Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norri with you.
Speaker 2: Nick Cook with us. Author of at least twenty books
Speaker 2: on fiction and nonfiction titles in the US and the UK,
Speaker 2: including several ghosts written Sunday Times bestsellers. A former technology journalist,
Speaker 2: he's well known for his groundbreaking best selling nonfiction book,
Speaker 2: The Hunt for Zero Point. He also has written, produced,
Speaker 2: and presented two feature length documentaries for the History and
Speaker 2: Discovery channels, and as a speaker, Nick imparts his wealth
Speaker 2: of experience passionately on issues such as global challenges, sustainability,
Speaker 2: defense and security, the future of technology, and the power
Speaker 2: of story and the tapping to the theme of his
Speaker 2: latest fact based thriller, The Grid, the Human Mind his
Speaker 2: latest book, The Light Beyond the Mountains, Nick, welcome back.
Speaker 2: How have you been.
Speaker 3: I've been extremely well, Thanks George. Good morning from the UK.
Speaker 2: How are you all is good? Thanks? Calming down after
Speaker 2: this weekend. I hope we had a rough weekend here
Speaker 2: in the United States.
Speaker 3: Neck we saw you know, we may be two great
Speaker 3: nations often divided by a common language, but it was
Speaker 3: extremely concerning to see all of that. I think, you know,
Speaker 3: whatever your political affiliations, that was just a terrible, terrible
Speaker 3: thing that we saw here and I don't think many
Speaker 3: people here in the UK would disagree with that.
Speaker 2: Watch to talk with you about tonight, Nick, including you
Speaker 2: were the eurospace editor for James Defense Weekly for what
Speaker 2: twenty years?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Almost twenty years, George. For part of that time
Speaker 3: I left the sort of freelancer and I became their
Speaker 3: aerospace consultant for a few years, but all in all
Speaker 3: it was about twenty years. Yeah, they were great years
Speaker 3: for me. I really really enjoyed that beat, went to
Speaker 3: some fantastic places, learned some incredible things. Yeah, it was
Speaker 3: a very good, good time.
Speaker 2: What were your favorite topics that you handled for them?
Speaker 3: Oh, without a doubt, it was being on the trail
Speaker 3: of classified aircraft programs in the US. My colleague and I,
Speaker 3: the North America editor of Jane's Defense Weekly at the time,
Speaker 3: was a guy called Bill Sweetman, and Bill Bill and
Speaker 3: I went on the trail of stealth and hypersonic programs
Speaker 3: at a time when they were deeply secret. So this
Speaker 3: was in the sort of latter stages of the Reagan administration,
Speaker 3: and no one was acknowledging in officialdom that these programs existed.
Speaker 3: Yet there were sightings all over the desert southwest of
Speaker 3: strange shapes in the sky. Bill did this fantastic bit
Speaker 3: of sort of Sherlock holmesy and investigation following up all
Speaker 3: of these technology clues that show that these programs were
Speaker 3: in existence, and I sort of came along as his
Speaker 3: then apprentice, and we had a lot of fun just
Speaker 3: building the evidence to show that these programs, these black programs,
Speaker 3: really existed.
Speaker 2: Now, how many of these stealth type aircraft got confused
Speaker 2: for UFO sidings.
Speaker 3: Oh a great many did, so, you know, it was
Speaker 3: very telling to us that I did an interview once
Speaker 3: with the head of the skunk Works and I was
Speaker 3: ushered into the skunt Works building. This was in about
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety six. For the interview, and during the course
Speaker 3: of this interview, the guy said I worked on. His
Speaker 3: name was Jack Gordon. I worked on fifteen real flying aircraft.
