KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)

In the eight decades since the modern UFO era began, few dates are as monumentally important as Dec. 16, 2017. That is when The New York Times published a blockbuster story about a secretive government investigation into alarming and ongoing encounters between U. S. military units and unidentified machines of unknown origin - machines that appear to be far more advanced than any technology known to exist on Earth. The fact that The New York Times, regarded as "the paper of record" and possibly the most respected news platform in the country, plastered the UFO exposé on the front page of its Dec. 17 edition sent shockwaves through American journalism, grabbed the attention of Congress, and reignited public interest in a subject that had been largely ignored or ridiculed - not only by The Times, but by nearly every major news organization in the Western world. The ripple effects from that report are still unfolding more than seven years later. The three journalists who worked on the story - Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean, and Ralph Blumenthal - somehow managed to overcome decades of government disinformation, scientific ridicule, and editorial scorn to get the story into the paper. Blumenthal, a brilliant, award-winning newsman, staked his reputation and career on that one report. How did he and his colleagues pull it off? What other secrets did they uncover that never made it into print? In a candid and highly personal conversation, Blumenthal reveals to Jeremy and George the difficulties that confronted the three journalists, including blowback from their colleagues, arguments with editors, and the conspiracy theories espoused by the loudest voices in the always rancorous UFO community. The story about AATIP, Tic Tac, Elizondo, Harry Reid, and other key players was not Blumenthal's entry point to the UFO debate. He was already investigating the life and career of a brilliant, mercurial, and flawed trailblazer - a Harvard psychiatrist named Dr. John Mack. Like the late Dr. Mack, Blumenthal suspects that the personal encounters between humans and non-humans, as reported by tens of thousands of people all over the world, might be far more important than the competition between world powers to master the technological secrets stashed deep inside the bowels of black-world programs. Follow Ralph's work here : https://RalphBlumenthal.com GOT A TIP? Reach out to us at [email protected] ••• Watch Corbell's six-part UFO docuseries titled UFO REVOLUTION on TUBI here : https://tubitv.com/series/300002259/tmz-presents-ufo-revolution/season-2 Watch Knapp’s six-part UFO docuseries titled INVESTIGATION ALIEN on NETFLIX here : https://www.netflix.com/title/81674441 ••• For breaking news, follow Corbell & Knapp on all social media. Extras and bonuses from the episode can be found at WeaponizedPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In this episode of Weaponized, featuring former New York Times reporter and writer of the 2017 bombshell UAP New York Times article, Ralph Blumenthal.

• 0:09George Knapp?

  There are some key dates, you know, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold and Roswell both happened. 1969, the so-called end of government studies, when Project Blue Book was closed down. And 2017, when the New York Times uncorked a front-page blockbuster story by Ralph Blumenthal, Leslie Kane, and Helene Cooper about secret government investigations into UFOs.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  We had an exclusive source, basically, who gave us slides that were shown to, you know, within the Pentagon, showing or naming, actually mentioning recovery, material recoveries of UFO remains, retrievals. This phenomenon does not lend itself to documentation, for whatever reason.

• 0:53Jeremy Corbell?

  You started to answer it, but I'd love to hear more. What did you leave out that you knew back in 2017, that you didn't have space to write about?

• 1:13George Knapp?

  This is Weaponized. I'm George Knapp, joined by my colleague Jeremy Corbell. Jeremy, how you doing?

• 1:17Jeremy Corbell?

  I'm good. How you doing, man?

• 1:19George Knapp?

  Good. You know, as we have talked about many times, UFOs and big-time journalism are kind of like oil and water. They don't really mix, or at least that's the way it's been for decades. I mean, major news media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News, have been overtly hostile to UFOs over the years, and to UFO researchers, and to UFO claims. But something happened in December of 2017, which kind of threw a monkey wrench into that whole thing, when the New York Times ran this blockbuster, front-page story about a secret, government-funded investigation into UFOs. Included in that story was the now-famous Tic Tac case that you and I had discussed on the air prior to December of 2017.

• 2:04George Knapp?

  Former Navy ace David Fraber was a primary witness for the Times story, and it was like Like a hydrogen bomb went off and there's before the time story and after the time story. Those are two different ages and we are still dealing with the fallout from that explosion. Three journalists worked on that story. Of course, Helene Cooper, who was a veteran Washington correspondent, Leslie Kane, our friend who has been researching UFOs, investigating UFO stories for a long time. And Ralph Blumenthal, who was just a veteran stalwart of the times. He'd been there for more than 40 years. I think he, his gravitas did a lot of the heavy lifting to get that story and make it happen.

• 2:45George Knapp?

  Of course, Ralph, as we know, has already been down the UFO rabbit hole for a couple of years, working on a book about Dr. John Mack. And that's, that's a name we don't hear much with all the debates about uh, secret programs and crash retrievals and whistleblowers and all the mess in Congress. We don't hear about Dr. Mack, but he blazed a path. Uh, his story kind of gets lost in all the muck of modern ufology, but it's really an important one. Wouldn't you agree?

