Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Martin willis your host, and
we have a great show for you this evening. We have, first of
all, Alejandro Rojas is going to be joining us for some UFO updates.
Then we have Stephen Bassett and he's going to be talking about something he is
up to in Washington, d C. And we'll be we'll be talking all
about that. I have I have a special connection with Steve Bassett because,
um, you know, as you know for long time listeners, I have
three hundred seven an some odd shows up and Stephen Bassett was show number one.
I reached out to a number of people when I wanted to start this
podcast, and no one paid attention to me, and Steven said, sure,
I'll be on your show, no problem. So I always I always
have it, Like I said, a special place in my heart for Steve
Bassett and he's welcome on my show anytime, and he'll be coming up right
right after the news. We do have a blog as usual over at podcast
UFO dot com. I'll tell you that in just a second, but you
can also go over there if you would like to support the show, and
you know, do check out the weekly blogs. That we have posted there
by Charles Lear. He does a great job. And this one was one
I had actually never heard of before. It's called the zen Fredick Ufo case
in Italy, and so it's really interesting. And check that out, and
I think that might be it. I want to thank Peggy that helps me.
Over at the Facebook page, check that out. We have new stories
up there every single day, not always on the weekend, but sometimes,
and so check that out over there. I guess that's enough for me.
I'll hundre, how are you? I'm doing well. I am actually have
my good mic set up, so I'm not doing you know, just the
laptop camera and the Apple ear sets anymore. So hopefully yes, the sound
and video is better for you all. Yeah, and you are? Are
you in our new location? I am Yeah. That's all you're gonna say
about that. That's all I gotta say about It's west of um here in
Maine. That's that's all we'll say. In an undisclosed location. Undisclosed location,
you can see that from the background of time obviously got to be a
spacecraft of some sort. I think it is. Yeah, we'll start that
conspiracy. So, I mean, I'm supposed to be here to talk about
UFO news, right, Yeah, but I don't really have much. You
know. What's kind of funny is most of the news out there is about
what we've talked about the last few weeks, the Army's project with to the
Stars and then also the Navy talk confirming that those videos where we're real something
I feel they already told us really back in December twenty seventeen with New York
Times, but that's still making some headlines. So those are the big headlines
kind of out there, which is interesting that, you know, even right
now, if you google UFO news, that's mostly what you're gonna find.
One cool peace though, is that Army Times dot Com also did an article
on this, so that's pretty interesting too. So yeah, just to catch
people up, I'm sure people have already heard, you know, to the
start, it's going to work with the Army of all of all people with
that, you know, examining some of these uh, what are being labeled
meta materials, there's probably a better term I think that people could use.
Really, they're kind of maybe UAP material might be accurate because they're material that
you know, allegedly comes from unidentified aerial phenomena. So doesn't that seem right?
UAP material seems like it would be better than meta material, which is
so vague a term. Well, yeah, I think now was this what
is considered arts parts? Is that do we know the origin of these these
materials? We don't know the origins of all the materials. You know,
who did a great Richard Dolan did an analysis of what materials they probably are
at the International UFO Congress. So you could get that DVD at Ufocongress dot
com and it'll be posted on the videos on demand soon. But yeah,
Richard Doling did a great talk on that. But yeah, arts Parts is
one of those pieces, but just one of many, or of several supposedly,
and we don't know the origins of all of them. So hopefully we'll
find that out in time and that will be really interesting. You know,
some people are a little concerned if you're partnering up with the army, you
know, could it be potentially that we won't be getting information? And from
what I understand that, you know, the intentions are to get the information
out to people as soon as they can, but the Army does have if
they're participating in the project, then they have say as to win that will
come out, and that's got some people concerned, no doubt, But well,
I think it's you know, it's a two way street with them,
because when I read through the agreement, you know, it basically said that
both sides have to get to give a conceits a written permission to share anything
and within thirty days of sharing, so both sides have to agree, right,
right, So, which is going to be the nature of these sort
of things even if it wasn't the army and if it was another organization,
Let's say, you know, it was Ball Aerospace or somebody like that,
or or you know, Lockheed or something and probably be similar. So so
I think that's something to consider. And I think, you know, what
I would say is it's interesting to watch all of this because what we're seeing
is kind of the mainstreaming of the topic. You know, if which is
extraordinary to be able to see this, I feel, you know, having
been in this, and I don't know how you feel, but you know,
we're seeing what would happen when main stream institutions start to kind of tackle
this issue and how would they do it? And you know, many of
us have been discussing these sort of things for a while, what would happen,
how would this work? And some of those people that have already been
in this space, such as people who are scientists or people who are in
the government, people like John Alexander, let's say, and Nick Pope,
who have experience with some of this sort of thing having worked in the government
and paranormal studies. So I think that's essentially what we're seeing is how the
mainstream handles it. And it's kind of interesting that so far, first we've
seen the military becoming so open about all of this and willing to participate.
