Disclosure Project Videos

The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret.

The video below contains segments of witness testimony.

Part 2

Alien Abductions

by Karla Turner, Ph.D.

World renowned UFO researcher Jacques Vallee has repeatedly referred to the similarities between UFO and abduction reports and the stories of folklore and fairy tales. I disagree with Dr. Vallee on many, many points of ufology, but here I will grant that there is one fairy tale which does have something important to tell us about the alien abduction phenomenon. It is not, however, what Dr. Vallee might think.

The story of Hansel and Gretel presents a lesson that every abductee should heed. These innocent children, wandering lost and frightened in the forest, came upon a gingerbread house that seemed to offer them shelter and sustenance. The owner of the house, a wizened old woman, was frightening to them at first, but their hunger pushed the children to accept her offer to come inside and be fed.

They entered the gingerbread house and promptly became the old woman's captives. Kept in cages, the two children were abundantly fed. It was not for their benefit, though. In fact, they were being fattened up for the oven! The deceptive nature of the gingerbread house and of the old woman's offer of food worked quite well.

It is the deceptive quality of this story that holds a warning for humans who are abducted by aliens. Like Hansel and Gretel, we are initially terrified by our encounter with aliens, but in too many cases, our fear is overcome by the words of our abductors and by the thoughts and experiences they present to us.

I, too, am an abductee, and my quest to discover the nature of my own experiences led me into abduction research over the past four years. Working with many other abduction cases, I have learned just how basic the deception of alien actions can be.

My family and I also delved into our own experiences, both past and present. Barbara Bartholic, a dedicated UFO investigator from Tulsa, Oklahoma, worked closely with us and helped us fill in the gaps in our recollections of strange encounters through hypnotic regression. Ms. Bartholic, by the way, began her own research as an assistant to Jacques Vallee in cattle mutilation investigations, so her expertise in ufology is wide-ranging. I have recently written a book, Into the Fringe, about the startling and often disturbing results of our personal investigations, and it [was] published by the Berkley Publishing Group in November 1992.

My interest soon expanded past the merely personal, and for the past several years I have worked as Ms. Bartholic's research associate, exploring literally hundreds of sighting and encounter cases with her. And what I've learned through this work has raised far more questions than answers. In fact, it has taught me to be wary of those researchers who do claim to have answers. I have yet to hear of a single theory or explanation that accounts for all of the data.

Some researchers have pointed out patterns of events in the abduction experience, such as the physical examination, the taking of sperm and ova, and the later presentation of a hybrid baby to the abductee. Other patterns include the training of the abductee in some way and the delivery of a warning of some upcoming global disaster. Yes, these events are frequently reported, as one researcher has said in boring repetitious accounts, and it is tempting to think that the explanation for alien abductions may lie in these patterns.

So the researchers announce that the problem is solved. The aliens are doing cross breeding experiments, ufologists tell us. Never mind the overwhelming evidence against the viable commingling of different species. Or, we are told, the aliens are here to save us from destroying ourselves and our planet through violence, drug use, epidemic disease, pollution, and resource depletion. Never mind that these problems have grown worse, not better, since the ETs began visiting us.

Most infuriating of all, we are assured that there are no actual aliens, that our experiences spring from our own subconscious turmoil or from our need for fantasy fulfillment. Never mind that many abductees are young children, too young to be suffering from such psychological disturbances. Well, then, the resourceful researcher counters, the imagined aliens must spring from some collective human super-psyche that is mirroring our failures and dangers back to us. This particular theory adores the archetypal gray ET, because it resembles some sickly fetal form of humanity and must therefore be an objectified warning of what our species is in danger of becoming if we don't mend our ways. Never mind that many, many abductees have no dealing with grays, but instead are victimized by robust reptoids and insectoid-type aliens. Not to mention the totally human-looking blond beauties and black-headed, black-robed clan with the widow's peak hairline.

No, too many researchers seem to find a theory and cling to it in spite of data that contradict it. And it is the ideas of these researchers that dominate ufology. But if the public had access to the raw data, to the first-hand reports of abductees, especially those unfamiliar with UFO-oriented books, magazines, and lecturers, they would find a much less neatly organized set of patterns. These "virgin" cases - people uncontaminated by ufological literature - supply a staggering picture of human-alien contact events.

What follows here is an overview of these "virgin" reports, a list of recurrent experiences that, taken together, gives us a close-up view of what the aliens are doing here on earth. This data doesn't tell us for certain just what sort of creatures the aliens are, or what their purpose here may be. But it does tell us what humans are experiencing and what they are observing in the actions and capabilities of the aliens. Every detail in the following list has been reported by more than one abductee, and in many cases the details have turned up quite frequently.

ABDUCTION "CHECKLIST".

If these reports can be believed - and there is no reason to doubt the honesty of the reporters - the abduction phenomenon includes the following details.

* Aliens can alter our perception of our surroundings.
* Aliens can control what we think we see. They can appear to us in any number of guises, and shapes.
* Aliens can take us--our consciousness--out of our physical bodies, disable our control of our bodies, install one of their own entities, and use our bodies as vehicles for their own activities before returning our consciousness to our bodies.
* Aliens can be present with us in an invisible state and can make themselves only partially visible.
* Abductees receive marks on their bodies other than the well-known scoops and straight-line scars. These other marks include single punctures, multiple punctures, large bruises, three and four-fingered claw marks, and triangles of every possible sort.
* Female abductees often suffer serious gynecological problems after their alien encounters, and sometimes these problems lead to cysts, tumors, cancer of the breasts and uterus, and to hysterectomies.
* Aliens take body fluids from our necks, spines, blood veins, joints such as knees and wrists, and other places. They also inject unknown fluids into various parts of our bodies.
* A surprising number of abductees suffer from serious illnesses they didn't have before their encounters. These have led to surgery, debilitation, and even death from causes the doctors can't identify.
* Some abductees experience a degeneration of their mental, social, and spiritual well-being. Excessive behavior frequently erupts, such as drug abuse, alcoholism, overeating, and promiscuity. Strange obsessions develop and cause the disruption of normal life and the destruction of personal relationships.
* Aliens show a great interest in adult sexuality, child sexuality, and in inflicting physical pain on abductees.
* Abductees recall being instructed and trained by aliens. This training may be in the form of verbal or telepathic lessons, slide shows, or actual hands-on instruction in the operation of alien technology.
* Abductees report being taken to facilities in which they encounter not only aliens but also normal-looking humans, sometimes in military uniforms, working with the alien captors.
* Abductees often encounter more than one sort of alien during an experience, not just the grays. Every possible combination of gray, reptoid, insectoid, blond, and widow's peak have been seen during single abductions, aboard the same craft or in the same facility.
* Abductee "virgin" cases - report being taken to underground facilities where they see grotesque hybrid creatures, nurseries of hybrid humanoid fetuses, and vats of colored liquid filled with parts of human bodies.
* Abductees report seeing other humans in these facilities being drained of blood, being mutilated, flayed, and dismembered, and being stacked, lifeless, like cords of wood. Some abductees have been threatened that they, too, will end up in this condition if they don't cooperate with their alien captors.
* Aliens come into homes and temporarily remove young children, leaving their distraught parents paralyzed and helpless. In cases where a parent has been able to protest, the aliens insist that "The children belong to us."
* Aliens have forced their human abductees to have sexual intercourse with aliens and even with other abductees while groups of aliens observe these performances. In such encounters, the aliens have sometimes disguised themselves in order to gain the cooperation of the abductee, appearing in such forms as Jesus, the Pope, certain celebrities, and even the dead spouses of the abductees.
* Child abductees sometimes show a new and obsessive interest in their own genitalia after alien encounters, saying that their abductors who come at night have been touching these parts of their bodies.
* Aliens perform extremely painful experiments or procedures on abductees, saying that these acts are necessary, but giving no explanation why. Abductees' eyes are painfully removed from the sockets, allowing the aliens to scrape the area or implant devices into the area before the eyeballs are replaced, for instance. Some abductees are subjected to painful constrictions, often around the head, chest and extremities. Painful genitalia and anal probes are performed, on children as well as adults.
* Aliens make predictions of an imminent period of global chaos and destruction. They say that a certain number of humans- -and the number varies dramatically from case to case--will be "rescued" from the planet in order to continue the species, either on another planet or back on earth after the destruction is over. Many abductees report that they don't believe their alien captors and foresee instead a much more sinister use of the "rescued" humans.
* In every instance from this list, there are multiple reports from unrelated cases, confirming that such bizarre details are not the product of a single deranged mind. These details are convincing evidence that, contrary to the claims of many UFO researchers, the abduction experience isn't limited to a uniform pattern of events. This phenomenon simply can't be explained in terms of cross-breeding experiments or scientific research into the human physiology.

Spritually Enlightened?

It becomes clear from these details that the beings who are doing such things can't be seen as spiritually enlightened, with the best interest of the human race in mind. Something else is going on, something far more painful and frightening, in many, many abduction encounters.

There is a theory current in ufological research that says abductees who perceive their experiences in a negative way only do so because they themselves aren't spiritually or psychically advanced. Persons with higher cosmic development have positive alien encounters, so the theory goes, and those who have painful or frightening experiences are merely spiritual Neanderthals. This is a pet theory of researchers who claim that aliens, whether objectively real or not, serve as "mirrors" of our spiritual nature, on an individual or a species-wide basis. Strieber has voiced this theory, for instance, in Majestic, where he says, "In the eyes of the others [the aliens], we who met them saw ourselves. And there were demons there."

Having worked with so many decent, honest, positively oriented abductees, however, I believe this theory is wrong. It is worse than wrong - it is despicable, as despicable as blaming a rape victim for the violence committed against her. This attitude leaves many abductees feeling doubly violated, first by the aliens who took them and then by the UFO researchers to whom they turn for explanations and help.

Perhaps it is easy to understand why such a theory would be so popular. Humans have a deep need to believe in the power of good. We need for the aliens to be a good force, since we feel so helpless in their presence. And we need for some superior force to offer us a hope of salvation, both personally and globally, when we consider the sorry state of the world.

I think the aliens know this about us--they know that we want and hope for them to be benevolent creatures - and they use our desire for goodness to manipulate us. What better way to gain our cooperation than to tell us that the things they are doing are for our own good? Looking at the actions, the results of alien interference such as the long list above, there is a great discrepancy between what we desire from them and what they are doing to us.

Not all abduction reports are filled with frightening or painful events, of course. Many people say that their alien encounters felt benevolent, that their abductors treated them kindly or at least with a scientific detachment. Some abductees recall being told that they were "special," that they were "chosen," and that they have an important task to perform for the benefit of humanity.

Given such a positive message, the abductees may ignore the fear and the pain of their encounters and insist to themselves and to others that a higher motive underlies the abduction experience. And, in some cases, all that an abductee remembers is a benevolent encounter, and so has no reason to assume any negative action has occurred.

Intensive research now shows that at the core of the human-alien interaction there is a clear pattern of deception. We know, for instance, that "screen memories" are often used to mask an alien abduction. Such accounts abound, in which a person sees a familiar, yet out-of-place animal, like a deer or owl, a monkey or a rabbit, and then experiences a period of missing time. The person often awakens later to find a new, unexplained scar on his body.

Uneasiness about the encounter will persist, however, and far different memories may start to surface in dreams or flashbacks, and then the person seeks help to explain the uneasiness. Quite often, hypnotic regression is used to uncover the events behind the "screen memory," and that is when a typical alien abduction surfaces.

The most recent research in which I've been involved has turned up yet a second sort of screening process. If it turns out to be accurate, then thousands of abduction cases are in urgent need of re-examination.

The typical scenario of undergoing the regressive hypnosis usually results in penetration of the initial blocked memories.

The abductee then recalls an encounter, hitherto un-remembered, such as undergoing a physical examination of some sort, perhaps having body tissues removed or having a gynecological exam. Other typical reports include the taking of sperm and ova, of being told of an important task to be carried out, or of receiving a warning of upcoming disaster.

In most cases, both the abductee and the investigator come away from the hypnosis session feeling that they have discovered the truth about the experience. Rationalization leads them to believe that the aliens' purposes must be scientifically objective or benevolent. The less threatening and more benevolent the hypnotically recalled event seems, the more satisfied are the investigator and the abductee. "That wasn't so bad, now, was it? These beings are our friends, or at least they are not our enemies." And everyone goes away with a sense of relief. I have yet to hear of a researcher who actually questions the uncovered scenario.

However, from several recent cases, it is apparent that these recovered memories may well also be yet another screen, masking events that are much more reprehensible. I will explain one such case, to make the point clear.

A Strange Report

A man in his late 40s came to us to explore several alien-related events in his life, and in the interview he told of a strange, although not apparently alien-oriented episode that had haunted him since childhood. When he was ten years old, his grandmother came to visit in his home, and since the house was small, she shared his bed on the first night of her visit.

