UFO's and Balloons - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 2/18/23

some time tonight, Greg, how are you this evening. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Well, come on, we're the ones who are lucky. You're just kind of the perfect guy for this gig because I think that not just with your background in in your investigations with Roswell, but you've done other things. You've had other books where you've you know, like the the I saw on your website, The Haunted Hillhouse, was like totally cool. I love that um and that you can lecture on all sorts of

various topics. So we may we may run the gamut with you, but let's start here. So you've been following the story of the balloons, these different shaped balloons. Some were cigar shaped, some were this shape, some were big, some were small. What were you hearing in that in though all of those different admissions or re pivots by

the by the Pentagon over the last couple of weeks. Well, it's it's funny because if you look back in the last couple of years, Um, they've changed some laws and they put some stuff in the National Defense Authorization Act that opens up some of these investigations and makes it very much more transparent. Before. You know, if if if a Navy flyer saw something, he would think, I really want to report this because they're going to make fun of me, right and when he would that information stayed

within the Department of the Navy. It didn't it was not shared, uh, you know, in the National Defense So now the laws have changed and they have to play well with others and everybody is sharing this information also, you know, they they they've opened it up to where um, it's our responsibility as the government to look at this

and to share annually our report on UAP. So you have all these government agencies that are now sharing this information working together and uh, and they're compelled to do it, which makes it fairly interesting there. Yeah, that's a very interesting observation to start with, because, as I mentioned last night, there's a Hulu series out which is a like a like a primer on the history of the subject. Didn't

this country and how it developed? And there was a concerted effort made by the government, like an actual symposia that they had across the country of different thought leaders to make sure that everybody got in line with the notion that people would be stigmatized if they spoke up. And therefore anybody in the military, officers, pilots, they didn't want that permanently in their jacket. Up until that point sometime in the I think it was the nineteen fifties.

Up until that point, people were talking openly about it. Then that shut down and they were they were basically the rule came out that said let's label them all kuks, and that will stop. That will stop everything. And then it's taken a long time for that frost thought. So now the emphasis is not prove you're not a kop.

It's it's the emphasis is the government to prove that what people are reporting isn't true, right, Yeah, And it's um when you're when you're talking about aerial phenomena, you're talking about a whole bunch of stuff. When I was a kid in nineteen seventy North Austin, Texas, every day I saw a flying disc every day because we lived very close to Berkstrom International or Berkstrom Air Force Base, which was the Sack Command at the time. And so

they were launching weather balloons multiple times a day. And once they got very very high, those those balloons that look like an upside down tear drop to us there on the ground, get very big, right, they get very very wide. Sure, and so you see a boy around four or five, six, seven o'clock, depending on what time of the year. You get those long sun rays as the coming up and they reflect off of that balloon material and it looks like a giant, shiny silver disc

up there. Right. We had a lot of those. I remember that crystal clear when I was a kid. So you have things such you know, benign as that to these other objects that apparently you know, maneuver very well and are are hard to spot, but well, you know, and that and that's well freeze that moment, because again, there seemed to be a time when this country the military needed to send up a lot more weather balloons. I'm not saying that they don't do it on occasion.

I'm not saying, but it's not. I mean the technology has progressed since then, The climatology and meteorology and all that has has progressed to a point where we don't need to send up a balloon. I mean that's pretty that's pretty primal in a way when you think about it, right, right, right, So I guess it would be more along the lines now as far as real test, because I mean using using models and satellites, you can't actually get you know,

the real air. You can't write the real air, so you still need uh, you know, air pressure and those types of things that satellite is not going to give you. True, but they also have we have a lot of different planes. They have the a wax, we have a lot of other we have other things that we can also do other than weather balloons, at least if the pentagons to be believed, and they said, and I believe them when they say, we don't really fly balloons over other countries.

So that let's just go with the balloon theory for a second, but that all of this is just balloons, so like makes me wonder, what is it then that China doesn't have that we have that a weather balloon or a balloon of some sort, whether it's for weather

or not, I don't know. But if whatever a balloon is that they feel like they have to float it over the jet stream over the United States and Canada, what is it that they could that they're gathering with those balloons that they couldn't gather using other data Because our country says, our satellites are so good, balloons are kind of we don't we just wouldn't bother, right, So where are you with that? Well? And so it depends on how you look at it depends on the technology

we're talking about. You remember a few years ago we were we were watching North Korea pretty close, and all of a sudden, they're burning everything and there's nothing but smoke, right right right, Yeah, they were moving surface to air missiles from one launch area to another. So the best way to do that is to create smoke, because it's really hard for us to see through smoke, and and so that sort of archaic warfare kind of stuff was

going on. Yeah, Yeah, And here's the thing is, we're assuming that this balloon was gathering data of some sort, possibly espionaged kind of stuff, right, well, what if it wasn't What if it was doing something else? And that was one of the things that kind of perturbed me a little bit is we can fabricate things pretty quick, and we can control things in a lot of different ways. And to bring a balloon down with a very high dollar missile was just right. I'm just sitting at home.

