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Interview With Dr. Bruce Maccabee December 2, 2008
Part I of III
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Ken: Today our guest is Dr. Bruce Maccabee, the famous photo analyst and UFO researcher. Hello Doctor Maccabee, it is nice to talk to you again. Dr. Maccabee: Thank you for calling. Ken: Thank you
Amateur Photo Dr. Maccabee: Well I won't be surprised. Of course we haven't had a wave of sightings over just the last couple of years, we have had a wave of sightings over the last 60 years starting in 1947 and perhaps in 1947 the only thing that changed was that they became flying saucers as opposed to unusual things in the sky. They have been reported over hundreds of years I guess and I suspect that extraterrestrials, or other intelligences, if you don't want to be specific about extraterrestrials then I say that other intelligences are and have been demonstrating a presence around the world for at least the last 60 years and perhaps for thousands or a few thousand years, who knows? Ken: Why do you think a UFO would hover over an airport gate as the one at O'Hare airport supposedly and have you ever gotten to see any photos of it? Dr. Maccabee: There were a couple of photos that people weren't absolutely sure about, I believe relating to the so called O'Hare Airport incident. That was on November 19th 2006, which became publicized in early January of 2007, where a grayish circular object was observed by a number of people apparently to be hovering over I think C gate, or something at O'Hare Airport and why would it do that? I'm not them, I can't say, but I can make a guess, this is where they wanted somebody to see them briefly enough to make it a worthwhile sighting without staying there for so long that it absolutely could not possibly be explained. You know that the explanations that were offered were first of all that there was light from the airport reflected off clouds. This doesn't make any sense, because the object was described as being darker than the clouds. It was sort of a grayish disc seen in front of a cloud background, or overcast at about 4:30 in the afternoon, I think it was. November 14, I think it was in 2006. Light in the clouds didn't impress anybody, then it was some kind of weather phenomena. Yeah, all right what kind of weather phenomena. could do that? It looked like a disc hovering at some altitude, 1600 or 1700 feet and suddenly shooting upwards and punching a hole in the clouds. Ken: Do you think that if we look back at some of these sightings that have taken place over the years, does it look to you that maybe these UFOs want to get their presence felt with the general public and that is why they are doing this? Dr. Maccabee: It appears to me that this is trickle up acceptance, or trickle up knowledge, information, learning, whatever you want to call it. Instead of top down where they land on the White House lawn, go to the president and say either, take me to your leader or we are your leader, whatever one they say. Instead of that we have a trickle up situation where they are showing their presence, they have been for years apparently, showing their presence to the ordinary people of the society. By doing this they inform individual people of their existence without doing it on a scale that might cause panic. As long as things are explainable, people can go about their daily lives and say, well maybe there was something there or maybe there wasn't, but who cares, it is not going to impact on me. If something lands on the White House lawn and the president and a few major news organizations all see this thing and publicize it widely, that could cause a panic, especially when you realize that the president would have to say, well they are here and there is nothing we can do about it. Ken: Well maybe they tried it with the president already? Comment: (We both had a good laugh here) Ken: It is now being reported that the UK has contacted the US and we have sent FBI agents to them on loan who have the assignment of investigating UFOs to see if they can come up with any answers. Do you believe this?
