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#83 Nick Cook - Aerospace, Black Projects & Consciousness
453 Plays2 years ago
Nick worked for the world-renowned Jane’s Defence Weekly as a reporter in the late 1980s – rising quickly to become its Aviation Editor. In 2001, his first non-fiction title, The Hunt For Zero Point, reached No 3 in the Amazon general list and Number 1 in its non-fiction charts. The Hunt was the culmination of a decade-long investigation into a heretical idea that anti-gravity technology could have been buried under decades of secret military development.
Nick's website: http://www.nickcook.works/
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Intro music:
• Track Title: Cold Shoulder
• Beat by https://chrishayesmusic.co.uk
#uap
Nick's website: http://www.nickcook.works/
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Disclosure Team is part of the Anomalous Podcast Network: https://audioboom.com/channels/5069292
DISCLAIMER:
FAIR USE NOTICE: This video MAY contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Disclosure Team distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment, and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107.
Intro music:
• Track Title: Cold Shoulder
• Beat by https://chrishayesmusic.co.uk
#uap
Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon.
00:00:51
Speaker
Hey guys, how's it going? Welcome back to Disclose Team. I'm your host, Vinny Adams. Thank you to everybody that's here live on YouTube. And then thank you also to everybody that may be listening or watching after today on the Anomalous Podcast Network or on YouTube as well. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So let's jump straight into it. I will quickly say if anybody does have any questions here in the live chat, please pop them in capital letters. It enables me to just see them
00:01:19
Speaker
or have more of a chance of seeing them. I may save them to the end of the interview, depends on whether they fit and slot into the topic that we're discussing at that time.
Conversation with Nick Cook
00:01:30
Speaker
Let's not waste any more time. I'd love to introduce my guest. Please welcome Nick Cook. Nick. How are you doing? I'm very well. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I've been looking forward to this since we agreed on it. Me too. Great pleasure. Looking forward to it. Excellent. I guess initially my first question would be,
00:01:50
Speaker
What came first, your interest in aviation or UFOs? Like where did it all kind of start with things in the sky?
00:01:57
Speaker
Oh, it was definitely aviation. My dad was an engineer and an inventor, unusually. So I grew up in a sort of rather engineering-minded household. And I think one of my earliest memories is just being fascinated by planes, aircraft, space. It was very much a topic of conversation in our house. So it was definitely that first. I was a very late,
00:02:26
Speaker
I developed a late interest in UFOs. In fact, actually it was my dad again who sent me a book. It was Tim Good's book, you know, Above Top Secret. Sometimes it was while I was at Jane's, I'd never, Jane's Defense Weekly, which is the magazine I worked at for quite a long time, never given them really any thought up until then. But that sort of tweaked my interest in the subject.
00:02:53
Speaker
Excellent. Any sightings at all over the years of your own? No, never. Never. Well, not...
00:03:00
Speaker
not a UFO that most people would distinguish as a UFO. The closest I ever came to seeing anything really unusual was something that I saw outside Area 51 back in, a long time ago, 19, well, actually 30 years ago, 1992. So we can talk about that if you like, but it was a sphere of very bright orange
00:03:30
Speaker
plasma-like light and it was like certainly wasn't an airplane so we can we can chat about that.
Career and Aerospace Industry Insights
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That's great. But let's take it back. You mentioned Jane's Defence Weekly. So, you know, how did you how did you go from an interest in aviation to actually writing about it for such a, you know, well-established publication? I guess I was lucky, really. I got some lucky breaks. I left university. I had a degree in Arabic and Islamic studies. So that had nothing to do with what I went on to do.
00:04:08
Speaker
graduated in the early 80s. So, you know, I'm one of those people I knew I had to go into something that would really engage me. I just, you know, I couldn't do something unless I was passionately engaged in the subject matter. And as we've already said, I had a long standing interest in aviation. So I thought, well, I want to do something to do with aerospace.
00:04:35
Speaker
But I didn't have an engineering degree, so that ruled me out of that. Maths is not my strong suit. And so actually it was my good old dad who said to me again, have you ever thought about writing about the subject?
00:04:52
Speaker
I had never thought that that was a possibility. So, but at that point, I thought, yeah, actually, you know, that's a great idea. I like the idea of that. So at that point, I just approached a number of different magazines. In fact, once, you know, half the battle is knowing what you want to do. And then when you know what you want to do, you can target
00:05:14
Speaker
your interest and I relentlessly targeted a number of publications and in the end I got a job with a very, it's not well known at all, but it was a trade publication called Interavia. It was based in Geneva, but it had a UK office and they gave me the job. They said, we'll give you a trial.
00:05:36
Speaker
And that was in 1983. And in 86, James Defense Weekly offered me a job of a reporter. And the following year, I was given the aerospace editor's job. And that was great because it was a real step up. That was quite a, James, back in those days, certainly was quite an investigative journal. We sort of
00:05:59
Speaker
like to think we kicked down a few doors and it was a very good fun solid journalistic organization to work for. Excellent yeah and did it help you forge relationships with people within the aerospace world and even possibly the military world and you know how did that sort of benefit you?
