Hi, everyone, Welcome to the show. This is Martin Willis your host,
and this is a rerun today. Now, I got to admit that
I've always been able to do a show no matter what, whether I was
traveling overseas or in other parts of the country. But this week, on
the twenty ninth, it's just impossible. I just couldn't figure out a way
to do it. So this is a rerun. This is Ralph Bloomenthal after
he wrote the Vanity Fair article back in twenty thirteen. Now, I just
did a day calculator. He was on my show two thousand, some two
hundred and forty nine days ago. So I hope a lot of you this
will be the first time. Well, actually, I'm glad if you listen
to the show when you did. If you're back, so you can't remember
everything you said after all this time, I don't think. But anyway,
it's an interesting interview and I hope you enjoy it. I apologize for not
having a fresh show for everyone this week, but we'll be back next week
with a Rizwan Verk on technology and entrepreneurship. Should be an interesting show.
Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next week. And here's
my guest. I have Ralph Blumenthal on Skype. How are you, Ralph,
I'm flyin Maudie. Thank you, thanks so much for agreeing to be
on the show. I understand this is the first show you are on about
your recent article and vanity fair it is. That's great, I got the
scoop. Well, you're a lucky man, and so am I to be
interviewed by you. So the article name is alien Nation, have humans been
abducted by extraterrestrials? And it's mostly about John Mack. I have to ask
a number of questions. First one comes to mind. You have had a
prestigious career. Have you had any ridicules so far for this article? Well,
a few emails came in. I'm used to that, but actually I
was surprised by the positive reaction. I think everyone was so relieved to find
a so called mainstream journalist treat the subject seriously that I was quite flattered by
the outpouring of positive reaction. Oh that's great. I was hoping it would
encourage you, you know, stay at what you're doing, but at least
do a little more exploring. I think you did. It's a wonderful article.
And this is in Vanity Fair, so one of the most major magazines
in the country. It's pretty exciting to see this article. Well, thank
you. Yes, it's on the website. Actually, they couldn't get it
into the magazine fast enough for the upcoming summer gathering in Newport of you know
of the experiencers, the abductees who meet, who meet there every year,
So rather than try to update it with another gathering, because I intended to
one last July, they decided to get it right up on the site.
But it's a very active site. It had quite a while ago, twenty
five thousand individual page views and two thousand shares, so it really seemed to
have hit a nerve. Yes, I bet so. You've heard mostly from
the UFO community. Have you heard from other colleagues. No, I really
must say I've heard. Well, a lot of my friends did see it,
and we're a little surprised that I'd be writing about this. We can
talk about that. But also there was quite a reaction in the UFO community,
as you know as well as anyone. It's a very tight knit group.
It very it's disparate, but people keep in touch with each other and
whenever there's a development PROO con there's a lot of sharing back and forth,
so everybody tries to keep on top of things. And when this article came
out, it was immediately sent back and forth. I could almost see it,
you know, flying through the cosmos, and I was getting responses from
all over the place. Yes, I write away a past guest. Actually,
just last week, Leslie Kane connected with me right away and said,
you have to get a hold of this guard right away, and so I
was really excited that you responded so quickly. Well, thank you. Leslie
is one of my favorite people. You know, she is so clear eyed
and sober about the whole UFO things. She's brought so much important investigative attention
to the subject and high, high credibility. So she really is one of
my favorite people. We did an article together for the Huffington Post on these
Chilean episode, a very strange flyover that went so fast and it was only
caught on film, but a she as somebody I highly respect. Wow,
that's great. Have you had an interest in the subject for quite a while?
Well, As I said in some of my proposals, I've talked to
a number of publishers. Now As a kid, I was very interested in
science fiction growing up in the fifties. It was really the big thing.
I mean, UFOs were suddenly on the agenda, and I gobbled up everything
by Ray Bradberry and Isaac Asimov. So as a kid, I was certainly
interested in it. But my interest came later when I picked up a copy
of a. John Mack's Passport to the Cosmos, and it was about two
thousand four or five, and I said, Gee, this is a guy
I'd like to interview someday. I was already an established correspondent for the New
York Times, and the next thing I heard he'd been killed in London.
So that's really where my interest started. I see. Yeah, there's there's
a little bit of controversy about his death, you know, I mean it
was kind of an unusual circumstances, probably just an accident, but still a
little unusual. Well, I have satisfied myself that it was an accident,
I know. I mean, there are a lot of conspiracies out there,
but it is important to stick to the facts. And while you can never
a negative, I must say I've talked to the family, I've looked over
the police reports and there's nobody serious out there anymore who thinks it was any
kind of anything else than a tragic accident. And the driver was drunk,
he admitted that. And John was very tired. He was coming back from
a talk in London and he stepped out of a subway station underground station,
was not used to the traffic patterns, looked the wrong way and was hit
and died almost instantly. So I think while the circumstances was so strange and
unusual, given his notoriety at that point, particularly his fight with Harvard,
there was immediately speculation that it was, you know, a hit or assassination.
