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Man, Welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Nori with you. Mike roth Miller with us. Served for ten years with the LA Police Department, including five years as a deep undercover detective with the Organized Crime Intelligence Division. He is the author of numerous books. His first LA Secret Police, Inside the Elite LAPD Spy Network, was a New York
Times bestseller. Alongside his dedication to public service, Mike has established a media career, producing television documentaries and working as a correspondent and presenter for major networks and a number of channels. Here he is on Coast to Coast Mike, welcome back.
Good to be here. How have you been, sir, I've been fined in yourself excellent.
Tell me how an incredible former LA Police detective got involved writing true stories of the paranormal and the explain.
Well, it's different. I'll tell you. Actually when it started. I was producing television documentaries in the early nineties and I met a former Air Force general who flew in Korea, and then he told me about some of the unusual occurrences he had flying objects that he saw and objects that came near him, like build Foo fighters from World
War Two. So we started looking into it, and I started making a lot of contacts through military personnel that I knew to high ranking pilots from all the different branches and commercial airlines, and that can me looking at UFOs. And as time went by, I said, well, okay, I'm going to start looking at some other things. And what I mean by that is not just talking to people, but seeing what evidence there may be, you know, basing it looking through a detective's eyes, and so about unless
you close. Two and a half three years ago now, when I was doing another book, I decided to start looking for stories of UFOs prior to the invention of the aircraft and prior to radio television, because I wanted to see what people were saying about these objects then, or if they were being reported. So probably within the first day of research, I came across a number of stories from newspapers in the eighteen fifties, eighteen eighties and
prior to that, talking about airships. And when I got into the stories, I realized they're talking about UFOs because they didn't know what they were. They had no idea what an airplane was and these giant things they saw flying in the sky, high speed, hovering, so forth, and they just started calling them airships, and so I thought that was quite interesting. So I kept pulling those stories,
kept finding him. Then I said, well, I'm going to expand this now because of an incident that I had on the mid seventies with a guy who was a documentary television producer. We found some huge footprints way above the timberline up in the eastern Sierra in a snowbank, and we looked at it and we said, wait a minute. The footprint was twice the size of my foot length, and with the stride was about twice my stride going through snow, and we're at about eleven thousand feet. No trails,
no nothing up there. We just were heading up over a ridgeline. And so we were talking, so, what in the world could have made this mountain lion not a bear? And what turned us to said, well, you know, we've heard a lot of stories about bigfoot and so forth. It's the only thing that made sense. Or it was a seven foot person up there running around barefoot, which wasn't the case. So when I started doing research for
this book. I started looking for things along that line. Bigfoot. Well, as you know, Bigfoot wasn't that term wasn't really used until several years back, and I started finding stories from around the world talking about a wild hairy man. And the way that the wild hairy man has always described is about six and a half the seven foot tall, very muscular built, covered with hair, eight a lot of apish type arms, and a conical head. And they were
showing up everywhere in the US, Australia, the Himalayas. They all had different names, but it was the same description time after time, and I just I was dumbfounded by these stories I was finding. So then I just expanded it into well, I'm going to look up ghosts and apparitions, start finding a lot of stories on that. Hauntings, giants.
