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24: Disclosure Team #78 Ralph Blumenthal - Congressional Hearings
320 Plays2 years ago
Ralph joins me to talk about the upcoming open congressional hearings held by a subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee.
Ralph's latest article with Leslie Kean: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/us...
Ralph Blumenthal, a Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and summer journalism instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy, was an award-winning reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009, and has written seven books on organized crime and cultural history. He led the Times metro team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the 1993 truck-bombing of the World Trade Center. In 2001, Blumenthal was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to research the progressive career and penal reforms of Warden Lewis E. Lawes, “the man who made Sing Sing sing.” The book on Warden Lawes, Miracle at Sing Sing, was published by St. Martin’s in June, 2004.
During the coronavirus pandemic he has contributed articles to The Times and other publications, worked from home on his Baruch Archives blog, “An Adventure in Democracy”, and given virtual talks on his new book, “The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack.”
For more than 45 years, Blumenthal led an extensive and illustrious career at The Times as Texas correspondent and Southwest Bureau Chief (2003-8); arts and culture news reporter (1994-2003); investigative and crime reporter (1971-1994); foreign correspondent (West Germany, South Vietnam, Cambodia, 1968-1971); and metro and Westchester correspondent (1964-1968). He began his journalism career as reporter/columnist for The Grand Prairie Daily News Texan in 1963.
Blumenthal earned a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001), a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Alumni Award (2001), and the Nieman Foundation’s Worth Bingham Prize for distinguished investigative reporting on USAir crashes. (1994.) He was inducted into the C.C.N.Y. Communications Alumni Hall of Fame in May 2010. Since 2010 he has taught journalism in the high school summer program of Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., and in 2010 was named a Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College where he taught journalism and currently oversees historic collections in the Newman Library Archives.
Ralph's Website: http://www.ralphblumenthal.com/
Ralph on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ralphblu
Ralph's article on The Debrief:
Ralph's latest article with Leslie Kean: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/us...
Ralph Blumenthal, a Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and summer journalism instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy, was an award-winning reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009, and has written seven books on organized crime and cultural history. He led the Times metro team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the 1993 truck-bombing of the World Trade Center. In 2001, Blumenthal was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to research the progressive career and penal reforms of Warden Lewis E. Lawes, “the man who made Sing Sing sing.” The book on Warden Lawes, Miracle at Sing Sing, was published by St. Martin’s in June, 2004.
During the coronavirus pandemic he has contributed articles to The Times and other publications, worked from home on his Baruch Archives blog, “An Adventure in Democracy”, and given virtual talks on his new book, “The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack.”
For more than 45 years, Blumenthal led an extensive and illustrious career at The Times as Texas correspondent and Southwest Bureau Chief (2003-8); arts and culture news reporter (1994-2003); investigative and crime reporter (1971-1994); foreign correspondent (West Germany, South Vietnam, Cambodia, 1968-1971); and metro and Westchester correspondent (1964-1968). He began his journalism career as reporter/columnist for The Grand Prairie Daily News Texan in 1963.
Blumenthal earned a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001), a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Alumni Award (2001), and the Nieman Foundation’s Worth Bingham Prize for distinguished investigative reporting on USAir crashes. (1994.) He was inducted into the C.C.N.Y. Communications Alumni Hall of Fame in May 2010. Since 2010 he has taught journalism in the high school summer program of Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., and in 2010 was named a Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College where he taught journalism and currently oversees historic collections in the Newman Library Archives.
Ralph's Website: http://www.ralphblumenthal.com/
Ralph on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ralphblu
Ralph's article on The Debrief:
Transcript
Introduction to the Anomalous Podcast Network
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon.
Excitement for Congressional Hearings with Ralph Blumenthal
00:00:49
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Disclosure Team channel. I'm really, really happy to be having this upcoming conversation. I was excited the other day when I woke up to see that congressional hearings were going to be happening next week, as I think a lot of people were. So naturally, I reached out straight away to Ralph and said, I'd love to chat. And he obliged. So let's jump straight into it, guys. I'd like to welcome Ralph Blumenthal. Ralph, how are you doing? Hey, great. Nice to be here with you. Thank you.