Saucer Dr. Maccabee: I would be very surprised if it were true. You say that somebody is saying that, I don't know..... Ken: Yeah they are reporting it in some places on the internet. Dr. Maccabee: The FBI got involved with the whole UFO subject way back in 1947 when they were directly asked by the Air Force in July 1947 to investigate the witnesses, the people who were reporting UFOs, well it was called flying saucers in those days. People who were reporting flying saucers were interviewed by the FBI to find out if there was any communist subversion going on. The Air Force was worried that communist sympathizers might be generating spurious stories of fantastic craft flying through our air with the implication that they could be Soviet, in order to undermine the confidence of the American people in the ability of the Air Force to control things in the sky. The Air Force went directly to J. Edgar Hoover the head of the FBI and said could you interview some of these witnesses and the FBI did it for about two months and found that there was no evidence of communist subversion that they could find and they got out of it. They acted like a collection agency. They collected information from the Air Force for a number of years afterward and some of the information in the FBI X file, in which there were actual documents marked, Security Matter - X the real X files. The real X files contained interviews of a number of witnesses of sightings of flying saucers. Like I said the FBI didn't find any evidence of communist subversion going on, so they stopped interviewing people but collected information from the Air Force for a number of years. Some of that information is found in the FBI files and not anywhere else. The FBI has continuously said since that they have not been involved with the subject and to imagine that they would go to Britain to investigate is a bit of a stretch. I can't imagine why they would do that? First of all I don't think that flying saucers come into the investigative purview of the FBI. Second of all, even if they did, I think that they could investigate flying saucers here in the United States and why would they do it in Britain? Britain has its own MI-6 and so on, MI-5 intelligence agencies in Britain that are as good as anybody else in tracking down, I don't know what they would be tracking down with respect to flying saucer sightings in Britain, but anyway I doubt that the FBI is actually doing that. Ken: The Disclosure Project is an organization trying to get the facts about UFOs. It has had many honorable people testify about UFOs. Most of the general public is still unaware about it, even though they have had testimony taken before the press club in Washington. Why do you think that it doesn't get more publicity?
Flight Of UFOs Dr. Maccabee: Well that is a good question. The Coalition For Freedom Of Information also had a press conference in Washington D.C. about a year ago in which they invited a number of Air Force and aircraft pilots from around the world literally, from South America, Europe, the United States, Canada and so on. These people were involved in some really potent sightings including Parviz Jafari, who was a pilot of a F-4 jet over Iran in 1976, when it chased some object that looked like it was shooting a missile back at the airplane. Suddenly the plane lost communications with its headquarters and the guy said that he even lost communications with his back seater, the person in the back seat in the rear of the aircraft. Anyway these are well recorded and well investigated sightings that were presented by the witnesses themselves before the assembled press, shall we say. It got no more than short brief stories here in the press. I think that the reason that the press doesn't push on this is that the story is too big to handle. They realize that if they were to take a positive attitude toward the subject it might make them look like they were idiots for one thing, for believing it. The other aspect is it might reflect on society, of them treating this seriously. You know the way the media portrays the subject generally is as entertainment. Its entertaining to laugh at these nuts that talk about flying saucers, aliens and abductions and stuff. To think that the possibility is serious, that is something else. We have seen over the past couple of years more of a motion to being serious about it. The upcoming Discovery Channel shows being put on by MUFON, The Mutual UFO Network, that's on December 13, on the Discovery Channel at 8:00 pm, two shows with over four hours of stuff that they are doing, two in depth studies of UFO sightings. This sort of reporting that we have been seeing on the History Channel, numerous documentaries on the History Channel and The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel and so on. People are paying attention all of a sudden. They also have this million fax march. It is being put on by the Paradigm, what is it called, Steve Basset's organization? Paradigm Research Group which the intent is to catch the attention of Congress by flooding Congress with fax messages saying that the government should be like Britain and cough up their secrets on UFOs. This million fax effort is apparently attracting some press interest as well. So who knows there may be a shift going on towards the subject being treated seriously. Ken: I hope so. Dr. Maccabee: They are not the first persons to talk about structures on the moon. A guy, I can't remember his name, published a book maybe 20 years ago about this. I personally tend to accept the word of Edgar Mitchell more, who would be aware if there had been actual structures on the moon. All the astronauts would be aware of that and none of them are aware of actual structures. There are reasons to believe that there aren't structures on the moon and I suppose reasons to believe there