I've caught him in my backyard too, and I'm like, what are you doing? And he
just runs away. I don't know what he does back there. Yeah, well he's ninety seven or ninety four. Yeah, getting mixed up. You can look it up and you can insert it whenever you want. Yeah. But he went like ten years without telling anybody that he had also seen this gigantic boomerang shaped object fly silently directly above his head. And it took him ten years before he apologized for lying to the public and to the media, right and because of that, you know, just talking to him and hearing
what he had to say. Or The program also featured and I interviewed the Federal Aviation Administration executive who revealed how the CIA warned him not to talk about specific UFOs because they told them the public might panic from the truth. So I thought, well, yeah, that's going to be on my top eleven list. Absolutely, Yeah, great one, and that was ninety seven. And in hindsight, as far as twenty eleven and the documentaries, that probably
was the most significant documentary. Or I mean, there's a lot of great TV shows. Yes, Are Faked has had some cool stuff on there, a lot of people love the ancient Aliens, but I kind of feel probably documentary wise, this was the most important one. Yeah, And I thought it was really well done. It was very fast paced. They threw a lot of stuff in there that was like no nonsense, and you had to pay attention to what they were saying. And that brings me to my number
seven, number seven, And the thing about number seven. It's like this kind of strikes me more personally than most of the other on my list. Back in March, more than eight thousand pages of previously classified UFO files were released by Great Britain, and there was one set of key documents that detailed how the United Kingdom actually attempted in nineteen seventy eight to stop the country of Grenada from trying to convince the United Nations to form a special UFO Study Committee.
Well, the presentation that Grenada put on in nineteen seventy eight, it was my presentation. And so when Great Britain released these documents just last year, I would wait a bit. Great Britain did what they tried to stop basically my presentation. Yeah, I took a little personally when I read this in these documents at the time. Do you remember having a short lived relationship with a woman with a British accent? Make I think of James Bond.
I've seen him do that kind of you know, well, I'm trying to come up with a good name like a pussy Galore or on Her Majesty's Secret Survey. Yeah, I know. No, I mean this was a total shock to me because I had no idea thirty years until thirty years went by, and so I saw these documents last year to see that England had had tried to do this. And so one of the things that I did was I contacted Nick Pope, who, as you know, was the former executive
He ran the British Ministry of Defense UFO office for three years. And he said he was expecting my call. He knew when the document came out that I would be getting in touch with him, and he said, look, he said, listen, when you were doing your presentation in nineteen seventy eight, I was still a teenager. I wasn't working for the government yet, so you can't blame me. But he said, but I will tell you
this on behalf of myself. I'm going to give you an official apology and unofficial he said, I'm unofficially apologizing for what my government did to you in nineteen seventy eight. And he admitted that we used dirty tricks. We would play down these stories that we knew were significant, and he apologized for that. Well, and you know what funny you should say that you just hit on my number six story of the year. Oh that was number six.