00:06:23
Speaker
Well, it did because a trade journal is not like a newspaper. It has this weird sort of slightly symbiotic relationship with the industry it's reporting on. And I think this is probably the same for any trade publication that reports on an industrial sector. So on the one hand, these companies will court you. They want their copy, whatever it is that's new on there.
00:06:51
Speaker
quotes radar screen to go into the publication. On the other hand, it is down to us not to kowtow or pander to them. You have to give them a fair trial in whatever it is that they do. So you kind of tread that
00:07:07
Speaker
walk that tightrope really between I wouldn't say I ever cozied up to them but on the other hand I was respectful of them. I was certainly respectful or tried to be of the facts.
00:07:23
Speaker
And as long as you adhere to the facts, I felt that was probably a pretty good guideline for how you should conduct your career. So to begin with, it was a very sort of ordinary kind of beat for me. I just reported on
00:07:39
Speaker
the developments of the day in the aerospace defense world because James defense weekly obviously was covering the military side of things. But after a while you sort of you tend to develop a set of interests and the late certainly the late 80s.
00:07:56
Speaker
When did I get the job? I got the job in 86. I became editor in 87. So by the late 80s, there was a lot of surfacing stuff about Black World programs. The F-117 stealth fighter had not yet revealed itself or been revealed. There was emerging talk about a hypersonic replacement of the Blackbird.
00:08:19
Speaker
deemed rumored to be this thing called Aurora. Well, I was in the right place at the right time. I was based in London, but I had a global beat. My expense account back then was unusually generous so I could travel and I could go and talk to people about these and other programs. And it was always America for me that was the
00:08:43
Speaker
the good and fascinating place to go and really dig these stories up because it was the place where the real technology was at. So I spent a lot of my time going to the States.
00:08:55
Speaker
Yeah, and now you mentioned Aurora there and it's still to this day is this mythical idea of this program. But did it exist and what did it represent? Some say it's a multitude of craft or planes under the Aurora banner. Others say it's just one craft or it doesn't exist at all. So are you able to help us get to the bottom of that?
00:09:18
Speaker
Well, I don't think we should be deceived by the name for a start. You know, Aurora appeared in the public consciousness because it appeared in a budget, a US budget, a defense, a DOD Pentagon budget book in
Speculations on Hypersonic Programs
00:09:35
Speaker
the mid late 1980s. It was a line item, but it was a big line item. It had, there was billions of dollars in that line item and no one could, there was no clear description of what this thing was, but it was called Aurora.
00:09:50
Speaker
So, a colleague of mine who was working for Jane's at the time, a chap called Bill Sweetman, he was based in the States, very well known aerospace writer, but he'd made a career almost out of writing about these secret programs.
00:10:06
Speaker
Bill had done an awful lot of digging even before that, early 1980s, about emerging stealth technology and hypersonic technology. And it was his view that Aurora was a blanket name for a multitude of different programs. But the one that we all focused on, rightly, was this hypersonic, which means a plane capable of exceeding Mach 5, five times the speed of sound.
00:10:36
Speaker
a hypersonic replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird which retired in 1990 if memory serves.
00:10:47
Speaker
And I believe that something was there. I think it was what they call an operational deployable prototype. So it didn't go into mass production, but it didn't need to. A handful of them were all that would be required. And that it filled a gap between the retirement of the SR-71
00:11:11
Speaker
and the emergence of a new generation of spy satellites, digital spy satellites, that were able to provide real-time surveillance of the Soviet Union, Russia and other places of interest. So for a narrow window of time, maybe two or three years, this thing
00:11:31
Speaker
was out there, and I got as near an admission as I'll probably ever get from an official, when on his very last day in office, the head of research and development for the US Air Force, a guy called Lieutenant General George Mulner,
00:11:50
Speaker
granted me an interview request and we were the the topic of conversation was black world aerospace programs which would have been or should have been under his purview and he came as close i think as anyone has to saying yeah we sort of probably developed or we could have developed something i mean i'm paraphrasing what he said
00:12:12
Speaker
But there was this sort of intermediate gap between what was retired and this new generation of spy satellites. So I took that as a yes.
00:12:26
Speaker
Excellent. You see, I've been looking recently into the Calvin case from 1990, which, you know, certain people in the UFO community say that it's apparently the the clearest UFO photo that's ever existed. And then there's a lot of other people that believe it to be a secret black project. So I just wondered what your thoughts were on that case.
00:12:49
Speaker
I'm by no means an expert in it, I mean I think it did not come across my desk when I was at James, but I've seen pictures of it obviously and I know that the Condyne report has given it a certain
00:13:05
Speaker
level of respectability, if you can call it that. I've looked at the pictures. The craft itself is very reminiscent of an artist concept that was run in Aviation Week.