And you know, I think some might feel it's them getting in front of
things, which I think is always wise of any organization. You know,
when you foresee that you're going to be challenged with questions or information, it's
best to be proactive and to get involved so that you can you know,
be seen in a positive, proactive light. And so we've seen that from
the Navy and from now the Army. As far as results and how will
that work, we'll have to see will it become another kind of Project blue
Book where which had major pr problems. You know, at the beginning,
they were pretty open and it was a very positive sort of project. And
what happened both the first conclusion they came to was it could be aliens.
You know, leadership didn't like that, and things then turned did a total
one eighty and they debunked, and for the next couple of years they got
to be seen as a waste of time. As you know, if you
have a sighting, don't go to Project blue Book. And Rupel, who
started Project blue Book even said, you know, he talked to scientists and
that was their sentiment that you're just going to debunk. You don't really have
an interest in this topic, because they so wanted to debunk everything after that
first Project signed report. And so that was a challenge of Rupelt's to try
to reboot then and to create a public, you know, facing organization with
credibility. But that was difficult to do. When he talked about nineteen fifty
two and Washington, DC and you know, UFOs flying over and Bluebook even
able to essentially take over the control tower during one of these incidents. What
happened, well, the Army sent out you know, General Stamford who gave
us an answer, a prosaic answer that it was just weather and versions and
radars, but that was BS as Rupelt says, they didn't even check with
us as to what our investigation was because we had already ruled that out.
They weren't interested in, you know, the actual facts of the investigation.
They were just interested in telling the public something. Now. In that same
press conference, so you know, General Sanford said that they do receive incredible
sightings from from you know, incredible resources forget how he said it, but
essentially very credible people. So I think that's something to look at going forward.
How is the Army going to handle it now? I don't believe that
to the Stars personally, from my conversations with people and to the Stars,
that they would want to be a Heinich, you know, want to be
someone to explain away cases for the Army. I think they're genuinely interested,
and certainly we've heard from Tom that he's very convinced that, you know,
some of these things come from elsewhere. So we'll see what happens. I
think it's going to be a tricky relationship between the Army and to the Stars,
and it'll be a tricky relationship between the public and both of those entities.
As well as they kind of figure out, you know, how to
maneuver around all of this, so it ought to be interesting. And then
yeah, yeah, we haven't really heard from the sign sientific community very much.
We've heard from some of the talking heads, Neil de grass Tyson,
Michio Kaku, Bill Knight, the science guy, says shaw Stack, and
of course you had him on the show the most recent interview and the latter
being more skeptical, whereas Neil de Grasse Tyson and especially mitchio Kaku being much
more positive about the whole idea of investigating all of this stuff. So I
think that's interesting too. That just shows that at least the talking heads for
science out there are on the fence still but considering it, which is a
lot more than what we've seen in the past where they really haven't considered it
anymore. And I think that they're going to have more and more pressure,
just like the pressure you put on shaw Stack. He's got to confront this
issue in a more educated manner than he has, and you pointed that out,
and I think Bill Knight is going to have to do the same because
they will face challenges and thus far, in my humble opinion. Bill Knight
and Shostak have not demonstrated that they're educated on the issue, and their conclusions
have been based off of the poorer and small amounts of information they have,
and they seem to kind of angry about it. Well, anyway they do,
they're forced into the position. I think Shostak for years has tried to
avoid it because of course they had a real struggle. They were into the
stars position, you know, twenty thirty years ago, when they were fighting
for legitimacy, when people thought what SETI was doing with silly looking for aliens.
Things have changed so much for them, and now you know, even
NASA arguably is largely a SETI organization, you know, looking for extraterrestrial life
out there, maybe not intelligence yet, but they're looking for microbes and to
such and that's a major part of their program. So things have changed quite
a bit. And how did they change for SETI? SETI had to be
hyper sensitive about being seen as scientific, so you can see how they would
be a little more skittish to attaching themselves to something that may seem more fringe,
and so they're being careful about it, but they can't ignore it,
and they can't be I think careful to the point where they are being,
um, you know, obviously unscientific about things, and really, in my
humble opinion, I think Seth should educate himself on the matter, which he
probably doesn't want to be forced into doing. But at some point he's going
to have to give some more educated answers, I think, and that'll be
fun to see them challenged and to see this all evolve. That's right.
Well, thank you. We went a little bit over time and I gotta
get thanks. Sorry step In here, Thanks so much, Ella, and
I'll talk to you next week. Thank you. All right, I have
a good one. All right, everyone. My next My next guest Paradigm
Research Group is Stephen Bassett. And Stephen welcome to the show. Yeah,
Martin, I heard the intro you had with Alejandro and your viewers should know
that he's in witness protection Okay, good to know that's where he is.
He's in witness protection program, has been for some time. Welcome to the
show. And you know I have said I'd say that on the show almost
every week now because I actually can see through analytics and things like that,
I have new people listening to the show all the time, someone may not
know who you are quickly in the nutshell. Can you go over that and
let's tell us what you're up to. Something new. So let's first of
all, just introduce yourself to the new listener, if you would. Yeah.