I was one of six were basically as these documents were released, Nick, like you said, and he actually revealed this exclusively to me in an indue because we just happened to start talking about it. He revealed that he was part of this official British policy of ridiculing UFO reports and the people who report them. And like you said, Pope said that he used what was a combination of spin and dirty tricks to downplay the reports and he now regrets being
a part of Yeah, I mean, he basically said. One of the reasons why they even did this in the United Kingdom was because once they knew they were dealing with something that was a real phenomenon, they weren't ready to go so far as to say, oh, we're being visited by aliens. All that they knew for sure was that there was something operating in their skies,
and they didn't want to cause any disruption in the population. They didn't want to tell their citizens that there was something in the sky that they had no control over. And it's interesting because that is similar to what Fike Simonton said about why he at the time downplayed the Phoenix lights. Yeah, exactly. So, so okay, on the one hand, you know, those of us who are doing research, and you know, we want this information
to come out, We want disclosure. But on the other hand, sometimes it appears that maybe disclosure is not a good idea because there could be something to the idea, that there could be some disruption in social awareness and how the public might react. Although I would like to think and hope that that's changed over the decades. Right, Well, I don't know, though,
probably not. But I think one thing to note well, and most people listeners know this because I talked about Nick bo But quite a bit, and that we've got him on the show, but that he is now currently still a UFO advocate, and he goes out and he speaks that we need to do more research in this phenomena because it does, indeed, unlike his government
claims, pose a threat something unknown flying around in the sky. Yeah, and people like Nick Pope, you know, they will go just so far and they will stop sort of saying yes, I believe we're being visited. Now, whether he believes that or not, he won't say it publicly, and I'm okay with that. I just want more people to feel comfortable to at least to be able to report what they see or what they photograph, what the video tape, because that's part of the big problem about UFOs anyway,
which brings me right to my number five. Before you get to number five, I did want to mention about that before we move off to the British thing. Is your story about how you started working on that record in the seventies, which then kind of morphed into this un initial to me was really one of the most fascinating stories I've heard all year. In fact, I've written a story. It won't come out to like what February in Open
Minds magazine all about that, But that's an incredible story. What you went that would be a great movie is you know Brad Pitt playing you and your seventies gear and going around the country interviewing these UFO guys. Well, so you pulled up Brad Pitt pretty fast, didn't you. Yeah, well, I'm looking at these pictures and you're a pretty suave guy back then. That's only because I was able to look good in a three piece of GOVI suit, right. Well, you know I after I did my UFO album in
nineteen seventy five, I was restless. It didn't seem to be enough, and I wanted to do something else. I wanted to step it up a little bit to see if there was a way that I could bring this idea of the UFO disclosure. Although I I've used the word disclosure, that's the more recent thing. I wanted to see if there's a way that I could get more people around the world to know about this. And I thought, well, maybe I could do this at the United Nations. And I found
out very quickly. If you want to go to the United Nations and do anything any kind of a presentation, you can't just walk off the street and say, Hi, can I do a production on UFOs dear please, thank you. They won't let you do that. You have to be an accredited delegate of a nation that wants to sponsor whatever the presentation is that you want to do. So. Coincidentally, luckily for me, Eric Gary, the Prime Minister of Grenada, had been trying to get the United Nations to pay
attention to his personal UFO crusade. And this was in nineteen seventy seven, and I noticed in the media that nobody was really paying attention to him. Tiny Caribbean nations. It just wasn't going anywhere. So I sent a copy of my UFO album to the mission, to the Grenada Mission in New York
and his ambassadors and I became friendly. They forwarded my album to the Prime Minister in Grenada, and then he wanted to meet me on one of his trips to New York and we met, and I basically, as some people have claimed, I made a deal with the devil, he being the devil. Why did I think of him as the devil? Well, only because I had heard stories that he had a goon squad, a group of people
in Grenada who quieted or silenced people who didn't agree with Gary's policies. And friends said to me, if he invites you to Grenada for the weekend, don't go. So in Grenada, it's opposite then what people think might have happened here. Here, they think people who see UFOs get silent. There the bunkers get That's a good way of putting it, I know. But I was determined to do something at the U n and and so I made
a deal. We had a handshake, and I said to him, mister Prime Minister, you're trying to get the United Nations to pay attention to you, and basically, with all due respect, they're not if you sponsor my presentation, I will bring the people to the United Nations who the world will listen to, Alan Heinez, Gordon Cooper, Jacques Vallet, Stan Friedman. I will bring these people and I'll put a presentation together. We'll have lots
of documents, will have visuals, and the world will take notice. I think, all right, I mean, I mean, what am I have going for me? I was on a hope and a prayer and so over a handshake we did it, and they made me a delegate of Grenada. I had to get a little delegate UN card that had my name on it that said I was an accredited delegate, and that started the whole ball rolling.