• 3:13Jeremy Corbell?

  Yeah, I remember when I first started looking into the UFO subject, it really dawned on me. There was this guy named Dr. John Mack, who's head of Harvard Psychiatrics or whatever it was. And, you know, it's a guy that you could, you could see was very serious and he was believable and you could trust him. And man, he looked at the aerial school encounters with the aliens. I mean, with the craft that landed where there's like 60 kids. You and I got to know a couple of the, the children who are now adults, who are closest to what they say were the aliens, right? So that's Liesel and Salma. So shout out to Liesel and Salma. I hope to have you on Weaponized at some point. But Dr. John Mack went down there, BBC covered it. And, and that's when I first heard about his work coming into it.

• 3:58Jeremy Corbell?

  I was like, wow, let me look into this guy. And you told me that a great book was written about his life by Ralph Blumenthal. And I thought that was so cool that he did a deep dive into this guy's history. And I've really liked Ralph over the years. Yes, he broke the, the 2017 New York Times story and that was a huge push. But just as a human being, as a reporter, as a journalist, uh, just talking with him, he, he's the real deal, isn't he?

• 4:22George Knapp?

  He is the real deal. The book that he wrote about Dr. Mack is this one. It's called The Believer. Alien Encounters, Hard Science and the Passion of John Mack. That title, The Believer, is a little bit controversial and I hope we get a chance to talk to Ralph about why he chose it. But let's bring him on.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  The following is a conversation with former New York Times journalist Ralph Blumenthal.

• 4:42George Knapp?

  There are some key dates, you know, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold and Roswell both happened. 1969, the so-called end of government studies when Project Blue Book was was closed down. And 2017, when the New York Times uncorked a front-page blockbuster story by Ralph Blumenthal, Leslie Kane, and Helene Cooper about secret government investigations into UFOs. Ralph Blumenthal, it's great to see you. You're still probably dealing with the fallout from that that story, aren't you?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Well, they did. They keep putting up the original videos that we had, you know, the Navy videos. And yeah, I mean, we keep getting told that we changed the paradigm. I try not to believe all that stuff, but it was satisfying.

• 5:27George Knapp?

  You know, when you and I have talked before, I have sort of asked and poked a little bit about how heavy a lift that was for the three of you. And looking at the history of the New York Times, I mean, for 50 years, they've been pretty darn hostile to the UFO story in general. Can you give us a little insight on how heavy a lift that was, what you had to go through to get that story published at all, let alone on the front page?

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Well, as you know, George and Jeremy, timing has a lot to do with it. And we were fortunate to come in at a very good time. I mean, for example, today, with everything going on with Trump, it's not a great time to get UFO stories, UAP stories into the paper. There's just too much noise out there, too much competition. So this happened to come at a good time. And I must say, we had, you know, some very good people at the Times. I had left the staff officially in 2009, but I kept up my contacts. And in 2017, the stars, the stars came into alignment. Dean Bakke was the executive editor. I went to

• 6:33Speaker 02

  him. I knew him. You know, the story, Leslie had gone down to Washington DC and had this meeting with Lou Elizondo and others and learned about the secret program. We called it ATIP. We now know it really had a, you know, earlier incarnation as ORSAP, which you guys have never let me forget. But so she found out about this program and that, you know, the government was supposedly out of the UFO business with Blue Book at the end of 69, but of course, they weren't. They kept a very high level of interest. So Leslie found out about that and told me, and even though I was off the staff, I had

• 7:17Speaker 02

  been working on my John Mack book since basically 2004. So it was not a topic that was totally foreign to me. But she surprised me by telling me that the government was very much in the UFO business. And not only that, but Lou Elizondo had submitted a letter of resignation to Jim Mattis, Defense Secretary, because he was so ticked off at the opposition he was getting. So there were a lot of elements, you know, to the story that were really of high interest. So I took it to Dean Bakke, and to his credit, he jumped on it pretty quickly. He put us together with an editor for the Washington Bureau. We laid it out.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  We had everything on the record, which is something we can talk about. I mean, we were very insistent on, you know, the Times' standards are very high. I don't have to tell you that for getting especially a story like this into the paper. So we had it all on the record, named sources, no unnamed sources. And they put us together with Helene Cooper in the Washington Bureau, which was a big plus because she knew the Pentagon, not that they would say anything, but at least we knew who to go to. So to answer your question more directly, it was not as difficult as you might think. Yes, the Times had been very hostile traditionally to the whole, you know, UFO subject, with

• 8:46Speaker 02

  some notable exceptions. But this story sailed through and got on the front page on a Sunday. You couldn't ask for better play than that.

• 8:55George Knapp?

