X-Zone Broadcast Network - John Greenewald

I had the chance to talk with my friend, John Greenewald, about his book, Inside the Black Vault: The Government’s UFO Secrets Revealed. We did discuss more than just that and you can listen to the program here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/17736668

John suggested that there is a cover up of UFO information and offered the evidence of it as it appears in many government documents. I had outlined a

John Greenewald. Photo
copyright by Kevin Randle

similar attitude based on a review of the administrative files that had been released as part of Project Blue Book. John suggested, as I have, that those who were creating the files, writing the reports, and doing the research believed that none of this would see the light of day. They had not anticipated the Freedom of Information Act which allows us all to see much of what was going on behind the curtains. The true attitudes and the real methodology used by those involved in UFO research can be seen. John pointed to a document from a Florida case from July 1969 where the Air Force officer in charge of the investigation had little respect for the witnesses, calling them names, and overlooking the fact that the witnesses were on active duty with the Air Force. It suggests an attitude of disbelief and outright hostility by the officer would was supposed to be gathering information. He wasn’t supposed to inject his own bias into that investigation.

We also talked about MJ-12, and I mentioned a document with a known provenance from 1952 that was code named “Majestic.” The problem is that it had nothing to do with UFOs. You can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/11/majestic-found.html

At that time, I was unable to update documents and illustrations to my blog. I don’t know what the problem was, but it was eventually resolved. Following are the four pages from that document.

Next time on A Different Perspective, I will be interviewing Larry Holcombe about his book, The Presidents and UFOs" A Secret History from FDR to Obama. If you have questions for Larry, post it as a comment. These are moderated so the questions won’t appear in the comment section. I’ll get to them during the interview.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Terry Lovelace

I spoke with Terry Lovelace about his abduction experiences. As many of you know, I’m not a fan of the tales of abduction, but Lovelace is a man with impressive credentials. He is a retired attorney who practiced civil litigation and criminal defense. More impressive is that he retired as an Assistant Attorney General for Vermont. Here is a guy who doesn’t need to create a tale of abduction to gain any sort of recognition. There is simply no motivation to come forward with something like this. You can listen to the interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/17671590

He talked about his first UFO sighting when he was only eight. He then had a series of encounters with what he called monkeys that were not real monkeys.

Terry Lovelace

These might have been some sort of a result of the UFO sighting, or they might be unrelated. These might have been nightmares or might have been real. The point is that I asked if he was familiar with Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic hallucination. These hallucinations are associated with sleep paralysis, and there is usually a manifestation of some sort of entity during these brief periods of paralysis. Lovelace said he was familiar with the terms, and that the monkeys disappeared when the hall light came on, breaking the spell. I thought this was interesting and suggestive of sleep paralysis.

We then talked about his abduction experience when he had been in the Air Force. I had wanted to get a little deeper into that, but the time ran out on us. He also mentioned that he had been chemically interrogated by members of the Air Force OSI. We touched on that, but again, time interfered with the discussion.

There were a number of aspects that I hope to follow up on in the future. For those who wish to learn more about Lovelace’s experiences, you can read his book, Incident at Devil’s Den or check out his website at:

http://www.terrylovelace.com.

Next week, I’ll be talking with John Greenewald of The Black Vault fame. He has just published a book about his experiences with FOIA and what he has learned from the thousands of government documents that he has reviewed. His book is Inside the Black Vault.

If you have a question that you would like that I ask Greenewald, put it into the comment section… These are moderated so that the question will not appear. I’ll make a note of it and try to fit it into the discussion. Thought I would try something new.

Betty Hill and Alien Books

I am in something of a quandary. For those who had read Reflections of a UFO investigator, you know that I interviewed Carroll Wayne Watts about his encounters with, shall I say it? Men from Mars. It was clear that Watts had a limited imagination. He suggested that the space traveling aliens used paper maps, when an electronic survey would have been much better… Just look at what we can do with our satellites, spy planes and aerial photography. His descriptions seemed to be drawn from 1950s science fiction movies rather than a tour of an advanced, alien spacecraft.

Where am I going with this?

For an upcoming interview, I have been reviewing the Hill abduction. As those of you who follow this blog, you know I’m more than a little skeptical of the Star Map that Betty Hill drew. There are four different interpretations of it, with the Fish model suggesting the Zeta Reticuli double star system as the leading contender. You can read about that elsewhere on this blog.

Alien from "Hocus Pocus and
Frisby."

