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When I opened your book and saw its your start, it started with the swamp gas case and that incident. I thought it was perfect timing because I don't know if you had noticed. In the months leading up to these drone swarms of recent weeks, the Pentagon, the spokesperson for the DoD who deals with these issues, kept using drones as sort of an all purpose dismissal of whatever UFO case was prominent at the time. Oh yeah, that's probably drones. And it occurred to me they're using it
sort of. We were being swamp gassed all over again in a sense or weather balloon, which was previously the all purpose explanation to dismiss these things. And when I saw you experiencing that same thing as a youngster, it seemed to me that you're saying that doctor j Alen Heinik was treated by the news media the same way the Air Force had treated the media and the public for so long, snide dismissal, using a broad brushed term like swamp gas, when that isn't exactly what was that correct?
That's exactly right. Heinich came to town. He was at that time the consultant of the Air Force project, and he in retrospect, he would say he naively believed he was hired as a consultant to help the Air Force actually take a factual approach to this. As you know, that's not why the Air Force hired him, But they didn't tell him that. They wanted to use his respect respectability as a leading astronomer from Ohio State University to get his inprimature, his sign off on explaining away as
many of these cases as possible. Now, it happened that Heinich was able to explain many cases as mundane or prosaic, but he was not committed to doing that for ideological reasons. And so when he went to the Michigan siding, and he toured around and talked to people all throughout the area, including near the swamp. And yeah, there was one particular area. Gas is a real phenomenon that leads to luminous discharges light due to you know, various outgassing around a swamp.
But they're nothing like the standard non ordinary phenomena called UFOs. But he was he simply said, well, maybe the one siding over at the edsure town there. The swamp might be might have been swamp gas. It was remarkable what happened.
Georgia's you.
You should probably know. He did not get that phrase out of his mouth before every reporter in the auditorium who had gathered from around the nation, because this was a big case. Walter Crownkit on the CBS Evening News led the news three or four nights in a row with his story. As soon as he used the phrase swamp gas, they ran out to their payphones in those days, no cell phones, and they called the news bureaus and said,
the Pentagon explains it all a swamp gas. Heinich was mortified because he hadn't done that, but you're wreck exactly right. He was. He was cajoled into an impression of having done that. And that, by the way, is what captivated me as a young cub reporter, if you will, as a twelfth grade a twelfth twelve year old, sixth grade student.
That was the piece that got my attention, the closing down instead of science, the official agents of culture, science, news, media, academia showing interest in this phenomenon, in the fact that something unordinary was happening, non ordinary that was not explained. Rather than that being something of interest, it was it was an opportunity to close down discussion. Even at that age, I knew that's not how science and not how inquiry worked.
And you know, my teacher actually complimented me for bringing that out. She said, keep great job with your report. You've got the makings of a reporter, maybe a scientist who knows, maybe even a detective. And I have to say I was very lucky at that stage of my life to have that kind of afrom a teacher to celebrate my inquiry. And so I went on doing what she said to follow the clues wherever they lead, mister Thompson,
follow the evidence wherever it points. So as the phenomenon began revealing more of itself to me as an observer, including the paranormal dimensions, I said, well, I can't dismiss the paranormal simply because I could prefer that the paranormal not exist, or that I don't quote believe in the paranormal. I didn't grow up believing in the paranormal. But when people report a phenomena that I understood, oh, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition,
these tend to be part of contact experiences. So I found myself opening to that.
Not.
At a belief level, but is there evidence for those qualities? Yeah, there is pretty good evidence now for psychic phenomenon. So I'm basically a fact oriented guy as I approached this.
So as a youngster, you start reading about this, you delve deeper and deeper into the topic. You learn of the importance of words in terminology. Unidentified flying object UFO, that term which, as you tell in your book, it becomes synonymous with ETS, and it is still used that way by our government in a derisive sort of way. When they want to dismiss something, they'll ask for evidence of the little Green men kind of a thing, equating
all UFOs with ET phenomena. That's not an accident that it's evolved that way, correct, that's right.