  You know, I'm thinking about what it would have been like if you had known about OSAP, Skinwalker Ranch, all that crazy stuff. Would you have been able to tell your editors about it and get the story on? Because I'm thinking, you know, I've talked to Leslie, Jeremy and I have spoken with Leslie Kane, and she said if we had included all that stuff, they would have kicked us out. I'm not sure that the story would have been published.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Well, maybe it's a good thing we didn't know all that stuff. You're right. But I got to tell you, when you look at the story, it really was very tightly written and constrained. We did not have a lot of space. So a lot of stuff that we knew, for example, about retrievals and things like that, it never made it into that story. Not that we would have gone there necessarily, but we had to keep a really a narrow focus. And with every story we did then and since for the Times and others, we left out a lot of stuff, some by design, but mostly because of space constraints.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  So maybe the Times did us a favor by, you know, confining us into a fairly narrow space.

• 10:04George Knapp?

  Yeah. Go ahead, Jerry.

• 10:07Jeremy Corbell?

  Oh, no, I just, you know, Ralph, so one of the journalists tackling this or that's willing to tackle this, I mean, 45 years, I believe more than that, at the New York Times, and you get to write about this, and you had an interest in it, but here you go. I mean, you get to write a big article. Can you just, I think for our audience, it'd be interesting to know, what is the process a little bit of vetting people? Like, how do you do that when you're hearing these stories? And then you started to answer it, but I'd love to hear more. What did you leave out that you knew back in 2017 that you didn't have space to write about?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Well, we learned so much since, it's kind of hard to remember what we knew then. But, you know, as a journalist, you're always, I got to tell you, I got some advice from a colleague years ago, when I got, this is a little sideline, but I got put on the media beat briefly, when the media guy was going on vacation, and it happened to come right at the time of a job action against the New York Times. So this thing drops into my lap, I'm the New York, I'm the media reporter, when the Times is basically on strike. And, um, yeah, how do you handle, uh, that kind of news about your employer? So this guy, uh, gave me a bit of advice. He said, Ralph, don't write everything you

• 11:26Speaker 02

  know. And, um, I, I've, I took that to heart because I knew a lot of stuff about the Times that I, I, I didn't put into that, you know, those stories about the job action. So it's always a, a selective process. So, you know, we know a lot of stuff, Leslie and I, as you guys know a lot of stuff. Um, not all of it is, um, is well sourced, as, you know, some of it you know on background, some of it you know off the record. Um, so, uh, yeah, that, that comes into play, but we didn't know a lot of the things, uh, then that we know now. I mean, we've made a lot of progress. This is something really worth noting that the government has come a long way from the

• 12:08Speaker 02

  days when, um, you know, it, it described anyone with a sighting as basically nuts. Um, now they're saying they're encouraging, uh, military personnel to come forward with, uh, with accounts. Um, and so there's been a lot of change, um, you know, within the Pentagon. But I gotta say that, um, uh, there was not a lot of stuff we knew that, that we kept out. We'd heard stories about retrievals, for example, but we, we fleshed a lot of that out since then.

• 12:36George Knapp?

  And you've tried to get that story on, right?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Well, we did, and we did get it in piecemeal. Uh, we did a story for the Times, uh, sometime later, a year, a couple of years later, uh, and we, we did get in the retrievals. It came in, um, if you remember the story, uh, kind of obliquely. Um, and, um, a, a very good part of that story, we had actually, uh, slides, um, uh, naming recoveries that we'd had an exclusive, uh, uh, source, basically, who gave us slides that were, uh, shown to, um, you know, within the Pentagon, showing or naming, actually meant, mentioning recovery, material recoveries of, uh, UFO remains, retrievals.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  We got that into the Times, but that, the slides only got in with another story that we did about how we got the story. Uh, so, uh, I guess in shorthand, the, the stuff gets in, but not always the way you want it to get in. And, um, and, and that was a particularly difficult lift, uh, retrievals, uh, as it remains.

• 13:42George Knapp?

  Jeremy?

• 13:44Jeremy Corbell?

  Yeah, I'm just curious personally, I mean, you're a veteran journalist, you've like George, you've broken stories across the board. You get into the UFO thing. What I'm curious about right now is, what is the responsibility of a journalist? When you obtain information like George and I have, like visual information, we struggle, I struggle sometimes with knowing what the boundaries are to allow stuff out. And you and I have had private conversations, Ralph, about this, you know, struggling with how to report to the American people on something that is of value to the American people, but also staying within the confines of national security. Did you have to deal with any of that when it came to your 2017 article?

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Well, as I said, I mean, there was not too much that we knew then, that we've learned a lot since. But, you know, you raised an interesting point. How much do you put in to a story? I would say that if you have it confirmed, and you have it on the record with a named source, there's not much I would leave out. I'm not trying to spare the American people, you know, any hard evidence. The problem is getting that hard evidence, or at least getting people talking about it on the record. So, on the other hand, you know, you're right, we were aware that this is a difficult subject. We didn't want to

• 15:10Speaker 02

  get too much ahead of ourselves. I mean, the basic news was important, that the Pentagon had a secret UFO unit. After years of denying an interest in the subject, the Pentagon was in fact hunting for UFOs and getting evidence, that, collecting evidence, very important evidence. That in itself, we thought was a big story. And, so, you know,

• 15:43Speaker 02

  The question of retrievals of, you know, of non-human remains, things like that. We hadn't really gotten to that point yet. I'm not sure if we'd had it, we would have put it in. I don't know. We didn't have it.