00:01:06
Speaker
Thank you.
00:01:19
Speaker
Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I really appreciate it. So Ralph, I'm going to start with a question which I'm not sure you'll be able to answer in depth, but I'd like to know how you get these breaking stories and what the process might be about that.
00:01:36
Speaker
Well, you know, I've been working with Leslie Kane for a long time, and she has particularly good sources in and out of the government. So we knew about these hearings for quite a while, and we knew they were going to be coming up. We didn't know exactly when. We knew probably in May, or latter May,
00:01:55
Speaker
And our concern was really not to have it leaked, because as soon as you start asking questions, you start to disturb the royal of the waters, and Washington is a civ. A lot of people in the congressional committees have friends in the media, so we were concerned that
00:02:15
Speaker
It was like a catch-22. I mean, you start to ask questions that you need to do for the reporting, and then you end up sort of broadcasting your intentions. So it was kind of nerve-wracking for a while because we knew this, we couldn't really talk about it, and we wanted to protect our exclusive, and luckily it did hold, and we broke the story last week.
Government Sources and Narrative Control
00:02:38
Speaker
Yeah, now the hearing in itself is intended to focus on the AOIMSG, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. Now the announcement of this group last year caused some controversy when it was announced because of the timing when the Gillibrand Amendment was actually pushing for a new office to be formed. So a lot of people felt that the Pentagon were attempting to hold, keep control of the narrative. Did you feel that at all?
00:03:04
Speaker
Well, first of all, that acronym doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Maybe they designed it that way to keep it secret because you can't even say it. Well, I think there was a lot of play behind the scenes that we don't really know about, but the Pentagon
00:03:23
Speaker
probably wanted to hold on to its primacy of this through the UAP task force. But Gillibrand, I think, was really very smart to try to broaden it and get allies in Congress to try to get it into a better forum and not just be dependent on the Pentagon. So I think it's a healthy development. And I think there's been much too much secrecy about this thing from the very beginning. As you know, decades passed.
00:03:52
Speaker
These are the first hearings in 54 years. I mean, that's a long time. And the hearings that did happen back then were often misleading. So I think these are all positive developments, by the way, that Gillibrand Amendment got through, that there's a new group, that there's a willingness to hold hearings. So that's all positive. Yeah, absolutely. I agree.
Reducing UFO Stigma and Pilots' Reports
00:04:18
Speaker
Now, Andre Carson made a comment and he said that the hearing is about examining steps that the Pentagon can take to reduce the stigma surrounding reporting by military pilots and civilian pilots, which I totally agree with, but I feel that it needs to extend beyond pilots into inter-military branches and agencies as well. Do you think that that will change in time?
00:04:39
Speaker
Probably slowly. I mean, again, you got to look at the progress that has been made. And I know it's easy to look ahead and say, gee, we're still there's still too much ridicule. You know, we still don't know a lot. We didn't know very little really about what the government has compiled. So if you look at that side of the, you know, the empty half of the glass, it can be pretty depressing. But if you say, you know, how far we've come,
00:05:05
Speaker
And so I think, you know, that's all to the good and I think there's still too much ridicule, as you know, I mean, Representative Carson himself said he's expected to take some heat for this hearing which is ridiculous when you think of it I mean heat to examine a phenomenon that has, you know,
00:05:27
Speaker
Flabbergasted, flummoxed, confounded are best experts for more than a half a century. I mean, and yet they're still taking heat for that. So he had to say that and indicate, you know, that maybe take a little bit of the sting off it.
00:05:42
Speaker
But the stigma is still there, and a lot of people in Congress are afraid to get out front on this issue. Maybe there's strength in numbers, so maybe, you know, at the hearing Tuesday, enough of them will give each other courage so that they can ask some tough questions. So, you know, we'll see.
