UFOs on Larry King Live

"It is time for the truth to be brought out in open Congressional hearings. Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense. To hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel. "
  -- Former Director of CIA, Vice Admiral R.H. Hillenkoetter in New York Times article Feb. 28, 1960, p. L30

For many years, reporting on UFOs in the major media was taboo. Almost all reports of UFOs were relegated to the tabloids. Yet the times they are a changin'. Just this year, both Larry King and the late Peter Jennings did full-length specials exploring the topic of UFOs, both of which ended up raising more questions than providing answers. The following quote (along with some fascinating links) is from the order page for the Peter Jennings ABC special "UFO: Seeing is Believing."

"Today, if you report a UFO to the U.S. government, you will be informed that the Air Force conducted a 22-year investigation which ended in 1969 and concluded that UFOs are not a threat to national security and are of no scientific interest. But as one of the world's leading theoretical physicists says, 'You simply cannot dismiss the possibility that some of these UFO sightings are actually sightings from some object created by a civilization perhaps millions of years ahead of us in technology.'"

Below are key excerpts from the July 6th Larry King Live special on CNN. A link is also provided to the full transcript. Key statements are highlighted in bold. For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information on UFOs, see our Information Center at https://www.WantToKnow.info/ufoinformation. You can also view the video which convinced me four years ago. Filmed at the prestigious National Press Club and featuring 22 military and government witnesses giving testimony of their personal experiences with UFOs, this eye-opening program is available free at this link. Let us not close our eyes to all that may be going on in the universe outside of our world. You take care and have a great day!

With best wishes,
Fred Burks for WantToKnow.info
Former language interpreter for Presidents Bush and Clinton

Full transcript of CNN Larry King special: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0507/06/lkl.01.html
To order a video or DVD of the Peter Jennings ABC special "UFO: Seeing is Believing":
http://www.abcnewsstore.com/store/index.cfm?fuseaction=customer.product&product_code=S050224%2001&category_code=HOME

CNN LARRY KING LIVE

Experts Discuss Possibility Of Existence Of UFOs

Aired July 6, 2005 - 21:00 ET (Slightly edited for reading ease)

LARRY KING, CNN HOST: Tonight, are UFOs real or fake? Have they actually been here? Some say the truth is out there. Others say there is no proof at all. Now we'll go inside some 60 years worth of sensational, controversial reports about people who say they saw UFOs, and those who even claim they were abducted by them. Investigators on both sides of the UFO question will take your calls.

Let's meet our panel in what should be an extraordinary hour. In Denver, is John Schuessler, former engineer for Boeing and NASA who has worked with pilots and astronauts who claim to have seen UFOs. He's director of the Mutual UFO Network and author of a book documenting a disturbing Texas UFO siting. In Boston is Dr. Susan Clancy, skeptical author of an upcoming book, "Abducted" about people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. She says memories are not always factual or reliable. Here in Los Angeles is Seth Shostak. He is senior astronomer for the SETI Institute -The Search for Extra-Terrestrial intelligence. In New York is Budd Hopkins, a top researcher into the UFO abduction phenomena, author of "Sight Unseen, Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings." In Washington is Rob Swiatek, long-time UFO investigator, researcher since 1968, and a board member of the Fund for UFO Research. And also in Washington is Bruce Maccabee, active in UFO research since the late 1960s. He works with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and serves on the board of the Fund for UFO Research.

John, what got you interested in this whole topic to begin with?

JOHN SCHUESSLER, MUTUAL UFO NETWORK [http://www.mufon.com]: I became interested in the mid '60s during the Gemini IV flight when astronaut James McDivit said that he saw something in orbit. The ground controllers kind of ignored him but he went ahead and took a picture. This was not anything really classic, but as a young engineer it just inspired the heck out of me because we'd worked night and day for several years to get Gemini IV up there. After that I started talking to pilots and others who I thought were highly credible people, good observers, capable individuals, and I've never stopped since.

KING: Dr. Clancy, what aroused your interest?

SUSAN CLANCY, AUTHOR, ABDUCTED: I started studying aliens while a graduate student at Harvard. I was doing research on how traumatic experiences impact memory functioning and alien abductions was a type of traumatic experience people were reporting. It was very interesting to me because, from the scientific perspective it was people who had created a false memory. That's an interesting group to study.

