Leslie Kean
Appearances
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Even then, we didn't know that they were underwater. I mean, we just talked about them coming in from space. So the underwater part was another new element that we learned from Dave Fravor some months or maybe a year or two later.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So but we did not know about psionics, people calling them in or technology that, you know, frequencies that that brings in the UFO or people controlling the technology with their minds. I know the government has has been studying that. That's really interesting. So the answer is, you know, we didn't know very much about that in the beginning.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Yeah, you know, all my books really kind of fell into my lap. It's very strange. They say that, you know, writers don't pick subjects. Subjects pick writers. I mean, it's kind of a Zen thing. And it was true in my case. Every book I did was not the end of a process of me looking around for a subject, but something happened. that sort of forced me to do a book about it.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
And it was the same in this case. I was in Texas for the New York Times And I used to you know haunt the used book shops and in one of them I picked up a copy of Passport to the Cosmos which was John Mack's second book. John Mack was the Harvard psychiatrist who famously learned about accounts of abduction from Bud Hopkins and decided at great risk to his lofty reputation at Harvard
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
to study it, to study the phenomenon. So I picked up this book. I was intrigued by the idea of an eminent Harvard faculty member getting involved in accounts of abduction by alien beings. And I thought it would be good to interview this guy. I didn't know, by the way, he was already very famous, but he had not come into my realm at all. I was a hard news reporter.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
I was covering national politics in Texas and national events. It's just not something I knew anything about. But I did think he was worth a story, very interesting. And as fate would have it, a few days later, I picked up the New York Times to find out he had been run over and killed in London. He had gone there for a conference on Lawrence of Arabia.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He had written a Pulitzer Prize winning book, a biography of T.H. Lawrence. And 30 years later, he went back to London and he came out of the underground, looked the wrong way and got killed. uh, hit by a car. A lot of, you know, at the time it was, um, uh, you know, uh, the conspiracists had a field day, uh, you know, but it turned, I checked it out very carefully. It was a complete hit and run.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
The guy didn't know who he was hitting. Uh, Mac was disoriented. He was, it was late at night. He couldn't see well. He had trouble seeing anyway. Um, So now I had an interest in John Mack, but he was dead. So I did go to the family quite quickly, and of course the family was in no mood to discuss a book about John Mack. They were grieving.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He was just about 75 years old, but he was not expected to die, unfortunately. The family was in deep mourning. But we stayed in touch, and eventually I convinced them to let me do a book, and they turned over all his archives to me. And, I mean, as a trained New York Times reporter, this became very important to me because, you know, it was one thing to imagine
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
his life, it was another thing to be able to document every stage of it through his papers, which I was able to do. Even his therapy sessions with his therapist. As a psychiatrist, he had to be analyzed. And he went through analysis and he taped those analysis sessions. So I know really his innermost thoughts with his therapist. And he wrote a lot. He was not a secretive guy.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He put everything out there. So I had all this material. and I decided to do a book, and I didn't know how long it would take me. It ended up taking 17 years, which was much longer than I expected and much more arduous.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Every project, every book, every article, as you guys know, is more work than you imagine, but this was a tremendous amount more work than I expected because I had to go into the whole process UFO phenomenon and the whole history of UFOs and all the other people who were doing work like Stan Friedman and Bud Hopkins. And I mean, it was a whole universe that had to be explored.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Anyway, so that's how I was. I happened to be in the end stages, the last few years of my John Mack research, when this opportunity came up with Lesley. So that's why you could say I was well-positioned to pursue the story in The New York Times.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Well, that's the hardest thing to get because this phenomenon does not lend itself to documentation for whatever reason. At the crucial moment, the camera doesn't work, the image doesn't come out. You guys know from your research at Skinwalkers how the
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
