Roswell

Podcast: Download (Duration: 56:30 — 51.8MB)

Bill Birnes

The UFO Hunter himself, Bill Birnes, joins us on this week’s Paranormal Podcast. Jim & Bill talk about various UFO cases, reverse engineering, his current show “Ancient Aliens” and why “UFO Hunters” was taken off the air. You guessed it, the UFO Hunters uncovered too much!

You can check out Bill’s magazine and other projects at UFOMag.com

Thanks Bill!

–
For paranormal content you can’t get anywhere else check out Jim’s Paranormal Plus Club @ JimHarold.NET

–

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Note From Jim: We monitor our transcripts as closely as possible for any typographical errors; however, these may happen from time to time…for the final authority on what was said during a podcast please refer to the audio file.

JIM HAROLD: … and I can’t think of a better guest to talk about the subject [of UFOs] than tonight’s, and I’m honored to have him on the show.  I’m talking, of course, about William J. Birnes, and he’s a bonified triple-threat.  A New York Times Best Selling author, a publisher of UFO Magazine, and as many of you may know him, a TV star in his own right who headed up the crew at UFO Hunters for The History Channel.  Of course, now they call themselves History, but I still call them The History Channel. He holds a law degree and received his PhD from New York University in 1974 and I could not be more pleased to have him on the program.  Doctor Birnes, thank you for being on the Paranormal Podcast.

BILL BIRNES: Well, it’s my pleasure.  Thank you for inviting me.

JIM HAROLD: Let me ask you this:  with that kind of erudite background, a law degree, a PhD, what in the world got you interested in UFOs?  How did you get into the field?

BILL BIRNES: Well, one, I actually had my own sighting back in the 1950s.  When I was a kid in New York City I saw this craft, it was a light, a big circular light, that at night blanketed out the entire sky over our city block.  Obviously, growing up in the 1950s you’re really  growing up in the era, right? The summer of the saucers.  The summers of the saucers.  It’s almost as if every year in the 1950s, some newspaper, somewhere — of course, they treated it with derision and disdain, but nevertheless these were news stories — would carry the story of some UFO sighting. It was UFOs over Washington, and that was in the newspaper. It was in all the major newspapers, and it was in the Movietone newsreels, so you went to see movies like This Planet Earth and Earth vs The Flying Saucers and Invaders from Mars and things like that, you’d be hearing stories and seeing some of the footage of UFOs over Washington DC. So, I mean, you’re growing up in that era. It’s hard not to be interested.

JIM HAROLD:  I know, and I’m of a bit different age — I’m in my early 40s — but I remember being fascinated with it as a kid.  We had our own mini little blip in the 70s, and there seemed to be a lot of interest in the popular culture in it, and also interest in things like the Bermuda Triangle with Charles Berlitz and those types of things.  Now, let’s go through your career as a UFO investigator.  Of course, I think probably most people listening to this program are most familiar with your work on the UFO Hunters program, but tell us how you got into publishing the magazine and where you started your professional engagement with the UFO phenomenon.

BILL BIRNES:  Well, I was and am actually a true crime writer, and when my wife and I were living in Hollywood I was working with a number of… just law enforcement officers, police officers on telling their story, one of whom was the very famous and celebrated Bill Roemer who was the FBI agent in Chicago who broke the big organized crime cartel from the Bonanno family.  One of the places that I was pitching his story to, as ideally a movie or television series on the fiction he was writing, was a motion picture company who was also dealing with — and it was a round-about way of doing it, but a television movie on the fates of the prisoners of war of the Vietnam war era who were kept behind by the Vietnamese.

JIM HAROLD:  I think I saw that… was that a TV movie?  Because I think I saw that.

