Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth With Annie Jacobsen 20170403

Interviewed at length for that book, of course everything about area 51 is a puzzle inside of a puzzle. That is even debated. The actual origins, the originaa story of 51. Host so what was going on in 1951 . Guest the Nuclear Commission was doing testing in the middle of the desert. Come they wanted to keep what theyre doing secret and the cia was coming into existence with its programs. The two merged in this idea of if you have a secret base inside of a secret place you can do seeker program. So this is not a military operation necessarily . Area 51 has every organization you can imagine there over the decades. Military intelligence committee, intelligence commission, so everyone has their foot in area 51. Host what was operation paperclip . Guest the idea of my book i get from books ive written before. When i was finishing up area 51, i learned about some nazi scientists who are here working on programs. I found it fascinating, in particular a fellow by the name of. This is a very important airchnl force, Technical Intelligence person. When he retired in the 70s he was given the Defense Departments distinguished civilian service award. Thats incredibly high honor to get from the pentagon. Ii, h when i looked into the past and that during world war ii he had been one of the most important Technical Intelligence officers. He was given the highest award that you could be given. I thought, how does this happen . How do you work from one side and the work for the other side. That is why i wrote operation paperclip. That was a springboard into that narrative story. What host but what was operation paperclip . Was it to bring nazi scientists to the u. S. . Af guest yes, we brought as many as 1600 nazi scientists to create our Weapons Program. This is something that rings up a lot of moral questions. What i found most intriguing about writing that book, perhaps all my books is trying to maintain a neutral position and looking at both sides of thehear argument. Eople wi many people will tell you paperclip was imperative. We had to bring the nazi scientists to the United States in order to be back the russians. Others will tell you, how could we possibly have brought these nazis here, some of them were war criminals. There is dod weapons policy for you in a nutshell. Its extremely complicated and always two sides of thee hos argument. Ber thre host what is the pentagons brain . Guest that is book number three for me. That idea came from paperclip when my editor, i was finishing with paperclip and one of the most famous operation paperclip scientists created the Rocket Program and then really responsible for the Apollo Program. But he was a nazi scientist . He had been hitlers rocket builder. My editor at little brown asked me when i was finishing a paperclip, what went on with him in such and such a year. I looked into it and found out that this was in 1957. This new agency was emerging and it was called our path. Ec the advanced Research Project agency. We now know it as darpa. When they were beginning the organization it was who is the best scientist in america could lead the program. To lead all the americans in military technology and was called blue sky research. He was interviewed for the job but his caveat to take the job was that hell take it but i need to bring 12 of my colleagues from the Rocket Program. So that was a lie for the pentagon. They passed on brown being darpas first record. The way it came about is calling it the pentagons brain was realizing the Defense Department is looking it the great mine. Thats what they are concerned with. Who will lead us in technology f of the future. Host what are some things that have come out of darpa . Guest you know i name it. The most famous is the internet which was recycled the arpanet. Technologies like gps. Laser weapon. What t there is no and its what the pentagon produces. There is reason to say that Artificial Intelligence is aa darpa product, biotechnology. This is important to thinka about. Ce darpa is the most powerful and productive military Science Agency in the world. So few people know about it. That is pretty much why wrote the book in a nutshell. It was like, how can this agency be so significant, changing and shaping our world if you will. Yet, it is Public Perception is close to zero. Host psychokinesis. What is it . Guest book number four for me. I just published it last week. It is the idea, the book is called phenomena and its about the governments investigations into extraSensory Perception. En in psychokinesis. ExtraSensory Perception, gaining knowledge through meanings other than the five known senses. Psychokinesis. The alleged ability to move matter with the mine. These are very controversialal subjects and subjects that manyc scientists will tell you a pseudoscience. Why is interested is having come off of a hard science book, the pentagons brain, on the other side of the spectrum was whats called squishy science. The pentagon, the Defense Department, the Intelligence Community are interested in both of the subjects. Sote my. An host so taxpayer dollars are spent studying psychokinesis . Guest yes. All roads lead back to the nazis. I find. Certainly when im investigating and reporting on defensede department weaponspartme progra. Intelligence community and intelligence connection program. Esp psychokinesis leads back toh the nazis as well. Were talking decades of research in the area going on today. The original programs came from the idea that after the war we had an intelligence connect collection unit. It began, in the end when the war was still going on. We sent our finest scientist to try and capture nazi technology. We did. This is the link between all of my books. So, one of the documents we found that links up to the book phenomena was part of the Science Organization called [inaudible] they were investigating extrasensory psychokinesis. The documents became interestede too many people in the military community. Guess who got the other half . The russians. Anything that we knew they had as well we were worried about who would win the race. That is how the psychic arms race began. Same way over and the hard Science Department you had the rocket arms race. That idea of getting man into space began with the captured nazi documents, dts and literar scientists. Was your career to be a historian . Not at all. Fate and circumstance intervene in ones own life. That is why its such an interesting concept for me to write about. About how circumstance has a role in the past and the path that one is on. I wanted to be a novelist when i was younger. I went away to boarding school with a typewriter when i was 15. I was going to be the Great American novel us. Decades past and that was not a the case. One of my mentors said to me, stop making things up. Pursue the truth. It is the truth of matters. She also pointed out that ahead difficulty following direction. And that if i worked with an editor at a newspaper or magazine, i would learn how too follow direction. That is exactly what i did. It was extraordinary helpful. I tell anyone who is struggled with writing to do that. If youre willing to take criticism about your work and work with very smart individuals who can help you streamline your ideas and pull out whatsther p important and send you another paths and suggest to interview different people, that becomes a powerful journey. When you bring other great minds into the mix. Then you wind up where youre headed. How did you get started on area 51. Guest that was eight and circumstance. I think luck comes into play. It was interesting writing the book on extraSensory Perceptiona and psychokinesis. A lot of the scientists to lean toward the supernatural talk about love. They talk about coincidence and they say these are these fall into the category of extraSensory Perception. Its a squishy science concept to think about. But i like thinking about it because of the question you brought up. This one get a lucky break . You could say fortune favors the prepared mind. If youre always reading and writing and thinking and working as subjects interesting to you then circumstance intervenes and youre on your way. Specifically with area 51 i was at a dinner party. I was seated next to a gentleman who i had known for eight or nine years. He was a distant family member. A always under the impression thaw he was an aircraft designer because i knew he worked for lockey. He leaned over to me and he said, a boy, have i got an interesting story for you. Te at the time i was reporting onhi terrorism. He said the cia just declassified my lifes work. I invented stealth technologyd e was the physicist to lead the team. Macros back to an eisenhower was president. This is a remarkable league for a reporter to get. I went to the cia and low and behold, they had just declassified this Aircraft Carrier called oxcart. That took place at area 51. It then i began to work with lovick talking to them about his roleie in this incredible aircraft. I learned very quickly that there is a back story to thisbao back story. There is a lot of tangents whoil are super interesting. S that is how i got the idea of that book. Went to the larger public to become aware of very 51 . Guest thats an interesting question in terms of u. S. National security. When you think of a powerful important site that area 51 was, the fact that it remained almost unknown to the generalal population until the earlylyearl 1990s is astonishing. Talk about being able to keep a secret, make the analogy in the book about the Manhattan Project, same idea. Vice president harry truman did not know about. Or congress. Nt guest i think secret keeping was very interesting but to your question to your question aboutf adam lazar, he squeaked this news out which landed on the edge of conspiracy. And then area 51 became known. I think that is the origins of e an extraordinary amount of Conspiracy Theory that grew outi of that basin still exists. Still things going on there now. Host who was robert lazar . Guest he was an interesting engineer. He was at the basin saw thingsbu that he believed. Host he was working there . Guest yes. Although people will tell you never work there. The myths inside the puzzles in the conundrums. But, he stood by his position that he set sans alien. And then you get into these realms of propaganda and did they trust someone up and make them look like an alien. This idea of mythology and misinformation and disinformation is part and partial and really to all of the books that i have written. The subjects are conducive of that. You talk about signing an oath if you are working at area 51. Is a called area 51 by people who work there as well or is that. Yes, no. Originally when i was interviewing the scientist who work there they would call it the ranch. There were codenames for it. And of course was fascinating is the actual word, area 51 was classified when i was writing the book. It has since been declassified because president obama referred to it publicly. Documents we when i was looking at the documents earlier you had readda along on their be a small word redacted like blocked over. If you looked up to the light thats area 51. Out of Something Like 7000 pages of documents that i reviewed i found two places where someone forgot to block out area 51. Se it was an aha moment. Appene host lazar and las vegas television, what happened . He went on tv and made thiss claim and said there is alien Tl Technology and an alien out there. People have been fascinated with ufos for the millennia. This was like setting up a match and people, the story built. I think that has since the, great point of condemning is contention and why area 51 is on the lockdown issue. What kind of cooperation did you get from various Government Agencies that you worked with on this . Or try to work with. Every book is different. Every book is different. There is a dance that is done with journalists because remember, the basic job of the journalist is to inform the public. In spirit youre not supposed to have an opinion. So, one would think you would want to work with transparent elements of a government to also make things no. I find in my experience that the pr office of these agencies they only want to present a certain message. That is a message not a fact. So where i do most of my reporting is an interviewing scientist who are retired and work on significant programs for these agencies. They are acutely aware of what they can speak of and what they cannot because it stillill cl classified. Because i write about cold war programs, things that were incredibly interesting and involved extraordinary measures decades ago, everyone wanted too know about them them but cannot. When they become declassified the public moves on. I find that by tracking down the scientist, they are willing and happy to share their stories about the incredible programs. People have lost interest. Its the idea that its important to know the past to safeguard the future. Thats the greatest joy with working with defense scientist who are dedicated patriots and believe in what they did. E also as they get older willing to share the pitfalls in the failures. In the press office of any given military does not want to talk about failure. I th thats a danger in that. Its not to ridicule a failure, but rather to demonstrate that failure as part of success. That we must be very careful without trying to cover up failures. How much of what goes on in area 51 is still classified . Host or dont you know . Guest sometimes i wrote the book on area 51, but if you imagine an iceberg and how much of the iceberg you see and how much is below the surface, im guessing, but if you planted a flag at the top of the iceberg, thats probably what i reported in a 450 page