Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Martin Willis your host,
and I'm pretty excited about our guest tonight, greg A Gigeon.
He was on back in twenty eighteen and I remember
it was a excellent show and he's on. He has
a new book and I'm going to bring that up
here in just a second here, and it's an interesting concept,
if you ask me. And the name of the book
is After the Flying Saucers Came, a global history of
the UFO phenomenon, and it's a lot of it is
about the people's reaction. I think he makes a statement
something like, it's not the UFOs that make his it's
the people that make the history about the UFOs, which
I think is that, you know, absolutely correct as far
as as that goes. I do want to make a
couple announcements. First of all, this coming weekend at the
Pine Bush UFO Paranormal Museum Randall Dickerson. I met with
Randall yesterday at his home in Massachusetts, hung out with
him for a few hours, had a really good talk
with him. You know, there's I do have to say
he's going to be more public about this, but he is.
He has actually been really treated wrong, and along with
other people too. I know I had Ron James on recently.
He spoke briefly about it. But we're talking to James
Fox and many other people. I don't know if there's
going to be some type of glass app but there
is a film company that has really done them wrong,
and I'm hoping he Randall said he's going to start
talking publicly about it. I will certainly give him a
platform to talk to because when someone's done wrong, I
think it should be turned around and should be treated
the way that they were supposed to be treated contractually anyway.
So he's going to be speaking, he's going to be
showing the film at the museum and speaking afterwards. So
he can get over there. If you're anywhere near the
Pine Bush area, it would be great to hang out.
He's very approachable, great guy, Randall Nixon. So check that
out coming up. That is this August third. Is that
a Saturday or I think that's a Saturday evening. I
don't have my calendar right up here in front of me,
but that's at the museum, and check that out. And
that is Saturday, yes, at seven thirty pm Eastern. So
our guest this week again is Greg Gigian. He wrote
this book just to let you know. On Thursday night,
I'll have this gentleman and his name is Robert Caveat
and he is a filmmaker. He's done a lot of
things on Fox Television with the UFOs and things like that.
He'll be on talking about the Mandela Effect. I'm kind
of on the fence about how I feel about that.
I understand how it works. So that's eight pm this
coming Thursday, right here on this channel. And thank you
all for being here. It's always a pleasure seeing you
in Chad and all that. Oh, I don't want to
forget our great blog this week because it has to
do with Paul Benowitz and what he filmed at in
New Mexico back in the late seventies early eighties, and
it's called the UFOs Caught in Film by Paul Benowitz.
And there are some images now Charles R. Blogger worked
directly with Chris Lambright, who actually wrote a book on
this whole situation. So there's some interesting images and you'll
see that all on the blog here at PODCASTUFO dot com.
Come in and check it out, and thank you all
who support the show. And those of you who cannot
support I do thank you for watching and listening, and
it would be great if you can write reviews, whatever
you can do to help the show. I would really
appreciate it. And just to have you here at all,
it is a real pleasure. And here is our guests. Hello, Greg, welcome.
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 1: So Greg, you were on quite a while ago now
as it stands, and again I remember it was a
really great conversation. And you are a professor of history.
You're at what is in Pennsylvania right.
Speaker 2: Right, Penn State University. You might have heard we have
a football team.
Speaker 1: I think I might have heard that. Yeah, so you've
been there a while, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, I have. I've been here since the early two thousands.
So yeah, Penn State is I'm pretty much at this
point a Penn State or I think it's official now.
Speaker 1: I hope. So your tenure dog would imagine by this time. Yeah. Hey,
so I gotta ask you right after about have you
ever got any bullback for looking at this UFO topic?
Speaker 2: You know, I will say, by and large no, I
mean I think I think particularly early on, maybe when
I was starting to get into this, I had some
people who you know, uh, you know, an upturned brow
or something like that, and I think you know what
it's like. Usually when you bring this topic up, there's
there's some people who are kind of sizing you up
and okay, wondering what's your angle here? What? Why are
you interested in this? I had a little of that,
but I will say, by and large, the the the
the reaction I've gotten in the world of academia has
been overwhelmingly not only supported, but downright enthusiastic. Get I
get lots of wow, that is cool or yeahn I
wish I had thought about that. Or one graduate student
said to me, I didn't know we could write about
things like this, and I said, yes, you can.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker 2: I think I think it's a it's indicative of the
kind of you know, see change and I changes and
ideas that are out there these days.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have to I mentioned this on a show
a while back up a few weeks ago, and I'll
just throw it out there again in case people missed it.
But I think it's kind of funny. I was helping
my cousin with a basically a yard sale of her
where she grew up. Her family had been there for
the last fifty nine years, and so she I was
helping a price, you know, how to set it up
and help helped her through it basically. And at some
point I said, I don't know if you know, if
this is any family, if the family knows this or not,
but do you know that I do a show in
UFOs And she went like that, and I go, what
you know? And I said what? And so she goes
like that like I'm the crazy man, and I went
out the crazy cousin. I went into the other room
and I came back out and she's like texting someone away.
I go, I know what you're doing. I know you're right,
crazy cousin Marty as they called me or whatever. I
hope people don't start calling me that, but anyway.
Speaker 2: Somebody's got somebody's got to fill in that role in
the family, that's right, obviously. So there you go.
Speaker 1: But her husband, who I just called my favorite cousin
in law, I mean, he's such a cool guy, really
great guy. So I said, well, you might as well.
You're gonna hear it from your wife, so I might
as well tell you, and he goes, awesome, Oh my god,
he's like the enthusiastic. That's so great. He goes, he worked,
he has a plumbing business, and he said, I got
to have one of my work and say he had a UFO.
I got to have them talk to you. And I
said great. And he goes, do you know of Betty
and Barney Hill? And I said, ah, yeah. He said, well,
Barney was a postman when I was growing up, and
he's he hung out. I don't know how we have
a delivered mail. He said he to hang out for
an hour or two sometimes and talked. He said he
didn't talk that much about UFOs, but every once in
a while he would bring me so it wasn't as
mad thing you talked about.
Speaker 2: Small world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, right in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. So that's right
where they were from. Yeah, he's actually the He's actually
the first person I have met and I grew up
in this area, in the Portsmouth area that actually knew Barney.