BILL BIRNES:  There were a number of TV movies on that.  This was not that, but I was hired to write the book.  Basically to edit a book on this, and one of the people we were working with was Colonel Philip Corso who was, as most people know, the person who negotiated operation Little Switch/Big Switch for the United States and President Eisenhower at the end of the Korean War during the armistice.
Well, in subsequent conversations with Corso and the motion picture company, as it was developing the story, he really dropped the bomb that he worked for the government on the R and D in the 1960s and he was in charge of the Roswell debris and bringing the reverse engineering into American industry, and he gave me a copy of the memoir, the biography of his boss, Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, also very famous, played by Gregory Peck, I think, but very famous as the general who led the charge up Hamburger Hill in North Korea to rescue his men.  So, I mean, the guy was very reputable, very credible, had a lot of history, and the story about the Roswell debris and the reverse engineering was really a fascinating story.  He was dropping names, dropping devices, and we checked a lot of the circumstantial stuff out, right, and it all checked out.  Indeed, some of the technology he talked about really had a jump start in the 1960s, and he said the jump start came from the fact that he had taken, for his boss, General Trudeau, bits and pieces of the Roswell crash.  Fiber optics, integrated circuitry, a strange memory metal, things like that, he had taken that… oh, a laser cutting tool, he had taken that to various industries and laboratories: IBM Monstanto, AT&T, Bell Labs, and this had been done prior to his own involvement in the late 1940s.  So, I mean, fascinating stuff. I checked it out and the circumstances were there that there probably was some reverse engineering going on, and sure enough, documents he pointed us to existed, and I basically sold the book for the movie company, called The Day After Roswell, they asked me to write the book and became a New York Times best seller, and the people who then owned UFO Magazine came to me, and we did an interview about the book and about Corso, and said, ‘look, we’re in some real financial difficulty here, we really can’t  meet our bills.  It’s a very sad thing. We want to stay in the publishing business.  Do you think the movie company would invest in them?’ Well, the movie company — I set the meeting up — heard their story, and they invested, and said ‘ look, though, for us to do this’ — and I liked these folks, they were very nice folks, good UFO researchers — ‘you would stay on in an advisory capacity. If the magazine ever does well we’ll compensate you, just be around, kind of the emeritus publisher’, and I did, and it didn’t do well.  It suffered under their business management, and ultimately they said, ‘look. We’ll sell it to you if you want it.”  And I bought it.  My wife, who was a professional New York literary editor, took over the magazine, turned it around financially and it began to get successful, and during the course of that, as we began to publish ebooks — electronic books — on various UFO-related topics and paranormal topics, the production company that worked for The History Channel came to me and said ‘would you be part of a show we’re doing on the Russian Roswell?” and of course I knew about that from articles in UFO Magazine, and so to make a long story very short, we did the piece on Russian Roswell for UFO Files for History, which was very successful, had very high ratings.  They asked me back to do something on underwater UFOs, did that… so I did about five UFO Files. The old UFO Files for The History Channel.  It was very successful. Finally, Pat Uskert, who was one of the UFO Hunters, lived in Venice California near us, and he had a UFO sighting over Venice Beach, wrote to my wife again to do an article for the magazine, so she suggested to him, because he said “gee.  I don’t know if it’s a balloon or UFO.  How do you tell?” So Nancy said, “listen.  Why don’t you get a metallic balloon”… you know, one of those birthday balloons?

JIM HAROLD: A Mylar balloon, yeah.

BILL BIRNES: A Mylar balloon. “Why don’t you get one of those, and launch it” — and Pat actually took a video of the UFO that he saw, he ran back to his house — he lived right near the beach — and he took a video, so he had this video of something.  We couldn’t tell, really — what was it, a balloon? A flying saucer? We didn’t know. But it looked intriguing, because it was moving against the wind.  You could see the wind pushing something one way, and here was this object going another way.  Well, everybody knows that sometimes the winds aloft do flukey things, right?  So Nancy said, “look.  Why don’t you get yourself a Mylar balloon, launch it, and then compare the flight of that Mylar balloon with the flight of the object you saw?”  Well, Pat did it, and — this is interesting — he edited the video so that it was a split screen, so you could see the balloon on one screen, and the object that Pat saw and  originally video taped on the other screen. Well, it was so compelling that I’d just done a motion picture, a television motion picture for Hearst Television.  It’s called “When Husbands Cheat” and it still runs today.  It was a motion picture based on a book that I represented in New York, when I was a literary agent in Manhattan, based on a personal story.  So I brought the video and Pat Usker himself to Hearst Television.  And they said, “wow, this is great. Let’s do something called ‘UFO Roadtrip’, get some friends, and why don’t you guys go on the road?” and they did, and shot some video, and ultimately Hearst decided that they were not going to make the television show.  They were getting out of the UFO business.  But the company that was doing UFO Files for The History Channel said to me, “we’d love to see this video and what you think you can do.”  Showed it to them, and they set up one of the UFO segments on USO — you probably saw that as well — one of the UFO segments called “Code Red: Deep Sea UFOs”.  We went out onto Santa Monica Bay in a dive boat, and basically we were trying to find any trace evidence — was there radiation under water?  Was there anything we could find that was trace evidence that maybe there was some kind of inner Redondo Trench or UFO? — of an unidentified submerged object. And of course it was great, because Pat was a dive instructor, a scuba-diving instructor, in the Phillipines, so Pat really had a lot of experience doing scuba diving.  So Pat and his friends were in the water, and the ratings of that particular show were off the chart.  I mean, the network loved it.  So based on that, we put together a pilot.  They saw a lot of promise in the pilot for the show. This is basic TV stuff, right?  You do a pilot, and they saw a lot of promise in the pilot and  based on the pilot they took an order for the first series, 13 episodes, for a show which they then re-named UFO Hunters. And of course, that was how the show started.  It was very successful in the first season.  We enjoyed a lot of success and they renewed us for two more years, and at the end of it I think we went a little too far — a lot too far, actually — with one of our segments on Dulce, New Mexico, showing the hybrids… and of course, a lot of that’s come to be a story in and of itself, of what happened at Dulce, and then the show was transformed, believe it or not, from very intense, interactive, kind of  three amigos UFO Hunters into a show that’s now on I also host called Ancient Aliens.