I found out months later that the State Department had at least one document about me, about what I was doing behind the scenes at the UN, naming me as the ring leader of this preservation. And so I just moved forward. And we had the one famous photograph that was taken in July of nineteen seventy eight that showed all of us sitting around the table with Secretary of General Kurt Waldheim, and that picture has been published all over the world since
then. Yep. And I'll be able to see it in the story that we have with some other great pictures you provided for us in the magazine. Yeah, I mean pictures like you know. And again this was I was working on this at the beginning and middle and end of nineteen seventy eight, just a few months after Close Encannas of the Third Kind. That was the big holiday movie for nineteen seventy seven. That's exciting. Spielberg had to been
paying attention to your efforts. Well, he was, because at some point in the beginning of the year in seventy eight, I got a call from Columbia Pictures, who had done Close Encounters with Spielberg, and they said that they were going to fly me from New York. They're going to fly doctor Alan Heineck from Chicago and Jacques Palle from Northern California. They were bringing the three of us to California to meet with Stephen Adam's office because he wanted to
see what he could do to help with my un presentation. How did that happen? Yes, it did, Oh my gosh, it did. It was an amazing meeting, and like I said, it was just a few months after. I think close Encoonnas was probably still in some of the theaters at that point, and so, and they provided me with some visuals, some production still, some other documents that they had, and Columbia Pictures was
very accommodating to us. So yeah, little little things like that. So so in the movie about this, who do you think is going to play Steven Spielberg. That's a good question. I'd have to think about that. I'm so not well versed with actors and actresses names these days. He may he may have to play himself. Yeah, Rickard Dreyfuss would play him. That'd be funny, that's right. So so yeah, I mean the whole
um thing played out over the rest of the year. We did the presentation in November, and basically the Secretary General invited the rest of the countries of the world to decide individually if they wanted to participate in sharing information about UFOs, and any countries that were interested in doing this, they could present this information in early nineteen seventy nine when the Committee for the Peaceful Uses of out of Space was going to convene, And he also said that Grenada wanted to
continue this Grenada could continue its thrust in this committee. The next time that the General Assembly met in nineteen seventy nine, well, gee whizz, none of that ever happened, because a couple of months after we did our presentation, Eric Gary was ousted in a political coup in Grenada. I wasn't going to say the British didn't do a very good job, because you really didn't notice anything that they were up to unless they were behind the Gary ousting.
Well I don't know, but I mean talk about coincidences and you know. And so when Gary out of power, there was nobody left in Grenada to continue his crusade, and the UFO issue very quietly went away. And well, three years later, under President Ronaldigan, we invaded Grenada. And I was saying, watching this on the news and thinking, boy, is it possible this is my fault? All right, that's toughly conspiratorial, but I guess you never know. And yeah, it's just this whole thing is such
an important story, and so many have forgotten about it. And that's why I always love to revisit this story, revisit the work of Heinek and Valet, because these are important things that happened. For goodness sakes. I remember there was a rumor a couple of years ago of a meeting in a back office at the UN about UFOs, and people got so excited. Big deal,
you guys brought this to the General Assembly. You're showing movies, You're you're talking to the General Assembly. I mean, bigger things have happened at the UN in the past. Regarding UFOs, well, it was an amazing experience, I'll and not to be soon forgotten by those of us who were involved. When I was talking to Jacques Vallet last year and for your listeners who aren't totally familiar, there was a character of the French astronomer in the
movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The astronomer was played by the famous French actor and director Francois Truffau. Well, that character was molded after Jacques Vallet, the real life astronomer, and so it was amazing for me to have him as part of my presentation. And when he and I were talking last year, I asked him, I said, Jacques, after all these decades after we did that, do you ever regret what we did or do
you think that what we did back then was a waste of time. And he said to me, no, even though we didn't get the outcome that we originally were looking for, the event itself was a milestone in the history of the subject. And when he told me that that made me feel really
good. It wasn't important coming from him. It just solidified or confirmed to myself that I tried it, tried to get some international thing happening, and we did what we could, you know, using the tools at the time that we had available to us. Well, and and now that I think about it, Francesois Trudeau played Valet Truffau. Heinich had a cameo in the movie. And they'm advising you they should have had you, and they didn't put you in the movie though, huh No, they probably would have used
