-Caveat Lector-

CNN LARRY KING LIVE

Experts Discuss Possibilty Of Existance Of UFOs

Aired July 6, 2005 - 21:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND
MAY BE UPDATED.

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. It's next on LARRY KING LIVE.
Let's meet our panel in what should be an extraordinary hour. In Denver,
Colorado, is John Scheussler, 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. 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. Works with the National Investigations Committee on
Aerial Phenomena, serves on the national board of the Fund for UFO
Research.

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

JOHN SCHUESSLER, MUTUAL UFO NETWORK: I became interested in the mid '60s
during the Gemini IV flight when astronaut James McDivit (ph) said that
he saw something in orbit. The ground controllers kind of ignored him
but he went ahead and took a picture and later came back and asked him
what he saw. 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 after that talking to pilots and others who I thought were
highly credible people, good observers, capable individuals, and I've
never stopped sense. 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 to make a long story short,
alien abductions was a type of traumatic experience people were
reporting. And it was very interesting to me because, from the
scientific perspective it was people who had created a false memory and
that's an interesting group to study.

KING: Seth, what is the SETI Institute?

SETH SHOSTAK, SETI INSTITUTE: Well, the SETI Institute is an
organization -- 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: You like the movie "Contact"?

SHOSTAK: Indeed. The movie "Contact" was based on our work.

KING: Paul Allen funded this?

SHOSTAK: Paul Allen has funded a lot of our research. He didn't fund
that movie, of course, and he doesn't fund all of our research.

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

BUDD HOPKINS, UFO ABDUCTION RESEARCHER: I had a daytime UFO sighting in
1964. I again was a complete skeptic. I had no interest in the subject.
And then a few years later a man I knew quite well told me about a UFO
landing that he had observed. He didn't know what to call it. This was
back in 1975. But he saw figures who disembarked from the craft. Soil
samples were taken. The remains of the holes in the ground that were
dug. This was in New Jersey right across the Hudson River from
Manhattan. And I looked into it and found a second witness who had seen
the whole thing from another perspective and found more physical
evidence and I was off and going.

KING: Rob, you're a long-time 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 on going and 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: Now we'll turn to Bruce Maccabee, and it is a fascinating subject
No doubt about that. Bruce, what got you involved in things up there?
BRUCE MACCABEE, UFO RESEARCHER: Yeah, well, back in the '50s an '60s
when there were lots of sightings around, I learned -- 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.

And at that time I decided that if there was really something there
where the rubber meets the road is in the interviews with the actual
witnesses that claim things. 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 and so I decided there
might be really something going on. And I began a historical research
and further case investigation and 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. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

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. Security guard Bob Nelson (ph) was sitting
on his porch with his dog.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Six or seven lights came across the top of the hill
and it was moving very slow. And then I went in jokingly said to my
wife, we've got a UFO coming over.

(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 in over 300 calls a month
of raw data. That culls down to about 10 percent resulting in good
sightings. Many like the Phoenix Lights.

KING: Which tells you to believe these are extra terrestrials coming
into our atmosphere? SCHUESSLER: I'm not willing to say they are
extraterrestrials. I don't know where they from. But they are beyond
what we fly at this point in time and have been at any point in time for
the past 50 years.

KING: Where else, Seth, could they be from then?

SHOSTAK: I would like to ask that myself. Either their extraterrestrial
or there's something -- it's neighbors. But, the funny thing is, despite
58 years of sightings of this thing, nobody can put a piece of evidence
on this desk, if you go to the local science museum and look for some
sort of display showing what we have learned, what we have collected
from all of these sightings, there's nothing there.

KING: Why do you keep studying it?

SHOSTAK: We're not studying aliens that might be invading our airspace.
I don't think that the aliens are buzzing the countryside. I just don't
think the evidence is good enough for that. I don't think it's proven.
But I do think that there is something out there. There's clearly, to my
mind, enormous probability that there's life out there, even intelligent
life.

