... stand up to, uh, any sort of, uh...

Well, in, in, I, I think anybody who's read my, my work over the years understand that I was not a big fan of alien abduction stories.

Um, I did a book called The Abduction Eni- Enigma with, um, Russ Estes and Bill Cone, and we did, uh, a lot of research into terrestrial explanations for that and, and suggested that there were terrestrial explanations for the abductions in the most cases.

That turned around for me when I started talking to Calvin Parker.

He, with, uh, Charles Hickson, had been abducted in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in 1973.

And what, what got me, as I was talking to Calvin Parker, he s- said something about, um, witnesses to the abduction.

And I said, "Yeah, but they all came forward much later." And he said, "No, no, there were people who came forward or they, they found, uh, much quicker than that." Uh, there's a document That, uh, was written at Keesler Air Force Base.

That one's not real?

So how do you validate something is absolutely true?

It's a long process, really, in most cases.

You have a story and maybe some witnesses talking about it.

You begin to look at the testimonies of those witnesses to see if they corroborate one another or are they at odds? What's the background of the witnesses? Do they have a history of making stuff up? Have they told you something about their background? We can check, for example, many witnesses have claimed military backgrounds and it turns out they don't have have them uh the one that comes to mind immediately is robert willingham about the del rio ufo crash and claimed to be a retired air force colonel turned out that he had spent 13 months in the army at the end of world war ii and then the rest of the time he was in the civil air patrol which is an auxiliary of the air force meaning it's a civilian organization which is geared toward search and rescue taking some of that burden off the active duty forces but also has a cadet program teaching young people about aviation in the Air Force.

He claimed to be a colonel, but there's no documentation for that.

He rose to the rank, I think, of lieutenant colonel in the Civil Air Patrol, but it's not the same as being a lieutenant colonel in the Army or on active duty with the military.

It's something completely different.

So I don't know if that was true or if he was pulling their legs.

Yes

... at the time.

And he, um, he asked questions about it, and they said that some of the records from Roswell had been destroyed.

Or improperly destroyed at the time.

And I mean, as an intelligence officer, part of my duties was to destroy classified material that was out of date.

But if it was classified secret or above, you had to specify specifically what the title of the document was and what the date of it was, so you could demonstrate that it was, um, destroyed.

If it was confidential or below, you could just say, "We destroyed the confidential material," and let it go at that.

Kevin, uh, if this, if the UFO phenomenon, what- whatever it is or isn't, uh, is true, how, how is it the US, and we are the main people that do this, uh, have been able to keep the lid on it for so long now?

And you talked to a lot of witnesses, didn't you? A lot of firsthand witnesses, people who were

there.

We talked to every member of Colonel Blanchard's staff that we could.

Jesse Marcel had left a large record of statements on tape and video.

He was...

They had a four-hour interview with Linda Corley, for example, and she wrote a book called For the Sake of My Country about the Marcel interviews.

So here's a firsthand witness talking to, in essence, a writer and telling everything.

Are you aware of any really solid crush retrievals stories in other countries?

Yeah

...has done an awful lot of work.

He's in Arizona and done a lot of work on the King-Kingman case.

And I, and I, uh, had some email conversations with him.

I had the impression that he'd talked to firsthand witnesses, and I thought, "You know, well, that's-- who, who are these people?" And he wrote back and said, "I have not talked to any firsthand witnesses." So in that respect, he's kind of where I was on the case, talking to secondhand witnesses or looking to Ray Fowler's, uh, comprehensive file on the case because he did an awful lot of work on that.

So when a case is investigated like that, you've got a, a reliable investigator such as Ray Fowler taking a look at it, you've got a very good place to look at.

Um, and as I say, Don Schmidt, uh, told me about Judy Woolcock, um, 30 years ago or so.

Can you tell our audience what you think your a- opinion of abductions are?

That's Pascagoula, right?

Pa- Pascagoula, ha- Charles Hicks, Pascagoula, October of 1973.

And in talking to him, he mentioned in passing that there w- had been witnesses to the abduction the next day, and I just didn't really buy that.

It just didn't make sense to me.

And yet there's a document that proves it, that, that there were witnesses.

A, a Air Force officer I mentioned, a senior m- Air Force officer signed a document dated October 12th, 1973, talking about their interview with Hickson and Parker and talked about at least four other witnesses they knew of the next day.

And this is a time when you're not looking at, uh, social media.

Right.

[laughs]

Um, and all I can say is, you know, I, I, I cover this on my blog, and I've covered it in a number of books in depth, and I've gotten to the point where I just don't accept Maury Island.

So the tales of the men in black just are irrelevant in this particular case.

There are instances, um- And then we go off in another tangent.

The guy, um, Heflin, who took the pictures of the UFOs near Toro Air Force Base in the, I think, the mid-1960s, um, was visited by two alleged officers from, uh, the Air Force who took his negatives away or took the pictures away.

He eventually got them back, but, uh, now there's the idea that these guys weren't with the Air Force at all.

They were just guys that showed up and pretended to be with the Air Force to gather the information.

Yes.

Do you think there's a diary out there?

There is a document that was found in the papers of Jesse Marcel that looks like some semblance of a document.

It was in what was the kind of book that the Air Force, the Army handed out to to keep notes in and that sort of thing.

So it's sort of a diary, but it's, it's, uh, um, quotes from other people, interesting things that happened.

Uh, and then in the back of it, there's additional information that it's written in a different hand.

Um, I think what happened was, uh, Marcel shared an office with, I don't remember his name because it didn't come up until recently.

And I was looking to see if the guy's name showed up in the, um, yearbook that Walter Hott had created.

Um, let us do a little of the original stuff and tell everybody, 'cause there may be some out there who don't know, back in 1947, what were the sequence of events, uh, roughly? What happened?

What we believe happened based, again, on eyewitness testimony, on the evening of July 4th, 1947, between 11:17 and 11:27 PM, an object crashed just north of Roswell, New Mexico.

Next day, the military is out there.

They've cordoned the area, and they're picking up the craft and the bodies.

Major Edwin Easley, the Provost Marshal of the 509th Bomb Group, told me it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Steve McKenzie told me that the, the, the object was heel-shaped, that there were five bodies.

Louis Rickett told me that the object was heel-shaped and that some of the m- metal, uh, was extremely thin, but he couldn't bend it, uh, and that they couldn't do anything to cut it.

Right.

So, um, how did it work? I mean, you went to Roswell and, and what? What did you find? Uh, w- what were you expecting to find?

I thought that we would-In, in a lot of the early UFO cases, if you go back to the primary sources, you can find a pretty, uh, interesting answer.

You can find something that makes sense that doesn't, uh, necessitate a belief in extraterrestrial spacecraft.

And we thought we would be able to do that, find a secret project, something like that, that would explain the case.

But it didn't happen that way.

We began talking to the witnesses such as, uh, Bill Brazel Jr, the son of the man who discovered the debris field.

And we sat with him for an hour and a half and listened to what he had to say, and discovered that he was telling the truth as he knew it, and there was not a prosaic explanation.

Uh, what about the source of criticism, um, of Carl Sagan in this AP story I read you about abductions? Have you looked at the abduction phenomenon and, uh, if so, w- what kind of credibility do you think it has?