I knew I know many people that knew Betty, but
only why He's really the only person I've ever talked
to that knew Barney.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So she it sounds like by everything I've ever read,
of course she was you know, of course she lived
a much longer life. But she she she was really
a very sociable person. I mean, she got out there.
And some things I've read seemed to indicate that Barney
was a little more reserved, a little little shyer than
she was. It seems like she was pretty outgoing.
Speaker 1: She really was. Yes, I've talked to a lot of
people that would say basically that, you know, I was
in a house and there was a picture on a
wall and I'm looking and this was a house to
look for antique, someone that was selling antiques, and I
was called in there as an appraiser basically, and I'm
looking at this picture and I said, is that a
woman named Betty? And they said, oh, yeah, Betty Hill
was a great friend, you know what I mean. Yeah,
And that was you know, two towns over. Yes, she
was very sociable. Yeah, you need definitely so, Greg. I
know we've gotten way off topic, but your book, how
what was the impetus for you to write this book
in particular?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I I probably a good decade ago.
I was just on a lark. I started to look
into this question I had in my mind. It came up.
It really was sort of inspired by talking to a
friend of mine who was working on a fairly unrelated project,
but about the occult after World War Two, and I
kind of wondered whether there was you know, these flying
saucers sighting and report about them, you know, in other countries,
and particularly I was working on Germany at the time.
I thought, well, what if I were to go in
and look at some of these digitized newspapers from the
late forties and early fifties, and you know, were they
reporting about flying saucers? And sure enough I go in
there and bam, there they were. And I thought, well,
that's wild. And I just you know, this is what
we nerdy historians do get We get excited about things
like that. I start reading, I started taking notes, and
pretty soon I realized I have an article. And then
a friend of mine said, you got to write a
book about the history of UFOs. I said, I'll come on,
there has to be so many professional historians who have
done this already. This is I'm not going to just
add one more voice. And then I looked up and
I realized that there's a lot of books about historical
aspects of it. But as far as I was ever
able to reharmin. The only professor of history who ever
wrote a book about the history of UFOs, right was
David Jacobs, Right, the famous David Jacobs, who, of course
later on becomes a you know, part of the story.
Speaker 1: And that McDonald. I don't know what McDonald McDonald McDonalds was.
He was in history, he.
Speaker 2: Was, and he never wrote a book, and he would
He did atmospheric physics, you know, people like Alan Heinek
and Jacques Falet. None of them were academic historians, right,
So you didn't really have anybody do that. And I thought,
my god, nobody's written a history of this thing since
nineteen seventy five, at least nobody from like I say,
a professional historical background like my own. And that's when
I thought, well, I think it's time. And little did
I know how deep those waters are, because a lot
has happened since nineteen seventy five, and a lot of
there are a lot of threads and a lot of elements.
And then the other thing, as I realized soon given
what I had just done about this German thing, I
realized I couldn't talk about this without trying to incorporate
the rest of the world. This couldn't just be about
American sightings and American figures. It had to be about
a lot of other people who made these UFOs make history,
as I like to say. So that's how I got
into it and started just becoming utterly, utterly fascinated by it.
Speaker 1: And the statement you make is like, the people are
the ones that make the history of you, fols. But
how much I didn't get it much of a chance
to preach through too much on your book, But you
hear a lot of people will talk about you know
that it's all initiated from pop culture, and so I
just want to say, ask this question, how much does
pop culture play into what you've researched?
Speaker 2: So I would say the way I see it from
what I from what I could really glean from. Then
the historical record is UFOs as we know of them,
as we think about them, as we talk about them,
are really unimaginable. Without popular culture, popular media that includes newspapers, magazines,
radio today, podcasts, things like that, we would not be
thinking and talking about them the same way without those influences.
That said, I think there's every indication that UFO sightings
from their very beginnings to I think this very day.
To me, are what I would call a grassroots phenomenon.
That is, they bubble up from below. They are not
the result of you can't explain them away by pop culture.
You do not see evidence, I think in a very
simplistic way that somehow, oh there's been a movie about
UFOs recently, and now you got all these sightings and
they're all reporting exactly what steals Speed just showed us.
You don't really see that. That's not the way it worked,
and it hasn't worked that way. So I think there's
this complicated thing going on where this phenomenon took place,
and it kept taking place, as you well know, flaps
and waves along the way. There were periods when there
very little action going on. But what you have is
then a bunch of people trying to make sense of it.
You have lots of at different points in times, you
have high concentrations of media attention on it like these days, right,
and then those inform the way in which people start
to speculate and think about things. But I think the
impact on actual witness sightings and things like that is
relatively minimal from what I can see. And so you
have something going on that's I think, very hard to
tease out right where one aspect starts and the other begins.
But I think without question, the sightings themselves, those tend
not to be something that are easily influenced by pop culture.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I'm kind of relieved to hear you
say that, because you know, there are plenty of skeptics
that will try to spin that that is, you know,
the reason. You know, I can't remember who I had.
I do believe. I want to say it was Shermer.
He was on my show once, Michael Shermer. Yeah, And
I believe that was part of his narrative, is saying,
you know, it's a pop culture influence. And he talked
about him thinking he saw after a long bike ride,
thinking he saw, you know, a UFO, but it was
something explainable, and as James Fox basically shut him down
on a show, he said, we don't want to talk
about the ones you know was not a UFO because
you could do that, you know, like I looked up
in the sky, I saw, oh there was a cigar
shaped Oh it's a blimp. You know, we don't need
to know any of this that can be explained. It's
the very small percentage, but definitely a percentage of the
ones that can't be explained. That's where people should be
looking and you know, and where they they come from.
I still, you know, I've been doing the show now
for it's almost thirteen years now, in a couple of months,
and I really do not have I mean, I don't
know if I can ask better questions, but I really
don't have any idea. I can't comfortably say that I
think they're extraterrestrial. I can't comfortably say I think they're
in interventional or time travelers. I can't say any of that.
And it's just as easy in my opinion, and it's
not me making this up. From other people I've heard
talk this way, it's more likely something or a part
of it is likely to be something we couldn't understand
easily or understand it all, you know. So I guess
I have to common.
