Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. All Right, I think
Speaker 1: that the panel has been uh verc patient, I'm sure
Speaker 1: very interested, and everything has been said, and perhaps we
Speaker 1: might ask who would like to start the questioning? Back
Speaker 1: to thinking, Well, I'd like to begin the questioning, if
Speaker 1: I may, with with one general line of inquiry. Our
Speaker 1: present understanding of the evolution of of life on Earth
Speaker 1: is that it's a slow process of evolution by natural selection.
Speaker 1: The human beings are the product of several billions of
Speaker 1: years of random mutation accidental effects leading up to what
Speaker 1: we are now. Other planets certainly have environments quite different
Speaker 1: from those on the Earth, and therefore we would expect
Speaker 1: it beings that evolved there would have even greater differences,
Speaker 1: and that would not look closely like human beings. And
Speaker 1: that's why I was interested to see that the characterization
Speaker 1: of the inhabitants of the supposed extraterrestrial space vehicle where
Speaker 1: we're a few minor difference, is very closely human. Head,
Speaker 1: two eyes, smell like a nose, mouth, hands, feet, and
Speaker 1: so on. This seemed to me that much more likely
Speaker 1: that this was putting projecting human experience onto perhaps something else.
Speaker 1: I think the thing that strikes me most is the
Speaker 1: fact that not only did these creatures breathe the Earth's
Speaker 1: atmosphere with no difficulty, but you were able to breathe
Speaker 1: the spacecraft's atmosphere with no difficulty. Is that a question, No,
Speaker 1: it's our common Well, that's all I can say is
Speaker 1: did you notice any respirators or anything of that? Not
Speaker 1: my position, um certain out of psychologists, but some aspects
Speaker 1: of the story that Mrs Hill told, particularly the needle incident,
Speaker 1: seemed to me recognizable having read Freud. I discussed it
Speaker 1: with Betty herself too, and that Betty is as a
Speaker 1: qualified state social worker, is aware of the dream symbolism
Speaker 1: and that sort of thing. Oh man, I had something
Speaker 1: said something that I've discovered sense the hypnosis, And I
Speaker 1: don't know is this would apply to it, doubts, But
Speaker 1: in hospitals, when it's necessary to obtain a blood sample
Speaker 1: from a small infant, it is done through the navel.
Speaker 1: I think that you might uh correct me, and this
Speaker 1: is wrong at least point out the one fact that
Speaker 1: you said it was a very large needle, larger than
Speaker 1: anything that you had ever seen before long that it
Speaker 1: had been plunged into your navel. I can't say that
Speaker 1: it was plunged in. What it was that they started
Speaker 1: to insert it and I had pain, and I was
Speaker 1: under the impression they stopped, But there was no blood
Speaker 1: or physical evidence of puncture. I wasn't aware of this
Speaker 1: until nineteen Well, whenever it happened, if it did happen,
Speaker 1: you didn't detect any wound on your body. That's Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan expressing his skepticism to Betty and Barney Hill on
Speaker 1: The David Schomberg Show in nineteen seven. I think a
Speaker 1: skeptical mindset has to be brought to bear on any
Speaker 1: claims regarding UFOs, and quite frankly, the UFO proponents that
Speaker 1: I spoke with for this podcast expressed the same opinion.
Speaker 1: But there's significant disagreement on what exactly constitutes evidence in
Speaker 1: this context and at what point you can conclude that
Speaker 1: abductions are happening. Carl Sagan asserted that extraordinary evidence of
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial visitation was required. A half century after the Hill
Speaker 1: experience kicked off a succession of abduction accounts. What is
Speaker 1: the state of the evidence. I'm Toby Ball and This
Speaker 1: Is Strange Arrivals Episode eleven, Extraordinary Claims. In the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties and nineties, interest in UFO abductions peaked partly because
Speaker 1: of the work of Bud Hopkins, John mac and David Jacobs,
Speaker 1: and partly because the concept had been adopted by popular culture,
Speaker 1: most notably in the X Files and Close Encounters of
Speaker 1: the Third Kind. However, it was all fueled by the
Speaker 1: sheer number of people who truly believe that they've been abducted.
Speaker 1: UFO researcher Alajandro Rojas there are, and I don't think
Speaker 1: the general public realizes this, tens of thousands, if not
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people that report these experiences, that
Speaker 1: believe they're having interactions or abductions with aliens. And some
Speaker 1: of these people are very credible lawyers, police, people in
Speaker 1: the military. That I think makes it very significant. During
Speaker 1: this time, there was a change in the standard abduction story.