KING: We'll take a break and come back with more. We'll be including
your phone calls. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In 1947, Americans found their skies filled with all
sorts of strange flying objects.

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.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 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, and that was the clip from that. What, 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. And 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 involved here or that it really happened. The true
believers, and Susan Clancy would be certainly one of the true
believers. 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.

Now, I can look into cases that turned out to be certainly not real
abduction experiences, but 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: Again, I echo what John Schuessler said, I don't like to use
the term extraterrestrial. 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. 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: Are you open to the idea, Seth?

SHOSTAK: I'm certainly open to the idea. It doesn't violate physics to
come here from other worlds. Could be. But if you're gonna make that
claim, as Carl Sagan was fond of saying, extraordinary claim like that
requires pretty convincing evidence. The L.A. Police Department solves
80 percent of the murders committed by humans against other humans. What
about the other 20 percent? You think they're aliens? Could be, but I
don't think so.

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 crossed. 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 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 all the other types of sightings that I have investigated,
including photographic film and video cases.

KING: Why do you think, Rob, that they don't -- why do they go over
strange places, pictures? They never land in Washington, DC at noon
while Congress is in session.

SWIATEK: Well, Larry, I wish they would.

KING: I know, I know. But why -- this intelligent life wouldn't do that?

SWIATEK: There is an answer to that and here is the answer. 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. Woody
Allen once said, maybe they like to hover. And that's what I would say.
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 or the river entrance of the Pentagon. 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, do you think?

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 to 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 an nice and investigate
those data. Not the data we would like to have or not the ashtray from
the craft we would like to have but the data such as it exists. That's
what science does. And unfortunately mainstream science hasn't yet
looked at the great cases, the really good cases in the UFO subject that
exist.

KING: We're going to say some of Rob's pictures when we come back. We'll
also ask John what pilots tell him. They're up there all the time.
You're watching LARRY KING LIVE. At the bottom of the hour we'll include
your phone calls. Our subject is -- don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Pre "War of the Worlds," which is terrific, that "The Day the
Earth Stood Still" is the best science fiction movie about UFOs ever
made. 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 life, whether
military pilot or civilian, 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, not amorphous lights in the sky, the
structural, physical things that come right up to them. They say this is
bizarre. This is beyond belief. I've got the tell somebody, and they
record that.

Quite often, though, they can't get the back-up tapes from the FAA or
elsewhere showing what was on radar. But we know it's there and we do
have a lot of radar visual cases now. You can fool the radar a little,
the eye a little but it's almost impossible to fool them together.
Particularly ...

KING: Why would you doubt pilots, Seth?

SHOSTAK: I don't doubt the pilots have seen something but to say that
it's extraterrestrial craft is a big step. We have thousands of
satellites looking down on the earth all the time. You show them on the
weather, right? They don't see these things. You've got amateur
astronomers looking every night. They don't see these things.

KING: Rob has brought extraordinary photos with us. 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 an 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 explanation force how the photographs might have been hoaxed
or what these photographs show 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, through 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 and they're representative of what
people see. I think that's the core of what I'm saying.

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

CLANCY: How I react is I look at that and I think, well, that could have
been somebody throwing a disk in the sky. And taking a picture of it.
But that's an aside. 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. KING: What is that to you?

CLANCY: What, the pictures?

KING: Yeah, what is that?

CLANCY: The pictures are somebody trying to create the illusion of
flying saucers or somebody took a picture of some weird thing in the
sky, 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 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 in the center, a little harder
to see that photograph. One down, I see at the bottom. This is -- 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. If you assume that we have hundreds of these, straight
line cut on the man's back.

Either the straight line cut or the scoop mark as you can see the back
of the knee. If you have these again and again and again, this is an
Australian case -- exactly the same kind of marks, exactly the same
patterns, then you will, on top of that, the ground traces when UFO
lands, it manages very often to, in a certain sense, bake the soil.
Kills the grass. The soil is baked to a kind of rock-like consistency.
We have had these rock-like things analyzed.