During the night, the boy was awakened by a loud male voice. He couldn't understand what the voice was saying, but it sounded angry and was addressing the grandmother lying beside him.

The next morning, he asked his grandmother, "What was that voice in the bedroom last night?"

His grandmother, with tears in her eyes, pulled him tightly to her and said, "That was the devil." She said nothing more about the episode, but she did insist that her son take her back to her own home immediately. It was an unreasonable request, and her son tried to talk her out of it. But the grandmother was adamant, and finally her son agreed to take her home the following day.

The entire family made the trip of over a hundred miles back to the grandmother's farm, and within an hour of their arrival, the grandmother suffered a massive stroke and died. Ever since that event, the man had felt a heavy burden of guilt associated with his grandmother's death. Yet there was no conscious reason for him to have felt that way. The entire event was poignant and mystifying, but in all the alien encounters he had subsequently undergone, he had felt that the aliens were his friends and were helping him by expanding his psychic abilities.

A regression session was arranged, and in the course of the hypnosis, he was asked to look at that childhood experience. What he recalled was an abduction in which he and his grandmother were taken to a spacecraft in the company of reptilian aliens. He remembered the aliens telling his grandmother that they were interested in learning about her knowledge of medicinal herbs, and they offered to exchange medical information of their own.

They gave the boy and the grandmother a liquid to drink, explaining that it was beneficial and would make the grandmother feel young and attractive again. So both of them drank the liquid, and the man remembered seeing his grandmother indeed looking much younger. That was the extent of his recollection.

Both he and Ms. Bartholic, who was conducting the regression, were puzzled by this, because there was nothing in the episode to account for the guilt he had felt about the grandmother's death. So Ms. Bartholic deepened the man's trance level and asked him to look at it again, with much clearer vision. And what he then recalled was much more disturbing.

The abduction, at first, followed his initial recollection. But when the liquid was drunk, he now remembered a very strong feeling of change in his body. And he saw that the grandmother didn't actually look younger. Instead, she was placed on a table and approached by one of the reptilian aliens who wanted to have intercourse with her. The liquid had acted as an aphrodisiac, yet the grandmother resisted and said that since her husband's death she would not have sex with anyone. The reptilian laughed and disappeared from the room momentarily. When he returned, he was accompanied by a man who looked exactly like the dead husband.

At this point, the grandmother agreed to have sex, but as the act was in progress, she suddenly realized that the image of her dead husband was a cruel illusion. It was actually the reptilian on top of her, and she cried out in great resistance for him to leave her alone. Once he was finished with her, he lifted up the little boy and placed him on top of the grandmother, forcing another sex act upon the both of them.

Then the grandmother was removed from the table and the little boy was victimized himself by the reptilian, forced to have anal and oral sex. The grandmother protested violently, pushing the reptilian away from her grandson and interposing her body between them. "By Jesus," she shouted, "you will not touch this boy!"

That must have been the wrong thing to say, because the reptilian became very angry and threatened her. "You will die for that!" he told her, and the two people were returned to the bedroom from which they'd been taken. The next morning, the grandmother told the little boy that the devil had been there the night before, and that was when she insisted upon being taken home. And, as it turned out, she did die immediately thereafter.

This, then, was the cause of the man's lifelong sense of guilt about her death. He had been forced to have sex with her, and her death had followed shortly after. But none of this story would have emerged if Ms. Bartholic had done as most investigators do and stopped the regression after uncovering the story about the exchange of medicinal knowledge.

There are other cases in our files that show a similar deception at work in the initial hypnotic recall. We cannot trust that first memory, it is clear, for like so much else in the abduction experience, there may well be further maskings of events.

Before we allow ourselves to believe in the benevolence of the alien interaction, we should ask, do enlightened beings need to use the cover of night to perform good deeds? Do they need to paralyze us and render us helpless to resist? Do "angels" need to steal our fetuses? Do they need to manipulate our children's genitals and probe our rectums? Are fear, pain and deception consistent with high spiritual motives?

Reprinted with permission by Elton Turner and Kelt Works, Inc. This article was first published in UFO Universe, Vol. 3 No. 1, Spring 1993. Copyright 1993 1700 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

Karla Kandace Turner, Ph.D. was a highly respected abduction researcher, author, lecturer, and teacher. She received her Bachelor's degree from the University of California in Sacramento, a Master's degree from the University of Nottingham, Nottingham England, and her Ph.D. from the University of North Texas in Denton. She authored three books about the abduction phenomenon: Into The Fringe, Taken, and Masquerade of Angels.

In 1995, Karla contracted a very dangerous form of breast cancer immediately following an abduction experience. She lost her battle with cancer on January 9, 1996 at the age of 48. Karla has been greatly missed by those her knew her and by the many people she helped through her books and research.

The CIA's UFO History

The CIA's UFO History

By Mark Rodeghier
CUFOS Scientific Director
http://www.cufos.org/IUR_article3.html
8-21-1

After the Cold War ended, the culture of secrecy and the operational style of the CIA began to change. Its director appeared on a radio talk show, and it became possible for citizens to pressure the CIA in ways unheard of during that earlier era. Ufology has been a beneficiary of these changes.

In late 1993, inquiries from several UFO researchers led CIA Director R. James Woolsey to order a review of all CIA files on UFOs. This agency-wide search occurred in 1994 and centralized the CIA's UFO files. Taking advantage of this opportunity, government historian Gerald K. Haines reviewed the documents, conducted interviews, and wrote a study examining the CIA's interest and involvement in UFO investigation and government UFO policy from 1947 until 1990.

Haines's study was published in Studies in Intelligence, a classified journal published quarterly for the intelligence community. The article, "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947­90," appeared in the first semiannual unclassified edition for 1997, on pages 67­84. It can be found at http://www.odci.gov/csi/studies/97unclas/ufo. html.

This is a rather important document because it is the first time that a government agency has written a review of its involvement with UFOs. Although the study had been available at least since June when I downloaded it from the CIA Web site, it did not receive widespread publicity until early August. But when the press learned about the Haines study, the attention was dramatic. The story was carried in most large newspapers, on the NBC Nightly News, and many other media outlets. A typical headline from the Chicago Sun-Times reads, "CIA feared UFO hysteria." Several columnists used the CIA history as an opportunity to bash the CIA and secrecy in government, as exemplified by the column by David Wise (author of The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power) in the New York Times "Big Lies and Little Green Men."

The media generally focused on two aspects of the Haines article. In a brief section entitled "CIA's U­2 and OXCART as UFOs," Haines claims that many UFO sightings in the late 1950s and 1960s were actually misidentified secret American spy planes. Moreover, he alleges that the Air Force's Project Blue Book was in on this cover-up, purposely misled the public, and falsified (Haines didn't use that word but that is plainly what the Air Force would be doing) UFO explanations. This is important news if true, and the media rightly played up this angle.

Note that the CIA is not accused of deception by Haines; rather, it is the Air Force that willingly concocted the bogus explanations. Reporters asked the Air Force for comment, and on August 4, Brigadier General Ronald Sconyers told the press, "I cannot confirm or deny that we lied. The Air Force is committed to providing accurate and timely information within the confines of national security."

General Sconyers sounds a bit like a weasel-worded politician, and his statement hardly serves to reduce the controversy.he second topic seized upon by the press and played up as news was the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel from 1953. Yes, that is correct, the Robertson Panel, whose report has been well-known to anyone interested in UFOs for over 30 years now. That the press could consider the recommendations of the panel to be news at this late date speaks volumes for the intelligence, reporting skills, and historical knowledge of the Fifth Estate. (The Washington Post, in full damage-control mode, said in an editorial that the study was "not an exposé full of new revelations," but the paper had already published an article claiming the opposite.)

Press coverage focused on the panel's recommendations that UFO reports be debunked (a policy Blue Book followed assiduously after 1953), that UFO groups be watched, and that there was a danger the Soviets might use UFOs to clog the channels of communication and then launch a nuclear attack. The deception about our spy planes was just a small part of this strategy.

Although the press was only late by about 40 years, their coverage of this aspect of the report is a positive note for ufology. What is clear from the tone of most articles is that the CIA's (and Air Force's) lies about UFOs are just further examples of all the many lies the American public had been told during the Cold War. And for once, ufologists are being viewed in a sympathetic light by the media as direct victims of government deception.

Coming on the heels of the Air Force's second report on Roswell, the tide has begun to turn against the government in the UFO debate. More and more, it is becoming apparent the government has lied about UFOs for years, and that it still may be lying today. Although the press gave so much coverage to the Haines article, it missed part of the story, failed to do any independent investigation, and generally swallowed the report as written. As Paul Harvey says, now for the rest of the story.

The CIA's excessive secrecy

The report by Haines is remarkably brief, given the CIA's complex UFO involvement. In its Internet version the full article is 21 pages in length, with eight pages of that for footnotes (with several interesting tidbits buried there). Whole swaths of history, such as the early 1970s, are compressed into a few paragraphs or sentences. Certainly a more complete study could be done, and perhaps the classified version is a bit longer.

Nevertheless, to this credit, Haines several times makes it clear that the CIA bungled the handling of UFOs because of its policies of excessive secrecy, in effect fueling the idea of a massive UFO cover-up (for which, not surprisingly, Haines finds no evidence). For example, in 1957 Leon Davidson, a UFO investigator who worked at getting the Robrtson Panel report released and was a believer in a government cover­up, was working on a UFO case involving a strange tape recording made by the Maier sisters of Chicago. This tape had actually been analyzed by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and found to be "nothing more than Morse code from a US radio station."

When Davidson wrote to Dewelt Walker, the CIA officer who had contacted the Maier sisters, Walker obfuscated and refused to provide a straight answer about his role. When Davidson persisted, the CIA had the Air Force contact Davidson saying that Walker "was and is an Air Force Officer." Then to further screw things up, the CIA had one of its officers dress in an Air Force uniform and contact Davidson, claiming to speak on behalf of the Air Force. One cannot blame Davidson for believing there was a cover-up because, obviously, there was. As Haines writes, "Thus, a minor, rather bizarre incident, handled poorly by both the CIA and the Air Force, turned into a major flap that added fuel to the growing mystery surrounding UFOs and CIA's role in their investigation."

In another incident, officers from the Contact Division (CD) of the CIA obtained a UFO photograph from Ralph Mayher in November 1957. After the photos were returned (with no comment or analysis for Mayher), he contacted the CD for the CIA's evaluation because he wanted to mention it on a television program on which he was going to appear. The CIA declined.

Major Donald Keyhoe, head of NICAP, heard about these events and contacted the CIA to confirm the story. But the CIA refused, referring the matter to the Air Force, even though, as Haines writes, "CD field representatives were normally overt and carried credentials identifying their Agency association." No wonder, again, that ufologists would conclude the government was lying about its UFO activities.

Monitoring of UFO investigators

Although the CIA clearly lied to Davidson and Keyhoe, the actual UFO events at the heart of each story were mundane and not of particular importance. More sinister is the suggestion that the CIA (or FBI at the CIA's direction) has monitored UFO groups and investigators. Haines has no direct evidence for this, but it is unclear where such records would be kept or whether they would even be at the CIA (rather than the FBI). Certainly, the FBI has files on various ufologists, including Richard Hall, head of the Fund for UFO Research and long-time staffer at NICAP.

A complete history of the CIA's involvement in UFOs should have discussed this critical issue in depth; after all, the Robertson Panel recommended that UFO groups be monitored for subversive activities. That Haines did not fully discuss this subject can probably be attributed to his ignorance of UFO history, to the lack of documentation about this subject in CIA records, and perhaps, to the scope of his article which is more concerned with the investigation of UFOs rather than the investigation of ufologists.

The one bit of evidence Haines does include involves Leon Davidson again. In 1958, worried about future inquiries about government UFO investigation, the CIA met with the Air Force to discuss what to do with such requests. CIA officer Frank Chapin "hinted that Davidson might have ulterior motives" and he suggested having the FBI investigate Davidson. Haines says the record is unclear as to whether the FBI ever acted on this suggestion, but it is not clear how deeply Haines investigated this possibility

Although the evidence is circumstantial, there are other hints that the government was monitoring UFO groups long before these discussions. In their book UFOs Over the Americas, Jim and Coral Lorenzen detail several rather bizarre incidents of what would seem to be rather clumsy attempts to learn the Lorenzens' motives for their UFO investigations and the work of APRO, the organization they founded. These occurred in several states over at least a dozen years, and the Lorenzens sound more amused by the experience than upset.

In point of fact, just about any ufologist would have been pleased to have the Air Force or CIA approach them and ask for advice about UFO investigations or what types of cases the investigator was receiving. The problem faced by these agencies, as Haines outlines, is that an excessive policy of secrecy kept them from openly contacting UFO investigators who most likely would have cooperated with government requests for information. As evidence, in early 1965 CIA agents finally did meet openly with Richard Hall at NICAP offices, who glady gave them copies of UFO reports for the CIA's own review of the UFO situation.