Another one that was fairly interesting is sea serpents. I went back as far as probably in about the mid seventeen hundreds with the British Admiralty and found stories of captains and admirals that were out and you know, the f basis these guys were at sea their entire lives. They knew Wales, they knew seals, they knew everything that was out there and these large, large creatures would come up next to them in the boat and they would describe them, and all of them pretty much described the
same thing. Over a period of one hundred years, they'd see these large things in diameter. They described the head of the waters, it was swimming and what did they see, I don't know, but they certainly didn't see whale. And they would report back to the Admiralty of their sightings. And what's interesting about that is a sea captain in the British Navy then was pretty much like a pilot,
a commercial pilot or military pilot during the fifties. If you saw something strange and bizarre flung, you were grounded, so you kept it quiet. Same thing with the sea captains that they would pull them off the ship and they would never command another ship because the ship was
too valuable. So you have to put a lot of credibility into the stories that these people are saying because they weren't making money off of there's no TV, no rate, you, no office into internet, and yet they were telling these stories. And the people that are in the stories, they're identified. Some of them were the UFOs are professors at colleges
they're police military people. They were seen flying over Stanford University in the Golden Gate Bridge, and this is in the late eighteen hundreds, and they described them as large cigar shaped craft in the sky. Airships again, they'd say, and they would say, they'd move at high speed from horizon horizon. Sometimes they're going very slow. Sometimes they would just hover in one place, making no sounds, no exhaust,
no anything. So when you start looking at that and know what has come out publicly and say the last forty years with them worldwide in the US about UFOs, immediately made me look at this said, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is too interesting not to do a book on.
Good for you.
Now.
These newspapers of the day, some of which still exists today, took these stories pretty darn seriously, Michael didn't.
I oh, absolutely. There were a couple of stories I included where the reporter was basically mocking the people said, and it's so it's funny when you read it, matter says, oh, this is crazy. There's nothing that can fly in the skies that the bird and the kite. You know that was it just talk about a machine flying in the Sky's just crazy talk. But the vast majority of the stories.
They took it very very seriously, and it was reported in that fashion, and when you read them a whole series of them, you start to realize over a period of years that it was very unusual they reported these things across the country. Yet it wasn't sensationalized like some things are today. It was just almost matter of fact.
In some cases they said, well, there's another bright ball of light speeding across the sky, and then they would go on say it's not of comment, it's not a meteor, and because it would stop and they go the other way, And so it really makes you wonder how long, for a better term, UFOs have been around. Obviously they go back many many years, hundreds of years, because they're in paintings and so forth, ancient paintings, and it takes it takes away some of the suspense that, gee, this is
all something new. Now, it's not new. It's been around for a long time and it's been reported for a long time. Except the vast majority of peace people do not realize that.
How do you think law enforcement at the time, it was probably the local sheriff's department, How did they handle it?
They was interesting there. Several times I came across stories
where it was the local police or the sheriff. They would see the object flying and they describe it as extremely large, a cigar shape, so forth, and they would follow it as far as they could, or they would go up to In San Francisco, it's one particularly, they went up to the top of a hill where they had an unstructed view and they would watch it for a long time as it just crisscrossed across the sky and then took off, and then it would come back the next day, the next night it was there again,
or during the day, and so they took it seriously. And I think Partner was too that they had no idea what it was, you know, because at that stage nobody had ever heard of an airplane.
They had no reference.
God, no, it wasn't invented. So they're just going, well, it's as big as a ship, and so it's an airship.
But the people in the stories, the fast vast majority of them are named, and they go into it say this person is the mayor certain of the town and very respected, or this guy's a minister, blah blah blah, and they go on like that and they're not mocking them, they're not trying to blow it off as just being nuts, and they just lay it out and it's very matter of fact that this is what happened, and it's not
the first time they're going to it. And I have stories in there where they were going across several states. It would be seen, for instance, in Chicago a few hours later, it would be over Detroit a few hours later, would be down someplace in Michigan again, and just traveling from state to state. So it's just it's quite remarkable, in eye opening when you read the stories from over one hundred years ago.
You call your book True Stories of the Paranormal and Unexplained Volume one, right, that tells me there's another one coming.
There is that will be out August one.
Good for you. Was it difficult finding the stories?
Not as difficult as I thought it would be, because quite frankly, I didn't think there'd be a lot of stories, you know, a few maybe on apparitions or hauntings. But I came across so many stories on UFOs and on the Wild Hairy Man Bigfoot. I was just astounded by it. I could not include all of them in two books.
That are about three to four hundred pages long. I mean, there were just so many of them, and as I mentioned, poor they were from all over the world, from a lot from Australia, New Zealand, obviously Canada, the US, some from Mexico, some from South America, and then some interesting stories that came out of Africa.
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