Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrie with
Speaker 2: you back with Garrett graf UFO the inside story of
Speaker 2: the US government search for alien life here and out
Speaker 2: there we were talking about the case of police Officer
Speaker 2: Lonnie Zamora, and that is the case that got the
Speaker 2: late doctor J. L. And Hydek, who headed up Project
Speaker 2: Blue Book for the government to believe that UFOs maybe
Speaker 2: coming from extraterrestrial places. Garrett, it was an incredible story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I was starting to say before the break,
Speaker 3: you know, the challenge for me is that witnesses like
Speaker 3: Lannie Zamora are uniquely credible, because what you had in
Speaker 3: his case was there were other witnesses who appeared very
Speaker 3: quickly into the New Mexico State trooper who was on
Speaker 3: the scene just minutes after his encounter. There was some
Speaker 3: physical evidence that something happened, and it seems very clear
Speaker 3: that sort of something happened and upset Jannie Zema, and
Speaker 3: that he is not someone who sort of had previous
Speaker 3: encounters or any subsequent encounters. And in fact, you know,
Speaker 3: he's not someone he was widely respected in the community,
Speaker 3: well life in the community, went on to sort of
Speaker 3: have a normal life after his encounter, and there's sort
Speaker 3: of no reason for him to have invented the story
Speaker 3: of an encounter like the one that he had. That's
Speaker 3: one of the things that stood out to Jay Allen Heinek.
Speaker 3: It stood out to me reading that history and testimonials
Speaker 3: and reports years later, and you know, there are those
Speaker 3: category of witnesses that you see over and across the
Speaker 3: years who have encounters who have no reason to make
Speaker 3: up the story and in fact have quite a lot
Speaker 3: potentially to lose for reporting a UFO or UAP encounter.
Speaker 3: I would put by the way, those navy pilots today,
Speaker 3: the naval aviators today in recent years come forward with
Speaker 3: the same type of category. And to me, those types
Speaker 3: of encounters, those types of stories, really are what convinced
Speaker 3: me that there is something here that is real, that
Speaker 3: is worth talking about, and would you know that our
Speaker 3: government should be more interested in figuring out what is
Speaker 3: actually going on.
Speaker 2: When I first heard the Lone Zamora case, which occurred
Speaker 2: in sixty four, and I heard about it years later.
Speaker 2: But when I first heard about the case, Garrett, I
Speaker 2: thought maybe what he saw was a test land of
Speaker 2: the lunar module, because this was five years before we
Speaker 2: landed on the Moon. Maybe he saw astronauts testing this
Speaker 2: thing taking off, flying down and landing and it sounded right.
Speaker 2: But dunnan, it hit me that Nah, he saw something else.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, in some wadys at the time,
Speaker 3: you could have said that that was the easy, simplex explanation.
Speaker 3: He was close to the White Sands proving grounds in
Speaker 3: New Mexico. It was the heart of the Apollo program,
Speaker 3: the heart of the space race. But the challenge is
Speaker 3: here we are, fifty sixty years later. We have never
Speaker 3: seen a craft emerge from the US government archives. We've
Speaker 3: never seen sort of declassified evidence of a craft that
Speaker 3: operates anything close to the way that what Janie Zamora
Speaker 3: explained that you saw.
Speaker 2: Did your research in this book convince you otherwise that
Speaker 2: the US government is holding back information?
Speaker 3: Well, this is a complicated story, and you know, sort
Speaker 3: of a complicated set of facts to try to untangled,
Speaker 3: because we know that there is a US government cover
Speaker 3: up about UFOs. You know, there are sort of several
Speaker 3: obvious cloaks of secrecy that we know exist in this world.
Speaker 3: You know, as we discussed previously, some chunk of these
Speaker 3: sightings are the US government's own secret plans, projects, experiments,
Speaker 3: and operations.
Speaker 2: No question.