00:13:21
Speaker
in I think it was the late 80s. This thing looked like a diamond and was very, was reported to be by Aviation Week, very high flying and very fast. So the bit that perplexes me and makes me doubt what I see in the Calvin case
00:13:44
Speaker
is that this thing looks identical to this design that was flammed up in Aviation Week, but yet is flying at very low altitude, very slowly, clearly, because it's in the company of a Harrier GR5 or a GR7. And to my mind, unless it's powered by something truly exotic, it should be falling out of the sky. So for me, I'm
00:14:14
Speaker
you know, I'm always ready to be persuaded otherwise. But it looks a bit suspect to me. That's what I appreciate the answer. But I mean, it's 32 years ago. I mean, if it was, you know, something secretive, like a black project, is that is that a normal amount of time? Or is it sounds a long time for things to remain, you know, in the dark? Is that normal?
00:14:37
Speaker
uh yeah well increasingly i think it will be the case i mean the last there was a round of black world aerospace revelations um in the in the in the late 80s and the early 90s um the f-117 stealth fighter the b2 b2 was kind of
00:14:58
Speaker
semi-black, it was more dark grey than black. But the F-117 stealth fighter came out of the shadows in 1988 and then there were some various other programs were revealed in the 1990s. Since then there's been nothing and I think there's a very good reason for that.
00:15:17
Speaker
because a lot of officials in the 1980s put their political reputations on the line when they denied absolutely that aircraft and projects like the stealth fighter existed. And then they were proven to exist. And these officials wriggled out of it by saying, well, you didn't ask me the right question. You were asking me about a stealth fighter. Well, that's not a stealth fighter. It's actually an attack aircraft.
00:15:43
Speaker
And it wasn't called the F19. It's called the F117. So we didn't lie. And there it is. Well, after that, the reporter community smartened up. And they asked them questions that gave these people no room for wriggle room. But as you know, Vinny, under special access program rules and waived saps, you can lie till the cows come home in order to protect the secret.
00:16:12
Speaker
So a bunch of other officials since then have gone on record as saying, no, there's nothing, Aurora doesn't exist, nothing like it exists. And so they are buried and kept buried for a very long time to protect those officials.
00:16:29
Speaker
And that's why I don't think you're going to see too much in the way of revelation about, yeah, buried black programs until they absolutely
Exploration of Anti-Gravity Technology
00:16:40
Speaker
have to. I mean, it will be, they'll be dragged kicking and screaming metaphorically into the light for that very reason, because people are embarrassed. They threaten to embarrass political careers, whether they are current or retired.
00:16:59
Speaker
Now let's move on to your book, The Hunt for Zero Point, which I think was published first in 2001. And a lot of focus was on the classified world of anti-gravity technology, with focus on Igor Wieckowski's claims that the Nazis developed some sort of UFO-like device. So what made you decide to go down that route with this book, and what did you discover during the process?
00:17:25
Speaker
Eagle-Wipkoski and some of the German stuff did get some attention when the book came out, and to a degree, still does. But that's not why I set out to write the book. In fact, actually, in the book itself, I say that the Nazi stuff is a really annoying distraction, but I can't ignore it because it keeps on popping up, so I have to address it. And that was true. It was an annoying distraction.
00:17:52
Speaker
The real thing that I wanted to write about was it stemmed from an article that came across my desk.
00:18:04
Speaker
saying that the US aerospace industry had looked at and had started to develop anti-gravity technology in the late 1950s. But by the 1960s, early 1960s, there was no reference anymore to this very public discussion in the late 1950s by very reputable aerospace companies that
00:18:27
Speaker
some of which were still, and still are household names, you know, Lockheed, Boeing, I think was in there, Convair, you know, well-known names. So I think, to begin with, I think, God, this is really hokey, and I'm sure there's nothing in it. But I made a few calls, and I called a few people I knew in the Lockheed's and the Boeing's, and I said, look,
00:18:55
Speaker
this is sort of crazy you know it's a slow month i'm just running a few checks but this article came across my desk it's a contemporary article from 1956 could you could you check it out for me you know and i had
00:19:10
Speaker
sources and contacts in. Actually, it was a very low level approach I made through the mostly through the public affairs organizations, these companies. And it wasn't until one of them came back to me and said, actually, we'd really rather you didn't dig into this. Well, okay. Now, if I wasn't before, but now I am, thanks very much. And actually, from then on, that's the theme of the book was, I want to go on a
00:19:38
Speaker
I'm going to go on a journey to find out what I can find out about what I deem to be the most secret thing I could conceive of in the aerospace and defense world. And I'm doing that because through this job at Jane's Defense Weekly, which was like, it was like my passport into the world of
00:20:00
Speaker
the deeply respectable world of aerospace and defense. There were very few. I don't think there were any doors that were close to me. I could interview senior members of the Pentagon. I could interview senior members of the UK MOD. I could interview government ministers. So why don't I just use this opportunity, because I don't think I'm going to be in the job forever, to just ask questions about this really taboo. This is 25 years ago.
00:20:29
Speaker
this subject where we're all talking about now, you couldn't breathe this in polite company 25 years ago for fear of being, you know, carted off. So I kept these questions very low key, but I sort of jotted it all down and I just said to myself, however long it takes, let's see where it goes. I wasn't intending to write a book even, but after about
00:20:54
Speaker
seven or eight years, I thought, God, actually, this is quite interesting, this journey. It's taken me into some very interesting areas. It's taken me into places, parts of NASA I didn't know existed, parts of the skunk works I didn't know about. And I just wrote it up. And along the way, there was this, as I said, this rather annoying, persistent sort of Nazi legend that kept on popping up. So I thought, well, I've got to go and deal with that as well.