book. What has gone on and what continues to go on boggles the mind. We could talk about Tunnel Technology for three more hoursl when i think of whats going on an area 51 there tunnel systems at the base. Cant its a great mystery. I cant wait to write area 52. Host have you become theile expert on foia request . Guest i write so many foia request and they often come in the mail with a by ten envelopes. They send the corner an essay or dod. Or caa. Their thin envelopes because that means you open up one sheet of paper and says the responses sorry we couldnt findndevery information. Every now and then, you get a bigger envelope and that was a great moment of joy. And thats what happened with phenomenon. I came home one day and theres a thick manila packet from the Central Intelligence agency. A foia request have been granted and there is almost a thousand pages of documents. The on these espn psychokinesis programs and that became the basis of phenomenon. Thats where i learned about the apollo astronaut, ed mitchell was going through esp tests going to the moon. The informatione was priceless. Host must go to phenomenon them. You visited Edgar Mitchell and first of all, tell us who he was. You visited him in his last part of life. Guest the way i got the idea to write phenomena was researching pentagon spring. I was looking at the apollo image library. So much of darpa has to do with space. It was the launching point of the organization. I found this image and it showed an astronaut standing on the moon reading a document. I thought, oh my god this is incredible image. You have advanced science, space travel and proto technology, writing, reading, and this one image. I had to know what that astronaut was reading on the moon. First i found out it was Edgar Mitchell of apollo for teen. The six man to step on theren moon. Guest so i went to interview him and i asked him what he was reading on the moon. And he said he was reading a map. It gets even better. A man on the moon reading a map of the moon. Why was he reading the map . Because he was lost. That to me is a brilliant, beautiful concept. Its so human that speaks to what youre talking about. Failures. How do you define failure . You have a Program Failure but then you have individual failu failure. That often leads to people being lost or feeling like they areana lost. Because i write narrative non fiction and its characterbased i care about the people i write about. I want to hear their story. And how it becomes a metaphorw for the bigger story. With mitchell, when he told me the story been lost on the moon its remarkable. What he said is that some of the apollo 14 mission, that comes after apollo 13, right, the failed moon mission. O if so much pressure on them to perform. The geologists wanted them to go to cohen crater and pull outd samples, rock samples and believed these rock samples could reveal earths origins and the moon. What a concept. You can have much more pressure on you. So that was their mission. They fly 240,000 miles to get to the moon. Mitchell was the pilot, he lands within 87 feet of the target. Itt and then they get lost, locally. Trying to find cohen crater. It doesnt get more human. When they found out there are lost in it speaks to many issues of perspective, where do you think you are versus where areeo you really in that environment they became confused and told nasa they could read all these transcripts, were lost we thinke were here there nasas trying to help them. Sa nasa give them 30 more minuteses and they cannot find their way to the crater. They were told to go home. So, hearing from mitchell about this disappointment of going all the way there and missing what turned out to be the target by about a thousand feet, its amazing. He shared with me how disappointed he felt on the trip home from the moon. But looking at one of the five windows of the spacecraft he had what he said was an epiphany. He looked out into him he realized that man was more than he previously thought. He became fascinated in that moment with the idea of consciousness and what is make capable of. Thats why think my new book is really about the reaches of what can be known. Mitchell came home, quit nassau, divorce his wife amanda friends and began this project tree into the world of esp and psychokinesis. He suffered dearly. Some say he got lost. But thats not what mitchell said. Ed mitchell with that kind f a snickering journalist pointed out that he conducted these espn expanded on the way to and from the moon. He suffered because of it. All of his colleagues were these hard scientist. He himself was. He had a phd from mit. But he had what is called a conversion moment. Again another important thing in the book phenomena. Uyet scientists, businesses, individuals who have these conversion moments when dealing with extraSensory Perception, psychokinesis, and they become absolutely convinced of the reality of the phenomenon, and a pursuant. Some pursuant to the gates of hell as of right in the book. And others maintain a very scientific attitude toward it. But because the scientific Skeptic Community insists that this is pseudoscience, because, rightly so, psychokinesis, extraSensory Perception does not pass Scientific Method must account the five steps, you must adhere to to move from hypothesis to genera general th. The most important being that it is repeatable. Well, esp experienced are not repeatable. Those pro this worksite its the go by nature and those against it say thats hogwash. But i love this battle. Theres a real battle between science versus supernatural if you will. It speaks to this idea of what are the far reaches of what man can know. Host in phenomena, Annie Jacobsen, you have government document saying we cannot not prove that this is not real. It is since theres some doubt there. Guest theres doubt, come absolutely there is debt everywhere but the cia concluded at the phenomenon was real. But they couldnt repeat it. They said it doesnt take away from the fact that these Real Laboratory experiments happened. But now what i found most interesting in reporting phenomena, the book, was about when they began researching and reporting, i was under the impression that the programs are buttoned up in the mid1990s, the kind of downfall this one big Defense Department program. But i was astonished to learn that they are actually back today under the rubric of advanced cognition, okay . So the Defense Department is now merging this idea of the biological, a sixth sense, the office of Naval Research calls it the spidey sense. But instead of the parapsychologists of the 70s and 80s, now the Defense Department has employed neurobiologists, computer technologists, computer engineers. They are taking individuals who have the spidey sense, its just a dressed up word for esp, and they are looking at their brain and trying to model was going on in their brains. And then of course to accelerate it and ultimately weaponizing, because thats the role of the Defense Department. Host because of your research have you had a conversion moment when it comes to those topics . Guest no. But i will, the harvard experiment a psychologist cartridge might or back in the 50s created this system to talk about gertrude how individuals approach this controversial subject matter. She sat on one side there were goats, goats with a scientific skeptics is that this is nonsense, ho forget about all of that. Sheep on the other hand for open to the idea. And i would say i began as a journalist, but looking at these experiences reporting, looking at the documents, i am open toih the idea. The conclusions are not yet in and i think that is the idea of the far region of what can bedel known. Area 51 . Host are there aliens at area 51 . Guest thats what everyone i interviewed 75 people and all of them had direct access and went on record. One source remained anonymous. He was on the Atomic Energy Commission Site and told me it takes up 12 pages in the end ofb the buck and its what garners the most curiosity. What he told me is there is a program out there that he worked on which was a black Propaganda Program to create creatures that looked like aliens and it involved human experimentation and he was very parsimonious width of the details but very distinct going on the record. I interviewed him for over 100 hours and stayed in contact after the buck and continue to have discussions with him and he sticks by. They were not alien. This does not mean that there isnt extraordinary material that continues to swirl aroundnd about why this information is incorrect. It is a big puzzle, but i appreciated his candor with me and i stand by everything he spoke of. Host welcome to book tv on cspan2. This is our indepth program. We have one offer to talk about his or her body of work into this is Annie Jacobsen. Her books area 51 an uncensored history of the topsy ric military base came out in 2011, operation paperclip, this Intelligence Program that brought scientists to america came out in 2014. The pentagon uncensored history of americas Top Secret Military Research Agency came out in 2015 and her most recent book is phenomena the secret history of the government investigation into extra Sensory Perception and psychokinesis just out this year. She will be our guest the next two and a half hours and if you have questions or comments you would like to make, this is thee way you can contact us. 202 7488200 for those in east and central time zones. 7488201 if yo you lived in announcing its pacific time zone. If you cant get through the 20 make a comment, try social media booktv is the twitter handling and you can make a comment on facebook. Com booktv. You will see that and you can r also send an email booktv cspan. Org and we will begin taking calls in just a few minutes. Were you able to get any dollar figures on how much to spend in area 51 and researching psychokinesis . What did obligation paperclip cost . The progra all of the programs i write about arabout are what are calld special access programs. They exist in the spare ac creek classification protocols that are far above normal classified. So it is almost impossible toims accurately say what the budgets are. One of the budgets i can give you is the darpa budget. They spend 3 billion a year ane that is the case thats basically did the same figure adjusted for inflation going back to the origin in 1958. Its an extraordinary amount of money for a 120 program manager. But thats only the public figure. So all of the programs are dealing with black budgets which means the money is essentially not knowable. On that subject i will give youu one fascinating details that may have the best analogy for all of this. In area 51, there is one of the kind of creators if you will, richard bissell, Deputy Director of the cia. The way in which he becamein involved in area 51 if you backup a couple of years he got a call from the cia and at the time he was in charge of the marshall fund. That was the plan to rebuild europe after world war ii. Of an extraordinary amount of mon money. He said and im paraphrasing can you give that money to us for a secret program and he said again paraphrasing are you sure i should do this . Yes. He did it and found out years later when he was made director of the area 51 project remember that money that you gave us, here is where it went and how area 51 was set up. He talks about these things in his memoir so you can find information. I. E. As a reporter find information and a whole array oa places from the memoirs to places that are stored ined different archives, sometimes the families give me access. Interviews. This is the joy of being a journalist you have different sources to try to piece together the stories of the reader asas best you can. Host somebody that plays a part in almost all of yourth books. The pen guest talk about a colossal failure and again others would say it was a colossal win. This was a Thermo Nuclear weapon and the father of the hydrogen bomb, you know, the average person thinks thermonuclearapony bomb, well, perhaps except in orders of magnitude. ThermoNuclear Weapons, one thermonuclear weapon can takemo out the seaboard. There was one weapon that exploded in castle bravo out in the marshall islands. From the perspective of the witnesses that were there and told me their story when i say cholos a daily or come it was supposed to be six and a half megatons but it went out of control. The calculations and all the scientists working with them, they could not predict the future or their own science experiment and instead it was a runaway thermonuclear bombing. 