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Bill Ryan interviewed by Tania
from
the Project Avalon Forum
July 18,
2010
Tania (T): Hello. [laughs]
Bill Ryan (BR): [laughs]
T: Yo yo yo. This is Tania from Brooklyn. What’s up? What’s up? I’m giving a shout out to Bill Ryan. [laughs]
BR: Right. Okay.
T: Yeah, I lived in Brooklyn. What can I say? Take three.
BR: So, we take two on that, huh?
T: Yes. Okay. Hello, my name is Tania. I am a member of the Project Avalon Forum. It is July 18, 2010, and it is my pleasure to be here with Bill Ryan who is the founder of Project Avalon, to ask a few questions about the current oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. Hello Bill. How are you?
BR: [laughs] Hi there, Tania. It’s a pleasure to speak to you, and it’s a pleasure to speak to anybody who happens to be listening to this. It’s about time that I publish some kind of a conversation, as it were, and I appreciate your support in helping me do that right now.
T: Well, you’ve had a, as most of us know, you’ve had a very watchful eye on this situation since the beginning, since April 20th. You have kept us up-to-date on your blog, as well as providing information on the Project Avalon Forum. And… Well, first I’d like to say that currently, after almost three months, the oil leak has been stopped. I know that BP is now testing the cap before it will come forward and label the situation ‘a success,’ which, of course, is very good news.
But, I would love to address the problems of BP and the U.S. government continuing to treat us on a need-to-know basis, as we all know that there was an intentional media blackout. And it seems that the alternative media sources have been giving all kinds of contradictory information, and this is where I’d like to get your opinion as to why you think this has happened, and do you feel that alternative media has been responsible in its coverage.
BR: Wow. Okay. How… [laughs] How many questions have we got in there?
T: [laughs]
BR: It’s … I think maybe the first thing to do, is to just summarize my own personal journey through this. Not because there’s anything special about my own journey here, but because it gives us some markers in the timeline which are kind of interesting. And, at first, when this all happened on the 20th of April, to be completely honest, I didn’t pay an awful lot of attention to it.
Alex Jones, in one of his early interviews with Lindsey Williams, said very honestly on radio, he said, ‘You know what? I’m just a little bit late for this party.’ And I felt a little bit like that as well. What woke me up was a broadcast interview with James Fox, who himself is a filmmaker, by Mel Fabregas from the Veritas Radio Show which, I think, was in something like the 2nd or the 3rd of June, about six weeks ago now.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: And I suddenly listened to that, and I thought, ‘Holy moly, we’ve got a problem here. I didn’t really realize it.’ I knew that there was what was euphemistically called an ‘oil spill,’ but that’s when I first realized that there were serious problems on the ground. There were problems with suppression of information. There seemed to be military activity and all kinds of things going on, and people weren’t being told about what was happening.
And, that’s when the word first started to become more widely known about a media blackout under certain circumstances, and then I started to pay very close attention to this, because suddenly all my antennae went up and I thought, ‘Okay, what’s going on here? There’s something different that's happening.’
And then – excuse the metaphor – I drilled down pretty deeply into this, and I spent quite a lot of time figuring out what was happening. And as I read to catch up, listened to all the interviews, trawled through the alternative media reports, trawled through the mainstream media reports, I started to become extremely anxious, which is actually unlike me, because usually I kind of think, ‘Oh okay, well this is happening, but it will be okay. And that’s happening and it will be okay. And this is happening and we need to pay attention to it.’
And we got a whole kind of range of stuff lined up which I kind of keep tabs on, on an ongoing basis. And this time, I thought, ‘My god, we’re in big trouble here. We’re in really big trouble.’ And I felt this. I felt this in my bones, and a lot of other people did as well. I actually became quite upset about it, which, again, is unlike me.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: And, I began to think, I began to feel... Let me describe it the way it really was. I really began to feel that maybe we had tipped the balance – we, collectively, had tipped the balance – into some unimaginably horrible scenario which was really going to end up with us sort of slippery sliding into some place on planet Earth that we really didn’t want to be. And I hadn’t seen this coming. A lot of people hadn’t seen this coming.
And I became very concerned. I followed it very closely for about two weeks. And on the Project Avalon blog, I actually said that I thought this was the most serious situation, short of nuclear war, that we could be facing together, and I really felt that.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: Then something changed. And I’m absolutely certain that something changed. Around about the 17th or the 18th of June, a lot of other people felt the same way. They kind of felt that there had been a tipping point somewhere…
T: Hmm.
BR: …and I woke up the next morning. And, for the first time, I looked at the news reports – because I was checking the news reports every morning – and I thought, ‘Okay. This is going to be all right now. This is going to be okay.’ And I even stated as such, publicly. I said, ‘This is going to be all right. The engineers will be permitted to do their jobs. There are lot of good people here who are trying to do the right thing. The relief wells are in operation. I understand how that technology works. They’re going to do it. The guy in charge of it is a good man. It’s going to succeed.’
