Answer: No. I’ll tell you why, folks. I don’t know if any of you have been to Leavenworth, Kansas or not but that’s where the federal prison is. It’s hot, it’s humid and I have no desire whatsoever to go. I still have a real, legitimate respect for the Department of Defense security. When you leave out there they debrief you. And the debriefing lasted quite a few hours, the better part of a day and the bottom line was – don’t talk or else. That was the bottom line. And they gave you a list of things not to talk about. I have not violated any of those this afternoon. Since I left out there, I don’t believe I ever have. I’m very careful about it.
Question: I lived near an Air Force base and I used to see unusual things flying about. Are these things terrestrial or extraterrestrial?
Answer: Well, a group of fellows and I were on our way to work one night to the test site. We saw something that to this day…..this was an aircraft of some sort, aircraft being defined as an object in the atmosphere that is moving around. There were 6 of us, we were all trained observers, we were not the type of people who see things go bump in the night, I’m pretty skeptical about things, generally. That aircraft that we saw land, which was next to the test site, did some things that with the technology we had then and probably with the technology we have now, were impossible to do.
We saw it, I saw it, the 5 other fellows with me, we stopped the car and got out and watched it for 15-20 minutes. I have no idea what it was. I had access to and was privy to a lot of classified information, for instance, the SR-71 was a common place aircraft to us and yet the general public knew nothing about it. But it came in and went and it made a lot of noise, that’s the only thing I didn’t like about it. It came in hot and it left hot. It came in over the speed of sound and it left at the speed of sound. So it was always making this horrible noise. That was a very common thing to see. Some of the other things I saw were uncommon.
Question: Who’s the boss, how did you get hired?
Answer: That was a mundane process. I went out there….
Question: Was it the Department of Defense?
Answer: At the time it was the Atomic Energy Commission when I was hired. And then it became the Energy Research and Development Administration and then it became the Department of Energy, the government keeps changing the name. I was there during the visit of two presidents of the United States, Lyndon Johnson was one of them, Gerald Ford was the other one. Neither one of them was shown certain things. The President does not have Top Secret Clearance.
Question: Do you agree or disagree with that?
Answer: That’s a tough one. We live in a republic, a democratic republic, supposedly. I don’t trust most politicians, however, not because they’re dishonest, necessarily. Nuclear weapons are a very terrible thing. I’m ambivalent about it. I don’t know. The time when Lyndon Johnson came out there we tracked him through an area that was hot, none of us had anti-contamination clothing on, we had no instruments, we were dressed just like this, we let him walk through a contaminated area because it wasn’t supposed to be contaminated. That’s all I can say about that.
Question: These things you can’t talk about, in your opinion, do you feel it would cause mass hysteria? You seem calm.
Answer: No, it doesn’t bother me, I have this belief. We have already been to the moon, okay? Big deal. It’s not going to be too many more years until humans will be to Mars and beyond. It’s a matter of propulsion systems, it’s a matter of getting people to the point where they can live in space for long periods of time, either suspended animation or whatever, so they don’t come apart, mentally or physically. We have the technology to literally explore the solar system right now, the planets that are in the vicinity of us. And so it’s not a big thing. It doesn’t take much of a leap, quantum physics tells you accurately that the speed of light is not a speed which beyond it you cannot go.
That old theory is gone. Quantum physics says that you may go faster than the speed of light. If that’s true, which it is, then travel to the nearest stars is possible. If we, who are barely out of the primeval mud as beings can do this, it doesn’t take much, it’s very logical to assume that there are other life forms out there somewhere. We’re not unique. Good Lord, if we are, it’s not much of a testimony, is it? There are other life forms, certainly….nothing that I saw surprised me. What surprises me is the government’s paranoia about what the government knows. Consider the fact that the Federal Government won’t even tell you the truth about the budget process let alone anything else.
Question: There are some who believe we are already on Mars.
Answer: Well, I don’t think so.
Question: Go back to the question of who’s the boss.
Answer: Well, during the time I was out there, one of the bosses was Edward Teller. Edward Teller is the father of the hydrogen bomb. He worked for Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, he’s still alive and he’s as close to being a “god” in the scientific community and the nuclear weapons community as anybody on this earth. Edward Teller was held in far higher esteem than the President or anybody else. Might be interesting to note and this is not classified, during the time I was out there, the Soviet Union had an exchange program with us. It was not unusual to see Soviet scientists out at the test site on a regular basis. We shared a lot of information with them. I came to the conclusion, having talked to a lot of them over the years, that they were really not our enemies anywhere near to what the politicians wanted you to believe they were. We showed them… I showed them things that I couldn’t believe we were showing people from the Soviet Union. And I asked about that and was told that we had an exchange program and they were able to see things and become aware of things that I certainly wouldn’t have shown them.
Question: Did they see certain things that you couldn’t see?
Answer: No, they couldn’t go to Area 51.
Question: Why were we told they were so bad?