JIM HAROLD:  Yes.  Ancient Aliens is a fascinating show, because I love the idea that the technology that the ancients enjoyed, pyramids and so forth, may have been given to us by other civilizations.  And we’re going to talk about all of that right after this break on The Paranormal Podcast.

…

Well, we are back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our very special guest tonight is William J. Birnes; Bill Burnes, as you know him, the host of Ancient Aliens and also UFO Hunters, and an author, a publisher.  He’s kind of done it all, and is one of the top names in UFO investigations, and he was telling us about this transformation of his career.  Now I do want to get onto that question of the Dulce Base a little bit.  I do a video podcast with my good buddy….every week, and we’ve talked about the Dulce Base phenomena several times on that program. Tell us about that episode, because I remember that disturbing picture of some cross breeding with a human and cattle and things.  Explain to folks what the Dulce Base is, and what its implications may be, because wow! (laughs)

BILL BIRNES: The Dulce Base — first of all, there’s a lot of controversy over whether it’s a base, it’s not a base, real, not real… the Dulce Base — what we’re calling Dulce — is an underground, inside-the-mountain facility run by I-don’t-know-who, okay, in Dulce, New Mexico, on the Jicarilla Appache reservation. There’s a lot of controversy about it… is it really a base?  Is it not a base?  Over the years, the story of the base came to be, real quick, because somebody who identified himself as a former security guard there, named Thomas Castello, said that he was working there and that during his tenure there he saw astounding things in that area.  He saw aliens, extraterrestrials, whether they were reptile ancient aliens, whether they were aliens that looked like us, gruesome aliens, he said they were there.  They were working on scientific experiments, in some cases side by side with Americans, in other cases they were working on their own.  There were places where human beings could go, places where only extraterrestrials could go… but the experiments, as he described them, and then actually drew images of them, were these horrible grotesque experiments, kind of like out of the movie The Island of Dr Moreau. Body parts floating in vats, human heads, human bodies, like something out of a Jeffrey Dahmer movie. It was really gruesome.  And he said these experiments were going on to blend humans and extraterrestrials.  They were growing a whole new species there.  And these stories were so compelling, so frightening, that people were actually drawn to them, and drawn to his sketches.  Well, Thomas Castello disappeared, shortly after going public, and telling his story, not only did he disappear, but the people he told his story to disappeared.  And so we went to the base, and of course if you talk to people like John Lear and others, they will tell you, that yes, this is a true story… John Lear, John Rhodes; it’s a true story, really awful things are going on there.  Another story, told to us by these two retired police officers who investigated Dulce — Ken Storch was one of the names, told us about literally a “fire fight”, pretty well known in UFOlogy circles, a fight between US service men and guards at the base, and the actual extraterrestrials, in which a number of scientists and US soldiers were killed in the fire fight, because the aliens were using very exotic weapons, weapons that we had no defenses for.  So this was the story of the fire fight. And this has been going on for years, and then, of course, could we have build a base deep inside what is basically a large hill?  What happened to all the dirt?  How do you get there?  All these kind of technical questions, you know?  Apparently, according to John Rhodes, we have the technology. Bechtel had these huge earth boring machines, he showed us the patents, so the more we investigated this, the more fascinating it became.  And of course the Native Americans who live there, the Jicarilla Appache, they told us stories about hybridized animals and people they call the ‘little people”, “the shadow people”, who lived in the area.  They showed us photographs — I have one of UFOs hovering over a mountain top.  One of the tribal police officers told us about a three-headed rabbit and strange black vans leaving Dulce in the wee small hours before the dawn. Well, it was compelling.  Finally, we met the very famous legendary Gabe Valdez, who was a retired New Mexico State Trooper, who showed us the photographs of what looked like a human head on a cow’s body.  And that was stunning, and of course the very famous Nancy Talbott of BLT research told us, “you know, don’t you, that bovine blood serum is used to culture human cells.”  And so it’s a very close serum.  And so if someone were to create a cross species, based on using cow parts for human organs, that’s something they would do is manage to blend human and bovine DNA in such a way as to create a hybridized entity that could be used as an organ machine, creating organs.