1m i mean, just an astonishing amount of power and energy andly apocalyptic by its very nature. He shows up in area 51 and operation paperclip, the whole gamut. Guest hes a super interesting character. Many people would say he had hubris and he was trying to outdo his rival. Other people will say he saved us from soviet invasion because he pushed the idea of the development of the thermonuclear bomb which some of his colleagues, by the way, called the evil thing. They did not think it would be developed because it could end the world. He pushed for it and ultimately won. Host he was also involved with the fbi. Guest he gets pulled into the program during the reagan administration. Administration. And again, ive interviewed people who swear by this and i say this because the castle bravo bomb which was a secret program no one even knew went on at the time. We found out later that the russians were only literally months behind us in the developed and have their thermonuclear weapon and then this idea of the battle of the superpowers going through all the books, the u. S. Government must stay ahead and what its interesting is that it does stay ahead and to give credit where credit is due i was interviewing scientists and when they got to the realm of cloning a, you have to thermoNuclear Weapons as aa part of the origin study and then today you have the autonomous weapons, artificial n intelligence, biotechnology, this is all darpa science and scientists would say to me when i would ask questions like is this why, they would say what if you were to wake up tomorrow morning and find out the chinese or the russians or even a dark horse like saudi arabiafi presented the world with the first human clone what americans say weve been beaten by anbeat enemy nation . Thats why these weapon programs exist and why area 51 exist and. Paperclip exists. We must stay ahead of the rest of the world so that we are not detained by technological surprises so far we have. Host 28 billion is the amount that you cite for the development of the bomb in your book. 20 200,000 employees. Oak ridge tennessee took more power than new york city. More electrical power. Guest i use that as an example whenever anyone says you cant really believe thatent ca government did this. They are not capable of doing that. Its a conspiracy to think otherwise. I cite exactly that. Of course the government can and does keep secrets. The other side of the argumentan is that it needs to. Ory but host history plays a part in that. Who was he . Guest he was a scientific director of the Manhattan Project and also going back in time now to the ear years right before america entered world war ii and if there was an extraordinary sense of isolationism in america. Enter t we didnt want to enter the war and didnt feel that we needed to or should. But at the same time, the president needed to make sure that we were keeping up with the science and technological advances that we knew the nazis were making thanks to people like einstein would already come here. So, you have secret science but i think thats really where it began. And with these green for technologies america was touching her back rightfully so because you cant start your Atomic Weapons Program an when e knock teams are working on their system. Gues host lets hear from cj in georgia. Caller good afternoon. I actually, i have recently been interfacing with a gentle man that worked at the National Laboratory for over 40 years. He contacted me because he knew i worked with one of the largest defense contractor. Th whats interesting is the project you are speaking of. He thought my personality wasrs outgoing and wanted to find [inaudible] that worked on the Manhattan Project and over the course of the Christmas Holiday for about three weeks, i contacted various agencies and organizations and was able to find five children of some of the individuals that worked on the Manhattan Project and it was interesting one that is a doctor in washington, d. C. Now said that his father kept journals and we are going to bes meeting with him in the next few weeks about various things. S. But what was interesting the gentleman said his father never talked about his work and that he would be gone for months at a time and as you indicated that the secrecy, there were over 200,000 employees that actually worked on the project and was i oak ridge tennessee and i never even knew about it until i met this gentle man that i worked for for many years. So the secrecy that exists both with the area 51 project and tht National Laboratory and others across the United States is so mindboggling to me it just, you know, we are hearing and years later finding out about theje secret project in things that happened but theres a lot of that and we will never know about it unless there are journalists like yourself that bring these things up with whats going on and often times we are not aware of why. Host thank you. Any comments . Uest guest youve touched upon a very important theme not only for the individuals to wor indin the program, but their families. And its why i love tracking down and interviewing thehildre children if the parents have passed because you can kind of get a sense of that secrecy. The children knew nothin there n many cases but a lot of times, they will share papers that are stored in the attic and so that becomes this idea of the legacy thats very interesting and i particularly found that when i worked on paperclip and i wentan to germany and i interviewed the children of some of these major nazis who worked for hitler and then later worked for the department of defense. Guest what was your reception like in germany . Guest it was either blackin. Or white. Either no i dont want to talk to you. Father didnt do anything wrong, never mind he was a convicted war criminal, speaking specifically about a convicted war criminal named otto ambrose, who was hitlers chemical weapon developer. He was convicted of as i write in paperclip and he wase convicted of mass murder slavery genocide and then was released by our u. S. High commissioner and consulted for the Atomic Energy commission. On the other hand i interviewed other children who had a different take and were very thoughtful and remorseful andefa courageous sharing with me the profound difficulty of that legacy. Psychologically it is an extraordinary burden to bear. I feel like that undergirds the book with significance. Host 1600 or so came over c the operation. How deep did their tentacles go in this country . Guest in every program that we were financing, there was a top nazi. That is a gross generalization but i think its also very accurate certainly from my reporting. In my book i focus on 21 who i found to the extreme cases. During the war, they worked directly with hitler, steer. When you think about that, then they were working for us and with us and that is real drama. So i look at 21 but there are 1600 am looking at those files and mapping out where everyone went coming as they were in every one of the programs. Host i think i read one of the scientists was the director of the Kennedy Space center. Guest they still give out the award for the most innovative thinker and i was shocked to find this out because the documents i was able to get from the freedom of information act indicated that he was a hardcore nazi. He even wore the uniform to work in nazi germany. He turned in a colleague for saying mean things about hitler and he got picked up by the gestapo and we are giving him an award. This kind of thing is astonishing. Ead of t i called the hit o head of the organization that gives the award and he said he was a greag innovator and i said but what do you say to the person that says to you he was a nazi and his response was very interesting. Hs he said no one has ever asked me that question before. So we have journalism to present the facts and let people decide what they think about those facts. Unning guest host was it snowing before and now hes running the Kennedy Space center . Guest very important question, absolutely not. From these he classified documents, i learned not only did they know about the past buw they were complicit in making sure this didnt get out. This was a quote from one of the documents because on brown because he was so highprofile, he was always being pulled in by journalists that were asked questions about his past. He was told by nasa to say if asked to say ive been thoroughly investigated by the u. S. Military. And he had been thoroughlyvestit investigated they just didnt reveal what the investigations had found. Host have you been to the headquarters here in the Washington Area lacks have you set forth foot . Guest i have not. They are secretive about letting anyone in their. They like to present the idea that they are a magnificentenefn organization. And they do some great things. The results of a lot of their work have profoundly impacted society and made it easier for a lot of people but lets face it. Darpa blank job is to create vast weapon systems of the future. So they are very secretive about letting anyone in and seeing what is really going on. Area 51, no journalist has ever been there including me. There was a former group of proe manhattan scientist projects when they were still alive in the test site to which all the other areas one, two, ten, 15, 20 that are aligned with area 51. The bo guest i was aware of the test sites are where you can see aseeand or the safe was blown up like a giant bank safe these were part of the tests to see what would survive a nuclear blast. The rubble that is out there in the desert is remarkable. The area is concealed. So i went and i saw area 515 miles away that the closest. I got. Host travis is calling in from eureka california. Youve are on with the author. Caller hello, good afternoon. I am interested what if any evidence did you find to be the most convincing and in favor of it being a fact . Guest if they work for extra Sensory Perception and it was created by the cia in the 1970s to destigmatize. It became part and parcel to all the programs that went on for the next 25 years across the cia come across the department of defense to the Defense Intelligence agency. There are extraordinary successt stories locating downed aircrafo and also cholos old failures and again i tell both of those stories in the book and ill let you decide tha but when you loos the facts of what you are able u to see with the cia defenseent department handler in the electronically shielded room theres no way they could be getting any information anyn ths other way. So i would say every the remote viewing areas. Host this email comes in from chris in houston texas. How does parco research make its way from being purely militaryin to something a company can so to the public at large . Guest lets talk about gp gps. Satellite technology finds some of its origins. The mayor of area 51, they were working early satellite technologies and experimenting with satellites hoping it would work. Think about that as a concept in terms of innovation. Our whole military runs with a satellite system being at thee center but in the 50s and six, these ideas were just coming online and there was a mandateno through Satellite Technology and it took decades to come tot whel fruition but when dark was able tbut wasable to make the systems a military targeting technology kept secret offset by a couple hundred feet. They wouldnt be able to target and it was kept it during the administration. The word came out that the thata european civilian organization was going to develop gps for the consumer and that is why they declassified the technology to be the innovators and primary drivers. You are on with booktv. Host caller do you mention a person called ingo swann . Ye guest yes he played a very significant role in the program and also in the years that the Defense Department program. Why do you ask about him . Caller thats one of my questions in the program he had contempt for the people that reached a. Maybe some other time i can contact you if you are interested. There was a study done about 30 years ago that scientifically proves what you are doing. Host we dont have time right now but we appreciate you calling in. There is a website we will put that up on the screen if you wish to contact her, go ahead. Guest they were extreme antiscientologist but it becomes a great point of contention and there are some mysteries that remain. The biggest mysteries that s remains around a psychic fact worked at the same time and his name was pat price. He was incredibly gifted at describing the situations narratively. Pat price could pull actual names, numbers and figures off of documents and classified facilities thousands of miles away. And he was so good at this that a number of security investigations, highlevel investigations came down on him because people couldnt fathom how he knew what he did. He died in 1975 under very mysterious circumstances and many conspiracies have arisen. One is the church of scientology. Host Annie Jacobsen, do conspiracy theorists come to your book events . Guest yes. I did a great event with the scientific skeptic at caltech for the area 51 book and he filled the auditorium. There mustve been 400 people. Because it is in pasadena right here the jet propulsion laboratory, it was like half the people in the room were these big brains and the other half were conspiracy theorists. We had this lively debate not just me asking questions but then the question started going back and forth. Sometimes they were shouting att one another. But i think that these are all imported for the readerimportano have because i find that conspiracy theories almost have their roots in truths and i write about this in my book where you have an alleged Conspiracy Theory where it is part of a black Propaganda Campaign or Disinformation Campaign and unable to unearth these documents and demonstrate things are not always exactly as they seem. Ot for host guest they are all a product of the race between the United States and soviet union and often china. Host george email then i believe paul salazar said element 115 was the purpose was for the Alien Technology that he was trying to reverse engineer. Since then, element 115 has been synthesized and is not a credible power source. Any comments . Just i think the individual is speaking to the fact that these ideas, these mysteries, these are not going away. People continue to be interested because they feel that their questions have not been answered and that of course speaks to this idea that we have been talking about in transparency,r, Government Transparency and what can be known and should be known and why we have to wait documents to be classified. Host you also write about Janet Airlines. Guest private airlines that fly from las vegas to area 51. It has its own conspiracies within the conspiracies. I had someone contact me and say they would give me the Janet Airlines schedules and they only fly at night. Again, these mysteries and conspiracies for it within one another and they dont want to end. Host why is it called