00:05:59
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned previously about the excessive secrecy that has been going on for
Historical Secrecy and Misinformation Critique
00:06:04
Speaker
so long. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he was quoted as saying, one of the great mysteries of our time and to break the cycle of excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency.
00:06:16
Speaker
Now, there's been a lot of discussion recently about this secrecy. Christopher Mellon's mentioned it a few times. So do you think Congress is aware of that and actually are trying to do something about it proactively? Yeah, you'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind, you know, not to know what's gone on in the past. And, you know, the history of this issue, this phenomenon is really very shameful when you go back to it. I mean, the the misinformation, the disinformation going back to the fifties
00:06:45
Speaker
And, you know, the government dismissed these as hallucinations, as illusions, flyspecs on the windscreen, you know, marsh gas, all natural phenomena, reflections from the desert floor. You go back and all along, the data was there. And, you know, right after World War II, we had the most highly trained military pilots in the world
00:07:11
Speaker
And they were seeing these things. And you can't tell them that they were seeing the planet Venus. So the data was there, but the government just covered it up and misled the American people. And it really is a shameful period. And now I think we made a lot of progress.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah, I absolutely agree. Just going to take a second to give a shout out to Lara. Thank you for the donation. Lara says, thank you, Mr. Blumenthal, for your dedication and persistence and to Vinny as well. Thank you so much, Lara. That's very, very kind of you. Appreciate it.
Secret Government Knowledge on UFOs
00:07:50
Speaker
where are we and now that we've also learned that there's going to be closed hearings straight after the hearings do you think that that is just where the sort of classified information will be discussed sources and methods and yeah i mean the committee has already said that there'll be a classified session after the public session so yeah right away that should make you a little uneasy like what are they saying in the classified session that they can't say in the public session and i mean that's always been the issue as you know the uap report that came out last
00:08:19
Speaker
a nine-page report. Some people thought it was too skimpy, but that was followed by a classified report that was given to congressional committees. We don't really know what's in that. So there's, you know, we're always playing this game that Congress publicly has given us information, then privately they're given more information, so we don't know
00:08:40
Speaker
we can speculate, but we don't know what's in that. And, you know, we've been very careful in our reporting to stick to what we can attribute, because, you know, on the web, there's all kinds of rumors and stuff floating around. And we've been very careful in the New York Times to focus on what we can attribute, what we can say we know is true, and to speculate and, you know, no heavy breathing that secret sources tell us this. And I think that inspires skepticism.
00:09:10
Speaker
I mean, there's all kinds of information out there, as you know, but to separate that from what, and you know, what has come out has been really very, very limited. I mean, people always ask, well, who's behind these UFOs? Where do they come from? What do they want? Where are the aliens?
00:09:27
Speaker
And we haven't dealt with any of that in our reporting because it's all speculative. What we do know is that they have been these objects. First of all, they're real because the government has now admitted that for the first time in the report last June. These objects are not illusions. They're not some mystical marsh gas or reflection. They're real physical objects. But other than that, nobody knows.
Non-Earthly Materials and Speculations
00:09:54
Speaker
But that in itself is progress.
00:09:57
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one thing we did learn from the the the briefing from last year, sorry, the report from last year, John Greenwald or the Black Vault managed to get the heavily redacted version. And one thing we learned was that there was
00:10:10
Speaker
the shapes. They were talking about the shapes of these things, but they felt the need to redact them, even though that doesn't give out the sort of sources and methods. So I think a lot of people were confused about that. Yeah, exactly. I think that there's absolutely much too much secrecy. Things like shapes. First of all, that's not a big secret. Shapes have been talked about by people, you know, ever since the beginning of the flying saucer era, the triangles, their, you know, their
00:10:38
Speaker
around their cigar-shaped, tic-tac-shaped, most recently they've been described as. So why are they redacting that? That seems to be overkill.