• 15:58Jeremy Corbell?

  What do you make of the whole psionics thing? Everybody talking about crash retrievals related to consciousness. Did that cross your, your kind of a barrier back then? What do you make of everything that everybody's saying now, which is that crash retrievals is connected to some sort of specialized groups that go in with their minds and control craft? It's pretty wild assertions. What do you make of all of that?

• 16:19Speaker 02

  It is wild. We did not know that stuff then. I mean, the idea of calling in UFOs, you know, is a fairly new phenomenon. We haven't really checked that out. We've heard the stories. We were in contact with people, you know, we're looking into that along with a lot of other stuff. But we certainly didn't know it then. I mean, it was enough to think that there were these, you know, objects coming in. Even then, we didn't know that they were underwater. I mean, we, you know, we just talked about them coming in from, from space. So that, the underwater part was, was another new element that we learned from Dave Fravor

• 17:01Speaker 02

  some months or maybe a year or two later. So, but we did not know about psionics, people calling them in or technology that, you know, and frequencies that, that brings in the UFO or people controlling the technology with their minds. I know the government has, has been studying that. That's really interesting. So the answer is, you know, we didn't know very much about that in the beginning.

• 17:26George Knapp?

  By, when this story comes across your desk, 2017, you were already sort of down the UFO rabbit hole. You'd been working on a project that made you somewhat familiar with the subject and the depth and breadth of it. A book that we're going to talk about today called The Believer about Dr. John Mack. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got on the trail of John Mack?

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, all my books really kind of fell into my lap. It's very strange. They say that, you know, writers don't pick subjects, subjects pick writers. I mean, it's kind of a zen thing. And it was true in my case. Every book I did was not the end of a process of me looking around for a subject, but something happened that sort of forced me to do a book about it. And it was the same in this case. I was in Texas for the New York Times, and I used to haunt the used bookshops. And in one of them, I picked up a copy of Passport to the Cosmos, which was John Mack's second book.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  John Mack was the Harvard psychiatrist who famously learned about accounts of abduction from Bud Hopkins and decided at great risk to his lofty reputation at Harvard to study it, to study the phenomenon. So I picked up this book. I was intrigued by the idea of a Harvard, you know, eminent Harvard faculty member getting involved in accounts of abduction by alien beings. And I thought, yeah, it'd be good to interview this guy. You know, I didn't know, by the way, he was already very famous, but he had not come into my, you know, realm at all.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  I was a hard news reporter. I was covering national politics in Texas and national events. It's just not something I knew anything about. But I did think he was worth a story, very interesting. And as fate would have it, a few days later, I picked up the New York Times to find out he had been run over and killed in London. He had gone there for a conference on Lawrence of Arabia. He had written a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, a biography of T. H. Lawrence. And 30 years later, he went back to London, and he came out of the underground, looked the wrong way, and got hit by a car. A lot of, you know, at the time, it was, you know, the conspiracists had a field day.

• 20:03George Knapp?

  Still.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  You know, but I checked it out very carefully. It was a complete hit-and-run. The guy didn't know who he was hitting. Mack was disoriented. He was late at night. He couldn't see well. He had trouble seeing. Anyway.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  So now I had an interest in John Mack, but he was dead. So I did go to the family quite quickly, and of course, the family was in no mood to discuss a book about John Mack. They were grieving. It was so, he was seventy five, just about seventy five years old, but he was not expected to die. The family was in deep mourning, but we stayed in touch and eventually I convinced them to let me do a book, and they turned over all his archives to me.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  And, I mean, as a trained New York Times reporter, this became very important to me because, you know, it was one thing to imagine his life, it was another thing to be able to document every stage of it through his papers, which I was able to do. Even his therapy sessions with his therapist, as a psychiatrist, he had to be analyzed. And he went through analysis, and he taped those analysis sessions. So I know really his innermost thoughts with his therapist, and he wrote a lot. He was not a secretive guy. Everything, he put everything out there.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  So I had all this material, and I decided to do a book, and it ended, I didn't know how long it would take me, it ended up taking seventeen years, which was much longer than I expected and much more arduous. Every project, every book, every article, as you guys know, is more work than you imagine, but this was a tremendous amount more work than I expected, because I had to go into the whole UFO phenomenon and the whole history of UFOs and all the other people who were doing work, like Stan Friedman and Bud Hopkins, and I mean, it was a whole universe that had to be explored.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Anyway, so that's how I was, I happened to be in the end stages, the last few years of my John Mack research, when this opportunity came up with Leslie. So that's why you could say I was well positioned to pursue this story in the New York Times.