Janet Airlines, and you describe the landing and what its like. Have you been on Janet Airlines . Guest no, you have to be invited. Certainly area 51 you have to be invited, but in all of my books, researching or interviewing the superman of science, low and behold i read your area 51 book and then they tell me the program they were on. One of the leading scientists im my new book phenomenon, he was at area 51 and i said thats incredible, tell me what were you doing out there. I cant tell you. Host lets hear from joel in idaho. Guest great program. My father was a pilot thats never talked about it much but he ended up in Niagara Falls new york and there was a program i can remember it picture of him. I never heard much about what happened to von braun after the Bell Helicopter plant of course. What can you tell me about warner von braun and what he ended up doing . Guest does a great question. That is a great question. Theres another former nazitionp general operation paperclip scientists that wound up there and that was Walter Doran Berger and i write about him in operation paperclip as well. Aun von brown had an interesting trajectory. He worked all the way through the Apollo Program and then retired and went into private enterprise than he was stricken with cancer and died. But he comes up in every one of my books. Theres a fascinating story in the book ive just written, ande a phenomenon with a cia asset and who had the Defense Department very concerned withey psychokinesis. So depending what he does and many people now view that hes a magician, the cia didnt think so and they were concerned what he could do with psychokinesis ahs think of the delicate Electronic System. They were concerned if he could bend a spoon with the tip of his finger using his mind he could disrupt about Electronic System so when he came to the United States he met with warner and there is a photograph i have the two of them but von brown was fascinated. Geller got his watch to stop and he made a Statement Like i have no scientific explanation for how he do this and geller got at old desk calculator that hadgott stopped working and he got it to start working just by touching it. This this mystified von brown and because he was such a powerful figure in the science community, it raised a lot of eyebrows that von brown was taken with geller. Host we have on the program is year or two back jonathan from the men who stare at goats. Does that tie into some of the phenomenon . Guest that is the remote viewing program. One of the things i demonstrate over time that happened in the phenomenon program was that the cia was under the impression that this talent which is still in the hypothesis stage lets call it enhanced intuition or perception, the cia doctors believed that its biological, but its individualistic. I know i cannot sing in the shower. Then you listen to the amazing music of mozart and thatsha different. Thats biology. Thats the metaphor of the cia used because they believed that individual people had some kind of extraordinary gifts that the rest of us didnt. The Defense Department took aenr different approach. They believe that soldiers could be trained to become psychic and the problems then arose because the cia advised against this and the cia pursued it and it led to a lot of problems in the program because in many cases you had soldiers trying to be psychic in having very little success and at the same time you have people that are psychic if you will working on these programs in and having success and it created a catch22 because the Defense Department didnt want to beat these people are psychic because iwere psychicbecause it was in f science. Host a lot of corporations are involved in your book. A lot of money to be made. Guest this is an important subject, defense contract. It speaks to what eisenhowerr said on his Farewell Speech about the militaryindustrial complex. I learned that the scientists come up in all of the world of conspiracy. Allegedly, they are this before i interviewed them one idea is they are the illuminati. I interviewed Marvin Goldberger right before he died and worked on many of these projects for decades. They were fulltime professorser and parttime defense scientist said they would get together in the summer and solve whatever conundrum and they were caught the superman of science. And what i learned in the recent era is there has been a shift in the Defense Department. They still consult that they are not as important as i was told and what is important now is and organization in the pentagon called the defense science boa board. As i write if you look at the individuals that are on the board, they are almost all fulltime defense contractors. So you have the very people that are deciding which weaponsfutu systems the pentagon will pursue to make an extraordinary amount of money on the weapon systems. Host who runs darpa . Guest is managed by these 120 Program Managers in the hands of 120 Program Managers and they have stop and startof programs. Most of the intense programs that they are working on committees are classified programs. Host thanks for holding. You are on with author Annie Jacobsen. Caller thanks for taking my call. I was just wondering you are talking about money. Is there any mechanism by which the United States gets money from the administrations because i know if you read are we making deals we get paid for that . Thank you. Guest the way that it flows is that it goes out into the hands of the laboratories that are developing the Weapons Program so if they have a product the they wanted they wod be paid. Does that answer the question . I interviewed for the pentagons bring some scientistpentagonspre working down atare uc irvine. They would be capable but this kind of research is 20 or 30 years out. But the scientists said is going to find that, no one. So they are willing to invest in early Laboratory Research that leads to extraordinary new things. The scientists i spoke to were very grateful for this funding because it allows them to continue their research and to seek grants elsewhere. So there is a give and take in this world that has to do with new programs coming out. Who is michael . Guest the individual who took biological science to a new level. Backup for a minute. Researching the pentagons brand, i was fascinated by the idea that the hard science ofmi those days did not involve biological science. So that happened ironically when the wall came down and you had soviet biological weapons engineers defecting to the United States and bringing with them the big reveal. They were breaking the weapons treaty and developing bees weapons mixing things like ebola and influenza to create apocalyptic results. So, when the scientists arrived and began working for darpa, it led to this idea we need to look inside the body, we need to look at the human biology. And that is where he enters the scene because at about the same time we were in the early 90s and Computer Technology is getting small so we are moving towards nanotechnology. And they become interested in the idea of human physiology and that individual soldiers are capable of and how you can enhance that and create a superl soldier and he led the way. The idea was to go to put Computer Technology inside humans. They wired up a rack and they were able to with a chip in his brain they were able to steer the rat through a maze. People cried foul and said this is at the edge and you cant be doing this thing its only going to go a bad direction. So the programs were somewhat curtailed. Now they involve pushing the biology of humans in anotherio direction it ultimately merging man and machine. Guest he was recruited and its an interesting story about how he developed a system that dealt with a Sterilization Technology under wake up one of those scandals that the fast food restaurants in a lot of trouble comes of Stabilization Technology he thought there has to be a military application for this and darpa agreed with him and he became a powerful player. Host kathleen is calling from los angeles. Caller hello. I am the cochair of the la ions group which is an organization to marry science and spirituality, physics and medicine but i just had to comment because as an acupuncturist i have a Youtube Video fixing a paralyzed dog with my electromagnetic field stimulator but i wanted to comment on Edgar Mitchell. In his last two years at the convention in chicago as well as a contact in the desert conference where he spoke about his career and being on the other side of the moon. They reported this to their doctor and if there were aliens with him on the moon. Its a wonderful organization that was started. Now we have the remedy for it after six years and host what is the ion society . Guest they do a lot of do ao research. I comment on the laser body and that is what we have. We have the potential and ofor course this organization is looking into that. Guest he came back after the epiphany, made new friends and started this organization with a couple different names and i found a fascinating. He was the front in doing that because he was a popular figure they needed to mask the idea that he was actually being tested by the cia. Host william is in new york. Caller i wonder if you know anything about the philadelphia experiment and a secret space ships with the nazis and the time though and if the alien bases on the far side of the moon and that is it. Host thank you, sir. Any response . Guest we talked about conspiracies and how they kind of leave their way through this. Because they write about the subjects of the cia filter it ie interesting to look at how the organizations you with the subject matters and usually it creates great problems. If you are prone to psychokinesis, for a lot of these individuals that leads to other ideas that are along the lines of what the caller was talking about. It became a problem because they didnt know how to set ground rules. You could think and talk about aliens but it has to overheard outside the home in a military environment and instead you had a couple of these individuals who were using government timewn and money to conduct their ownne experiments using remote viewing to try to do these ideas that the call is talking about and locate aliens around the world and the declassified documents on this are fascinating becausei dod didnt know how to put a lid on this because they were concerned i dont know if it was upsetting people were just created a colossal problem and ultimately it led to the downfall of the program. Host stevensville montana with two questions. Are you aware of magicians both retired and working that actively debunk paranormal phenomenon for the benefit of the public at large . Guest yes and i write about them in the book because it is important to address boths sides of the aisle. There is no doubt that magicians can bend spoons. You could watch a million Youtube Videos demonstrating exactly that. The question is whether or not dell or or someone like him can bend a spoon not using a magic trick. I write at length about that battle. That is science versus supernatural at its heart. Second question from montana. Are you aware of the james educational foundations offer to pay 1 million to anyone thatt can exhibit any paranormal phenomenon under controlled conditions if so have you talked with him . Guest i interviewed randy for the buck. M i am fascinated because i write about war and weapons im fascinated by battles and feuds, personal and global. They had a decades long battle over this subject and all these decades later they stand by their ideas. One says this is hogwash and the other says this is a biological talent. So the reader might be interested to see that play out as it does in the phenomena hopefully from a neutral point e of view showing different declassified documents on the subject and what they thought of randy and geller and how they all played a role because their view elevated all of this to a public dialogue so that was interesting because here they are making this initiative and the Defense Department and cia are trying to keep it secret. You are on with Annie Jacobsen on book tv. Caller great to talk with you again and i am really interested in her book. I got up to chapter 11. Im really interested in a couple stories you have. One is the Early Research done in the relationship to psychic ability. The other is the degree to which there was something of an arms race between the russians and the americans in trying to figure out how you could ask fo explore the military. The other is i used to live in california and was fascinated with russells work. If you have an opportunity to enter you and for your buck andt then i have another thin had anl leave you with. Youve done a lot of investigative reporting with darpa initiatives, you mentioned earlier that edward has his feet in so many different strands, there is a new thing that has been emerging and the geoengineering and they came up with the first concept of how to possibly mitigate with metallic substances in the atmosphere but are now being touted as possible solutions to mitigating climate change. Host lets hear from anniet jacobsen. The first question is interesting to me because it speaks to the origins of the psychic programming in the polls from the original documents that were discovered by the war so one of the early ideas was following with psychokinesis and est and had to do with the psychopharmacology which is a fancy name for drugs. This pulled from an old aztec legend hallucinogenic mushrooms and idea that the shaman would take the hallucinogenic mushrooms and their powers woulm be enhanced so they would be able to tell you what was going to happen in the future or tello you who stole your donkey. So it had prophecy and intelligence collections. This got the cia in attention anattention