KING: Seth, what is the SETI Institute?

SETH SHOSTAK, SETI INSTITUTE [http://www.seti.org]: Well, the SETI Institute is a non-profit research organization designed to investigate the whole question of life beyond earth. And part of our project is to try and prove that there is extraterrestrial - not only life, but intelligent life out there by eavesdropping on signals.

KING: Budd Hopkins in New York, what got you interested?

BUDD HOPKINS, UFO ABDUCTION RESEARCHER: I was a complete skeptic. I had no interest in the subject. [Then] I had a daytime UFO sighting in 1964. And a few years later a man I knew quite well told me about a UFO landing that he had observed. He saw figures who disembarked from the craft. Soil samples were taken [from] the remains of the holes in the ground that were dug. This was in New Jersey right across the Hudson River from Manhattan. I looked into it and found a second witness who had seen the whole thing from another perspective and found more physical evidence.

KING: Rob, you're a longtime investigator. What got you involved?

ROB SWIATEK, UFO INVESTIGATOR: Well, Larry, I was completely intrigued by sightings of these strange objects back in the 1960s. I couldn't believe that seemingly unexplained craft were being seen in our skies and couldn't be explained. Moreover, I was fascinated by the University of Colorado UFO study that was then ongoing. This was basically an attempt by the Air Force to have the UFO problem looked at scientifically. The whole thing just fascinated me, and I've been fascinated from that day to this.

KING: Bruce, what got you involved in things up there?

BRUCE MACCABEE, UFO RESEARCHER: Back in the '50s an '60s when there were lots of sightings around, I knew about them but I didn't really do anything about it until about the middle '60s when there were a lot of sightings in the United States that resulted in the University of Colorado study that Bob Swiatek just referred to. At that time I decided that if there was really something there, [it was] in the interviews with the actual witnesses. So I went with a group known then as Night Cap, and we interviewed some people that would have various types of sightings, and it turned out they weren't nuts. So I decided there might be really something going on. And I began historical research and further case investigations. All of them concluded that there is really something flying around.

KING: Okay, we've got to have drawn sides here. In March of 1997 there were numerous reports from people who claim to see mysterious lights over Phoenix, Arizona. In a special on UFOs earlier this year, ABC's Peter Jennings explored it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) [see a six-minute video clip of this siting at http://www.thephoenixlights.net and see this CNN page for more on the Phoenix sitings and excellent links.]

PETER JENNINGS, ABC ANCHOR (voice-over): There have been UFO sightings with hundreds, even thousands of eyewitnesses. Phoenix, Arizona, March 13th, 1997.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There were some incredible sightings over Phoenix, called the Phoenix Lights. And they occurred while I was doing my program. I took call after call after call of people in Phoenix saying oh my God, what's flying over our city?

JENNINGS: At 8:30 p.m. that night hundreds of people reported seeing a mysterious flying something.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KING: By the way, a skeptic interviewed for that ABC special claimed the lights were merely flares and aircraft flying in formation, and people were just connecting dots. John, that's a classic example of so many things we've seen and heard through the years. What do you believe?

SCHUESSLER: I believe there are actual unconventional flying objects in our skies on a regular basis. We at MUFON get over 300 calls a month of raw data. About 10 percent resulting in good sightings.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) [order excellent Sci-Fi network video "Out of the Blue" here]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The UFO phenomenon really took off, actually, in June of 1947 in the State of Washington when a pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold saw many objects going in formation at a very, very high speed by Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold said that the nine silvery objects he'd seen looked like saucers skipping over a pond. The next day, his story was front-page news, and a new term entered the American lexicon -- flying saucer.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KING: That's from a Sci-Fi network special aired recently on Roswell and UFOs [order this excellent documentary at link immediately above]. Budd Hopkins, I know you're a believer. But Seth just said there's no proof can be shown. Can you show us tonight right now absolute proof that extraterrestrials came here?

HOPKINS: The first thing I want to say is about a believer. There are two groups of people looking into the subject. The true believers and the pragmatists. The pragmatists believe when they hear a story of an abduction, for instance, that either there's a mental problem or there's a hoax or that it really happened. The true believers, and Susan Clancy would be certainly one of the true believers, know in advance that this did not happen, that this is a false memory. And she has said so in her writing. In other words, rather than investigating she makes the assumption that these are simply impossible. The point is we have to test each one and look into it.