But at the moment, it looks pretty apocalyptic and genuinely terrible for an enormous range of sea life, which I find very upsetting to watch. But actually we’re going to make this through, and with a bit of luck – and this is where I really began to kind of change my tune on the whole thing – I thought, ‘Okay. This is all over now, but they haven’t fixed it yet, but they will do.’
And now the challenge is, what can we learn from this together? And, in the last few weeks, this has really been my focus. I’m delighted that it seems to have stopped. The whole story seems to have been rewritten in terms of what we felt we knew. We thought that we knew that the pressures were really high in the well. Lindsey Williams said between 20,000 and 70,000. And then another source told him 40,000.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: In the meantime, I’ve been contacted by somebody who was a mathematician and very knowledgeable, connected with people who are active in the oil industry. Somebody who is a good, well-intentioned guy, who had access to good information. Now he didn’t give me numbers, but he said the pressures were extraordinarily high. And we kept on hearing this on the grapevine.
It’s like, ‘Oh my god, we’ve really woken up the sleeping monster here and we’re never going to be able to put it back to sleep again, because we don’t have the technology to do that,’ and all the information seemed to be corroborating that, but that is not the case. It just isn’t the case.
Now if you look back on things, we can see, if we kind of take a really deep breath and look at the data that’s in the public domain, and now we know where to find it. And the pressures are high, but they’re not that high. They’re kind of average for an oil well. They’re 11,900 pounds per square inch. This is not unexpected. It’s well within the range of what can be handled by normal means.
And since then, I’ve spoken with a number of people and they’re saying, ‘Listen, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the situation at all, apart from the fact that they screwed up big time in their implementation of the regular procedures, and this whole thing is happening a mile under the surface of the water, which makes it a little difficult, because you’ve got to do everything remotely.’ And, there’s actually not that big a potential problem, and the whole thing is being talked up hugely by the alternative media in…
T: Mm-hm.
BR: …and the stories have become wilder and wilder. And that process alone... I was kind of watching all of this, listening to what good people were saying, what good people were believing. These are people who are concerned about the planet. They’re trying to do the same thing as what you and I and many other people are doing. They’re trying to get the truth out there, because we don’t trust the mainstream media.
And I found myself thinking, ‘They’ve got this all wrong. They’ve just got it all wrong.’ And I was pleased that they got it all wrong, because I don’t want there to be an asphalt volcano or 500 miles an hour tsunamis that kind of sweep across Florida leaving it all as a … [laughs]
T: Mm-hm.
BR: …giant sand-bar with nothing else there. Or, you know, rivers of fire flowing up to the Yellowstone Caldera, setting off all the volcanoes on the West Coast and down to South America. I mean, it’s like, give me a break! It’s almost as if there are some people who kind of want these things to happen.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: Now, I know that it’s very easy to get polarized about this. And to make flip remarks about the doomsayers and the neurosis of the alternative media and all of this kind of stuff. And I really started to look at this, and it was such a wonderful case-study, because what I really felt I understood more clearly than I’d ever understood before, was that there are a very large number of people in the alternative media who are desperately and sincerely concerned about the fate of planet Earth.
They don’t trust the mainstream media, for good reason. They don’t trust the politicians, with good reason. They don’t trust what they’ve been taught in school, for good reason. And they know deep in their bones that there’s something badly, badly wrong. And they’re kind of all motivated to do something about this, but they don’t have the facts and they don’t know what’s wrong, because no one’s giving a news conference as about what’s really happening.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: So, what happens is, these people, these good people, well-intentioned people, all over the alternative media, they jump on something and they pick it up. And they hear a report, they don’t fully understand it. And there’s no reason why they should, because in this case they are not experienced oil-exploration geologists or…
T: Mm-hm.
BR: …engineers. They don’t understand the hydrostatics of oil wells. They don’t understand how this stuff works. I didn’t understand how this stuff works. And they don’t understand this stuff. There’s no reason why they should, because it takes a lot of expertise to really get to the bottom of it all. They know that there’s something wrong, and they pick up the wrong ball and they run with it as fast as they possibly can do, because they’re asking the right question, but they’re coming up with the wrong answer. And then after that, you’ve got a new generation of what are known as ‘YouTubers’ now.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: YouTube is growing at a most enormous rate. I saw the statistics once and I kind of remembered what it was. There are like, I don’t know. This is wrong, because I’m making it up right now, but it’s something like 10,000 new videos per day or something. It’s an enormous growth rate.
T: Yes.
BR: And people copy things, and they think they’re doing the world a service by having to spread the news because they're all these young crusaders who feel that they’re flying the flag for truth and justice and…
T: Mm-hm…
BR: …doing the job that they feel the alternative media isn’t doing. But the problem is, and this is where you can map this process across a whole lot of other things, about Planet X, about 2012, about…
T: Mm-hm.
BR: …about everything you can think of where the facts aren’t known, but there are good questions to ask, and what you get is, you get an almighty confusion.