andthey hired a medo was at the chemicals enter. He has a foot in many conspiracy theories as well because he was a someone i worked on the program so the esteemed believe all of my books with elements of truth. Yes there was a program the cia ran that sought to pursue hallucinogenic mushrooms for intelligence collections purposes. One of the details i found fascinating on this check is that the cia sent one of its scientists bases in 1953 to one of the largest mushroom growers in america. Made a secret deal with them an said and the plan didnt reveal that we are going to find his hallucinogenic mushrooms in these hallucinogenic mushrooms in mexico and bring them back to the United States and to do the volume of the experiment the cia intended seemed pretty significant based on the documents. But of course the program, thenw scientists who led the mission he was a banker from j. P. Morgan and after he came back from mexico he wrote a huge Magazine Article about it and blew the t cover on the program so the cia Mushroom Program fell by the wayside. Host it seems like when you start pulling a thread in one of your stories or topic you are researching, all of a sudden thertheres 100 threads you havo pull out. And you must be careful of the rabbit hole because you do go down a lot of tunnels and i think also its important to realize that some of these programs have a dead end and they really do, or they just end. Others have different incantations or did they get rebooted and rebranded like the psychic programs of today. Area 51 uncensored history of americas top military base in 2011, operation paperclip the secret Intelligence Program that brought nazi scientists toerica. America 2014 the pentagons brain but finalist for the pulitzer and uncensored history americas Top Secret Military Research Agency came out in 2015. Phenomena is her newest secret history of the governments investigations into extraSensory Perception and psychokinesis and doctor marcus jacobsen. Any relation to you . Im curious about her approach to writing how much does she get done four books in six years is an amazing achievement especially given the difficulty she has mentioned with some of her sources. How does she schedule heard words and what advice might she offered to other writers. Guest thank you for the question that is one that is near and dear to my heart and would have to do with process and also have to do with early failures would say. Ac nine interested in meaning ive been writing for a very long time since i was 15, went to boarding school with a typewriter and no one was really reading what i was writing foror decades so the fact now that ict have a great privilege of having people read me inspires me to keep at it and to keep writing. And i encourage anyone who is writing to continue to follow that idea because i think the only failure is quitting. If you just keep with it. How do i schedule my writing . I write full time and im alwayu contained about what im writing and why im writing it and looking at whats happening in the current climate of the world and trying to balance what are the concerns we want to be thinking about today and filtering data back to where did a lot of these problems come from and what are the solutions. I love the eisenhower idea in his Farewell Speech he spoke at the militaryindustrial complex that is so famous that what often gets left out of that is what he says in the second part of the speech where he talked kd about in alert and knowledgeable citizenry and he said that is how you balance security and liberty. What a simple idea just being alert and knowledgeable. Thats how i approach all my books. I tried to the alert and i read a lot to be knowledgeable and then i get to go out and enter e people who are on the ground doing the hard work and tell their stories in my book so others can read them. A each of your books is built on a sense of the last one. What is the next topic . Guest i hate to talk about the next topic. Im actually not going to talk about it. Uest guest absolutely i will give a hand im writing about the cia and it its a really interesting story. Host to you right at home and offline . Is there a computer that you use that is not connected . Ly guest i definitely right at home and i have an office. Im in los angeles and i have an office kind o of through the garden might take a littleen paw garden pathway and that is my office out there freestanding. Its small enough not to be distracted. My computer is definitely connected. Host we talked with john grisham and he writes with an offline computer. Sneer guest i am able to not look at the internet all the time but its a huge resource for me so i also did a lot of writing longhand and that is how i begin my chapters because i find the brain, the human brain no matter how Much Technology we have around, it works up its own speed. At least mine does. So for me, the process of writing kind of dislike similar to my thought process. Once i have information and i know how to begin a chapter i write it out longhand and the first couple pages are pathway. Do you still write poetry . All of your books are dedicated to kevin. Who is kevin . Guest my husband. The new book is dedicated to my children. The joy of writing is so i get to hang out with my family. They are a super source ofof inspiration to me because that has to deal with the quality of life. If you enjoy your life and love who you are with, then you are inspired i think to do interesting and challenging things. Host what kind of work does your husband to . Guest hes a commercial actor, and every commercial youu can imagine. Milk, cars, beer. Host i think that we have some of him in a commercial. First ever shown on cspan thate he ibuthes in the nissan pathfr commercial and he does that fulltime . Guest yes. Host does he enjoy it . We are both entrepreneurs in this world you live we are thate creative and entrepreneurial an thoughtful. I dont think we have seen him yet. There he is driving a bunch ofun animals around. Thats my husband. We have been married for coming up on 21 years. Host we will continue our conversation in just a minute after we look at some of the things that have influenced her and some of her favorite writers [inaudible conversations] inaudible n you say that you are reading where you have read by douglas preston. What is that . Guest its about the archaeological quest. I love these stories i think they are part and part two ishe human nature and they always bring in the idea of success and failure and then also this idea of who are we and where did we come from. The more we learn about the past i think it gives us ideas about the future and where we are going which takes me back. I am always fascinated when wew have this and then archaeology reveals that was a little different. Ce host do you think darpa knew that when it was first found it . Guest thats a great question. Maybe it goes all the way back to the inventor of the first computer that contained its own instructions. We are talking in the 1940s now at the institute for studies. He created this computer he called the maniac. It is essentially a giant calculator but it was interesting if you ask where are we now i would go back to that because for this reason its an amusing anecdote. Hes so smart and he built this computer and originally in 1947 now he would try to beat the computer at a numericalal calculation and his assistants would read him the calculations and he would compute them in his brain and he was able to beat the computer originally and then one day in the late 1940s, the computer beat him and its this profound moment. He said he believed one day computers would be able to think. So thats looking far off. And today with the smart phone it pulls back to that story. The first generation smart phone has more technology than when they sent ed mitchell to the moon. Think about that. Whos thinking about the futurel certainly almost all of the scientists employed. Ick leit host these are not names we know today. Guest keyes called the Johnny Appleseed of the internet because he didnt plant the first seed because he was a scientist called upon to do something about the command andg control. Go back to 1962, jfk looking at a red phone. Thats the phone if you think theres a Nuclear Strike you have to call. Think about the dialing capacity on a rotary phone. Darpa was brought on board to try to speed that up. At the time, computers were the size of a room so that was brought in to speed up the process and while he was working on those programs there at the pentagon he came up with thishis idea that one day people would be able to communicate with computers. He was talking about the internet in his mind, but heisd called it a the Intergalactic Computer Network and it was going to be this relationship between man and machine. He planted those and left and many capable people took over. Then you have this today linking up to the technology in our phone so who is in capable off thinking about this an and furtr reaches of what we will know next. re host also the norse mythology. Why . Guest my husband is norwegian so my kids are norwegian and also i love it. I love the idea of storytelling and archetypes. There is a role in my new book phenomena for that reason. The archetypes of the unconscious. They are basic tenets of how people live their lives and what they strive for. 202 is the area code if you want to talk with our guest, 748 for those in the east and central time zones and 7488201 for those of you in the mountain an pacific time zones. Zones. We will also go through some of our social media sites that way you can also make a comment over social media. July 91947, roswell new mexicoo what happened . Guest im thinking of tom maybe you looked up some of these conspiracy theories. The myth is part and parcel to area 51. Certainly to the idea that thehn government keeps secrets and that the military keeps secrets. That is when it allegedly a ufoe crashed and the military stepped in and took the evidence away. It links up to area 51 as i said because this source of mine told me he was part of the team that years later received the what a1 crashed at area 51 and this is the origin story when you readac your accounting of july 91947 it is very believable. Guest everyone has a different interpretations of this is a perspective. Tell me yours. Host you talk about the fact that there was a bulletin sent out some of the air force put out a bulletin on the news this was found and then another hour later they had a bulletin and there were 47 witnesses to this whole thing, 98, trucks being loaded, childs coffin, etc. Guest like the jfk conspiracy, there are numerous people that spend so much time going over the precise details. I go over them broadly but you mentioned the most important ones because we would fact chect them. When you have discrepancies in the fact check information i think its fair to raise questions about what actually went on because there is a coverup if youre going to change your story. Guest did you do any reviews of the book series and do you think the current election and the cabinet do you think that is a dark cia project . M not fa guest im not familiar with the books talked about ob host robert more guest yes, yes i misunderstood. As for the Current Administration i stay out of politics because it is more valuable to maintain neutrality in terms of the political system is agenda because that doesnt change. The commander in chief changes that many of the individuals ar entrenched and i work with many people on both sides of thee aisle and i see their point so i am more interested in the individual request and outcome. Host lets go to operation paperclip for this but in all of your books i think you can find have we compromised ourselves aa a nation at the time for the goals . Guest that is a perfect segue. When i was working on paperclip my editor and i would have conversations about making sure that i was showing both sides of the argument and if there was a book that i was prone to having an opinion about, it was operation paperclip. And im not jewish by the way. Because my last name a lot of people think that. But what was interesting is i did try to maintain that neutrality and i think they may have succeeded and heres why. Because i tried to show also why there was an argument that was important to bring them back here to beat the russians, so was it a moral compromise . Im telling you here on the tv in my opinion, yes it felt that way when i was writing it. My job as a journalist is to tell i was on one televisionn pa program that cleans right lets say. m and they said im so glad you wrote this book. You show the part and parcel why we have to have this program. We needed to bring them here to win the cold war. I could be on another show that would mean left and they would say thank you for writing this book. You show that this is morally reprehensible. We never should have brought them here no matter what. They read the same book which speaks to my curiosity and perspective about how people interpret the same fact and that is part of human nature, the ability to see things our way. It gets really interesting whena you have some call it a change of heart and others call it the change of mind. Thats what interested me because almost everyone who works in that world has what is called a conversion moment when they have a change of heart or change in mind and their life changes and the results are dramatic. O host i think i rememberr reading warner von braun had a conversion that he was born again as a christian. Guest i didnt interview him or any of the family members, so its hard to know the reality behind that and i know the motivations lets say because theres no way of knowing if it was personally motivated or whether it was a motivation from his handlersrs said