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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrie with you back with Garrett graf UFO the inside story of the US government search for alien life here and out there we were talking about the case of police Officer Lonnie Zamora, and that is the case that got the late doctor J. L. And Hydek, who headed up Project Blue Book for the government to believe that UFOs maybe coming from extraterrestrial places. Garrett, it was an incredible story.
Yeah, and I was starting to say before the break, you know, the challenge for me is that witnesses like Lannie Zamora are uniquely credible, because what you had in his case was there were other witnesses who appeared very quickly into the New Mexico State trooper who was on
the scene just minutes after his encounter. There was some physical evidence that something happened, and it seems very clear that sort of something happened and upset Jannie Zema, and that he is not someone who sort of had previous
encounters or any subsequent encounters. And in fact, you know, he's not someone he was widely respected in the community, well life in the community, went on to sort of have a normal life after his encounter, and there's sort of no reason for him to have invented the story of an encounter like the one that he had. That's one of the things that stood out to Jay Allen Heinek.
It stood out to me reading that history and testimonials and reports years later, and you know, there are those category of witnesses that you see over and across the years who have encounters who have no reason to make up the story and in fact have quite a lot potentially to lose for reporting a UFO or UAP encounter. I would put by the way, those navy pilots today, the naval aviators today in recent years come forward with
the same type of category. And to me, those types of encounters, those types of stories, really are what convinced me that there is something here that is real, that is worth talking about, and would you know that our government should be more interested in figuring out what is actually going on.
When I first heard the Lone Zamora case, which occurred in sixty four, and I heard about it years later. But when I first heard about the case, Garrett, I thought maybe what he saw was a test land of the lunar module, because this was five years before we landed on the Moon. Maybe he saw astronauts testing this thing taking off, flying down and landing and it sounded right. But dunnan, it hit me that Nah, he saw something else.
Yeah, And you know, in some wadys at the time, you could have said that that was the easy, simplex explanation. He was close to the White Sands proving grounds in New Mexico. It was the heart of the Apollo program, the heart of the space race. But the challenge is here we are, fifty sixty years later. We have never
seen a craft emerge from the US government archives. We've never seen sort of declassified evidence of a craft that operates anything close to the way that what Janie Zamora explained that you saw.
Did your research in this book convince you otherwise that the US government is holding back information?
Well, this is a complicated story, and you know, sort of a complicated set of facts to try to untangled, because we know that there is a US government cover up about UFOs. You know, there are sort of several obvious cloaks of secrecy that we know exist in this world. You know, as we discussed previously, some chunk of these sightings are the US government's own secret plans, projects, experiments, and operations.
No question.
The CIA goes, you know, went back and tallied up that they think almost half of all sort of publicly reported UFOs in the nineteen fifties were the U two spot plane as it was being secretly developed during that decade, which was very much a UFO. It was a plane that flew a multitude that plane did not fly at, that did not look like any known plane, flying at
speeds that its planes were not known to fly. You know, if you were a commercial airline pilot in the nineteen fifties winging your way across the country and you saw a YouTube spyplane above you, that was a true UFO, and we know that sort of some chunk of today
you're sort of stumbling across similar efforts. We also know that there's a cloak of secrecy around, as we discussed that advanced adversarial technology that's being tested against US by foreign governments China, Russia, Iran, you know, maybe other governments. And we know that because the Pentagon has said that
it has detected some of this as adversarial technology. But the government just does squirrely about what its sensors pick up, what it detects, what it doesn't detect, and it doesn't really necessarily want to let on everything that it knows about some of these UAP sighting for the purposes of not sort of sharing with China and Russia what it sees and what it doesn't. So you know, you have sort of those cloaks of secrecy that we know about
at the heart of the government cover up. Though. I think John Brennan, as I mentioned earlier in the show, when he said in December twenty twenty, that there's stuff up there that he's puzzled by, that he doesn't know what it is, I think that that was an honest comment that I think he I think that US government leadership is honestly confused and unsure of what a lot
of these UFOs and UAPs actually are. And one of the things that sort of bothers me as a taxpayer and a citizen writing about this subject is the lack of curiosity and serious study about what these things actually are.
Unless it's going on clandestinely, it could be it could be clandestined.