And the government claims to want to want it to get beyond. UFO was supposed to be neutral, but over time it became non neutral. It became associated, as you say, with little Green men. So ostensibly, the Pentagon's reasoning for shifting to UAP unidentified aerial phenomena was to get back
to clarity or to get away from the connotations. I actually think UAP was chosen because it is such a colorless, bland term, and I think it's a subtle way of taking attention away from the complex challenge that this phenomenon poses. As you know from my book, I'm not whatever is revealed in the hangars of McDonald, Douglas and Lockheed Martin, and I think there's something to be looked at there
amen to that, it's not my primary focus. My primary focus is the disclosure of the phenomenon as a whole. And I'm convinced no matter what is revealed in those hangars, there are still aspects of this phenomenon that are demanding a fundamental paradigm shift. And that is having to do with it with our not having reckoned fully with consciousness as a and as you know, the Skinwalker ranch is just one example of the anomalies of consciousness that are associated with the UFO phenomenon.
I wonder, do you have a sort of sympathy for the devil here in this sense, for the government if they true do not know what these drones are, at least there's some of them, a small number of them that are genuinely unidentified. If they don't know. What do they say? You know, what could they say that would not raise suspicions and eyebrows and leave us perplexed and angry? Well, is there a better way to handle it than they're doing now?
Well, I've often thought that's I mean, this week, I've been thinking that there's an analogy with the government's tendency to respond to this. I haven't think there are many people who are nate stayers in the government about the UFO phenomenon who don't actually probably know what's in the
hangars and McDonnell douglas. I think that whatever that level of this phenomenon is is so highly compartmentalized and so limited in a need to know that the average press secretary of press spokesman at the White House or at the Pentagon who comes out is really constrained to say, well, there's really nothing going on, But what else could they Let's say, let's say they do know. Are they going to acknowledge whether it's the drones or before the drones.
Are they going to come out and say there is something that is transversing our skies conducting maneuvers beyond anything we can account for. Enormous speeds and trajectories and sudden changes on a dime. We don't know what it is or where it's from. We'll get back to you when we do. No, they're not going to do that, and so I think frankly, a large part of what they don't understand now that there may be back engineering and may be successful. I don't I don't have a vote
on that. I don't have knowledge of that, and I'm really good at saying what I don't know. By the way, that's phenomenous. I don't know is a complete sentence, and there's a lot I don't know. But in any case, I think there is there are aspects of this that they don't know that the average government official, let alone
the members of Congress, do not know. And they also know that there's been a laughter curtain down around this topic, like an iron curtain, and so being on the wrong side of the laughter curtain can be just deadly for a politician's career.
Sure, I mean, I suspect sometimes I feel a little bit of sympathy because they've they've painted themselves into a corner. Might have had legitimate reasons in the beginning, and now they're kind of stuck, and more and more people these days in our country anyway, are interested in the topic, are asking questions. They have mainstream media that finally got
on board and did some work. You've got politicians who would never be caught dead talking about UFOs holding hearings, public hearings and closed door hearings with the whistleblowers and witnesses insiders. It's an amazing transformation a short period of time, and I imagine the pressure grows on folks who certainly know way more than we do. The general public probably have bodies and craft and materials that they've stashed and
analyzed for a long time. But even if they have, that doesn't necessarily mean they know where these things are from or what the agenda is. They just know it's not us. I see that with these the drones. They've been all over the map and the responses to what's going on, But they've they've said a lot without addressing the really big question. I mean, they've said they're not
a threat. Presumably you haven't seen any bombs drop, their building's vaporized, they're not from foreign adversaries, they're not ours, but we can't say whose they are. That one gets me. That kind of gets me, is, isn't it you?
Yeah, it does me too. And we have had a couple of occasions now with presidents who said they're going to get in, you know, they're going to explore and they're going to reveal. Jimmy Carter saw a UFO in nineteen sixty nine, I believe, and said he would reveal the truth when he came to office. Apparently he told NASA to do so, and they came back and said no, no, thank you, and we don't urge that you go there. Mister President Bill Clinton also tried to penetrate it or
wanted to. Now what's interesting is is Donald Trump has indicated that he is going to and his son Don Junior has said we're going to take a real serious look and we're not going to be stopped where they've been stopped before. And Bobby Kennedy has said the same thing. He's playing a unique role. And I noticed Daniel Shehan was at the Thanksgiving dinner at the Kennedy house. So I don't know if that means there's really a shift in that paradigm. But what's Donald Trump going to do?
Is he really going to push is he what does he know and what is he willing to help get revealed.