KING: What do you believe? Do you believe that extraterrestrials have come to the planet earth?

HOPKINS: We don't know where they're from. The interesting thing is we know what they're doing, what they look like, the marks they leave on the ground and on people, and how they can be photographed. Yet we don't know where they come from, what their ultimate goal is.

KING: No one can know that. Dr. Clancy, if I told you I saw one today or I was abducted, you would definitely say that I was whacko?

CLANCY: No. I would never say you were whacko, Larry King. In fact, I don't think anybody who sees aliens or thinks they have been abducted is necessarily whacko. In fact, the research shows otherwise. In general, people who believe they've been abducted are not suffering from any more psychopathology than the average person. I would think that you actually thought you saw an alien. But I would also know that what you think you saw is not necessarily what you actually saw.

KING: How would you know that?

CLANCY: I mean, human perceptual systems are frail. How would I know that? I wouldn't know it for sure. I would think it was interesting, but until I saw some form of objective evidence that it was extraterrestrial in nature, I wouldn't believe it.

KING: Before Rob shows us some extraordinary pictures and the whole panel comments, in 1997 the U.S. Air Force issued a report declaring the Roswell case closed. The Air Force said the so-called space aliens were military dummies used in high altitude parachute drops. What do we make, Bruce Maccabee, of Roswell?

MACCABEE: Well, I think something actually occurred which has not yet been explained. I have not been convinced by what the Air Force claimed and, of course, what I call the dummy drop theory of Roswell doesn't satisfy anyone. Even the skeptics tended to laugh at that. I like to stick to the testimony of the original witnesses which made claims about extreme characteristics of the materials that were found and so on. My own opinion, however, has not been based on Roswell, but on all the other types of sightings that I have investigated, including photographic film and video cases.

KING: Why do you think, Rob, that they go over strange places? They never land in Washington, DC at noon while Congress is in session.

SWIATEK: If we are indeed dealing with alien intelligence, we have absolutely no idea what this alien intelligence - how it would act and what it would do. How does any of us as a human being know how an alien race would think? Their idea of contact might be to never approach main government buildings or land at the mall. So I think it's just kind of ridiculous to discount the whole phenomenon because they don't do what we as humans think they would do.

KING: Well, since this has been reported for ages, are we ever going to know Rob?

SWIATEK: Yes, I think we will know, Larry. I think this problem is amenable by science. But I'm not going to say we're dealing with ETs because I think that's one step beyond where we are as researchers of this phenomenon. The first thing we do is deal with the data such as it is. And if the data is that they never land in public places and that they just have overflights of military bases or airline pilots deal with these things and see them, then we have to investigate those data. That's what science does. And unfortunately mainstream science hasn't yet looked at the really good cases in the UFO subject that exist.

KING: What do pilots tell you, John?

SCHUESSLER: Well, pilots tell us real good stuff. You have to stop and think. A pilot is a highly credible, highly trained good observer that protects the lives of millions of people a day. They say that things fly up to their aircraft. They're quite often noticed on radar. They move around the aircraft in ways that their own airplane can't do in very close proximity. [They are] not amorphous lights in the sky, [but rather] structural, physical things that come right up to them. They say this is bizarre. This is beyond belief.

KING: Rob has brought extraordinary photos. Rob, we'll put some up and talk about them. First, this is McMinnville, Oregon.

SWIATEK: Larry, McMinnville, Oregon, was a series of two UFO photographs. You are looking at, I believe, photograph two there. That is photograph number one. These photos have passed the muster over many years of study of many experts, including Dr. Maccabee here. Now the thing I wanted to qualify about UFO photographs is that in and of themselves they don't prove we're dealing with ETs. Any photograph can be hoaxed. The good thing about photographs like McMinnville is that all the obvious explanations of how the photographs might have been hoaxed have been ruled out, i.e: a model suspended from the wires. It's certainly not an unusual cloud. It's not something that the witnesses threw in front of them like a Frisbee and photographed. Extensive research by private sector scientists like Dr. Maccabee and by the University of Colorado study back in the '60s couldn't explain these sightings.