But I'm absolutely convinced, and so is everyone else who's looked at the
subject seriously, that it was just an accident. Yeah. I've heard of
a lot of people getting in accidents in England in particular, you know,
looking the wrong way, you know, just regular car accidents and things,
because it's so used to, you know, the right handed traffic. He
was very tired. He had gone to talk about the great fascination of his
life, which was te Lawrence of Lawrence of Arabia. He'd written a book
that won the Pulit Surprise in nineteen seventy seven, so he'd gone to give
a talk on Lawrence. He was up late. It was very emotional for
him. It was sort of a lot of strange things. And it was
the anniversary just about to the day of his father's death in a vehicle accident.
His father was killed in Vermont in a car accident coming home from their
summer home. And there's also a lot of interesting things after he was hit
and killed. People who had visitations from him or say they did so.
He was getting very interested in survival life after death. And this almost seemed
talor made for his research in that he himself, according to associates, appeared
to them with messages after he died. So in that sense, it was
kind of an extension of his life's work. Wow, let's talk about the
Rhode Island event. Was that the first time, the end the only time
you've ever gone it is? Yeah, I had talked to Let's see,
this is how I got onto it. As I started interviewing Max associates,
they were telling me that he showed up periodically at a convention every year in
Newport, Rhode Island, hosted by this woman who was a fairly prominent Newport
resident whose grandfather had had a mansion there, part of Old Newport actually,
and so I was kind of interested in that, but I never thought of
going until last summer. I was in New Hampshire and I was not far
away, and I was talking to the woman who hosts these gatherings. Her
name is Annekoolier. She has a B and B in this beautiful mansion on
the Newport waterfront, and she said I should come and attend, and it
seemed an invitation too good to pass up because a lot of these experiences,
as you know, Marty, are very publicity averse. They're not looking for
attention. Contrary to what you know. Outsiders often believed that these are either
hoax or publicity seekers, fabricators looking for attention. It's quite the opposite.
They're very troubled people based on what has happened to them. They were in
troubled before, but they were troubled as a result of what they went through,
so they are not looking particularly for attention. But she invited me to
come and meet with them, and I had met many of them already.
I thought it was a wonderful opportunity, which had turned out to be.
It anchored the peace in vanity fair because it gave it a focus. So
it was a good device for telling the story. But it was also very
important to me to meet not only experiencers, but scientists who were there,
Scientists, astrophysicists who showed up, the director of a hospital in Boston who
had all kinds of anomalous psychic experiences. So that that's the story on Newport.
You speak in your article about when Mac was on Oprah with some experiencers.
Did you have you ever seen tape of that? Have? I have?
Very interesting because first of all, it was fairly early in Oprah's television
career, and she you could see already what a good interviewer she was.
She was a bit skeptical, but she was very accepting of these very strange
stories. So not only was there Mac talking about the phenomenon, but he
had a group of people, young people who told very straightforwardly of their extraordinary
experiences taken aboard a craft and meeting these beings and losing, you know,
missing time, the whole syndrome. So the fact that they were talking about
it so casually and so lucidly, and that there were no visible signs of
insanity. I mean, it was all very forward and Oprah was really impressed.
Yeah, I would like to see that tape now, you know,
I was wondering if there was any type of ridicule or something during that tape,
or how the audience reacted. Basically, the audience was. It was
pretty accepting and I think quite fascinated. Oprah would indicate her skepticism by a
raised eyebrow or quizzical look, and her intro actually is interesting. She said,
you know, we have here, you know John mac He believes that
people have been abducted by aliens. He believes that they have had children with
aliens. So she was you know, you could see her skepticism there.