Speaker 1: Instead of driving lonely roads at night, the abductee would
Speaker 1: be in bed asleep and it would be pulled from
Speaker 1: their bedroom up to a craft where they'd be subjected
Speaker 1: to examination and experimentation. The new narrative was consistent with
Speaker 1: the medically recognized condition known as sleep paralysis. Skeptoid host
Speaker 1: Brian Dunning. Sleep paralysis is when you wake up, Usually
Speaker 1: it's shortly after you've fallen asleep or shortly before you
Speaker 1: wake up. You're conscious, but you're unable to move, and
Speaker 1: you see you often see some sort of an entity
Speaker 1: there in the room with you, and that entity often
Speaker 1: sits on you or pushes down on you, and you
Speaker 1: feel a weight on your chest holding you down and
Speaker 1: you can't move. That's a classic case of sleep paralysis.
Speaker 1: It's a very thoroughly documented actual phenomenon. This is not new.
Speaker 1: Samuel Johnson defined the conditions of sleep paralysis as a
Speaker 1: quote unquote nightmare in his Dictionary of the English Language
Speaker 1: in seventeen fifty five. The term nightmare eventually evolved to
Speaker 1: today's meaning of a bad dream. Now where the Betty
Speaker 1: and Barney Hill story comes into it and impacts the
Speaker 1: history of sleep paralysis is what character people have seen
Speaker 1: sitting on their chest during these episodes prior to this,
Speaker 1: Prior to the nineteen sixties, in Western society, it was
Speaker 1: always the old hag. That's where we get the turn
Speaker 1: feeling haggard from. You feel Haggard today because you were
Speaker 1: up last night, because the old hag was writing you
Speaker 1: around like a donkey. People would wake up and they
Speaker 1: would see this hag a crone which type character sitting
Speaker 1: on them, are standing over them. After the Betty and
Speaker 1: Barney Hills story changed and this idea of the gray
Speaker 1: alien entered sort of the pop consciousness, suddenly we had
Speaker 1: alien abductions. People would wake up reporting gray aliens in
Speaker 1: their bedroom. Thees I think was when this really peaked.
Speaker 1: University of California, Irvine professor Elizabeth loftis sleep paralysis. It's
Speaker 1: very scary if you don't know what it is, and
Speaker 1: they end up, you know, in the hands of somebody
Speaker 1: like Hopkins or John Mack who manages to convince them
Speaker 1: that this is a sign that they were abducted and
Speaker 1: that's what they need to deal with. And through suggestive interventions, interviewing, hypnosis, whatever,
Speaker 1: they helped these patients clients, whatever they are, conjure up
Speaker 1: images that then feel as if memories. Even among supporters
Speaker 1: of the idea that UFO abductions are occurring, there is
Speaker 1: an acknowledgement that at least some reported abductions are the
Speaker 1: result of sleep paralysis. It's a fascinating topic, and Betty
Speaker 1: and Barney Hill story had a huge impact steering the
Speaker 1: history of sleep paralysis in the United States, which I
Speaker 1: think is just marvelous. Belief that aliens have visited the
Speaker 1: Earth remained strong in the US. In twenty century Fox
Speaker 1: Home Entertainment commissioned to survey regarding UFOs and aliens. It
Speaker 1: found that almost thirty nine percent of Americans believed that
Speaker 1: aliens have visited the Earth. An eighteen percent believe that
Speaker 1: aliens do abduct people. But despite this, alien abductions seemed
Speaker 1: to have slipped from the public consciousness in recent years.
Speaker 1: Author Terry Matheson, I remember you could go through a
Speaker 1: supermarket checkout line without seeing at least one tabloid with
Speaker 1: a picture of an alien on the front cover and
Speaker 1: a news story about somebody who has been abducted by aliens. Now,
Speaker 1: I can't remember the last time I saw anything like that.
Speaker 1: It seems to have just dropped off the radar. As
Speaker 1: I've mentioned earlier in this series, I think this is
Speaker 1: largely due to the escalation in the scope and strangeness
Speaker 1: of abduction stories. When you are constantly one upping the
Speaker 1: previous story. There comes a point at which the narrative
Speaker 1: becomes so incredible that it can't plausibly be made more extreme.