Brad Pitt, although he might he's probably like a little kid back. Yeah, he was just a little fella like me. Well, you know, and again again you know, remember it was Alan Heinich who came up with the with the phrase close founders of the first, second, and third kind Yeah, amazing staff, Yeah, it was. It was amazing to be
part of that. That whole scene is that unfolded. I I knew at the time that I was involved with something that was very special, and I wrote it as much as I could to try and get this information out there, and I knew that we were doing something really good and important. All right, I guess we'll move on to number five. Well, number five, you know, was something that this is a perfect example of how people
can be fooled by things, by photographs, by videos. Probably the biggest video of the year I think that that was an actual hoax was something that happened at the end of January, and these videos went viral on the Internet, allegedly taken by different people at different angles, showing a UFO that descended from the sky and had hovered over an Islamic shrine in Jerusalem, and after several seconds, this glowing white light suddenly shot straight up in the air,
allegedly joining other unexplained lights in the sky. But that's when the controversy began. At least one of the videos that came out is considered a hoax because what it did was it used a soundtrack, the same soundtrack as another one, and it looks like it was this videotape from a still photograph on a television screen right yeah, and so when you get things like that, it
just kind of washes everything else out. Whether any of the videos were actually the real thing, you never know because there was so much damage control already done. Well, and those other to that film that were caught in lies, they said they didn't know some of the others that had filmed it, and it turned out they were movie professors. And these other people who say they said they didn't know where their students, that's right. They were busted
by the Israeli news. So yeah, it and you know what, there's gonna be people listening to the show. We're going to be upset at us were calling this one. Well, well, well, hey wait, did we get to my number one story? Okay, well, let's move towards it. Then let's see number four. Number four was was was really something
because again this was something that I was directly involved with. At the beginning of September, I was I was talking with Oh, okay, you're gonna have to add this pot out, the Black Fault guy, John green John green Wall, Okay, yeah, okay, take two. Uh. At
the beginning of September, I was talking with John Greenwald. He's the creator of this amazing site called the Black Vault, and it's like the biggest online collection of previously classified documents on of our variety of subjects, but so many
of them about UFOs. And so I was doing a story about that and John sent me a document that was dated in October of two thousand and eight, and he said, you know, I find this very interesting because in nineteen sixty nine, the Air Force officially closed the books on its investigation of UFOs, that was the Project BO book. They basically said, after years of studying UFOs, there's nothing to it, nothing of any scientific interest. They're not from out of space. They can all be explained. Now,
don't bother us anymore, go away for not investigating it. So this document that John sent me that he had in the Black Vault was it was basically a reporting manual, a lengthy manuals for Air Force procedures on how Air Force personnel are required to report various things that they come across in the course of a day. And in one of the chapters of how to report certain things,
one of the things was listed was unidentified flying objects. And I thought, well, this is very interesting because if the US Air Force got out of the UFOs in sixty nine. Why is this manual from two thousand and eight giving instructions on how to report UFOs? So I called the Pentagon because I wanted to talk to someone about this. I just wanted to ask them a few questions about why why were UFOs included in the two thousand and eight
Air Force manual? Pretty simple, straightforward, and I gave it the details. I said, here's the manual number, here's when it was dated in two thousand and eight. I'm going to ask somebody there's some questions because I would like to answer to my readers. Well, they said, we'll try and get back to you with an answer as soon as we can, and I didn't hear from them for several days. Four days later, I went onto the Air Force site to see if I could find that same manual and
I did find it. But four days after my initial inquiry, I noticed that the Air Force had just released an updated manual and all the UFO references were deleted. Again that word coincidence, Well, what I think, it's hard. And there was some debate that came up in the UFO world about this, whether or not it happened, and there was a good argument that why would the Air Force care. They have so many procedures and policies, why would they care about your inquiry and take it out. However, this