But the audience was quite supportive, especially once they had a chance to hear
these people. You know, one of the things I've seen a documentary on
that I thought was pretty fascinating is when he went to Africa, when he
was interviewing those children. You mentioned that briefly here. You know, it
wasn't really abductions, but what an amazing story that is. Well, it
is one of the most I mean, the whole canon of alien abduction,
as you know, revolves around certain very powerful stories. One is the story
of Betty and Bonney Hill, and one is the Linda Napolitano Brook so called
Bridge abduction, the Alleghash incident. So there are a number of things that
you know were particularly that loom large in the history of the abduction phenomenon,
and one of them certainly is the incident at Rua in Zimbabwe. And as
I sort of tell it in the Vanity Fair Story and tell it and hope
to tell it in greater length in a book, Mac at the time was
being persecuted, I think is the only way to describe what Harvard was putting
him through. They'd subjected inquisition for his willingness to entertain the reality of alien
abduction. And while he was being subject to all these hearings at Harvard,
he got a call or his office, initially from a BBC correspondent in outside
Harare, Zimbabwe, that a children's school had had some kind of an episod
so a visitation of a Ufo and the children saw beings which they reported to
the school authorities, and it had become quite a story in Zimbabwe, and
Mac, despite all the troubles he was going through at Harvard, dropped everything
and with his research partner, flew to Zimbabwe to talk to these kids themselves,
and Mac and his associate interviewed dozens of these kids and they all had
the same story that they saw this craft come down. It was either hovering
or landed, and they saw two or three beings as small dark figures in
form fitting outfits, and they were communicating telepathically with the children, and the
children were very troubled by it, and they all had similar story, which
was interesting. It was hard to imagine that these kids could make all this
up and keep their stories consistent, right, And that's really the basis of
that story, which is very very powerful. Yes, getting back to your
career now, you actually were involved in writing in Vietnam. Yeah, I
was a New York Times correspondent Vietnam. It was early in my career and
I had been a correspondent in West Germany at the time, and then they
sent me to Vietnam. It was pretty much the high point of the war
sixty nine, a year after ted I was fascinating. I was in Vietnam,
covered a lot of the war, and then when the war shifted or
spread to Cambodia, when Prince and it was overthrown, and Cambodia sort of
joined the war on the American side, which was kind of a disastrous decision
for them. They got drawn into it. And I covered that pretty much
from the beginning and then left about the time, said Sidney Schanberg came in
and covered the arrival of the Khmer Rouge, which became, of course,
his wonderful movie The Killing Fields. Let's see, I've just wonder if we
should talk a little bit more about your career in general. What do you
think, Well, that's fine. I think it's very important for you know,
listeners to know that, you know, I come to this not as
a proponent or an advocate, at least I didn't start off that way.
I don't think I've become an advocate. I still consider myself a reporter,
um and I think that I hope that that's the strength of my reporting,
that I come to it as a reporter. And the one thing, uh,
you know, I've really stuck in my investigative reporting. Over the years,
I've been involved in a lot of political exposes for The New York Times.
My training is to stick to the facts, and I think I hope
that what I've brought to this story is a adherence to the facts, an
openness to to to hear things and to understand things, but also in innate
skepticism. I don't believe anything anyone tells me on the face of it,
and that everything has to be tested, right. I think what is lacking
is the one word you just mentioned out there is the openness to at least
investigate. And it's like a breath of fresh air to have someone like you
actually investigate something like this. Well, you know, I sort of took
my cues from John mac who also described at great length in his books and
all his interviews how he came to it as a skeptic. It's an interesting
story. He was brought up as a scientist. His whole family had been
eminent physicians at Harvard. His training was science. He was he had to
be a medical doctor before he could be a psychiatrist, so he trained.
I have a photo of him conducting an autopsy. Yeah. He was a
man of science, and he was an activist, a social activist. He
believed in, you know, ending nuclear weapons, and so politically he was
certainly on the left, but he was a strictly a man of science and
when he eventually started learning about these unusual, this anomalous world. He had
taken breathwork training with Stanislav Groff and his wife, and he had learned well,
I mean psychiatrist deal and hypnosis and alternate states. All the time.
He was always aware that there were some hidden corners of the human mind,
which every psychiatrist knows. But he began experimenting himself. He tried some psychotropic
drugs, hallucinogenic drugs, and he was surprised at the things they brought out
in him. He had had a very traumatic youth. His mother died when
he was seven months old. His father remarried, but he always missed his
mother. So a lot of these issues came out when he was experimenting with
drugs. So he knew that there were sort of hidden corners of the human
mind, but nothing prepared him for the letters that Bud Hopkins showed him.
When Mac met Bud Hopkins, and Hopkins said he'd been getting these letters from
people who had been abducted or said they'd been abducted, and Mac looked at
them and was trying to figure out what was going on. He didn't believe
it either. Do you know how they first met. Yeah, Mac had
been dabbling in some of these interesting groups like est on the West coast.
You know, it was an era of great experimentation, sexual experimentation, you
know, psychiatric experimentation. All these things were going on in the fifties and
sixties, great opening up. And he was an ego participant. And there
was a woman in one of these groups on the coast California who knew Bud.