KING: What does all that say to you?

HOPKINS: Well, it says that there's -- 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. And, of course, the sleep paralysis theory doesn't even begin to
explain those whatsoever. You have cases ...

KING: Let me get a break and we'll come back and show more pictures and
take phone calls as well. Don't go away.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (video clip): Here's a flying saucer in a rare close
up portrait. But this one is no mystery. Unlike its highflying cousins,
this saucer is created in an army laboratory at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia.
Physicist Noel Scott (ph), 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? (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOM CRUISE, ACTOR: Feel that?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Feel that?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. I feel that. Is it the subway? train maybe?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Water main?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That can't be the water main.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's nothing else down there.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The water main doesn't run through here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, there's something down there and it's moving.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: One of the great scenes from many great scene in "War of the
Worlds."

In Denver, Colorado, is John Schuessler, former engineer for Boeing and
NASA.

In Boston, is Dr. Susan Clancy. By the way, the full title of her
forthcoming book is "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were
Kidnapped By Aliens."

In Los Angeles, is Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI
Institute.

In New York, is Budd Hopkins, a top researcher in the UFO abduction
phenomena.

In Washington, Rob Swiatek, long-time investigator, board member for the
Fund for UFO research. Also in Washington, Dr. Bruce Maccabee, active in
UFO research, serves on the National Board of the Fund for UFO Research.

We'll take a call and then, go to some more of these photos.

We'll go to Newport News, Virginia. Hello.

CALLER: Hi. Thank you, Mr. King, for accepting my phone call.

My question is: Since there is intelligent life on the surface of Earth,
does your guests think that there's possibly intelligent life in the
deep of our oceans?

KING: Is that a possibility? Anybody want to grab that? Seth: Unlikely.
It's hard to, you know, do things like smelt metals, you know, you don't
tend to have prehensile hands and things like that. It's a difficult
environment for intelligence. And by the way, if there were intelligent
life at the bottom of oceans, I think we would have found it by now.

KING: But Hubert Humphrey said we should explore the oceans as much as
we explore space.

SHOSTAK: Should do, indeed.

KING: Agreed?

SHOSTAK: Absolutely.

KING: There's a lot to be learned from the oceans.

SHOSTAK: Much to be learned. I don't think there's intelligence down
there.

KING: Let's look at some more pictures from Rob Squiretech's (ph)
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 of throwing model, as Susan seems so blithely 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 (ph), again, 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, right, 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.

SWIATEK: And that's false.

SHOSTAK: You know, there are all kinds of air crafts. I mean, look, it's
not convincing evidence that there are alien craft in the sky.

I'm sorry.

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

KING: Dr. Carter's (ph) reported seeing things.

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

KING: It was Venus.

Bruce Maccabee, what do you believe about these photos?

MACCABEE: Well, these photos have been studies 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.

Mr. -- the photographer himself, was -- nobody ever managed to prove
that he 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.

KING: Dallas, Texas. Hello.

CALLER: Hi.

I'm just wondering if these marks or scoopings you guys claim were
caused by aliens during abductions, is there any other possible
scientific explanation that could possibly explain their origin?

KING: John?

SCHUESSLER: You wanted me? I didn't understand the question.

KING: All right, we'll start with John and then Bud. Is there another
scientific explanation for this?

SCHUESSLER: Well, it's either happening or it isn't happening.

KING: Right.

SCHUESSLER: And the people have passed psychological exams, they've
passed medical exams, lie detector tests. All of these things show that
they really believed this has happened to them.

Now, again, you're back to belief there. But the accumulated evidence of
lots and lots and lots of these starts to give you patterns and patterns
of information that -- different ones from different places don't know.
And that hidden information, is what we use, in many times, to put
together cases that have like- characteristics and there's no way that
they could have copied each other.