that were pointed at, you know, whatever was out there failed at the crucial moment or the guts were ripped out of one and the other one was trained on it, didn't pick it up. I mean, that is extraordinary that technology always seems to fail. when we're at the brink of discovering something. So I think the hardest part of the story is documenting these interactions with these abduction accounts.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So what we can do, though, is use our technology or the government technology to at least document the objects. So as I said before, that is a big step forward, is that the government is now acknowledging that these things are real. You know, for a long time, they were dismissed as hallucinations. People were crazy. There were reflections off the desert floor.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Now the government is saying, yeah, there are these objects and we have the technology, which we never had before, of capturing them on video. So I think that's where the emphasis is. The other stuff you just can't document. I get accounts all the time, people calling me up and saying, listen, this happened to me, but I can't do anything with it because there's no proof. So that's where we are.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
But the other part of it, the technology, is really moving ahead pretty quickly. And this stuff as you know that the government has in its coffers that has never been revealed to the public. That's what we're hoping we can get more of because this stuff does exist and the public deserves to know about it.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Yeah. No, that's clearly the biggest mystery around. But it is the most intractable. And there seems to be no way of documenting it. But what we do have now, not only do we have the military videos that are coming out, but we have whistleblowers coming forward. like David Grush and Jake Barber and others, who are coming forward with really fascinating accounts of interacting with the hardware.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
And I think that's where the emphasis has to be because there's no shortage of accounts of individual people, ordinary people, interacting with other intelligence and seeing – having alien encounters, et cetera. But it's a dead end for now. We can't document it. We can't prove it. And, you know, as I said, I get these accounts every day, people coming forward with stories.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
But what are you going to do with that? The other stuff, the military stuff, is really much more accessible. And I think that's where we have to put our focus for now.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He was, and I was gripped by his story. He really risked his reputation. He came from an interesting family. He came from a rather wealthy family. His father was a professor. You know, talk about the strange things that happened. I went to City College. The City College of New York was a public institution, very highly regarded.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
And when I was there, John Mack's father was in the English department. Now, I knew his name. I didn't know him. I didn't have a course with him. I certainly didn't ask him about his son, who was at that point not yet investigating UFOs, studying psychiatry. But anyway... So Mac came from this fairly prominent family.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Interestingly enough, his mother died when he was eight months old of appendicitis. She was pretty prominent herself, came from the Rheingold family of beer brewers.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
and so he came from a kind of a wealthy background and he was a real leader in psychiatry he was a very he was a social activist he believed in trying to make the world better he thought he could bring peace to the Middle East he met with Yasser Arafat he lectured in the Middle East and he marched against nuclear weapons he was arrested in your neck of the woods up there and
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
at some of the test sites, the atomic test sites. So he was very active, politically active, and As, again, often happens, he got interested in these strange healing methods where you relax or you go into hypnosis and your body can project itself, astral projection. And that was his introduction to the world, the paranormal world. He didn't believe in it at first at all. But...
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
he met the Stan Groff who was experimenting with all these hypnosis style technique of projecting your body and relaxing and at one of these sessions in California where else he ran into this woman who was telling him I have a friend Bud Hopkins and he's interviewing all these people who were abducted by aliens and Mac thought it was a lot of nonsense and
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
But, again, one of the strange things that happened in life, he was in New York, and he decided to call up Bud Hopkins pretty much out of the blue after dismissing it. And Hopkins showed him – Bud had written these books about – uh, encounters, uh, very strange encounters that he, he, he was an artist. He, he was not a psychiatrist like Mac. He was an artist.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Uh, but he got interested in the subject because he had spotted a UFO in Cape Cod. So he started meeting these people and hypnotized, studied hypnosis, you know, put them in a relaxed state and heard their stories. And then he meets John Mac and he said, gee, John, you're the psychiatrist. You know, what do you make of this?