The Robertson Panel

There is no more pivotal event in the CIA's involvement with UFOs, perhaps in the U.S. government's interest in UFOs, than the Robertson Panel of January 1953. Haines devotes just over a page to this critical study, which provides him no room for nuance or much more than a bare reciting of the facts.

In his review of CIA documents he demonstrates the very high-level CIA interest in UFOs engendered by the UFO flap in the summer of 1952 and, especially, the sightings over Washington, D.C. A special study group was formed within OSI to review the UFO situation. Director Walter Bedell Smith "wanted to know whether or not the Air Force investigation of flying saucers was sufficiently objective," and he wondered "what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts."

Memos and meetings were frequent in late 1952 as the CIA considered what should be done about the UFO problem. Haines's research shows that the Robertson Panel's concerns about the clogging of communication channels and the use of UFOs to disrupt U.S. air defenses were taken straight from CIA concerns expressed in internal memos during the summer of 1952. In other words, the Robertson Panel, despite the eminence of the scientists involved, appears to have been carefully orchestrated by the CIA to come to the conclusions it did, which included debunking UFOs with the help of the Air Force Project Blue Book. Haines does not comment on this element of the CIA's role in determining government policy.

Spy planes and UFOs

I turn now to the issue that so dominated press coverage of Haines's article, the claim that many UFO reports were caused by secret aircraft flights. Given the nature of many UFO reports of objects seen at close range low to the ground, ufologists have uniformly found this claim preposterous. I have over the years personally reviewed the majority of Blue Book reports and know that that they were not caused by misidentifications of spy planes. But because this is such an important claim, here is the full discussion of this issue by Haines.

In November 1954, CIA had entered into the world of high technology with its U-2 overhead reconnaissance project. Working with Lockheed's Advanced Development facility in Burbank, California, known as the Skunk Works, and Kelly Johnson, an eminent aeronautical engineer, the Agency by August 1955 was testing a high-altitude experimental aircraft-the U-2. It could fly at 60,000 feet; in the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew between 10,000 feet and 20,000 feet. Consequently, once the U-2 started test flights, commercial pilots and air traffic controllers began reporting a large increase in UFO sightings.

The early U-2s were silver (they were later painted black) and reflected the rays from the sun, especially at sunrise and sunset. They often appeared as fiery objects to observers below. Air Force BLUE BOOK investigators aware of the secret U-2 flights tried to explain away such sightings by linking them to natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions. By checking with the Agency's U-2 Project Staff in Washington, BLUE BOOK investigators were able to attribute many UFO sightings to U-2 flights. They were careful, however, not to reveal the true cause of the sighting to the public.

According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U­2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project. While perhaps justified, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the cover-up controversy of the 1970s. The percentage of what the Air Force considered unexplained UFO sightings fell to 5.9 percent in 1955 and to 4 percent in 1956.

What exactly is the evidence for the claim that "over half of all UFO reports . . . were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights"? In one footnote, Haines mentions the monograph The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954­1974, by Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach (1992). A colleague at CUFOS tried to obtain a copy of this reference, which was published by the CIA History Staff, but has been told the monograph is classified. That makes it impossible to verify its accuracy. In a second footnote, Haines mentions a telephone interview with a John Parongosky, who "oversaw the day-to-day affairs of the OXCART program." I would like to call Mr. Parongosky myself, but have been unable to find any listing or address for him. In any case, there is a very straightforward step which could verify this claim about spy planes, one I am surprised was not taken by at least one reporter. If the Air Force was lying about the cause of UFO sightings to protect the secrecy of our spy planes, then obviously the heads of Blue Book would hve been central to the deception. Yet no one seems to have contacted any of these officers, most of whom are still living, for a comment.

I had previously spoken to Lt. Col. (Ret.) Robert Friend, head of Blue Book from about 1958 to early 1963, on a matter of UFO history, so I called him again recently to discuss this subject. Friend had not heard about the CIA report (he doesn't watch much television and doesn't follow UFO news closely these days), but he was very interested to learn about its existence. He asked me for a copy plus any news stories I had on the report.

I read to him the discussion by Haines reproduced above and then asked for his comment. Almost the first words he said were that it is "absolutely not true" that he or his Blue Book team were covering up spy flights as alleged by Haines. He found the whole idea laughable, and he knew Blue Book did not receive more reports from pilots and air traffic controllers after the U-2 began flying.

I asked him if he had ever concealed classified activities that were reported as UFOs. Friend indicated that, indeed, this had occurred on a few occasions, but it was not a regular occurrence. I inquired as to whether he had regular contact with the CIA at Blue Book. He said that he did because the CIA overlooked no potential source of information and wanted to keep tabs on all government intelligence activities. In addition, the Air Force had utilized the services of the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the CIA's photo analysis office, to analyze UFO photos. However, in none of his contacts with the CIA or U-2 project staff was Friend ever told to conceal sightings of the U-2 by the CIA.

To be absolutely sure before I ended the conversation, I asked Friend whether the project had ever received a sighting which he recognized as caused by a U-2 (or other secret aircraft). He said, to his recollection, no. Once again, he chuckled about the idea of half of all UFO reports being caused by manned reconnaissance flights. I then read him the statement by Sconyers quoted earlier, in which the general cannot "confirm or deny that we lied." This brought a guffaw from Friend, who wondered why Sconyers, or anyone currently in the Pentagon, should know what happened 30 years ago. We both marveled at how the press and the military (and Haines) had failed to contact the obvious central figures in this alleged cover-up.

In summary, then, the claim that motivated the press coverage of Haines's report is inaccurate and is not evidence for a CIA and Air Force cover-up of UFO sightings and lies to the American public. Yet the CIA and Air Force did knowingly debunk UFO sightings, and Blue Book personnel often came up with any old explanation so that the yearly summary sheets would have only a small percentage of unidentified sightings. So I'm not too unhappy that the CIA and Air Force were taken to task for something they didn't do, but it is important to set the record straight.

Forcing disclosure of CIA records

Beginning in the mid-1970s, UFO researchers began using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to request government, including CIA, documents on UFOs. Once again, the CIA mishandled the requests. After William Spaulding, head of Ground Saucer Watch, wrote in 1975 requesting UFO records, the CIA Information and Privacy Coordinator Gene Wilson wrote to Spaulding that the Robertson Panel was "the summation of the Agency interest and involvement in UFOs." As Haines states, "Wilson was ill-informed."

Not believing Wilson's statements, ufologists sued the CIA for records and won the release of about 800 pages in December of 1978. Since the CIA had, unwisely, been denying its inolvement in UFO matters, the media was surprised to learn how many documents were held by the agency. The New York Times claimed as a result that the CIA was probably secretly involved in the study of UFOs.

CIA Director Stansfield Turner was so upset by this that he asked his senior officers "Are we in UFOs?" He received a negative answer from his deputy and so moved to quash a new lawsuit asking for the withheld documents from the first release.Notwithstanding the reply Turner got, Haines found that the CIA continued a few activities during the 1980s. As he writes:

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Agency continued its low-key interest in UFOs and UFO sightings. While most scientists now dismissed flying saucers [sic] reports as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s, some in the Agency and in the Intelligence Community shifted their interest to studying parapsychology and psychic phenomena associated with UFO sightings. CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects. Agency analysts from the Life Science Division of OSI and OSWR officially devoted a small amount of their time to issues relating to UFOs. These included counterintelligence concerns that the Soviets and the KGB were using US citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive US weapons development programs (such as the Stealth aircraft), the vulnerability of the US air-defense network to penetration by foreign missiles mimicking UFOs, and evidence of Soviet advanced technology associated with UFO sightings.

If I hadn't checked the calendar after reading this, I would have sworn this was 1952 and I was reading of CIA concerns about how UFOs could be used by the Soviets against the United States, as eventually expressed in the recommendations of the Roberson Panel report. Some things never change, at least during the Cold War. Haines notes that during this period, "Agency officials purposely kept files on UFOs to a minimum to avoid creating records that might mislead the public if released," and Haines says he found almost no documentation on CIA involvement with UFOs in the 1980s. This certainly is an effective method to circumvent FOIA, but it hardly leads to further confidence in the CIA.

Finally, in an intriguing footnote, Haines says that the "CIA reportedly is also a member of an Incident Response Team to investigate UFO landings, if one should occur. This team has never met." Say what? He offers no evidence for this statement, which, if true, belies the notion that the government completely ignores UFO reports.

In the end, Haines's article is not as revealing as press reports indicated, but it does open a window on CIA activities that have long been closed to the public. Perhaps its chief contribution will be the documents referenced in the footnotes which can now be specifically requested through FOIA by an enterprising UFO historian. His historical analysis is unremittingly pedestrian, but he does admit that CIA errors of commission and omission contributed directly to the notion of a UFO cover-up, and he demonstrates that there was indeed a cover-up, though not of spy planes, of a UFO crash near Roswell, norother events of similar import.

Another effect of Haines's article is a gradual shifting of media opinion toward granting greater credibility to the statements of UFO groups and investigators and a concomitant greater distrust in government claims about its UFO activities. This is all to the good and here the old phrase "better late than never" surely applies. Those wishing to acquire the full text of the article may download a copy from the CIA's Web site at http://www.odci.gov/csi/studies/97unclas/ufo.html (This site has since been removed from the CIA website.). Hard copies can be obtained from the Photoduplication Service, National Technical Information Service, 5285 Port Royal Road, Springfield, VA 22161. To expedite service, call the NTIS Order Desk at (703) 487-4650.

AntiGravity - Holy Grail of the 21st Century

British Aerospace, NASA and independent researchers worldwide are on a quest to understand the mysteries of hyperdimensional physics and unlock the secrets of antigravity.

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 10, Number 6 (October-November 2003)
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

by Bruce A. Smith © 2003
PO Box 1676
Yelm, Washington 98597, USA
Email: bruceasmith49@yahoo.com
Website: http://www.geocities.com/bruceasmith49/

A Primer on the Role of Electromagnetic, Electrostatic and Torsion Fields in Antigravity and Field-Effect Propulsion

While singing in the shower before visiting a University of Washington physics professor to talk about electrostatic propulsion and hopefully anti-gravity, I realised: Hey, birds defy gravity. So do 747s, for that matter. They apply the laws of physics and lift off the ground. That's antigravity, isn't it? Yes, that's true, I suppose in a metaphorical sense. Seagulls, jumbo jets and spacecraft all manifest antigravitic effects, strictly speaking, but the kind of phenomenon I want to address here is not the overcoming of gravity but, instead, the neutralising of it.


Dr Eugene Podkletnov and the Hunt for Antigravity

Dr Eugene Podkletnov, one of the foremost researchers in antigravity and whose work is sought by NASA, Boeing and British Aerospace (now known as BAE Systems), describes the hunt for antigravity as the greatest scientific quest of this century. He calls for an international effort, akin to the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, to conquer the secrets of antigravity and usher in a new era of scientific understanding whose technological development will be at a scale so vast that the potential outcomes are merely hinted at by our previous achievements. Just getting such a project off the ground will require unprecedented international cooperation, and public disclosure as well--the potentials are that vast, that scary, and that dangerous.

Dr Dan Marckus, noted British avionics expert, states in The Hunt for Zero Point--the seminal work to date on antigravity, written by Jane's Defence Weekly aviation editor Nick Cook--that the secrets of antigravity in the wrong hands will make thermonuclear weapons look like firecrackers.

The secrecy surrounding antigravity research is phenomenal. Boeing refuses to acknowledge publicly any activity in antigravity development despite the fact that its competitor and sometime subcontractor British Aerospace (BAE Systems) does--and has provided funds for four university research efforts as part of its Project Greenglow, one of which was a Podkletnov replication experiment headed by Dr Clive Woods at the University of Sheffield. Further, Nick Cook publicly, and privately to me in an email, states quite directly that George Muellner, former director of Boeing's ultra-secret Phantom Works, claims Boeing sought the services of Dr Podkletnov to unlock the secrets of his gravity-shielding research. Cook says that Muellner states Boeing was denied Podkletnov's services due to the objections of Russian officialdom--which the Russian-born Podkletnov must pay attention to, apparently, despite the fact that he works in Tampere, Finland. Dr Podkletnov, wisely perhaps, chooses not to clarify these particulars despite our several emails.

Perhaps Boeing can deny any activity on antigravity because NASA is doing its own research, and as a prime contractor to NASA, such as by running the Space Shuttle Program, Boeing probably knows what NASA knows. NASA spent US$600,000 recently in its Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) program to purchase Podkletnov replication equipment. Inexplicably, that equipment sits in boxes in NASA's Marshall Research Center in Huntsville, Alabama, awaiting more funding, according to an email I received from NASA propulsion researcher Ron Koczor.