JIM:  Ah, that was my question:  what would be the percentage in trying to create hybrid, possibly dangerous crossbreeds?  What would be the benefit of that?

BILL BIRNES:  That’s the benefit.  That’s the whole point.  Now imagine, why would the military would be involved?  Just think about it. Imagine you needed a stockpile of organs for soldiers in battle. Somebody loses an organ, somebody gets shot in the lung, somebody gets shot, you need organs. What if you had the ability to grow human organs in a factory?  And what if you could take that person’s stem cells, or that person’s genetic materials, and from that, by blending that with a cow, create organs? Imagine the pharmaceutical companies… what a boon for pharmaceutical companies.  Think of this. Think of human beings having organ replacements; those that can afford them, obviously. It is… you’re looking at the possibility of immortality.  Or at least of living hundreds and hundreds of years. As organs give out, you have a heart attack, you lose heart tissue, but you can grow a whole new heart and have it implanted.  And it’s your heart, so there’s no rejection. I mean, imagine the pharmaceutical  market for that.  Well, we’d evidently stepped on the big one, because we were told, “what did you do? You’re off the air.  You guys are bad guys, you shouldn’t have done this.”  Weeks after… months after the show aired, three republican senators, Grassley, McConnell, and Lindsey Graham, went before congress and submitted a bill — I don’t know if it ever passed — it was a bill to criminalize the interbreeding between humans and other animals. So, interspecies interbreeding criminalized. Well, so, we knew we’d done something and of course we were contacted by — I was contacted by — someone who represented himself as a member of a not-so-friendly intelligence agency, though he was pretty friendly…

JIM HAROLD: With three letter, maybe?

DOCTOR WILLIAM J BIRNES: A three letter agency… who said, “what you did was just really… you could have stayed under the radar, but you wouldn’t do it, and now you’re off the air and now ABC and Disney and The History Channel have to do payback to the boys upstairs. The guys on the ground liked you, but their bosses didn’t.” And so that’s the story of how we did UFO Hunters and why we got off the air.  And so the network had such high ratings with the show — and television is such a ratings business, as you know — that they didn’t want to lose the show.  So what they did was they took one of our episodes from season three, out of the segment on the ancients with Giorgi Tsoukalos, in which we were the ones that took his model of what looked like — a bird, some kind of strange thing…

JIM HAROLD: Yes!  I remember seeing it!  What was it… a thunderbird-type thing…?

BILL BIRNES: Yeah, we were the ones who took that, went to our special effects producer Rick Price, in Hollywood he does special effects stuff, and he modeled – he took the exact scale specifications and scaled up a balsam wood model of that, launched it from a catapult, and lo and behold it flew like the space shuttle. From that one segment, The History Channel went to another production company and said, “do you want to do a two-hour special on Ancient Aliens?” and that was the segment, they re-did that segment on that show, and from that they grew the series, then the production company came to me and said, “Bill, we’d like you to be one of the hosts of that series” and I’ve been doing that show for three seasons as well. So I’ve been six seasons on The History Channel hosting UFO shows.

JIM HAROLD:  That’s fantastic. Well, I’d like to talk about some more cases.  That Dulce case is fascinating.  And I’ll put this one to you:  let’s say you had a skeptic before you… now, we know there are those people who call themselves skeptics who are really debunkers, and you could almost walk them up to a UFO with an alien and they wouldn’t believe it.  But let’s say you had somebody that’s skeptical but intellectually honest enough to be open-minded.  And you had to take one case to them that you’ve investigated and say “this is the best case where I have the best chance to convince you that something’s really going on here.”  What would be that case and why?