00:21:21
Speaker
And but it was interesting because it opened up the world of an individual called SS General Hans Kamler, who was in charge of all Nazi Germany's secret research programs at the end of the war. And at the time I was looking into Kamler's career, which was
00:21:40
Speaker
exotic, weird, unpleasant and extraordinary. There were many conflicting accounts of his death and a bit like those conflicting accounts of anti-gravity stories in the late 1950s where you've got those
00:21:59
Speaker
where you've got that level of sort of pushback, you think, well, actually there's something here. So what did happen to Hans Kamlo? Where did he go? Did he do a deal with the Americans? Did he do a deal with the Russians? So it led me down that rabbit hole. And along the way, I met Igor Vitkovsky and came across the story of the Nazi bell and, you know, da da da da da da.
00:22:23
Speaker
So what is De Glocca, in your opinion? We hear that it's like a UFO and then they fly it down to Antarctica and all this kind of stuff. It's taken on a life of its own. I mean, it's amazing. That story has really burgeoned. And, you know, for me, in the Hunt for Zero point, I say, look, this place where the bell
00:22:50
Speaker
And I think there was something there, there was a program, there was something happening in this location.
00:22:57
Speaker
which was in southern Poland, near the city of Breslau, as it was in German days. But the site itself, which was an SS-run secret weapons site, in the middle of it is this thing that people have called thehenge. I think I may have referred to it such an aunt, for zero point.
00:23:23
Speaker
But I say this construction looks awfully like the base of a cooling tower. It doesn't look like an anti-gravity. It could be an anti-gravity test rig, I suppose. And that's what Eagle-Vikovsky conjectured it was. I said, but given this place is a very secret site, it unquestionably has links to Germany's secret nuclear program.
00:23:50
Speaker
at the end of the Second World War, it is either something truly exotic along Igor's lines, or it is, I think, more likely to be part of Germany's nuclear program to do with the separation of nuclear isotopes for a weapons program. As I said, that henge thing looks like the base of a cooling tower. You get cooling towers all over nuclear sites.
00:24:20
Speaker
You know, the jury was kind of slightly out when I wrote the book 20 years ago. I'm absolutely convinced it was to do with their nuclear program today. I don't think it has anything, sadly, nothing to do with an anti-gravity program.
00:24:35
Speaker
I am in total agreement with you on there. I have these conversations with a lot of different friends and colleagues and especially Graham Rendell who wrote the recent Foo Fighters book and he tackles the Germany aspect of things in a lot of depths and there's just nothing there. There's just no evidence, there's hearsay and stories and
00:24:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's very difficult. It's intriguing from that point of view, because there is a lot of sort of circumstantial evidence. You know, there are Germans who've come out of the woodwork who said, I worked on a sorts of program during the Second World War. But there is absolutely no, well, as you've just said, Vinny, there's no smoking gun, which is, it's really, it's strange, but, you know, I try to follow evidence and see where that evidence takes me.
00:25:24
Speaker
as I said in the hunt, it took me everywhere and nowhere when I was doing the investigation, but nothing that led to a German disc program, an anti-gravity program, anything like that.
00:25:39
Speaker
So during your time looking more into the UFO side of things, I'd be interested to get your thoughts on the Roswell incident. Do you believe that it could well be an object of non-human origin or do you lean more towards the sort of Prozac, Project Mogul, some kind of balloon?
00:25:56
Speaker
I definitely don't lean towards a prosaic project mogul type explanation. I remember I was at Jane's Defense Weekly when the Air Force produced it. I think it was something really kind of presumptuous, like the final report on Roswell. And I think when was that? That was probably early 90s, maybe.
00:26:22
Speaker
And it was clear they were covering something up. I didn't know what they were covering up, but it was very clear they were covering something up. And of course, again, as we've touched on a number of times already in just a few 20 minutes or so, where you get that level of disagreement, contradiction, pushback from officialdom, even though officialdom itself might not know what's going on, there's something there. That denotes
00:26:52
Speaker
There is something to look at. I never spent any time investigating Roswell because hundreds of dozens if not hundreds of people have. And, you know, I was always interested to read what they came up with.
Roswell and UFO Skepticism
00:27:06
Speaker
I unquestionably something very strange happened something very secret happened.
00:27:12
Speaker
a crash disk, perhaps. I mean, I incline more towards that than I do in a prosaic explanation, certainly. And there is, I firmly believe, again, from my own
00:27:28
Speaker
journalistic career that where there's smoke there's often fire or there is usually there is all there's always fire um and in Roswell's case I've no doubt that something very very unusual and secret happened um I just don't know what that thing what that
00:27:48
Speaker
what that instance was. Yeah, of course. Now we often hear the term crash retrieval, especially more recently banded about when it comes to UFOs. But do you believe that possibly the US government or a private entity such as your Lockheed, your Skunk Works and that, they could have UFO wreckage in their possession?