listen if you pull some religion into the mix, you are going to be more appealing to the average american than the former nazi scientist with a strong german accent. Host does this tie in at all to the project over at switzerland and france . Does it tie in at all some ofthd the research darpa is doing . Guest i wouldnt doubt it because all the science is interconnected and in an america they are always looking at what is happening around the world. De going back to that theme that we cannot be beaten, we cannot be overtaken by technological fight. Thats what happened in 1958or they made it into space before we did and that has neverdi happened since so there is good reason to say they are doing their job. J host do you have any knowledge of soldiers being experimented on during the vietnathevietnam war war era ofe lsd and also testing them with ufos etc. Guest human testing is an interesting and problematic area. I write about the deep origins of the code, and then in area 51 i write about how it was defied by our scientists working for the Atomic Energy commissioncond conducting experiments related to radiation and the nefarious experiments that were made t transparent by the clintonminisi administration. Either they are the documents that are important to look at because it shows what is possible flying in the face of Something Like this code. I am always on the lookout for that kind of work. I didnt find any that the reader is specifically referring to. Host Annie Jacobsen is our guest. Caller thank you for taking my call and thank you for booktv. My question is concerning 1957, the year sputnik and also the life article with the multi color photographs appeared in 57. In april of 57 a. M. Project 57. It. It occurred right before the nuclear test series operation plumb bob. In project 57 this was near area 51, plutonium are scattered across the desert and i wonder if you research in kerry 51 from if you give us any more details about project 57 that might be of interest. Host do you have come why the interest in these topics . Caller back in 1989 i was delivering mail and met a man who had been in hiroshima, a youth are mak. I saw a tv show about cloud samplers and i also started getting a lot of newspaper photographs relating to the nuclear test series. I was able to tour the test site in 1995, and i have quite a lot of documents i got from the government. One time i was at the Electrical Engineering public reading room down there in las vegas and i had in my hands uncensored documents. I saw the names and the rates of dose cloud samplers are getting. That was a thrilling day. Im wondering a particular about project 57. Trent u i read project 57 at length in area 51. It was a fascinating cast because we did do that plutonium dispersal. And i tell it to the perspective of the sturdy cart out there at the time, i meant by the name of richard mingus. Its extraordinary what went on, the kind of fast and loose operations that the aec was conducting. I also write about cloud sampling because that is part and parcel to this because many of the test pilots who i interviewed for area 51, including the great Hervey Stockman was the first man to fly over the soviet union in a you too. This is a 1956, bringing home a photograph of 400,000 square feet of the soviet union that had been unseen by Intelligence Community before. Stockman then went on and was a nuclear test pilot and flew directly through some of those clouds that are being discussed here. So again this all kind of loops around together the different threads come out in different ways. Host the u2 was developed in area 51, right . Guest that was the cias first biplane program. They called it eyes in the sky. The u2 and then when, so much of this is about we do this and then the soviets would beat us, our soviets would beat us back. We built the u2 to fly high enough that would be out of range of the soviet surfacetoair missiles. Well then they built up their surfacetoair missiles. Suddenly yet the incident, gets shot down. The cia Start Building this new airplane and we talked about called the oxcart and that was this incredibly secret project at area 51. 51. Many of the same scientists, who gave me my original scoop, worked on the u2. Then worked on oxcart. Host would it surprise you today if congress or the Vice President were not aware of some of the things that are going on, or even the president . Guest i wrote that income i found that out, much to my astonishment when i was writing area 51 and i was talking to a source about this incredibly secret program that allegedly involved human experiments out there. The crossover with the alien. And i said how come this is not uncovered during the Clinton Administration when so much of this that these nefarious human experiments out at the test site can public . And the source of the president did not have a need to know. That is an interesting statement. Host roy, new castle indiana please go ahead. Caller yes. Kudos to cspan and you, peter, and to Annie Jacobsen. And i just have a little question here. Ive talked with carol rawson that was there for a while, right arm to von braun in his latter days. And i communicated with her by skype, email and talking with her and i just wonder if you know anything about her whereabouts and if she is still involved doctor grier and such, continue . Guest i dont. Host do any of those names ring a bell besides von braun . Guest no. Host where did he end up . Guest von braun backs he worked in the defense contracting industry, but from my lead on documents about him from the government is about after the Apollo Program ended so abruptly, it was extraordinary distressing to them. Where you go from there . It kind of those famous scientist in the country during the apollo era, and then you know, people give up on the program. Very difficult time, vietnam war. And von braun sort of, the way i read it, lost his calm he lost his wife and he became despondent pic and a right about that in paperclip. He is diagnosed with cancer and he died very quickly. Host craig, clearwater florida. Please go ahead with your question or comment for Annie Jacobsen. Caller thank you for taking my call. I do question question about the current state of the art of secret Aircraft Technology in the u. S. Does the sr 71 and a 12 spy planes were 19 \50{l1}s{l0}\50{l1}s{l0} technology, the fy 17 Stealth Fighter was 1970s technology, and the b2 bomber is 1980s technology. At the long time ago. Have you heard about anything about current stateoftheart exotic aircraft being operated on the u. S. And other capabilities . I do know about the air force is x37 space plane, what it which is still in orbit after 600 days in space. Tragic i think you nailed it with that last program. Thats what of the more interesting ones i know that and i write about in the pentagons brain. The way i would approach that answer to say like if you look back at the technology in the 1960s with the oxcart and you consider going 2400 miles an hour, then, under these sick of programs you can kind of you get what must be going on today based on the information that you talked about, the programs that we know about, and then you kind of can speculate on what is unknown. Those programs are kept secret because they are part and parcel to national security. The air has always been important space to dominate for the Defense Department. Host from page 364 of phenomena that you enter into extrasensory powers powers to a fine saddam husseins weapons sites. Guest this gets into the downfall of the program. Because you had some of the soldiers who had been trained to be psychic, retiring from the military and taking it upon themselves to offer their services outside the military and that is the situation youre talking about. That led to a grave problem because the protocols involved in remote viewing at the time were still classified. And so by bringing the very subject to the public that there was a press release on that, because a journalist found that interesting. As they should. And then the kibosh was put on that and it took a couple more years for the program to really be revealed. But that was a former soldier going outside of the military offering private services to the u. S. Host since robert lazar in 1989 revealing area 51 to the general public, has the been someone else who has done this . Guest thats a good question. Not specifically related to area 51. Certainly the numbers of people interested in that are phenomenal. But, and yes, there are revelations all the time, but i think robert lazar learned an interesting, you know, came to an interesting conclusion, certainly in nine my interview with him about what happens if he reveals something in us post revealed, and the Defense Department learned how to deal with people who say outlandish things, or people who say things that they can spin is outlandish or, you know, reflect us outlandish. And also keep in mind when robert lazar made this declaration, the world was a totally different place in terms of our smart phones, you know, information is king now, and you can find some Different Things in so many different ways so it doesnt have the same power that lazar had going on tv. That was a big deal. Host when you put in a request to visit area 51, to whom did you put in and what was the answer . Guest i requested to go with ed levick. I presented it as we may be a terrific way to make transparent to the public, and the response is brilliant. Its always true to form. And they spin around the fax because they cant actually say i refer to as good leg thinking they would may be take the bait but they didnt. And, of course, its like your request to go somewhere that we cant even say exists has been denied. Host what is area 12 . Guest there are all kinds of areas the nevada test site, and have divided up all of them involve nuclear testing. Area 13 was where there was the plutonium test. Area 25 was where they were building a spaceship is good to take us to mars using Nuclear Weapons technology. You could write a different book about every one of those areas there. Host it you drive north of vegas i believe state highway 95, you go right past the air force base or through it in a sense. Is that what area 51 is . How far off 95 is area 51 . Guest area 51 instead of north in a different direction because its inside the test site. But its always played an interesting role because stories abound about pilots, because her but he knows you cannot fly over area 51, and every now and then theres kind of like some opponents there went into the tip of the box so to speak and theres a report, most of which is redacted. But yes, they were canton cloth and the outset. That part of the country all these different classified areas out there. If you look at a map its between china lake and california and area 51 and nevada. The test site. These are huge swaths of land where classified military technology is fully underway. Host when you requested to visit the headquarters of darpa, which you describe in your book, the pentagons brain as being in arlington virginia, what was the response . Guest same thing. They really want to be able to control the message i think more than anything. And the idea is welcome if you keep a journal passion and journalist out your definitely controlled the message because they are not in. So that is an ongoing source of frustration i think because i do think that theres a responsibility by government to try and make the facts known and try to make some of these facilities available to people like myself. But what darpa said, which they give a good point, they are not a laboratory. Its just administration thats going on, or so they say. So they were saying you were going to do better visiting the actual laboratories. And so i did. Host and there is a headquarters on your screen. Does nasa have an official position on Edgar Mitchell and his turn towards esp and psychokinesis . Guest you know, i dont know after an official position but you can definitely, i could in reading the document, you could get a sense of, i dont want to say disappointment, but thats the word that comes to mind. You know, they like individuals who are part of their big programs to stick with the park, stick with a message so to speak. He had some wild ideas. He became very interested in the idea about aliens, toward the end of his life and he spoke about at length. And i think a lot of, you kind of go where the love is, for lack of a better expression. Hes getting a lot of, lets say, nastiness from nasa. They brought a lawsuit against them at one point over some equipment. And he is being embraced by individuals who lean towards what i would call conspiratorial ideas about aliens. And he definitely leaned towards that way. And again it cost him, you know . But i find it really interesting. What i also found fascinating was his relationship with gelder. Because i interviewed gal at length in phenomena and i found him to be extraordinarily interesting and dynamic. I also wound up at Prime Minister netanyahu is house when i was with gelder in israel, raising extraordinary questions about whether or not he works for which is why he left the cia program. But when interviewed mitchell he spoke so highly of gelder and when i spoke to kelly spoke side of mitchell. They were like foils for one another. To mitchell, he represents everything that is possible to that idea of the far reaches of man and of biological capability. And geller, mitchell represented the great explorer, the great hero because he was young when mitchell went to the moon. He was in his toys and he told me that ed mitchell knowing about geller telepathy experiments and his public persona, mitchell sent him a photograph of himself on the moon and cited and said to the public, go, yuri. This made them feel really dragged through the