You might also remember that I have suggested that the illustration of the aliens that Barney provided is reminiscent of the aliens shown on the Twilight Zone episode, “Hocus Pocus and Frisby.” Betty had asked Barney at one point if he had been watching the Twilight Zone, though she said that she had never seen the program herself.

And, let’s not forget that in The Interrupted Journey, she described the aliens, saying, “Their chests are larger than ours; their noses were larger (longer) than average size although I have seen people with noses like theirs – like Jimmy Durante’s. (page 298 in the hardback edition).” Her later descriptions are somewhat different.  

Just so that I can again be accused of being an “abduction propagandist,” I noticed something else in one of the sessions that Betty had with Dr. Benjamin Simon. She was describing her talk (telepathic communication?) with one of the aliens. She wanted something for a souvenir, to help validate her

Jimmy Durante

story. He seemed agreeable and she looked around for something. She said, “…there wasn’t much around – but on a cabinet there was a book, a fairly big book. So I put my hand on the book and I said, ‘Could I have this?’ And he told me to look in the book and I did. It had pages, it had writing, but nothing like I had ever seen before. It looked almost like a – I don’t know – it wasn’t a dictionary – maybe a – it had the – the writing didn’t go across, it went up and down (page 172).”

I’m thinking now, “A book? With pages? A book made of paper and writing that she would later suggest looked like Japanese.” And while I understand that it looked Japanese but certainly wasn’t, I’m wondering now why they would have a book at all. I can’t tell you the last time I actually bought a book that was printed on paper. I now get them digitally, on my iPad. I have dozens of them that I can haul around easily and they take up no real space… and that would be something important on a spacecraft. Saving space and weight. A data retrieval system that is virtually weightless and doesn’t take up space would be ideal. I certainly wouldn’t want to carry around any books.

I have a one terabyte external hard drive. I mention this because, on it, I have the Project Blue Book files. I have the vast majority of the more than 12,000 cases (though I have found a few minor gaps) and thousands of pages of administrative files. On that same hard drive, I have most of The A.P.R.O Bulletins, CUFOS IUR, NICAP’s UFO Investigator and the MUFON Journal beginning with the issues known as SKYLOOK. It also holds several dozen UFO books, including the manuscript versions of many of my own.

The point is that the hard drive is only slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes but not as thick. I can slip it into my pocket and carry to conferences, if the mood moves me. No matter where I am, I have access to a huge amount of data that not so long ago, would have been difficult to review.

To make this worse, and as I have said many times, my cell phone is more powerful than Star Trek’s communicator. I have access to all of human knowledge through the Internet. True, I have to ask for the right information, and sometimes there is a fee to access it, but it’s all there, in my cell phone which is even smaller than that external hard drive that I just mentioned.

Back in the 1960s, when Dr. Simon was treating the Hills and John Fuller was writing his book, no one thought in terms of digitally stored data. Having a book, and something that might have been a paper star chart (or some other flexible material that was rolled up) didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Astronauts, pilots and nearly everyone else thought of data retrieval in terms of something printed. But today, with my desk covered with electronic devices that give me access to so much information, I have to wonder why a spacefaring race would deal with books and paper. When Betty talked about a book in the 1960s, no one thought about that being unusual. Today, well, you have to wonder.

Is this a major problem with the Hill abduction? Nah. It’s just something that struck me as I was reading parts of Fuller’s book. Everything we need is available digitally with no need for ink and paper. There are schools that no longer teach cursive because that is now an obsolete form of communication.

And all that just makes me wonder about that book just laying around on that cabinet in an alien ship. Wouldn’t everything be available digitally? Wouldn’t they have advanced beyond pen and paper? Would they be carrying books? Did they even use it if they are telepathic… but that’s a question for another time.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Dr. Michael Masters and Time Traveling UFOs

This week I interviewed Dr. Michael Masters, who has published a book suggesting that UFOs are the result of time traveling humans, at least in part. He has

Dr. Michael Masters

purposed, based on the evidence gathered by UFO researchers and the US military, that the descriptions of the “aliens” is more in line with human evolution than with alien creatures. While he does concede that evolution on another world, in environments similar to Earth, might generate similar forms, the more likely explanation is that the beings that have been reported are evolved humans. That leads us to time travel. You can listen to the discussion here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/17595923

We do explore some of the anthropological evidence of earlier visitation and do examine the “Butterfly Effect.” This is, of course, the theory that Ray Bradbury purposed in a short story. Even the slightest change in the past could radically alter the future as the effects spread out like the waves formed when a rock is tossed into a pond. Time travel is a topic that presents all sorts of opportunity for wild thought. With Robert Charles Cornett, I wrote three science fiction novels that dealt with time travel beginning with Remember the Alamo!.