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Now you mentioned earlier as well that these are the first hearings in over 50 years. There was what I think 66 and 68. I think in 66, the Air Force just put it off to things like swamp gas. And I think by 69, the Air Force had concluded that UFOs had no threat to national security, which obviously is simply not the case. Right. Do you think there's a chance we could see something similar with these hearings? Or do you think the door is well and truly open now that such levels of secrecy and obfuscation can't creep back in?
00:11:20
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think they can't say anymore that these things aren't real, because they've already said they are real. So we have to move on from that. And there are a lot of questions about the data. For example, some of the sightings by veteran pilots, like Dave Fraber, have suggested that these things are operating trans-medium in the water as well. They've been seen entering the water or under the water, coming out of the water. I mean, that is an amazing question.
00:11:49
Speaker
because we can almost understand hypersonic objects in the atmosphere. We've been conditioned to understand that, think of that, but underwater, I mean, water is a very difficult medium to operate in quickly, fast.
00:12:08
Speaker
because the water resistance and if some objects can operate underwater as submarines have seen and as they've been eyeballed coming into and out of the water, well that's sensational news. So I don't know how much of that might come out, the trans-medium aspect and of course the question that we raised very carefully in a limited way in the New York Times as to whether the government is in possession of any actual materials
00:12:35
Speaker
We reported in the Times that congressional committees were briefed with a series of slides, one of which we showed in the New York Times, on possible recoveries of
00:12:52
Speaker
whatever you want to call it, anomalous material. So that would be sensational. And there'd been a lot of stories over the years about that. Again, we stuck to what we could document in the New York Times. We didn't go into speculation, and there's a lot of crazy stuff floating around that may be true, but you can't prove it.
00:13:15
Speaker
But what we do know is that congressional committees
Unexplained Origins Despite UFO Acknowledgment
00:13:19
Speaker
were briefed on some possible material recoveries, and this material was deemed to be non-earthly. In other words, it was not anything that they could identify as products of earthly technology.
00:13:38
Speaker
And that brings up the question, which is often raised, could these things be super-secret US technology or Russian or Chinese? And that's trotted out periodically. It was in the report last June as a possible explanation. Well, maybe it's Russian or Chinese, but
00:13:56
Speaker
You know, they had to go through all the possibilities in this report. And then they pretty much rejected them one by one that they were not natural phenomena. They weren't cloud formations. They weren't, you know, thunder clouds. They weren't all these things. And they weren't Chinese and Russian because the technology is so superior to anything we know on Earth.
00:14:20
Speaker
So we're pretty much, you know, the people we've talked to at the Times have discounted the possibility that this could be, you know, technology of our adversaries. So what's left? I mean, you do the logic. There's no answer, except that, well, it ain't from Earth. So, you know, go figure. Yeah.
00:14:40
Speaker
Just a quick message to everyone in the chat. I've only got Ralph for a very limited time, so I won't be able to get to all of your questions, but I did notice this one here, which I think is really good. Resi Tube asks, does Ralph believe the provenance of these objects is known at least at a certain military level, or are the military as baffled as everyone else?
00:14:58
Speaker
I think they know more than they're saying. For example, NASA has obviously very sophisticated surveillance technology because they're in the space station and they're way up there so they can see if these objects are entering the atmosphere. We have defense technology, the NORAD,
00:15:20
Speaker
system that guards against the missile attack. So, you know, have they seen these objects entering the atmosphere? Those are really good questions. And I think, you know, I don't want to speculate on the answer, but I would say that it's probably more than has been put out publicly because there's a certain defense aspect to this. Everybody knows that. And the government doesn't always say everything it knows.
00:15:48
Speaker
So to answer the question, I think they do know more than they're saying.
00:15:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think that was like one of the questions that Christopher Mellon was, he put out a list of questions on Twitter, and I think that was along those kinds of lines as well. But the thing as well that I find strange is that AOIMSG, the group, is actually situated under OUSDI, which I think is limited in its scope, and it may not be able to meet the needs of Congress. So surely it would be better placed somewhere else. I don't know, ODNI or even Space Force. Do you agree with that?