But enough of the cloak-and-dagger business. What do we know about antigravity?

The search for that answer has taken me to some exciting and obscure places in this world, like the Aeronautics and Astrophysics lab at the Seattle campus of the University of Washington. I called those folks because Nick Cook, in The Hunt for Zero Point, mentions that UW received a NASA contract to study theories of inertia as part of its BPP program. That's a good place to start, I thought, but it took backtracking to BPP Project Director Marc Millis at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland to find Dr John Cramer at the UW Physics Department. His mission was to confirm with Dr James Woodward the latter's 1996 preliminary research into the loss of gravitational mass in a targeted piece of metal from oscillating capacitors. Although Woodward's initial data appeared encouraging, NASA's Millis told me that their funding dried up before they'd completed their research.

Furthermore, the entire BPP became unfunded in 2002, and now, in 2003, has become a hazy, privatised version of its former NASA subset self.


Electromagnetic Containment of a Plasma Field

However, the University of Washington is continuing related research, such as into magnetically confined fusion energy generators--and by using electromagnetism to contain an inner field, this, in my view, makes it a close cousin of antigravity and field-effect propulsion.

I spoke with Professor Uri Shumlak who told me that he and other UW staff from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, along with a bevy of their grad students, are building a prototype of a fusion generator called an HIT, which stands for Helicity Injected Torus. Doughnut-ring shaped, the torus encloses a roundish chamber. Within that chamber a vacuum is first created, and then a volume of hydrogen gas is introduced and heated to a few million degrees Celsius, which separates the electrons and protons from their atoms, turning the whole stew into a quasi-neutral foam of plasma. Then the torus envelops the plasma with a magnetic field to keep it away from the sides of the chamber, enabling the plasma mass to stay hot and keeping the rest of Seattle cool. (While I was standing next to his little eight-foot-long gizmo, Prof. Shumlak assured me there was no danger of a couple of million degrees of heat escaping. The heat density of the plasma was "too low" for me to, well, break a sweat over. His quote was, "There's no more heat mass inside that chamber than what's contained in a cup of coffee." I sure hope you're right, Doc.) Then, once the plasma field is contained, the magnetic field squeezes the plasma, fusing the nuclei of one hydrogen atom into another. As the hydrogen couples combine, a helium atom is created and a neutron is released, along with lots of energy in the form of heat.

One day, such a generator will give us unlimited amounts of electricity, as the heat can be transferred to other mediums to produce voltage. The UW predicts lots of electrical power on the cheap, and the Department of Energy agrees--once the details of building reliable magnetic field generators are solved.

What does magnetic fusion have to do with antigravity? Two things: firstly, magnets. Electromagnetism seems to be one of the major players in antigravity, particularly the use of electromagnetic fields to contain other fields, such as plasma fields in the HIT or torsion fields in antigravity devices--but more about that later. Secondly, the HIT works--or is about to work. It's real, and mainstream science embraces it; while antigravity is, well, a little more "out there" and reliable data harder to obtain. So the technology of HIT lays a base that other research can build upon, such as not only containing other fields but also building field-effect propulsion systems, the most elementary of which is electrostatic propulsion--and aspects of this are already being applied by NASA.


Electrostatic Propulsion Systems

Electrostatic propulsion uses electrical fields differently than electromagnetism does. In EM a current flows and creates a field, while in electrostatic systems the current is static and a charge builds up in a field, such as in a capacitor or a fuel tank.

These theories are utilised on NASA's Deep Space I, a probe bound for the outer reaches of our solar system. On board the probe, the propellant--a tankful of xenon gas--is excited electrostatically into positive ions. The containment vessel of the engine has a negative charge at the exit end, so the charged xenon rushes out the tail pipe with a greater thrust than if it was just using conventional chemical propellants. In fact, the electrostatic propulsion system on Deep Space I allows it to fly at 60,000 mph, or 10,000 mph faster than it would with a conventional rocket. In addition, only 82 kg of xenon is needed for its entire mission, so with its smaller mass and weight the probe will fly alongside its intended target, a comet, and drag-race on equal footing while filming and conducting studies. Again, not antigravity per se, but electrically charging Deep Space I's fuel field sets the stage for a closer look at electrostatic propulsion.

Taking that closer look is Tim Ventura and his fellow researchers at American Antigravity, an organisation based in Kirkland, Washington. Ventura and his crew use electrostatic asymmetrical capacitors to create a field that levitates objects, such as their small, kite-like "lifters". These lifters are very light, weighing only a few ounces, and have balsawood struts that support the capacitors. When two capacitors of different size and load receive their share of a 30,000-volt charge, the lifter lifts--with no motors, no wings and no apparent source of lift. How, no one really knows, in my judgement. The phenomenon is replete with controversy and mystery. But as one who has seen a lifter fly, let me tell you what one looks like and what I saw when Tim Ventura's took off.

Tim has been building lifters since he was a kid and has perfected a 4 x 4 x 4-foot triangular lifter which has flown so many missions in his garage that the silver aluminium foil has turned white. The thin, chopstick-like balsawood ribs that hold the aluminium foil in place are joined every few inches by a vertical strut (much like a telephone pole on an HO model railroad set) which sticks up and secures the copper or stainless steel wire of the upper capacitor. The ribs are intersected every 10 inches or so by the strut of an interior triangle, since the whole lifter is composed of interconnected isosceles triangles which give the necessary strength to the balsawood frame. All told, there is about 30 linear feet of aluminum foil and a similar run of wire.

The lower and larger capacitor is a strip of aluminium foil stretched between the horizontal balsawood struts. The second capacitor is a thin strip of 50-gauge wire mounted about one inch above the aluminium foil. As capacitors, they store electrical charge but don't pass it on in a current.

The negative lead goes to the lower aluminium foil, and the positive lead is attached to the upper wire. The three corners of the lifter are tethered to the work table so that the electrical leads from the power source are not broken off in flight.

The power source kicks out 15,000 volts at 250 watts. Tim uses a voltage generator made by Information Unlimited, Inc., but, before the current reaches the capacitors, the voltage is stepped up to 30,000 volts by Tim's home-made voltage multiplier stack. At full throttle, the lifter is straining at the tethers, bending the balsawood frame near the point of fracture.

The capacitors of the lifters are controversial, for asymmetrical capacitors are not supposed to hold charges of two different volumes. Yet the lifters fly and the question of how is a mystery that gets stacked on top of the controversy. But here is what happens.

Throw the switch, and at around 17,500 volts the lifter begins to quiver in take-off. At full power of 30,000 volts, the lifter is roaring and a noticeable downward breeze is observed. Many physicists call it "ion wind" and say that this is what causes the lifters to fly. But what exactly is ion wind, and can it be the cause of flight?

According to Ventura, "Ion wind is the movement of ionised air particles which flow downward according to electrical charge". Here's his theory. The positively charged wire on the top part of the lifter steals electrons from the surrounding air, leaving the affected air molecules positively charged. These positively charged air molecules, or ions, then head downward toward the large source of negatively charged electrons generated by the aluminium foil. These air molecule ions are bigger and heavier than the electrons seeking them, so there is a net thrust downward, pushing the whole lifter up.

That's the theory--and, frankly, all I can do to verify it is to tell you what others tell me. Before I do that, though, let me tell you what I experienced while standing next to a levitating lifter. In flight, the lifter emits a high whining, hissing buzz, and I could feel a good breeze coming up at me from the work table underneath the lifter. Also, while standing next to the lifter but not touching it, the hair on the back of my head started to rise up in electrostatic-like fashion.

To analyse the air currents, Tim blew baby powder at the top of the lifter. The majority of the particulate cloud was drawn into the middle area of the lifter and then sucked downward. A kind of vortex was created at times, for intermittently I could see a cloud forming into an organised column beneath the lifter and then spreading out 360 degrees once it hit the work table surface.

Is that ion wind? Well, there certainly was a breeze, and it sure felt like air, but how would I know if it was ionic? Something definitely sucked the baby powder down, but was it more than just regular air blowing past me? Again, I don't know.

Is the movement of wind why lifters fly, regardless of whether the air is ionised or not, or is the wind just a by-product and not the propulsion? Could the capacitors be creating a field that neutralises gravity, allowing the craft to levitate? Or are they creating some kind of new field that is localised, the surrounding ambient field pushing this "field bubble" up--much like a helium balloon is pushed up by the surrounding heavier air trying to fill the emptier "field" of the lighter helium?

Ventura thinks at least two phenomena are at work. Ion wind is definitely one, he feels, for the breeze is self-evident. However, he thinks a second effect is at work, too, and many agree with him. Most speculation concerns what is called the Biefeld-Brown effect, the "Brown" being T. Townsend Brown, whose name is well known in early quantum research and whose work is prominently discussed in Nick Cook's The Hunt for Zero Point.

The Biefeld-Brown effect, according to Ventura, is the theory that low-efficiency, high-voltage, air-gapped capacitors with different or asymmetrical capacities generate a net directional force upward from the larger element to the smaller element, which on the lifter is from the aluminium foil to the wire. This force then pushes against the ambient energy field of the surrounding area, perhaps pushing against a more rigid energy field of the zero point energy field.

Brown apparently made his case for these electromagnetic effects, receiving patents in the 1960s for his research. NASA's Dr Jonathan Campbell at Marshall Research Center in Huntsville, Alabama, confirmed to me that recently he also has received a patent for his research into the thrust effects of asymmetrical capacitors.

However, prominent physicist Hal Puthoff--whose research cuts a broad swath across the fields of the "new physics", as featured in Lynne McTaggart's The Field and Nick Cook's The Hunt for Zero Point, and who was also the military's "top psychic" as the director for 12 years of the CIA's remote-viewing squadron--has a different perspective: "I'm quite certain at this point that the so-called 'lifter' phenomenon is just an electrostatic ion wind phenomenon, not 'antigravity'."

But Dr John J. Rusek, Adjunct Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at both Purdue University and the United States Air Force Academy, says that "Initial findings of 'classroom' experiments with lifters show ionic wind to be way too small a factor, by three orders of magnitude". Dr Rusek has formed a technology company, Swift Enterprises, to continue this research and bring it to the level that is "presentable to the mainstream physics community".

Along these lines, Jean-Louis Naudin shows on his extensive website not only how to build a lifter but also several photos of research into the ion wind issue. Naudin's team has wrapped test lifters in plastic, yet they still produce antigravitational effects.


Dr Fran De Aquino's Space-time Bubbles

Others may have a clue to the second or even a third force at work. Researcher Fran De Aquino, professor of physics at Maranhão State University in São Luís, Brazil, has described in the literature that "bubbles of localised space-time" can exist in variance to the surrounding fields.

Anecdotal experience suggests that the lifters may be undergoing such space-time anomalies.

Tim Ventura has a heavy cast-iron bench vise on his work table. Intermittently, he gets zapped by a charge when he touches the vise. But his experience is seemingly out of time, because he gets zapped before he turns on the machine. He also gets zapped occasionally during a lift-off, and can be jolted again days after turning off his lifter.

Further, he finds anomalous magnetic events in his garage. Firstly, the lifter does not fly straight up. It goes back to the rear wall of his garage and is stopped and held in place by the sheet-rock. What could be in the wall that attracts it? What could be there that is not present elsewhere in the garage?

Why not be attracted to a freelance journalist standing adjacent? Secondly, Ventura finds he has intermittent and inexplicable magnetic fields up to 14 feet away from his lifter, and these fields linger for up to 15 minutes after he switches off the machine. Could all of these effects be part of a larger, more esoteric phenomenon?

Dr De Aquino stated the following in an email to me: "If a particle absorbs or emits electromagnetic energy (for example, photons), its gravitational mass (not inertial mass) is changed. The gravity, as we know, is proportional to the gravitational mass; consequently, gravity is also altered." Could the lifter be levitating because it weighs less, bathing in the glow of 30,000 volts and some kind of anomalous magnetic field? Further, could it be levitating because gravitons are blocked in some kind of gravity-shielding manner? Ventura believes this is possible; so do some at NASA.

The Hunt for Zero Point states that NASA sought the services of Dr Eugene Podkletnov. However, while NASA's replication research languishes, the book claims that researcher Ning Li, of Huntsville, Alabama, is pursuing this line of research as a private contractor to NASA.

Another Huntsville operation, Transdimensional Technologies, is exploring these multi-faceted phenomena, and its extensive website shows it to be a frequent contractor to NASA, conducting research into "asymmetrical capacitive propulsion" and capacitor-based devices to test "ion wind" forces. Jeff Cameron, of Transdimensional, is said by Ventura to be "the father of the lifter", having developed the device while exploring anomalous torsional effects of high-energy lasers. The lasers twisted and broke the metal frames of unrelated test material, and at the time this was considered a nuisance. But the unknown forces at work later led Cameron to found Transdimensional, develop lifter technology to a commercial level and subsequently patent many pieces of related technology. Unfortunately, I have been unable to reach Jeff Cameron or anyone at Transdimensional for any kind of confirmation.