BILL BIRNES: Let’s start about what is a skeptic, okay, in terms of a UFO case. Believe it or not, a skeptic would be somebody from MUFON (the mutual UFO network).  Most serious UFO investigators and researchers — serious ones — are bigger skeptics than anybody, because they know how easy it is to mistake something for a UFO and build a whole story, when it’s not really a UFO at all. It’s something conventional.  So that’s first of all… if you’re looking at a skeptic, you’re probably looking at — an honest skeptic — you’re looking at a UFO investigator.  So that’s one.
Two, there are so many cases that I look at a case that would have a number of things about it, things such as multiple credible witnesses.  That’s one.  Two, is there some form of physical trace evidence that remains from that case, whether it’s photographic evidence, soil, something like that.  Is there any official documentary history on that case, not just ‘Joe writes to Sam’ or ‘Mary writes to Joe’, but really a documentary history where the government or some official agency like the military seems to get involved to make statements about the case.  And finally, the final thing for me is, is there a history of an extraordinary attempt to debunk the case by doing things that in themselves are more implausible than the fact that the case might involve an unconventional craft or otherworldly manifestation. So those are my prongs of what makes the kind of case to respond to what you were talking about.  And there are many many cases like that.
One case of course is Roswell, but I’m not going to dwell on Roswell too much, but Roswell is one such case. There’s physical trace evidence, there are multiple eye witnesses, there is official government documentation in the form of memos from the head of the Air Force Material Command.  We have deathbed affadavits from various people, and the attempts to debunk the case — oh, it’s a weather balloon; oh, it’s a project mogul balloon; oh, these are crash dummies — are so implausible it’s ridiculous. So, Roswell fits the bill on that.
The other one for me is the 1952… I’m calling it ‘The Summer of the Saucers’.  It’s UFOs over Washington DC, where there’s actual film footage and still photographs of these objects hovering over the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building… I mean, you can see these things.  We have eye-witness testimony from various pilots, radar operators, air traffic controllers. And then you have the book by Edward Rupelt, who was the former leader of Project Blue Book, saying flat out, these were not temperature aversions, clouds, malfunctioning radar, these were real objects that our planes were chasing.  So, the 1952 Summer of the Saucers.
Then there was the 1997 Phoenix Lights.  Thousands and thousands and thousands of people saw these, great video footage, great witness testimony.  The governor of the state of Arizona,
Symington, who was an air force officer who himself had a sighting back when he was in the air force, I mean, he said this was real. I mean, these weren’t just sightings of strange lights in the sky.

JIM HAROLD:  The thing about that one that was interesting to me, was that Governor Symington came out right after that and they had that ridiculous press conference with the figure dressed up like an alien, but then later on he recanted and said, ‘look.  I shouldn’t have done that, and this is real.”  And if I’m not mistaken, he saw the lights, too.

BILL BIRNES: Well, he saw the lights… that’s the interesting thing that you mention here, is that it wasn’t just the lights that he saw, and a number of other witnesses saw, he actually saw a structured craft.  He came on our show, UFO Hunters, to make that confession, and that was part of the show.  James Fox and I introduced him, and he said that not only did he see lights, what he saw was an actual, structured triangular craft. It had a kind of shimmering, wavy surface to it, and he felt a real sense of awe and majesty as this thing hovered by.  I mean, it just floated by as if it were a kite, but it seemed to be intelligently guided. And thousands of other people up close and personal saw this triangular-shaped object, bigger than football fields, float by them literally a hundred or so feet in the air.

JIM HAROLD:  The thing I love about it is, well, we’ve had Doctor Lynne Kitei on the show, and she’s written books and done documentaries as well, and the thing that I love is when the military comes back and says, “oh, it was flares from an exercise.” I mean, come on.

BILL BIRNES:  And you just mentioned that fourth prong.  When the government does something that’s so ridiculous in order to debunk it that it’s more implausible than the fact that it’s a flying saucer or something.

JIM HAROLD:  That’s like in the 90s when the government, 50 years after it happened, came out about the mogul explaination for Roswell, it’s kind of like… they drew attention to it.  “There’s nothing to see here.”