I'm the executive director of Paradigm Research Group, which is formed in ninety
six to pursue the political resolution, not the scientific revolution resolution, but the
political resolution of the ex addressial issue. I did this because I'd come to
conclude that the problem was not science. Even by ninety six, there was
more than enough science to prove the extratrastial president. So what was the problem.
Well, the problem was there was a political decision part of the government
going all the way back to late forties, early nineteen fifties, that this
issue would be suppressed, embargoed, as I like to call it. I
denied, undermined misinformation, disinformation for national security reasons. It's a legal national
security policy. So essentially, the most profound information probably in the history of
the human race was embargoed by our government and its allies, and it had
a lot of allies back in nineteen nineteen fifties. Some of the more authoritarian
countries like Soviet Union, Communist China went the same way, perhaps for a
different reasons. So what do you do Pile science on top of science on
top of the science, and have the government go, we don't know what
you're talking about. That's not how I roll. So I got involved in
the politics to this and have been a political activists lobby and I'm going to
continue to do that and until we get the announcement, we get the formal
confirmation from the government. Now, when you had your your big huge event
there that kind of pushed things forward, you're still getting ripples from that.
I mean, things still happening from that. And that was what four years
ago, now three years ago. Now you had to actually been a lot
this happen. Twenty and thirteen was a citizen hearing on disclosure, and then
as the plan follow up to that, I went to Wars, came back
to Washington two thousand and fourteen, just November delivered We delivered a full thirty
hour set of DVDs to every member of Congress just let them know that that
had happened. And I began to develop a story for the political campaign of
two thousand and Sixteeneen sixteen, which happened to involve a woman by the name
of Senator Hillary Clinton, who was the leading candidate and the leading the likely
person to be president, and worked that story into the mainstream media until it
caught fire and generating four hundred plus articles about the connection between her John Podesta,
and her husband to the et issue, going all the way back to
the early nineteen nineties. Our mid nineteen nine. Yeah, early nineteen nine.
But the nature of media right now still that they'll only go so far.
So all four hundred articles were written. The debate moderators refused to touch
the issue, and she was able to avoid having to confront it more than
she had. And we had forced them to speak to the issue a number
of times, about eleven or twelve total, and she was going to just
get to the White House. I believe she intended to disclose not shortly shortly
into her first term. Uh and a lot of other people did as well.
But that didn't happen, So things changed. I went to Europe for
most of two thousand and seventeen, came back early twenty and eighteen. I
went and was basing. But then in June of this year, I became
aware that the two to the Stars Academy, which I've been following very closely
and supporting from the day it was launched. UH, members of Congress that
a pilot briefing of the President had taken place, and I knew at that
point I had to get back to Washington, d C. Wasn't going to
be easy either, so I set about trying to raise some money and make
the necessary arrangements would allow me to get back here and not just getting back
to stay, which I intend to do until disclosure come, but also to
get an office. And the office one it was in the National Press Building.
It's not easy to get in there, and I spent some time I
was working it and an opportunity came about and I was able to secure an
office. That office is now open, it's done, it's completed, but
it's an office studio. Because the plan is to launch soon a video podcast
I think most uh the National Press Building out of Washington, DC, and
that is about two blocks from the White House. So it would be the
first streaming broadcast of any kind formerly coming out of Washington, DC on all
matters extra political. So that's that is the plan. And UH, it's
bold, it's not as bold as what the TTSA is doing. I mean,
they're they're they're way out in front. They got they got a h
a battle cruiser out there. But it has possibilities. My my primary goal
is to use the special location of the podcast to use the fact that a
member of the club, which is housed in net in the penthales of that
building, to meet, greet and convince some mainstream people to to to speak
about this issue an interview and highly intelligent safe space that would have never done
that before. It's not doing live stuff when on this issue for somebody,
it's got a high level position in the politics or journalism or academic concern so,
but this will be a TAPS product podcast and the beauty of that is
that if the person is not comfortable with how the interview go and it can't
be fixed, then it just doesn't get aired. I won't put it up.
So I'm not looking to grill people. I'm not looking investigative journalists.
I'm looking to be a conduit or a bridge between the developing mainstream world interests
in this issue and the general public. Because I am I am a political
activist and a populist, and that's Another reason why I got back to DC
is that once I knew that the Two the Stars Academy was in fact lobbying
Congress, which is what they're doing. You don't have to be registered to
do that as long as you're not. Well, maybe it this way,
it's complicated, but the point is they were. They were obviously on the
hill talking to members about their issues and what have you, and that's fine,
but sir to me that those issues were those of the military intelligence complex
from which they came, which is appropriate. The military intellist's complex has an
array of concerns and issues where there's interest with respect to the disclosure process,
predisclosure disclosure event itself in the post disclosure world, so that they would be
wanting to talk to members of Congress about it makes total sense. Of course,
I know where that's going. Eventually, it's going to hearings when the
political hurricane ends here at DC. But that's not me. I don't represent.