00:28:06
Speaker
I didn't until recently. I just felt that, again, I've always tried to follow things that I can pin down. And I like to think that most of the things, almost everything, I think, in the hunt for zero point was sort of pinable data, pinable evidence, and where it's not, I try to say it's not, or I don't know.
00:28:35
Speaker
So in the case of crash retrievals, again, I've never investigated them, I've never looked, but doing what I do, people have, again, they've come out of the shadows and they've said, people who should know or have spoken to people who should know, and they have said, we think that
00:28:59
Speaker
There is a pretty strong case for saying that they have crashed to earth. Again, whose they are, we don't know, but I don't align to the view that again that there's a sort of prosaic explanation.
00:29:15
Speaker
you know, some have conjectured that, you know, a top-secret Soviet craft crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947. That is just impossible, you know, given the state of the technology of the day. So if it wasn't, you know, what the Pentagon likes to call adversary tech at the moment, whose was it? Again, I think that
00:29:45
Speaker
What is interesting is what has flipped in the last five years since the New York Times is a groundbreaking story on the US Navy's UFO sightings and the revelations about the ATIP program within the Pentagon tasked with looking at UFOs. Actually, since then, everything has changed.
00:30:13
Speaker
What was taboo is now no longer taboo. What was, what couldn't be discussed in polite company is now discussed in Congress and in unclassified versions of reports to Congress.
00:30:29
Speaker
The more tenuous position, I think, these days, is the debunkers' position. It just doesn't look credible anymore. It just sounds ridiculous, in fact, because the weight of evidence says, no, there is something exotic in our airspace. And whilst we don't know what it is yet,
00:30:51
Speaker
it defies all of those logical, rational explanations that debunkers like to say, you know, is, is the more likely, offers the more likely explanation, you know, birds, balloons, swamp gas and adversary tech, you know, some of it is that stuff. But, you know,
00:31:15
Speaker
Another thing I like to say is it's very easy to debunk one point of evidence, a single data point, but actually what you have to do is, if you want to be credible, is you need to debunk the whole lot.
00:31:32
Speaker
And there's just too much evidence these days that's out there to say that this is a phenomenon that is prosaic, dull, and we shouldn't be paying attention to. It's quite the reverse of those things as Congress is now telling us. Congressional panelists who grill defense officials are telling us
00:31:58
Speaker
those old tropes are no longer acceptable. You've got to do better than that. Yeah, indeed. I'd love to get your take on a lot of the cases that we've heard in the last few years relating to
00:32:11
Speaker
And I hate the word when it's associated, but drones and these objects that are hovering over these Navy fleets for really long periods of time, more than any kind of commercial drone could possibly do. But, you know, with the history of UAVs, you know, like the RQ-180, which is not really a drone, same with the X47B, these unmanned vehicles, could these be like a next generation unmanned aerial platform that they're testing? Or do you still lean towards it being more
00:32:41
Speaker
more unexplained than that? Well, I guess I fall back on the same arguments that were put forward in the early days. We were talking earlier about these black world stealth programs and there would be sightings of something
00:33:05
Speaker
in the skies, you know, over the desert Southwest of America. And people would conjecture, you know, is it a stealth platform that's being tested that secret, or is it something else? Well, quite often these things were cited over cities, you know, the Phoenix lights, or, you know, some other quite dense population center. Quite often people would report them over Las Vegas, for example.
00:33:32
Speaker
It is insanity to test a top secret aerospace vehicle over a city. It would be insanity as well to test a top secret
00:33:45
Speaker
drone against your own side. I suppose there's probably a smidge of a possibility you might want to do that to get some kind of reaction or test the reaction time of your kind of friendly adversary if you're the Air Force and you're putting this thing up against the Navy. But it's extremely unlikely in my view. And it's unlikely to vanishing
00:34:13
Speaker
in my view, that you would, for example, fly a top-secret drone over a nuclear installation. Who's going to do that? A, it risks being shot down or disabled in some way, and then the tech is exposed.
00:34:31
Speaker
So again, whilst some of these instances may point to drone technology, again, if you look at the body of the evidence, all of it, what you're getting back from that is a massive question mark. In fact, more than that, it's everything I know from a career in aerospace
00:35:01
Speaker
technology, investigation, and evaluation does not stack up against what people are reporting. So therefore, I have to think again. Praseic explanations don't cut it. And thank God for the New York Times again. And it's December 2017 article, which really enabled everyone to talk about this stuff
00:35:30
Speaker
in sort of open source company. It's very liberating and it needs to be because if commentators are having difficulty, think what it's like for a pilot, a military pilot who comes up against one of these things, who just can't talk about it because it's taboo. Yeah, absolutely.