Vacuum Energy and Torsion Fields

Nevertheless, how would gravitons be blocked or gravity shielded? Dr Hal Puthoff says there are two ways of looking at it. Firstly, one can look at the issue from a quantum point of view: that there is a particle exchange between the gravitons and something else, and the net effect is antigravity. The hows and whys of that are speculative, so Puthoff turns to a classical approach for answers. He prefers the notion of "engineering the vacuum". To do that, one must first consider what the vacuum is.

As I understand it, we are all in the vacuum; everything is. The "vacuum" is the matrix that contains all matter and all energy. It is the engineering perspective of the zero point energy field, or "the field"--as popularised by Lynne McTaggart in her masterpiece, The Field:

Dr Puthoff shared with me statements from fellow researcher Dr T. D. Lee: "The vacuum is the seat of energetic particle and field fluctuations, and.is the seat of space-time structure.that encodes the distribution of matter and energy. The vacuum is energetic in its own right."

Thus energy can be drawn from the field, and spacecraft can have "vacuum propulsion systems, or propellant-less propulsion"--in other words, field-effect propulsion. Tim Ventura may be flying his lifter by having his capacitors push against the energy field of the vacuum.

At any rate, more and more physicists are thinking that the vacuum can give them a whole lotta oomph--enough to propel spacecraft--and when they learn how to corral it, a whole bevy of new phenomena may be encountered, including antigravity. This new potpourri of research is being called by many the "new physics". And although his approach is classical, Dr Hal Puthoff seems to be sensing what's out there waiting to be discovered.

Dr Puthoff's current research has been to explore ".the perturbation of atomic or molecular ground states, hypothesized to be equilibrium states involving dynamic radiation/absorption exchange with the vacuum fluctuations. In this model, atoms or molecules.are expected to undergo energy shifts that would alter the spectroscopic signatures of excitations involving the ground state."

Puthoff says he's had no success so far with this approach, but his words remind me of De Aquino's speculation that objects lose mass as they absorb energy. Pull energy from the field around you and you lose weight. Bingo.lift-off! But how does one pull energy from the field?

Torsion fields might play a role here, according to many, and the literature on antigravity is filled with the term "torsional effects". But what exactly is a torsion field?

"It has something to do with spin," Nick Cook told me on the phone. "You have a torsion field when you spin something. Add a little electromagnetism and you might have antigravity."

That's the shorthand version of it, and here's a deeper look.

Mike Wright, resident physics expert at BeyondTheOrdinary.Net webstream radio, told me this:
"When forces create curvature (such as rotation) in more than two planes, a torsion field results. Not only does the object go around, but it goes around and 'down' or 'up', and the up/down movement is an additional acceleration in that dimension. EM and gravitational fields differ by having a magnitude of force and only one direction of movement.
"A tornado is a structure of air in air. A whirlpool is a structure of water in water. So, because more than two planes are involved, objects can be created from 'nothing'; that is to say that objects can be created from the medium of the environment, such as a tornado from two air masses of differing temperature."

So, spin plus movement is the key. Again, Tim Ventura is on the hunt. He demonstrated to me that spinning magnets will cancel out their magnetic fields sufficiently so that two magnets facing each other with like poles (positive-to-positive, or negative-to-negative) will not push each other away if one of the magnets is rotating perpendicularly to the force of opposition. It's not antigravity, but it gets us closer to the heart of the matter.

Furthermore, Russian physicists, such as N. A. Kozyrev, have been researching the torsional effects of subatomic particle spin and the loss of gravitational mass in planets from the angular momentum of their orbits.

Spinning makes something happen, but what? Tornadoes and Mother Nature might have a few clues. Tornadoes spin, in a sense, although no one in Oklahoma who has spent a night in a storm shelter during an F5 event would describe the tornadoes in the night sky as "spinning". Nevertheless, tornadoes have anomalous effects that are legendary: blades of grass stuck into mirrors, a piece of straw embedded flawlessly into a tree trunk. How? It seems as if the laws of mass, gravity and inertia are melted as winds swirl at speeds up to 300 mph in an organised vortex pattern. Is this a clue to melting the pull of gravity?

Getting information to answer this question has not been easy. Many scientists, including particle physicists at major US universities, claim not to have even heard of torsion fields. So, again I turn to Nick Cook and The Hunt for Zero Point.

Cook's cloaked source, Dr Dan Marckus, says that if ".you generate a torsion field of sufficient magnitude, the theory says you can bend the four dimensions of space around the generator. The more torsion you generate, the more space you perturb. When you bend space, you also bend time."

Marckus continues: "If you dipped.one of these whirlpools.into the zero point energy field, the seething mass of latent energy that existed on an almost undetectable level all around us [in the field would].react in an almost magical way by directing that energy."

The torsion field, in effect, is "a pump, a 'coupling' device that could dip into and then direct energy out of the zero point energy field".

"But," Marckus continues, "the vortex wasn't a three-dimensional phenomenon or even a four-dimensional one. It couldn't be. For a torsion field to be able to interact with gravity and electromagnetism, it had to be endowed with attributes that went beyond the three dimensions of left, right, up-and-down, and the fourth-dimensional time field they inhabited; something that the theorists for convenience sake labelled a fifth dimension--hyperspace."

Cook concluded from further conversations with Marckus that the torsion field would "bind with gravity.to produce a levitational effect--an antigravity effect", yet "it wasn't doing so in the four dimensions of this world, but somewhere else". That somewhere else is hyperspace.


Entering Hyperdimensional Space

So how do we activate torsion fields and enter hyperspace? Dr Eugene Podkletnov may have a clue.

Podkletnov, the Russian researcher working in Finland, has studied the gravity shielding effects of superconductors. Again, Nick Cook in The Hunt. relays vital information. He says Podkletnov claims that "[i]f the superconductors are rotated considerably faster than 5,000 rpm.perhaps five to 10 times as fast, the disc experiences so much weight loss that it actually takes off". Or 25,000-50,000 revolutions per minute within some kind of torsion field creates levitation.

I emailed Dr Podkletnov to find out more about this issue. He replied:
"[A] fast rotating object can, under certain conditions, cause the polarization of the volume that it occupies in space and around it. This polarization causes the gravitational effect as it modifies [the] local gravity field. The vortex of the polarized particles will create a vertical thrust with a certain force and spatial momentum. Some scientists call these polarized particles gravitons.
"The term graviton is an artificial one and at present we are not sure if it is a wave or a particle and what type of particle. Maybe it is a usual tachyon or a superluminal neutrino [a faster-than-light particle].
"Polarization of the media means that the spins of electrons, protons, neutrons and of small subatomic particles that constitute the fabric of space or vacuum would be parallel. Then a kind of gravity well is formed and the objects tend to fall into this well. We observe this picture as an object rising to the sky.
"Polarization of the media (of space) causes some glow around the object as it acquires additional energy and, because of it, the glow around some objects is observed."

What I understand from Dr Podkletnov is that gravity is the effect of spin--the spin of all subjected particles, from the subatomic level and up, being parallel, thus they are all aligned to fall into the gravity well of Earth. And spinning objects, such as his superconducting discs, when influenced additionally by an electromagnetic field will experience a shift in the spin of the subatomic and atomic elements. They will be turned and not be aligned in parallel. Thus, they are able to levitate.

But how to polarise the media and get things spinning? Enter Dr Marcus Hollingshed, an enigmatic figure allegedly from Cambridge University. Dr Hollingshed claims to have built a six-ringed toroidal coil antigravity device which achieved great effect using rotating magnetic fields. In January 2003, he announced on the Internet that he has developed a 160-kg vehicle able to lift in excess of 2,000 kg and that it has both horizontal and vertical drive features.

His device not only can go up and down and sideways, but it can push things away and pull objects to it, much like a Star Trek™ tractor beam.

In addition, the field that the device purportedly generates is capable of being broadened and weakened, or narrowed and amplified in a lensing effect, with the field producing an absolute vacuum of 2.2 metres in spherical diameter. Best of all, when it's cranked up, the core of it goes invisible, although the term Dr Hollingshed uses is that there is a "loss of reflected light".

There are no reports of independent confirmation, and Nick Cook says he hasn't been invited to see the device, so he's sceptical.

Where does this leave us? Perhaps Dr Podkletnov's words sum up our current situation.

"Modern theoretical physics cannot give you the direct answer to your questions [levitation, torsion fields, etc.], and a scientist who would agree to give you the answer cannot be regarded seriously, softly speaking. If you had asked Dr Einstein if he were an expert on gravity, the answer would be 'No'. I can repeat his words: 'No, I am not a magician, yet; I am still learning.'"

One Nation Under Siege

One Nation Under Siege !!!

Beyond Treason

Beyond Treason - Full Length Video

Worth watching - Warning: NOT for the faint of heart.

Disclosure Project Video

Disclosure Project - 450 governmental witnesses willing to testify under oath, of their first hand knowledge of UFOs/UFO Technology

11:11 Video Clip

This is quite good - people such as myself have been seeing 11:11 for years and years now. If you've seen it to you might enjoy this clip.

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

New 911 Video Released

Hope this comes through ok...

911 World Trade Center Collapse Video ( New Video )

26 min 25 sec - Sep 14, 2006



A video blogger uploaded a 30 minute video of the WTC attacks. It was filmed from their home 500 yards from the north tower. This is the first time this video has been publicly released. The video starts after the first plane hit, then they turn it off. then it starts again as the south tower collapses, it is obscured, but you see the cloud. then it records the north tower collapsing entirely.

8-year-old boy being "punished" under Shia law

Fair warning! This is a shocking series of photos of an 8-year-old boy being "punished" under Shia law for the crime of stealing bread. Whether this was his actual crime, whether this was actually in Iran, whether this is even completely photoshopped (which I doubt) is irrelevant to the point that every single day men and women are absolutely savaged by that Shia Law and its supporting culture, and that is not to mention the poor young girls who are genitally mutilated in such an horrific act.













And this is what they wish to impose on the west. Well I for one certainly can't wait, I'm off for my Burka fitting now - can't wait to be covered all in black, get rid of all my modern applicances and revert back to the stoneage. Umm what a dream come true. Like NOT!

The Disclosure Project

The Disclosure Project have over 400 government, military, nasa, intelligence community witnesses testifying to their own direct, first hand knowledge of UFO's and the cover-up of this information.


Click Here to Visit The Disclosure Project Website

The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret.

A Reply To The Loose Change Video

Saw this posting on the 911blogger.com site - thought it was worth repeating here:

Who realy is the fake the goverment or this site
Iv'e watched the tape just as i have watched tons of coverage on 911, and im not going to be one of these far right people and start saying you people are all just crazy, yet their are so many holes in your movie, such as all these claims of highjackers being alive yet none of them have ever come out and said hey im alive and im not a killer. Also i have a brother who works in the Cleveland Airport and nothing happen like you claimed in the movie, Also if the fire was hot enough to bring down 2 buildings do you not think it could melt these boxes, the person you spoke of that said he has never heard of not being able to find the boxes, my brother told me their have been other crashes were boxes were lost our distoried. You talk about all these drills that took place just weeks before 911, in the world trade center, but if you dig further you would also find out that these drills have been taking place for years. Now the pass port that was found, their was a gas fire here in my town a few years ago the report talked about the flams being so hot that firefighters couldn't even get close enough to the house to put the fire out, yet when it was all done nothing left but ashes a family photo was found almost unharmed, now how is that even possible, i can't say but don't tell me a pass port couldn't last, as far as these so called flashes of lights that were bombs going off to bring the towers down any middle school kid with a small computer could add things to a video, yet your tape is the only copy that shows these so called lights, maybe the people i should be asking about 911 is you not our goverment, If Osama is not the one responsible why hasen't he come out and said (not in some so called written statement) it wasen't me??? Now in closing im not going to say their wasen't any cover up cause I would be lieing to myself, but would you want to come out and tell the country hey sorry for your lost i f-up, no you wouldn't, but if you think the goverment spent all this time and money to do all these bad things and have no care for human life to take out 1000s of people that they would let 3 kids live after all this information was released, you guys are the ones that need to get real!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ps if i were to take a pole on all these 911 crack pipe sites, as too how many of the people visiting these site do drugs ( and they were 100% honest) im guessing it would in the 85-90% range, just food for thought...............later

Conspiracy Theorists say Terrorists Couldn't Have Worn Red

This is a relatively new allegation made by the Conspiracy Theorists. They say that the Terrorists on the Hijacked Planes the day of 911 couldn't have been Muslims as they were wearing Red Head Scarves and wearing red "is against Islamic law" (Ummm really, well someone better tell the Arab world that "fact" as there does seems to be millions of them wearing red and white head scarves!) This "theory" makes it easier for them to tie in other theories, such as there were no Islamic Terrorists on board, the planes where flown by a pre-programmed auto pilot software within the planes themselves, plus the witnesses on the plane making those cell phone calls were all fake so what they said about them wearing "red" wasn't true. Now as you can see for yourself, even Osama Bin Laden even wears red.