Speaker 1: There is a limit, and for abductions that limit seemed
Speaker 1: to be hit during the Hopkins era. Matheson has a
Speaker 1: similar take. It relies on the book Morphology of the
Speaker 1: Folk Tale by Vladimir Prop, which looked at how folk
Speaker 1: tales are structured. Prop argue that there are only certain
Speaker 1: of that can follow from a previous event. Take a
Speaker 1: fairy tale, for example, Cinderella's mother dies. Okay, what's going
Speaker 1: to happen? There are two possibilities. The father will marry again,
Speaker 1: or he won't. Then he marries again. The stepmother will
Speaker 1: be good and loving or hard and ruthless. Well, it
Speaker 1: makes a better story if she's the latter. And he
Speaker 1: went on and on showing how there are certain developments
Speaker 1: in every story, that the story is limited by the
Speaker 1: number of things you can profitably put into as a
Speaker 1: subsequent event. And I think that gets us back to
Speaker 1: this whole thing about what happened to the abduction mess.
Speaker 1: The myths ran out of things to add on that
Speaker 1: would be believable. The alien abduction has receded from the
Speaker 1: public consciousness. That doesn't mean that research on the phenomenon
Speaker 1: has ceased. After the break, strange arrivals will return in
Speaker 1: a moment. Meant you might remember the name Dr Don Dndree.
Speaker 1: We heard about him much earlier in the series. He
Speaker 1: was one of the authors, along with Bud Hopkins, of
Speaker 1: a paper about alien symbols. He's a retired associate professor
Speaker 1: at McGill University and he's active in the field of
Speaker 1: UFO investigation. I spoke with him because I wanted to
Speaker 1: find out what is currently happening in the field of
Speaker 1: abduction research. He struck me as a little like Bud
Speaker 1: Hopkins and his beliefs, but far more measured and with
Speaker 1: a significant background in science. Dr Dondrey has boiled his
Speaker 1: theories into three simple propositions about alien abduction. The first
Speaker 1: proposition is some of of people report as UFOs are
Speaker 1: extra terrestrial vehicles, they actually are from somewhere else. Proposition
Speaker 1: to some of those vehicles have et crews what in
Speaker 1: popular languages called aliens or extraterrestrials. And point three, some
Speaker 1: of those crews catch and release people to study us.
Speaker 1: That's commonly called an alien abduction. I think all of
Speaker 1: those three propositions are true, but notice that each of
Speaker 1: them has a sum in it, so not every account
Speaker 1: is true. But some of what people report as UFOs
Speaker 1: are ET vehicles. Some ET vehicles, not all of them,
Speaker 1: have ET crews, and some of those ET crews, to
Speaker 1: put it in plain language, mess around with us. They
Speaker 1: grab people, bring them aboard, do examinations and other things,
Speaker 1: and put us back. So that's the story. That's what
Speaker 1: I think is happening. I wondered why, as a scientist,
Speaker 1: let him to assert these propositions, given the lack of
Speaker 1: physical evidence of abductions, what could you point to as
Speaker 1: evidence that these events were actually taking place. There are
Speaker 1: many reports like this goes back many years, and those
Speaker 1: reports have basically been classified, studied, and documented. Many of
Speaker 1: them are military people. Many of them are people in
Speaker 1: positions of public authority like cops ore CNP officers in Canada,
Speaker 1: military people in the United States, many of them accompanied
Speaker 1: by videos and radar plots. So the evidence is cumulatively overwhelming.
Speaker 1: There's no lack of evidence that is both instrumental. That is,
Speaker 1: people are not just saying something, but they're showing you
Speaker 1: a video showing you a radar plot showing you, and
Speaker 1: this is acceptable, a drawing that they made from memory
Speaker 1: right away. A scientist or a naturalist goes about his
Speaker 1: or her work exactly the way I'm describing. You go
Speaker 1: out into nature, you look at something, you write it down,
Speaker 1: you take a picture of it, a video of it,
Speaker 1: you catch it. Or in the case of science, you
Speaker 1: set up an experiment in which you control some conditions
Speaker 1: and you see what happens. They abduct people from their houses,
Speaker 1: from their cars, They test them, they examine them, they
Speaker 1: put them back. That is, from my point of view known.