• 22:42George Knapp?

  You know, one of the reasons we want to talk to you now, Ralph, is because, you know, partially in reaction to your 2017 story in The Times, people are chasing government secrets, crash retrievals, secret technology, the race for that technology, and the focus is always on, seems to be on shiny objects up there in the sky, and not on the personal encounters that people have been reporting all over the planet, the kind of things that Dr. Mack investigated. In a sense, do you think that that is where the heart of this story is, as opposed to the technology itself?

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Well, that's the hardest thing to get, because these, you know, this phenomenon does not lend itself to documentation, for whatever reason. You know, at the crucial moment, the camera doesn't work, the image doesn't come out, you guys know, from your research at Skinwalkers, how the cameras that were pointed at, you know, whatever was out there, failed at the crucial moment, or the guts were ripped out of one, and the other one was trained on it, didn't pick it up. I mean, that is extraordinary. That technology always seems to fail when we're at the brink of discovering something. So

• 24:03Speaker 02

  I think the hardest part of this story is documenting these interactions with, you know, these abduction accounts. So what we can do, though, is use our technology, or the government technology, to at least document the object. So, as I said before, that is a big step forward, that the government is now acknowledging that these things are real. You know, for a long time, they were dismissed as hallucinations, people were crazy, there were reflections off the desert floor, you know. Now the government is saying, "Yeah, there are these objects, and we have the technology, which we never had before, of capturing them on, you know, on video."

• 24:49Speaker 02

  So I think that's where the emphasis is. The other stuff you just can't document. I get accounts all the time, people calling me up and saying, this and this happened to me, but I can't do anything with it because there's no proof. So that's where we are. But the other part of it, the technology, is really moving ahead pretty quickly. And there's stuff, as you know, that the government has in its coffers that has never been revealed to the public. That's what we're hoping we can get more of, because this stuff does exist, and the public deserves to know about it.

• 25:29George Knapp?

  I think Jeremy and I are as guilty as anyone of chasing the shiny object. You know, the paper trail. It's like when I started down this road, chasing the paper trail, that's something a journalist can do, you know, dig into records and file a FOIA request, talk to people who are working on these programs. That's where the bulk of the public attention seems to be these days. But I think you could make the argument, and probably Dr. Mack would agree, that the heart of the matter is these encounters. That whatever this intelligence is, interacting with humans, one-on-one, sometimes with small groups, that seems to be at the core of what's been going on for maybe forever.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, that's clearly the biggest mystery around. But it is the most intractable, and there seems to be no way of documenting it. But what we do have now, not only do we have the, you know, the military videos that are coming out, but we have whistleblowers coming forward, like David Grush and Jake Barber and others, who are coming forward with really fascinating accounts of interacting with the hardware. Um, and I think, um, that's where, you know, the emphasis has to be because there's

• 26:48Speaker 02

  no shortage of accounts of, you know, individual people, ordinary people, interacting with other intelligence and, you know, seeing, having alien encounters, et cetera. But it's a dead end for now. We can't document it, we can't prove it. And, you know, as I said, I get these accounts every day, people coming forward with stories, but what are you gonna do with that? The other stuff, the military stuff, is really much more accessible. And I think that's where we have to put our focus for now.

• 27:27George Knapp?

  So perhaps tell us a little bit about Dr. John Mack. You don't hear his name in UFO world all that much anymore, but really you should. I mean, he was a trailblazer, he was courageous, brilliant, mercurial. Your book, The Believer, you can almost have a subtitle of sex, drugs, rock and roll. I mean, this guy was an interesting character.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  He was, and I was gripped by his story. He was, he really risked his reputation. He came from an interesting family, he came from a rather wealthy family. His father was a professor. You know, talk about the strange things that happened. I went to City College. The City College of New York was a public institution, very highly regarded. And when I was there, John Mack's father was in the English department. Now, I knew his name, I didn't know him, I didn't have a course with him. I certainly didn't ask

• 28:26Speaker 02

  him about his son, who was, at that point, not yet investigating UFOs, studying psychiatry. But anyway. So Mac came from this fairly prominent family. Interestingly enough, his mother died when he was eight months old of appendicitis. She was pretty prominent herself, came from the Rheingold family of beer brewers. And so he came from a kind of a wealthy background. And he was a real leader in psychiatry. He was a very, he was a social activist. He believed in trying to make the world better. He thought he could bring peace to the Middle East.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  He met with Yasser Arafat. He lectured in the Middle East. And he marched against nuclear weapons. He was arrested in the neck of the woods up there and at the, you know, some of the test sites, atomic test sites. So he was very active, politically active. And as again, often happens, he, he went to, he got interested in these strange healing methods where you relax or you go into hypnosis and your body can project itself, astral

