And welcome to the show. I'm Martin Willis to host, and a couple
of things before we get started with our great guest, I want to wish
everyone a merry Christmas that celebrates Christmas. We'll be back on the twenty six
and I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful time. And with our guest
tonight, I've been really looking forward to speaking to him, actually a long
time. When he first came out, Jacques Valet and I think it was
Wonders in the Sky came out with Historic UFOs I was doing the show.
I can't remember exactly when it was, but I've always really have been fascinated
by that aspect of you know, the ufology, the ancient stories and things
like that. So it's Chris Aubek and he'll be coming in in just a
minute. We're going to be talking about his new book called Just Let's See.
It's called Alien Artifacts, The Forgotten Story of how we came to believe
in visitors from the stars, and so really looking forward to speaking to him
about that. And he's also going to touch a little bit on his other
book, which is about disc shaped objects. So it should be fascinating our
blog this week is a Nuts and Bolts UFO Guy and Marley Woods by Charles
Lear. Check that out. And of course, of course, last week
we had a blog including our guests tonight Chris Aubec, so check that out
as well. I'm going to link both of those to the show notes.
And I think that is about it again. I wish you all merry Christmas,
those who celebrate, and let me bring my guests in now. Hey,
Chris, welcome to the show. Hi, Hi there. And I
do have to say that this is a pre recorded show because I guess it
would be in the middle of the night where you live, right, I
think about two in the morning or something like that. Yeah, it's my
normal hours. Yeah, yeah, it's four pm now here in Spain.
And yeah, yeah, so I have done I have done shows at at
very strange times in the in the middle of the night for me, and
I've sort of looked like this and it's likely to find the show about I
suppose. So I like to ask this of my guests that I haven't spoken
to before prior, what actually led to you having a fascination with this topic?
Mm hmm. Well, when I was a teenager around fourteen, thirteen
years old, I collected Marvel comics in London. I'm from London originally,
and I remember going to this market store where i'd pick up nineteen sixties Avengers
comic books, and I came across an old, scruffy paperback by Eric Vondarniken.
It was his second book, I Returned to the Stars, and I
thought it was pretty fascinating, and my mind was already open to sort of
science fiction type possibilities because of my comic reading, and so I started reading
that and I thought, this is interesting how mythology, folklore and archaeology seemed
to intersect, and how this might support the idea that our planet had been
visited by aliens in antiquity. And it started from then. I became a
member of the Ancient Astronaut Society when I was about fifteen sixteen. When I
was eighteen, I went off to the States spent a couple of weeks visiting
some of my favorite authors, and then I began looking into this in a
different way, by searching through old books and newspapers for any kind of evidence
I could on the subject of strange phenomena in general, but particularly UFOs that
happened to well our ancestors view of the paranormal h I mentioned this something.
I don't know if you've ever seen this, but when you're going back in
time, this is really interesting. I put this up a couple of times
during my show. It's the Simeon Perkins Diary of seventeen ninety six. Have
you ever heard of that? Yeah? I have mentioned that one. Oh
you did mention that one. Yeah. Here here's the account of it.
I've shown that a few But it's fascinating when you really think about, you
know, all through time there's been something reported, you know. I mean
you go back and some of your books to back to early BC history,
you know what I mean, And it really is something, you know.
I read a couple of excerpts from your latest book, and one of them
is the fictional account. I can't remember exactly what it's called, but eighteen
forty six or seven, I think it was maybe eighteen forty eight, when
the guy's looking into the telescope and he has his wife take a look in
the thing leands. But you know what's really I know that's fictional, but
really what's really interesting about that is the thing that you hear people say a
lot about when they have an counter with being is the tight fitted suit that
they wear, and that was back then. It it almost makes you wonder
if the fiction was based on something well, I mean, the idea of
a tight fitting suit is actually earlier than that. That would be eighteenth century
when we're talking about Immanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic who said that he'd met
aliens and traveled through the universe, had encountered extraterrestrials on many different planets,
and he said that the Mercurians were the most interesting, who travel around planets
looking for information, trying to build a kind of encyclopedia of knowledge about the
whole of existence. And they dress in blue one piece suits without seams,
And of course Swedenborg's understand was that they were from the planet Mercury. These
days we would call them grays or whatever race of extraterrestrials is currently in fashion.