Speaker 2: I think that's a common perspective that I think a
lot of a lot of thoughtful people, right, people who
have spent time really you know, trying to get get
the answers. That's a very very common sort of refrain
about it, you know, And I think from my from
my position I you know, the because I really am
primarily interested in the way in which we human beings
sort of try to deal and grapple with this that
side of things. And you know, one of the things
that creates that that's problematic here is certainly the ways
in which we have tried to find little boxes to
put this thing in, right, the ways we've tried to
package them. So, I mean, to me, the best one
of the best examples is just the language we've used historically.
Right at first it was flying saucers, and of course
then by the early fifties, the Air Force is like,
oh god, we hate this laying which we hate this
let It doesn't work because people aren't just seeing saucer
like things. So they come up with UFO to solve
that problem. And of course, very quickly they learn that
doesn't solve the problem because what happens is the media.
What they would do, and often the Air Force would do,
is anything that somebody saw in the sky they couldn't explain,
they just put it in that that bin, the UFO bin.
And of course, as you're you're sort of hitting that right,
that's a lot of stuff. That bin is full of
all sorts of different things, many of which are pretty
mundane things, right, pretty pretty pretty ordinary kinds of things.
And so when you sort of have this language problem,
and now of course we use UAP, and I count
me in the in the group that doesn't think this
solves the problem. I don't think it solves the language problem,
but I know I have colleagues and friends who like
it much better. But in any event, it's still is
something that creates, you know, it opens up questions for us.
But what it also does is it means we invariably
throw things under that category, and it just clouds up
the picture. More So, a lot of this has to
do with us human beings and the flawed ways in
which we go about thinking. Right.
Speaker 1: I wonder if another intelligence has had this same dilemma
like being visited from wherever they're being visited from, and
have the same deliver dilemma of not knowing exactly what
they are, and you know, have gone through, you know,
the similar things that we've gone through trying to figure
out what it is in our skies and in our
oceans and whatever, or maybe perhaps around us, you know,
and we just don't see them there or know that
they're there. Or something who knows, you know. I mean,
I just think there's so many mysteries here, and you know,
and there's some people, I'm sure that you've heard people
think that we're in a simulation. You know, there's all
types of theories of and then you know, the the brains,
the many membranes or whatever they're called, the other alternative
lives and things like that. I mean, it's all there's
so many questions, you know, and we don't really I
don't think we really understand reality, you know, I don't know, right.
Speaker 2: And I mean that's that. I like that you laid
out all those different kinds of explanations because that gets
that again, it's been there from the very beginnings of
thinking about flying saucers in the late forties, has been
this kind of schmortas board, if you will, right of
ideas and theories and speculations, everybody sort of choosing their own,
sometimes the discussion being lively and exciting and productive as
you well now, sometimes it could get kind of acrimonious
and not so nice. But yeah, that's that's the nature
of this whole thing, right, is that it's really kind
of difficult to sort of pin any one thing down
and so at times it feels like there's the flavor
of the month, right, that that sort of is running
things at any given time. Right.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think we can in some ways
be egocentric where you know, I mean we think it's
all about us or like, you know, it's kind of
the way religion and as can be handled in a
similar type way, like we think that every move we
make it's actually something is observing or or cares about
us in some type of way, you know. And I
think that's I think in some ways we can make
this whole phenomenon be in that way. And you know,
I've I've asked this particular question to a number of people,
like astronomers, and so I just want your opinion of it.
So say we're the blue marble, We're floating through space,
you know, and whoever it is develops how they developed,
and they can look at us and detect that we
have life first of all, oxygen, whatever, water, all that.
But this could be something that's very common, you know,
supposedly very common in the universe. So why would we
be getting all the attention? Why? Why? Yes, again, it's
kind of an egocentric sort of question, right, but are
we that special? I know we have a lot of species,
we have a lot of life, but I don't know
if that's any different than other you know, inhabited inhabited
planets that are out there. I don't know. I mean,
are we special?
Speaker 2: Right now? It's a great question. I mean I see
it on two levels too. I mean the question itself, right,
are we that special? Well? You know, you could you
could point to you know, Copernicus of course pointing out that, hey,
guess what, we aren't the center of the Solar system
or the universe, it's actually the sun. Was one of
those moments. Another one was when Darwin puts together, you know,
evolution by natural selection, which sort of says, hey, we're
we are one of the animals, so we're not we're
not terribly special. So this would be another version of that,
and you're quite right, it would. You'd almost be led
to the argument that that, you know, they either came
across us by accident or we're just the next in
line right where one thousand, three hundred and seventy. You know,
it's like you go to the get your ticket now
here it's it's our turn, and they aren't going to
stay long because they're moving on to the next, the
next place. I mean, what's interesting to me again when
I think about like the history of how we have
tried to grapple with it, what's intriguing is to think
about this is that question again? Was there when people
first started to talk about this in the forties and
fifties and really really give it some time about well,
if they're visiting us, you know, why are they visiting us?
What's this all about? And of course you have in
the nineteen fifties you have the famous some would say infamous,
but the famous contact these right, oh yeah, who said
they you know, were visited by these really celestial, really wondrous,
almost angelic beans. And that was of course from their standpoint,
it was exactly that we are special. They've decided to
come here to save us from ourselves, to preach a
message of love and all of that. And of course,
by the time you get to twenty five thirty years later,
a lot of that stuff is gone and now you're
hearing stories about you know, little small beings that don't
even interact with us, right, have no interest in us,
or just seem to be like collecting plants, So you
kind of already had for years, You've had this kind
of discussion within the world of people who said they
had actual encounters, seemingly reporting very different versions of alien
or whatever beings. These would be right, So both sets
of arguments could be seen as pointing to certain witnesses
over the decades who sort of lead us down different paths. Right.
Speaker 1: I know you said you were talking earlier about you know,
from the nineteen seventy five forward, nobody's really written any
book about the history of this. But what about nineteen forties.
You know, some I've heard some people speculate, like Stan
Freeman used to say that because of the nuclear you know,
I was getting involved in new care weapons, et cetera,
the kids found the mattress, that type of thing, and
then you know, that's why some people, not everyone, but
some people think that's why all of a sudden, the
visitation started in forty seven and fifty two real heavily,
and you know, on and on and on like that.
I mean, I'm just asking for a speculation from you
as well. I mean, do you think the modern UFO
era was ushered in because of the nuclear situation?