could be. When you look at these pictures and you start blowing up the pictures and you try and get very high spatial resolution out of pictures that have low spatial resolution, you see bright and dark areas that are adjacent to each other and various patterns randomly and you may look at them and think that you see a pattern there. It is sort of like a Roshak test, ink blots that supposedly look like pictures of things..... Ken: Well what do you think of that robot head that they took the close up of? Dr. Maccabee: I haven't looked at that so I am not really sure what that looks like. I was looking at a picture recently, it was a NASA photo from last August I think. It has recently been discussed on the Internet and it is on Mars. It looks like a sort of rectangular cross section of a piece of wood, something dark anyway. The argument is that it looks like a railroad tie, its got square corners and all that so therefore it has to have been constructed. There is no way that we can find out because it is not where the lander is. You can't go over to it I guess and take a look at it. We just have to sit there and look of pictures of it. Ken: Yeah there is so much of that isn't there where people say that this must have been done by some race or culture? You have to laugh at some of these things. Do you think that some of the photos of the moon and Mars have been airbrushed by NASA to hide evidence of ruins? Dr. Maccabee: One can only speculate especially if there is a deep conspiracy to withhold information from the public. NASA certainly releases tons of pictures, some of them they release in real time. I suppose they could have an army of analysts trying to locate every picture of something that shouldn't be there. I am not talking ones where there might be if you look at it sideways or in any type of light you have a certain something or other out there. I am talking about pictures that could only be a hoax, or the real thing and there is no half way point. I would tend to believe that NASA is not holding anything back, but you know, somebody might be able to prove that they has been. Ken: Well let me ask you this, let me change this question a little bit. Have you ever come across any photos from NASA that looked like they were airbrushed? Dr. Maccabee: No, but I should point out that I haven't spent that much time on NASA photos, especially the photos of planets or of the moon. The NASA photos that I have spent time on are Gemini Eleven photos taken in September 1966 and the Skylab Three photos taken in September 1973, I believe it was. Those are photos where astronauts actually saw something going past their spacecraft or flying along with it or whatever. Then they took pictures of this thing. So there is a situation where you have visual conformation of something out there that you have taken a picture of. Ken: If I am not mistaken, wasn't that where ground control thought that they were seeing their own booster, that it had caught up or something?
Unknown Object Dr. Maccabee: You mean Gemini Eleven? Ken Yeah. Dr. Maccabee: The Gemini Eleven case was where they thought that they were seeing a Russian booster of a Proton rocket. If you look in the Condon study you see that was what it was claimed to be, however I and another guy, Brad Sparks, in the first half of the early seventies actually worked out the orbital details, using some information supplied by James Oberg. We worked out the actual orbital details and located where the Gemani was and where the Proton Three booster was. We found that they were 3,000 miles apart. The guys were looking at this object, opposite the direction of the booster, so the point is that no way could it have been the Proton booster that they saw. NASA itself carries that sighting as unidentified. Ken: Have you ever gotten any photographic evidence presented to you that you felt was proof that UFOs were capable of performing beyond the parameters of any known man-made craft? Dr. Maccabee: Well yes. Not still photos per se. Although properly interpreted I guess there have been a couple of still photos that indicate sudden accelerations. I am thinking in terms of a couple of videos, one in particular that I worked on from Gulf Breeze, Florida in the early 90s. I forget what year it was now, it has been a long time since I thought about it. Anyway in that particular video the person saw this thing coming out over the water south of his house. He or she was living on witnesses anonymous, but known to the MUFON investigators. Anyway this person got a video camera and set it on a railing so he could look out over the ocean and video tape this thing. When you see it you are looking at this round, sort of a shiny thing and you can vaguely see clouds or vapors over the ocean drifting by and it sort of jiggles around and jiggles around, normal hand motion, then all of a sudden it almost seems to disappear. If you are looking straight at it, you see it zip off to the right. When you go frame by frame realizing that the video camera gives you actually sixty fields and two fields make a frame, sixty fields per second corresponding to thirty frames per second. There is a bit of a technicality there. The point is that you get sixty pictures every second. At least this is from an old fashioned video camera, I am not sure the modern ones do it the same way. Anyway, if you look at it field by field, you can see this image moved to the right a little bit in the first field and it moves to the right more in the second field and even more than that in the third and even more in the fourth and by the fifth or sixth frame in the field it is gone. So it zipped off to the right hand side and you can actually see the image stretched and get dim, which are things you would expect to see if this object was moving at a sizeable distance at the time of the image exposure. What it