thing has been on the records for them since the fifties. It's topfly coincidental that sixty some odd years later, at the same time you request is when they take it out. That is, it's either extremely uncanny and an extremely coincident, or they're like, you know what, this is the straw that broke the camel's back. We're try it. Tired of being harassed about it,
let's just take it out. I don't know, I don't know, and I will I will, I will say, and I'll go on record that I came under a lot of fire, a lot of heat from people who said I was making way too much of a big deal out of this, that that the Air Force had already been spending months in preparing this updated manual, and that it was just a coincidence that four days after I called them to try and put the screws through them, suddenly this new manual came
out a few days later. Maybe it was coincidence, I don't know. But then when I pressed them further to find out, well, now do you still have reporting procedures for UFOs or are they now finally gone forever. I was told that I was going to have to contact someone at NORAD because NORAD was now the only organization that had jurisdiction over both the United States and
Canada. Well, it turns out you can't really press nor AD into giving you answers because nor AD doesn't come under the jurisdiction of the Freedom of Information Act in the United States. Really, I didn't know that. Yeah, so you can't You can't be using the FOIA and thinking you can get information on a nor AD because they don't have to talk to you. Wow, what a racket. Yeh, Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
What our racket these guys. Yeah, So that was That was like a really interesting one, and I put that up on my list and again as part of the same scenario. Even though the Air Force supposedly ended its UFO investigations in nineteen sixty nine, we have documents nor AD documents, by the way, that show that a significant number of incidents have involved UFOs with correlating radar reports and reports of military jets that scrambled to try and intercept the
unknown objects with no success. And these are from nineteen seventy five. So if the Air Force hasn't been investigating UFOs in sixty nine, why do we have documents in seventy five showing not only are they interested, but they tried chasing these things and they couldn't get them. Yeah. Well, one thing we've all learned in the past few years, and I don't think anybody doubts
anymore, is that the military are liars. Well, when they don't want you to know about something, they don't want you to know about something. Yep. Number three the book that came out at the beginning of the year about Area fifty one, written by investigative report Annie Jacobson. It went best selling in a matter of time, and like very very quickly in an explosive book that she wrote about the top secret Nevada military installation. Now, the
entire book was basically, here's the history fifty one. Here is some of the things that we know happened there, the fact that the United States used this top secret military base to test new technologies. It's pretty fairly well known
that this is what happened there. But in the final pages of the book, just the final pages of the book is what caused all the controversy that lasted a long time, where basically she was suggesting based on one person's account, a person who used to work at Area fifty one who told her that former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin recruited Joseph Mengela, the Nazi doctor who was called the Angel of Death, that he was recruited by Stalin to surgically alter children
to look like aliens in nineteen forty seven as part of a plan to crash a disc shaped craft outside of Roswell, New Mexico. Well, I mean, everybody went nuts when they heard about this. This is all they wanted to talk about. And the media was jumping all over Annie Jacobson saying, you know, how reliable was your contact about this? How can you prove this? Are there documents and it's still kind of out there. Well,
she stood behind it. Yes, And what's great with your story is you put you show the video because this is what kind of ended the whole story. It was a big news. And then ABC did an interview with her witness the only time that she let someone and he's like well, I don't know. She blew it out of proportion. I don't know that I actually said those things, and I can't remember. And as soon as that story came out, everybody dropped it. Oh I know. And yet, like
I said, she stood by the story. Yeah. So again. While it's generally known that the secret base has been used to develop spyplanes, right the UFO fables the lore surrounding the place, it still captures the imagination of the public. How many people you know have driven along the Extraterrestrial Highway there? Yep, very many except for me. I haven't been there yet. No, I haven't either. One of these days, I'd like to go to this place called the Little Ali Inn. Yeah, we'll have to check
it out. I saw it on Paul the movie Pod. Yea yeah. Well, and now we come to number two, my number two story of the year. Boy, it just has to be the We the People White
House UFO petitions. I mean, boy, did this get lots of publicity Just a few months ago when the White House created a site where citizens can petition the Obama administration to ask him to respond to different issues of concerns that they have in the country, and the first two UFO related petitions were submitted and they they had to get At the time it was only five thousand signatures.