Speaker 2: So, you know, Stan Friedman others make this iron In fact,
it was an argument that got made almost really within
the first few years after the Kenneth Arnold side, because
it was one of the questions that everybody had, right
you had to answer. You had to address a question
which was, you know, we haven't heard this thing before.
Nobody had heard now. Of course, there are people now
who go backwards and say, oh, we've seen other things
that are like this, but certainly at the time it
was seen as really unprecedented, so you have to explain it.
You had to say why now of all times? And
if the first explanation that made sense to people in
the late forties, you could see why it would make sense.
We had just been through a horrendous World war where
we had used unprecedented weapons of mass destruction, including two
atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people immediately, right,
and then you have experimenting in all these atomic tests.
So it seemed like a natural explanation for people. And
so that argument, I think, as you see with people
like Freedman and others, still has legs today. You know,
from my standpoint for me again, I come back to
what interests me is what explanations did people seek out,
how what made sense to people at any given time
about these kinds of things. And it seems to me
what you see time and again, particularly in the forties,
fifties into even the sixties, is everybody kept coming back
to the Cold War. Everybody kept saying or kept finding inspiration,
shall we say, in the Cold War that here it's
got to be either our atomic bombs or our atomic weapons,
our intercontinental ballistic missiles have caught the attention of these
other beings, right as you said, the kids have found
the matches. Or the other argument, of course, which was
very common, is these must be secret technologies of one
of the superpowers, right, and again that seemed like a
very reasonable explanation. Why because as people have said at
the time, Hey, during World War Two, one of the
superpowers in the United States had kept a secret, right,
this secret of atomic bombs and then had used them
and nobody had known about this. So why it's not
that far fetched to think that the Soviet Union or
the Americans are playing loosey goosey with some new technologies.
And we know in some cases that was the case, right,
like the YouTube planes. So you have both of those
arguments are going on at the time, and that, to
me is interesting is to unpack that and see how
people got there.
Speaker 1: The one thing that because I think that, I think
that too. I think today what people see, I think
some of it could be definitely technology. But when you
go back far enough in time and you hear people discuss,
you know, the maneuvers and things that they had seen
way back in the sixties. But also the thing that
a lot of people do not talk about very much,
I believe is the fact that these things are seen
shooting off at high rates of speed, there's never a
sound barrier broken. It's not whatever it is, I don't
you know, it's possible we may have that technology now,
but I don't believe that they have that technology, you know,
forty years ago or longer right any stretch. It just
seems like if they had that type of technology, we'd know,
we'd have to know something about it, right, I think
if it was around that long.
Speaker 2: Those are those Those are the cases, right, Those are
always the cases that leaves a lot of people scratching
their heads, and usually they go into the other bin
of unexplained phenomenon. Right, that's the that's the thing you get.
I mean it again, It's interesting because you know, I
look back. I think about, for instance, back in the
nineteen sixties and seventies, when people were really, really skeptical
and downright cynical about the way say, the US Air
Force was dealing with UFO reports and sightings right and
seemingly so dismissive and of course the arguments. Then there
were there kind of do two camps that you typically
saw you The one camp was the people who said,
you know what we would today called disclosure right disclosure
movement was the people like Donald Keijo and Night kept saying, hey,
these people know stuff and they're not they're not giving
it to us. We need to pressure them. And then
there were people like James McDonald or Coral Lorenzen who said, no,
you know what, I don't think they do know. I
think what it is is they're not very good at
this stuff. Or to be perfectly blunt, they used to
talk more privately how stupid the Air Force was, and
they were like, you know, let's quit demanding them give
us the information because I don't think they know what
the heck is going on, and I don't think they
have it.
Speaker 1: I agree with that. I say that quite often. I
think that they I do believe, you know, this is
again speculation, but I don't think they have the full picture.
I think they may have more of a picture than
we do, or some part of some compartmentalized part of
our government may have more information than we do. But
I still think that it's very possible. The reason we
may not see the full disclosure, as the big d disclosure,
as they say, because I don't think they know the
whole picture. And if you don't know the whole picture,
then how can you say you can protect someone. You
can't say that either if you don't.
Speaker 2: Have it, right, Yeah, that would be that would be
a very scary option, right, yeah, if that was the case.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I don't think that. I think that's why
the Air Force is holding back. You know, the Navy's
more open than the air Force. But I think, you know,
they just don't want to have to answer those questions.
You know, That's kind of how I feel. Here's another thing.
I remember I had Stanton Freeman and Kathy Mardin on
like a couple of days after there was the Sunday
Times December sixteenth, I think was twenty seventeen when the
Pentagon you know article came out in the New York Times.
Well by happenstance. Stanton Freeman was on that Tuesday afterwards,
and that video on YouTube quickly went over one hundred
thousand views, So there was a lot, you know, everyone
I wanted to know what stan Freeman had to say
about the whole thing, and the thing he said right
off the bat is why now, why are they coming
out with this now? So I'm asking you because you
must have addressed twenty seventeen in your book. I haven't looked.
I don't know if you did or not, but I mean,
what is you know, why would you think that they
they picked that time? Do you think was by force
in some way because of what was going to be
released with videos? Or you know?
Speaker 2: It's interesting, right. I mean I've tried, I've thought, had
long and hard about this, and part of me has
come to the conclusion that I need to defer to people,
for instance, who have made a career of say studying
or reporting on the Defense Department, for instance, because I
know that's its own very peculiar animal bureaucratic beasts. Right.
But you know, I've talked about it and the very
thing you're talking that you say, Stan Friedman sense strikes
a chord with me because I can remember talking with
a journalist who was covering and has written about some
of this very stuff, and who said to me, you know,
I've talked to people who do study the Defense Department,
and everybody is you know, most of the public is
always about, hey, you know, what aren't they telling us?