• 29:55Speaker 02

  projection. And that was his introduction to the world, the paranormal world. He didn't believe in it at first at all. But he met this Stan Grof who was experimenting with all these techniques, this hypnosis style technique of projecting your body and relaxing. And at one of these sessions in California, where else? He ran into this woman who was telling him, I have a friend Bud Hopkins and he, he's interviewing all these people who were abducted by aliens. And Mac thought it was a lot of nonsense. But again, one of the strange things that happened in life, he was in New York.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  And he decided to call up Bud Hopkins, pretty much out of the blue, after dismissing it. And Hopkins showed him, Bud had written these books about encounters, very strange encounters, that he was an artist. He was not a psychiatrist like Mac. He was an artist. But he got interested in the subject because he had spotted a UFO on Cape Cod. So he started meeting these people and hypnotized, studied hypnosis, put them in a relaxed state and heard their stories. And then he meets John Mack and he said, gee, John, you're the psychiatrist. What do you make of this? So he gave John a bunch of letters from these people who were responding to Bud's books

• 31:23Speaker 02

  about, you know, abductions. And John was totally intrigued. And he had the courage, as I said, to pursue it. He could have said, look, this is going to kill me at Harvard. I mean, but he got interested. He collected his own group of people with these stories, again, ordinary people, men, women, children in some cases, two-year-olds, who said, little man, take me up in the sky. I mean, little kids don't make up detailed stories like that. Anyway, he was intrigued as a psychiatrist, who, by the way, he was no naive pushover

• 32:07Speaker 02

  for these stories. He had investigated and written a book on nightmares. He had studied all kinds of aberrant states of adults and children. So he was not some rube who came across this information and decided to get good publicity for himself and jump into it. On the contrary, he was reluctant. But the stories would not let him go. And so that was the beginning. And then he started, you know, he got his own group together. And again, he was not ashamed to tell Harvard pretty soon after he started collecting these stories what was going on.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  And of course, that got him into a lot of trouble at Harvard. We can talk about that. But he had the courage of his convictions and he jumped into it. He was, and by the way, this phenomenon remains a mystery. He never solved it. We have not solved it. We don't know that any more than he did. Just that ordinary people tell very convincing stories with a little bit fragmentary evidence to back it up, not much, a little, of encounters with other intelligence. So that was the course I followed in this book.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  I thought that he was very courageous and he left a wonderful record of his research, which helped me in writing the book.

• 33:42George Knapp?

  I get the sense that you really learned so much about him and you came to like him and admire him, even though you didn't get to meet him.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  I did. I mean, he wasn't, again, what made him interesting. He was not a perfect person. He cheated on his wife. He was naive at times. But all in all, he was, you know, the model for the, you know, the human being who goes out on a search, the questing human being that Joseph Campbell wrote about. And I thought he was really remarkable in that way. But he was not, you know, he was not a saint. And that's made him even more interesting. He struggled with kind of a sex addiction.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  He alienated his wife, who was a wonderful supporter. But he was not dishonest. I mean, he was pretty open about his attraction to other women. So that added to his allure for me. He was a fully rounded human being.

• 34:52George Knapp?

  Yeah, your book is powerful. It doesn't paint him as a saint. It's warts and all. You include the warts to some degree.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's important because he struggled, you know, with his humanity and again, he he had disagreements with other people in this field, you know. The big question, as he learned more and more about it, was were these things happening in a reality that we can recognize? Or were they happening in some other reality that we can't, we can't access? And he eventually had a kind of a break with Bud Hopkins and Dave Jacobs, who said, "Oh, these things are real. These things are happening in everyday reality. People are really getting abducted." And the more Mac looked into it, the more he, he said, you know, "I don't know if these things..."

• 35:41Speaker 02

  I mean, we don't see people getting abducted on the street, you know? I mean, so maybe it's happening in some other reality that we don't understand. So he, he was equivocal on that, and I, I thought that was interesting. He was really troubled himself as to whether, you know, where this was happening. How could this be? And he was as confused as anyone. It's not like he was certain, you know? That's the thing. He was not an ideologue. He was not a propagandist. He was troubled. But he was honest enough to admit what he had come across from these, these accounts from ordinary people,

• 36:23Speaker 02

  telling the most detailed accounts. And by the way, when he would put them in a light stage of hypnosis and, and hear their accounts, they were terrified, these people. And that was very convincing to him. He was a psychiatrist. He knew when people were faking. But when these people would recount their abduction, "Oh, they're sticking the needle in. Oh, my God, they're doing this, they're doing that." He realized that they weren't making it up. Whatever had happened to these people...