00:35:55
Speaker
Now, I recently had a conversation, an interview with David Marla on Black Triangles, and he brought up the TR-3B, which is kind of the bane of my life. I forever hear that phrase banded about when anything triangular is talked about in ufology. But he mentioned that it all comes down to the word of one man, Ed Gafouche. Did that name or phrase TR-3B ever come across, did you ever come across it in the
00:36:21
Speaker
your work over the years within, you know, aerospace or military conversations? Yeah, it did, but in a wholly different context. The very first time I heard it, it was
00:36:43
Speaker
designation that was pinned on a putative, if I recall rightly, reconnaissance sort of sibling of the F-117, that there was, and I think again it might have been Aviation Week or
00:37:01
Speaker
or a very diligent investigator down in Texas called Steve Douglas, it might've been him, who had photographed an aerospace platform looking very stealthy, but was clearly very conventional. I mean, it was just flying very conventionally, that he or someone like him dubbed the TR-3B. Since then, a bit like Aurora,
00:37:29
Speaker
I feel it's very, for me, it's been very unwise to get hung up on titles, because they take on a life of their own, and they come to describe, in the end, anything you want it to describe, you know, so if you're an anti-gravity proponent, oh, it's a TR-3B, and it was built by humans. If you're a stealth
00:37:55
Speaker
aircraft proponents, oh it's a stealthy aircraft platform called the TR-3B. So I tend to avoid those, the designations themselves, when it comes to exotic
00:38:12
Speaker
technology, propulsion technology for terrestrially designed aircraft. Again, I'm back where I was at the end of The Hunt for Zero Point, and I don't want to, you know, if anyone's still out there attempting to read it, I don't want to throw in too many spoilers. But, you know, I do say at the end of The Hunt, which is this, more than anything else, it's my journey through
00:38:40
Speaker
a sort of a dark and unfamiliar landscape, which is the world of classified aerospace development, insofar as I was able to navigate it.
00:38:50
Speaker
And at the end of the journey, I go, there's no smoking gun. I wish there were. I wish I could say I found the anti-gravity program that's buried 10 levels below the Lockheed skunk works. But I didn't. And I think there's some very powerful, and again, it's detailed in the book, very powerful circumstantial evidence to show that a program could exist. But did I find it? No. Found lots of other stuff.
00:39:20
Speaker
No, just sticking with anti gravity. One name that I keep coming across and there's very little information I can find is Ning Li. Is there anything you can tell us about her work? Because it all just seems very mysterious because it sounds like she was at the forefront of, you know, anti gravity studies, at least.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah, I met Ningli. So, let's think. I think she just made, yeah, she's in the hunt for zero point. But she was very, very white world then that she was working
00:39:53
Speaker
at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, I think, close to, obviously, Huntsville is a center of rocket technology, and I didn't meet her when she was working for the university or for NASA, which she then went on to do,
00:40:13
Speaker
But she was doing some quite interesting experimentation in rapidly rotating superconductors and noticing, as did a number of other experimenters, that there were some anomalies associated with these devices, which appeared to show a reduction in gravitational pull force in the column of air, or the volume of air above the rotating superconductor.
Ning Li's Experiments and Consciousness Exploration
00:40:41
Speaker
And that was on the order of sort of three to five percent, which actually when you think about it is quite a noticeable weight drop. Lots of people tried to replicate these experiments that
00:40:57
Speaker
There was a guy in Russia called Yevgeny Podkletnov who had done similar experiments. No one could replicate them. And that was the issue. If you can't replicate someone else's experiment in a laboratory, it doesn't exist, according to science.
00:41:15
Speaker
Anyway, Ningli was amongst that generation. We're talking mid-1990s. She then got a, I think in 2001 or two, she got a contract from the DOD Redstone Arsenal in Alabama for, it was,
00:41:37
Speaker
about a half a million dollars, I think. And no one, she didn't say what it was for, but by that stage, people were beginning to get very interested in something called an impulse gravity wave generator. This was not the weight reduction thing that you saw above the superconductor. What Podkletnov and others were saying was if you shot a jolt of a very powerful jolt of electricity,
00:42:02
Speaker
through that distorted gravitational field, you would get an anti-gravitational jolt, a beam, a sort of pulse of anti-gravitational force, which could be used as a weapon. And it had, I mean, I interviewed Pod Klepnov as well.
00:42:26
Speaker
And he was talking about experiments he'd done in Russia, which was knocking stuff over at a distance of about a kilometer. You scale that up and you get an anti-satellite weapon. You could knock a satellite out of its orbit. So, you know, conjecture. Was that why the Redstone Arsenal gave Ningli a half a million dollar contract was to investigate this technology as an anti-satellite weapon?
00:42:51
Speaker
because that was sort of what Redstone Arsenal would be charged with. I met her in 2003 at a conference called, it's achieved some notoriety since, I think it was called the MITRE
00:43:09
Speaker
a high-frequency gravity wave conference in McLean, Virginia, Spooksville, just outside Washington, and Ningli was there. In fact, she chaired the conference, and I interviewed her, and I asked her about her work, and she said, my work is very real, I'm on the verge of a breakthrough, and I'm going to do it for all mankind. And then she disappeared.
00:43:37
Speaker
What happened to her? No idea. But, well, of course, we know what happened to her sadly in the end. I think she next cropped up last year in a bitchery notice in Huntsville newspaper saying that she died. But what happened in the intervening 20 years almost, no one really knows.