BILL BIRNES: Right. And the reason they came out with the Project Mogul statement was not in response to anything, but was in response to congressman Steve Schiff, who mysteriously died of cancer shortly thereafter, but congressman Steve Schiff from New Mexico, who raised the question, “what really happened at Roswell?” Well, the government on the 50th anniversary of Roswell came out with, “oh, it’s really a Project Mogul balloon” and they made it absolutely clear that it was a top secret project designed to detect the residue of nuclear waste from Soviet nuclear test explosions.  Well, the ludicrousness of that was, they said ‘we were doing this in 1947’ and the materials were so exotic that either the officers at the Roswell 519 air field couldn’t identify it, or guess what?  That wasn’t true at all. The Project Mogul balloon, believe it or not, was simply a series of weather balloons — conventional weather balloons — strung together so they could reach extraordinarily high altitudes. What were weather balloons made of in 1947?  neoprene rubber.  Not Mylar, not cellulose acetate, but regular old-fashioned neoprene rubber, the same neoprene rubber used in World War 2.  Everybody at the base could have identified neoprene rubber.  And, to make matters worse, the weather balloon factory was — if you’ve ever been to the Roswell base — right across the street from the base.  So even enlisted personnel knew what a weather balloon was… they saw them being made at the base.  So that was implausible, right?  So that fits that prong of extraordinarily implausible statements than the fact that it was a UFO… well, that’s the Phoenix lights.  After Luke air force base said ‘no, we had nothing in the air that night’, suddenly, suddenly the next day it was, ‘oh no, we really did, it was the Maryland International Guard, they were down here doing maneuvers, they were doing flare maneuvers.’  So now it was flares.
Well, analysts of that video footage — and we have plenty of video footage of the Phoenix lights — measured the colour spectrum — remember, flares give off a specific colour because we know what’s burning in them, it’s phosphorous, it’s incandescence, right? — looked for the various traces of flares and lo and behold when you look in split screen, and we did an episode on this, when you look at the split screen of what a flare looks like — and again this goes back to what Nancy was doing with Pat Usker — if you look at what a flare looks like and the Phoenix lights look like, they’re totally different. Then the location that the air force base gave for where the flares were being dropped didn’t match. They said they were being dropped over at the Goldwater Range, because why would you drop incandescent flares over somebody’s house? No, they’re being dropped in the flare test range.  But the flare test range was behind various mountains.  When you analyze the footage, these things are actually in front of the mountains. And so on and on… but once the flare explanation got out there, how easy it is for everybody to say, ‘oh, they’re flares! You UFO nuts, you guys will believe anything.’

JIM HAROLD: It seems they always have one of those.  Somebody put on my facebook the other day a great thing, and you’ve probably seen it I’m sure.  It’s a chart of US Air Force explanations for UFOs and it shows all different shaped UFOs including one that looks like the USS Enterprise, and everything under it has “weather balloon” “weather balloon” “weather balloon” “swamp gas” “weather balloon”… and I said the only thing they were missing was ball lightning.

BILL BIRNES: Right, and they used ball lightning to explain actual UFO sightings in World War 2 that were called “foo-fighters.”

JIM HAROLD: Well, I was actually going to ask you about that, because that’s always fascinated me; because that predates the Kenneth Arnold 1947 “flying saucers” phenomenon… but gremlins and foo-fighters and all that, talk about that a little bit.  Because that’s fascinating.

BILL BIRNES: Well, foo-fighters — again, we have photographs of these — were real phenomenon from World War 2. They intercepted our fighter pilots that were escorting our B-17s over in Germany, in the Shweinfurt raids and Dresden raids, and the thing about these is that we thought at first that they were German secret weapons, and the Germans thought they were Allied secret weapons.  Nobody knew what they were.  They didn’t fight with our planes, they didn’t shoot back at us, they simply observed.  They were basically orbs, just like the orbs that people see in places like Marley Woods in the midwest, but people think that they only were observed over the skies over Germany, of Europe,  in World War 2.  Not true, because in 1945 one of our B-29 bombers saw a foo-fighter over the South Pacific and fired on it, and apparently hit it, and it split into a number of objects and disappeared. And foo-fighters were taken seriously enough by journalists — journalists had not yet been told ‘do not write about UFOs’ — that it was a cover story in one of the national news magazines in the 1940s.  So these were real phenomena.

JIM HAROLD: It’s fascinating to me.  I want to be respectful of your time, and you’ve been very generous with your time.  I have a couple of other things I wanted to ask you, though. One is this idea, and you talked about it earlier, of reverse engineering, and that has always fascinated me because when I look at the progression — and I’m not the only person that feels that, in fact I think you mention this on the episode you did on it that talked about the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane — but if you look at the progression of technology from, let’s say, 1900 – 1950, there were obviously, you know, the atomic bomb and so forth, but it kind of went on this curve that looked pretty reasonable. And then, from 1950 ‘til today, it goes exponentially.  You know, I was just telling somebody else I was interviewing earlier, I have a computer that I just built for myself about a month ago; it probably is as powerful as a military super computer from 15 years ago, or maybe more so.  And just the idea that we can do this show, which would have taken millions of dollars of equipment and we can do it with consumer-grade technology… the way that technology has progressed, and it seems like it would have had to come from somewhere. And that kind of explosion fits pretty nicely with Kenneth Arnold and  with Roswell and so forth.