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Was was real to them and and seemed to be really he he examined and rejected all the other explanations that they were, you know, fabricating, they were making it up, they were confused. These were people with strong a strong sense of reality. He checked them all out. They they they weren't harboring, you know, other trauma that they were transferring into abduction. You know, he he heard all these. And by the way, this you pushed my button here, and I'm gonna say that the the so-called, you know, skeptics, the debunkers, who are ready to ridicule Mac and others and say, oh, it's clear that this is, you

• 37:36Speaker 02

  know, these people are fabricating or they're they're hiding a sexual trauma or so. They do not know what they're talking about. Mac looked at all these other explanations, and they don't fit. That's the problem. It is a complete mystery what happened to these people. But they cannot be explained by any explanations that are readily at hand. And this is from a from a, you know, expert psychiatrist, but others who've looked at it have come to the same conclusion. So the so-called skeptics who are, you know, ready with an explanation, they can explain it, you know, and immediately, oh, it's clear that these people are, you know, it's a sexual trauma that they're, you know, it's not true. It remains a complete mystery.

• 38:19George Knapp?

  Well, let's go into some of the criteria that he developed, because over time, he developed sort of a checklist of criteria that sort of, all right, if you're going to try to explain these things away as mental illness or something else, you have to count for X, Y, Z, right?

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, he looked at all the other explanations. As I said, this is why the the so-called skeptics have it wrong. Mac looked at all these things in in order, because at first, he couldn't believe it himself. He was a skeptic in the beginning. He ridiculed Bud Hopkins at first, saying he must be crazy to believe this stuff. But as as as he as John started to look into it, he was more and more intrigued. So first of all,

• 39:07Speaker 02

  The phenomenon seems to occur to people across the spectrum, not only in the United States, all over the world, young, old, men, women, not to any particular group of people. And as I said, including young children, who have not been to the movies to see, you know, space movies or alien movies, they haven't read alien books, they would say things that really seem to come out of their experience. And we can get to the stuff in the Ruwai, you know, outside.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Zimbabwe? The. Ruwai, Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe, you know, sighting, which came up later. Anyway, so, so first of all, he said, "These things are happening to ordinary people all over the world." And the accounts are basically consistent, which is interesting. They're not cookie cutter, they're not all the same. It's not like everyone's reading off a script. But there's a certain consistency to these accounts. These experiences are happening to people all over the world, you know, they describe being in their bedrooms at night, or not even at night, riding in a car, and seeing a bright light, and then losing track of time, and then, you know,

• 40:35Speaker 02

  encountering these beings, etc. So, the accounts were consistent. They were happening to people, you know, all over the world, of all kinds of different groups. These people had no other traumas. I mean, but they were not perfect people. They had sexual experiences, they had been raped, they had had been victims of crime, they'd had, you know, trouble with their family members. So, these were not, you know, extraordinary, perfect people. These were ordinary people with all the baggage that ordinary people have. But these experiences,

• 41:14Speaker 02

  like a sexual trauma, don't translate to the kind of encounters that they were relating to Mac. So, you know, one by one, he was eliminating all the possibility, the fabrication. When, when these people were recounting their experiences and, and reliving the trauma. Really terrified. They could not be baking this up. Mack said that based on his experience as a psychiatrist. So he had some expertise to draw on. So he put all this stuff together and he said, "All the explanations that have been offered don't add up." So what is it?

• 41:59Speaker 02

  He says, "I don't know, but it ain't that, and it ain't that. You know, it's something else." So anyway, that's how he came to the conclusion that, you know, he was in some very strange world. And that's what gripped him.

• 42:16Jeremy Corbell?

  I think you, George, and I look into this from a hardware standpoint to a degree because that feels very tangible. You know, we are convinced, it sounds like all three of us are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that our government has certain NHI, non-human intelligence-made craft, that there's a physical tangible component, and our government's been trying to reverse engineer this. And I assume we're all on that same page from what you said earlier. I think where it becomes difficult for people is, well, if that's true, then are these abductions real? Are we being operated on by some non-human intelligence? You probably know John Mack better than he knew himself from everything that you've

• 43:01Jeremy Corbell?

  been able to access. So I got a, I hear what you're saying, but I got a question for you, which is that, you know, this technology that we are convinced exists and that we've seen people try to do material transfers, we know a lot of the people, all three of us, that have worked in those programs. What happens when we talk about abductions? What happens when we talk about this phenomenon where people feel they are being taken, they are being operated on? Where do you put that as a journalist in, like, what is your opinion on that? Bottom line, after doing all this work?

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I think... You know, we're all trained in journalism in following the facts. And there's certain facts, you know, we have at hand. We know that there are objects in the sky and under the water that defy explanation. There are pictures of them, there's, you know, they've been detected, they have been documented, and the government basically admits, yeah, these things exist, we don't know about them. After that, you really get into another realm of speculation. So if you're, you know, a journalist pursuing facts, there's certain things you can confirm and verify as fact, and then you sort of get into an area where you can't verify, and

• 44:17Speaker 02

  there are no hard facts to back it up. So that's the dilemma with this whole subject, that we're at the, and I don't want to belittle the progress we've made. We now agree, even the government, that these objects exist. We can explain them. We can capture images and parameters in our sensitive devices, which we never had before, by the way, years ago. So we have equipment that can document that these things exist. That's a big plus. Now, who's piloting them? Are they intelligent? Where do they come from? Why are they here? What do they want with us?