00:44:00
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of theories. I always hear people say, oh, she was ordered back to China or something and, you know, kept under lock and key or work was suppressed. And I mean, there's just no evidence for that. So, of course, it remains a mystery. But no, I appreciate you discussing here, because like I said, I've really struggled to find much information on her. So, yeah, that's really interesting.
00:44:21
Speaker
There isn't much. No, yeah, there you go. Now let's jump completely into a different area. This is the consciousness studies. So last year you entered the BICS essay contest, run by Robert Bigelow. With your paper, what is the best available evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death? So can you give us a bit of a mini breakdown of what the article entails in your theories? Yeah.
00:44:49
Speaker
So just a bit of background to that. I've become interested in consciousness because my wife had an unusual experience when her mother died, which was some of the attributes that near-death experiences report, which is a sense of being transported into a
00:45:15
Speaker
a place that, you know, where seemingly sort of time stops, there's this great sense of connection. You know things, you know, it's a very weird sort of transcendent experience. We have been married a long time. She doesn't make things up. But she told me this, and it happened at the precise moment her mum died.
00:45:40
Speaker
My curiosity was piqued, obviously. And I sort of wouldn't let it go because I wanted to know what this thing was. And I did a bit of digging and just did a bit of Googling. And it told me there was this thing called a shared death experience, such as the one I've described, very like an NDE, a near-death experience.
00:46:02
Speaker
I sort of did a bit of digging and became intrigued enough about it actually to write a book about it, but not a non-fiction book. I wrote a novel called, a thriller called The Grid, and the whole subject of consciousness formed the backdrop to The Grid. When I stopped writing The Grid, I was still really interested in the subject of consciousness. What is it that gives us our sense of self? What is it that gives us
00:46:29
Speaker
perceptual capabilities, how are we able to map our reality? How are we able to navigate our reality? These are questions that don't have answers, that yet they're huge. Science doesn't have an answer to this. So I think a really lucky break. I got a grant, a research grant that allowed me to research where I'd left off in the consciousness field. And I was able to go off and do this for about a year and a half, dedicate myself to the study of consciousness.
00:46:58
Speaker
And then weirdly, that grant funding ended. And I thought, well, that was fun, but what do I do with this research? And then within a month or two, Robert Bigelow, known for his work in the UFO field and Bass, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies and all the rest of it, he popped up.
00:47:25
Speaker
with this competition. He launched a competition. There was a one point, well, at the time, I think there was a million dollars or one and a half million dollars attached to it. It grew in the end to be a one point eight million dollar prize fund. And I suddenly realized that the question that you read out, Vinny, about the survival of consciousness
00:47:46
Speaker
after permanent bodily death, I thought, crikey, I've actually investigated, I've researched this. That is part of what I'd researched for this in this consciousness study. So I thought, oh, well, I'll have a crack at it. And I didn't really didn't expect to get anywhere at all. I mean, you had to pre qualify to enter it.
00:48:09
Speaker
I think 1,300 people or thereabouts were accepted as sort of pre-qualified to enter the contest. I've done some work with, I don't know whether the name resonates, but one of the remote viewers was called Ingo Swan. In fact, he was one of the founders of the remote viewing program.
00:48:29
Speaker
I'd known Ingo. I'd met him several times before he died, and I laterally came to be commissioned by his family to write a biography of him. Well, the biography didn't happen, but I ended up actually
00:48:52
Speaker
working with his archive, finding a couple of undiscovered Ingo manuscripts, which the family then published. But I helped to edit and put all of that together. And I was able to put that into my submission for the Bix essay as probably the only sort of qualification I had to enter this, apart from the fact I'd done some research to enter this competition. And as I say, to my enormous surprise, I found myself amongst the 29 winners.
00:49:19
Speaker
and ended up getting presented with a check at Bigelow's aerospace facility in North Las Vegas in December last year. Amazing. What was it like being inside that building? Everyone always says, oh, I'd love to see inside. But I mean, I suppose it was a great feeling, but nothing. Well, it was interesting because, I mean, on one level, it's like, you know, bear in mind,
00:49:49
Speaker
I've probably toured hundreds, if not thousands of aerospace factories over the course of my 20-year career. And one looks very much like another. So on the one hand, I walk into this facility and go, oh, this looks really familiar. There's a habitable space module in there.
00:50:12
Speaker
It is a regular modern aerospace facility. But on the other hand, you're pinching yourself and thinking, I know people who would give their eye teeth to get into this place. And so from that point of view, it was fascinating. And a very enjoyable evening, particularly rubbing shoulders with some of these other
00:50:37
Speaker
very worthy winners who had PhDs and MDs. And I am suffering from imposter syndrome. I'm literally thinking, what am I doing here? But it was a great privilege to have won. It's opened up some other doors. And it also gave me some insights into the world of ufology as well, actually, because
00:50:59
Speaker
You know, I hadn't pre-2017, as I said, in the New York Times piece. I'd not spent a whole lot of time looking at UFOs. And I know that sounds strange because a lot of people equate the hunt for zero point with a UFO book. I'd probably argue that toss. And I'd say, to me, it's not. It's the story of my hunt for exotic terrestrial technology.