BILL BIRNES: Well, the fascinating thing about reverse engineering is that, after Roswell — this is in 1947 — as the story goes,  our president Truman told his military Chief of Staff, his — I forget the person’s name, I want to say it’s George Marshall but I could be wrong — to take the lowest common denominator of technology that came out of that crash — because nobody knew really what that thing was — and take it to whatever industry they thought might have been working on something that was similar.  And that’s the secret of reverse engineering.
The argument against the possibility of reverse engineering, and reverse engineering obviously existed — I mean, when one of our B-29 bombers had a forced landing, in the Soviet Union at the end of World War 2, the Soviet Union actually took the plane apart and rebuilt their own Ilyshin bomber, which is physically identical to a B-29, probably bolt for bolt.  We’ve done that with some Soviet technology, so reverse engineering is a common thing; it’s not some magic thing, it’s common. The big skeptical argument about reverse engineering from UFOs is ‘oh, let’s just say we’ve gone back in time and left a cell phone in ancient Sumeria.  Now, not only would they not know how to reverse, they wouldn’t even know what it was. How could they tell?’  Well, I mean, again:  implausible argument because, in the case of the Roswell craft, some of the technology — and this is always my argument against it being a very advanced craft — some of the technology was technology we were already working on. So, when you look at it, it wasn’t that far ahead of us in terms of the electronics; in terms of, we were already working on lasers at the army lab at Columbia in the 1940s. So we were already working on this stuff. But the point is, you just create this unbelievably hypothetical situation and then take what people say is the reality and overlay it to that situation, so of course it’s illogical. Reverse engineering was that we were already working on some of this technology.  In the case of the integrated circuit, Brattain and Shockley at Bell Labs all the way back in the 1930s were looking for a way to create a switch, a way to pass current through a circuit without having to use this nineteenth century device.  By the way, this same nineteenth century device is called a light bulb, which was invented by Thomas Edison. Like the incandescent bulb, which we’re only now beginning to replace with other kinds of light bulbs, because you realize how energy-inefficient it is… but when you go to the store and buy an incandescent light bulb and put ‘er in a lamp, you’re basically using technology that’s almost two hundred years old. I mean, 150 years old, right?

JIM HAROLD:  Getting away from tubes, I even remember as a kid we had tube TVs, and they had to come and fix them.  The tube would burn out, they’d take the tube to the store…
BILL BIRNES:  Right.  And it’s funny, because then in some of the pharmacies and super pharmacies, they had tube testers, and if you could look inside your TV see which tube wasn’t lit, like a light bulb you’d pull it out, take it to the tube tester and you’d plug it into the sockets, and you’d turn it on and see if the tube was working or not. Well, in the 1930s, Brattain and Shockley wanted to find a way to create a level of circuitry that didn’t rely on Edison tubes, ie light bulbs, to pass current.  And to use these devices they were working on as switches — on other words, could you pass one electron through and shut it off.  So, on/off.  A binary circuit. And they were using silicon as a base for the two nodes to pass it, but they couldn’t do two things with it: they couldn’t only generate or pass one electron at a time.  I mean, when you watch electricity, right, it’s the flow of electrons through some conductor. They couldn’t pass one electron at a time. Either you’re passing a bunch or you’re not.  And the electrons would flow both ways. So you couldn’t do a singular directional circuit. Well, when they received the pieces of debris from the Roswell crash — this would have been in Fall, 1947… over the summer of 1947, actually  – they looked at the chemistry of the base of this circuitry, and they saw that is was a combination of silicon and certain amounts of arsenic — when they used arsenic and silicon as a base, suddenly they were able to direct the flow of electrons and use this device as a switch, and that became the transistor.  And thus the modern digital computer age was born. But, the evidence for this, look at the reach:  there was a crash at Roswell, the crash was of some kind of crash that was otherworldly, pieces of that craft went to Bell Labs with Brattain and Shockley already working on the transistor, suddenly… well, Brattain and Shockley had no work bench notes in the 1940s.  In other words, there was no documentation of their work. Only after the transistor was patented by Bell Labs in 1948, and then re-patented in 1949 and then suddenly by the end of ‘49 people had these little transistor radios, these little teeny radios… I remember their first appearance in 1950 as a consumer device.
Well, after these were in consumer applications, and of course they were in military applications as well, suddenly Brattain and Shockley reverse engineered their own notes to account for how they discovered this. In other words, their notes we’re using didn’t exist in 1947, but suddenly by 1949 they did exist, reverse engineered from the 1930s.  That, to me, is another case of reverse engineering. Every item that Philip Corso said he brought to various industries were things that the industries were already working on. So, fiber optics:  the army technologists basically flashed a light through this kind of Y-shaped set of glass-looking filaments, monofilaments, and sure enough it was in different colours, and they realised that they could use light to carry signals and that became fiber optics, and that went to AT&T Bell Labs.  Kevlar, that substance went to Monsanto and the University of Colorado, working on trying to reverse engineer the substance in spider web; one of the strongest substances, by the way, on planet earth, if you look at what spiders do.  That’s what they were doing. So here’s a case where those substances were actually being used. Those inventions were already being made.  The army was already working on powered light, a maser, and they were doing it at Columbia University, and of course, proof from history we now know that the general of the army, Dwight D. Eisenhower, later the president of the United States, after he retired from the army, was the president of my alma mater, Columbia University, and that was where the army lab was. So, fascinating that it would go there. You have General Douglas MacArthur in 1952 at Sperry Rand saying that our next major battles will be in outer space.  He told the New York times. So there’s a lot of evidence for reverse engineering of something, whether it was from alien technology or not, I would love to see the memo, but circumstantial evidence really supports that.