T: Mmh.
BR: And often, in that confusion, as happens in any crowd of people who are all trying to communicate at the same time, the loudest voices get the most attention, or those who are standing higher above the rest of the crowd, in some way, because of their agreed-upon authority status. And, I mean, I don’t mean anything bad by that, but I”m meaning, like, you know, if somebody says something on Coast to Coast, or Jeff Rense, and everyone steps back and says, ‘Wow, it must be true!’ But that’s not necessarily the case.
And, to bring this into sharp focus with a good example, Lindsey Williams, who, most people listening to this will know, he’s a wonderful man. I think he’s in his 70s now or pretty close, and he used to work as a chaplain on the oil pipeline in Alaska, Prudhoe Bay, and he got very friendly with a lot of the senior executives there, and maintained that relationship to a degree.
To the extent that he has an inside source, who’s now very elderly, who told him two years ago that the price of oil would fall from $147 down to $50 by the time of the November 2008 election in America, and that’s exactly what happened, even though nobody could believe it at the time. And ever since then, people have been saying, ‘Wow, Lindsey Williams has got this source who really knows what’s going on, so we’d better listen to Lindsey.’ And I felt…
T: Yup.
BR: …it myself, and I still do to some degree, because Lindsey is a dear sweet man. He’s very sincere. I love listening to him. I support his work in every way. But he was interviewed on Jeff Rense on the 1st of July, and he had a new source, one somebody who he hadn’t spoken to. This is not the original guy who told him about the oil prices. This is somebody who, he said, was a senior BP source who approached him, told him…
T: Mmh.
BR: …that there are two main problems, that the granite which was encasing the well was cracking, and that the oil pressures in the reservoir were known to be 40,000 pounds per square inch. And the absolute God-given truth about this, is that this is false information. It’s just incorrect. Lindsey believed what he was told. He’s not a geologist.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: There’s no granite in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil reservoirs are not encased in granite. There’s no granite anywhere near the area. It’s just untrue. And he may have misremembered what he’d been told. That’s a possibility, which, of course, is a danger in itself. If you're told something which you can’t quite remember, and then you think, ‘Well, what did he say? I think it was granite. I guess… okay, that’s the kind of rock, that’s true.’
T: Hmm.
BR: But we don’t know. But this how these things get out there. And the figure about 40,000 pounds per square inch, it’s just untrue. He was, I believe there is good reason to believe that he was lied to, and this is a problem.
And then, of course, if we really step back, and sit and think about this, you start thinking, ‘Okay, poor Lindsey. Okay, so he was lied to and he did his job and he went on Jeff Rense and he attracted a lot of publicity and he was trying to say, Listen, there’s a big problem here.’ Maybe the same kind of thing has happened so many times.
And many of you listening to this will know that for three years, I worked very closely with Kerry Cassidy in Project Camelot. I’m still involved with that peripherally, and we do have some projects that we’re going to be doing together, and I fully support all the work that we have done, and that Kerry is still doing.
But the providence of information, which means the history of information, where did it come from, how do you know that it’s true, who told you, why did they tell you, how do they know what they knew. Is there a factor here which Richard Hoagland says, very smartly, in my opinion, ‘The lie is different at every level.’ People can, an inside source can say something, but we don’t know where he got the information from.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: Maybe Lindsey Williams wasn’t actually knowingly lied to. Maybe he was told this by a senior executive who didn’t actually know the figures, because he’s not a geologist. Maybe he’s an economist or something, and he was told it by somebody else, and maybe he was led up the garden path, because he mentioned to his mate that he was going to call Lindsey Williams because the truth had better be out and...
We don’t know how these information channels flow, and it’s a real problem, because there is so much bad information in the alternative community. And as I say, many, many times, there’s a lot of crazy stuff out there, and some of the crazy stuff is true. There are diamonds in the mud. There really are. There are very, very important things going on.
The ETs do have an agenda here. There are, in my opinion, reptilian walk-ins in politicians, business, finance, even the media. There is a strategic occupation going on, on a sort of astral level which is really important. There is a secret space program. 9-11 was a setup job. There are all kinds of things going on in the backgrounds here, which we don’t have the information about in detail. But we do know, with a large degree of confidence, that some of these things are true. And the problem lies in the detail.
I think the devil is in the detail, and every now and then, we get things wildly, wildly wrong. And what’s changed for me personally, in the last 12 to 18 months I think, is that I’ve become much more focused on the quality of information rather than the quantity of it. Much more careful about reporting something that we just happen to have been told. Because at Camelot we got our fingers burned a couple of times.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: And, in my opinion, it’s very smart to learn from that. People who think that we’re making things up. We don’t make anything up at all, but we might have been a little too quick to believe something immediately, simply because we were part of this process that I have described a few minutes ago, about knowing that there’s something wrong and being so highly motivated to jump on what we believed was the truth and communicate that, that sometimes we may have picked up the wrong ball.