I represent only the American people. I try to represent their interests charges
complex interests because that obviously is well represented right now, and I as AUNTIL
recently it was still the only registered lobbyists on the issue, which I did
in order to appeal to the media because they check these things. But the
co host for this coming podcast, which is called The Disclosure Wire, will
be Theresa Tindall, who is the currently state director of move On Maryland,
among other things, and she's going to provide a powerful networking component. She's
also registered as a lobbyist, and now there's two registered federal lobbyists. Finally,
only took twenty three years to get the second one, and it was
the pay. The pay is just so good people are afraid of it.
For everything's gonna make a lot of money, it's going to ruin your life
whatever. So that gives you a sense of what's happened on my world,
starting with the business and hearing hunt disclosure, going through the twenty sixteen election,
a hiatus in Europe where I did go to Moscow and get into an
interview that had never been done before. But nevertheless, finally I've got to
get back to DC, and as crazy as it is in this town right
now, I gotta be oh, well, Steve, let us know we
are actually out of time. We have to go under break and so that'll
be it for us. But can you tell us where we can actually get
to this and is it on your website? Well, if you go to
Paradigm, it isn't up yet. You go to Paradigm Research Group the main
website, there's a link right there to the indie go go funding campaign we
wanted to. We set a goal of ten thousand. We reached that about
two days ago. We're going to keep it up and develop some additional funding.
And the information about the podcast is extensively right there in the iny Gogo
campaign linked from Paradigm resarcroup dot org. Excellent, excellent, Well, thank
you so much, and I wish you great luck with that. I will
be checking it out for sure. All right, you take care, bye
bye. Now, all right, everyone hanging there. We have to go
to a break and we'll be right back right after these messages. All right,
we are back. We have our guests, Jennifer Stein and Peter Robbins.
Both have been on the show. Well, Peter a number of times,
Jennifer three or four times, I think altogether. But welcome to the
show. You too. Thank you, Martin. Yes, and I really
enjoy hanging out with both both of you. I saw Jennifer out in Phoenix
and Peter. You and I've run into each other a number of times over
the years. It's always a lot of fun. And I consider you both
really good people and I'm really glad that you both work together. And if
you look, if you're on YouTube now and you look in the background,
Jennifer, what are those awards behind you? Well, it's my office and
those are some Ebby awards. These guys are kind of fun. I think
I can reach one. Oh can I? Yeah? Just a second,
Oh, this ought to be interesting. These are these funky looking guys,
you know, they're they're the little oh yes characters that Open Minds gives out
Oh yes, and they are a gray alien and it's holding a video camera
and it's got a little reel under its arm. So I've been the lucky
winner of four of their awards, and the others are some film festivals Orlando
and you know, just some other awards in the UFO community. It's nice
to have that this What do you do with them? You stick them in
your office. So well, I think you deserve those awards and you do
a really nice job. You know. One of the things where we are
going to be talking about Forest Stell, but just also other topics as well
for those people that were writing me saying that they don't want to hear about
Forestell, We'll talk about other things as well. But how did you,
Jennifer, how did you get interested in this topic? I know, I
believe I heard you talk one time. You did, I think up in
Maine. That was a long time ago conference. I think that's when I
first met you, Mark, that's right. Yeah, Well, you know,
I had a sighting, a personal sighting. I've had more than one
now in my life, but the first one was when I was nineteen,
and it was a significant sighting, like eighty ninety feet long, five six
feet high, a rectangle of white light, which made no sense to me.
At that point in my life. I wasn't really following the UFO topic.
It was nineteen seventy five and I was nineteen years old, and it
occurred right outside my bedroom window where I lived in near Landsdale, Pennsylvania,
and it kind of stayed in my gray box. I was journaling, and
I had written it down, but I didn't know how to understand it,
and it stayed in my gray box for about almost twenty five years until I
had the luck of encountering someone who was at my house at that time and
had the same experience I had. And once we kind of compared notes,
which we did it independently, I told him, go write your stuff down.
I don't want you messing with my memory. I have my memory,
but I don't know what you saw. And once I looked at his drawings
and diagrams and his story he wrote out, I realized, okay, that
was real. And that was when I was about forty five. So that's
when I kind of just profoundly decided, Okay, you know, either I'm
going to allow this to inform myself. I'm going to start to educate myself.
I'm going to start to go to conferences, read books and whatnot.
And shortly after that, I met Peter Robbins at the Roger move On conference
and that's kind of how I but I don't know if we lost you.
Peter, you there, I am, and you just lose me? Did
you lose me? Yeah, you're froze. I jumped for a second.
Okay, So Ruben Udiarte, who was the state director of mouf On,
encouraged me to start an active mouf On group in Pennsylvania because there wasn't one,
so I did in two thousand and I've been had the pleasure of bringing
in speakers and you know, Martin, by interviewing people and going to conferences
and reading books, you learn a tremendous amount and my life has never been
the same. I never looked back. I've been grateful for the wonderful people
like Peter that I've just come to admire, and they are mentors to me.