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So he gave John a bunch of letters from these people who were responding to Bud's books about, you know, abductions. And John was totally intrigued. And he had the courage, as I said, to pursue it. You know, he could have said, look, this is going to kill me at Harvard. I mean, but he got interested. He collected his own group of people with these stories.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Again, ordinary people, men, women, children, in some cases, two year olds who, you know, said, little man, take me up in the sky. You know, I mean, little kids don't make up, you know, detailed stories like that. Anyway, he was intrigued as a psychiatrist who, by the way, he was no naive pushover for these stories. He had investigated and written a book on nightmares.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He had studied all kinds of aberrant states of adults and children. So, you know, he was not, you know, some rube who, you know, came across this information and decided to, you know, get good publicity for himself and jump into it. On the contrary, he was reluctant. But the stories would not let him go. And so that was the beginning. And then he started, you know, he got his own group together.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
And again, he was not ashamed to tell Harvard pretty soon after he started collecting these stories what was going on. And, of course, that got him into a lot of trouble at Harvard. We can talk about that. But he had the courage of his convictions, and he jumped into it. And, by the way, this... phenomenon remains a mystery. He never solved it. We have not solved it.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
We don't know any more than he did. Just that ordinary people tell very convincing stories with a little bit fragmentary evidence to back it up. Not much, a little. of encounters with other intelligence. So that was the course I followed in this book. I thought that he was very courageous, and he left a wonderful record of his research, which helped me in writing the book.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
I did. I mean, he wasn't, again, what made him interesting, he was not a perfect person. He cheated on his wife. He was naive at times. But all in all, he was, you know, the model for the, you know, the... human being who goes out on a search, the questing human being that Joseph Campbell wrote about. And I thought he was really remarkable in that way. But he was not a saint.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
And that's what made him even more interesting. He struggled with kind of a sex addiction. He alienated his wife, who was a wonderful supporter. But he was not dishonest. I mean, he was pretty open about his attraction to other women. So that added to his allure for me. He was a fully rounded human being.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Yeah, I think that's important because he struggled with his humanity, and again, he had disagreements with other people in this field. The big question, as he learned more and more about it, was were these things happening in a reality that we can recognize, or were they happening in some other reality That we can't access.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
And he eventually had a kind of a break with Bud Hopkins and Dave Jacobs, who said, oh, these things are real. These things are happening in everyday reality. People are really getting abducted. And the more Mac looked into it. The more he said, you know, I don't know if these things, I mean, we don't see people getting abducted on the street, you know.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
I mean, so maybe it's happening in some other reality that we don't understand. So he was equivocal on that. And I thought that was interesting. He was really troubled himself. as to where this was happening. How could this be? And he was as confused as anyone. It's not like he was certain. That's the thing. He was not an ideologue. He was not a... propagandist.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He was troubled, but he was honest enough to admit what he had come across from these accounts from ordinary people telling the most detailed accounts. And by the way, when he would put them in a light stage of hypnosis. and hear their accounts. They were terrified, these people, and that was very convincing to him. He was a psychiatrist.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He knew when people were faking, but when these people would recount their abduction, oh, they're sticking the needle in, oh, my God, they're doing this, they're doing that, he... realized that they weren't making it up. Whatever had happened to these people was real to them and seemed to be real.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He examined and rejected all the other explanations that they were fabricating, they were making it up, they were confused. These were people with a strong sense of reality. He checked them all out. They weren't harboring other trauma that they were transferring into abduction. He heard all these – and by the way, you pushed my button here.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
I'm going to say that the so-called skeptics, the debunkers who – are ready to ridicule Mack and others and say, oh, it's clear that this is, you know, these people are fabricating or they're hiding a sexual trauma. They do not know what they're talking about. Mack looked at all these other explanations. and they don't fit. That's the problem.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