KING: Susan, how do you react when you look at that?

CLANCY: I think that could have been somebody throwing a disk in the sky and taking a picture of it. [What] I find interesting about the pictures is they're flying saucers. And I want to remind the viewers that flying saucers were supposedly first seen by Kenneth Arnold in 1947, but if you actually look at the transcripts of what he said he saw, he did not see flying saucers. He actually saw crescent-shaped objects that moved like a saucer would, if you skipped it across the water. The media got confused, reported that flying saucers were shown and it was flying saucers ever since. The pictures are somebody trying to create the illusion of flying saucers or somebody took a picture of some weird thing in the sky [that] happened to look like a flying saucer. It's certainly not evidence that there's something extraterrestrial in the sky.

KING: Budd Hopkins, to you what does it mean?

HOPKINS: Well, it's just one more piece of evidence that supports the physical reality of these objects. Here's the thing about the abduction phenomenon [as] it connects with photographs like this. We have over and over again physical marks on people's bodies that are somehow inflicted upon them when they're abducted into craft. I've seen perhaps 100 what we call scoop marks. These are like the one at the bottom -- the straight line cut on the woman's body. I've seen dozens and dozens of these. The doctor the next day asked if she had some kind of surgery. There's a scoop mark on the back of a leg. Here's a scoop mark on the front of the leg. We have hundreds of these. On top of that, when a UFO lands, it manages very often to bake the soil -- kills the grass. The soil is baked to a kind of rock-like consistency. We have had these rocklike things analyzed.

KING: What does all that say to you?

HOPKINS: Well, this is a physical thing. The idea that this is sleep paralysis, which is the big explanation du jour is as completely full of holes as Bush's rationale for invading Iraq. The first thing about the sleep paralysis is for the first 15 or 20 years of abduction research, not one single person was in the bedroom asleep.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (video clip): Here's a flying saucer in a rare close up portrait. But this one is no mystery. Unlike its high-flying cousins, this saucer is created in an army laboratory at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. Physicist Noel Scott, who discovered the effect, says it's the same phenomenon that has baffled scientists, hexed radar screens and led pilots on costly wild saucer chases. A mass of air under low pressure and electrically charged, as you see taking the shape of a glowing saucer. It's the answer to the year's number one scientific mystery, or is it?

KING: Let's look at some more pictures from Rob Squiretech's collection. What's this in Santa Ana, Rob?

SWIATEK: Well, I don't actually know what it is, Larry, but yes, it is one of a sequence of four photographs that were taken of seemingly -- I'll put the words alleged and seemingly before the word object each time I say it, a large metallic disk that crossed the road in front of a highway inspector in 1965. He took three photographs of the disk itself. And one photograph later on, of a smoke ring that allegedly the disk left behind it when it departed. Again, these photos have passed muster with investigators. They've ruled out the hand-throwing model, which Susan seems so blithely to describe as the source of all of these photographs. What is left is the puzzle and the enigma that we need to figure out. The person who took these, Mr. Heflin, had a pretty unimpeachable character and no strings were found from which this object was dangled from in his truck, nor double exposure or anything like that.

KING: How do you respond, Seth, to what you see?

SHOSTAK: Well, look, one of the problems with these photos...

KING: Come on, it is pretty amazing.

SHOSTAK: Well, yes, but it could be, as Susan has suggested, just a hubcap thrown up and somebody takes pictures. There saying that's not...

KING: Don't look like a hubcap.

SHOSTAK: It doesn't look like a hubcap, but the point is that there's no point of reference. You don't know how far away that thing is. It could be an aircraft that's very far away and only looks like it's up close. You need, you know, you need a couple of cameras.

KING: Doesn't look like an aircraft.

SHOSTAK: There's something in the sky there. To say that it's alien craft, that's a big step.

KING: President Carter's reported seeing things.

SHOSTAK: It was Venus. He's an unimpeachable source and it was actually extraterrestrial, but it was Venus.

KING: Bruce Maccabee, what do you believe about these photos?