Stanton Friedman was a huge mentor to me, and I just continue to
learn and challenge myself. And it's very humbling because this is not an easy
field and not an easy topic to wrap your brain around. Yeah, oh,
I totally agree with that, and I also agree with what you just
said that it's this whole topic has kind of enriched my life. I mean,
it's it's interesting and you meet some wonderful people. I mean, really
enjoying myself, you know, hanging out with some people that we share at
least a curiosity about what's going on. Maybe we'll never find out exactly what
it is, but it's still fun. Your turn, Peter, we want
to find out. I know you actually had and maybe you've told this story
a number of times on the site, but again, we do have a
lot of new people. You had that amazing sighting that you shared with your
sister with those silver disks in New York, right, And indeed, my
sister Helen and I had a very clear daylight sighting as kids in the village
that we grew up in about thirty miles east of Manhattan. It was undeniable.
It was overwhelming to me. It was something I was emotionally and informationally
completely unprepared to deal with at that point in my life. What we observed,
coming in at a high rate of speed and stopping over the neighbor's house
were six silvery white disc shaped objects, essentially ellipses like holding a dinner plate
at an angle in a very precise military v as in Victor type formation,
and they just hung there for an internally long period of time, close enough
that we could see they were obviously metallic, not shiny like stainless steel,
more like you know, non reflective aluminum or something, and that we could
make out regular detailing around the edge of each which, in comparing notes many
years later, we both could only draw on how windows looked on an a
commercial aircraft at an appreciable distance. But I was overwhelmed by it, and
I refused to speak with my sister about it, who never forgot it,
and made myself forget it. It became my repressed memory of childhood, although
I occasionally joke with people that if I have other oppressed memories from childhood,
I don't remember them. But it took more than fourteen years for that memory
to re emerge, and when it did, it did like a freight train
and come through artwork. More partially, it was several contributing factors. I
think, the most important one being that my mind was ready to deal with
this subject. But the triggers were going through a number of drawings that I
had recently been given by my grandmother that she had saved from my childhood at
a time when most relatives adults did not save kids drawings. My theory is
because it was before they invented refrigerator magnets. Be that as it may,
none of the drawings related to the subject, but several of the drawings were
done at about that time in my life. That combined with the fact that
I was lost quite a bit of sleep. It had just been the Chinese
New Year, and I lived in Chinatown and back in those days, the
police looked the other way with fireworks, and you know, you were essentially
in a zone that, for seventy two hours or so smelt like cordite,
and the noise never stopped. And I had taken a human potential workshop fairly
recently before that, which essentially gave me more things to think about. But
it all came together in the course of about fifteen minutes or so, and
it absolutely immobilized me. I was shocked in that I knew how real it
was. I thought I must be going crazy, because how could anybody forget
something so profoundly impacting, certainly the most significant moment of my childhood. I
now understand that the human mind can certainly do an extraordinary job repressing things.
But I waited until I had kind of calmed down, had a cup of
teeth, thought things out before calling my sister, who lived a mile or
so north of me and East Village, mostly as a poet at the time,
and had enough forethought to not tell her what I remembered, because I
knew if I did, she'd either say yes or no, and I wouldn't
know for sure. In my heart, very much the same spirit as Jennifer
having that experiencer right down and do his drawings before they compared notes. And
I chose to set the scene and described the time of year, about how
old we were, where we were standing in front of the house, what
the weather was like, and she cut me off mid sentence, Martin,
and then proceeded to tell me what I had remembered, with one slight variation
the number of craft, which we worked out very quickly the next day,
but more to the point that she said there was more, and then went
on to describe what now sometimes even word for word, is an archetypical series
of fragmented memories that many many people who have had the UFO abductions experience share.
This was not only new to me, but it was not part of
the culture except for Interrupted Journey, the very fine book about Betty and Barney
Hill's experience, which happened ten years before that I know actually had happened the
year that we had had our siding. I was clueless and at the same
time completely shocked by my sister's memories of flying through the air, of walking
through a curved metal hallway, of being on the table. The term gray
who was not in the culture for some years after that. So she described
the beings as best as she could from her twelve year old memory. And
you know, people use the phrase my life change overnight, mind change in
about ten minutes and ultimately served to derail the career that I had long for
aim for was beginning to make a reality, namely being a serious painter in
New York City, because something more important had come up and I resented it
tremendously. I continued to teach painting to paint, but the heart had gone
out of it, and after a number of years I just began to devote
myself full time to UFO studies. Hmm, thank you for all that.
That's uh, that's really fascinating. And I have to tell you. You
know, you've told me this story on my show, which was about,
oh, I don't know how many shows, and it was just a few
shows in when we met. We met fairly early on when I was started
my show. And the reason I'm bringing that up, your your story is
exactly the same, nothing has changed at all, and which is always a
very good sign. I'll work on it, Megan, I had some details
next time. That's good. Yeah, now you'd be normal. So forrest
All. Let's talk about him. What whose brain child was this to to
do this film about him? And I understand a lot of I didn't get
a chance to Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to see it, but I
understand a lot of it as footage of him that was dug up. But
anyway, why don't you get into that a little bit? How that all
came about? Well, I wouldn't say a lot of it, but some
of it. The life and death of James Vincent Forrestall, our first Secretary
of Defense, has fascinated me and at times obsessed me on and off for
more than thirty years. Who learned about him first in nineteen eighty seven,
fairly significant year for me in the work, and a year that I had
decided to really commit myself to this work professionally. At the nineteen eighty seven
International Moufon Symposium held that year at American University in Washington, d C.