What else don't we know? And these things who said no,
they always tell us, they always advise us when this
stuff happens, is ask yourself, why are they coming out
with this? Like what's the motivation for them to say
something when they don't seemingly have to say it. I mean,
of course what it was was the New York Times,
and then of course Washington Post and Politico were all
putting this stuff out there, so there was pressure. But
if you remember, there was a lot of hemming and
hauling and a lot of delay for a while coming
out of there, and then this sort of slow drip
of recognition acknowledgment. And I what strikes me is I
get the sense that what you saw going on was
just a very different political climate than the old days,
that there's a lot more voices and a lot more
avenues for the public to express its discontent, a lot
more platforms for politicians to speak out and to say, hey,
this is important to my constituents, or hey, you know,
I've made a career out of looking after the welfare
of people who of people in the Air Force, in
the navy, because I got a base right right here
in my own district. Right that seems to me to
be a different climate than say, existed back in the
nineteen fifties and sixties during the Cold War, when I
think there was greater kind of censorship and self censorship
going on. But that's the best I can come up with.
To me, it still remains. And I know a lot
of other people scratch their heads and say, what is
it about twenty seventeen and eighteen that allowed this kind
of genie to get out of the bottle?
Speaker 1: Right right? Yeah? And you know you could say also
the same thing. I like, is this a place where
if you you know, the old term, follow the money,
you know, I mean, that's what you know Congress has
been trying to figure out, because you know, there there's
some and I don't know where that stands these days.
We just came up on the year. I was actually
in the room in DC when that hearing happened, and
I was lucky enough it needs to be the second
to last person in there. Now we're a year out,
and you know, I mean, it doesn't feel like I
don't know really what happened, you know, I mean, was
there momentum? I mean, does it feel It feels like
there was momentum. But you know, when you're looking at
this topic for a while, there's plenty of stages where
you feel like there's forward movement, and then you get
discouraged again. And you know, lou Elosando's book got leaked
and it's out there everywhere, and I've been trying to
help him retain some of the copies to you know,
get them taken off. But he's coming up in September,
you know, and on my show here, I'm going to
be asking him a lot of you know, these questions,
and one of them comes up all the time. Someone
just sent me something they took my quotes and some
news story or whatever about the twenty three minute video.
Have you heard about it? Yeah? So I can't wait
to talk to him about I mean, I talk with
basically you know his wife through email, That's how I
communicate with him. But I'm really curious about that video,
you know what I mean, Like that's supposed to be
another moving the needle situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and you know, to go back to
just what you were saying about this and how you
contextualize it. I mean, again, this has been and anybody
who's been in the business of UFO study. When I
talk to the veterans, they're all very, very familiar with
this stuff, is that this is exactly the pattern that
you've seen since the forties. Is these patterns, these moments
when there is this, like I say, concentration of a
lot of energy, people get mobilized. There's leading voices who
are leading the charge and who are having an impact
on public perceptions and seemingly getting movement within government circles,
even sometimes impacts on civilian research and academia, and then
it just sort of falls away. It just all sort
of disappears and dissipates. And how people try to keep
that alive is typically with some sort of new development, right.
I mean, you can go back and look over old cases,
only so only so many times before you need more
cases to sort of talk about and look at. So
that's the mo of I think the way this has
always played out, the reality is it just seems to
me every single time, just about every single time, people
get disappointed with the way the intelligence community comes back
at this. I don't think I've ever seen a time
when anybody, when large groups of people who were interested
in UFOs have been satisfied with that. You know, for
my money, if you really are interested in seeing some
sort of movement, it's going to have to be on
the civilian side of things, which means, you know, I
always tell people to me, the most encouraging thing is
to see NASA get behind this. NASA is about civilian
academics getting involved. And of course, when NASA says, hey,
it's okay to study this stuff, you know, we academics say,
all right, if you start saying there's money available, we'll
we trust me, we'll write the grants, we'll do the research.
So that's that's starting to go on. And so I think,
if you want to hang your hat on something, that
to me is the really to me, the real sea
change that you say, that's pretty unprecedented. We never had
something like that happen before in the over seventy five
years of history that we've seen. That to me is
where maybe just maybe you'll see developments and you'll see
research that we've never ever ever had a chance to
see before.
Speaker 1: I know what you're saying about NASA, and I was
all excited too, But whenever they came out with the
one hundred thousand dollars budget, I just thought that was
you know, that's like buying a lunch for them, you know,
it just it just seemed like, what do I want
to say, window dressing. You know, it didn't seem like
you know, it didn't seem legit to me. But I
don't know, No, I have gone further.
Speaker 2: No, Well, here's the thing I mean, I said the
same thing when it first came out. I mean, one
hundred thousand dollars for an agency like that is you
can't even buy out a full professor for that around
them money. So, but what was made very clear was
this wasn't to a study, a concerted study of UFOs.
What it was was simply as as as the you know,
the director or the chair pointed out about it. This
was supposed to be establishing a road map for future research.
The idea was, hey, well, before we can even do investigations,
we need to have set ideas about what are the guidelines,
what are the kinds of tools and resources we're going
to need if in fact we want to ever study
this stuff in a seriously scientific way. And that's all
they tried to do. And I will say they delivered that.
They delivered that, and now the idea is supposedly, now
go out and let's start doing this stuff. Now. From
my point of view, this is where people in academia say,
show me the money. All right, let's see the money.
And you're right. If we don't see NASA or the
National Science Foundation putting up some funds for people to
do this stuff, then maybe then you get skeptical and
you say, okay, this was a lot of talk, but
no real you know, no real uh, no real foundation
behind it.
Speaker 1: I'm thank you for clarifying that, because I was unaware
of that, and I don't think they made it very
obvious that that's what they were doing, or I just
didn't read enough about it, so all I saw was
that amount of money for funding, and I just thought, well,
that doesn't really mean anything then, But thanks for you know,
looking into it more.
Speaker 2: And I think they they Again, I know people were
in various circles were very critical of what they said
and how they approached it. Again, I think if if
if you read it, you read their report, but you
listen to what was said in the public news conference,
this was stuff that is completely unprecedented for NASA. The
history of NASA has been to put UFOs at arm's length. Yes,
they did not want to touch it when Vanda vant
Brown was around, never wanted to get near it. This
is a very different climate and a very different way
of of talking about this stuff. And the and the
fact that they're too recognition and acknowledgment that what people
were talking about and what particularly pilots were reporting unseeing
we're actual objects, We're physical, We're actual objects and not
just computer glitches. That that is something that is really,
like I said, quite quite unusual for an agency like NASA. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Uh, you know, I mean, I don't know what
to think about. Since we're on the topic of NASA,
I don't really know what to think about some of
the footage. It seems to me, you know, like when
you see UFOs from the space station or something like
that or outside of the Shuttles and some of the
old films, and a lot of times you say, well,
this is you know, this is ice particles, this is uh,
you know something like uh. I think a stage that
dropped off U. You know that looks you know, very
weird from far away. I had a conversation with Alan Bean,
you know, fourth person on the Moon several years ago,
and I couldn't get Supposedly in nineteen seventy, I can't
remember space Lab. I can't remember the name of what
was Skylabb, But there was a skylab. Yeah, there was
some type of thing with a tail, red tail on
you know that they all spotted. I could not He
was on my other I do a podcast in art
and antiques, and he was an amazing artist, so he
talked about his art. But when I try to get
him to talk about that, UFO to talk about it.