That since has been up to twenty five thousand, but you had to get a required number five thousand signatures in order to get the White House to issue an official response to the petition. And UFO believers they were not happy when the White House said that there was no evidence of alien life visiting Earth, no evidence that any information is being hidden from the public. Well,
it's like an ongoing saga. Now. Suddenly two more petitions sprung up again by Stephen Bassett with his Paradigm Research Group, and Bryce Zabel and Richard Dolan collaborated to put a petition together and they actually tried to get twenty five thousand signatures and they had to get it by December thirty first, but both petitions
fell short, so the White House did not feel compelled to respond. Yeah, we had Bryce on a couple of weeks ago to talk about this, and I did see the news that Bassett is going to run his again. Oh yeah, he's planning on doing it. He's claiming that twenty twelve is going to be the year of disclosure. Well, okay, maybe maybe not. It's hard to say, but you can certainly try. Yeah, what
did you think? I felt the one thing I had a problem with not so much with their response that was no surprise, but one thing I do have a problem with. The whole thing seems kind of disingenuous because given Grant Cameron's work to find some of the emails that were in the back channels, they're like, hey, we got to answer this damn thing. Essentially, you know, we've got two days to come up with some foofy answer to throw out there. They don't take this hole and we either people think very
serious. It doesn't seem well. I also remember the people who were assigned to come up with the official responsors at the White House. They don't necessarily know anything about UFOs or the subject matter at all. You know, these are people who wouldn't even have a need to know or high enough security classification security clearance to even be able to talk on it. And so it's certainly easy for the White House to come up with a generic response that basically says,
we don't know anything. We don't know what you're talking about. The Air Force got out of it in nineteen sixty nine. We don't know anything more. You know, we us alone. They can say that, and they basically did. And they tried to spice it up a little bit by saying, well, you know, the Kepler or spacecraft is out discovering more planets, and now we know that there might be earthlike planets out there in the universe, and so our hopes are raised that we might someday find a
planet that might have microbial life. Well, okay, fine, expedition please, right, but one thing that is significant, which also I think, you know, justify your number two spot for it. It's the first time, as far as I know, the White House officially has had to answer a question like this. Yes, but how many people really seriously thought that the White House was going to give it all up? I only know of one. And who might that have been? Possibly the author of the first
one? Oh well, yeah, you could be right. I mean, sure, it's one thing to build up the hopes, but but you know what, they're not going to give it up that easily. Yeah, if there is something to give up, the White House isn't going to do it. They don't have to. Yeah, and I don't really think that anyone at the White House knows anything, and it may be some guy who's not
sharing it with the rest of the people in the White House. You gotta go to the Pentagon or Area fifty one maybe for the answers, or as I'll suggest, they should just go to Nora End, because that's where I had to do. There. You go, yeah, and I won't tell you anything. They'll lock the door. So do we have like a drum roll now trumpet van drumwall. We didn't leave much time for it. But
here is number one. Well, this is this is again. This is my personal number one story, partially because I was involved with it and I
came under a lot of heat about this one too. Back in October, NBC broadcast a football game between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts, and coming out of a commercial break, they showed a little thirty second video that spotlighted the Saint Louis Cathedral. It's a landmark cathedral in New Orleans, and it was like a very slow moving video that showed the cathedral, very
nice looking landmark. Well, some viewer at home body saw something streaking through the sky behind the church and he apparently he had dvrd the game, and so he ran it back and he slowed it down and noticed that when he really slowed it down, what was streaking behind the cathedral appeared to be like long, elongated, brightly lit objects that shouldn't be there behind the church.
And so he figured, well, at the at the normal speed, these things couldn't possibly be anything earth bound because of how fast they were moving. Yeah, it looked like a zip bye zip by several times, and so it prompted all the speculation with a meteors and some people claimed that they were They had to be insects. They had to be insects flying very close to the camera lens because they couldn't possibly be flying behind the cathedral because then they'd
be huge like Rodan or Mafra speed, you know. Or they had to be UFOs. Well, okay, fine, So I put this story out and the day after my story hit the Huffington Post, I got an email and the subject line of the email basically just said, I'm the guy who shot the video in New Orleans. Would you like to talk to me? So I was curious and ended up speaking to R. D. Willis, the NBC cameraman who shot the footage. It was his job. This is
what he does when NBC was putting on Sunday night football games. He would get to the city wherever the game was going to be broadcast from, and he would get there on the Friday before the game with all of his equipment, and he would go around the various cities and shoot what they call beauty shots, different landmarks, different nice things about the city that they would show coming out of the commercial brace. Now, the special rig that he had
was a video rig used time lapse photographic equipment. It was. It was a computerized rig which when you, for example, to show a thirty second video, to shoot it in real time, it took more than an hour to shoot it, so that when you played it back it would be thirty seconds long. So the time lapse photography gives the appearance of objects moving much
faster than they are. So he said, while he was just watching his camera doing its work, he was just hanging out and he was just merely watching these airplanes that were passing behind the cathedral on their way to a landing. But the long shutter exposure of his camera made the planes seem much more
out of this world. Okay, but this was the explanation. He even said, if you look closely at the clock on the front of the cathedral, as as it appears to be moving slowly, you'll see the second hand of the clock moving really fast, and you can see it if you actually look for it. Or if you look at the ground in front of the cathedral, you will see people and buses and cars moving at superspeed, just
like the objects in the sky. But it's because of the way the camera was moving by the computer that it looked like it was moving very slowly in front of a fence. So people thought, well, must be UFOs. Okay, So I put out the explanation. I said, folks, it's revealed the UFOs were not UFOs. They were planes. End a story.
