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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norri with you. Nick Cook with us. Author of at least twenty books on fiction and nonfiction titles in the US and the UK, including several ghosts written Sunday Times bestsellers. A former technology journalist, he's well known for his groundbreaking best selling nonfiction book,
The Hunt for Zero Point. He also has written, produced, and presented two feature length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels, and as a speaker, Nick imparts his wealth of experience passionately on issues such as global challenges, sustainability, defense and security, the future of technology, and the power of story and the tapping to the theme of his latest fact based thriller, The Grid, the Human Mind his latest book, The Light Beyond the Mountains, Nick, welcome back.
How have you been.
I've been extremely well, Thanks George. Good morning from the UK.
How are you all is good? Thanks? Calming down after this weekend. I hope we had a rough weekend here in the United States.
Neck we saw you know, we may be two great nations often divided by a common language, but it was extremely concerning to see all of that. I think, you know, whatever your political affiliations, that was just a terrible, terrible thing that we saw here and I don't think many people here in the UK would disagree with that.
Watch to talk with you about tonight, Nick, including you were the eurospace editor for James Defense Weekly for what twenty years?
Yeah? Almost twenty years, George. For part of that time I left the sort of freelancer and I became their aerospace consultant for a few years, but all in all it was about twenty years. Yeah, they were great years for me. I really really enjoyed that beat, went to some fantastic places, learned some incredible things. Yeah, it was a very good, good time.
What were your favorite topics that you handled for them?
Oh, without a doubt, it was being on the trail of classified aircraft programs in the US. My colleague and I, the North America editor of Jane's Defense Weekly at the time, was a guy called Bill Sweetman, and Bill Bill and I went on the trail of stealth and hypersonic programs at a time when they were deeply secret. So this was in the sort of latter stages of the Reagan administration, and no one was acknowledging in officialdom that these programs existed.
Yet there were sightings all over the desert southwest of strange shapes in the sky. Bill did this fantastic bit of sort of Sherlock holmesy and investigation following up all of these technology clues that show that these programs were in existence, and I sort of came along as his then apprentice, and we had a lot of fun just building the evidence to show that these programs, these black programs, really existed.
Now, how many of these stealth type aircraft got confused for UFO sidings.
Oh a great many did, so, you know, it was very telling to us that I did an interview once with the head of the skunk Works and I was ushered into the skunt Works building. This was in about nineteen ninety six. For the interview, and during the course of this interview, the guy said I worked on. His name was Jack Gordon. I worked on fifteen real flying aircraft. There are fifteen real flying aircraft programs in the course of my career that I can only talk about twelve
of them. Now I've done a sort of audit since then of what those missing three aircraft could have been,
and even to this day they have not appeared. I mean, there are some programs which could fall into that bracket, but there are so many classified aircraft projects still that have flown that have not been acknowledged and for reasons we can maybe go into later, George, but it is all of those, I mean, a lot of those unfamiliar shapes in the sky at the time got lumped into a kind of UFO category, and of course that suited the powers that be because there is advantage for them
in having classified aircraft programs confused as UFOs. It just obscures the whole, the whole picture, and keeps things to meant to be secret secret. And it has precedent. You'll recall, I'm sure that during the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties the CIA deliberately obfiscated it's two big spyplane programs, the U two spyplane and the A twelve, which was
later to become the SR seventy one Blackbird. You know, both of those were flying in the sky, but both needed to be hushed up, and the UFO sort of curtain to hide them behind was perfect. And so with that precedent in mind, they've gone on to do that in spades subsequently, and you know it's even going on, especially going on today.
And they of course still continue to deny, deny, deny too, Nick, don't they.
Oh yeah, I mean that's all part of the game plan. And there is a big sort of you know, toolkit, as you know, of deniability and disinformation that keeps these projects secret or is supposed to. And they've become actually much harder to investigate in the modern era because they're they're they're obscured even more by social media and you know the sort of binary kind of slanging matches that go on on forums like Twitter and elsewhere, and all of the signal gets lost in a lot of noise,
and you know that again is advantageous. I'm just I'm very glad I'm not investigating these things anymore because they would be they would be pretty challenging to do. So there are people, of course out there who do that and I think are doing a good job. But that's that's not my bag anymore. But I had a lot of fun doing it while I was at Janine's Defense Weekly.
What do you think the percent Nick of sightings were UFOs compared to stealth airplanes.
Well, that takes us into some quite interesting territory, because I think you can safely say, you know, there are sort of known unknowns, there are unknown unknowns to coin that famous Rumsfeldian expression. But within the sort of known unknown category, I think quite a high percentage of sightings during the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties even could be put down to classified aircraft sightings, you know, particularly
in places like the desert southwest of America. And it wasn't just self, you know, there was this rather wonderful mythical beast that Bill Sweetman and I chased called Aurora, and was meant to be a very high flying, very fast replacement for the SR seventy one Blackbird. There were plenty of fightings of this thing, both actually over America and over other parts of the world, including the UK, where this mythical beast was meant to be based for a while in the wilds of the western Highlands of
Scotland at a remote base there. And I think there's very good evidence now to say that that aircraft program Aurora existed. I've spoken to plenty of people in officialdom who have given nods and winks over the years to say it did. Of course, there are sort of political implications of owning up to this stuff as well, because during the stealth era, politicians were able to get away with denials that there was any stealth fighter program because in the end it wasn't a stealth fighter, it was
actually a stealth attack aircraft. So semantics played a really big part in the denial the denial game. But you know, journalists wiped up to that after the sealth fighter was revealed in nineteen eighty eight and then began to ask all the right questions and didn't give politicians any room to wiggle or wriggle their way out of out of it.
So that's sort of political embarrassment attached to owning up to these programs, even if some of them are now forty years old, because some of those same politicians are still alive, and you know, to have them admitted to
now would again be politically embarrassing. So I think a lot of those programs, or those aircraft projects, perhaps even Aurora itself, were literally he dropped into a hole in the desert, the sand buried over them, and you know, they were left there or would be left there for somebody else to figure out politically how to deal with it, you know, maybe decades down the track.
Oh, Nickcock, Come they didn't continue with Aurora. I mean, why bury it like that?
I did have really had a really fascinating interview once George with a guy called another George, General George Malner. General Malner was the USF Forces head of R and D programs during the late the late nineteen nineties, and on the day that he retired from office in I think it was in nineteen ninety eight, I went to interview him on the agenda was officially with black programs.
I could talk with him about classified aircraft development programs, And in the course of that he said to me, I asked him the question about Aurora, And I said, come on, it's your last day in office. You can tell me. Was it real? Is it real? And he said, well, let me put it this way. He said, we had a retirement issue with the Blackbird aircraft in nineteen ninety We had an old generation of satellites up there, spy
satellites that couldn't quite do the job. We had a new generation that was coming online but wouldn't be online for a while. So how do you think we filled the gap? And I went, okay, you'd need a very fast, flying, quick reaction spyplane that could get up there and monitor developments on the ground in the case of some you know, a political crisis, some regional crisis. And you know, I think that was a really good and strong hint that
what a raw did was fill a gap. It filled a sort of surveillance gap between an old generation of spy satellites that couldn't do the job, a new generation of digital real time satellites that weren't yet in place, and this retired aircraft, the SR seventy one that was no longer there to fill that gap. So you know, for me, that was kind of cake plots. Aurora was real. They built a few what they call deployable prototypes. The prototypes were seen. I know RAF pilots who've seen it,
who've talked to me about it. So yeah, I call it a mythical beast, but it's not really quite as mythical as I make up.
But you don't think it's secretly in process right now?
No, I don't, because actually it along with that sort of semi confession of general Molners to me was something else that he said, which was that it was I think he kept couch to it this way. It would be a very expensive shortfall gap solution to put this thing up there. You can imagine this was an aeroplane that absolutely pushed all of the limits in terms of
engine technology, in terms of materials. To build it. It cost an absolute fortune, and it cost a fortune to run because it probably ran on some kind of exotic fuel which was hard to maintain and keep in service. So all in all, you know, it was a great breakthrough technologically, but expensive to maintain and keep in service.
And I think it's legacy though, continues in that. You know, we've seen for some decades now, companies like Lockie Martin, you know, the skunk work saying we're going to build an SR seventy one replacement. Well, a lot of people would say you've already built one, but you can't admit to it. So it's you know, it's a fascinating piece of the sort of classified aircraft puzzle.
Oh it's Nick Cook. Nick tell us about the History Channel and Discovery Channel's documentaries you produced.
Well, the first one I did was called Billion Dollar Secret and that was for Discovery, and we filmed it in nineteen ninety eight. In fact, that General Mulna interview was part of that, and that for me was it was quite an edgy departure from what I normally did, because you know, it's quite hard to remember now, but back in the day, you didn't talk about UFOs. I mean, in my certainly in my line of work, you'd be sort of drummed out of the business pretty quick if
you had. But I wanted to explore this hinterland between FID aircraft's development and sightings thereof and what people commonly reported as UFOs. So Billion Dollar Secret explored that hinterland, and that came out in nineteen ninety nine, and then I did another one called UFO's Secret Evidence, which sort of did the same thing, but it went into it in a bit more detail and took the disinformation angle as its sort of main compass bearing And that also
was two hours. We did that for the History Channel, and that also was a fascinating departure for me as well. By when you know, we were still in this very heretical zone of you just don't talk about UFOs in my line of business. Things of course have eased up a bit now, but hard to remember back then that this was a really taboo subject.
When you were with Changed Defense Weekly. Did you ever do any kind of UFO stories?
Well, Uh, I didn't. I kind of. I sort of dropped the odd hint every now and again in my writing. But maybe we could come onto this in a minute, because it's a sort of topic in its own right in a way. But I, in the course of my job at Jane's, I decided to write The Hunter zero Point, which was my sort of investigation of anti gravity, and that did emerge out of the work that I was doing at Jane's, but I did it on my own,
if you like. It was the sort of sub radar activity for me that I didn't know it was going to morph into a book. But I started doing that investigating this in the sort of early mid nineteen nineties period, and by the end of the nineteen nineties I realized I had enough material for a book, and that went into The Hunter zero Point.
What other places did the Hunt take you?
Oh? The Hunt took me everywhere, and it really sort of itched this scratch, this itch that I'd had. The question being to myself was Okay, Nick, you have all of this amazing access to all of these people through your Jane's job. What is it that you personally would really like to investigate? And I thought, well, actually, an undiscussed technological breakthrough on the order of the atomic bomb from the Second World War. What would that breakthrough be?
I thought, well, I think it would be in the propulsion arena. And that said, I think it would therefore be in the kind of anti gravity field. And I think that would be a secret you really wanted to hush up, and it would of course make it very UFO like, which would make it incredibly hard to talk about.
But that was the question I set myself, and I just went on this massive road trip, a physical road trip, but a road trip mind as well, which took me to all kinds of places, predominantly of course, all across the United States where everything was going on at the time, but also back in time. I had to go into what, for example, Nazi Germany was ding doing during the Second World War to try and eliminate some of the legends that had come out of the Ufology law to do
with the Nazis and UFOs and stuff. So I had to address all of these things, and a lot of it was deeply unfamiliar territory for me, but a fascinating hinterland to explore.
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