But there are people that will I had a story
musk Grave, for instance, he was on my show years
ago and he talked about you know, UFOs. And I
know there are other people that Gordon one am I
thinking of Gordon the famous astronaut, you know what I mean? Yeah,
I just I can't think of his full name right now.
But anyway, and shame on me for that. He was
a great guy. But there are people that took the
subject serious for many decades and and you know, have
a lot of validity, you know, But there are people
that talked about there they saw something in the moon.
I don't know whether I believe that stuff. I don't know,
you know, like they think there's beings on the moon
and all that. I don't know. Again, it seems egocentric.
Why would they be here, you know, at arm's length
and you know, studying us, And I don't know what
to think about any of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, exactly. We we we probably if that were
the case, we you'd think they get pretty bored of
us after a while. Yeah, it'd be like watching one
long game of golf or something, you know, because we
just we seemed to we seem to we human means,
keep seeming to make the same mistakes over and over again.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, the Truman Show. Yeah, yeah, but you know,
I mean, how are there is there any place in
your book for the purported abductions that people claim to
have that? Yeah, I did your.
Speaker 2: Book, Yeah, I do. I do talk about that in
the book, and particularly the last the last substance of
chapter is about alien abduction and trying to understand it
in the context of its time, and and and there again,
my argument is not to dismiss it, and I make
this point very clearly in the book. My book is
not designed to support the idea that aliens are visiting us.
Neither is it an effort at debunking. I'm doing what
historians have done for a very long time, which is
to sit back and to say, hey, how can we
understand the way in which we are trying a way
in which people sort of reacted in respet responded to
certain realities. Right, how did they do that? How did
they try to put the pieces together? And then how
did how did then people respond to the way people
put those pieces together? And so that's what I do
with alien abduction is I take it seriously. But the
idea is to understand how did this thing come to be?
When you understand it in the stream of UFO history,
and what you see is what striking to me is
the way in which so many of the ways in
which people talked about it were built on certain kinds
of reference points that existed at the time. Right, so
that people helped sort of build a way, built ways
to understand what they were experiencing by turning to you know,
what a historian wants called the mental tools available to
them at the time. Right. So people saw, you know,
described operations that sounded like a laparoscopy, uh, you know,
talked about uh forms of of of what appeared to
be technologies of cloning at a time when, of course
cloning was very very big, Right, Things like this that
that were ways in which, like I say, don't don't,
don't denigrate the way people talked about their experience, but
but says that, you know, people had to find ways
to make sense of something that was for them utterly bewildering.
And then the other thing I talk about was is
the critical role played by what I call consoling consultants,
people like David Jacobs, people like Bud Hopkins, people like
John Mack.
Speaker 1: John Mack. I was going to ask about John Mack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the very important, Yeah, the very important role they played.
They do not play an inconsequential role, because all of
them came to the phenomenon with certain ideas in their
heads and saw in the phenomenon something that made sense
to them, right, they themselves didn't have those same experiences,
though I know Hopkins had a UFO experience, but I
don't believe he ever had an abduction experience himself. But
the idea is is that is that they play a
really important mediating role in helping to steer people they
were talking with to view things in certain kinds of ways. Again,
not an unusual phenomenon, but it did sort of. It
is sort of interesting that when you see people who
would say, go to say Leo Sprinkle or John Mack
tended to view their experience one way if you went
to David Jacobs and but Hopkins to view it another way. Right,
Not an accident given who those people were, And of
course they're very different attitudes about what this phenomenon was
all about. Right, So that's the kind of stuff I
want to try to understand and unpack and how those
role of mediators helped it shape very different perspectives on
the phenomenon.
Speaker 1: So do you think that people like John Mack and
Bud Hopkins and David Jacob Sayale come to the table
with preconceived notions before they even started? Is that kind
of your thoughts?
Speaker 2: I think the way I would put it is before
before somebody has walked in the door or writes them
a letter, Right, they had some ideas in their mind
that were very fixed, some of them not very fixed, right,
but they had something to call on. Let's face it,
Otherwise you couldn't exactly be a very good counselor or
consultant to somebody. Right, if you had no preconceptions, then
I don't know how I would why I would come
to you. Right, they had identities, and people knew this.
And you talk to people who said I deliberately sought
out so and so because I knew about their reputation.
So they had some very clear ideas about what they
were doing. It doesn't mean that they implanted or created
these experiences for people. That's not what I'm saying. What
I'm saying, though, is that just as if you were
to go for advice from a counselor, right, which most
of us have done in our lives, even if it's
like a vocational counselor, they have something in their minds
about how they're going to talk with us, and that's
going to help shape the way I'm going to start
to think about what was going on that to me,
is a really interesting social relationship, and it's a social
relationship that that is complex and that I think requires
thinking about very seriously, which of course people did at
the time.
Speaker 1: Now I have to I'm gonna just throw the statue live,
wondering if you wouldn't mind going like another fifteen minutes further.
I just feel like this. I feel like I could
talk to you for another few hours, but if I
could have fifteen more minutes or so times, you know.
So I just want to say to that, I want
to say goodbye to everyone over at k A Radio
and we'll be back. I'll be down on the Cape
cod next week and face to face with Robert Schroeder,
who has a nuts and bolts type of theory of
how UFOs some UFOs have propulsion. He's a great guy.