00:51:29
Speaker
But by some definitions, that is a UFO book. But along the way, post 2017, when the New York Times came out with that story, I thought, well, actually, you know,
00:51:42
Speaker
This does deserve, this phenomenon, this subject really does deserve to be looked at. And so, you know, and I'd done some reading before that of, you know, books by Jacques Vallée and others. I'm a great admirer of Vallée's work. I think he did some pioneering stuff. And I thought, you know what? I mean, I come from a nuts and bolts background. That's my, that was my beat. And I know,
00:52:10
Speaker
So many people have gone down the nuts and bolts road to try and decipher the UFO enigma. I thought, you know what, I'm actually, I'm sort of, I'm more in the valet camp. I think there is a connection with consciousness. I don't know what it is, but let's start to have a look at it. So, you know, in opening up the pure consciousness research that I've been doing, it also gave me a sort of sideline
00:52:39
Speaker
a sort of seat in the sidelines of the theater on the sort of the UFO phenomenon as well. And that's been interesting because it's perhaps given me some insights into that world that I wouldn't otherwise have had. Yeah. And you recently became a research director for Forbic. So what does that entail? Exactly any specific duties
00:53:06
Speaker
Well, no, I mean, it's early days at the moment, to be honest, the formation of BICS, I mean, Robert Bigelow formed BICS just prior to the contest. So that was in whenever we said it was last year.
00:53:24
Speaker
And then after that, he wanted to use the essay as a platform for further research into consciousness, but particularly into the survival aspect, the survival or continuity of consciousness after death. So I was asked, I guess it was a couple of months ago, whether I would like to be a research director
00:53:52
Speaker
the organization along with several other BICS essay winners and I said yeah I would like to be. This research is conducted in a spirit of openness, it is tasks or its mission is to you know try to plumb the depths of
00:54:15
Speaker
what possibly to us is the greatest mystery. What happens to us when we die? And to be a part of that, it's nothing like a full-time job at all. It's a very part-time job. For me, very rewarding, insightful, and a privilege. So far, I'm enjoying the work, but we haven't got very far into it yet.
00:54:46
Speaker
Well, I mean, I suppose I should say congratulations on the essay and on the new role, but I really look forward to seeing what does come from this, from these early days. Hopefully, you know, it'll be something that the public will be able to see when it's released. So yeah, really exciting stuff. Well, that concludes my questions. I do have one here, which I'll put to you from Elena Campbell asks, thoughts on zero point energy and pyramids.
00:55:19
Speaker
There are some weird sort of synchronicities in that question. I think I said at the top of the interview that I'd studied Arabic and Islamic studies at university. I actually have lived part of my life in Egypt. And so I'm sort of used to go and visit the pyramids a lot. I'm very familiar with the Giza site and other ancient Egyptian sites. I've never looked into that aspect of zero point energy or exotic energy. I'm very aware that there are
00:55:39
Speaker
Well, I don't... I mean...
00:55:48
Speaker
questions about what the pyramids are and whether they have hidden facets to them which bestow exotic properties on objects.
00:56:09
Speaker
But I don't know anything about it. So I'm going to have to duck that one. So thank you for the question. But I wish I knew more about it. I don't. And I do know that my friend Jay Anderson has just been to Egypt and has looked, he of Project Unity, and has looked with some other people I know at some of the more exotic aspects of the pyramids and Egyptology. And I think he'd be a much better person to ask than me.
00:56:38
Speaker
Fantastic, thank you anyway. We've got one last question here. Who is conducting the best current research on life after death?
00:56:46
Speaker
Well, obviously, I'd love to be able to report that BICS is. But as I said, that's the Bigelow Institute. But it's very early days for the Bigelow Institute. So they're just getting up and running on that very question. There are a great many. No, there aren't a great many. There are a number of academic institutions and institutes that do look at that subject.
00:57:16
Speaker
uh the spr um in the uk so the society of psychic research is very you know it's a very old society it's been doing that very question um looking into
00:57:30
Speaker
post-death consciousness research for 150 years. That's one of the leading institutions. There are universities. The University of Virginia, for example, is tasked with consciousness research on that question and on reincarnation and the continuity of consciousness before and after death. So it's a growing field, but it's a relatively
00:58:00
Speaker
recent field in terms of its acceptability by mainstream academia. Right, excellent. Well, before we go, I'm just going to give a quick shout out to Jimmy the Earthling. Thank you so much for the donation and the lovely comment, great discussion. It's been my pleasure and it's been absolutely wonderful. Well, Nick, thank you so much. That was fascinating. I knew it would be. So yeah, thank you ever so much.
00:58:25
Speaker
Cheers, Vinny. Good to see you. Thanks for having me on. My pleasure. Thank you to everybody that was in the comments, in the live chat for keeping it nice and mature and clean. I always appreciate that. I will be back next week. You can go over to my Instagram or my Twitter to see who I've got coming up next. But for now, everyone, enjoy the rest of your day wherever you are, and we'll see you soon. Take care.
00:58:49
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon.