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And welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Norrie with you along with doctor Elliott Hayimoff. His website is linked up at Coast tocoastdam dot com. We're talking about his latest book that he edited. It's called Space Pioneers Conversations with the Men of Apollo. Apollo Won nineteen sixty seven. What a tragedy, Elliott.
Yes, yes, it was a tremendous tragedy, but it was something that was It was an accident waiting to happen.
Yeah, I think so too.
And we lost three great astronauts, including Gus Grissom, who was one of the original Mercury seven astronauts, right.
And Ed White who was the first one to do an EVA.
That's right, walking outside of spaceship. And then Roger Schaffee, good guy. Now you talked about an astronaut who might have spotted a UFO.
I'm going to guess that was Gordon Cooper.
That's correct. We interviewed him a while ago. He was a part of the early Apollo missions, but his team, his crew was split up, and so he just never flew on Apollo, and then he told us, just you know, plain as day, that he saw a UFO and the Otherness officials that we interviewed just more or less poo pouted as particles that came off of the heat shield while he was entering the Earth's atmosphere, and that was what he saw when these particles started to heat up and glow.
I had hearted Elliott that they confiscated his film.
Is that true?
Well, that's probably the case that a lot of times don't forget that this was the heat of the Cold War and the Department of Defense. Also, all of the Gemini missions and the Apollo missions had to clear the Department of Defense censors. So I don't doubt at all that his film was confiscated.
I knew the lady Edgar Mitchell, Apollo fourteen astronaut. Did you ever have a chance to talk to him.
No, but we really wanted to talk to him because he was I don't know if you were aware that he was the only astronaut of the Apollo missions that tried to do esp experiments with people on the Earth from the Moon.
When he came back, he established the Noetics Sciences Institute right.
Right, several. I think he wrote several books on the subject too. You see, that's another thing that it was the range of diversity that the Apollo astronauts were all the way from, like it was just another test run, just another job for them to go to the moon. And for others it was very spiritual, very religious. So I don't know if you if you do that. James Irwin on Apollo fifteen, he left a Bible on the rover and so and so there were like very like
spiritual people, religious people. And then people like Alan Bean that he he was on Apollo twelve and once on a skylab mission that he became an artist. He just uh you know, was inspired and became an artist. And so just all and and there's other people who were just like stayed with NASA, like John Young, the Apollo ten and the Apollo sixteen commander. I mean he was just like a like an Apollo guy all the way through, like he bled NAT's a blue.
Now, the original Mercury seven astronauts, I think they've all passed now.
Haven't they.
Uh yeah, I think so pretty much.
Yeah, they're all they're all gone.
But what you know, we interviewed like Wally Sharon and Scott Carpenter. Uh, it was, you know a unique experiance to have met Deeke Slayden. Did you ever have one of the of the Mercury seven that did not fly?
He had some kind of ear infection or something right right.
Well, but you see, and that was why he was so well suited to be the like the head of the Astroduct Corps is because he was like, you're part of the old Guard that you know. It's like when he was going to kick somebody off of a team or to change a person, it's like, you know, he he he, he went through. He knew what it was like to be an astronaut and to to not fly.
Why do you think we still haven't gone back to the moon with astronauts.
Oh, it's it's it's a piece of cake a blind man could tell. Uh. Back then, it was a goal oriented event. It's racing to the moon. So once the race is finished, then that's it. It's not like there was a race to form a colony on the moon. It was just a race to get to the moon. So when it was a goal oriented process, then that then when the race was won, then that was it. So there was no reason to go back. However, the findings of the Apollo astronauts is the cause of the
newest space race. Now, I don't know if you knew that, but I know your other guy was talking about China, and that's where the next space race is going to be. The Americans that there are Chinese are going to have a space race based on the findings of the old Apollo era astronauts, and that is the finding of helium three on the Moon's surface. That's a source of energy for future fusion reactors, such that there's enough fuel on the Moon to last the Earth population for one hundred years.
That's what I heard, buzz Aldrin. You had a chance to talk to him, Oh.
Sure, a couple of times. He was just going on and on about why it's important to go to Mars. I mean, and he was talking, and he was very insightful that he was talking that we're not going to go to Mars as quickly or was as much enthusiasm to go to the Moon, because that was a goal oriented event. You were racing against the competitor to go to a specific place, whereas going to Mars. And he was big, big for going to Mars and having the Moon as being like a gas station that would be
like a stopover spot. But he was saying that the going to Mars is going to be a process oriented event. It's like working together with other people of their countries or their nations to go to Mars.