It is a complete mystery what happened to these people. But they cannot be explained by any explanations that are readily at hand. And this is from an expert psychiatrist, but others who have looked at it have come to the same conclusion. So the so-called skeptics who are ready with an explanation, they can explain it immediately.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Oh, it's clear that these people are, you know, it's a sexual trauma that they're You know, it's not true. It remains a complete mystery.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Yeah. And, you know, he looked at all the other explanations. As I said, this is why the so-called skeptics have it wrong. Mack looked at all these things in order because at first he couldn't believe in himself. He was a skeptic in the beginning. He ridiculed Bud Hopkins at first, saying he must be crazy to believe this stuff. But as John started to look into it, he was more and more intrigued.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So first of all, the phenomenon seems to occur to people across the spectrum, not only in the United States, all over the world, young, old, men, women, not to any particular group of people. And as I said, including young children, who have not been to the movies to see space movies or alien movies. They haven't read alien books.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
They would say things that really seem to come out of their experience. And we can get to the stuff in... The Rui in, you know, outside Zimbabwe, the Rua Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, you know, sighting, which came up later. Anyway, so so first of all, he said these things are happening to ordinary people all over the world. And the accounts are basically consistent, which is interesting.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
They're not cookie-cutter. They're not all the same. It's not like everyone's reading off a script. But there's a certain consistency to these accounts. These experiences are happening to people all over the world. They describe being in their bedrooms at night or not even at night, riding in a car. and seeing a bright light and then losing track of time and then encountering these beings, etc.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So the accounts were consistent. They were happening to people You know, all over the world of all kinds of different groups. These people had no other traumas. I mean, they were not perfect people. They had sexual experiences. They had been raped. They had had been victims of crime. They'd had, you know, trouble with their family members. So these were not perfect. extraordinary, perfect people.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
These were ordinary people with all the baggage that ordinary people have. But these experiences, like a sexual trauma, don't translate to the kind of encounters that they were relating to Mac. So, you know, one by one, he was eliminating all the possibility, the fabrication. When these people were recounting their experiences and reliving the trauma, really terrified.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
They could not be making this up. Mac said that based on his experience as a psychiatrist. So he had some expertise to draw on. So he put all this stuff together and he said all the explanations that have been offered don't add up. So what is it? He said, I don't know. But it ain't that and it ain't that. You know, it's something else.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So anyway, that's how he came to the conclusion that, you know, he was in some very strange world. And that's what gripped him.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
we're all trained in journalism in following the facts. And there's certain facts we have at hand. We know that there are objects in the sky and under the water that defy explanation. There are pictures of them. They've been detected. They have been documented. And the government basically admits, yeah, these things exist. We don't know about them. After that,
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
you really get into another realm of speculation. So if you're a journalist pursuing facts, there's certain things you can confirm and verify as fact, and then you sort of get into an area where you can't verify, and there are no hard facts to back it up. So that's the dilemma with this whole subject. And I don't want to belittle the progress we've made.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
We now agree, even the government, that these objects exist. We can't explain them. We can capture images and parameters in our sensitive devices, which we never had before, by the way, years ago. So we have equipment that can document that these things exist. That's a big plus. Now, Who's piloting them? Are they intelligent? Where do they come from? Why are they here? What do they want with us?
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Those are all other questions. that veer into another realm where we don't have the explanations. We have a lot of anecdotal accounts of people who say they've been taken, but no pictures, et cetera. So I think that's the dilemma I face as a journalist, you guys face too,
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
that it doesn't mean we're not interested in these accounts of abduction or who's piloting these things if they're being piloted. Why are they here? What do they want with us? Why do they focus on military sites, atomic sites, as they seem to, as it's been documented? That's been documented, by the way. Why are they warning us away from atomic adventurism?
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
We don't know, but they do seem to focus on On atomic sites and they've shut off the technology at times. So that's documented. So, you know, you hit on a central dilemma with this whole subject, which is certain stuff we can we can document and and and report and other stuff is pure speculation. But we can't jump ahead, you know.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
We can't pretend to know and jump ahead or beat ourselves up because we can't jump ahead. We just can't. We don't have that information yet. Maybe we'll get it. We got a lot so far that we didn't have before. But we don't have the most important part. Are we alone? Are we alone in the universe? Where do these things come from? Who's putting them together?