Even Bin Laden's former personal bodyguard wears red. Plus you've seen countless images of Bin Laden surrounded by guards and they usually wear the red and white scarves.

Osama bin Laden's former personal bodyguard is certain the Al-Qaeda leader is planning a new attack against the U.S.

A former personal bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden says he is certain the al-Qaeda leader is planning an attack on the U.S. In the first television interview with an al-Qaeda member close to bin Laden since 9/11, Abu Jandal tells Bob Simon first-hand details about the world's most wanted man for a 60 MINUTES report to be broadcast Sunday, April 2 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

Abu Jandal, who was with bin Laden in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000, says bin Laden's last tape on which he threatened consequences to the U.S. is not a threat, but a promise. "When Sheik Osama promises something, he does itÉ.So I believe Osama bin Laden is planning a new attack inside the United States, this is certain," he tells Simon in the interview conducted in Yemen earlier this month.

It's been long speculated that bin Laden is hiding in the tribal areas of Pakistan, but Abu Jandal says Afghanistan is the place. "Not Pakistan. I know the Pakistani tribe along the border very well. Yes, they can be very trustworthy and faithful to their religion and ideology, but they are also capable of selling information for nothing," he says.

Even if found, bin Laden will not be captured, says Abu Jandal, whho says the al-Qaeda leader gave him the authority to kill him if he was surrounded. "If he was going to be captured, Sheik Osama prefers to be killed than captured," he tells Simon. "There was a special gun to be used if Sheik Osama bin Laden was attacked and we were unable to save him, in which case I would have to kill him," says Abu Jandal.

The closest the Americans came to getting bin Laden before 9/11, recounts Abu Jandal, was the U.S. missile attack on al-Qaeda training camps near Khost, Afghanistan -- a retaliatory strike for the al-Qaeda bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. It was luck that saved him the night before the strike. "There was a fork in the road," remembers Abu Jandal, "one road leading to Khost and the training camps and another one leading to Kabul. I was with Sheik Osama in the same vehicle with three guards... he turned to us and said, 'Khost or Kabul?' We told him, 'Let's just visit Kabul.' Sheik Osama said, "Okay, Kabul.'" So the missile strike the next day failed to get bin Laden, but the man they think provided information that led to it was discovered. "It was the Afghan cook," said Abu Jandal. He says he would have killed the man who betrayed bin Laden himself, but bin Laden forgave him and sent him home. "Sheik Osama even gave him money and told him, 'Go provide for your children.'"

Conspiracy Theorists Now Say Government Used Minimum Residual Radiation (MRR) devices

Now the Conspiracy Theorists are saying "The US Government's Usage of Atomic Bombs - Domestic - WTC".

And "why" do they think this? It's their explanation to the growing number of survirors, civilian and Fire Fighters of 911 WTC that are getting sick and now have respiratory problems. They don't take into account that the WTC Towers had a large amount of asbestos and that is why on the day that 911 happend you see alot of people wearing breathing masks.

Of course people are going to get these kinds of aliments when they were so close to this amount of dangerous Asbestos! Not only was there Asbestos in the air but there was also fine fragments of glass and concrete - a very dangerious mix! They even made comment of such effects on the day of 911. They were extremely worried about the public and Rescue Personal breathing in this toxic mix.



It would be almost impossible for some of the people who were close to the Twin Towers collapse and those who worked in the Recovery mission not to have breathed in amounts of Asbestos. Having the conspiracy theorists now come out with this absurd notion that no only did the Government deliberately plant explosives in both of the WTC Towers but they used Minimum Residual Radiation (MRR) devices is one of the more absurd claims that I've heard yet.

When are they (the conspiracy theorists) going to understand that sometimes, just somethings bad things happen just the way they appeared to happen.

Religion : Sometimes It's Just Barking Mad

To be "fair" and balanced I thought I'd post a true story about the Christain religion. I mean I am bashing the Islamic Fundamentals and calling them "Barking Mad" - so to balance it out ;).... here's a piece of factual information you may not of heard before.

One of the most bizarre historical accounts involving the papacy involves an event known as the Cadaver Synod. Stephen, made pope in 896, ordered the exhumation of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, and had him tried for alleged crimes against the church. Formosus had only been dead for about nine months. Stephen dressed Formosus' corpse in papal robes and sat it in a chair. Stephen presided over the trial.

"E.R. Chamberline writes, 'The corpse was provided with a council, who wisely kept silent while Pope Stephen raved and screamed his insults at it. The pretext for the trial was that Formosus, contrary to canon law, had accepted the bishopric of Rome while he was still bishop of another diocese.

"'But few, if any, in the council chamber, were impressed by the charge. The real crime of Formosus was that he had been a member of the opposite faction and had crowned 'emperor' one of the numerous illegitimate descendants of Charlemagne after having performed the same office for the candidate favored by Pope Stephen's party.' (The Bad Popes, 1969, p. 209)

"Formosus was declared guilty. His remains were dragged through the streets of Rome and then thrown in the Tiber. The effect of the Cadever Synod backfired on Stephen. Formosus' supporters, appalled by Stephen's macabre trial, rebelled. He was deposed, imprisoned and strangled to death."

A Large Number 911 Terrorists are Alive and Well (what rubbish)

One of the absurd points that conspiracy theorists say is that "some" of the supposed 911 Terrorists are alive and well (yes probably living with Lord Lucan and Hitler ;). This report first surfaced in an Article published by the BBC who simply "got it wrong", but the conspiracy theorists frothing at the mouth at such a juicy tidbit grabbed onto it and made it part of their folk-lore. These are the kinds of ridiculous claims that the conspiracy people come out with. I can assure you that Mohammad Atta isn't sipping tea in Egypt thinking what a bunch of wankers we are. No.. instead "of course" he is sitting in paradise with his 72 virgins licking from the lakes of honey that surround him and patting himself on the back for being such a wonderful freedom fighter. Of course the Islamic propaganda have now addressed the problem with the 72 virgins, as so many of their followers had asked them "but if have sex with the virgins they won't be virgins anymore and therefore not available to me anymore"... ahhhh not to worry, they've now changed their blerb to include that the virgins "stay virgins" because their "hymens" grow back! Well that solves that problem!

WHOOF - as in totally and utterly barking mad! What a load of cobblers!

New DNA Blood Tests For the Shroud Of Turin

Michael Willesee
Photo by Gary Johnson

You know Mike Willesee well, or you think you do. You saw him change the nature of current affairs television, providing many unforgettable moments along the way. You followed his ups and downs in the business pages, at awards nights and through the gossip columns. But you probably don't know just how profoundly he's changed in the last 10 years, making an extraordinary journey from great sceptic, to that of a man who believes in miracles, a man determined to prove that the blood of Jesus Christ still exists today.

ANDREW DENTON: Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Willesee.

ANDREW DENTON: It's a pleasure to have you here.

MIKE WILLESEE: Thanks, Andrew.

ANDREW DENTON: You've been off our screens for a while, but you've been involved in another passion, a deeper passion. Can we go back to that incident in Africa, I think about eight years ago, which took you back towards God? What happened?

MIKE WILLESEE: It wasn't actually a defining moment but it was pretty extraordinary, nonetheless. I was sitting with cameraman/producer, Greg Low, who I worked a lot with and we were going up into the Sudan. I had this very strong premonition, so strong as I believed it was going to happen, that this plane was going to crash, and I didn't believe in premonitions. I thought, "What do I do about this? What do I say to Greg? He's going to think I've lost it, I've lost my nerve or whatever". So I thought, "Well, that's it, we're going to crash." So I stayed on the plane, but I said a prayer, which was unusual for me. I'd got to the stage of thinking "What's it all about?" But I hadn't done anything about it, but I did say, believing the plane was going to crash, "Okay, Father, I put Greg and myself in your hands." We took off and flew for a little while and the plane fell out of the air. The only thought that occurred to me was, "Yes, I was right." It didn't give me a lot of comfort, but...

ANDREW DENTON: No.

MIKE WILLESEE: We knocked down a couple of hundred trees. We flew over it later that morning, it was quite sensational. And the plane was written off. If ever there was going to be an instant conversion, maybe that should have been it, but it wasn't. I did have the decency to then thank God, and then forgot about him again.

ANDREW DENTON: You said that you'd been thinking a bit about God before that. What had you believed in up to that point?

MIKE WILLESEE: Well, nothing. It's pretty classic, really, of getting caught up with the world. I got caught up in always competing. Every day was competitive for me. There was always a new programme to beat or a new guy to beat or some new challenge, and who needed God?

ANDREW DENTON: When you were a kid, or when you were at school, you actually had flirted with the idea of being a priest, hadn't you? What became of that?

MIKE WILLESEE: Puberty. I started thinking about girls and I realised the two were incompatible.

ANDREW DENTON: You wanted other people in frocks?

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, I sure did.

ANDREW DENTON: Because I want to step through a bit of your career, for people to get some sense of the world you moved in, who you were. We've got some footage here from your Logies Hall of Fame biography, which is you when you first were at the ABC. I think you were only about 20 years old. This is a very young Mike Willesee.

ANDREW DENTON: What kind of man was that young man?

MIKE WILLESEE: Terrified. I'd over-achieved at that stage. I got there pretty quickly and I was quite young. I was about 24, I think, then. I'd been to Vietnam with my old paper, the Perth Daily News, which set me alight as a journalist. I just never knew excitement or adrenaline like it, or the importance of covering and getting things right, of trying to understand what you didn't understand and so on. Then I came back to Canberra and I called my editor in Perth and said, "I'm back," and he said, "So what?" So I looked around and found television. By coincidence, they were starting a programme called 'This Day Tonight', which was brand new and turned out to be very successful. Unknown to me, while I was thinking about television, they'd auditioned some journalists and hadn't found a suitable guy, one who could handle television and knew a bit about politics. I got the job and I was suddenly political correspondent on a national programme and I was 'The Man'. I was like Laurie Oakes, but I was 24 and knew very, very little. So rather than be ambitious and competitive at that time, I was quite terrified.

ANDREW DENTON: We've got some more footage here of you in full flight. Michael Willesee is part of our television furniture, but some may not remember the vast scope of his work when he left the ABC, went to commercial television with 'A Current Affair' and 'Willesee'. This is also from his Logie Hall of Fame induction.

ANDREW DENTON: I don't want you to be modest, this is a genuine professional question: When you were at your best, what made you good?

MIKE WILLESEE: Quite seriously, I think I did more research and preparation than any of the other guys. I mean that Hewson interview, for example, is a classic example, I spent about two days preparing for that and I had a researcher assisting me. He gave me a list of questions and I used to say to him, "Please don't give me questions without reasons." So I went to him and I said, "What's this question about the birthday cake?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "That just makes it hard for me. I don't have a lot of time and you've stuck me with this question and I can't just dismiss it because I've got a feeling that there's a reason for it," and he said, "Well I don't know what it is."

I sat down and thought about it and I thought, "Well what if I was asked the question and I was in his position? Would there be GST on a birthday cake? What is a birthday cake? It's a cake, but then it has artwork on it. That's different. It would be treated differently from a basic foodstuff, so if it's just a basic cake. It has candles. That's something different altogether. It might have cream and chocolate in it, which is a luxury. This is a really good question." But I had to, sort of, work it out. So it wasn't just an off-the-wall question. But, yes, I researched very heavily and I would anticipate the answers and what I would do, if I was in trouble. I don't think I was ever in a position that I couldn't get out of when they came back at you, and a lot of those guys did come back at you. But I don't think I was ever in a position where I couldn't justify the question or come back with a response because the homework was there.

ANDREW DENTON: When you look at commercial current affairs shows today, what's your view on their standard?

MIKE WILLESEE: I really don't want to be a critic, you know? Don't you think we have enough?

ANDREW DENTON: Well you don't have to be a critic. You, of all people, are in a position to comment. You've been there, done that, many times over.

MIKE WILLESEE: To be honest, I don't watch them unless one of the promotions catches my eye and I think, "I want to watch that story," because they've become much more magazine, which is not my sort of journalism. I don't want to be a critic of them, they must know what they're doing. They have the ratings, they know who their audience is and they're meeting that audience, but in a very different way and in a way that doesn't really interest me.

ANDREW DENTON: Do you have any advice for Eddie?

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, his first mistake was Collingwood.

ANDREW DENTON: Spoken like a Swans' man.