Was all doing.
Is ninety four years old, second man to walk on the Moon.
Amazing he was.
He was such an articulate guy. We interviewed him he was living in Orange County, and then we interviewed him again at a convention and interviewed him when he's out here in West la I mean, this guy he knew space. He is very very articulate, and he was all for going to Mars. Right after we went to the Moon, he was like thinking, and a lot of the other astronauts thought that, okay, so you know, we beat the
Russians to the Moon. And then the Russians kind of said that, well, we didn't really want to go to the Moon. We want to go to the to the red planet kind of thing, and where it's red and so and so we're going to go to Mars. And so they just thought that, okay, so we beat them to the moon, and so now that's the next goal is the race to Mars kind of thing. So, but the Russians just fell apart. Their whole space program just fell apart.
What would you say was one of the most compelling interviews you did with the astronauts and who was that?
Oh? Absolutely, the most compelling astronaut that we ever interviewed was the Apollo seventeen lunar module pilot, the Harrison Schmidt. He it was actually a funny, a bit of a funny story that you know, he was, you know, an astronaut who walked on the Moon. He was a scientist. He was a United States senator, and we came out to his office and we thought that we'll have like
ten or fifteen minutes of his time. And you know, we all dressed up in our like you know, suits and ties and things, and this guy he opened the door and it's like he's a blue jeans and a lumberjack a lumberjack longsleeve shirt. And he says, come on, we're not going to go into the office. We're going
to go out to where I want to be. And he takes us and he gets us all into like some something like working pickup trucket he spent half an hour to go to the mountains overlooking Abuquerque and then he says, Okay, this is where I want you to
interview with me. And for like two or three hours he's talking about his findings on the Moon and going to going to Mars and then setting up a looter colony, and Howard what we should be doing on the Moon to be a profitable venture and had to set up companies. I mean, just like this guy, he was just telling us so many things that was on his mind and then it's like he takes us all back and then he takes us out to dinner kind of thing. I mean, just like very unexpected surprise.
You looked out the Tunguska situation in Russia and you believe it was a crashed ufo, not a meteor, right, well it was.
It was more like a science testing hypothesis, is.
You had.
And this is based on when we went to Russia to deal with these cosmonaut scandals, we also met a scientist who told us that the head of the Russian space program, a guy by the name of Kolyiov, he went out to that crash site and he found that they found radiation and the guy was looking for like pieces of an alien spacecraft. And so it's just like in nineteen oh eight, there was a forty megaton blast that wiped out the entire part of Siberia. There was
no crater, but everything was just wiped out. And so you have to think of, Okay, what could produce a
forty megaton blast? And so my colleagues were thinking, it could be a black hole, it could be a meteor, it could be a or it could be a UFO and so and so we kind of like did a hypothesis tested and it turned out that there are no other alternative explanations that can explain the scene and justify any other reason that it bead the engines of a UFO that that exploded coming through the atmosphere.
Amazing. Did did that theory shock many people?
Well, I mean the Tunguska show that we we produced, like it won all kinds of of of awards back in the days when we when we produced it. You know, this goes back like, you know, twenty five thirty years, but it's there is no other natural occurring event that could explain the setting.
At all.
So you know, it's it's kind of like you know, it is it possible that it could be like, you know, a comments, could it be a black hole, could be a meteor And then some people were thinking that that Nikola Tesla developed a like one of these kind of like planetary killing machines, you know, electrical charges kind of thing. You know, that any of these things are in theory possible,
but what's the likelihood? And so god knows who's But it's also a case that the Russians put everything in their vaults and in top secrets that they did at the radiation when this guy Carlov who was the head of the Russian space program went down to that site. So why would the head of the Russian space program go to that site if it was just a naturally occurring you know, like and then a meteor comment would have an impact crater or something.
And what year was Gosco? Was it nineteen oh eight?
Yeah, nineteen oh eight. So that was just like another one of the shows that we came across that we you know, just fortuitously came across when we were in Russia dealing with the with this cousband at the shows.
And this of course was before we had nukes, right exactly.
So there's no such thing as, you know, a forty megaton blast in nineteen oh eight at you know, just like there's no crater and the guy that came there forty years later fans radiation.
Big time.
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