I don’t think we picked up many wrong balls, but I think we picked up a few. And those people who have written to me saying, ‘Well, why don’t you post more stuff on Project Avalon?’ It’s actually because when I do put something there, I really want it to be well-researched and valuable.
And I’m kind of smiling at myself when I say that, because, in early June, when I really started to look at the situation in the Gulf of Mexico, I posted a whole bunch of information. And now, you know what? I’m thinking, ‘Ah, well, you know, I was re-broadcasting what Richard Hoagland said about the tsunami. I was broadcasting an interview that I did with Bill Deagle when he talked about really serious dire things. And I don’t know if that’s good information, but I did my best at the time.’
T: Mm-hm.
BR: What I think is going on here, and this is all a very long response to a whole bundled-up bunch of questions that you asked me... [laughs]
T: Mm-hm. Thank you.
BR: ...but in a minute, you’re going to have the interesting job of trying to figure out where to go from here. But my current belief is that this situation is not the way we believed that it was. The pressures in the reservoir seem to be low. It may be depleted. There’s a very interesting unprovable theory that somebody may have done something behind the scenes to alter the situation without letting anybody know, because you’ve got a lot of experienced engineers, now, looking at their pressure graphs, thinking, ‘You know what? I don’t understand this. What’s happening here?’ They don’t understand what’s going on.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: But it’s good news, because the whole thing is behaving like a solid reservoir that hasn’t got an awful lot of pressure in it, And that’s exactly the kind of situation you want to be in.
I don’t know to what degree the situation was an accident. It’s arguable that it could have been allowed to happen. There was certainly a whole series of irresponsible mistakes that were made, errors of judgment that seemed to be connected with self-interest and cost-cutting. There were a number of critical mistakes which combined together to result in the big blowout. And I do think that all of this is going to come out in the wash in the end, and I don’t think this whole thing was planned.
But, as Lindsey Williams says, and, of course, I’ve referenced him earlier, but one the first things that he said, which I do think is correct, is, he said it was an accident, but the Powers-That-Be kind of knew that this was going to happen, because they have their own occult sources of information. They’re not the drivers of the situation, they’re just the caretakers on planet Earth.
And every now and then, they get little clues and hints that things are going to happen. And then they play their financial bets, and then they take advantage of these situations when they occur, because they kind of got an agenda to drive things in an certain way.
Meanwhile, inverted commas here, you’ve got the forces of light who are kind of trying to work in the opposite direction and the whole thing ends up with a very interesting, again metaphorical, Star Wars-type scenario, whereas you’ve got the Jedi who are countering the intentions of the dark side, and the Jedi on planet Earth take a number of forms. I would say literally hundreds of thousands of very good people who are incarnated here with the specific purpose of making a difference. And so the game goes on.
I think that the well will be capped. I think that this cap is good. I don’t think there’s a big problem. I think the relief wells will work. I think that we’ll all be left scratching our heads in a couple of months thinking, ‘Well, what was all that about?’
And my main concern, I think – as I stated in a presentation that I gave a week ago that I might possibly release at the same time as this. Just a little stage presentation I gave to a small group of people – that if we don’t wake up from this wake up call, then it’s a little bit like having a snooze alarm. And then the next time it goes off, it’s going to go off a little bit louder and a little bit longer, until we finally get the message and we wake up. For me, this is an opportunity to really contemplate what is it that we are doing to planet Earth. And you and I have talked about the Avatar movie before.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: I love the movie. I must have seen it four or five times. And for me, it is full of plain, beautifully presented and important messages for us on planet Earth. It’s clear to me that the whole thing is an allegory. It’s an allegory…
T: Mm-hm.
BR: …that we can’t treat this beautiful, beautiful diamond of a planet in the midst of empty, cold empty space, with the contempt and the lack of care that we all do. This is our spaceship. It’s not that big. There are a lot of people on board. We’re trashing it, and there’s nowhere else for us to go. There may be places for some of the controllers to go, if they want to jump ship, but there’s nowhere for us to go. This is our home, and look at what we’re doing to it.
And one of the things that came up for our attention, simply because it was topical, and I didn’t know about this and no one else I knew, knew about this, was that over the last 40 years there’s been an ongoing ecological catastrophe in the Niger Delta, in Nigeria.
T: Mmh. Yes.
BR: Nobody cares. Nobody knew. It was under-reported. It was happening to those guys over there. It wasn’t happening to us, and therefore we could conveniently look the other way, just like people do when they walk down the streets of New York – excuse the reference here – and they see a mugging happening on the other side of the street and they walk on, because…
T: Mm-hm.
BR: …it’s not their street, it’s not their business. It’s not their responsibility. They don’t want to get involved, and they’d rather look the other way. And it’s human nature to do that, but we can’t do that anymore. The situation in the Niger Delta is desperate. But the Nigerians, to whom this has happened, no one’s been listening to their cries. They’re starting to get militant about it.