MIKE WILLESEE: I think he's in a difficult position because the whole culture at Channel Nine has changed and they've lost one of the great television brains in the world in Kerry Packer. Kerry, while being the smartest, was also smart enough to let Channel Nine run itself, whereas now it seems there's a huge crossover between the Packer Empire and the Nine Network. I haven't seen any reason to believe that Eddie has the control that David Leckie had, or Sam Chisholm before him. I think he's part of a much bigger team, so it's very hard to give him advice. He's part of a team and I don't quite know where he slots into that team.

ANDREW DENTON: By the late 80s you'd made a considerable amount of money, somewhere in excess of 50 million dollars, and I think you were the owner of the Swans for a while...

MIKE WILLESEE: Part owner.

ANDREW DENTON: ...Sydney Radio Station, Today FM, thoroughbred racing, property investment, none of which were really low-risk investments. What was the thing that drew you? Was it the money? Was it the competition? Was it the gamble?

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, I never did anything just for money. It was always the challenge or because I wanted to do it or because someone needed a hand.

ANDREW DENTON: The reason I asked you about was it also the gamble that you liked - you were very keen on gambling?

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, loved gambling.

ANDREW DENTON: For a long time.

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: There were stories that you had to sell properties to pay back a multi-million dollar gambling debt. Did it get to that extent?

MIKE WILLESEE: There were two stories. One was that I won a lot of money and one was that I lost a lot of money. Both stories were incorrect in their detail and both stories cancelled each other out.

ANDREW DENTON: Are either of the stories substantially true?

MIKE WILLESEE: Both were largely true. I did have a big win at one time and I did have a big loss at one time, but they were both quite incorrect in the detail.

ANDREW DENTON: Gambling can become quite obsessive for people. Did it become a thing that you went for too much?

MIKE WILLESEE: Probably, but fortunately I never gambled for long periods. I think it was when I wanted a little bit of excitement, you know, go to the edge? I mean I did it by deliberately going to the war zones also, because I did the one thing for about 20 years straight, sitting behind the desk five nights a week. At times you get very tired and bored. You started doing stories and you'd think, "Haven't we done this story before? I think just the names have changed." I'd think, "Oh this is bad. If you get stale, you're in trouble." I would deliberately find an excuse to go and do something exciting, and gambling was one of those things. Finding exciting stories, going into war zones, and in war zones I'd always go to the edge. If there was trouble somewhere, I'd go - because you could pick the journalists. Half the journalists would go towards the action and the other half would go to the press conferences.

ANDREW DENTON: You talked before about you began to, later in your career, have this goldfish-bowl effect; you were going round and round and round. This was at a time when you had also made a lot of money. Was God on your mind at any of this time, or was, basically, it's still all about Mike?

MIKE WILLESEE: It was when I had not enough to do, that I had a really flat spot in my life. Because I'd been so busy, which I don't complain about, it was great. I think I was born to be busy. I got sick of that and I thought, "I don't need to do this anymore. I've got nothing more to prove." But after those challenges went, then I kept looking for the combative stories or the going-to-the-edge sort of stuff. I thought, "Well why sit behind a desk? Why pretend anymore?"

Nine bought me out, which seemed a good idea at the time because it sort of wasn't working, and it was a lot of money to pay me out, even though the money didn't really interest me, and then I suddenly had nothing to do. I had time to stop and think. Then I got around to thinking about, "Why are we here? Am I really just going to die and things stop? That would make everything so pointless." I tried hard to do some good things. I think, on balance, I was a more of a good man than a bad man. I had a good sense of justice and social welfare and protecting the underdog and so on. But, yes, I was selfish in my personal life. Apart from my children, I looked after myself, and there were a lot of things that I did that I wouldn't do if I had the views that I now hold.

ANDREW DENTON: Can I just take you back on, before we get on to the real conversion for you, which was your state of mind towards the end of your time on 'A Current Affair', and first of all that infamous incident where you appeared on 'A Current Affair', and you were filling in for Jana and you were drunk. In fact I think the next night Derryn Hinch went on air and said, "I'm Derryn Hinch and I'm sober."

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: When you look back...

MIKE WILLESEE: I'm not sure he was telling the truth.

ANDREW DENTON: I'm not sure anyone cared. When you look back on that now, do you see a man lost?

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, I think that's pretty fair. The problem with being lost is not just being lost, but not knowing that you're lost. If you know you're lost you can do something about it. I didn't know I was lost because everything had worked for me. I guess I had a golden touch - whatever I did seemed to work. As you rightfully pointed out, that night I was filling in. I'd been doing nothing. Life wasn't a lot of fun. This was the time I should have had fun because I could fly anywhere I wanted, I could have a holiday anywhere I wanted, I could afford whatever I wanted, but it was much more fun when I was working. But I got bored with that so it wasn't really - I mean, maybe that plane crash, maybe that was a jolt. It wasn't a conversion, but maybe that really kicked me into saying, "Well wait a minute, are coincidences, coincidences?" The more I thought about God, the more, at the very least, I had something to think about.

ANDREW DENTON: There's one last thing from your career, this speaking your state of mind, which was probably the thing you were most criticised for, which was the Cangai Siege. Now this was four years after the incident of being drunk on air and there were two young children that had been taken by three armed men who'd killed some people. They were in a farmhouse and you were able to get a line through to them. This is a little bit of the footage of an interview which attracted a lot of criticism afterwards for Mike.

ANDREW DENTON: Now, as you've said, you believed yourself to be a fair man and that you acted well, yet you copped enormous criticism for that as being a lapse of judgment, putting those children into a situation of further psychological distress. Again, when you look back on that, do you have a sense of somebody who was so used to competing that the moral compass had gone astray?

MIKE WILLESEE: No, I don't, and I reject all but one part of the criticism. I was wrong to ask the little girl if she'd seen Leonard do anything bad. That was a mistake. This is not an excuse, however, the circumstances were that I was driving to work and I got a call in the car saying, "We have them on the line and he said he'll wait to talk to you," I was thinking very fast, I was driving very fast through traffic and I literally drove my car into the studio, jumped out of my car, went to the desk and started that interview. It's not an excuse - I made a mistake.

But far more importantly was that my only concern and the only thing I had in my mind, "These guys are not just killers, they're actively killing. They killed yesterday and the day before and maybe the day before that, and these two children are in there." The fact that the guy stayed waiting on the phone for me, I thought, "He must think something of me, or want, I don't know, the fame of being on this television programme. I've got to use whatever advantage I have here. I've got to get these kids out". So that looks bad. I mean that's really taken out of context of a very long interview.

Most of the time I spent talking with him. I got him on the phone and I said, "Leonard, I'm going to ask you a favour," and he said, "What is it?" I said, "I want you to let those kids go." He said, "Okay, I will." I said, "No, I want you to let them go now." And he said, "Alright, I will," and he did. Now all that criticism is theoretical. That I should have got off the phone and let someone else have a go. Now this guy hated police officers and they wanted police officers on the phone to him. The fact is I got those kids out. They're alive today and their parents have thanked me. Of course I wouldn't ask that question again, knowing the mistake and having the time to think about it, but I got the kids out. The other people were hypothesising they would have got them out.

ANDREW DENTON: Again that self-belief, that confidence in yourself.

MIKE WILLESEE: I had a determination to get those kids out.

ANDREW DENTON: I mean that's over 12 years ago. I can hear it in your voice - you're still quite stirred up about that, aren't you?

MIKE WILLESEE: They were in a really dangerous situation.

ANDREW DENTON: You stepped away from regular current affairs television later that year and you were 50, and as you've said, you'd been everywhere, done everything and you started to think about the universe and about bigger things. It was a few years later that you met your wife, Gordana. What sort of change did she bring into your life?

MIKE WILLESEE: Again, this word 'coincidence'. You know, why did I meet Gordana, who I'd known before, we'd worked together, but Gordana's much younger than me and when I first met her I thought she was fantastic but a little young for me. Oh, okay, me a little old for her. But we met again seven or eight years later and the difference didn't seem so much. She rescued me at a Logies party actually. Someone was harassing me and she came over and helped me out and I asked her of she'd like to have lunch the next day. Then I said, "Would you like to go out one night in Sydney?" I went to her flat, very small, tiny flat, and I remember there was a large picture of 'The Last Supper' on the wall. Then on the other wall there was a picture of the Virgin Mary and a few other relics and holy pictures and so on. I said, "What do people say when they come into your flat and see all this religious stuff?" She said, "I don't care." I thought, "That's pretty good," you know? So at the time of my life when I was thinking about God and had had a bit of a wake-up call with the plane crash, I met Gordana, who had strong faith. Maybe it was about that time I started thinking about this word 'coincidence' being a word that doesn't really apply.

ANDREW DENTON: It was after you met Gordana that you had your first confession - not directly after, but some time after - your first confession I think in 30 years, which, considering the life you've led, it must have been tag team priests. What was the experience like?

MIKE WILLESEE: Well there is a God. He proved it that night because he stepped in and saved me. Because I'd got to the stage where I knew God was there, apart from having some rational reasons to believe it. I mean, you can't get faith rationally. You can't read the right books and think it through and say, "Therefore there is God and he's a God of love and mercy, therefore I will love him in return." That's it. It doesn't happen like that. Faith is a gift. I'd gone past that stage. I had the rational belief that God was there, by proving some supernatural things to be true, by reading the writings of this woman Katya Rivas, by seeing a stigmata, which was seeing the wounds of Christ re-enacted. I mean I had all the reasons you needed to believe in God, but somehow that wasn't my conversion.

My conversion was a gift. It was inside me and I knew I believed in God and I wanted him, but I didn't have the courage to take the next step and say, "Well I'm already a Catholic. I'm baptised. But I've got to go to confession," and as you rightly say, over 30 years or so, the life I led, you do accumulate a bit of a track record. I didn't even confront it in my own mind. I was just, you know, putting it off.

I'd bought a hotel in North Sydney and I had built some offices above for our own use. I built a restaurant below. Katya came out to Australia, accompanied by her spiritual director, a beautiful Italian priest named Father Renzo Sessolo, and just as the main course was being served Father Renzo, who didn't speak very good English said, "Your offices are here?" I said, "Yes, they're up here, Father." He said, "Are they blessed?" Then I had to stop from laughing because I thought, "I'm not blessed. What?" The thought of having my offices blessed just seemed odd. I kept a straight face and said, "No, no, Father, they're not." He said, "Would you like them blessed?" Out of politeness, I'd never thought of such a thing as having your offices blessed. So I politely said, "Yes, Father, I would." So he stood up, said, "Okay." We started walking out and we went upstairs, and I don't know why, but halfway up the stairs I said, "Padre, one day I would like, one day, I would like to talk to you about confession," long way away, talk, just have a chat, friendly chat, you know. Maybe when we meet in another country, in another decade.

ANDREW DENTON: Another life, perhaps?

MIKE WILLESEE: He didn't answer me, and I thought, "This doesn't make sense. Maybe it's his English," his English wasn't very good. He was ignoring me and he looked into the smallest place, which was the little kitchen area. He said, "What is this?" I said - I think Father's losing the plot here. I said, "It's the kitchen, Father, Padre. It's where we make the coffee." He took me by the arm and walked in and blessed me and started the confessional right. I went so close to saying, "No, no, no, you don't understand. I mean, let's talk about it." But the next thing I was confessing and crying and there was 30 years just falling out, spilling out, gushing out.

ANDREW DENTON: How did you feel after?

MIKE WILLESEE: Weightless. Weightless. Like this load was gone. It was a very, very beautiful and profound moment. Katya was leaning over the couch in the reception area praying. She stood up and she was crying and we were all crying. She reached into her dress and pulled out a holy card and gave it to me. It was perfectly crisp and fresh, not like you can put it in your pocket, let alone in your dress. It was a picture of Christ hugging the prodigal son, and she couldn't have known by any normal means that I was going to have confession that night, because if you had asked me if I was going to have confession that night, I would have given you a written guarantee and, being a betting man, offered you a shade of odds, there would be no confession tonight.

ANDREW DENTON: Let's talk about Katya Rivas. For those that are unfamiliar with the story, Mike travelled to Bolivia at the invitation of his neighbour, Ron Tesoriero, to meet a woman who had stigmata. He ended up making a documentary about her called 'Signs from God', which was seen in America by an audience of some 20 million. Here's an excerpt from that.

ANDREW DENTON: What was that experience like for you?