Bud Hopkins was a very accomplished artist who had himself seen a UFO on
Cape Cod in the sixties and had written about it. And this woman became
a kind of a bridge between Mac and Bud Hopkins. She told Max she
had met Mac I guess on the coast and said, there's this guy,
Bud Hopkins was really interesting. You should meet him. So Mac said,
he always remembered the date it was, you know, in nineteen eighty I
believe, and he went to visit Bud and Bud showed him these letters.
So that's how it came about. I see in the article you wrote you
talked briefly about the Brooklyn Bridge UFO abduction. Do you know more details about
that. I've heard about that, but I've never really well, I do.
It's really one of the most sensational. That's certainly a fair word to
use cases that have ever come up. I mean, of course, the
Hill's story is very sensational. They're all sensational. There's not an abduction story
that's not. But the Linda Apoloitis I called her by her real name,
which he gave me permission to do. Bud Hopkins gave her a pseudonym in
his book. But I'll give you the story very quickly. A major world
figure. This is in Bud Hopkins telling of the story. A major world
leader was on his way downtown to a meeting with two bodyguards. His car
suddenly came to a stop under the FDR Drive at the East side of Manhattan,
and they didn't know what was wrong with the car. They stopped and
got out and were looking around and again. This is according to the story
told in Bud Hopkins book and the story that Linda later told me. The
world leader and the two bodyguards saw a spacecraft hovering over a building near the
Brooklyn Bridge. To their amazement, they saw a figure come out of the
window levitate out of the window, followed by three to join three small beings
who had come out of the spacecraft. They all floaded toward the spacecraft.
The spacecraft then shot over the East River, over the Brooklyn Bridge and plunged
into the water. That was the story. There were apparently there were some
witnesses on the Brooklyn Bridge drivers whose cause had also stalled. There were witnesses
at the New York Post printing plant anyway, And in his book Witnessed,
Bud Hopkins tells this story. And later when I met Linda, the woman
who was supposedly levitated out of her window, she confirmed the story to me.
At least in her experience, this is what she remembered. You often
under hypnosis, it's very hard to recover these memories because they're very clouded.
Anyway, I you know, there was no way, in the context of
this article, or even in a book of my own, that I could
completely check out the story. It's become kind of controversial because different people have
claimed it was a hoax, and it's really spread a very lively debate online.
But at least I was able to talk to Linda and the world figure
who Bud Hopkins never identifies in his book, but is identified in other articles
online supposedly the former Secretary General of the United Nations, via Perez Daquire,
who was on his way to a meeting. I did get the chance through
a news colleague to get some questions to Daquire, who's now retired in Peru,
and he was asked about this whole episode, and his responses were quite
enigmatic. He said he didn't really remember. He didn't deny it, but
he said he has no interest in these types of stories. But it was
not exactly a flat denial. It's a very peculiar story, to say the
least. At least I was able to track down some of the figures as
like Linda for example, and Leslie Kane, who was close to Bud Hopkins,
has a lot of his original research, and I was able to confirm,
you know, some of the outlines of the story. So again,
that's the so called brooklyn Bridge abduction. And the story goes on that Linda
was taken to a strange place, some beach, and one of the people
she was abducted with came back with some of the sand. But it had
been tested, and as usual in these stories, it's inconclusive. There's never
enough physical proof to be persuasive. That's one of the mysteries of the whole
you know, UFO and alien abduction phenomena. No one has ever been able
to come back with incontrovertible scientific proof. There's always tantalizing things. There's little
cuts that heal quickly. There's witness sightings that coincide with abductions. You know,
there's a pattern of evidence of fragmentary evidence that falls short of controvertible proof.
That's the way it seems like it's always been. Since you've written this
article, have you considered what you would do if someone contacted you and started
relaying their abduction experience to you. Where you would go with that? Well,
you know, some people have actually contacted me. They've also contacted you
know, they told me they've been in touch with other you know groups and
had talked to MAC at the time. So I would definitely talk to them.
I frankly, I've interviewed a few of them for what I hope will
be my book. So I've heard these stories firsthand myself. I've you know,
tested checked them out. I've talked to other people. For example,
there's a young woman in Massachusetts who told me all kinds of stories and she
told me about an episode where she felt she was abducted from her bedroom,
and I talked to her, you know, to check it, to verify
it. I talked to her husband. They've since separated, but they're in
good terms, and he was What struck me particularly is he's a police officer.