But the parallels are very interesting. I write in Alien Artifacts this book
that you've been mentioning about how the sweden Book's Mercurians traveled the universe in a
sphere of light, how they could read minds. They used a form of
telepathy, and we're talking about a period in which the expression telepathy hadn't been
coined yet. Parallels are deep and fascinating. That's really something, and it's
pretty interesting how they always assumed that they were basically in our Solar System from
one of the planets that we know of, and Swedenborg did say that he
traveled outside our Solar System too. I mean, the idea of the inhabited
universe replete with life goes back to the ancient Greeks, to the atomist school
of thought. They believed that all things were made from atoms, which is
an amazing conclusion to reach when microscopes hadn't been invented yet. And they believe
that well, this particular school of thought believe that our atoms sort of formed
form patterns and formed living beings and mountains and whatever, and that it would
be replicated throughout the universe. And so they were aware of planets beyond the
Solar System. They believed in galaxies and probably an infinite number of galaxies where
or life would have been created in just the same way that it happened on
planet Earth. You know, I recently had Adam frank On an astrophysicist,
and you know, I brought that up about you know, how likely you
know, life is out there, you know, in his thoughts and his
opinions and things like that, and most people like him. It was his
opinion as well, is that us being you know, bipedal binocular vision,
you know, opposing thumbs is kind of it would never happen again, you
know, so that seems like very unlikely to him. But you know,
I personally think it's it just seems like evolution goes in that direction because it
works. But then again, there are so many variables and that's that's what
you do here. A lot is you know, humanoid type figures, and
you know, I mean there are all types of concepts of course, as
you know, you know, the time travel one and all that, and
the hybrid. You know, people are suggesting that or as I've brought up
on the show before, I was told by someone that was in Vietnam studying
UFOs for the Air Force told me in the nineteen nineties that he thought the
government thought we were a Petri dish, which I that the aliens are using
us like a Petrit dish, you know, that was what he The conclusion
at that time, in the sixties late sixties, that he was told by
someone in the government at that time, according to him. You know,
I'm not saying these are all factual, because I don't really know. But
still it is interesting how they always seemed to be very much humanoid, you
know, and these encounters you don't often hear of any other type of strange
being. You do hear the variation, and I didn't. One of your
accounts say that they thought they had springs on their feet so they could travel
fast for something like that, which I think is pretty well. There were
lots of in the nineteenth century, many mediums during the spiritualist movement said that
they could travel into space using the power of their minds, basically what we
would call remote viewing today. And they said that they had had encounters or
at least observed beings on other planets who used springs on their feet. But
those were not the typical stories. What I do in this book is in
fact it's a book series, and I was rather hoping it would be only
three, but I have a feeling it's going to be four or more.
But I'm going back to the origins of the belief in in alien visitors,
going back to the origins of euphology itself and finding out when we started believing
that the planet Earth could be visited from by creatures or beings from other planets,
and I show how this has evolved from very ancient times down towards well
in medieval. In the medieval period, it was established that the plurality of
world's hypothesis, the idea that there could be more than one planet like ours
with intelligent life on it, was established officially by the Catholic Church in the
year twelve seventy seven, and starting from that point onwards, it did open
up a kind of a gateway into new possibilities. Then, from the beginning
of the nineteenth century, what we find is people started speculating very seriously that
pieces of other civilizations, and that's why the books called alien artifacts could reach
the planet Earth. So by eighteen twenty three, for example, a writer,
a French writer called Francois Chabrier, reached the conclusion that the asteroid belt
had what was composed of pieces of a planet that had been destroyed in the
way that Krypton was destroyed in Superman stories, and that not only pieces of
the planet, but also survivors from that planet had come to Earth, and
that's eighteen twenty three, So in that sense, twenty twenty three is the
two hundredth anniversary of the ancient aliens hypothesis. But of course he also reached
the conclusion that they were humanoid, that they were sufficiently similar to us to
be able to interbreed with us to become our gods. We've all we've always
had this idea that ancient aliens or modern ones should be somewhat humanoid in appearance.