They don’t have YouTube accounts. They don’t have Facebook. They don’t have blogs. Some of them haven’t even made a phone call, these people, in the whole of their lives. This is the way things are in the developing world. Their entire way of life and everywhere where they live all around them is being completely trashed, and nobody cares because nobody’s looking. And that’s because the way that big business works, is that if nobody’s looking and nobody reports it, then they just keep on pushing that line…
T: Huh.
BR: …to see what they can get away with, because they don’t want to have to go through the costs and the time and all those factors that, in strictly business terms, are not considered to be necessary, unless they have to. And there are many, many, many situations all over the world where this is happening. The Amazon Rain Forest is being cut down at some enormous rate. I don’t have the figures in front of me. It’s... I don't know. It's like it’s a square mile a minute or it’s something horrific. If you saw it happening in front of your eyes, you’d think, ‘What are they doing here?’
But it’s happening over there and the cameras aren’t there and the… I heard a report, for example, which I have no reason to believe isn’t true, that some of the indigenous people in, I believe, it was Peru... It might have been Ecuador. I’m not totally sure. People listening to this may know the facts. They started to protest about what was happening. They took to the streets. They were gunned down by the military. They were actually gunned down by helicopter gunships.
T: Mmh.
BR: They were machine-gunned. The cameras weren’t there. Nobody knew. They didn’t have any legal representation. They didn’t have any legal status. These were indigenous people who we were talking about. They buried them, and that was it. And they continued cutting down the trees.
This is what we’re doing here. And what happened in the Gulf of Mexico happened on America’s own doorstep. It had the shock factor of 9-11, which I know you were involved in personally, because usually these things happen on the other side of the world.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: This time, it happened right in front of the television cameras, on the mainstream news, with people watching, people reporting, and it was a traumatic incident that couldn’t be just dismissed as something that didn’t concern the American people.
Now, of course, the wake up call from 9-11 was grossly twisted and misused as a justification for starting the war on terror, and we need to watch very carefully to see if this is somehow going to be taken advantage of in a similar way. At the moment, I don’t see the signs of it, and this is the… What date is it? 18th of July, 2010.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: At the moment, I don’t see the signs of this being jumped on, with the kind of announcement that George Bush made the morning after 9-11 saying, ‘Okay. It was Osama Bin Laden, and now we’re going to smoke him out.’
T: Mm-hm.
BR: I don’t see that. But that doesn’t mean to say that the controllers don’t have plans for taking advantage of this in some way. I talked a little while ago about the timeline changing in some strange way around about the 17th or 18th of June, whereby a lot of people were suddenly able to relax and say, ‘You know what? This is going to be okay now.’ I don’t know whether this also means that the controllers’ plans to capitalize on the situation have also evaporated.
I just don’t know what games may be being played behind the scenes, so you need to be very vigilant. There’re some people who’ve done some good financial reporting. Global finances aren’t my expertise. And it may be that there’s some things going on behind the scenes to do with cap and trade, to do with regulation of the oil industry, that they’re going to jump on and we’re going to find that this is going to be part of the New World Order agenda. We don’t know that yet.
So, in response to your question, I talked quite animatedly for the best part of half an hour. I’m going to take a deep breath, take a swig of my coffee and, [they laugh] and then you can throw another bunch of questions at me, but at the moment that’s the best I’ve got.
T: Thank you very much for that reply. Something that just came to mind as you were speaking was, do you feel that there’s some level of desensitizing going on here, with the media and all the misinformation swirling around the internet? Meaning, one minute there was a lot of pushing of fear and now they’re saying everything is fine.
BR: You’re asking me about what the mainstream media are doing – is that right?
T: Yes, and the alternative community, too. There’s so much contradicting information in the alternative media sources. I know that myself and a lot of forum members are very confused at this moment and part of when you were talking, I was thinking, ‘Well, maybe this is on purpose, to desensitize people.’
Because one minute it’s really, really bad, and the next minute, ‘Oh it’s okay, it’s much better!’ I wanted to get your take on that.
BR: It could be. I know what you’re saying.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: And when you’re talking about the desensitization, the simplest version of that story is the ‘Wolf-wolf’ story. It’s like when people cry ‘wolf’ and then there’s...
T: Mm-hm.
BR: ...no wolf, then eventually when they cry ‘wolf’ when there really is a wolf, no one pays any attention to them.
T: Exactly.
BR: The little story of the shepherd boy. And, in the last two weeks, I’ve been getting my information from a very high-quality website and forum which is called the ‘Oil Drum,’ theoildrum.com.
T: Yes.
BR: And it’s like sitting in the canteen or the coffee shop of a whole bunch of very experienced, highly qualified and very smart geologists, engineers, oil men, people who really know this business inside out and who’ve got no axe to grind, who are not necessarily any friends of BP or Obama, but who are just looking at all of this and who are able to integrate the reports and what they’re seeing with their own enormous database of information.