We also talked about his introduction into the world of UFOs, and how he began to develop his theory. Naturally, an hour seemed to be too short for us to get into the depth of his research and his theory. His book is Identified Flying Objects and can be found on all the normal platforms.

Next week, I’ll talk with Terry Lovelace, a retired attorney who will tell us about his lifetime of UFO experiences and abduction. In an interesting contrast, Lovelace will talk about the stigma he and his family faced because of his claims while Masters and his family weren’t ridiculed for their (his father’s actually) sighting. Two different experiences that tell us something about the history of UFOs.

Curse of Oak Island Flames Out Or I Just Don't Care Anymore

Okay, I give up. I just don’t care if there is a treasure on Oak Island or not, but I suspect there is not. I have been watching this show since it began but my interest in the subject started much earlier, as I have said before. I learned about Oak Island in a book, This Baffling World, that I bought in the early 1970s. It told of many strange things such as UFOs, which is why I bought it in the first place, but it also contained some of the more terrestrial mysteries such as Oak Island.

It told the traditional story, but it was interesting enough that I looked for other

One of the many attempts to get at the Money
Pit treasure.

information about that buried treasure. I found some magazine articles and when I found D’Arcy O’Connor’s The Big Dig: The $10 Million Search for Oak Island’s Legendary Treasure, I had to buy it. Of course, the book ended with the failure to find the treasure for a variety of reasons. Just the hints that something was there, but no real evidence of anything like millions of dollars in treasure.

In 1968, Dan Blankenship and David Tobias formed the Triton Alliance Ltd. with the purpose of recovering the alleged treasure. In 1971, Borehole 10X was enlarged and lined with steel. They wanted to put a video camera down, into a void they had discovered. According to the story, they saw a floating hand suspended in the dirty water. Another such probe picked up what looked like three chests, various tools, spikes and logs and finally what looked to be a human body. On The Curse of Oak Island, in the first seasons, they repeatedly showed this poor-quality video.

They enlarged the borehole to the point that someone could get down it and look around. Blankenship showing great courage, made a number of dives in his attempt to locate and recover the treasure. During a dive in November 1976, Blankenship heard a rumbling and demanded to be pulled up immediately. As he looked back down, he saw that some of the casing had collapsed. Access to the bottom was now blocked. They tried to reopen the borehole, but mechanical issues and other troubles finally forced them to abandon the attempt. Much later those problems would be resolved.

After this, they planned a “Big Dig” with a new shaft large enough to encompass the earlier attempts, to be lined with steel to defeat the alleged boobytraps and to protect any divers brave enough to go down there. The stock market crash in 1987 ended those plans as investors pulled out and other sources of capital dried up. You might say the money dried up with the stock market.

There is another major problem with all this. There is no real evidence that any treasure is buried on the island. There might have been, but it might have been removed by those who buried it or, more likely, there might never have been any treasure buried there at all. Interestingly, now that we have the Laginas trying to get to the treasure we learn that the things they are finding today are the same sorts of things found during all those earlier attempts. These include wood and coconut husks and iron spikes. Those spikes, according to the analysis, had been forged prior to 1790 and the wood was carbon dated to 1575 plus or minus 85 years. All that suggested someone on the island long before the boys found the Money Pit in 1795, but again, that doesn’t prove there was ever a treasure hidden there.

I’m not going to go into all the items found in those earlier years and what was extrapolated from them. I wrote about it in a book, Lost Gold and Buried Treasure that was published in 1995, which, of course demonstrates my interest going back a couple of decades, if that is necessary. Back then I wrote, “Oak Island is unique in the field of treasure hunting. Everyone knows where the treasure is. At the bottom of the pit. Modern technology should be able to defeat the booby traps…”

This was before the Laginas showed up and used that modern technology to defeat the booby traps, if there were, in fact, any booby traps to defeat. Instead it seems that the high-water table of the island, and a series of natural underground chambers and caves might have given the impression of an elaborate maze of pits and booby traps. The question that no one seemed to ask, but I will now, “Who had the technology prior to 1795 to create the Money Pit as it is described today… and even if they did, would they have been able to recover the treasure?”