Speaker 3: The CIA goes, you know, went back and tallied up
Speaker 3: that they think almost half of all sort of publicly
Speaker 3: reported UFOs in the nineteen fifties were the U two
Speaker 3: spot plane as it was being secretly developed during that decade,
Speaker 3: which was very much a UFO. It was a plane
Speaker 3: that flew a multitude that plane did not fly at,
Speaker 3: that did not look like any known plane, flying at
Speaker 3: speeds that its planes were not known to fly. You know,
Speaker 3: if you were a commercial airline pilot in the nineteen
Speaker 3: fifties winging your way across the country and you saw
Speaker 3: a YouTube spyplane above you, that was a true UFO,
Speaker 3: and we know that sort of some chunk of today
Speaker 3: you're sort of stumbling across similar efforts. We also know
Speaker 3: that there's a cloak of secrecy around, as we discussed
Speaker 3: that advanced adversarial technology that's being tested against US by
Speaker 3: foreign governments China, Russia, Iran, you know, maybe other governments.
Speaker 3: And we know that because the Pentagon has said that
Speaker 3: it has detected some of this as adversarial technology. But
Speaker 3: the government just does squirrely about what its sensors pick up,
Speaker 3: what it detects, what it doesn't detect, and it doesn't
Speaker 3: really necessarily want to let on everything that it knows
Speaker 3: about some of these UAP sighting for the purposes of
Speaker 3: not sort of sharing with China and Russia what it
Speaker 3: sees and what it doesn't. So you know, you have
Speaker 3: sort of those cloaks of secrecy that we know about
Speaker 3: at the heart of the government cover up. Though. I
Speaker 3: think John Brennan, as I mentioned earlier in the show,
Speaker 3: when he said in December twenty twenty, that there's stuff
Speaker 3: up there that he's puzzled by, that he doesn't know
Speaker 3: what it is, I think that that was an honest
Speaker 3: comment that I think he I think that US government
Speaker 3: leadership is honestly confused and unsure of what a lot
Speaker 3: of these UFOs and UAPs actually are. And one of
Speaker 3: the things that sort of bothers me as a taxpayer
Speaker 3: and a citizen writing about this subject is the lack
Speaker 3: of curiosity and serious study about what these things actually are.
Speaker 2: Unless it's going on clandestinely, it could be it could
Speaker 2: be clandestined.
Speaker 3: Yes, but I don't think that, you know, when you
Speaker 3: see these high level figures making comments that are sort
Speaker 3: of as genuinely puzzled as what John Brannan was saying,
Speaker 3: I think that there is at least some chunk of
Speaker 3: this phenomenon that they are still quite puzzled by, and
Speaker 3: I think they should care more about what the what
Speaker 3: the answers are.
Speaker 2: Do you think it's still conceivable within government that the
Speaker 2: left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and we have all sorts of evidence across the
Speaker 3: eighty years that I really sort of spent the eighty
Speaker 3: years that I really try to study in this book
Speaker 3: of the government not knowing what the government was doing.
Speaker 3: You know, you have the very famous case from the
Speaker 3: dawn of what was sort of then still called the
Speaker 3: Flying Saucer Age, when Captain Thomas Mantle, who was a
Speaker 3: Kentucky Air National Guard pilot, is dispatched in a P
Speaker 3: fifty one to chase a UFO over the skies of Louisville, Kentucky,
Speaker 3: and he is He and a couple of flight mates
Speaker 3: are dispatched and they race after what they see as
Speaker 3: a giant object. This is January seventh, nineteen forty eight
Speaker 3: in the skies over central Kentucky and Captain Thomas Mantle
Speaker 3: ends up flying you know, the official government report later
Speaker 3: is that he ends up flying too high in the
Speaker 3: sky without oxygen, trying to chase whatever this object is,
Speaker 3: and that he ends up passing out and his plane
Speaker 3: crashes and he's killed. And there's this a real moment
Speaker 3: of panic in inside the government that, you know, whatever
Speaker 3: these UFOs are, whatever these flying saucers are, you know,
Speaker 3: did they shoot down Captain Thomas Mantle? You know, are
Speaker 3: they actively hostile against US aircraft? And it's actually Project
Speaker 3: blue Book years later, about four years later, nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 3: finally pieces together what they think happened to Thomas Mantle,
Speaker 3: and Edward ruppolt a name I'm sure your listeners know
Speaker 3: who's the head of Project blue Book at the time,
Speaker 3: figures out that there was a secret Navy research balloon
Speaker 3: that he was chafing after and that sort of the
Speaker 3: Navy never mentioned to the Air Force that it had
Speaker 3: this capability, and that it had that he had died,
Speaker 3: you know, chasing the US government's own project.