Speaker 3: There are fifteen real flying aircraft programs in the course
Speaker 3: of my career that I can only talk about twelve
Speaker 3: of them. Now I've done a sort of audit since
Speaker 3: then of what those missing three aircraft could have been,
Speaker 3: and even to this day they have not appeared. I mean,
Speaker 3: there are some programs which could fall into that bracket,
Speaker 3: but there are so many classified aircraft projects still that
Speaker 3: have flown that have not been acknowledged and for reasons
Speaker 3: we can maybe go into later, George, but it is
Speaker 3: all of those, I mean, a lot of those unfamiliar
Speaker 3: shapes in the sky at the time got lumped into
Speaker 3: a kind of UFO category, and of course that suited
Speaker 3: the powers that be because there is advantage for them
Speaker 3: in having classified aircraft programs confused as UFOs. It just
Speaker 3: obscures the whole, the whole picture, and keeps things to
Speaker 3: meant to be secret secret. And it has precedent. You'll recall,
Speaker 3: I'm sure that during the nineteen fifties and early nineteen
Speaker 3: sixties the CIA deliberately obfiscated it's two big spyplane programs,
Speaker 3: the U two spyplane and the A twelve, which was
Speaker 3: later to become the SR seventy one Blackbird. You know,
Speaker 3: both of those were flying in the sky, but both
Speaker 3: needed to be hushed up, and the UFO sort of
Speaker 3: curtain to hide them behind was perfect. And so with
Speaker 3: that precedent in mind, they've gone on to do that
Speaker 3: in spades subsequently, and you know it's even going on,
Speaker 3: especially going on today.
Speaker 2: And they of course still continue to deny, deny, deny too, Nick,
Speaker 2: don't they.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I mean that's all part of the game plan.
Speaker 3: And there is a big sort of you know, toolkit,
Speaker 3: as you know, of deniability and disinformation that keeps these
Speaker 3: projects secret or is supposed to. And they've become actually
Speaker 3: much harder to investigate in the modern era because they're
Speaker 3: they're they're obscured even more by social media and you
Speaker 3: know the sort of binary kind of slanging matches that
Speaker 3: go on on forums like Twitter and elsewhere, and all
Speaker 3: of the signal gets lost in a lot of noise,
Speaker 3: and you know that again is advantageous. I'm just I'm
Speaker 3: very glad I'm not investigating these things anymore because they
Speaker 3: would be they would be pretty challenging to do. So
Speaker 3: there are people, of course out there who do that
Speaker 3: and I think are doing a good job. But that's
Speaker 3: that's not my bag anymore. But I had a lot
Speaker 3: of fun doing it while I was at Janine's Defense Weekly.
Speaker 2: What do you think the percent Nick of sightings were
Speaker 2: UFOs compared to stealth airplanes.
Speaker 3: Well, that takes us into some quite interesting territory, because
Speaker 3: I think you can safely say, you know, there are
Speaker 3: sort of known unknowns, there are unknown unknowns to coin
Speaker 3: that famous Rumsfeldian expression. But within the sort of known
Speaker 3: unknown category, I think quite a high percentage of sightings
Speaker 3: during the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties even could
Speaker 3: be put down to classified aircraft sightings, you know, particularly
Speaker 3: in places like the desert southwest of America. And it
Speaker 3: wasn't just self, you know, there was this rather wonderful
Speaker 3: mythical beast that Bill Sweetman and I chased called Aurora,
Speaker 3: and was meant to be a very high flying, very
Speaker 3: fast replacement for the SR seventy one Blackbird. There were
Speaker 3: plenty of fightings of this thing, both actually over America
Speaker 3: and over other parts of the world, including the UK,
Speaker 3: where this mythical beast was meant to be based for
Speaker 3: a while in the wilds of the western Highlands of
Speaker 3: Scotland at a remote base there. And I think there's
Speaker 3: very good evidence now to say that that aircraft program
Speaker 3: Aurora existed. I've spoken to plenty of people in officialdom
Speaker 3: who have given nods and winks over the years to
Speaker 3: say it did. Of course, there are sort of political
Speaker 3: implications of owning up to this stuff as well, because
Speaker 3: during the stealth era, politicians were able to get away
Speaker 3: with denials that there was any stealth fighter program because
Speaker 3: in the end it wasn't a stealth fighter, it was
Speaker 3: actually a stealth attack aircraft. So semantics played a really
Speaker 3: big part in the denial the denial game. But you know,
Speaker 3: journalists wiped up to that after the sealth fighter was
Speaker 3: revealed in nineteen eighty eight and then began to ask
Speaker 3: all the right questions and didn't give politicians any room
Speaker 3: to wiggle or wriggle their way out of out of it.