00:16:19
Speaker
Well, I don't know where this thing could be. I mean, it is tricky. First of all, you know, most of the most sophisticated agencies we have, the surveillance military agencies, so ultimately under the Pentagon. And, you know, the problem they came across with the previous
00:16:38
Speaker
agency ATIP, which is what we broke in the New York Times in 2017, that the Pentagon had actually a secret office that was monitoring, you know, UAP or UFOs, whatever they want to call it. And the problem was that ATIP could not get the top security clearance to investigate.
Secrecy Barriers and Information Access
00:17:00
Speaker
And
00:17:01
Speaker
you know, not for lack of trying, but you know, there's so much secrecy and so many levels of a super secret, you know, classified areas in the government that even an agency officially tasked in the Pentagon with investigating this phenomenon couldn't get access to the special access groups that is holding this information.
00:17:27
Speaker
So that's the problem, that the information is very, very tightly held. And penetrating this, the reason it's been secret for so long for a reason, because they've been very good at, you know,
00:17:45
Speaker
closing this off, smokestacking it or whatever you want to call it, that only certain people have access to this information. It's not shared widely in the government. Even presidents, we've heard, have not been able to penetrate this. It's not something that is normally briefed back and forth to different agencies. So it's very, very tightly held.
00:18:10
Speaker
I'm just going to shout out Sneaky Toaster, thank you for the $5. The question, which do you put more stock in or credibility in? Or SAP or ATIP? And do you think James Webb Telescope Science Discovery will be a key part to soften public backlash?
00:18:27
Speaker
Well, AATIP was the previous agency. And AATIP was the public name of it. They played games with these names. Some of the names are more public than other names. And at the New York Times, we just kept calling it AATIP. And not to confuse readers that it went under different names. But I think the web telescope is a real
00:18:54
Speaker
potentially huge advance because that can if that pokes into space and sees these if these things are really interplanetary um and come from from truly from outer space they they could or should be picked up somehow somewhere
00:19:11
Speaker
And these telescopes, I mean, now we just had the story broken the other day about the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. And they have images of another black hole 55 million light years away. So that's even further away. So they can do that.
00:19:30
Speaker
Maybe they can pick up these objects traversing space. So that would be sensational. Now would they release that if they have those images? You know, that's something that Congress could perhaps pry out.
Bipartisan Collaboration on UFO Phenomena
00:19:44
Speaker
Yeah. Do you think this whole situation within the government, it helps that it's actually a bipartisan effort as well?
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think this is one thing that hopefully both parties in our very fractured democracy can agree on, that it'd be nice to get the answers to some of these questions. It's completely not, there's no Republican or Democratic answer to these questions. And in the old science fiction movies, the threat from outer space was always the thing that brought the world together. So that is probably a very helpful aspect of this, that there is no,
00:20:17
Speaker
Certainly in this country, there's no partisan way to look at this issue. Nobody can get an advantage one way or the other in hiding or putting out this information. And most of all, the American people have an interest in knowing this stuff because it's our future.
00:20:37
Speaker
We need to know what the potential is, what the questions that are raised are the most fundamental questions in the history of humanity. Are we alone? What else is out there? How did creation start? You can't get bigger questions than that.
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And now since the announcement of the hearings, you know, I've been updating all my social medias with with all the the news as it comes in and things. But I've seen an awful lot of people commenting things like the government will never tell us anything. It's just deflection tactics. It's another nothing burger. What sort of response would you give to those kind of comments?
00:21:13
Speaker
No, I don't believe that. I think progress comes. I think we've made progress. I think it's very easy to be cynical. It's also easy to be overly optimistic and say, this is the beginning of disclosure. When we did our reporting, Leslie and I and Helene Cooper in the beginning,
00:21:33
Speaker
One of the things we've heard is, oh, this is part of a careful plan to feed out limited information. You know, there are always people who have a conspiratorial bent and they will tell you that this is all part of a conspiracy to do this or that. I've been reporting long enough to know that it's very hard.