I had him on years ago, Robert Schroeder, and he's
an engineer. It'll be a great show next week. So
thank you everyone on at KGr A Radio, and we'll
see you next week. So you know, I'm I think
this is this is also fascinating. And to ask you
how you thought, well, I'll just tell you my opinion first,
and I whant I understand yours a little what you
thought about it. I thought John Mack wasn't person first
of all. And ironically, I just work at selling a
house full of beautiful antiques for someone in Wellesley, Massachusetts
that was a friend of his and was distraught when
Harvard was trying to push him out and all that,
and saw all the turmoil he went through. But what
I wanted to basically say is when you watched John
Mack with those kids at the Ariel School, he was
just wonderful. He was down to their level. He was
not he was not feeding them any information, but he
made them feel comfortable. And I've talked to some of these,
you know, children that are adults now and basically said
He's the only one they really wanted to talk to.
You know, these other people were nice and everything, but
they felt really comfortable around him. And I guess what
I'm asking you is, you know, do you think if
John Mack was around today that things would be different
for him. He wouldn't have to go through all the
turmoil that he did at the time. And you know,
I don't even know the full John Mack story. Even
though I've had some people on that one woman Diana
can't remember her name, was going to make a film
about him. But anyway, I don't really know what the
genesis of how he started in particular, I don't really know.
Speaker 2: I talk, yeah, I talk about it in the book.
So so it's not a surprise that at all to
me to hear what you say about him and the
way he talked with these children and others. I mean,
he was an enormously well respected psychiatrist. I mean, you know,
he was. He was absolutely beloved by his colleagues, right,
who really respected him. And so he was seen as
a very talented person. I mean, this is this is
his training, but it was also his personality. But he
was somebody who always had a very much of a
broad perspective on what his mission was in the world
as a psychiatrist and a researcher, and and you know,
he was well before he got into UFOs and abduction.
He was very interested in two things. One is changing
the world. He became a you know, a climate activist.
He was very interested in the peace movement. He was
very very much someone who saw himself as as somebody
who is going to take an active role in helping
make the world a better place. The other thing that
he gets into before he gets into the alien of
ducts phenomenon, is something called trans personal psychology, right, which
is this psychology that understands the human personality more broadly
as connected to the wider cosmos a kind of I
guess a lot of people would think of it as
something kind of new age, like right, new age age
kind of thing. And so he had already had this
idea that part of making the world a better place
also means improving yourself and connecting to really the universe
and seeing yourself as part of really a kind of
cosmic citizenship. And so when he meets Bud Hopkins and
hears about these people who are abductees, he said, I
was absolutely skeptical. And then I talked to them, and
they don't strike me as mentally ill, they don't strike
me as hallucinating. They strike me as very lucid, thoughtful people.
And I'm starting to think that what this is is
something much bigger than I had ever imagined. And so
he saw it as fitting into this bigger picture, and
you know, he himself, you know, he did say, I
think that most of these people are actually having real
experiences about about a reality. He himself kind of hedged
his bets. He didn't. He sometimes said I think they're extraterrestrials,
and then at other times he really doesn't. He backs
away from that. But he did think that these folks
were having very real experiences that were worthy and transformative
but also worthy of study, and that they needed help.
They needed help in grappling with something so big that
it sort of defied explanation for themselves. And so that's
how he was open to this prospect in that way, I.
Speaker 1: Say, you know, I'm going to go back and talk
about egocentric one more time, you know, having a conversation
with someone off record, not not on this show, but
someone who you know, mentions that they were abducted, and
and I do believe something seriously, you know, did happen.
It's not just it's someone that I know that's very
very stable and talked about it. But that same person
thinks that whatever it is that is abducting people is
going to intervene, you know, if we do go to war,
and I think that's it seems again, like I said,
used this like five times today, egocentrical. You know, it's
kind of like, uh, he in particular, is saying this
because he says that we're all connected and this he
believes that whatever it is maybe here with us and
has been with us, and it's a higher intelligence here
and they have a lot at stake, and that's why
they're going to intervene if we can't make it through
the bottleneck and we start to blow ourselves up. He's
totally convinced that they're going to intervene. I don't know
what to think about that, but he says, it's not
just us, it's all the species on you know, all
the living species you know, and of course would all
be affected if we blow ourselves up.
Speaker 2: Basically, yeah, yeah, well right, I see it. You're right,
And the term is belief because one doesn't have much
else to go on when it comes to something like that.
But again, the problem, I will say, the one thing
that happens with most of most historians, most of my
colleagues and friends who are historians, is unfortunately, when you
study history, you actually tend to become a pessimist about life.
The story of history can be very, very depressing about
what a human beings and the way the world has worked.
I I'm sorry, but I also try to as much
as possible, whether I'm teaching or whether I'm writing, I
do try to identify either great, great moments where things
did in fact change, or people who have made huge
differences for the better. There's there you can find lots
and lots of examples of that. We have in fast,
in fact faced down major crises and walked back from
real peril in the past, even if, even if it
seems at times that things are hopeless. So as much
as I must admit I have a tendency to get
a little pessimistic, at times, I do hang on to
a threat of optimism that I'm not willing to relinquish,
and the belief that there's all a way out. There's
always avenues to get out of these authority situations, and
somehow we have managed at times to do just that.
Speaker 1: There's the saying I was I do. I don't know
who said it, but as a it's a wiser yet
sadder man I am. I don't know if you ever heard.
Speaker 2: That, but I had no I like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but uh, you know, I mean I'm optimistic too,
you know, I think you know, but I think it Unfortunately,
I think we're at the point where it really takes
something major because you know, like if if someone said, hey, look,
if we give up our cell phones, everyone in the
world gives up the cell phones, then we can solve
climate change. I don't think that's going to happen. I mean,
I'd have to really think about it, you know, and
it would be like, okay, well, how I know everyone's
going to give it, you know exactly. It was something
like that, if there was some type of that we
we once we get our technology, it's really hard for
us to let go. And you think of everything that
powers the earth, everything that we're you know, except for
renewable energy. We're taking the sunlight from you know, millions
of years and basically going through that energy, and you know,
we're using that energy and not really replacing it much.
You know. So yeah, I mean I don't know what
type of road you know, we're on. You know, I
don't want to get depressing either.