KING: Susan, what do you make of the body marks?

CLANCY: I would say that strange marks on the body are very common and I
think there's possibly a litany of other more-probable explanations for
why you have scoop marks or weird moles.

And as an example, one of my subjects was an 18-year-old construction
worker who woke up and found strange patterns of marks on his back and
concluded it was aliens. And when we asked him, isn't it more likely you
started at the construction site and it was falling construction pieces,
he said possible. But I feel like it was aliens and that's what I
believe. So, for these people, that's their explanation.

KING: Let me get a break and we'll -- I...

We'll get -- you're not saying they're lying, they believe it?

CLANCY: No, I think they believe it. Absolutely.

KING: We'll take a break and be back with more phone calls, more
pictures as well.

Don't go away.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don't look at that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the beginning of the process by which we read
the brain for the finitely-indexed memory bank.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What have you done with my father?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE; We will return him to you eventually and the police
officer, too.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(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 plying 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 Shuster (sic), 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 had done a through analysis, and found -- I believe
he should speak to this, but one of the objects was obviously what we
consider an unconventional flying object. some of the others were
something else.

KING: Doctor Maccabee, what are we looking at?

MACCABEE: Well, after doing an extensive study of the videotape that I
was sent by the -- 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, was not
able to see anything associated with the radar target, either visually
or with a FLIR, 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: To Johnson City, Tennessee, hello.

CALLER: Hello.

KING: Yes.

CALLER: Hey, I'm sorry. I thought I got cut off.

KING: No, you're on. Go ahead.

CALLER: Okay, from Johnson city, Tennessee.

KING: Go ahead. CALLER: Hey, Mr. King. My father was an MP at Ft Seal,
Oklahoma in the early to mid '50s. He told his friends later on while he
was there when he was out in the middle of nowhere that there were these
incredible lights that used to come in close to the ground. And then
they would go back off in the distance. And would come back in. And then
just absolutely go off in the distance and disappear. And he
subsequently got cancer, but when I was 14 he told me, he said, we are
only a stack. There is so much more going on out there.

KING: Dr. Clancy, how would you respond to that?

CLANCY: I would respond -- I think her father saw something. And I'm
sure it was something compelling in the sky. But what that's called is
that's an anecdotal report. And why it's interesting. it doesn't
constitute any form of objective or scientific evidence.

KING: Wouldn't you have -- Seth, wouldn't you hope they're out there?

SHOSTAK: Of course. In fact, I wouldn't do if kind of work I do which is
to look for signals from these guys, if I didn't think they were out
there. I do think there's a good chance.

KING: By the way, if they allow cell phones on airplanes, will that
screw you up?

SHOSTAK: No. It will annoy me when I travel.

KING: It won't affect you?

SHOSTAK: No, telecommunications satellites are the problem.

KING: Owensboro, Kentucky, hello.

CALLER: Yes. Hi, Larry. Owensboro, Kentucky. I love your show.

KING: Thank you. What's the question?

CALLER: I just wanted to confirm that NASA does have a UFO research
program. And, you know, if they didn't know for sure that there was
things out there that maybe the Roswell incident did happen, why would
they waste all their money and time on this UFO research program?

KING: Yeah Rob, why are they doing it? Rob Swiatek.

SWIATEK: Well, actually I don't know that. I don't know that the
government has any official program looking into UFOs right now, NASA or
classified government project of another agency. I'm not aware that NASA
is officially or informally looking at UFOs at all.

KING: Does anyone know if there's -- no?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.

KING: Seth, no?

SHOSTEK: No.

KING: There's no government money?

SHOSTEK: Not that's visible to anybody.

KING: The Russian government is looking at it?

SHOSTEK: The Russian -- various foreign governments have looked at the
phenomenon. Look, the governments were very interested in the UFO
phenomena in the beginning, because they thought this might be somebody
else's military aircraft. They wanted to know what they were.