mud. And he said mitchell gave him the kind of, the stamina and energy and the hopeless to go forward. They just had this passing friendship over the decades that i found really mysterious. Host finish the story about being at Prime Minister netnews house with uri geller. How did you get there . Guest how did we get there . A quest narrative. I was interviewing geller and i wanted to spend a lot of time with them because i wanted, i figured that it he was a magician and he was doing this act by preaching to station and what randy and others do, magicians can bend spoons by just a trick. I figured if i spent enough time with geller, i might be able to see a crack in the vale, so to speak. Which i never saw. I was with him for several days like eight and ten hours a day walking all over tel aviv. And everywhere we went, and he so famous turkeys most famous person individual, it seems like everyone ask asked him to bend a spoon committee did. These remarkable circumstances and big soup spoons and the kitchen once in a restaurant. It was really host you saw that happen . Guest i thought have a turkey doesnt necessarily touch the spoon. Thats what i found fascinating. I saw him bend a pair of for two north africans were there. They are crafted to withstand extraordinary heat. He did that. They are like this and he kind of held his finger, it was remarkable. But the one situation i was curious about and i wasnt come i told him i wasnt really buying this idea that he worked for the mossad as he told me that he when he was a little boy that administering pics i wondered going to this archetype, all, maybe this is kind of childhood fantasy. And i said that to him. Im not buying it. What would them aside 94, the spoon bender quick he got angry with me. He has a very big ego by his own admittance. And then a few hours later we walk up to the residents of the Prime Minister. What was amazing is everybody knew very geller. The agent, the protective detail, hey, what you been dispelletospend for us . He was bending spoons. It just had this very surreal quality to it, like there is something going on that is outside the scope of the journalists need to know. And i found it really fascinating. And then of course we were sitting there in the residents, and then geller disappeared into the back, and i wondered is this how the mossad works . I dont know. Its industry. Host it makes you more of a sheep than a goat. Guest it makes no more of a sheep than a coat, you. That kind of experience. But really it makes me open to the idea. Its like im open to the idea because im open to the idea of its craft quest to determine, to think about and what can be known, what is man capable of . And if you think of the world we live in now and is astonishing rate of technology, young said that when he and the Nobel Laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli were discussing esp, that a decades long debate, esp, fact or fantasy . And young said you can only judge what is possible by the criteria of the age, right . To think about what weve been talking about for hours now, where we are now with Computer Technology. I mean, where we are with space travel. This is Science Fiction decades ago, and now its all possible. So if you allow yourself to hold that idea and not be so judgmental againstthese ideas that yes, for millennium have been aligned with the supernatural, have been aligned with magic. But if you can just hold the idea and think about it, i think there is more to be revealed. Host don, houston, texas, Annie Jacobsen is our guest. Caller thank you for taking my call. I was in the air force for eight years and i was in, at for five of those years, and some things happened at brandenburg. I worked with nasa in with the 4392nd and i met carl sagan. I also met the girl that was over blue book and there was rumors, and i saw a number of officers that landed on a private aircraft. We were told they were majestic 12 people. A few days before this gathering of whatever you want to call them, early afternoon, three ufos passed over our base and all the power went out for 15, 20 minutes. It was a factbased. We had missile silos but we were not a Nuclear Armed missile base. They transpired missiles that would be used if we did go to war with russia. Host did you actually see the ufos yourself . Caller yes. I was at dock site when they pass over, and my Work Partners was outside the silo, and other people were standing in the area, the air police were out there when, where they passed. They didnt pass. They came to a stop, and i remember, i looked at my command and he can look at me. I said look, am i seeing what i am seeing are what . He kind of laughed. He said, im not sure, but he said, you know, i dont think with anything in our industry that can do these kind of things. And i said well, you know, i set a think youre right. And then they took off on a high rate of speed and then they came back about three or four minutes later. They hovered right over the missile silo sites and then they headed out towards where the nassau launch with communication satellites and sometimes it was topsecret operations and then i guess they were launching whatever for the military. And host are you convinced these were ufos . Caller well, because of this happened, okay, i walked the fence. I didnt say yeah, we are alone. Im an Irish Catholic and i told a person one day, be ashamed if you know the god that created the universe put us out here by ourselves all alone. Host thank you. Lets hear from Annie Jacobsen, or did you have a question for him . Guest so, ufo, unidentified flying object. I write about this at length in area 51, unidentified flying objects. There are two sides of the aisle, those who say they come from another galaxy, lets say, and those who say they are identified flying aircraft, meaning they are still classified projects. And one thing i can tell you for certain is that ufos were part and parcel to the early days of area 51 because the u2 was often mistaken for a ufo. The oxcart was often mistaken for ufo. And the interview pilots and tha scientist working on this and the official from the government who were in charge of putting the kibosh on those reports. Sometimes people who saw them, and again what nursing was the oxcart, okay . They would see this shiny object going at a speed that was inhumanly possible because 2400 miles an hour was an unknown speed to be able to fly in the early 1960s. So the fbi would knock at the door and literally pay a visit to the people who reported these to let them know that they didnt see anything strange. And that created its own new conspiracy. A cousin of the fbi shows up at your door and tells them you did see something that you know you saw. Thats not to completely disregard all of those individuals who firmly believed they had seen things in the sky that cannot be explained. I just think there are different sides of the argument. Host all of your books have been bestsellers. Does that surprise you . Guest someone who has spent decades trying to get someone to read what i was writing, yes, that surprises me. Its the best kind of surprised. Host why did you give up on the Great American novel . Guest no one was buying the Great American novel from Annie Jacobsen. Its important to benefit to where pipit to where the work is when i say work i mean employment. When i became a reporter, that really change things for me because i was able to accept that so much of writing at least for me is craft. Its just stay at it and keep at it and ultimately you will find and narrate the story. Host a couple of your books are in a movie mode, arent they . Guest they all are. Theyre in television dillon. My new book phenomena was just optioned by stephen spielberg. So its amazing to get some of the old guard, et, close encounters. Lets face it, spielberg built this genre in the fictional world. In the modern fictional world. And then blumberg responsible for not only the horror genre becoming so popular, but they also make really interesting movies like whiplash, document is like the jinx. And those projects are all about what makes you uncomfortable. I think and you with phenomena is squishy site idea, this idea that the senate of the battle between the skeptics and the supernatural us. It makes people really uncomfortable because they think one thing and then they talk to the other side and a think that think that i find that super interesting because we have to ultimately come to terms with her own belief set. A lot of times its a process. The amazing thing about film and television is there sort of a gentle way into many of the subjects. They spark an interest in the nonfiction world i think. The work part and parcel. Host explained hollywood. You said phenomena has been optioned by both spielberg and bluhm house. Happen to people optioned as a product . Guest they team up. Like two great teams and in the content is cratered of how to move forward. If you see that operation paperclip is in development with brad Pitts Company which is called plan b. And rat pack, which is brett ratner is company and they team up. A lot of times you have come and in the pentagons brain you have jj abrams bad robot, the people behind star wars working with warner bros. And area 51, amc with the woman who cowrote the terminator. But again i thinkScience Fiction is super interesting to a lot of people from my favorite thing, the reaches of what can wbe done. So much of Science Fiction winds up becoming the truth. And, in fact, so many scientists, famous scientist, Nobel Laureates tell me that their ideas come from reading Science Fiction as a child. Host well, George Orwell was one of your influences. Why . Guest i mean, you know, that idea of what the future may be like is very interesting to me. And unlike Cautionary Tales because you can see what you want to avoid. What you hope to avoid. The idea of dystopia is a spooky one, and particularly important this speaks to the pentagons brain, the last chapter in the pentagons brain i wrote about darpas quest to create a synthetic brain. And my visit out to los alamos to meet with the scientists were working on it. Will Artificial Intelligence lead us to a place that George Orwell wouldve written about, or did write about . Or will it liberate us . Its that eisenhower question. How do security and liberty live sidebyside . Now that Artificial Intelligence is such a major player everywhere, the quest for it because of course we have, whether or not we will achieve machines, but we have yet to know. But the Defense Department is moving in the direction of marrying autonomous weapons, drones, with Artificial Intelligence. I see danger in that. I see the cautionary tale. Host marcia, union bridge maryland email you were you ever threatened because of the research you do for your books . Do you know if youve ever been under surveillance . Guest look, there are capabilities of the government are extensive. In terms of surveillance. I write about that in all of my books. I just really keep my nose clean, meaning im just after the fax. And i talked to scientists who worked on. Secret, very classified military programs, and they are aware of what they can say and what they cannot say. And thats really where the risk is. So im just contrary grateful that scientists agree to talk to me because it would perhaps be easier to say i cant. Because theyre the ones that have to tell that line and keep these ideas in the mind, okay, i can talk about that program and i cant talk about that. Because you cannot disclose classified information. Thats the risk that they take which is a far greater risk i think then me as a reporter writing narrative nonfiction. Host gene in hillsboro North Carolina good afternoon to you. Caller i wonder if you could maybe confirm or say if you covered about this rumor that was running around at one Technology Company i work for a long time ago, that is special forces delta and seals get a chip embedded for identification purposes like after the failed iranian hostage attempt. They got remains back and after that they decided they needed to put chips into those guys so they could maybe identify remains easier. Host thank you, sir. Guest the chipping technology is very controversial. Yes there are chips in the body for identification purposes. Civilians do that as well. But theres also the chip in the brain programs that are right about in the pentagons brain at a think are far more of concern and again they are presented by darpa under the rubric of warrior wil wellness, under this idea that brain loaded soldiers can have a chip in the brain and they can work on these programs to bring back some cognition. But this is a very slippery slope area, and even the scientists who i interviewed advise the pentagon not to go in that direction for fear of, and this was an exact quote, it could lead to high quality brain control. And when you have, i can come back cautionary tale idea, when you have a warning from a group of scientists who have been advising the pentagon for decades and the pentagon chooses to ignore that, i think its important that those facts be known. Then the citizenry can decide whether or not they think this is a good idea, putting chips anywhere in peoples bodies. Host but on the flipside then what if the russians could what if the chinese are working on this and we dont want to be caught technologically surprised . Guest and thats always the argument. So you would have to say he was pushing science where and why, right . And yes, darpa is absolutely on the cutting edge of all these technologies by the russians also have a darpa and so do the chinese. Host paul, Huntington Beach california Annie Jacobsen is a. Guest we have about 15 minutes left. Caller thank you very much for putting me on. I have a number of questions. The first question is bob