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Are these grays so-called, are they human? I mean, are they beings or are they robotic? Are they mechanics or are they actual beings? All these things we don't know. We do seem to have, we, the U.S. government, and maybe the Russians and maybe the Chinese, do seem to have actual retrieved graft. That's pretty much been documented, at least according to people like David Grush and Jake Barber.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So and yes, maybe, you know, we've been able to reverse engineer some of those things, according to, you know, various people come forward whistleblowers. So, again, that takes us up to an area of the unknown. But the crucial thing that you put your finger on is what's all the other stuff? And we just don't know.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
I did it sort of a little bit ironically because he did reject that title. It does connote somebody who's naive and sort of latches on to things without proper investigation. But I chose it provocatively because I knew people who respected him and liked him, including myself. would also maybe bristle a little bit at that title.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
But I use it, as I explain at the end of the book, in the way that he believed in pursuing the truth wherever it took him. He believed in fighting for a better world, in marching against nuclear weapons, in trying to get peace in the Middle East. Talk about a difficult topic. You know, in case you haven't noticed, we haven't gotten to peace in the Middle East. He met with Yasser Arafat.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He gave lectures, you know, in Lebanon and all over. And, yeah, we didn't get too close to peace. But so he believed in all these things. So that's the sense I like to use the word. And even though, as you point out, he would not have he certainly didn't want to be called known as a believer.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
They came down really hard on him. It was interesting. Of course, John, because he came from a wealthy upbringing and he was overconfident, according to Bud Hopkins, he was supremely confident in his ability to attract women, to win over skeptics. He was born privileged. He didn't have to struggle too much growing up. So he was pretty, as I said, very, very confident.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So he wasn't too concerned that Harvard would crack down on him. He actually gave lectures at Harvard. And I talk about a guy who showed up at one of his lectures and was flabbergasted that he was hearing about, you know, abductions and aliens. And he had a woman on, John Mack had a woman on stage reliving her abductions, screaming. And it was at Harvard. And he didn't care what they thought.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
It's really one of the best observed cases of a landing. I mean, along with the... Betty and Barney Hill case, which really started off the whole abduction cycle. And by the way, you know, it seems to have started in the 60s somehow, for whatever reason, we don't know why, abductions seem to have surfaced then.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Well, they keep putting up the original videos that we had, you know, the Navy videos. And, yeah, I mean, we keep getting told that we changed the paradigm. I try not to believe all that stuff, but it was satisfying.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
We had an exclusive source, basically, who gave us slides that were shown to, you know, within the Pentagon, showing or naming, actually mentioning recovery, material recoveries of UFO remains, retrievals. This phenomenon does not lend itself to documentation for whatever reason.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Well, as you know, George and Jeremy, timing has a lot to do with it, and we were fortunate to come in at a very good time. I mean, for example, today, with everything going on with Trump, it's not a great time to get UFO stories, UAP stories into the paper. There's just too much noise out there, too much competition.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So this happened to come at a good time, and I must say we had, you know, some very good people at the Times. I had left... the staff officially in 2009, but I kept up my contacts. And in 2017, the stars came into alignment. Dean Baquet was the executive editor. I went to him. I knew him. You know the story. Leslie had gone down to Washington, D.C.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
and had this meeting with Lou Elizondo and others and learned about the secret program. We called it ATIP. We now know it really had a you know, earlier incarnation as OSAP, which you guys have never let me forget. But so she found out about this program and that, you know, the government was supposedly out of the UFO business with Blue Book at the end of 69. But of course, they weren't.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
They kept the a very high level of interest. So Leslie found out about that and told me and even though I was off the staff, I had been working on my John Mack book since basically 2004.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So it was not a topic that was totally foreign to me but she surprised me by telling me that the government was very much in the UFO business and not only that but Lou Elizondo had submitted a letter of resignation to Jim Mattis, Defense Secretary, because he was so ticked off at the opposition he was getting. So there were a lot of elements to the story that were really of high interest.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So I took it to Dean Baquet, and to his credit, He jumped on it pretty quickly. He put us together with an editor for the Washington Bureau. We laid it out. We had everything on the record, which is something we can talk about. I mean, we were very insistent on, you know, the Times standards are very high. I don't have to tell you that for getting especially a story like this into the paper.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So we had it all on the record, named sources, no unnamed sources. And they put us together with Helene Cooper in the Washington Bureau, which was a big plus because she knew the Pentagon. Not that they would say anything, but at least we knew who to go to. So to answer your question more directly, it was not as difficult as you might think. Yes, the times had been very hostile traditionally.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