I’ve been kind of hanging out in that little community. I haven’t been communicating with them very much, but I’ve been listening to their conversations. What they have to say about the alternative media is embarrassing to hear.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: They... And of course, all the problems here are to do with making sure that the babies aren’t thrown out with the bath water. Because, as I was saying before, the alternative media are concerned about some things that are being underreported, misreported, twisted, hidden from us, and so on and so forth.
But they also pick up things which are completely... [sighs] which they shouldn’t be picking up if they were just a little smarter. Let me give you an example of this. This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy. There’s good circumstantial reason to believe that there’s a massive body in the solar system which some people believe is a brown dwarf star.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: Dramatically, it’s been called Planet X. People have connected this with what Zecharia Sitchin reported as Nibiru from his translations of ancient Sumerian texts. And the whole thing has gotten mixed in with this big stew of conjecture. But underneath all that, there’s a solid ground of good reason to believe that there may be something out there that is coming this way.
And even if it’s unlikely to be true, just hypothetically speaking from the point of view of the argument, the consequences of it coming this way are so huge that, you know what? It’s worthwhile spending a few minutes just to check this out rather than laughing it off.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: And then what happens, is you get somebody who sees what’s called a ‘sun dog,’ an atmospheric effect in the sunset. And they see ... they see our sun and then they see something that looks like a little sun beside it and they think, ‘My God, there’s Planet X. That’s it. Hey, you know what? I’m going to get it on my cell-phone camera. Then I can… [laughs] put it on the internet.’
And it’s like, ‘Ohhhh.’ You know, I appreciate the intention, but give me a break. There are tens of thousands of amateurs astronomers who would know that this thing was there. You don’t have to take a picture of it on your cell-phone camera and think that you’re the only person in the world who knows.
Reality doesn’t work like that. Yeah, it really doesn’t work like that.
If you’ve got an ET who appears in your bedroom, then please, use a cell-phone camera and grab it because nobody else is looking at it. But, Planet X? Give me a break! And that’s the kind of thing that makes a laughing stock out of the alternative community from the viewpoint of very solid, smart, data-driven, pragmatic professionals.
And those are the people who we want to be talking to, to say, ‘Hey listen. We’ve got problems out here in the world. Can you help us figure them out?’ We want to be talking to the professionals, to the data-driven guys, to the scientists, to the observers, to the people who know how to evaluate information.
But the so-called alternative community has been mixed up so much with the New Age movement. It’s been mixed up with channeling.
T: Yes.
BR: You get good, solid, honest-to-goodness reporting of UFOs, with reliable observer witness reports and some extraordinary personal experiences. And then it’s all mixed up with Blossom Goodchild talking about a ten mile spaceship that’s going to appear over, I don’t know, whenever it was, back in October 2008 and...
T: Mm-hm.
BR: ...then the whole subject just becomes muddied, because there are a lot of people in the alternative community – and this is going to make me sound like some kind of a... I don’t know what. I’m a little worried about how this makes me sound – but they don’t know how to evaluate information.
It’s like, if you got your head in the clouds, you’ve got to have your feet on the ground as well, or you’ve got to be working very closely with somebody who has their feet on the ground. Otherwise, the guys with their heads in the clouds just float off like a balloon.
And I am as sure as I can be, that the powers that be, the controllers, playing with their high technology, there’s good reason to believe that, at an experimental or maybe even a fully-operational state, there are technologies which will influence thoughts or even broadcast hard data into people’s minds on a targeted basis. They can do this kind of stuff, and...
T: Mm-hm.
BR: ...if somebody wakes up in the morning feeling that, ‘Oh my God. I had this vision of X, Y and Z,’ we can’t be 100 percent sure that it wasn’t put there by somebody who is doing their particular science-experiment or maybe even trying to throw people off the track deliberately. We just don’t know that.
And the danger here, just to flip this over into the other way, is that then we start throwing all of this information out, because we start thinking, ‘Well, people who’ve had a wacky vision, they’re all either being messed with or they’re all deluded.’ And this goes back to what I was saying before, that some of these stories are true.
Some of these stories are authentic. There really are non-physical beings who try to communicate with us in the best way that they can. But how do we tell the signal from the noise? It’s all about the signal-to-noise ratio.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: And this is where, I think that… It’s like, my call to the alternative community is, to take a deep breath. If you get a piece of information, look at it without judgment. Try and correlate it with other things. Try and consider the possibilities that it might be false, it might be true. Try and look and see what else seems to support it.
If you know somebody who understands the area which this is related to, like, for instance, geology, or hydrodynamics, or plate tectonics, or astrophysics, or whatever. If you don’t know about that stuff, what a wonderful opportunity to learn something. There are all kinds of people who are happy to explain these things.
And to some degree, I now feel, I guess, that it’s a little more important than I thought it was a couple of years ago, to try and reach right across from the sort of, let’s say, from the data-driven side, to the feeling-driven side, and to try and connect this in such a way that we can be intelligent about what it is that we’re feeling, what it is that we're hearing, what it is that we’re concerned about.