Speaker 3: So that's sort of political embarrassment attached to owning up
Speaker 3: to these programs, even if some of them are now
Speaker 3: forty years old, because some of those same politicians are
Speaker 3: still alive, and you know, to have them admitted to
Speaker 3: now would again be politically embarrassing. So I think a
Speaker 3: lot of those programs, or those aircraft projects, perhaps even
Speaker 3: Aurora itself, were literally he dropped into a hole in
Speaker 3: the desert, the sand buried over them, and you know,
Speaker 3: they were left there or would be left there for
Speaker 3: somebody else to figure out politically how to deal with it,
Speaker 3: you know, maybe decades down the track.
Speaker 2: Oh, Nickcock, Come they didn't continue with Aurora. I mean,
Speaker 2: why bury it like that?
Speaker 3: I did have really had a really fascinating interview once
Speaker 3: George with a guy called another George, General George Malner.
Speaker 3: General Malner was the USF Forces head of R and
Speaker 3: D programs during the late the late nineteen nineties, and
Speaker 3: on the day that he retired from office in I
Speaker 3: think it was in nineteen ninety eight, I went to
Speaker 3: interview him on the agenda was officially with black programs.
Speaker 3: I could talk with him about classified aircraft development programs,
Speaker 3: And in the course of that he said to me,
Speaker 3: I asked him the question about Aurora, And I said,
Speaker 3: come on, it's your last day in office. You can
Speaker 3: tell me. Was it real? Is it real? And he said, well,
Speaker 3: let me put it this way. He said, we had
Speaker 3: a retirement issue with the Blackbird aircraft in nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: We had an old generation of satellites up there, spy
Speaker 3: satellites that couldn't quite do the job. We had a
Speaker 3: new generation that was coming online but wouldn't be online
Speaker 3: for a while. So how do you think we filled
Speaker 3: the gap? And I went, okay, you'd need a very fast, flying,
Speaker 3: quick reaction spyplane that could get up there and monitor
Speaker 3: developments on the ground in the case of some you know,
Speaker 3: a political crisis, some regional crisis. And you know, I
Speaker 3: think that was a really good and strong hint that
Speaker 3: what a raw did was fill a gap. It filled
Speaker 3: a sort of surveillance gap between an old generation of
Speaker 3: spy satellites that couldn't do the job, a new generation
Speaker 3: of digital real time satellites that weren't yet in place,
Speaker 3: and this retired aircraft, the SR seventy one that was
Speaker 3: no longer there to fill that gap. So you know,
Speaker 3: for me, that was kind of cake plots. Aurora was real.
Speaker 3: They built a few what they call deployable prototypes. The
Speaker 3: prototypes were seen. I know RAF pilots who've seen it,
Speaker 3: who've talked to me about it. So yeah, I call
Speaker 3: it a mythical beast, but it's not really quite as
Speaker 3: mythical as I make up.
Speaker 2: But you don't think it's secretly in process right now?
Speaker 3: No, I don't, because actually it along with that sort
Speaker 3: of semi confession of general Molners to me was something
Speaker 3: else that he said, which was that it was I
Speaker 3: think he kept couch to it this way. It would
Speaker 3: be a very expensive shortfall gap solution to put this
Speaker 3: thing up there. You can imagine this was an aeroplane
Speaker 3: that absolutely pushed all of the limits in terms of
Speaker 3: engine technology, in terms of materials. To build it. It
Speaker 3: cost an absolute fortune, and it cost a fortune to
Speaker 3: run because it probably ran on some kind of exotic
Speaker 3: fuel which was hard to maintain and keep in service.
Speaker 3: So all in all, you know, it was a great
Speaker 3: breakthrough technologically, but expensive to maintain and keep in service.
Speaker 3: And I think it's legacy though, continues in that. You know,
Speaker 3: we've seen for some decades now, companies like Lockie Martin,
Speaker 3: you know, the skunk work saying we're going to build
Speaker 3: an SR seventy one replacement. Well, a lot of people
Speaker 3: would say you've already built one, but you can't admit
Speaker 3: to it. So it's you know, it's a fascinating piece
Speaker 3: of the sort of classified aircraft puzzle.
Speaker 2: Oh it's Nick Cook. Nick tell us about the History
Speaker 2: Channel and Discovery Channel's documentaries you produced.