Stan Friedman gave a presentation that in a way changed my life. I had
first heard Stan speak ten years before, when I was very new in this
but had the privilege of working on being an editor on a paper that had
been requested by the Secretary General of the UN on a possible triggering of nuclear
war by a misidentification of a truly anomalous UFO. And for that work I
earned the right to be in the General Assembly Hall during a series of meetings
of the Special Political Committee, which stand addressed along with doctor Alan J.
Allen Heineck, Jacques Valet, Captain Coyne, Army captain who had been involved
in a very well documented helicopter semi abduction. And it was on the secret
life of a man who most of us knew in the work as a debunker,
but a quiet academic one, the head of astronomy studies at Harvard,
who went on to become the mentor of Philip Class, probably the best known
UFO debunker. And it was called the Secret Life of Donald K. Menzel.
And in it, by dint of sheer scholarship and research and high intention
and extraordinarily well documented, Stan had gotten permission to go into the Harvard Archives
and access all of the papers around Menzel, then in the National Archives,
and then became the only person to add a third which was a permission from
Menzel's widow to go over his personal papers. And what Stan established was Menzel
did indeed live a double life. He was the head academic on astronomy at
Harvard and as such had great sway in the astronomy community, but he was
also a trusted member of our national security apparatus, which even his wife was
not aware of. Anyway, it was about the same time that the MJ
twelve briefing paper, the eighth page memorandum to Presidents Elect Eisenhower with the attached
one page letter from September of forty seven from Truman to Forestall as the new
and first Secretary of Defense to begin his work on this particular topic. And
I decided I was going to write a paper and do the research, modeling
it on stands, and I had it down to two or three of the
members of MJ twelve. The other one who was closest was doctor Van of
Var Bush, Roosevelt and Truman's science and technology advisor and one of the most
extraordinary Americans ever. He I won't even go into I could spend the whole
show talking about Bush, no relation to the current crop. Anyway. I
spoke with my parents shortly after and had dinner with him, and sitting with
my mom and talking about the project, showing her this memorandum, telling her
who I had it down to, and she said, due Forestall. I
said, well, that's pretty definitive. Why she said, Number one,
you have no idea how important he was to us during World War Two.
His name was in the news as often as Harry Truman's was. He genuinely,
as an individual, was credited with helping us win the war as Assistant
Secretary of Navy. Secretary of Navy had lived an absolute storybook life, almost
ratio algerlike the arc on the narrative of his life. I compare in the
documentary to had Scott Fitzgerald needed or wanted a real character to base his most
famous literary character on J Gadsby James Forrestall could have been that person anyway.
She went on to say that when he committed suicide, which was the understanding
at the time, donation went into deep mourning. She said, for me,
it might have been the closest thing I had to your experience as a
young person to President Kennedy's murder. And then she said, and you know,
he was incredibly handsome. He was a very sharp dresser. He hung
out with movie stars and writers, and I had a crush on him,
and I thought, well, that's that my mother had a crush on the
first Secretary of Defense, who I think may have been murdered. And I
got to work, but intermittently. I first spoke about the subject, not
until two thousand and four, then continued to write about him to do presentations,
which brings us up to about two years ago when I expressed to Jennifer
and a number of other clothes as colleagues that I was searching for some medium,
some way to reach a larger audience than the one that people like me
traditionally reach. Let's face it, if Jennifer and I speak at a conference,
the great majority of people that are there, we're preaching to the choir.
They're already interested, they're already involved. They either believe or are studying
the subject. And how do you break through that in the world of conferences
and podcasts and the set universe of uphology. And I thought, I have
a background in theater, and a fairly extensive one. I worked for years
off Broadway in management and had the great thrill of working with Tony Award winners
and Academy Award winners, also assistant directing and I thought, perhaps there's a
way without writing a play. Because I'm not a playwright, I can bring
this into a more a staged reading where I create a script. I have
images illustrating what I'm saying, but I'm not standing there with a clicker moving
the slides forward. I can concentrate on the script and tell this story and
a very strictly chronological timeline, but not even mention the subject of UFOs until
it came up. Chronologically. The story begins in the eighteen nineties, when
Forrestall is born, and the first mention of the subject is nineteen forty seven,
my hope being that by then serious listeners who might never go to a
UFO conference but would certainly go to a play, and might be interested in
seeing a slightly dramatized just in terms of the words that I used and how
I handled them, the images behind me treatment of a really interesting story about
an American, a true hero, a patriot, a very decent man who
had been written out of American history and who may in fact have been murdered.