Yes, but I don't think that, you know, when you see these high level figures making comments that are sort of as genuinely puzzled as what John Brannan was saying, I think that there is at least some chunk of this phenomenon that they are still quite puzzled by, and I think they should care more about what the what the answers are.
Do you think it's still conceivable within government that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
Absolutely, and we have all sorts of evidence across the eighty years that I really sort of spent the eighty years that I really try to study in this book of the government not knowing what the government was doing.
You know, you have the very famous case from the dawn of what was sort of then still called the Flying Saucer Age, when Captain Thomas Mantle, who was a Kentucky Air National Guard pilot, is dispatched in a P fifty one to chase a UFO over the skies of Louisville, Kentucky, and he is He and a couple of flight mates are dispatched and they race after what they see as
a giant object. This is January seventh, nineteen forty eight in the skies over central Kentucky and Captain Thomas Mantle ends up flying you know, the official government report later is that he ends up flying too high in the sky without oxygen, trying to chase whatever this object is, and that he ends up passing out and his plane
crashes and he's killed. And there's this a real moment of panic in inside the government that, you know, whatever these UFOs are, whatever these flying saucers are, you know, did they shoot down Captain Thomas Mantle? You know, are
they actively hostile against US aircraft? And it's actually Project blue Book years later, about four years later, nineteen fifty two, finally pieces together what they think happened to Thomas Mantle, and Edward ruppolt a name I'm sure your listeners know who's the head of Project blue Book at the time, figures out that there was a secret Navy research balloon that he was chafing after and that sort of the Navy never mentioned to the Air Force that it had
this capability, and that it had that he had died, you know, chasing the US government's own project.
It was an incredible case. What did you think of the late Harvard the professor John Mack, who spent part of his career chasing down alien abduction cases.
Yeah, I spent a couple of chapters sort of wrestling in in the book with the stories of alien abductions, and you know, all of those names that I'm sure your listeners no, John Mac, Bud Hopkins and others, and you know, to me it was one of the more fascinating corners of this subject because you know what what John Mack and Bud Hopkins and others who look at this phenomenon come away convinced is that some real trauma has happened to these people who report these types of encounters,
that they you know, that they share all of the hallmarks of trauma victims, and that there is not a shared psychology behind them before they experienced their encounters. You know, these were not necessarily people you know, for instance, who all all had a type of mental illness before they had uh, you know, reports of their encounters with aliens.
Where I think I settle is, you know that at a certain level we have to believe them, that you know, that they are coming forward and telling the truth, that they understand it, that they have had some type of encounter that at least for now, remains unexplainable to us. I don't necessarily end up concluding that. I think that you know, that necessarily means that they are being abducted by aliens, but that they're they are having an encounter
of some time. We have a force that we don't yet understand.
What is it about Harvard? Now we have Professor A.
VI Lobe doing his thing, yes, and you know, I actually was, uh did an event with Abby Lobe last week at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and you know, one of the things that sort of kept going through my mind was, you know, the sort of main figure arguing against the you know, the sort of early UFO and early UFO and early flying saucer age was Auvy Lobe's predecessor, sort of the debunker in chief, Harvard astronomer, Donald Menzel.
And I was thinking about sort of how far we have come in astronomy in fifty years that you go from Donald Menzel, who was the you know, the the arc type skeptic, to Azvy Lobe, who you know, is about as close to to a curious believer as you can find these days.
When you read the context of the Bible Garrett, and it talks about fallen angels and things like that. If you add in and replace them with extraterrestrials, it still makes a lot of sense.
You know, then, yes, And I think one of the things that it is very clear is that they're you know, you go but sort of through almost any civilization in human history, and they report weird things in the sky and they you know, this is not something that was totally invented in the summer of nineteen forty seven by Kenneth Arnold in the Pacific Northwest. This is sort of something that human have wondered about and struggled with for
their entire for our entire existence. And to me, part of what makes this story so interesting is the way that it mixes spirituality and science. You know that this question of are we alone? Is one of the two or three most profound questions of human existence, you know, right up there with is there a God? And what happens to us after death? And I don't know that we will ever solve you know, those latter two questions, but I am very optimistic that we will solve that
first question of are we alone? You know, if humanity pursues it in, and we sort of give ourselves as a civilization the chance to live long enough to explore it.
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