00:21:50
Speaker
to obtain a real conspiracy. So I don't believe that this was trotted out at this particular time for a particular reason. I think we did some really good reporting. We had some good luck. We had some good sources. We got the story out. It was not fed to us, I can tell you that.
00:22:10
Speaker
Nobody put this out in the New York Times for any ulterior motive that we could ever discern. We dug it out because we talked to the right people. And by the same token, I don't think it's wise or accurate to downplay it and say, oh, this is just all window dressing. It's nonsense.
00:22:35
Speaker
because there's too many moving parts here. I mean, there are people involved in the secrecy, some of whom I've spoken to who would like to see the veil lifted and more information out, not everything, but a good part of it. There's struggles going on behind the scenes. It's a complicated business and there's no one orchestrating it to the point of, you know, hand feeding out the information or clamping down on the information saying this can't come out. I think that they will try
00:23:03
Speaker
To be careful in the hearings, they being the government, Bray and Moultrie, the two star witnesses, I don't think they're going to spill their guts. But I think they'll be careful. I think there will be a lot of thought beforehand on
00:23:20
Speaker
what they could say should say in response to questions. After all, there are some security aspects involved here, you know, how much we know, we, the government knows about this phenomenon, what we don't want our adversaries to know, what we think our adversaries are doing. They're doing the same thing, by the way.
00:23:36
Speaker
The Russians and Chinese, from everything we know, are also investigating. And they're trying to reverse engineer this phenomenon, whatever it is. So we are competing. So not everything is going to be laid out in the public record. I understand that. But I don't think that we should be cynical and say, oh, this is just window dressing. This is ridiculous.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean sometimes I kind of understand the cynicism because it's been so long That this has been hidden from us but at the same time for me personally I do feel like there's a bit of a change at the moment a little maybe I wouldn't go as far as saying a paradigm shift But it feels like something's a little bit different in this day and age.
Progress on UFO Disclosure and Overcoming Skepticism
00:24:16
Speaker
How do you feel about that kind of thing?
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, a lot has come out. I mean, a lot. Some has come out. And as I said, the UAP report last June, almost a year ago, when they said, you know, we looked at all the, they said all but one of the 140 some odd cases that they featured in this report remain a mystery.
00:24:36
Speaker
So that's a far cry from what the Air Force said that this was all explained in Blue Book, even though there were 701 cases left on the table that were not explained. They didn't feature that. But they said, oh, no, this has been explained away. And this is all ridiculous. Nothing to see here, folks. Just move on.
00:24:56
Speaker
And now this UAP report said that all but one of the 140 some odd cases remain unexplained. So that's a lot of progress. And I think there's a greater willingness now. And the reporting that we and others have done, I think, have helped push that door open.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And will the New York Times have a presence at the hearings for reporting it as they happen? I'm sure they will. I mean, they cover Congress. They will probably cover it with their own people out of the Washington Bureau. But absolutely. I mean, I think this is not the kind of thing that will pass unnoticed.
00:25:36
Speaker
and you won't be going yourself then? I will not be going because we have a big bureau there. I'm a contributor to the Times now. I was on the staff for many years, but now I'm not on the staff anymore. So when I come up with a good story, look with Leslie, we've had a chance to break that story as outsiders in the New York Times as contributors. So I think they'll probably handle that in-house.
00:26:01
Speaker
Excellent. I look forward to seeing some more coverage and hopefully for the weeks following. Have you got anything in the works that you can talk about at all?
00:26:11
Speaker
Well, Leslie and I continue to talk to sources. We have a lot of things pending and information requests out there. And when we feel we have enough pulled together, we'll try to break it in the New York Times. We're certainly not at the end. We haven't answered all the questions. There's a lot of cases out there that are interesting. They come up all the time.