to the whole UFO subject, with some notable exceptions. But this story sailed through and got on the front page on a Sunday. You couldn't ask for better play than that.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Well, maybe it's a good thing we didn't know all that stuff. You're right. But I got to tell you, when you look at the story, it really was very tightly written and constrained. We did not have a lot of space. So a lot of stuff that we knew for example, about retrievals and things like that, never made it into that story.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Not that we would have gone there necessarily, but we had to keep really a narrow focus. And with every story we did then and since for The Times and others, we left out a lot of stuff, some by design, but mostly because of space constraints. So maybe The Times did us a favor by confining us into a fairly narrow space. you
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Well, we learned so much since, it's kind of hard to remember what we knew then. But, you know, as a journalist, you're always – I got to tell you, I got some advice from a colleague years ago when I got – this is a little sideline, but I got put on the –
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
media beat briefly when the media guy was going on vacation and it happened to come right at the time of a job action against the New York Times. So this thing drops into my lap. I'm the New York, I'm the media reporter when the Times is basically on strike. And how do you handle that kind of news about your employer? So this guy gave me a bit of advice.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
He said, Ralph, don't write everything you know. And I took that to heart because I knew a lot of stuff about the times that I didn't put into that, you know, those stories about the job action. So it's always a selective process. So, you know, we know a lot of stuff, Leslie and I, as you guys know a lot of stuff. Not all of it is well sourced.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Some of it you know on background, some of it you know off the record. Yeah, that comes into play. But we didn't know a lot of the things then that we know now. I mean, we made a lot of progress. This is something really worth noting that the government has come a long way from the days when, you know, it described anyone with a sighting as basically nuts.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Now they're saying they're encouraging military personnel to come forward with accounts. And so there's been a lot of change, you know, within the Pentagon. But I got to say that there was not a lot of stuff we knew that we kept out. We'd heard stories about retrievals, for example, but we fleshed a lot of that out since then. And you've tried to get that story on, right?
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Well, we did, and we did get it in piecemeal. We did a story for The Times sometime later, a couple of years later, and we did get in the retrievals. It came in, if you remember the story, kind of obliquely. And a very good part of that story, we had actually slides naming recoveries.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
We had an exclusive source, basically, who gave us slides that were shown to, you know, within the Pentagon showing or naming recoveries. actually mentioning recovery, material recoveries of UFO remains, retrievals. We got that into the Times, but the slides only got in with another story that we did about how we got the story.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
So I guess in shorthand, the stuff gets in, but not always the way you want it to get in. And that was a particularly difficult lift, retrievals, as it remains.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
Well, as I said, I mean, there was not too much that we knew then that we've learned a lot since. But, you know, you raise an interesting point. How much do you put in? to a story, I would say that if you have it confirmed and you have it on the record with a name source, there's not much I would leave out. I'm not trying to spare the American people any hard evidence.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
The problem is getting that hard evidence or at least getting people talking about it on the record. On the other hand, you're right. We were aware that this is a difficult subject. We didn't want to get too much ahead of ourselves. I mean, the basic news was important, that the Pentagon had a secret UFO unit. After years of denying an interest in the subject, the Pentagon was, in fact,
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
hunting for UFOs and getting evidence, collecting evidence, very important evidence. That in itself we thought was a big story. The question of retrievals of non-human remains, things like that, we hadn't really gotten to that point yet. I'm not sure if we'd had it, we would have put it in. I don't know. We didn't have it.
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
KABOOM! The Explosive UFO Story That Changed The World - Guest : Ralph Blumenthal (PART 1)
It is wild. We did not know that stuff then. I mean, the idea of calling in UFOs is a fairly new phenomenon. We haven't really checked that out. We've heard the stories. We were in contact with people. We're looking into that along with a lot of other stuff. But we certainly didn't know it then. I mean, it was enough to think that there were these objects coming in.