MIKE WILLESEE: Very, very moving. A little bit frightening, little bit hard to deal with. I hadn't converted at that time, remember, I was still trying to investigate. It was very difficult to be an investigator and go through this huge life change at the same time yourself. So maybe it was particularly difficult for me because I was trying to be objective. I was taking the blood because we were testing everything. My attitude was, my opinion doesn't count for anything, I've got to test everything that I see, and yet we saw her, over the three-hour period, deteriorate in her health. The wounds didn't look that serious, they were open wounds. They did appear naturally. There's no possible way they were self-inflicted or put there by anybody else. We had two cameras rolling and 10 witnesses and I was feet away from her. Then her health deteriorated to the stage, in the last minutes, the last five to 10 minutes of the three-hour period, it stopped at three o'clock, and it's believed that Jesus died at three o'clock. Her lungs seemed to be filling with a liquid. She seemed to be drowning. Two women were lifting her up to help her breathe and her eyes were rolling back. If you didn't know what was happening you would say, "I'm watching a woman die." By that night the wounds started to heal, some of them completely, and by the next day all the wounds had disappeared except for those on the top of her feet. But they were completely healed, but there were marks there, but when you felt them, they were completely smooth.

ANDREW DENTON: There was no possibility that she had cut herself in some way?

MIKE WILLESEE: I don't believe there was any possibility. I mean, master magicians can do things that really fool you, but it's hard to fool a camera. Magicians use movement, illusion and distraction. She didn't use any of those - she was lying still. There was certainly no one that jumped between me and her and did it.

ANDREW DENTON: You went there to test it and you went there as a questioning man. Did you look at all possible alternatives? The British Medical Journal, for instance, had examined stigmata and had talked about a thing called 'Gardiner Diamond Syndrome', where people, in a highly emotional state, can will themselves to bleed as an explanation for stigmata. Did you look at that?

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes. Yes, and talked to a number of psychiatrists about it who said they'd read of similar things and heard of similar things. We were even approached by people who said, "We know of people who can do this." To each one I said, "Please find one of these people for me and we'll do the same tests." Nobody's ever produced anybody. But the second question I put to all these, especially the psychiatrists, anyone from the medical field, I said, "Okay, in those tests could those people then heal their own wounds within hours?" The answer was, "We have no evidence of that ever happening."

ANDREW DENTON: This has gone much deeper for you now. You're on the trail of a great detective story, really, which is to try and prove the existence of the blood of Jesus Christ, that it still exists. How do you prove that?

MIKE WILLESEE: We started thinking about the blood of Christ because there's the shroud which wrapped the body of Christ, which has blood on it. Parts of it have been examined - it's type AB. There's the Sudarium, which is a very little-known cloth which covered the face of Jesus, which also has blood on it. We found that in a place called Oviedo in Spain. That blood's been tested and it's AB also. If you take pictures of the two - and the small cloth only covered part of Jesus' head while he was still on the cross, so it doesn't go all the way around - but if you take that part which coincides with the same part of the shroud, which covered all of his body, there are more than 120 wounds of coincidence when you put the two pictures one over the other.

So there's a very strong case already to say that these two cloths were the two cloths mentioned in John's Gospel. So we thought, "Well if the blood's there and science is advancing, why don't we take the same scientific approach, and instead of people arguing about the story of Christianity and the story of Jesus Christ, let's, if the shroud is true and the Sudarium is true, then that gives a very strong rational basis for believing the whole story and gives a much stronger argument for believing the Resurrection, that Christ rose from the dead".

ANDREW DENTON: You have scientific challenges ahead of you though. There are questions over the age of the Shroud of Turin. Nature Magazine tested it and said it dated back to medieval times, somewhere in the 13th century.

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, that's been completely discounted.

ANDREW DENTON: It was discounted and then they stood by their findings, so that's in dispute still.

MIKE WILLESEE: I've been to a number of conferences where scientists from different disciplines get together. They don't even discuss that anymore. In fact one guy summarised one conference - he was the leading academic scientist there. He said it would be a greater miracle if it were a 13th century fraud than if it were the real story, because we have the greatest artist of all time and no-one even knows his name. However, that was carbon dating, and all the scientists who've worked on it since from different disciplines say it's just incorrect. Many scientists have done other tests and say, "Well, we can't say, therefore, that the shroud is authentic." Nobody can say it's authentic, but it is of about the right age.

ANDREW DENTON: The bigger problem you face, of course, is the ability of science to prove these things because - and I'm sure you've talked with DNA experts - you know that blood degrades over time, that DNA degrades over time and there's a real question as to whether, this being 2,000 years old, it's a contaminated sample or not because many people have handled it.

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, the contamination is extreme. We've done a lot of work on this for the last six or seven years.

ANDREW DENTON: You're going to end up hosting a forensics show. I can see the angle here, Mike Willesee.

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, current DNA protocols don't allow them to extract and profile degraded DNA. We believe, with the natural progression of science, that they will be able to do this. We are working with one very brilliant scientist who was actually rebuilding damaged DNA. He'd got up to rebuilding 200 pairs. I won't try and explain all that, but it's about 20 per cent of what you need to say, "This blood," or, "This matter comes from the same person."

ANDREW DENTON: But even the human body, when it replicates DNA, seldom does it perfectly. Don't these various hurdles cast into doubt your ability to prove what it is you're trying to prove?

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, definitely. There's no guarantee at all that science will ever be able to put together that seriously damaged DNA, but in pursuing this part of the detective story we have found several other mysteries which science can't explain. But you're going to have to wait for the book.

ANDREW DENTON: Oh come on. You can't you can't leave us with a cliff-hanger like that.

MIKE WILLESEE: But if I tell you the main bits of the book, you're not going to buy it, and, you know, I've got seven children.

ANDREW DENTON: Hang on, there's - you're down to your last 50 million, I know.

MIKE WILLESEE: We have discovered a couple of mysteries which require more work.

ANDREW DENTON: Can you give us one?

MIKE WILLESEE: I can tell you that from two of our samples we've gone to a number of scientists who have found no results at all and say that that, in itself, is inexplicable.

ANDREW DENTON: Sorry, what do you mean, no results at all?

MIKE WILLESEE: No results.

ANDREW DENTON: From?

MIKE WILLESEE: For looking for DNA, even damaged, degraded DNA, they will find something. It's led us on another trail which I, and even with your great powers of persuasion I'm not taking you down that trail any further, but it's fascinating. More importantly, we have a positive result of two samples that are 1,300 years apart, and that also - you must read the book first. But I won't be mean - I'll send you a copy.

ANDREW DENTON: Isn't the point of faith, though, that it shouldn't have to be proved? Isn't faith enough?

MIKE WILLESEE: Exactly. But that hasn't worked.

ANDREW DENTON: Says who?

MIKE WILLESEE: The statistics. In this country alone we have a great Catholic school system, but more than 90 per cent of those kids leave school and don't go to mass. You would think that having such an infrastructure as your own school system would be a guaranteed way of regenerating your faith on a strong basis. It's not working.

ANDREW DENTON: So you believe that by a logically and scientifically-based proof of the miracles of God, this will regenerate faith?

MIKE WILLESEE: With some people. I don't think for one moment that the world's going to turn on its axis and say, "Okay, now there's a God because Mick told us." Some may be converted, some will at least open their hearts to the possibility that there is a God and that he's a loving God. He's a God of love. If I get that message through to a limited number of people, then I'll have done my job.

ANDREW DENTON: I'd like to have a look at another excerpt from 'Signs from God', and this is when you were interviewing Katya after the stigmata and she believed that Jesus was actually talking to you.

ANDREW DENTON: This notion that you mentioned before, of a God that intervenes in ways that can't be predicted, why would he, for instance, intervene for you, talk to you in that instance or perhaps answer your prayer on the plane, but he wouldn't intervene, perhaps, to save children in Dahfur? Why that?

MIKE WILLESEE: He's not saving the children in Dahfur for the same reason that he's allowed, for 2,000 years, all sorts of atrocities - wars, famines, natural disasters, man's inhumanity against man - because he's allowed us to run our own world and man's inhumanity to man is enormous. Dahfur is a great example. I've worked in the Sudan, as I was talking earlier, and I've seen it. But the Bible will also tell you that it's those poor who will find themselves in heaven. It's those people who are treated in that manner who will come first.

ANDREW DENTON: Why reach out for you though?

MIKE WILLESEE: I don't know. Probably because He was making the statement - I mean, the very fact that he allowed the stigmata, for the first time ever, a stigmata, which I totally believe to be genuine, to be filmed, to give us the date and time, to be there, to have it filmed, was so that the world could be reminded of what he gave us - His life, and He's our creator. He made us and yet he let us treat him as we did. He wanted to remind us of that and He knew there would be a large audience for that. It was actually 28 million that night in the United States, which is a pretty large audience to see an event like that. It touched a lot of people and Jesus knew that it would, so maybe that was part of it. But don't ask me to read his mind.

ANDREW DENTON: It did touch a lot of people and none more so than you. As you said, it was profound for you. I want to show one last excerpt here. This is Mike's response to something that Katya said when she was talking to him.

ANDREW DENTON: That's a remarkable question and I look at that and I think, "Did you truly have an open mind at this point, or did you really want to believe?"

MIKE WILLESEE: No, no, I had a truly open mind. What inspired that thought, to look at it, was, one, that somebody thought they saw a light in editing. It hadn't occurred to me. I didn't have any belief in it. It was a matter of you investigate everything that anywhere you can investigate.

ANDREW DENTON: That was a very indistinct image.

MIKE WILLESEE: Very.

ANDREW DENTON: I mean, I looked at it and...

MIKE WILLESEE: It proves nothing.

ANDREW DENTON: It's a very big leap though, is it not, from there was some trick with the light, to could this be Jesus Christ?

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes. I think it's a fair question. What do you think? Could it be?

ANDREW DENTON: In a universe of possibilities, yes.

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, so it was a fair question.

ANDREW DENTON: I think it's admirable, absolutely, what you're trying to discover for yourself and for other people. I wonder, though, which is why I was asking about your frame of mind, your desire to believe, why in these circumstances, with the stigmata for instance, with Katya, which you absolutely believe to be real and you've overseen the verification of it, why not hand that over entirely to people that aren't carrying any of the religious or psychological baggage you're carrying? Why not hand it over entirely? I know that the American sceptic, James Randi, has a standing million-dollar offer to anyone that can prove stigmata. Why not hand it over to, I don't know a Swiss researcher and a German and an American research group...

MIKE WILLESEE: James Randi is a phoney. I mean he forgets that he once named me Investigative Journalist of the Year and sent me a trophy. Fortunately I threw it away, I didn't take it seriously.

ANDREW DENTON: But, okay, put aside James Randi. Why not give it to somebody that's not carrying any strong religious belief to absolutely thoroughly investigate?

MIKE WILLESEE: We were quite prepared to do that, but all the people who criticised us, not one person asked to see the footage, including all the footage that didn't go to air. Not one person asked to interview any witnesses. Not one critic made the slightest attempt at investigation, so now tell me who I hand it over to?

ANDREW DENTON: Your religiosity has changed over the last decade. Do you believe that you're still the same clear-minded man that you were at the height of your career?

MIKE WILLESEE: Oh I think much, much clearer, because before I found God I trusted in me. You know, that's pretty dangerous. I was a bit of a loose cannon at times and not always the best person to give advice, least of all to myself. But I find now, if I really have a dilemma or can't work something out, then I put it in God's hands and I pray about it and I find that assists me. I find that I'm a more peaceful person, more forgiving person. I think I made a few improvements, or God has allowed me to make a few improvements.

ANDREW DENTON: Has this given your life purpose?

MIKE WILLESEE: Absolutely, where there was none, apart from my family.

ANDREW DENTON: When you see people take their belief in God, perhaps God's speaking to them, and use it as has happened historically and is happening again in the world today, for violent ends and aggressive ends, how do you reconcile that?

MIKE WILLESEE: Oh I can't and it's not for me to reconcile. That's, again, free will.

ANDREW DENTON: That's a double bind, isn't it? It's God's will but it's free will.

MIKE WILLESEE: Yes, well, I can't explain that, which is why I turned to God. Because, with God, there are a lot of rational answers and there are a lot of answers that satisfy your heart. Without God there aren't any answers.

ANDREW DENTON: I can't wait to read your book.

MIKE WILLESEE: I'm not sure you're going to. At the start of the interview I thought you might, but...

ANDREW DENTON: What? You're not going to send me a copy anymore? You cheapskate.

MIKE WILLESEE: Maybe I'll just Photostat a couple of the relevant pages and send them over.

ANDREW DENTON: But are you surprised that I'm taking this line of questioning? Because I'm trying to ask rational questions, in the same way that you are.

MIKE WILLESEE: I said earlier in the interview that you won't find faith simply through rational thinking. It is a gift. I also said that if you want faith, all you have to do is open your heart, at least recognise that God might be there. In the meantime, if you rely on your own rational thinking, then you're pretty well saying, "I can out-think God and I'll decide for myself if he's there or not," and you can't out-think God. And if there's no God, don't bother thinking about it. It's all a waste of time.


ANDREW DENTON: Mike Willesee, I admire your questioning spirit. Thank you very much.

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