He was able to confirm some of the details. He was as very
common as you know. He was kind of paralyzed, he couldn't move,
but he saw the flashing red light, he felt the presence in the room,
he felt her struggling when she was abducted. So here's a police officer,
you know, with some degree of credibility, still working as a as
a law enforcement officer, who confirmed some of the outlines of the story.
So I have talked to quite a few of these people, and wherever possible,
you tried to get outside con information. It's very difficult, as you
know, and again it always falls short, you know, full of scientific
proof. But I'm happy to hear these stories and meet with people and just
listen to them. Would you attend any other like for instances an experiencers conference.
I'm right in my neighborhood up in Portland, Maine. This September.
Would you ever consider attending one of those? I would? I mean,
I know there are a lot of these conferences. There's the mouf On conference
that you know every year. There are a lot of groups meeting, and
the hard part is, you know, to keep up with all of it.
And as you know, there's also it is a kind of a mixed
bag. I mean, there's some groups are more credible than others, and
one I think has to be careful to, you know, focus I have
to be careful for was my effort on the more reliable rewarding of the conferences
or so, because there's so many of them. But for example, I
talked in my article about the famous abduction conference at MIT that took place in
the nineties. It was extraordinary put on by David Jacobs and David Pritchard,
and MIT was the shall we say, reluctant host. It did open its
doors to this very prestigious, high level conference where a lot of papers were
presented and the issue was looked at from various perspectives. So that became its
own book by CCB. Bryan, the great writer who wrote Friendly Fire,
he wrote a book Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, just about that conference.
I wish I had attended that Prince at Harvard, at the Harvard Divinity
School. Not open to outsiders, but a conference of a lot of professionals,
including Mac, to look at this problem and issue and see what the
make of it. So, yes, there are conferences I think that are
very worth attending. You mentioned briefly a book. Do you have something?
Do you have something in mind? Do I've been trying for the longest time
to to sell a book on John Mac. It has not been easy because
of the mindset that we were talking about. There's a lot of hostility I
would say more than skepticism, hostility in the publishing community. Even though books
keep coming out about you know, UFOs and abduction and movies. For sure,
the mainstream publishing community is quite skeptical or hostile, and Mac was not
seen as enough of a figured to anchor a book. So I've had a
lot of difficulties selling it as an idea. I think in the end I'll
prevail. I have some interest now, I think I know where I'm going
on it, and I think the Vanity Fair article really helped show the interest.
But it has not been easy. I bet we're getting near the end
of the show here, have you had any of these type of experiences or
your family that you're aware of. No, I've really searched my memory because
a lot of these experiences are deeply buried, as you know, and often
come out only in connection with something else. But I can't say i've ever
I have I've never seen a UFO that I can remember, and I'm glad
I have not had these troubling experiences because I know how people suffer. As
you know, they tend to occur in families. So if you're grandparents and
parents have had abduction type experiences, you are more likely too, and that
has not been a pattern of my family. It tends to happen early in
life, not late in life. So it's as if these beings or whatever
they are, are following people from generations, which might be some kind of
study, but it does seem to be. That seems to be the pattern.
So in my case, No, And as I say, from what
I've seen about the deeply traumatic effects, I can't say I'm sorry I have
not been singled out or had these experiences because they're very, very difficult.
I've been rereading Whitley Strieber's book and how he was tortured by his experiences.
They're very trouble, you know. The outs and skeptics are always trying to
make a link between these experiences and mental illness. Is to the extent these
people are mentally disturbed, it's what's happened to them as a result of their
experiences. They're not mentally disturbed and conjuring up these experiences. They're perfectly normal
people until they encounter these inexplicable events, and then they're thrown off center.
As you would, Mac found that many people hoped to be told that they
were insane way they could deal with what had happened to them. So when
he gave them the bad news that they were not crazy, that as other
people have had these same experiences and there were witnesses and something had happened to
them in some dimension, they were even more troubled because they lacked any system
for processing that information. Well, sure is a mysterious phenomenon. It is,
and that's the thing it'll I think it will remain mysterious for a long
time to come. I'm very pessimistic that we're close to a solution. I
think it's just something we're going to have to keep studying. That's right,
Ralph, you've been amazing. I'm so glad that you've written this article,
and I hope to see your name in print a number of times in the
future about this well, thank you so much for having me. It's a
great pleasure. Yes, all right, that was back in May up thirteen,
and this is July twenty ninth, twenty nineteen. And yes we did
see his name in print again, and that was the New York Times article
of course, with Leslie Kane back in December of twenty seventeen. So we're
going to be back next week with a great guest, Rizwan Verke. We're
going to be talking about entrepreneurial ship and technology, UFOs and a lot more.
Thanks for listening everyone, and remember to keep your eyes to the sky. Att