Four hundred thousand dollars missile to knock down a balloon? What are we doing? Who is in charge of this? Right? If I was, if I had the authority and I had the responsibility to for somebody to say, hey, I need you to go get that balloon, that's not how I'm gonna do it. No, And I want to protect the payload of that balloon and keep it pristine so I can get people that's a lot smarter than me to take a look at it and figure out what

it's doing. But instead they shoot a missile at it over the ocean and it's going to drop into salt water. Whatever electronics is on it's done instantly done. Yeah, yeah, and then how are you going to find it? And how are you going to recover it? I don't know how they're they're they're doing with that part of them.

I think it's it was all theater, I think at some point, and it became, you know, it obviously became very politicized, like we don't have the guts to to shoot down a balloon, and then after we shot down the balloon, they go, oh, what a stupid waste of money to shoot down a balloon. It's like, pick up your mind, you know what I mean, Like, what what do you want? The government's gonna do whatever it thinks the people think will make them look good. They're not

necessarily going to think it through. And you're a guy who knows a little bit about this, because I mean, you served about a decade in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. Were those in successive events or were you at the same time in all three of those? So out of high school, Army then I became a cop when I got out of the Army, and I was doing that for a little while, and I thought, you know what, I'm gonna go do. The Navy a buddy of mine called me up, said hey, let's go

do the Navy. So we went into the Navy. I got out and went, I'm gonna be a cop again. And then I was there for a couple of years, and the Bosnia thing came up, and I was like, yeah, I'm gonna go do the Air Force and sod Yeah. When were your jobs in each of those stints? So when I was in the Army, I was an infantry parachutist. I was a paratrooper with the eighty second Airborne Division. I was in Alaska and the Middle East and North Africa, and I had I had a really good, really good

tour with them. They traveled around right a lot, and then the Navy, and then the Navy. I was an operation specialist, And that's one of the things that makes me more interested in these UAPs, UFOs and that sort of thing, because as an operation specialist, it's one of the very few jobs in the Navy that you don't you're not a technician, you don't fix anything. Most jobs in the Navy to fix something. Operations specialists don't fix anything.

We use a whole bunch of electronic means to gather information. We analyze that information and disseminate it to the people that have a need to know for the information. And so that was one of the things. You know, I worked air detection and tracking in one of the one of the modules on mimits Air Detection and Tracking. This was way before the UAP incident. I'm using air quotes here on limits. But the equipment that we use there people, I think people have a very basic and rudimentary idea

of how those things work. But let's say the electronic counter measures and electronic counter counter measures and the radars and things that we use our f energy for to do things without having to touch things, those are frequencies, and those frequencies can be adjusted. So for me and for anybody that's work in air detection and tracking, as we're going someplace and doing something, we're looking for objects that are of interest to us, in other words, a

hazard and navigation or a direct threat. Right, And when you run into flocks of birds, you adjust your frequency, you tune your radar right so that they'll go away on your radar screen so you don't see them and you don't get distracted by them. Well, the same thing would happen with a non rigid inflatable balloon type object. You could pick that up if the payload was big enough, like this particular payload on this Chinese balloon was apparently a couple of school bus sizes. I mean that that's

a lot of equipment. I can't imagine how big this thing was, but apparently it was pretty large. And you know, something like that, you wouldn't necessarily tune it out. You would automatically see that. Some of these others that they've been talking about, the smaller ones, you would probably if you couldn't get a signature off of that flying object, whatever it is. In other words, you're you're looking for it, and is it in a commercial air corridor? Is it

move at a certain speed at a certain altitude? Is it squawking some sort of radar also or any other RF energy for you know, transmitting whatever it might be. You can identify that as a commercial aircraft or military aircraft.

But if something's moving very slow and it doesn't seem to be doing anything, a lot of times you won't even assign a tracking number to it, just because you know it could be it could be some sort of weather anomaly, squall, It could be you know, so when it doesn't seem to be a threat to you, Yeah,

you just don't pay that much attention to it. So it's interesting after this, after these new laws came in and they basically tapped on everybody's, you know, a military's foreheads and said, hey, boys, start paying attention to this stuff. Start logging this stuff. So everybody's tuning in the radars different. It's like, oh man, these things from popping up everywhere. Right, So yeah, well, and then so the Air Force just a round it out. I mean, which one was your

favorite branch that you served in? So I was indoctrinated in the United States Army and that's the way I feel. That's that's who tattooed on your soul. Yeah, it still is right, exactly right. Yeah, I was a I was actually a combat arms training and maintenance instructor for the Air Force, So I was I was a rainmaster. I did all the small arms stuff up to a Mark nineteen and like eighty one millimeter mortars and stuff like that.

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