Speaker 2: Easy to do, easy to do at times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's a question that came in, and please thank
you for putting in caps and people please do if
you want to ask a question. Does Greg see anything
different about the current public discussion? Oh progress us more
towards transparency than in prior times. Thank you for the question, Eve.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I think that that that that folds in really nicely
with what Martin, you and I were talking about when
we talked about NASA. I it's just maybe the way
I think is that is that trying to get transparency
out of governments is historically been difficult, particularly in the
modern world. It's just the nature of the beast, and
I don't know that anytime soon government is ever going
to change on that. On that count, I think where
you get transparency is through people getting access to information
that they themselves are able to glean. And so I
put a lot of hope in what seems to me
something that is very unusual, which is a lot more,
as I say, academics getting into and studying this stuff.
And I know at times people can be very cynical
about US academics and thinking that we're part of the problem.
But you know, the thing is still to this day
we are an environment in which we work when you're
supposed to work transparently. You get to see all my data.
My book has lots of footnotes, so you know where
exactly I'm getting my information. Our data is there for
other people to look at and to criticize. We go
through peer review where other people criticize our stuff, and
go to conferences. We don't keep anything from you, And
in fact, if we're keeping something from you, somebody else
is going to find it and then come back to
you and say, then, why didn't you bring this up.
We're a good place for people going about stuff in
a really serious, thoughtful way. That says, by the way,
we don't have to play by the rules of the
intelligence community, right because we don't have to keep secrets.
We don't keep secrets. That to me is where the
future of transparency lays lies. And I will say there
is a lot of action going on. I think a
lot of people are not aware of this, but there's
a lot going on in academia right now. In fact,
in a few weeks, I'm going to be at at
I'm helping to organize this conference of the Society for
UAP Studies that's meeting online. Feel free to come join
us and listen in on some of the great talks
we're going to have. But it's a society that is
all about just that scholarly open, transparent research and trying
to find answers to the phenomenon on all sorts of levels.
That to me is the future and I think that
is encouraging. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people are still talking about the
I think it was called Soul Yeah. Yeah, Gary H.
Nolan Nolan yeah out in California organized that and I
wrote to him, I really want to make sure I
get there next year if that, if that's gonna happen again.
SCU you're talking about they they had a conference already,
like a live conference, right.
Speaker 2: That's a CEU and this is a this is a.
Speaker 1: Difference is different. What is your organization? Please?
Speaker 2: This is the Society for UAP Studies. It's been around now,
we've been around for yees a year now, Yes, and
it is it is it is different than all the
other organizations, and that it really it's its focus is
really exclusively built around UH scientific academic research, and it's
it's all about promoting that and finding avenues for that
to get to get explored and to get discussed. So
it's not about lobbying, it's not about white papers, it's
not about policy making. It's really a scholarly organization and
that's what makes it different. That's what makes it different
from I think a lot of other organizations.
Speaker 1: It's me that I I had, like I'm just looking
right now, but I don't see it. At one time
I did have like a graphic on my website that
would leap do that. So I'm going to ask you,
you know, once we get done our show tonight, if
you wouldn't mind sending me, you know, information about that
so I can yeah. Yeah, and this person, just as
are you accepting volunteers to help the cause? You know,
I mean that wouldn't be you. You're involved, but you're
not like an organizer, are you in any type of way.
Speaker 2: I'm an organizer. I'm an organizer of the conference. I
serve on the advisory board. But I'm sure there are
there are different sort of departments or departments is the
wrong term, but different aspects of the organization. But one
of the organizations if if you are not an academic
researcher but you're looking to help get involved. We have
a group who's who work in citizen science, and we
actually have a whole section of the organization that we're
courts on citizen science work because we think citizen science
is one of those things that's really really important in
building You can't just leave this to the to us academics.
We need to have people from all walks of life involved,
and so I think you can find that. So what
I'll do is when I I'll give you them information Martin,
and you can distribute this information about the conference. You'll
when you go to the conference site, you'll see information
about the organization and what it's about, how to get involved. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great, and I very I have selver years
that I have seen you know, so many people in
academics and science. You know. Finally, to me, it's one
of the most incredible questions puzzles that could be answered,
you know, that I've seen. And I have to say
that it goes back to the twenty seventeen article coming
out of in New York Times that I that's when
I saw the shift where people, you know, I started
because I used to say I had a few different
people on scientists and over the years where I'd say,
why does science not take this topic seriously and look
into it? And I've had answer ranged Trump there's no funding.
We couldn't get funding. And the reason we couldn't get funding.
Is that there's an end game? You know, you can't
really see closure on this because for instance, you know,
you see a UFO, it's a fleeting thing. It's not
something that you know, hotspots can be, you know, the
place where things can be observed a lot. But still
for the average Joe out there seeing UFO, it's maybe
a once in a lifetime. Like I consider myself that,
you know, I've seen other things, but I don't know
if they're unexplained. The first thing I saw, I still
want to say will always be on It explained to me.
But here's another question here, let's see what are your
thoughts on the upcoming public hearing? Is there one confirmed
for this fall?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, is there one apparence might know something we
don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. So yeah, i'd like to know more
about Maybe they just slipped. I never saw it, and
I would like to be there again because that was
really exciting, you know, to meet with like minded people.
And a thousand people showed up for those thirty seats,
which is quite amazing. Yeah, they never saw anything. The
people that worked there in that building, I forget the
name of the building, but the people that work there,
they said they have never seen anything like it as
far as people showing up. So but anyway, your book,
I'm going to it is linked down below in the
text and just it's right behind you after the flying saw. Yeah,
that's right, it is. Yeah, yeah, there it is right there.
So yeah, make sure you look at that book. And
there's a free preview right on our website on that,
not the whole book, of course, but that just comes
up naturally. But thank you, Greg. It's been a real
pleasure as always, and I really love having this conversation review.
It's it's great and I like the fact that you know,
you look at this with a real balanced, your balanced thoughts,
but you're not you know, denigrating in any type of
way or or you know, saying, oh yeah, the abductees
are you know whatever.
Speaker 2: You know, you know there's a responsible would be responsible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I like that. But thank you, thank you
very much, Greg, And as usual, yeah, thank you. Hope
to talk to you soon. All right, everyone, we'll be
back next week again with Robert Schroeder'm gonna be down
at the Cape and he's going to be We're going
to be face to face and another it should be
another really show. Thank you so much for watching and
being here every week, and remember to keep your eyes
to the sky.
Speaker 2: H