When they decided it was a whole laundry list of phenomena that were
very prosaic, they sort of dropped their investigation.

KING: Because if they can fly straight up and down, if they can stop in
midair, go at normal speeds they might travel on light, right?

SHOSTEK: Yes.

KING: There would be an experience unknown to us.

SHOSTEK: Yes. But look, you know, 55 years after Columbus discovers
America, the Indians were not in doubt. They were not having discussions
about whether they were being visited by Europeans. I think if they were
here, we would know it.

KING: Susan?

CLANCY: Can I say one thing, which is that I know for a fact that in
1969 the National Academy of Sciences sponsored a study of all the
available evidence on UFOs. And what they concluded then was that the
least likely explanation for unidentified flying objects is the
hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings.

So no one's denying that there are things in the sky that people are
reporting seeing and we're not sure what they are. But there are, again,
a litany of possible explanations for them. And the least likely is --
was UFOs. I think that's saying a lot.

KING: We'll hear the counter to that. Let me get a break. And get a
counter to that right after this. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Midland, Texas, hello.

CALLER: Hi. My question is for Mr. Schuessler. Did you ever live in the
Midland-Odessa area Texas. And whether or not you did, are you aware of
any credential and/or publicized sightings there in the '60s or '70s?

SCHUESSLER: Yes, there were credible sightings in that area, but I'm not
prepared to pull it right off the top of the head. We do have things on
file from that. (INAUDIBLE) have hundreds of thousands of case on file,
as do a lot of other organizations.

KING: But you never lived there?

SCHUESSLER: And I never lived there. I lived in the Houston area.

KING: What's the story of Betty Cash and Vicky Landry?

SCHUESSLER: Well, that was a very interesting case where two women and a
small boy encountered a UFO in the east Texas, Bonnie Woods. The thing
came down the road in front of them. The car got hot. The two women got
out.

They were eventually irradiated in some manner. And when the object flu
away, it was chased by military helicopters. We did an extensive
investigation on that. And worked with many doctoring around the
country.

The main doctor that worked with Betty for several years to keep her
alive was Dr. Brian McClellan. He said that she had a typical radiation
exposure case including the dermatitis, the hair loss, the GI tract
problems, and all of the other things. She eventually lost her life as a
result of this through anemia and being up on it.

KING: Budd, why would the government -- I know this is the charge by
those who believe -- why would the government hide the information from
the public if they had it? Why?

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, a project and so
on. We don't know anything about it, ultimately. 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. We'll let you know if we hear more about it Thank you and good
night.

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 the conversation I had years ago with the late Carl Sagan, we
agreed that the UFO phenomenon was an extraordinary phenomenon.

If you put together hundreds of pictures which have been analyzed very,
very thoroughly, as we've seen all of the pilot, astronaut, and so on
reports that John Schuessler has been talking about, the abduction
accounts, the physical marks on people's bodies, which doctors have
examined and describe as being the kind of scar you..-

KING: Well, what did Carl say?

HOPKINS: They look like they're the scars you get by a punch biopsy. We
have no idea what it's for.

But at any rate, we agreed that all of this together constitutes an
extraordinary phenomenon and so, 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 sight,
the physical marks, whatever it is, to do any medical work. But who have
very glib explanations of each little piece of evidence that's brought
up. But the cumulation of this evidence is overwhelming.

KING: I will confirm that, because I interviewed the late Dr. Sagan many
times and he was, Seth, open to the possibility of it and to more
investigation of it.

SHOSTAK: I am as well. I am as well. But I think that it's a mistake --
Budd is suggesting that the burden of proof is now outside the people
who are making the claims and I don't think that, that's fair. If
they're going to make the claim, they have to come with the good
evidence.

KING: We'll take a break and be back with more...

HOPKINS: Well, I'm not saying...