MACCABEE: Well, these photos have been studied for many, many years, since the time they were taken in '65, I think it was. And they have, as Bob pointed out, passed muster over and over and over again. Nobody ever managed to prove that [the photographer] would be a person likely to make any sort of hoax. These things are either the real thing or a hoax. I mean, it's really an unexplained object or hoax. There's no halfway point. In my opinion, having studied what these other people have done and my own investigation of the photos themselves indicate that this is a real object, and there is a possibility of estimating, let's say, distance and size based on the atmospheric effects on the photo -- on the object itself, indicating how bright it is as a function of distance. It's a bit technical, but it does suggest that the object was probably within a few thousand feet of the camera.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) WOLF BLITZER, HOST, "WOLF BLITZER REPORTS": What was in the skies over Mexico in March? Members of the Mexican Air Force think they could be UFOs. Pilots taped 11 unidentified flying objects over southern parts of the country near the Gulf of Mexico. Only three of the objects showed up on RADAR and members of the plane's crew say it seemed as if the bright lights were responding to them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: That was a Wolf Blitzer report on CNN. John, what do you make of it?

SCHUESSLER: Well, that was an excellent report. And it kind of thrilled us all, because we had an air interdiction aircraft that had forward looking infrared radar that was picking up heat images of something. And the analysis of that has stood the test of time. Again, Dr. Maccabee has done a through analysis, and one of the objects was obviously what we consider an unconventional flying object. Some of the others were something else.

KING: Dr. Maccabee, what are we looking at?

MACCABEE: Well, after doing an extensive study of the videotape that I was sent by the Mexican Air Force, I concluded that some of these objects were actually lights, most likely to be lights on the ground. But on the other hand, this whole event started when the surveillance aircraft flying over the Yucatan peninsula picked up a radar target that got within two miles, and tracked it, followed it for ten miles, and was not able to see anything associated with the radar target, either visually or with the forward-looking infrared. And that by itself is unusual. I would consider that to be what we call a radar unidentified flying object, because it was a radar target. These other lights that you see, some of them are probably lights on the ground. There may be some UFO lights mixed in. But until the Mexican Air Force actually does some experiments that I recommended, we wouldn't be able to tell for certain.

KING: Budd, why would the government hide the information from the public if they had it?

HOPKINS: Larry, if all a person could say is, my fellow Americans, they are here. They can outfly anything we have. They're abducting our men, women and children in an ongoing series of experiments. We don't know anything about it. We don't know whether they are going to be friendly or not. We have no idea what this is leading to. There's nothing we can do about it. Now, I always said I would rather be in the liquor business at that point, than the stock market. But the most important point here, Larry, is that [in a] conversation I had years ago with the late Carl Sagan, we agreed that the UFO phenomenon was an extraordinary phenomenon.

KING: Well, what did Carl say?

HOPKINS: We agreed that all of this together constitutes an extraordinary phenomenon. What I said to Dr. Sagan was: shouldn't we be saying an extraordinary phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation? We're not getting an investigation here. We're getting, unfortunately, lots of arm chair theorists who sit away from the investigation process, who have actually never really gone out to examine the site, the physical marks, or to do any medical work.

KING: I will confirm that, because I interviewed the late Dr. Sagan many times, and he was open to the possibility and to more investigation of it. Budd Hopkins, do you think we're going to ever have proof in our lifetime?

HOPKINS: Well, I never use the word proof. I use the term evidence. We have so much evidence that we can hardly handle it. We have to remember that in terms of proof that there's still something like 10 or 15 percent of the American public do not believe that the Holocaust occurred. It has not been proved to them. So, my point is, the evidence is so extensive and so complex. I've been doing this for 30 years, and I'm talking about the medical evidence, and even though Susan just mentioned sleep paralysis, we have hundreds and hundreds of abduction cases where's people are driving cars. I was just dealing with a police sergeant who was abducted. His family, seven people, saw the craft coming at rooftop height in the middle of the afternoon over their picnic. And he was been abducted and returned.

KING: Why don't they ever abduct Colin Powell. You know, abduct Seth Shostak. Why don't they take you? You come back on this show. If they took you, we're going to believe it. We thank John Schuessler, Dr. Susan Clancy, Seth Shostak, Budd Hopkins, Rob Swiatek and Bruce Maccabee.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com

For a PBS Nova interview with Budd Hopkins: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/buddhopkins.html
For the best Budd Hopkins cases on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/cases.html
For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information on UFOs: https://www.WantToKnow.info/ufoinformation.