00:26:36
Speaker
and we hear about them, but we don't write everything we hear about till we, you know, nail it down. So, and, you know, the hearing may open up some new doors. I mean, it may give courage and confidence to people, whistleblowers and people in Congress and in the Pentagon who have information. Clearly there's more information than has come out so far. We'd like to hear some of that and see if we could
00:27:06
Speaker
We're definitely going to keep up our reporting. Excellent. Now, for somebody that's written and studied the work of John Mack so much, dare I ask what you think he might think of what's happening at the moment?
John Mack's Alien Encounter Investigations
00:27:20
Speaker
Well, I think he'd be very encouraged. He was very courageous as a Harvard psychiatrist who heard from his patients and people who sought him out that they had these encounters with alien beings. And it was even more
00:27:36
Speaker
ridicule provoking then than it is today because now it's become sort of part of the culture but it was more sensational then and yet he resolved to try to get to the bottom of it and he paid a big price. Harvard put him under investigation. He suffered a lot of ridicule
00:27:57
Speaker
But as I say in my book, The Believer, he went about it in a very rigorous way. In a book he wrote, he focused on 13 case studies. He interviewed the people extensively, talked about their background, their history, their psychiatric history. And he found that there was nothing in their history to suggest that they were deluded or crazy.
00:28:26
Speaker
or that they had anything to gain from telling these stories. On the contrary, they were ashamed. They couldn't understand what had happened. They said to him, please, tell me I'm crazy. And he said, no, you're not crazy, but you have had some kind of experience that we cannot explain. And there were so many of these stories.
00:28:43
Speaker
and so similar in a way. And they occurred to men and women, old young professionals, blue collar, even children as young as two who told stories about being taken up in the sky by little beings. And these children have not
00:28:59
Speaker
read books or seen movies about aliens. They didn't know. So that all added to the mystery, and Mack pursued it. He didn't come up with the answer. But the people who claim there's an answer, like, oh, it's sleep paralysis. It's this. Oh, the hypnosis planted these stories. None of that checks out. None of that checks out.
00:29:22
Speaker
So the so-called skeptics, I wish they'd spent a little more time studying the literature and the stories because it remains a deep, profound mystery. We don't know, but we know at least what it's not. And it's not all the things that a lot of people think they know. It's not mental illness. It's not natural phenomena, misunderstood. So what it is, we don't know.
00:29:49
Speaker
I highly recommend everybody go out and check out Ralph's book, The Believer. I think it's available on Amazon and all the kind of regular outlets. So my final question, Ralph, is do you have any plans to write another book?
00:30:01
Speaker
This took a lot out of me. This was seven years. I started this when Mac was run over in London. A lot of people had conspiracy theories. He had gone to London for a conference on Lawrence of Arabia. He won a Pulitzer Prize. His biography of T.E. Lawrence was spectacular. It was a psychological
00:30:25
Speaker
biography of one of the most enigmatic figures in history. And he went to London 30 years later for a conference after the book had come out and he was run over, looked the wrong way, which happens in your country. Yanks, go over there and look the wrong way. And it was a guy who had too much to drink as I point out in my book. And
00:30:49
Speaker
and that's when I started my research and that was you know 17 years ago and it's been I got access to all his papers from his family and stuff that had never come out his unpublished articles and his own therapy sessions by the way as a psychiatrist he had to go into therapy himself with a therapist
00:31:11
Speaker
so we know what was going on in his mind. He wasn't crazy either. He was just curious. So anyway, so I haven't figured out my next project yet, but I've done some articles in the New York Times on other things. So I'm always looking around.
00:31:28
Speaker
Excellent. Well, Ralph, we've just got over the half an hour, Mark. I cannot thank you enough for agreeing to come and talk to me today. For everybody watching, the congressional hearings are going to be streamed live on YouTube, but I'm going to be joining a group of friends over on Witness Citizen Sean's channel as they happen. We're going to watch along and discuss anything that's said. So come and check that out if you want.
00:31:51
Speaker
But for now, everyone, again, thank you, Ralph. Thank you, everyone, for watching live. And I hope to see you soon. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Ralph. Anytime. Cheerio. Bye bye.