JIM HAROLD:   Yeah, I think so.  One last question, then I want to ask where everybody can go and find out about UFO Magazine and everything you’re doing. I do a weekly video show, as I said, and a lot of what we do is feature a lot of video from youtube and so forth, and you’ve been doing this for a good while now.  Is it becoming more difficult because of the proliferation of different video devices, that there’s almost too much UFO video and it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff?

BILL BIRNES: Well, first of all, anybody can create a UFO video, as you know.  And certainly there have been some very famous UFO film hoaxes. You don’t need a consumer grade camera or a cell phone camera to create a UFO hoax. I mean, so we know that, right? The more sophisticated you get… so you’ve got to be careful.  But on the other hand, the prevalence:  why would there be so many hoaxes? Why would people waste time creating a hoax? Well, as one person from the military told me, they’re put up to it by the very three-letter agency that keep us safe in our beds at night, because the more hoaxes you can show on youtube, the less likely people are to believe they’re crying wolf. The less likely people are to believe that there really is something out there.

JIM HAROLD:  That makes a lot of sense.  Well, thank you for being so generous with your time. Tell folks a little bit about UFO Magazine, where they can go; obviously, watch you on The History Channel — I can’t just call it History, to me it’s The History Channel, probably always will be in my mind. Where can people go on the web to find out everything Bill Birnes is up to?

BILL BIRNES: Well, if you want to look at UFO Magazine, if you want to get a free sample issue of UFO Magazine, we give them away.  You pay for the postage, we pay for the magazine; send it right to your door, first-class mail, go to www.UFOmag.com.  That’s the website. And you can see all of our past issues. You want a real bargain, order one of our past issues or our current issue, even before it comes off press you can order the current issue of our magazine electronically; that will be in a PDF file that you can read on your computer, your iPad, your iPhone, whatever you have, you can order that. $2.50.  When you order it using our shopping cart, it downloads right to your computer. So it’s the fastest way to get UFO Magazine, and if you don’t want to have a bunch of copies sitting on your bookcase, and wait for them in the mail or wait for the post office to deliver them, order it electronically. So that’s how to get UFO Magazine.
When you’re on that site, you can also pop over to our radio show, every Saturday night we go live at 6 o’clock with some very interesting guests, not necessarily from the field of UFOs, although many of them are.  We do a lot of conspiracy and alternate history topics as well.  It’s called Future Theatre, and the radio show is there.  We’re on talk stream live, and folks could download all of our past shows from UFO Magazine, just click on “Future Theatre”.

JIM HAROLD:  Good deal.  Thank you, Bill Birnes, for being on the Paranormal Podcast.

BILL BIRNES: You’re more than welcome.  Thank you.

Legal Disclaimer

{ 11 comments }