And then how do I present the case? Because I knew I would
be speaking two attorneys as well as layman. Ultimately I work shopped it several
times, first in a friend's apartment with about twenty people in New York City
about two years ago than before a terrific like Jennifer's mainline, mouf on a
group called the Rochester UFO meetup group run by the Indomitable Cookie string Fellow,
and that was a bit smoother. Ultimately, we brings us to last April
when I was scheduled to speak for Jennifer's group, and that early afternoon we
had some hours before the talk, and Jennifer said, you know, I
have a home studio and with Bob Terrio, our third wheel who did oversaw
the placement and the use of all the visual material was Jennifer's cameraman on the
Outstanding Award winning Travis The True Story of Travis Walton documentary that with the green
screen, Jen said, I have a new piece of equipment, which is
a teleprompter. Have you ever used one? And I said no, never,
And she said, well, I've loaded your script into it. Let's
give it a go. And I had thought, if we were going to
do it, I'd work as usual with a sheaf of papers that I'd half
memorized, coming and going from them, It's a very different experience staring into
this box for an interminable amount of time and doing my best to keep in
contact, remembering that if it worked well, the illusion would be that I
was speaking directly to viewers, the same way. You know we're used to
newsreaders. That allusion from that they're speaking to us, when you know we're
just part of a large audience and they're speaking into a mechanical device. Anyway,
when it was done, I turned it over technically to Bob and Jennifer.
I had assembled most of the images, but I hadn't even thought about
adding film images, you know, an independent researcher, I fund all my
own stuff, and having Jennifer as an overseeing producer I knew would allow me
some latitude. She and Bob found some wonderful film footage which we use I
think very well and the ending impact. It's only been shown publicly twice,
once as a finalist in the International UFO Congress Film Festival, or got a
very nice mention and up against if competition, and about a week a little
over a week ago for a moufon group in Syracuse, New York, where
I speak sometimes as well, and we've now had more and more people taking
a look at it, who not only find it engaging but very moving.
And within the next few weeks it will be available internationally online or to be
ordered as a DVD, and that will be the true test. But it's
an important story. And before I relinquished the floor just to say, why
even bother with the story that's sixty years old, seventy years old, it's
old history. Well, it's a very important window into the early days of
the UFO cover up and a very different perception about the nature of secrecy.
Who could keep it? Who could not? A very tragic twist, literally
a Greek agedy that his life story ends with um and I document everything if
anybody is interested, you know, after seeing it. There's a long bibliography
attached to thirty five or so print sources. And we're looking forward to get
going excellent. Okay, do you have one, Peter you can hold up
so we have to add back when we come back. We have to go
into a break right now, so hang in everyone, we'll be right back
right after these messages with We'll be back with Jennifer Stein and Peter Ruck.
My guests to this evening are Jennifer Stein and Peter Robins. We're gonna be
talking about the James Forrestell case for a while, and then of course we'll
get into other things. Peter, Well, I'll ask you this, Jennifer,
what was was your involvement in this any curiosity about Forrestell himself or was
it just to work with Peter both? Peter is such admiration for Peter.
I mean, what author takes books that they have off the market, who's
made a life career and interest in researching and studying this work, and then
takes the products they have and no longer has them. And I looked at
his research and was so impressed with it. I said, Peter, let's
do an experiment. I mean I literally just threw this at him. I
don't think he expected it at all. I said, if you can read
this from paper, you can read it from a teleprompter. Let's just put
you in front of a green screen and see what happens. And he was
like, well, like, do we have time before we go to the
meeting. I said, sure, we have an hour and a half.
Let's just try it. So I made lunch, I invited Bob over,
I invited another filmmaker over and I think Peter didn't know quite what hit him,
but I wanted to get him in front of a camera, and I
thought, gosh, she's got this great power point done. I did a
project like this a number of years ago with Hatty Martin. She wanted to
release the audio tapes of Betty and Barney, and I said, wait,
wait, wait, don't release that an audio because everyone will bootleg it.
Let's do a video. And I literally sat her down in front of a
camera, interviewed her, and then took her power point and made a quick,
simple video for her called in their own words, and she loves it.
She's grateful that she has it. And Bob and I did that,
and I thought we could do something similar with the Forrestall project and Peter would
have another product to go out to the UFO community with. You know,
it helps to have books and products that people can identify you with. And
I thought that the research she did on Forestall was tremendously important because we are
starting to see disclosure in a way now that we never had before. And
what's happening is everyone is hearkening now back to when did all this disclosure begin?
Well, boot it's right there with Forrestall. You know, nineteen forty
seven to ninety nine to nineteen fifty two. All these important parts of history
become extremely important. If you're going to be an historian and really understand this
topic. You need to understand the veil of secrecy, and you need to
understand who James Forrestall was. And for me, it was an eye opening
experience. I learned a lot, and I've even learned more. I mean,
if you think about what was going on in that period of time.