Speaker 1: What their motives are is unknown. That they mess with
Speaker 1: us is known, and that's not good. During our conversation,
Speaker 1: Dondree asserted that he believed that abductions were happening. He
Speaker 1: did not venture a guess about the number of abductions
Speaker 1: that might be occurring, though I asked. He also didn't
Speaker 1: put forth any particular cases as being exemplary, though he
Speaker 1: has written about many cases. His message to me was
Speaker 1: simply this abductions are happening to be transparent. I don't
Speaker 1: believe they are. And this has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: Dr Dondree, who is smart, sane and very gracious when
Speaker 1: talking to a person with much less knowledge of the
Speaker 1: field and an admittedly skeptical outlook. Instead, it might have
Speaker 1: to do with the way that I'm wired. Let's go
Speaker 1: back to the very beginning of the podcast. I talked
Speaker 1: about the lights that a group of us saw across
Speaker 1: the expanse of a New Hampshire lake. Two of us
Speaker 1: concluded that they were alien spacecraft. The other two, myself included,
Speaker 1: conceded that we couldn't identify what the lights were, but
Speaker 1: we were sure they had nothing to do with aliens.
Speaker 1: Why is it that in the face of identical experiences
Speaker 1: we would draw such different conclusions. Is it down to psychology?
Speaker 1: I asked the University of New Hampshire's Mark Ken about this.
Speaker 1: There have been a few neat experimental analyzes that are
Speaker 1: showing some reliable differences that are intriguing, like, for instance,
Speaker 1: a memory test where we give people a list of words. Say,
Speaker 1: for instance, the words might be pillow, blanket, night moon.
Speaker 1: The one thing that's not in the list is the
Speaker 1: word sleep, but everything around that list talks about sleep.
Speaker 1: Or we could do the same thing with everything around
Speaker 1: the world word music, or everything around the word suite.
Speaker 1: If you give people these lists to memorize, both skeptics
Speaker 1: and believers will come up with the same number of
Speaker 1: words right that we're on the list, so we have
Speaker 1: very similar memories there. But the believers will also tend
Speaker 1: to remember the words that were not on the list,
Speaker 1: the target word that was not there, more than skeptics do.
Speaker 1: Not only does the believer group remember a word that
Speaker 1: wasn't on the list, but that word that they falsely
Speaker 1: remember is the explanation that pulls together the other words
Speaker 1: into an understandable whole. Next, he talked about an older
Speaker 1: study that examined how believers and skeptics reported observing paranormal
Speaker 1: activities about a century ago, when psychology was getting started
Speaker 1: and the spiritualism movement was getting started. So it's not UFOs,
Speaker 1: but this is seances. You could experimentally set up a
Speaker 1: seance such that you knew because you set it up,
Speaker 1: that this thing was going to move by itself as
Speaker 1: you had your hands held around the table and we're
Speaker 1: talking to the dead people. Now, the question was with
Speaker 1: the believers reports seeing the things that actually happened, but
Speaker 1: also other things that didn't, and what skeptics actually declined
Speaker 1: to report the seemingly supernatural things that they saw. It
Speaker 1: turned out that for those experiments, again it was the
Speaker 1: believers who were more likely to see things and report
Speaker 1: things that didn't happen. The skeptics actually did, on average,
Speaker 1: tend to report the unexplainable things that did happen. Finally,
Speaker 1: he talked about how preconceived ideas are very difficult to change.
Speaker 1: This study he describes involves medical students. Some of the
Speaker 1: students believe in Darwinian evolution and some in Lamarchian evolution.
Speaker 1: I had to read up on what the difference was
Speaker 1: for our purposes. You just need to know that these
Speaker 1: are two different theories on how traits are passed down
Speaker 1: through generations. Darwin's theory has turned out to be the
Speaker 1: scientifically valid one. Lamarck has been disproven. Medical students should
Speaker 1: definitely understand this and see evidence of it during their studies. Hence,
Speaker 1: says of the students they tested them going into medical
Speaker 1: school on their belief system and regarding evolution, and they're
Speaker 1: specifically looking at beliefs that are Lamarchian versus beliefs that
Speaker 1: are Darwinian. Then they're going through medical school where they
Speaker 1: are using by oology on a regular basis, and they're
Speaker 1: learning all these different things and they measure them coming
Speaker 1: out of med school and the people who came in
Speaker 1: with Lamarckian beliefs left with Lamarchian beliefs. So for the
Speaker 1: Lamarchian students, despite a period of study during which their
Speaker 1: views on evolution are demonstrated to be wrong, they still
Speaker 1: persist in their beliefs. Even when we get information that
Speaker 1: disconfirms our beliefs, we tend to process it in a
Speaker 1: way that doesn't challenge those beliefs. We get this new
Speaker 1: information and we put it in the same old boxes.