Speaker 2: It was an incredible case. What did you think of
Speaker 2: the late Harvard the professor John Mack, who spent part
Speaker 2: of his career chasing down alien abduction cases.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I spent a couple of chapters sort of wrestling
Speaker 3: in in the book with the stories of alien abductions,
Speaker 3: and you know, all of those names that I'm sure
Speaker 3: your listeners no, John Mac, Bud Hopkins and others, and
Speaker 3: you know, to me it was one of the more
Speaker 3: fascinating corners of this subject because you know what what
Speaker 3: John Mack and Bud Hopkins and others who look at
Speaker 3: this phenomenon come away convinced is that some real trauma
Speaker 3: has happened to these people who report these types of encounters,
Speaker 3: that they you know, that they share all of the
Speaker 3: hallmarks of trauma victims, and that there is not a
Speaker 3: shared psychology behind them before they experienced their encounters. You know,
Speaker 3: these were not necessarily people you know, for instance, who
Speaker 3: all all had a type of mental illness before they
Speaker 3: had uh, you know, reports of their encounters with aliens.
Speaker 3: Where I think I settle is, you know that at
Speaker 3: a certain level we have to believe them, that you know,
Speaker 3: that they are coming forward and telling the truth, that
Speaker 3: they understand it, that they have had some type of
Speaker 3: encounter that at least for now, remains unexplainable to us.
Speaker 3: I don't necessarily end up concluding that. I think that
Speaker 3: you know, that necessarily means that they are being abducted
Speaker 3: by aliens, but that they're they are having an encounter
Speaker 3: of some time. We have a force that we don't
Speaker 3: yet understand.
Speaker 2: What is it about Harvard? Now we have Professor A.
Speaker 3: VI Lobe doing his thing, yes, and you know, I
Speaker 3: actually was, uh did an event with Abby Lobe last
Speaker 3: week at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and you know, one
Speaker 3: of the things that sort of kept going through my
Speaker 3: mind was, you know, the sort of main figure arguing
Speaker 3: against the you know, the sort of early UFO and
Speaker 3: early UFO and early flying saucer age was Auvy Lobe's predecessor,
Speaker 3: sort of the debunker in chief, Harvard astronomer, Donald Menzel.
Speaker 3: And I was thinking about sort of how far we
Speaker 3: have come in astronomy in fifty years that you go
Speaker 3: from Donald Menzel, who was the you know, the the
Speaker 3: arc type skeptic, to Azvy Lobe, who you know, is
Speaker 3: about as close to to a curious believer as you
Speaker 3: can find these days.
Speaker 2: When you read the context of the Bible Garrett, and
Speaker 2: it talks about fallen angels and things like that. If
Speaker 2: you add in and replace them with extraterrestrials, it still
Speaker 2: makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3: You know, then, yes, And I think one of the
Speaker 3: things that it is very clear is that they're you know,
Speaker 3: you go but sort of through almost any civilization in
Speaker 3: human history, and they report weird things in the sky
Speaker 3: and they you know, this is not something that was
Speaker 3: totally invented in the summer of nineteen forty seven by
Speaker 3: Kenneth Arnold in the Pacific Northwest. This is sort of
Speaker 3: something that human have wondered about and struggled with for
Speaker 3: their entire for our entire existence. And to me, part
Speaker 3: of what makes this story so interesting is the way
Speaker 3: that it mixes spirituality and science. You know that this
Speaker 3: question of are we alone? Is one of the two
Speaker 3: or three most profound questions of human existence, you know,
Speaker 3: right up there with is there a God? And what
Speaker 3: happens to us after death? And I don't know that
Speaker 3: we will ever solve you know, those latter two questions,
Speaker 3: but I am very optimistic that we will solve that
Speaker 3: first question of are we alone? You know, if humanity
Speaker 3: pursues it in, and we sort of give ourselves as
Speaker 3: a civilization the chance to live long enough to explore it.
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