really amounted to was that this thing was going tens of Gs and when they put the pedal to the metal, they put the pedal right through the metal. Ken: It looks that way. Dr. Maccabee: It was gone in one fifth of a second. I play it to audiences and I say if you blink, you are going to miss it. People don't. They have to be staring right at the video to see this thing move. So anyway unfortunately we don't know how big it was, or how far away it was. If it was only about one thousand feet away and about ten feet in diameter then it was at some huge speed, or the speed of sound by the time it got to the edge of the frame and went off the frame and the screen. Ken: About 1 in 10 sightings get reported, do you think that this is a true estimate? Dr. Maccabee: Well that it is an estimate that has only been guessed at by Dr. J. A. Hynek and Friedman and so on. It certainly could be true if you consider that we continually get reports of things that happened years before. In other words on December 2, 2008, you might get a few reports from people that saw things in 1973, in 1966, in 1982 and so on. You would have to say that those three sightings happened a long time ago. They were part of a group of sightings that never got reported at that time. In other words, the mere fact that we get reports of sightings that are old, means that there are sightings that havent't been reported. Whether it is one in ten or some other number, it is hard to be specific. Ken: It seems that more of them are getting reported than say forty years in the past. Do you think that is true?
UFO By Broken Tether Dr. Maccabee: That would be hard to say, the reporting system is a lot better than it used to be. We know that there have been situations in the past where there were lots of sightings. In 1952, the big peak year for sightings collected by Project Blue Book, we had about 2,000 sightings of what they estimated to be about 1,500 objects in the sky. Two thousand sighting reports of fifteen hundred objects, meaning that there was typically more than one observer per object. The reporting systems have changed over the last thirty or forty years. When the Air Force Project Blue Book was going, they were sort of the standard you might say, collecting both military and civilian sightings. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, APRO started in either 51 or 52 collected sightings until it ended in the late 80s I think. NICAP, the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena basically started in 57 and I know that by the time they closed in 1980 they had over 10,000 sighting reports, many of those not in the Air Force files. So anyway the point is that it would be hard to be quantitative and say yes for sure that there were more sightings now than there were. Ken: Yes it would be hard. Dr. Maccabee: It could be that nowadays you have the Internet and people will see something and slap their sighting on the Internet, where in years past they would have to look around. That is why these old sightings occur by the way. Very often a person says I had a sighting back in 1964 but I didn't know who to tell. Ken: Or maybe they are so old now that they don't care about the ridicule factor? Dr. Maccabee: Yeah that may be true too. There is nothing they can do to me now. Ken: Some people believe that when former President Reagan said things like the world would be an easier place if we had a common alien threat and said this during several different speeches before the UN, that he was trying to tell us something. Do you think that is true? Dr. Maccabee: Well it may be. It is a philosophical argument that probably holds true anyway, in other words even in the absence of ufo reports. If there were to suddenly appear some threat from the outside, some threat against humanity, probably humanity would figure out someway to get together. We know, I guess for a fact, that Reagan had at least one sighting while he was flying in his airplane. He actually diverted the pilot to fly towards this thing. I don't remember the details of the event now. It might have been when he was governor of California and back in the 70s some time. The fact that he had a sighting certainly suggests that he might have been trying to subtly get in to the thinking of the people who hear his speech that humm, maybe there is something to this after all. He didn't say anything publicly about his sighting which I think came out publicly from private information. I don't know if it ever was reported in the paper or not. He didn't mention the sighting when he was talking to the United Nations. He might have when he was talking to Gorbachev privately, we don't know what happened then. Ken: Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell has stated that aliens exist. He has been quoted as saying, “I’ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it’s been happening quite a bit.” . Why would a respected astronaut say this if it wasn't true? Dr. Maccabee: Well I don't think that he would say it if it weren't true. It would be essentially stupid. I mean he's gotten criticized for saying it, true or not. So if it weren't true why say it? I was fortunate to sit next to Edgar Mitchell at the X-Conference last April in Washington D.C. There will be another X-Conference coming up in Gaithersburg Maryland, just outside Washington D.C. Ken: Did he give you any tidbits? Dr. Maccabee: There will be another one next year. I don't know what the program is going to be yet, but I am sure that this million fax march on Washington will be featured. Whatever the effects are and the effect of them. Podesta is now Obama's secretary of something, or advisor, is that right? Ken: You know, I am not sure, he is something but I don't remember what it was, but if I was guessing, I would think that he was an advisor. I think that's what he is, but I am not sure.