I started getting almost hate mail from people accusing me of making it all up and claiming that I was part of a large debunking and ridicule policy, and like, boy, couldn't we come up with a better explanation than time lapse photography? And I went, wait a minute, that is what happened, all right, tomar On, Folks, give me a break. I am
not at the bunker. I'm not a Ridiculer. I'm a reporter. I'm trying to get to the root of something, and it's just amazing that people with the truth staring at them, in the face of Alejandro, they will
believe what they want to believe. Yeah, it's really sad too that you come under attack, because the point is you're just as much as them wanting to find some good, real UFO videos because you believe they're flying around out there, and you know, hopefully someone will get a great video that you can post and not just for popularity so we can show the world that something's
going on here. I feel that way. But more than that is the truth that you know, you don't want to just show some video that you know isn't a real UFO just for the the reason to show something to people that that isn't genuine I know. And but because people are so setting their ways, setting their beliefs, they want to believe what they want to believe because of this problem. This to me is what made the New Orleans story
the number one UFRO story of twenty eleven. Yeah, you know, and I get to give Jason credit from Open Minds because he when he looked at it, he was the only one I knew the first day that said I think it might be time lapse, and then the next day, you know, you came out with your story and explanation that indeed that's what it was. Yeah, people can even go look at some of the pictures real time, right that you've got some of that video. Oh yeah, yeah,
it's it's just amazing. I mean, yeah, I want to believe a lot of us want to believe, but I don't want to believe it at the expense of coming across like I'm a debunker. That's right, the furthest thing that I want to do. Right, So, so what a year? Yeah, what a year? And you know what, we're going to have to save twenty twelve for next time because we're pretty much out of time.
But we can, Hey, this pluge your site. People can go to the Weird News on Huffington Post or look for least we go on Huffington Post and they'll see your story about twenty twelve and how there's already been a lot of sightings. Right absolutely, yeah, I mean I'll tell you this story quickly. For the entire month of January of twenty eleven, new from the UFO network, they recorded about five hundred reports. Right now, after the first week of the new year, they had two hundred and thirty three
reports. That's about a fifty percent increase over the last year already. That's a lot of sightings. So you can read more about that on the story. And also you'll be talking about this and other things at the UFO Congress coming up in February, that's right, so check out ufocongress dot com. I meet us. I'll be there least there and come and meet us and say hi, and we'll talk about all this sounds great. Thank you so much for having me on the show again, Alejandro. All right, thank
you so much for being on again. And I think you know from what we've talked about this entire show shows are certainly dedicated to this effort. Well, hey that I'm a debunker now right, all right, thanks for being on the show. Okay, thanks to Lesepiegel. He's a great guy. He's always wonderful to have on the show. And remember that, you know, like we talked about this whole show, there's a lot of news going
on, so you're gonna want to be up to date. And you're up to date and you're gonna want to have our Twitter feeds, which are pretty much news feeds. So you can go to Open Minds dot tv or Open Minds TV on Twitter, or you can go to UFO Daily News on Twitter. I have a news feed where all the news stories, you know, you get them every day as they come out. I'm Jason from a Centric you can him. And of course we've got all of our Facebook as well. All of us have a Facebook out there, so go check us out
and stay up to date. Thank you all so much for listening, and we will talk to you next week. Audios