Speaker 1: We put it in the same cubbyholes. It takes a
Speaker 1: lot for us to build a new cubbyhole to put
Speaker 1: things into. This dynamic cuts both ways. Of course, it
Speaker 1: can be hard to shake believers from their beliefs, But
Speaker 1: from the believer point of view, the same can be
Speaker 1: said of skeptics. And that's a common criticism that abduction
Speaker 1: proponents level at scientists. They aren't willing or aren't able
Speaker 1: to expand their notion of what could be real. Dr
Speaker 1: Don Dondry. If you take a giant ship out to
Speaker 1: Tierragui ol Fuego, which is the south end of South
Speaker 1: America and you and your big wooden ship from Europe
Speaker 1: go exploring. The natives don't even pay attention to the ship.
Speaker 1: What they pay attention to is these little robots that
Speaker 1: come out from the ship, because they've never seen a rowboat,
Speaker 1: but they have these little rafts, so the robot for
Speaker 1: them is an improvement on the raft. They can imagine
Speaker 1: that the ship is something out of their imagination. They
Speaker 1: don't even pay attention to it. So science, in quotes,
Speaker 1: doesn't pay attention to what science has no clue at understanding.
Speaker 1: That goes for point nine percent of all the professional
Speaker 1: scientists employed in say the US and Canada. It's basically
Speaker 1: a forbidden topic because it doesn't fit in science. The
Speaker 1: facts don't fit in science. There's no theory connecting those
Speaker 1: facts with what else we knew, and so scientists shrug
Speaker 1: their shoulders, let the craziest deal with it. That's it.
Speaker 1: There is no science. I can understand the frustration. It's
Speaker 1: not just that the scientific world is dismissive of this work,
Speaker 1: but that doing scientific work on this topic is very difficult.
Speaker 1: Simply put, there's essentially no money to fund the research.
Speaker 1: There isn't a major government grants program to which someone
Speaker 1: interested in investigating the reality of alien abductions can apply
Speaker 1: for funding. But here's the thing. It's been almost fifty
Speaker 1: years since the Hill abduction, and to my knowledge, there's
Speaker 1: no single piece of physical evidence that you can point
Speaker 1: to and say, look, this proves that an abduction occurred.
Speaker 1: There's nothing that's been found that would seem to warrant
Speaker 1: a government's funding of research into abductions. Yet despite this
Speaker 1: lack of evidence, there remains the public perception that extraterrestrials
Speaker 1: are visiting US. I talked with Kendrick Fraser, who is
Speaker 1: the founder of the magazine Skeptical Enquirer, the magazine for
Speaker 1: Science and Reason. I asked him about the difference between
Speaker 1: the public perception of extraterrestrial visitors and scientists perception. It's
Speaker 1: an incredible gap of understanding between what the scientific view
Speaker 1: of this subject is and what the popular believer's point
Speaker 1: of view is. What's also interesting to me is both
Speaker 1: are motivated by the same curiosity. Astronomical scientists deeply what also,
Speaker 1: I think to discover any signs of intelligence life in
Speaker 1: the universe, and we have many programs trying to do that.
Speaker 1: At the same time, they know that in the public
Speaker 1: this is a strong belief and desire also. But scientists
Speaker 1: are trained to be critical of evidence and not to
Speaker 1: accept things on face value, whereas many people in the
Speaker 1: public who are interested in these things put their skeptical
Speaker 1: side aside because they want to believe in this so much.
Speaker 1: And we have found this is to be a great
Speaker 1: danger in science. Think about Carol Rainey's assessment of Bud
Speaker 1: hopkins work on the Linda cortill A case. He wanted
Speaker 1: so badly to prove what he believed to be happening.