You know, in fact, Linda Howe and I were just on a cruise
together, this UFO cruise that went out of San Diego, when we were
sitting around with about twenty five people and we were thinking, okay, what
was happening between January and like July of nineteen forty seven. This was right
when the height of the codification of secrecy was starting and MJ twelve was forming
and Forrestall was moving into his position. And you think about it, they're
all like four or five major events. In January, Admiral byrd Right took
off and went to Antarctica. You know, of course I don't remember this
in my life history because I wasn't even born yet. I wasn't born until
nineteen fifty five. But apparently there was a blot of hooplah. He left
with like an armada to go to you know, anti Arctica. Why we
weren't at war anymore. And then everything gets hushed up in the news and
he makes this announcement from from Chili that he's had a very strange experience there,
and then he comes back and never talks about it. That was very
strange, and I think he lost half his fleet. He went with fourteen
ships and a like a navy you know, a navy carrier and things.
So that was incredible, right if he really had an encounter down there with
UFOs, which everyone thinks. Then you go to May nineteen forty seven.
You've got the famous Sacora case, right, and in what year nineteen forty
seven? No, that wasn't So that wasn't Scora. I thought, I
thought that was all the same year. Then you have June fourteen, nineteen
forty seven, you've got Kenneth Arnold right in the Cascade Mountains. Of course,
you know, he comes out, he's an you know, an experienced
pilot. He knows what he's seeing and I think he designed air aircraft.
I think he was an aircraft engineer. And then you have July nineteen forty
seven, the whole Ross Wild case, So bam bam, bam, bam
bam. You have all these things happening, and you think, gosh,
what was going on for James? What was he being thrown into and what
was he having to digest. We don't really go into all these events,
all these UFO events in the film. It mostly just follows James life,
so you can climb inside his life and understand who he was. And I
really commend Peter. This is one of the things that I tried to do
with the t Travis film, and Peter just mentioned it, but I think
it's very, very important. There are many intelligent people that won't even begin
to digest the topic of UFOs because it's been this forbidden topic. It's not
polite dinner conversation, right. You don't go to a cocktail party and start
talking about it. You'll be alienated. So to do something historically accurate that
suggests there might be a difficult history and past to someone who should be remembered
as a real hero in our country and is not and was probably murdered over
this topic. I think it forces anyone in the general public interested in this
topic and interested in the history to go do their own digging, and this
type of documentary can get out to the mainstream. Just like the Travis film
I did. I didn't do a film about UFOs. I did a film
that was about this man's personal life and how it was destroyed. And all
the seven loggers lives in many ways were destroyed over having this incident happened to
them, and the film became a bit of a breakthrough film. I mean,
we made it into mainstream festivals that would never accept a documentary on UFOs,
but because they didn't know who Travels was and they watched it a lot
of the festival, you know, screeners said, hey, I love this
film. I loved this film. I loved this film. I wanted in
our festival, so we made it in. I think I applied to fifty
film festivals. I got into twenty eight, and I think I won like
eight awards on top of getting into the festivals. So I think that the
Forestall project had that potential, and that's why I sat Peter down and said,
look, let's do something with this and actually we dedicated it to Stanton
Freedman had just lost Stanton or actually when we started this in April, Stanton
was still alive, and I think he had decided to dedicate it to him
already, and that and then when he died, it was even more important
to get it out there. But a couple of things. First of all,
that was nineteen sixty four for the Skoro incident. Thanks, that's no
big deal. But I do want to and I don't care either one of
you want to tackle this. But I've heard, you know, MJ twelve
come up a number of times, and that is that's a controversial topic,
and it is Martin, whether MJ twelve actually exists, existed or not.
And does either one of you want to tackle that? What your thoughts are?
Let me go first. Another thing that Stanton Friedman was able to establish
through a very careful extended search of records within the National Archives was locating two
completely authentic, independent documents that were independent of anything associated with UFOs, identifying
a MJ twelve or Magic twelve as it's sometimes known, working group, a
highly secured working group within the government, with no reference to what the group
was about, like many people in the field who have studied this material to
one degree or another. I have a lot of problems with a lot of
it. Again, going back to the summer of nineteen eighty seven, eight
page document purporting to be a briefing document on Roswell and associated subjects for then
President elect Eisenhower identified this original working group of twelve individuals around Truman. However,
in the intervening decade since eighty seven, I'm sure no less than several
hundred documents purporting to be majestic twelve m j twelve documents have come out.
I agree with stands conclusions that the initial eight page briefing document and the one
page attached letter from Truman to Forestall are authentic, and I go to some
pains in the documentary to make sure that one can see how they fit letter
perfect aspects of them with the known timeline, and then make sure that in
each case, if they were proved to be not authentic the letter and the
briefing document, that within that exact same timeframe, we have other material to
draw on that supports the same conclusions. So I do go on at the
end because I know I'm talking hopefully primarily primarily to folks who are not involved
in the subject of very brief summation on MJ twelve. In no way is
this documentary about. It simply refers to it. And even in the brief
treatment of an hour based in more than thirty years of investigation, five members
of the twelve come up playing roles directly involved with Forrestalls life and interfacing with
him personally throughout the narrative. Okay, that is it for the free part
of the show. Thank you so much for listening. And if you'd like
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I want to thank you all for listening, and next week we are going
to be back with Kathy Martin in the first hour and Stacy Wright and Marion
rob in the second hour of that show. So thanks again everyone, and
remember to keep your eyes to the sky.