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Those, excuse me, are all other questions that veer into another realm where we don't have the explanations. We have a lot of anecdotal accounts of people who, you know, say they've been taken, but no pictures, et cetera. So I think that's the dilemma I face as a journalist, you guys face too, that it doesn't mean we're not interested in these accounts of abduction, or who's piloting these things if they're being piloted? Why are they here? What do they want with us? You know, why do they focus on military sites, atomic sites, as they seem to, as has been documented? That's been documented, by the way.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Why they, are they warning us away from atomic... You know, adventurism, I mean, I, we don't know, but they, they do seem to focus on, on atomic sites and they've shut off the technology at times, so that's documented. So, um, you know, you, you hit on a, a central dilemma with this whole subject, which is certain stuff we can, we can document and, and, and report, and other stuff is pure speculation, but we can't jump ahead, you know, we can't pretend to know and jump ahead or beat ourselves up because we can't jump ahead. We just can't. We don't have that information yet. Maybe we'll get it. We got a lot so far that we didn't have before. But we don't have, the most important part, are we alone?

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Are we alone in the universe? Where do these things come from? Who's putting them together? Are these grays, so-called, are they human or, I mean, are they, are they beings or are they robotic? Are they mechanics or are they actual beings? All these things, we don't know. Now, we do seem to have, we, the, the US government, and maybe the Russians and maybe the Chinese, do seem to have actual retrieved craft. Uh, that's pretty much been, been documented, at least according to people like David Grush and, and Jake Barber. So, um, and yes, maybe, you know, we've been able to, to reverse engineer some of those

• 47:09Speaker 02

  things according to, you know, various, uh, people who've come forward, whistleblowers. So again, that, that takes us up to, uh, an area of the unknown. But the, the crucial thing that you put your finger on is what, what's all the other stuff? And we just don't know.

• 47:28George Knapp?

  It was interesting, uh, the title of your book again, The Believer. Um, I, the first time I met Dr. Mack, it was early nineties at a conference, a UFO conference in the Ozarks, and I asked him about that, that label, and he bristled a little bit.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:47George Knapp?

  And said, I'm not a believer. This is science. I'm going about this as a scientist and a researcher in the correct way. Um, why did you settle on that title?

• 47:56Speaker 02

  I did it sort of a little bit ironically, uh, because he did reject that title. Uh, it does, it connot, uh, somebody who's naive.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  And sort of latches on to things without proper investigation. But I chose it provocatively because I knew people would, people who respected him and liked him, including myself, would, would also maybe bristle a little bit at that title. But I use it, as I explain at the end of the book, in the way that he believed in pursuing the truth, wherever it took him. He believed in, in fighting for a better world, in marching against nuclear weapons, in trying to get peace in the Middle East. Talk about a difficult topic. You know, in case you haven't noticed, we haven't gotten to peace in the Middle East. He met with Yasser Arafat, he gave lectures, you know, in Lebanon and all over.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  And, yeah, we didn't get too close to peace. But, so he believed in all these things. So that's the sense, I like to use the word. And even though, as you point out, he would not have, he certainly didn't want to be called, known as a believer.

• 49:09George Knapp?

  He put everything on the line, his reputation, his stature at Harvard, everything on the line in order to pursue understanding. You know, you, as you document in your book, he got in a lot of trouble at Harvard and went through like a 15-month-long inquisition, in essence. Harvard, of course, a place, as you write, has been known for cutting-edge, out-there kind of research for, forever. And here they are reacting to his increasing public profile on this abduction phenomena. And they, they initiated sort of a secret tribunal. Can you tell us, walk us through that part of the story?

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. They came down really hard on him. It was interesting. Of course, John was, because he came from a wealthy upbringing and he was pretty, he was overconfident, according to Bud Hopkins. He was supremely confident in his ability to, you know, attract women, to win over skeptics. He was very, he was, he was born, he was... Privileged. He didn't have to struggle too much growing up. So he was pretty, you know, as I said, very, very confident. So he wasn't too concerned that Harvard would crack down on him. He actually gave lectures at Harvard.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  And I talk about a guy who showed up at one of his lectures and was flabbergasted that he was hearing about, you know, abductions and aliens. And he had a woman on, John Mack had a woman on stage reliving her abduction screaming. And it was at Harvard, and he didn't care what they thought.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Next week in part two of our interview with journalist Ralph Blumenthal.

• 50:56Jeremy Corbell?

  Ruiz Zimbabwe, what that was about. To me, it was a big deal that this Harvard psychiatrist comes and actually investigates this with the BBC. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's really one of the best observed cases of a landing. I mean, along with the Betty and Barney Hill case, which really started off the whole abduction cycle. And by the way, you know, it seems to have started in the 60s somehow. For whatever reason, why, we don't know why. Abductions seem to have surfaced then.