Speaker 1: He wanted to prove that it was actually happening, and
Speaker 1: that he had evidence. This seemed to me a recurring
Speaker 1: issue in the abduction research field. In the absence of
Speaker 1: physical or substantial third person an eyewitness evidence, researchers would
Speaker 1: latch onto whatever corroboration they could. Thus the use of
Speaker 1: regression hypnosis as evidence, or Marjorie Fish's construction of the
Speaker 1: star map models. This has to be worked out, so
Speaker 1: I have to figure out the absolute magnitude through all
Speaker 1: these stars, or the photos of body marks sent to
Speaker 1: Bud Hopkins. These are very characteristic and this is the
Speaker 1: scoop mark rather than the straight line cut. It's science like,
Speaker 1: but not with the same rigorous standards as science. The
Speaker 1: collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking working together
Speaker 1: keeps the field on track. So as exciting as this
Speaker 1: subject is, as interesting it is, as fascinating it is,
Speaker 1: those are signs that wishful thinking can go and take
Speaker 1: us out of reality. And it's something most scientists and
Speaker 1: certainly psychological scientists are well aware of. But it's something
Speaker 1: that I think more people who are fascinated with the
Speaker 1: subject as fans need to be aware of exercise critical
Speaker 1: thinking and skepticism towards these ideas. Scientists haven't found any
Speaker 1: evidence of extra trastial intelligence, and yet the mythology is
Speaker 1: that we have and and they're coming, and they're here,
Speaker 1: and they've been here, and they're here all the time.
Speaker 1: The Betty and Barney Hill case requires this skepticism. The
Speaker 1: reality for me is that most, but not all, components
Speaker 1: of their story have convincing non extraterrestrial explanations. The regression
Speaker 1: hypnosis elicited the story of Betty's dreams. The Hills mistook
Speaker 1: the light on top of Cannon Mountain for a UFO
Speaker 1: slow driving and numerous stops account for the missing time,
Speaker 1: but the explanations for parts of the story seem a
Speaker 1: little less plausible. Well, I understand that wind up watches
Speaker 1: were easily broken, it seems like quite a coincidence that
Speaker 1: both Betty and Barney would break their watches at the
Speaker 1: same time in this way, and even the best explanations
Speaker 1: of the craft hovering above a field near Indian Head
Speaker 1: rely on Betty and Barney to be at near hallucinatory
Speaker 1: levels of fatigue and stress. The reality, though, is that
Speaker 1: the onus is not on skeptics to disprove every point
Speaker 1: of the story. For an event this incredible, there needs
Speaker 1: to be real evidence, not just a story that is
Speaker 1: hard to explain away at points. The absence of a
Speaker 1: completely satisfying answer to what they saw in the field
Speaker 1: does not mean there was an alien spacecraft. The burden
Speaker 1: of scientific proof lies with proponents of extraordinary stories. I
Speaker 1: remember that Carl Sagan said, at the heart of science
Speaker 1: is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes and
Speaker 1: openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive,
Speaker 1: and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas old
Speaker 1: and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from
Speaker 1: deep nonsense. Although I am skeptical of the reality of
Speaker 1: the Hill abduction story, I think it's important to acknowledge
Speaker 1: their contribution to popular culture. They and particularly Betty, created
Speaker 1: a narrative of alien abduction so compelling that it has
Speaker 1: proven durable for half a century. Through all the changes
Speaker 1: over the years, the core of abduction tales, whether purportedly
Speaker 1: real or fictional, has remained true to the story of
Speaker 1: the events of September nine. It's an astonishing legacy of
Speaker 1: cultural influence to emerge from a late night drive through
Speaker 1: the mountains of New Hampshire. Next week, on a bonus
Speaker 1: episode of Strange Arrivals, my interview with Sarah Schools, author
Speaker 1: of They Are Already Here, UFO Culture and Why We
Speaker 1: See Saucers. There was also a CIA sponsored panel called
Speaker 1: the Robertson Panel, and in their Scientists and Military Personnel,
Speaker 1: we're specifically looking at the effects that UFOs and UFO
Speaker 1: reports might have on people and chaos and panic, and
Speaker 1: they essentially said, if we get too many UFO reports,
Speaker 1: it might clog our intelligence channels and it might cause
Speaker 1: you know, hysteria in the streets. So what we need
Speaker 1: to do is essentially make propaganda to tell people not
Speaker 1: to worry about UFOs. And so just throughout history for
Speaker 1: decades and decades, you have these instances of the government
Speaker 1: trying to manipulate public opinion and interpretation of UFOs, but
Speaker 1: then also saying like we have no interest in them
Speaker 1: and neither should you, and it just leaves people feeling
Speaker 1: like they can't trust the government on the topic I
Speaker 1: think and they're not wrong. Strange Arrivals is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey.
Speaker 1: This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and
Speaker 1: produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was
Speaker 1: portrayed by Gina Rickikey. Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at
Speaker 1: the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y Am
Speaker 1: in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary, the executive
Speaker 1: producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project Blue Book
Speaker 1: learn more about the show over at grimm and mil
Speaker 1: dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.