I think it's I think it's because a lot of it's evolved from the
idea that if they were creations of God, then God created us in his
image, and therefore aliens would look to a to a considerable degree like ourselves.
Interesting, I never thought of that angle of it. How through throughout
time you hear of, you know, different accounts, and indigenous of America,
you hear of the Star people, and I do believe that I've heard
that Aborigines had a similar type of thing that they would talk about. And
it's just as far as you know, in all your research that you've done,
do you think these accounts are basically worldwide that people have talked about these
type of things. Yeah, definitely. I've been researching folklore and mythology in
this way for I'm fifty two and i'd say that since I was about fourteen
fifteen, I've been collecting stories, so that's quite a long time. Yeah,
definitely, we're talking about over I mean, I would say every single
country, every culture in the world has come to that conclusion sooner or later
that we've been guided or visited or created by beings from the sky. And
the idea that the Aborigine is in Australia had that theory or had that belief
independently from from African communities and other cultures across the globe is fascinating. I
don't know whether that means that we're talking about a Jungian archetype, that we're
looking always towards the sky for help and for some kind of answer, or
whether you know, something literally did come from the sky at some point.
But it's interesting that you mention Australia and the Aborigine is because in my book
in Alien Artifacts, I have a whole chapter about Australia because there was a
point in the nineteenth century where people reach the conclusion that Australian aborigine is and
the whole continent itself could have come from outer space. There was a theory
from the eighteen seventies onwards that maybe Australia had been an asteroid that had fallen
down from the sky into the Pacific Ocean, and that would explain why the
flora and fauna of that continent are so different from what you would find anywhere
else. And we're talking about a theory from one hundred and fifty years ago.
So we can see that this obsession with finding with looking for signs of
extraterrestrial contact has been with us for centuries and centuries. It's just that we've
collectively forgotten about it. Most people think that these theories and ideas originated in
the twentieth century, but the further you look back, the more you find
there was this. There's an old English story about the green Children of Woolpit,
which is about I think it's a twelve or eleventh century story about these
green skin children who appear from nowhere. And there are some modern twentieth century
books which Jack say Berzier, for example, mentions that maybe they came from
another planet, which seems like an amazing twentieth century idea looking at the ancient
past through sort of space age glasses. But in reality, if you go
back to the sixteenth and seventeenth century, people already reached that conclusion. Six
hundred years ago, people speculated that maybe these green skin children had come from
another planet. So, I mean, we haven't reinvented we haven't invented the
wheel where we're just constantly reinventing it, right, you know, if it's
possible there the society out there is say a million years more advanced than us,
then you know, one of the discussions I've had with astronomers and people
of science, you know, they I'm sure you've heard this also many times
is that you know, they basically can't get there from here in any reasonable
amount of time. And you know, I bring up, well, perhaps
there's some something in physics we haven't figured out yet that they have, you
know, And so but I think when the most recent person I had on
as I mentioned, was Adam Frank a few weeks ago, and you know,
he's you know, basically agreeing that it's a possibility they figured out how
to manipulate time space time, you know, for travel but it doesn't matter
if it was ancient in our times. These societies could be advanced, you
know, a million years ago. So as far as you know, what
is the earliest account of, you know, someone claiming that we have been
visited? Well, we have to distinguish between UFO reports and mythology or religious
interpretations of strange phenomena in the sky and actual claims that UFOs have been seen
or aliens have come here. So if we think about UFO reports, there
are some Sumerian tablets which are interesting. They talk about omens. They mention
dark meteorites, for example, or meteors, which are very difficult to explain
because meteors are never dark. When you see one, that's always going to
be bright. So this kind of thing they do mention these Sumerian tablets,
I mean, we're talking about five thousand years ago, very unusual phenomena in
the sky which were interpreted as omens. If that's classifiable as UFOs, I
don't know. In each too. There are very very few references to UFOs
in ancient Egypt, very few in ancient Greece, but the ones that you
do find are certainly interesting and talk about lights behaving weirdly. Then, when
we talk about, of course mythology and the idea that we are visited by
people from the Moon or from the planets, I mean we don't know how
far they go back, because our ancestors didn't leave a written record in most
cases, but we can at least push that back about four or five thousand
years. Then, I mean, the story is about invasions from the Moon
by moon people. We can even find a tenth century story about that,
about how the Japanese emperor decided to fight a team of people from from space
and lost because they of course had advanced technology. I've put that in the
book Alien Artifacts too. But then you get to the beginning of the nineteenth
century, eighteen twenty three, as I said, the idea that our ancestors
could have come from another planet, so that could be included as a kind
of UFO or alien contact. Then in eighteen fifty seven there was a book
published called The Magic Monitor, which talks about a small village in Ohio called
j which no longer exists, where the neighbors came out of their houses one
day and saw a kind of weird ship sailing across the sky, crewed by
giant people who are obviously not from this Earth. And the writer in this
case, a man called Monette, it's all in ancient alien alien artifacts to
so it's all in my book. He says that clearly they were a crew
of interplanetary explorers here on Earth, maybe looking to some kind of commercial opportunity
or to do scientific, scientific exploration. So that was night. That was
eighteen fifty seven. And in fact, I went to Ohio about eight years
ago to look for that little village and I found it, and I've got
some very nice pictures from that period. So there are lots of stories like
that. Another thing that I mentioned in my book is how from eighteen forty
seven onwards there are a lot of reports of weird objects falling from the sky.
Some of them obviously are hoaxes, but many of them were meteorites covered
in hieroglyphics, meteorites containing weird objects. There's even the tale of a giant
meteorite that contained a Martian mummy inside. Even when we even when these are
hoaxes from that period, they're very valuable because they show us that people were
ready to accept the possibility that we were being visited by by extraterrestrials. Wow,
that's interesting. Yeah, I read a little bit about that, whatever
it was, the hoax with the hieroglyphics, that was very interesting. So,
you know, when you think about the modern UFO era nineteen forty seven
forward and then it's spotty before that, but there's pretty consistent reports, but
nothing like after nineteen forty seven. And I remember Stanton Freeman used to always
say it was he kind of thought that the contributing factor to that was that,
in his words, the kids found the matches. In other words,
we found you know, nuclear weapons, nuclear power, all that. But
what is what is your thoughts as far as you know why everything increased starting
in that that era nineteen forty seven and not so much before. Well,
firstly, it wouldn't be really true to say that there haven't been periods of
UFO waves and UFO flaps before nineteen forty seven, because there were mysterious balloon
sightings in the eighteen eighties. You have the eighteen ninety six to ninety seven
airship wave, in which you have literally one hundreds, if not thousands of
sightings in a very very short period of time, many of which didn't look
like a wooden boat with masts and sails, which is something that many modern
writers believe that the airship wave consisted of. There were just lights in the
same way that they are today, and that really took off at that in
that period. Then when you get to I mean, then there were several
decades of intense UFO activity in that sense. Then when you get to nineteen
forty six, October nineteen forty six, that for me really marks the beginning
of the UFO phenomenon, even though there was a gap between that case and
Kenneth Arnold's sighting on the twenty fourth of June nineteen forty seven. In October
nineteen forty six, people in San Diego. In San Diego saw a bullet
shaped object flying in the sky, and this caused such a stir, such
an uproar that newpaper headlines were full of things like alien spaceship scene flying over
San Diego, extraterrestrial seen in our skies. And that was just a few
months before Kenneth Arnold. And the point is that at that time people were
more than ready to accept the possibility of alien visits. Then what happened after
June the twenty fourth is that people originally didn't associate flying saucers with alien spaceships.
That was just one theory at that time, and if you look at
the reports, a lot of them have absolutely nothing to do with modern UFOs,
many of them because of the word saucer. Many of them were just
very small, like sort of coaster or literally saucer shaped and saucer sized sized
objects. Many of the sightings that began the nineteen forty seven wave just not
related to UFOs at all, and many of them were hoaxes too. But
what this did was to elevate the status of UFO sightings and possible alien visits
to a sort of celebrity status. It encouraged people to go out and look
up in the sky and report what they'd seen, because for decades nobody did
that. If you saw a strange thing in the sky, people would not
have believed you. Scientists wouldn't have reported it some of the time because that
was highly ridiculed. It would have been ridiculed in academic circles. Most normal
people didn't report it. That was also a time when the belief in the
supernatural was quite was quite powerful, So if you saw a weird thing in
the sky, maybe it meant that your uncle, or your grandfather or your
mother was going to die. That's the kind of superstition that existed at the
time. It was called token phenomena, And there are hundreds and hundreds of
sightings that never went reported formally because they were considered supernatural. Then what happened
was when it became socially acceptable to say that you'd seen a flying saucer,
everyone went out and reported the weird lights that they saw. This is exactly
the same thing as what happened in the airship wave of nineteen ninety eighteen ninety
seven. When it became socially acceptable to say that you'd seen a weird object
in the sky, then you had more reports of them because nobody feared being
ridiculed or mocked. So that's the first explanation really of why it became so
important. But it's not true that there weren't UFO reports from before that.
It's simply that until recently, relatively recently, through research groups like my own
called Magonia Exchange, which anyone, if anyone's listening, they can join freely.
It's a group in which about one hundred of US exchange cases that we
find from the historical records, we've shown that the history of UFO sightings is
much longer, much more interesting than what, for example, Stanton Friedman would
have known at the time. So I was not familiar with the fact that
those what did they call them, the ships, the ghost ships or whatever
they call them in the airship Wave. I do remember thinking, well,
that's odd that it was a ship with a mask. But you're saying that
that was because I read something a clip or something somewhere that someone wrote in
a newspaper that it was like a wooden ship, you know, with mass
and everything. But that was just confabulated from their stories. Is that,
well, you know these guys these days, you're going to find flying saucer
and UFO stories, particularly from the nineteen forties onwards, about weird discs with
antenna and all kinds of things that people made up. And those are the
ones that those are the stories that got the most attention because they were so
silly or so eccentric or so whatever, very extravagant. During the air Shipwave,
the same thing happened. The stories that got the most attention were the
ones that seemed the most impossible. So again through the nineteen seventies, eighties,
and nineties, anyone writing about the air ship waves would have reached the
conclusion that most of them were that they looked like wooden ships with masts and
oars and whatever, and that has nothing to do with UFOs. But nowadays,
I mean, I bought a book around the nineteen ninety eight I think
it was about the air ship wave, and it included about two hundred and
fifty cases, which seemed impressive at the time. But right now I've got
nine five hundred cuttings from just from the eighteen ninety six and eighteen ninety seven.
So now that we have a lot more information, I can tell you
that the air ship waves were a lot more interesting. That's going to be
volume three of my Alien Artifact series. Volume two is going to come out
in a month or so, and then it's going to be volume three.
Now, when you mentioned earlier the San Diego bullet shaped type of craft or
whatever it was, that kind of reminded me of Also the ghost rock rocket
flap in Sweden during nineteen forty six. Was it a similar type of an
account? Not really, no, because the ghost rockets were basically sort of
rocket type things, and they were confused also with meteors, and they were
fast moving. The reason that they were called rockets was because they were pretty
fast moving and they just seemed to be some kind of wartime technology. But
the object that was floating allegedly above San Diego was just motionless in the sky.
Then it became even more interesting as a story because a medium called Mark
Probert entered into communication allegedly with the crew aboard the weird thing, and they
said, yeah, it's a spaceship and we'd like to meet with your leaders
and this kind of stuff. I mean, it's a more complicated story,
but the fact is that it appeared in headlines across the United States in October
nineteen forty six. So I just think that that should have started the UFO
wave, or there'd been many previous triggers. I mean, if you go
back to I believe it was nineteen twenty six or twenty four, there was
a farmer who said that he'd found the skull of an alien whose ship had
obviously exploded above the atmosphere, and he got together a group of neighbors so
they could find the rest of the alien body and the remains of the ship,
and there was so much of this going on throughout the nineteen tens,
twenties, thirties, but it was just forgotten about during the war period,
World War Two, and it seemed like something totally new when nineteen forty seven's
sightings came around. I'm sharing your I should be sharing there is this is
your the website you mentioned Magagonia Exchange where you can join for free. I
will have that linked in the show notes and also in the text for the
show. I've seen this one before, the Battle in the Sky? I
can't remember. Was it Germany? Was there about the picture on the crest
of it that you have here on the top of the website. What was
that battle when all these people saw the Battle in the sky And I remember
correct how that was. If I remember correctly, that was Nuremberg, I'd
have to look that up that I have several of those, but yeah,
there were so many of those. The problem really is that the Internet is
the main source where people get their information about what happened before nineteen forty seven.
But obviously there aren't too many pictures from that period. I mean,
photography didn't really exist before eighteen forty. Not everybody I mean newspapers didn't didn't
publish photos, drawings, or sketches of most of the things that they reported.
And we live today in a very visual culture. I mean, people
are very interested in sort of graphic representations of things. So what that means
is that to sell the idea that aliens visited us in the past, you
have to present like cave paintings, religious paintings, and so on. But
that means that people are missing out on all of the fascinating stories and texts
about cases that happened, you know, before that period. So what I'm
trying to do in all my books now is to is to add a lot
of pictures, drawing, some of which I'm using artificial intelligence to create,
but to represent what our ancestors saw in the sky, because there just isn't
enough visual stimulus for a lot of people to get excited about. One thing
that I do mention in my book on sources, This is called Sources,
but this is the Spanish version. I don't know where my English version is
left it somewhere, but what I do here in one of the last chapters,
I talk about how we've got to be very careful with cave paintings,
religious paintings, sculptures, Mayan sculptures, Aztec sculptures of flying sources, which
is something that is very popular these days on the internet. But in fact,
most of it's just fake. Most of it's just not true. I
think one hundred percent of it isn't true, to be honest with you,
and it's unfortunate, but it's just that people just want to invent this glorious
visual past. And these days nobody reads books as much as they used to,
and a lot of the information you're not going to get without reading proper
texts. So anyway, what I try to do. All of the books
that I published these days are just totally full of graphic representations of what happened,
and I tried to make it as entertaining as possible anyway for modern readers,
because young young people today, without wanting to offend anybody, they just
don't read as much as as we did thirty years ago, unfortunately. So
that's right, you know, there's a there's along those lines. I know
that when I was first looking into this topic, I read something somewhere well
Alexander the Great how to UFO Sighting, and then I go, oh,
so when I started to research that, I realized that that only that was
in a novel in nineteen fifty two, and it goes no further back,
so you know what I mean. So that that's it doesn't necessarily have to
mean that it's a contemporary hoax or whatever it is, or fable of some
kind. These things just get carried on from whenever they're created. So how
do you find your You know, you talk a lot about text and that
that's really interesting. You dive right in deep for reading in text. But
do you actually go to like libraries as well, or you know, you
mentioned those nine thousand clip clippings or whatever. Is that all through like microfiche
searchers it all online that you do? Well? Yeah, I used to
depend on visits to libraries, which is something that I did when I was
in the States for the first time in nineteen ninety when I was eighteen.
I used to spend most of my time playing truant from school and just going
to the university library with a pen and notepad and whatever, or taking photocopies.
These days, everything's changed, and this is the wonderful thing, and
this is why we can expect a massive revolution in eupology over the next few
years, because you can access literally billions of articles, but I mean hundreds
of millions of pages of newspaper text online. Some of them you have to
pay for, some of them are completely free. So for example, I
use newspapers dot com, which has again literally billions of articles going back to
the eighteenth center I think in English. And another one is newspaper archive dot
com. It's equally massive. Then there are many which are completely free,
and you can do word search is just as you do in Google, but
within these these massive libraries of information, so you don't need to physically go
to a library anymore. Even so, I do sometimes have to buy books,
So just last week I ordered a book from a bookshop in the States,
which has cost me one hundred and forty dollars. I believe, I'm
hoping it's going to arrive very soon and it's going to be another important part
of the of the puzzle. So the information can come from anywhere, anywhere.
Anyone who wants to join Magonia Exchange can very easily find new cases to
share, and we can tell you where to go, and you don't need
to spend any money honestly, a lot of these, A lot of the
major libraries these days have digitalized all of their books, and Google Books is
a fantastic place too to find historical cases. And it's only when you have
literally thousands and thousands and thousands of cases that you can start seeing patterns in
the data. Magonia Exchange has a round between forty and fifty thousand cuttings altogether
in the archives. And I mean, when I did this Wonders in the
Sky with Jacques Valet, then I have this edition here, which is this
massive hardback edition because we needed to re edit it because that particular book had
mistakes in it, had problems with it. But of course it did.
Shortly after publishing it, there was this massive digital explosion and we had access
to better sources. But the point is that this catalog here is based on
sifting through hundreds and thousands of historical reports. So it's something that I'll continue
doing in the future. Jacques Valet wants me to continue writing with him and
do a sequel to Wonders in the Sky over the next year. Let's see
if we have time to do it. Yeah, I mean, it sounds
like it takes a lot of time to do what you're doing here. It's
not something you can I mean when you say a year, it seems like
that research would take like ten years together or something like that. In that
particular book, how long would you say that you did research for it?
Well, this particular version of the book was probably based on the first version,
which it was about fifteen years maybe, but this one here was like
three or four years later and full of corrections and things. But for example,
this book here, I started around nineteen ninety eight, but I mean
it is going to be several volumes. Fortunately, these days, with artificial
intelligence, you can organize information, look for patterns in the data, and
do wonderful things that we couldn't even do twelve months ago. So I'm looking
forward to spending Christmas getting up to date on AI and putting it to good
use to organize this data. So basically, what I'm saying is that what
would have taken me fifteen or twenty years several years ago these days would probably
take about six months or less. But it's not it's not the not the
data that's the problem. It's knowing how it all fits in together. Because
most ufologists don't really have an idea about the chronology the timeline of all of
this. When I speak to UFO enthusiasts, they say, yeah, what
whatever happened today? Then they go back to Kenneth Arnold, then they'll jump
back to the airship wave, and then they go back to ancient to ancient
Egypt, and they have no idea what happened in the intervening time, which
is why I'm writing this book series. So it isn't it isn't the amount
of time this is going to take to organize. Now, it's more the
the that you need a sort of historical framework in your mind in which to
fit the pieces. Yeah, that's I love the work you're doing. It's
just it's just great. Going back to this book we have about uh wait
a minute, it's not showing here. Hmm, okay, it says it's
up. But the book we hit there goes uh Saucers tracing the origins of
the disc shape UFO. So that book there we have about let's see,
we have about seven or eight minutes left here, so I and I thought
we could talk a little bit about this book in particular, which you also
released a last September. I'm very interested in that. The Ufo sighting I
had was I guess you'd call it a disc or saucer shaped. But there
are early accounts. Obviously, there's you know, carvings, you see an
ancient you know, ancient carvings that show like a disc shaped type of thing.
Whether you know, I mean, whether they were depicting what they saw
in the sky or not, I don't know. But what are some of
the early accounts of people seeing you know, saucer shaped at Okay, So
in this book, I've dedicated four chapters to historical accounts. So I have
two which are not source of shaped, and then I have two which are
circular sources ring shaped and so on. Well, you can go back to
the eighteenth century. You can find stories of people who saw objects like a
grindstone which is around like a thick wheel in the sky. There are cases
in which people compared the phenomena that they saw with coins. For example,
there's a very nice case from the seventeenth century of an object that they compared
with a hat but around sort of disc shaped hat. And there's actually a
picture of it too, which I've put in the book. And yeah,
I mean there are but the point that I make in this book, however,
is that we shouldn't be too fixated on disc shapes. It doesn't mean
they don't exist, but it means that we have to be more aware that
UFOs can take on a lot of different shapes. In fact, if you
look at the databases, the biggest databases that have ever been made about UFO
sightings, normally discs are about two percent. That means ninety eight percent of
UFOs and not disc shaped at all. If you look back before nineteen forty
seven, you find that I calculated it as zero point zero zero two percent
of all UFOs were disc shaped and all the rest were other shapes. And
if you look at modern UFO databases and catalogs, the discs have practically disappeared
completely, which is why you don't find YouTube videos of discs. Normally,
you don't find good photographs of discs. Generally speaking, none of the videos
that you see that the military releases show anything resembling a disc shape. And
this is just a reality that we have to accept. So that's an important
point that I make. Why why do we consider disc shaped objects represent the
UFO phenomenon If such a tiny percentage of cases actually involve discs. I mean,
the fact is, I've had to put a saucer on this book,
and it's a kind of signal to everybody this is about alien spaceships or something
like that, because everyone knows what this is. But in reality, this,
as I said, ninety eight percent of UFOs don't look like this.
In fact, I know the introduction to your program has a disc shaped to
UFOs. I know that it's it's the most common picture that we find on
t shirts and postcards and posters and Fox Mulder's poster behind him. I want
to believe it's all about disc shaped UFOs, but then the number of cases
show that it's it's a very, very very small fraction of the total number
of UFO sighting. So I explore that in this book for the first time.
No one's ever ever done that, and it's had different reactions. Some
people have been really annoyed, that's that can't be true, that's not true,
and whatever, But it just is, this is the way it is,
and some people just accept it and they say, well, obviously something
with something's going on that we didn't realize. And I don't know, it's
just I think that we've been fixating on the wrong shape. It doesn't mean
what you saw was not a disc shaped UFO. It just means that you
are probably very lucky you should buy a lottery ticket because you should have on
that day, particularly because it's such a tiny fraction of cases. So also,
what that book does is that it explores the life of Kenneth Arnold.
It talks about his other UFO sightings that people never mention. I was discussing
all of this with Kim Arnold, his daughter while I was researching for it,
also with Chanel, his granddaughter. Very nice people, and yeah,
I go into areas that have never been explored before. For example, I
talk about the origin of the expression flying saucer, which most dictionaries will tell
you was invented in nineteen forty seven. But what I've done is I've shown
that it comes from around eighteen eighty eighteen eighty one, and the Oxford English
Dictionary has contacted me to tell me that they're going to use my findings to
update the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary using this book because I've managed
to push it back about sixty years. It's actually very interesting because you can
find the US military using the term flying saucer during its operations in the mid
nineteen forties in a different context, but the point is that they were using
the expression flying saucer. So when Kenneth Arnold said that he'd seen nine weird
objects in the sky, and everyone called them flying sauces, it was a
term that was extremely popular at the time. Hundreds of thousands of people who
picked up the newspaper and read that a guy in Idaho had seen flying saucers,
they already knew the term. It was a common expression. And that's
something that we've forgotten about. Very very interesting, I know it would be.
So if you had to go through I don't know if you've ever done
this type of concept, but if you go through time, what would you
say, is the most common shape? All the spheres? Very very common.
Sphere is the most common shape. I would say anything anything like bubbles
and spheres. I did a study with a British scientist meteorologist uthologists called Martin
Schoff, and we published a book called Return to Magonia, which is this
one here through published through Anomalist and together we did a we made a catalog
of cases which we called solar bubbles, because there's this interesting path of UFO
sightings that seem to be about luminous bubble like phenomena. I mean what it
means, I don't know. We just tell people what we find, you
know, So there was a lot of that. I mean, I think
that the main thing is that anyone interested, I mean seriously interested in UFOs
and they want to know where all of this has come from, they really
need to pick up a book about UFO history. And unfortunately, the only
one that I can recommend to them is my own, simply because I'm the
first person to put all this together. I really wish that there were more
books around. You just can't trust most of them. The thing is,
a lot of authors make a living from this and I don't, which means
that I'm freer to just report what I find. And a lot of writers
just tried to prolong the mystery, you know, for monetary gain. So
you just need to know what books to look for. Well, I really
do appreciate your work, and thank you so much. And we're out of
time, so I really appreciate it, and you take care and I will
link the website and your books and all that in the show. Notes and
everything. Thank you, it's being a pleasure. Yeah, all right,
okay everyone, So we'll be back next week on the twenty six