UFO Dr. Maccabee: He has come out publicly in favor of release of information. Anyway back to Edgar Mitchell, I was next to him at the X-Conference last spring and basically he was telling me you know, what he said for a number of years. He made a big splash in the press last August for what he said about knowing about alien visitations and so on. The thing is that he has been saying that for ten, or fifteen years and it is just that people haven't been paying any attention. The reason that they paid attention back in August, maybe July, whenever he made a big splash there in the press it was, because he had said it in Britain. The British press told the story of what Edgar Mitchell was saying. Some American correspondent picked up who had never heard about this before and said wow look at that and assumed that this was the first time that Edgar Mitchell ever said anything like that before and then writes a story that gets picked up in the American press and the American press portrays it as if gee Edgar Mitchell is now releasing this information whereas the fact is that this is what he has been saying for ten or fifteen years. He said it to a number of people including the press, radio station interviews and so on. Nobody paid any attention. It is the old situation that nobody is a prophet in his own land. Ken: Yeah that is true. Comment: (We both enjoyed another good laugh) Dr. Maccabee: I am sure that he wouldn't say that if it weren't true or if he didn't at least believe its true. He was kind enough to write a little blurb in endorsing my book on the UFO FBI Connection, when it came out eight years ago, so I know that he has read about what the FBI has found out. I don't know all the other stuff he's read but..... He claims that he was living in Roswell and knew about this stuff when it happened. Ken: Oh I didn't know that. Dr. Maccabee: The Roswell case, yeah. Ken: Oh that is interesting. Dr. Maccabee: Yeah you have to go back and check up on all the stuff he has said. Ken: So that was before, way before he was an astronaut I presume? Dr. Maccabee: Oh yeah. Ken: He must have been a young boy? Dr. Maccabee: That's right. That was what he said. He was in Roswell. While he wasn't directly involved with anything, he knew people who knew people who were involved. If I recall him saying correctly, the people in Roswell assumed it was true. Ken: Several sightings that were made by lots of people took place in Stephenville Texas. Not only were strange lights being reported, but also black triangular craft. What is your opinion of these craft? Do you think we have a new secret plane or that these are alien craft? Dr. Maccabee: Well I suspect that at least part of this stuff is related to alien craft. Triangle sightings go back years by the way. Ken: Right, I know they do. Dr. Maccabee: Into the 80s at least and probably further back are a few sightings. The implication is that if they were ours, we must have had them years and years ago. Then the only question is why don't more people know about it? Why are the only reports coming from the nuts seeing UFOs? You can look through Janes all world aircraft you know, they have stories about top secret stuff. Ken: Oh yeah, I look through there. Dr. Maccabee: As far as I know they don't have any triangle aircraft. They might have some triangle shaped, I think there was a lifting balloon type thing. Instead of being shaped like a blimp, it was shaped like a triangle. Ken: There is a story going around that we have a plane that we have had for a few years now. It has a solid frame, it is filled with helium to give it neutral buoyancy and that it had some sort of pulse jet engine that would allow this thing to go four or five thousand miles per hour. Have you heard about that? Dr. Maccabee: The pulse jet engine at four or five thousand miles per hour yes, but not something..... To have neutral buoyancy requires that the volume of gas that is inside be huge. It has to be some number of cubic feet for pound that you are going to lift. That is why the blimps and so on were so huge. End of part I |
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