The real point is that I don’t believe there is a treasure there and I don’t think there ever was. We have been treated to breathless finds that turn out to be nothing extraordinary. A coin dated 1695 that proves nothing other than someone with a coin with that date on it had been on the island… not that it was dropped in 1695 or 1795 or even 1985… it could have been dropped two days before it was found.

We have iron artifacts, which are not gold, but iron, and these sorts of things have also been found on the island a half century ago. They prove nothing and worse yet, they were found close to the surface. Little has been pulled up to suggest any

Marty Lagina

hidden treasure. You might say that it just the trash left by human occupation.

I could go on, but I’ve written about this in the past on this blog. They have nothing to prove a treasure is there. But the real clue might have been in the last episode on April 2. Marty Lagina, in talking about the treasure and the history, seemed to be less than candid. His body language suggested, at least to me, that he was discouraged and might not even believe there is a treasure here anymore. Oh, I’m sure he did at one point, but he seems to have lost his enthusiasm for the search.

After six seasons of this, I’m tired. I can’t take more excitement over wood structures that were built by those looking for the treasure over the last two centuries. I’m tired of things found on the surface that prove human occupation but do not prove a treasure is buried there. I’m tired of guesses that have no real basis in fact and leaps of logic that tell us nothing but lead off on tangents. If the ratings remain high, I’m sure we’ll be treated to a seventh season, but those of us who pay attention know that the answer has already been found. If there ever was any treasure on Oak Island, it is long gone… and the more likely answer is that there never was any treasure to begin with.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Bryan Sentes

In this Special Edition of A Different Perspective, I spoke with Bryan Sentes, who is known for his poetry, but who has a great grasp of the world of the UFO. It was a free-wheeling discussion that began with us talking about Project Blue Book on History and moving on to the Great Airship of 1897, to some of the modern topics. You can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/17524869

Bryan Sentes

We did touch on one problem that has worried me for years and which Bryan had also thought about, which is that Airship stories mirror the modern ear of UFO sightings. All aspect of the various facets of Ufology show up in the Airship tales of 1897. These include cattle mutilations, crash retrievals, alien abduction and generic sightings of craft flying overhead, seen by dozens.

You can find his website here:

http://skunkworksblog.com

One sad thing, however. The by-play between us between segments was lost. We delved into some other topics including the best of Game of Thrones. He thought that early episodes, that were based on George R.R. Martin’s books were better than later episodes in which the show runners had to base the story on, well, what Martin had told them would happen… but, as they say, “I digress…”

This show was fun from the very beginning, and I plan to bring him back in the future.

Contrary to what I said early in the last segment, next week (April 10) I will be talking with Dr. Michael Masters, who, if the emails are any indication, should be as much fun. We’ll talk about his book, Identified Flying Objects and his time travel theory.

Time Traveling Aliens and Dr. Michael Masters

Dr. Michael Masters*, author of Identified Flying Objects, has proposed that the occupants of those UFOs are time travelers. I mention this for a couple of reasons. First, it is my favorite theory which is not to say that it is the most likely explanation. Time travel is a fun subject, with all the contradictions in it. Robert Charles Cornett and I wrote three science fiction books using time travel as a basis, beginning with Remember the Alamo in which a group of modern soldiers, using modern weapons, are transported back in time to the Battle of the Alamo. Think Force Multiplier here. Machine guns against muskets.

Masters suggests in his book that given the majority of the descriptions of the alien creatures are humanoid, meaning two arms, two legs, two eyes and one head,

Dr. Michael Masters and a few of his ancient pals.

there must be a connection to Earth. I extrapolate from here that he is looking at the next evolutionary stage of the human and therefore the beings are from Earth. They are from our far future, using time travel so that they can study us as we have been studying the ancient people. They just have a better tool than we do because they can see us in action rather than guessing how we lived based on the material left behind

.

The second point is to announce that Dr. Masters will be appearing on my radio show A Different Perspective on the X-Zone Broadcast Network on April 10. For those who are unable to catch the program at that time, it will be available on line later in the day. As soon as the link is available, I’ll get it posted.

Although we’ve touched on the time travel aspect of the UFO phenomenon in the past, this will be the first time that it will be the focus of the discussion. Should be a lot of fun for everyone.

*For the record here and so that I don’t surprise anyone, I keep wanting to call him Tom McMasters. I don’t know why**, but I do know he is Dr. Michael Masters. Just thought I would mention it.

Though looking at his email address which is MMaster…, that might be the reason for the McMasters, but no reason for the Tom.