Speaker 3: Well, the first one I did was called Billion Dollar
Speaker 3: Secret and that was for Discovery, and we filmed it
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety eight. In fact, that General Mulna interview
Speaker 3: was part of that, and that for me was it
Speaker 3: was quite an edgy departure from what I normally did,
Speaker 3: because you know, it's quite hard to remember now, but
Speaker 3: back in the day, you didn't talk about UFOs. I mean,
Speaker 3: in my certainly in my line of work, you'd be
Speaker 3: sort of drummed out of the business pretty quick if
Speaker 3: you had. But I wanted to explore this hinterland between
Speaker 3: FID aircraft's development and sightings thereof and what people commonly
Speaker 3: reported as UFOs. So Billion Dollar Secret explored that hinterland,
Speaker 3: and that came out in nineteen ninety nine, and then
Speaker 3: I did another one called UFO's Secret Evidence, which sort
Speaker 3: of did the same thing, but it went into it
Speaker 3: in a bit more detail and took the disinformation angle
Speaker 3: as its sort of main compass bearing And that also
Speaker 3: was two hours. We did that for the History Channel,
Speaker 3: and that also was a fascinating departure for me as well.
Speaker 3: By when you know, we were still in this very
Speaker 3: heretical zone of you just don't talk about UFOs in
Speaker 3: my line of business. Things of course have eased up
Speaker 3: a bit now, but hard to remember back then that
Speaker 3: this was a really taboo subject.
Speaker 2: When you were with Changed Defense Weekly. Did you ever
Speaker 2: do any kind of UFO stories?
Speaker 3: Well, Uh, I didn't. I kind of. I sort of
Speaker 3: dropped the odd hint every now and again in my writing.
Speaker 3: But maybe we could come onto this in a minute,
Speaker 3: because it's a sort of topic in its own right
Speaker 3: in a way. But I, in the course of my
Speaker 3: job at Jane's, I decided to write The Hunter zero Point,
Speaker 3: which was my sort of investigation of anti gravity, and
Speaker 3: that did emerge out of the work that I was
Speaker 3: doing at Jane's, but I did it on my own,
Speaker 3: if you like. It was the sort of sub radar
Speaker 3: activity for me that I didn't know it was going
Speaker 3: to morph into a book. But I started doing that
Speaker 3: investigating this in the sort of early mid nineteen nineties period,
Speaker 3: and by the end of the nineteen nineties I realized
Speaker 3: I had enough material for a book, and that went
Speaker 3: into The Hunter zero Point.
Speaker 2: What other places did the Hunt take you?
Speaker 3: Oh? The Hunt took me everywhere, and it really sort
Speaker 3: of itched this scratch, this itch that I'd had. The
Speaker 3: question being to myself was Okay, Nick, you have all
Speaker 3: of this amazing access to all of these people through
Speaker 3: your Jane's job. What is it that you personally would
Speaker 3: really like to investigate? And I thought, well, actually, an
Speaker 3: undiscussed technological breakthrough on the order of the atomic bomb
Speaker 3: from the Second World War. What would that breakthrough be?
Speaker 3: I thought, well, I think it would be in the
Speaker 3: propulsion arena. And that said, I think it would therefore
Speaker 3: be in the kind of anti gravity field. And I
Speaker 3: think that would be a secret you really wanted to
Speaker 3: hush up, and it would of course make it very
Speaker 3: UFO like, which would make it incredibly hard to talk about.
Speaker 3: But that was the question I set myself, and I
Speaker 3: just went on this massive road trip, a physical road trip,
Speaker 3: but a road trip mind as well, which took me
Speaker 3: to all kinds of places, predominantly of course, all across
Speaker 3: the United States where everything was going on at the time,
Speaker 3: but also back in time. I had to go into what,
Speaker 3: for example, Nazi Germany was ding doing during the Second
Speaker 3: World War to try and eliminate some of the legends
Speaker 3: that had come out of the Ufology law to do
Speaker 3: with the Nazis and UFOs and stuff. So I had
Speaker 3: to address all of these things, and a lot of
Speaker 3: it was deeply unfamiliar territory for me, but a fascinating
Speaker 3: hinterland to explore.
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