lazar, and im sure you discussed bob lazar. The interesting thing is by coincidence he was hungarian and apparently doctor teller recommended that he work on reverse engineering. So i wonder if youve already discussed that i was that you would like to discuss it . Item number two, i visited Wrightpatterson Air Force base last year, and, of course, the roswell incident involved the removal of debris initially to a special anger at wrightpatterson ai air force b. Anything from there it was Spirited Away to area 51. And unfortunately i havent had the opportunity to read your books, but i will because im a neighbor. So thats another area. The third area that is fascinating is, back in the 90s and American Military gentleman, a colonel, published a book in which he theorized based on his experience and proposed the fact that alien craft an alien reverse engineering was largely responsible for the explosion of Technological Breakthroughs that took place in the 50s, and that many of those breakthroughs were done by darpa and then disseminated through the private sector. Host we will leave it at those three questions, but very quickly, do you believe that, on your third question . Caller its, its hard to disprove because the explosion, if you take a look at the development of human civilization, there are timelines when major discoveries are made. Archimedes, aristotle, the euclidean therrien, you cut through isaac newton. But theres huge concentration in a three decade. Of explosive discoveries, simply is statistically out of the norm of human evolution, at least i certainly feel this because we are looking at computing looking at bioengineering, look at the discovery of the transistor. We are looking at a tremendous proliferation of use of silicon, and the additional electronic discoveries. But in particular, kelly johnson, skunk works, and im sure your family with skunk works. The aerodynamics that emerged out of the skunk works and subsequently are so radically different from the previous history of aerodynamics, in particular the sharp aerodynamic edges of the u2 which was host thank you for that and i apologize. I think we got the gist. Guest many of these subjects are covered in area 51, from lockheed, teller, bob lazar. These are all ideas pick you to think about going back to what were just talking about, what is possible in any age, okay . The idea of strange things in the sky has been an issue that people have thought about and contemplate and created art about going back to precivilization. I visited the British Museum was writing the phenomena and looked at the earliest examples of what people that were ufos. I looked at writings from the library. The omen, rulers back in 600 bc would say who will win the war . I went to the oracle at delphi, that kind of read and feel what itwas like to work with prophecies. The prophecy, ufos, man, civilization, biology, what is possible these are all part and parcel to all the subjects i investigate. And i just love the fact that there are ideas that exist, and we look as journalists come we go into the documentation, we interview people. We present the stories as best i present the stories that i do in my books as best as i can, based on eyewitnesses, based on documentation and based on the work of other journalists before me who have laid the tracks down. And so the story is always evolving and changing and transforming but ultimately its going in that direction about what we know about the past, and how can we use that as we move forward in the future and make sense of this world that we live in, where technology is advancing at this astonishing rate, and yet we and our ideas, our brains are still relatively the same. Host what about his point that all of a sudden we had these great technological leaps beginning in the 50s . Guest many scientists talk about that idea of knowledge kind of the same discoveries cropping up in different parts of the world at the same time. And that is super interesting. One of the things i write about in phenomena that i did not, that is new to my sort of works, if you will, speaks a little bit to the readers question and to your point. It has to do with this idea of where this inspiration comes from. Eureka moment. And i will tell a story about the great charlestown and what he told me in her interview. Charlestown won the nobel prize in the early 1960s with the laser. Arguably one of the most important technological inventions of the modern era. I mean military applications, laser weapons, civilian use, eye surgery, the laser printer. And i bring this up because the scientific skeptics always go crazy on this idea and on balance when you think the idea about to tell you come from Charles Townes, it kind of puts things in perspective. I asked him to confirm with me a kind of story that was after about him, that the idea of the laser came to him while he was sitting on a park bench. Denny said yes, that is right. That was his eureka moment. Now Charles Townes wheeler is a man of faith. So that eureka moment to him in his view of the world and in his perspective was something akin to him from the supernatural, okay . And this i think speaks to the callers questions about where are these ideas coming from. And some people, the sheep will tell you that great moments are not limited to i came up with this i can myself sitting at my desk. There are three Nobel Laureates i write about in the book will talk about these eureka moments and to believe that these ideas come from without. I think the whole world and the narrative of aliens and higher intelligence, a b even consciousness that is touching upon that theory that there is a greater intelligence out there. And i think that its not, i think its unwise for me anyways to dismiss this whole cost to take the position of the goat and essentially ridicule it. I think the idea of being open to it is far more interesting and far more courageous. Host deck, troy alabama you are on booktv. Caller cspan, thank you very much for the last two hours and 50 minutes. This has been absolutely captivating. Ms. Jacobsen, i have a question. First of all i would like to tell you, you just sold for books because im going to buy them tomorrow. But what id like to know though is, you made this quotation twice about, attributing, eisenhower was Farewell Speech. But the balance between security and liberty. Is an informed public. I want to know this, and please dont consider this to be a mean question because i dont mean for it to be. But just how much should we know about whats going on . Host we would get an edge in two seconds. Will you tell us a bit about yourself . Caller im just, i try to be a writer, but not very good at it. Im not very wise. My knowledge is very shallow. I really couldnt, i dont even know if shallow would be the proper word about what you are talking. Host what kind of work did you do . Are you retired . Caller i taught school for a while that i been a lot of other things, too. But this has been a most most enjoyable show. And i wish you would write a novel, ms. Jacobsen. Host there we go. Guest thank you so much. Host how much should we know . Guest another theme that im always writing about. Because when you see some of the programs declassified and you realize what was at issue, what was at stake, there is very good reason in many instances to keep those programs classified so that the other side doesnt come isnt aware of that, and it remains to defensive measure. There lies the conundrum of the militaryindustrial complex. I think the question is brilliant. Because the militaryindustrial complex exists for a purpose for national security. But if their goal is to see up the revelation, then you also have what one Defense Department official described to me as a self licking ice cream cone. Right . So in other words, if you could have a great weapons system that state classified, and the other Intelligence Community on the other side knew about it and couldnt defend against it, and the goal was to keep the two powers in check, then essentially you have an effective weapons system. The minute that system becomes known, like the fy 17, then that becomes obsolete and it creates an entire new vacuum, i. E. New business for the defense contractors to create a new weapons system. So its a great question and i think there is no easy answer but the investigation, the investigator in the is infinitely interested in pursuing that thought and find out what i can and presenting those faxed to the public. Host this is an email from joe. Which one or two programs would you like to see released to the public tomorrow . Which one or two wake you up in a cold sweat . Guest i mean, thats a great question. But i dont know because i think the old, really and truly see unknowable programs are the most interesting. It never ceases to amaze me when you learn about a program that no one knew about before. Then you really know the government is doing its job of keeping things secret. But if i had to say looking back, i think the weapons tests that we did in space are extremely interesting. And i would like, i know a lot of those are still classified because ive reported on those, and that speaks to the space race. There is talk right now with the Current Administration of rebooting the space race i think that is extraordinarily dangerous for a number of reasons, first and foremost because they are also talking about perhaps a return to nuclear testing. Thats frightening. And if you look at the weapons tests were done in space, you get a sense of how dangerous this all can be. Host please go ahead with your question or comment for Annie Jacobsen. Caller this is mr. Jacobsen, and thanks for having me. I 92 years old, and my grandfather first name was tourville. That was Leif Erickson brother. So i dont know if any relative or not but i thought it would bring it up. The question i wanted to ask is, do the government still have all that material they picked up at oswald . I mean, over at oswald, the city of oswald . Host the city of rossville. Thank you for watching. Guest amazing you have the adventurous spirit in your blood. But for the roswell remains can we dont know where they are. Host do we know there were remains . Guest i mean, it depends on who you ask about the remains. I write about that in area 51. 51. I think thats one of those mysteries and maybe to your earlier caller, if there was a program that could be declassified, could you imagine if roswell was really declassified . Host Annie Jacobsen is the author of four books. First came out in 2011, area 51. Operation paperclip came out in 2014 and i was the secret Intelligence Program that brought nazi scientist to america. The pentagons brain came out in 2015. At her most recent book is phenomena the secret history of the u. S. Governments investigations into extraSensory Perception and psychokinsis. She tells us her next book will have something to do with the cia. That leaves it pretty broad i guess. Do you enjoy the book to her . Guest i love it. I love you and eating out on the road and talking to people who like to read. It reminds me of that image that we talked about of Edgar Mitchell, the man on the moon reading. And you think about this idea, the archetype of reading, of knowledge. I often say i the best job in the world. I get to write books and listen to what readers think about and what the expense of reading a book and then how it influences them in their lives and their thinking and as they become more alert and knowledgeable part of the citizenry. Host lets hear from barbara from newark new jersey. Caller speaking about neardeath experiences and extraSensory Perception. I had a neardeath experience and i think the brain is more powerful than any computer. Also, have you heard of dark social . Its supposed to be something where on the internet people can read what you write on facebook or in any kind of log or anything and then they take it and they write it and claim it as their own. And then when you go to verify your own writing, youre being told that you are plagiarizing yourself . Host before you go you talked about neardeath experiences. What was yours . Caller i fell on concrete, slipped and hit the back of my head on concrete, and i had no, nothing to prevent my whole weight hitting just on the back of my head. And i was out for, i dont know how long. But when i got in the ambulance, i saw, i dont know whether it was vertigo or what it was, but it was like a jet speed it up rocket ship speed, like, in front of my eyes, but it was, it was going from left to right or right to left. And it was like, what would you call it . Like a slot machine going in front of my eyes. Host i apologize to her almost at a time. Neardeath experiences. Have those been investigated as well . Guest yes. I write about them in the book phenomena. Because thats the conversion moment for a lot of people where they have a neardeath experience and they come back from that with extreme conviction about what they are now going to pursue it and it often has come as the caller explained, to do with consciousness. What is the brain capable of . Because if you go somewhere else, come back, you sort have a different perspective. And i find that super interesting. Post the medical Research Involved in a lot of the things you have looked at . Guest yes absolutely. Human physiology. Thats what we are today with the psp program. Instead of the parent psychologist you know biologist, neural physiologists looking inside the brain and inside the body and working to map the human brain is a remarkable concept, particularly when you put the military in the mix because the military is working to enhance human functioning, enhance cognition and ultimately to weaponized the systems. Either civilian applications . Like all things. Host Annie Jacobsen has been our guest on booktv