And I’m concerned that as we head towards what a lot of people are convinced is some kind of nexus-point which is a back end of 2012. I don’t agree with this for a moment, by the way. I don’t even know where that date came from. I’m not convinced that it’s reliable.
I think that a lot of it is internet myth. As David Icke says, ‘I think that this is the new age version of Y2K.’ I think that we’re all going to wake up again on the 22nd of December, 2012 thinking, ‘Well, wait a minute. Nothing happened!’
And then, I think, as I’ve said in several places, I think then we’re just going to have to say, ‘Well, okay. No easy fix. No ascension. We’re not going to get beamed out of here. We haven’t been through 3 days of darkness. There hasn’t been a pole shift. We’re still on planet Earth. There’s still oil in the Niger Delta. They’re still cutting down the rainforests.’
They were delighted – the controllers were – that we were all distracted by New Age hysteria for the best part of two or three years, while they got along with their own Georgia Guidestones agenda. We really need to get focused here, because there’s no easy exit. We’re here for a reason. We’ve got to do our jobs, and it’s got something to do with publicizing and taking responsibility for what is really, really happening here.
And, I want... Personally, what I want to do in the next two years, is to balance what I’m concerned about as becoming a sort of gradually rising New Age hysteria where people are either worried about huge disasters, they all think they’re going to get beamed out of here in some rapture, or that Planet X is going to come in and stir up the sun into unleashing a whole bunch of coronal mass ejections that then make Ed Dames’ remote viewing forecast of what he called the ‘Killshot,’ true.
There are things to be concerned about. But we still don’t know exactly what they are. And I’ve got what I guess I have called my ‘Maybe-box’ and, as a spectrum, I’ve got some things over on one side that I’m pretty sure are nonsense. I’ve got a whole bunch of things on the other side that I’m pretty sure are true. And in the middle, I’ve got my ‘Maybe-box’ which is actually getting bigger and bigger.
There are a lot of things in there, and I think it’s quite smart and it’s intellectually honest of us to say, ‘You know what? I really don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m checking it out. I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m going to keep on digging deeper. I want to talk to people who have something to say, especially if they don’t agree with me, and I want to find out what the truth is, but the truth is probably complex. It’s probably very, very multi-dimensional, in the sense that it’s not just a simplicity that can be articulated in a few sentences.’
And, if we can work together on this, collectively, then we might stand a better chance than we are at the moment. And so, once again, this is a long answer to a simple question. And I’ve completely forgotten what the question was! [laughs]
T: [laughs] I had asked...
BR: Why are we not surprised?
T: ...if there was a level of desensitizing going on and I’d like to follow that up, if you don’t mind, just giving a brief description on what is your definition of responsible media?
BR: Ooh.
T: Mmh.
BR: Okay. Well, to some small degree by default, I have become a kind of journalist, and meaning, that like every blogger or commentator, I write stuff for publication that is then on record on the internet and it’s the electronic equivalent to the printed page.
Now, what I do is, if I state something, I state whether it seems to be an accepted fact, in which case I’ll give a source. If it’s my opinion, I’ll say it’s my opinion. If I think something’s unlikely, I’ll say that it’s my opinion that it’s unlikely and I’ll try and explain why I think something is a fact or I think it’s unlikely.
What I try not to do, is to make blanket statements which are general. Especially blanket statements which are general and alarmist, really aren’t helpful, because what this does is, it disempowers the reader. What responsible journalism should be doing, what responsible media should be doing, is empowering the reader.
Meaning, if the reader is interested in the story, then the reader can find out more, they can check things out, you’re helping them do that. If you’re writing like something that's like a real published article, it’s got footnotes, it’s got references, or the internet equivalent of that is it’s got links, it’s got places where you can go to follow the information through, to follow the string trail to see where this stuff comes from.
And it’s what I call ‘intellectual honesty’ which just means, doing the best you can do to say, ‘Look, this is what’s in my head at the moment. This is how I know it. This where I got this information from. This is my degree of certainty about it.’ And then you map all of that onto your document.
Not just a little summary, but the degree of certainty you’ve got, the sources of your information, how you feel about it, whether it’s an opinion, whether it’s a fact, what other people might feel who don’t agree, and, of course, some people would recognize this as being a sort of what has been called the ‘scientific method’ inasmuch as you’re reporting everything that you know and giving others the opportunity to either refute it, to support it, to kind of conduct the same experiment.
We’re not talking about experiments in a laboratory here, but we’re talking about following through this same analysis of data to see whether one comes up with the same conclusions or the same theories to explain the data. And so we do have a scientific sort of methodology here that we can map onto all of this. And I think that that’s what responsible media is.
And, I sat up very straight about three days ago when I was tuning into the BBC. It was some kind of news hour. I can’t remember when it was, but it was a major news hour like ten o’clock in the evening or something. And I was in front of a television and I had a choice of channels. So I thought, ‘Well, which channel shall I go to? You know, Fox News, well, maybe not.’