KING: Hold it. I'll be right back and pick right up on you, Budd.

As we go to break, I interviewed a woman some years back who claimed to
have been abducted.

Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TERRY MATTHEWS, CLAIMED ALIEN ABDUCTION: There have been abductions that
I have felt as if I was going through a tunnel, almost shaped like a
funnel. It's very fast. There's a lot of light. Sometimes it's a big
black void.

KING: Any method of travel, ship, anything?

MATTHEWS: I do end up in a place where there are hallways and waiting
rooms and examination rooms.

KING: Are you spoken to?

MATTHEWS: I understand and know what they're saying to me. I don't hear
words.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) KING: Get another call. Pittsburgh, hello.

Caller: Hi, Larry.

I am trying -- try on the as brief as I can. I had two experiences
around 1967 in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. And the first experience was
night around 9:00, 9:30 at night. My mother and I went out on the front
porch. We were talking and we both -- I happened to look up and I was 16
at the time, and we saw this dark triangle in the sky.

I mean, it was huge and it was just in the -- it wasn't moving, there
was no sound coming from it. We -- I went out into the garage to look at
it and it started moving towards the house and it went right over the
top of our house back into a wooded area behind us.

And I don't know if there was anything going on at that time in
Pittsburgh, but when I tried to run and get my camera, it was too late.

And the second experience I had maybe a week to two weeks later. As I
was laying in my bed sleeping and something woke me up and I looked up
at the window that was above my bed and it's about two stories off the
ground and I saw these two figures looking at me through the window. And
they were dressed with dark hats, very pale skin and they had dark coats
on.

KING: How do you know you weren't dreaming?

Caller: Pardon me?

KING: How do you know you weren't dreaming.

Caller: Because -- well let me finish and I'll explain that.

KING: We don't have enough time. How do you know you weren't dreaming?

Caller: I know I was awake because I panicked and when I finally could
finally move, I ran into the other room. I was not sleeping. And...

KING: Dr. Clancy, how do you explain it?

CLANCY: I mean...

KING: Are you saying she didn't see that triangular object?

CLANCY: No, in fact, what she just said, the last thing she said, when I
could finally move, which pretty much --I'd say that's an episode of
sleep paralysis. It's very common. People wake up in the middle of the
night. They're paralyzed for a few moments, up to a minute. And they
have a tendency to see strange things in the room, et cetera. It's a
very common, non pathological de-synchrony in sleep cycles and it scares
people.

KING: Rob Swiatek...

Rob, what are crop circles?

SWIATEK: I don't know what crop circles are, Larry. They're imprints in
field in England. Some of them are a hoax. There's no doubt about that.
The vast majority of them are very intricate designs and I'm not so sure
we know how they are formed. I don't know that. It might not be hoaxers,
but there doesn't appear to be any overt UFO connection here. We don't
see UFOs in conjunction with crop circles very often. Extraordinarily
rarely, actually.

KING: Seth, what do you think?

SHOSTAK: I find it remarkable to think that the aliens would come all
this distance to carve graffiti in our wheat.

KING: All right. How do you explain it then, otherwise?

SHOSTAK: Most of them -- they're all don at night and the usually on the
weekends.

KING: pranksters?

SHOSTAK: Yes. It sounds to me, either that or the aliens have strange
union rules.

KING: Budd Hopkins, do you think we're going to ever have proof, 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 in this case, we have
just hundreds and hundreds of abduction case where's people are driving
cars. There may be three people. They all remember exactly the same
thing.

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 --

KING: Why.

We're running out of time.

HOPKINS: And he was -- he had been abducted and returned. So...

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.

HOPKINS: May I answer that, Larry?

KING: I'm only kidding, Budd.

We're going to do another show on this. We've run out of time, but I
know there are answers.

We thank John Schuessler, Dr. Susan Clancy, Seth Shostak, Budd Hopkins,
Rob Swiatek and Bruce Maccabee.