I know that there's some people around him, as you mentioned some of the ones that are known. I know that there's some other people around him who helped in his campaign and are working on that transition, who are deeply interested in this topic and they want to be able to say something. But I would imagine it is pretty hard for any president to draw the line on how far can you go once you open that door? Yeah, it's real, but we can't tell you very much more.
The questions are going to be endless.
Yeah, and I have to say say too. I don't like to be macab, but he has had two assassination attempts in one year, and how far can he go?
Now?
Again, I don't want to be macab and hyperbolic here, but you know what level would he begin to release information about? I don't know. You can imagine that there is a scenario, there's scenario planning going on in the transition. It's certainly not issue number one, probably a lot of other issues ahead, but it's probably it's probably on some front burners in the transition.
So I'll tell you what if they were to make an announcement. If they were to make an announcement of some sort, it would become issue number one. Even if there were some dire threat that somewhere else. I mean, good gosh, that would be gigantic.
It would be, especially depending on how limited it was. I mean, maybe they'll say, here's what happened at Roswell all these years ago. But if what happened at Roswell was an alien craft, then that is that's the fact that it's old is not going to change the significant its significance is anything. Is going to be probably a lot of questioning about why this was kept from the American public.
So you have been involved in that level of a political intrigue on the UFO issue, and there's a chapter of it in your book, the UFO Paradox, that we'll get into in the next hour. Before we go there, I want to just go back to the idea that UFOs equal ets and how limiting that kind of a
framework is. As you learn more about the topic, you realize that that really is not a very all encompassing explanation for a variety of phenomena that people don't equate with UFOs but are somehow related at a basic level, right right, Well, you touched on.
This earlier and I didn't pick up on it. Namely, UFO means unidentified flying object, so I means something in the sky is unidentified and appears to have mass. It appears to be an object. So people say, well, is this a real UFO? Sometimes I'll say, well, if it's unidentified and flying it appears to be an object, it's a UFO. But how it is eventually explained is yet to be determined. But you're right, We now know that these are preferential to bodies of water, they are seen
on land, They are clearly atmospheric in the sky. So the attempts to try to find a single acronym really tough. Unidentified anomalous phenomenon is a common one, but the word anomalist doesn't roll off the tongue really well. So the acronyms don't really help us out here very much. But this is so much broader and deeper than a set of initials can convey, and it's part of how the linguistics of it make it easy to push this away off the front table.
The deeper you dig into it, the wider the discussion gets I mean, you know, my entry point to this weird world was UFOs and the dominant paradigm when I started, as when you started, is these things are spaceships from other worlds. But really that is not accurate for what was really going on. The cases that kicked it off. Kenneth Arnold, for example, his story and you go into
it in great detail in your book. His story was mischaracterized from the beginning, and some of the most dramatic and weirdest and most important things that happened to Kenneth Arnold were never reported at all, not for decades later.
Correct, that's correct. Maybe we have to go into this in the next hour. I don't know how close we are to the commercial, but yeah, to the break. It's absolutely true. His daughter Kim Arnold, came forward later and said, my dad had a whole different experience that day, and he kept it quiet for the rest of his life because he was already the weird guy who was associated
with flying saucers. So I'd be glad to go into how the opening case in the creation myth of ufology, blind saucer sighting over Mountaineer involves something far different than we have come to believe.
I just think for both of us we had the same sort of experience in that our entry point to this general unified theory of weirdness was UFOs and maybe it's ets. It's like a spoke on a wheel that leads to a hub that's way stranger than just ets or UFOs craft in the sky. It's connected to a whole bunch of other things, and it makes people everywhere uncomfortable. You know, people who investigate UFOs, they don't want to hear about bigfoot standing extra flying saucer, do they?
No, they don't. And when you say that they've been happening through time immemorial, and we have petroglyphs with alien figures going back centuries and cultures, and when you bring in shamanism and the near death experience and the fairy faith, as our great friend Jacques Bela did by broadening the framework, he simply said when he wrote his book Passport to Magonia,
he said, this didn't start in nineteen forty seven. We need to look at our myths and our folklore, and the mainstream of uthology said, oh no, Jacques is now reducing the et hypothesis to mere myth he said, no, I'm broadening. It's not mear myth. Don't dismiss mythology because they may be reports of real phenomena in their time, in their culture. So I give Jacques bel A continuing great credit over the many years of his remarkable work in broadening our framework for this phenomenon.
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