T: [laughs]
BR: ‘Let’s try BBC World.’ And the reporter that they had on BBC world, who was talking about how well the containment cap was doing on the Gulf of Mexico blowout, I mean, bless her, she hadn’t got a clue. She didn’t know what she was doing. It looked like she had been just put on the job a few minutes earlier.
She didn’t describe it well. It sounded like a good story, but at the end of that, I thought, ‘I don’t know anything more. She’s got some information wrong. She completely missed out on the more interesting aspects of things.’
And what I kind of learned from that little episode is that, just because you got a news report from the BBC, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be high quality. Sometimes it’s just part of something that’s just got a few visual images and which fills a 90 second slot that they want to fill. And they don’t want it to make it look like a science program for some reason and so they just have somebody up in a helicopter saying, ‘Gee whiz, look at all that oil. I hope that they’ve got it fixed now.’
T: [laughs]
BR: That doesn’t help anybody.
Let me just put in a plug for a blog that is worth following. Actually there’s several blogs which are worth following on this, on this particular topic. I mentioned one which is ‘The Oil Drum,’ theoildrum.com. Another one is ‘Washington’s Blog,’ washingtonsblog.com. And a third one is ‘Alexander Higgins,’ it’s blog.alexanderhiggins.com.
As I speak, there are no others that I would immediately recommend, that I apologize to anyone who I may have inadvertently dropped off this list. Washington’s blog did a fantastic job two days ago of summarizing the entire thing. Whoever it is, is really working hard to try and present good information.
And he’s somebody who I think would generally support what I’m saying at the moment, which is that the mainstream media isn’t doing its job very well, but the alternative media isn’t doing its job very well either. And...
T: Mm-hm.
BR: ...he’s trying to provide summarized, good information, about what is really, really going on, which is accessible. It needs to be accessible information as well.
That’s just a postscript of what you were saying, because if something is hard to understand, written in very technical language in a way that’s not appealing, then it doesn’t have much value, because people aren’t really going to read it. It needs to be something that people are going to want to look at.
That’s a communication skill that… [sighs] that some journalists don’t have, I guess. [They both laugh] How are we doing? You’ve asked me 3 questions and I’ve been talking for an hour.
T: Well, you’ve been answering questions, other questions. My next one was going to be, ‘What advice could you give to somebody like myself seeking the truth on a situation like the crisis in the Gulf.’ And you pretty much just answered that.
Do you have any other advice to give someone when they’re trying to… obviously we aren’t getting the information through mainstream media, we are having to go online and seek this out for ourselves, and it can be very difficult. Do you have any other advice to give us and how to discern what is real, what is true?
BR: Another website that’s very high quality which I visit quite a lot is GlobalResearch.Ca.
T: Okay.
BR: It’s a Canadian site that’s got a lot of good articles on it. And, the articles are kind of vetted, so that before publication, it is a fairly good bet that the articles would have come up to a certain high journalistic standard. But it’s not all coming from one source. It’s coming from a variety of different writers who are presenting a variety of different things.
They tend to have a broad picture, political and economic-based context, in which they operate. And usually one needs to read a number of different articles so that you see a number of different perspectives.
And, of course, that’s the way things should be because, if you want to form an intelligent view about something that you don’t know an awful lot about, what’s really smart is to listen to several people who have spent quite some time looking into this themselves, once you’re assured of their own intentions.
Don’t just jump on one opinion and run with that. Do get the balance. We have to be intelligent about this. And intelligence has got an awful lot to do with knowing how to evaluate information.
T: Okay. Okay I...
BR: Alright, you’re working your way through a long list of questions. [laughs]
T: I only have one more.
BR: You only have one more?
T: One more and that’s it. What can we learn from this, moving forward?
BR: Oh boy.
T: Mmh.
BR: I think I said it, but I’m going to summarize if I can.
T: Thank you.
BR: Inasmuch as, in the alternative community, we’re all informing each other all the time, by emails, by what we forward to people, by the links that we give, by what we post on Facebook, and then, at a certain end of the spectrum, we’re talking about interviews like this.
If you’re forwarding any information to anybody about anything at all, I would ask: make sure that it’s in context, try and balance it with other information if you can; don’t just extract a shrieking headline and forward it around saying, ‘This, that or the other has just happened. Take a look.’
Maybe that’s not what’s happened. Maybe it can be toned down a little bit to be said, there’s a person here in this YouTube video who’s presenting an interesting perspective that I haven’t thought of before. What do you think? Has he got a good point or not? Let’s figure it out.
And so, it’s got something to do with being a little bit more measured and little bit less hysterical.
I’m really not trying to put anybody down here, because in all of my presentations, I always say to anybody, ‘Do what you can, start a website, start a blog, make our own videos, communicate the information, get it all out there, do what you think you are here to do.’
But… there’s a friend of mine, called Richard, who has the website ‘FreedomCentral.Info’, he and his wife Mel run Freedom Central. They’re good people. He wrote a wonderful article a little while ago, which basically is about the kind of … [laughs] It’s the absurdity, in a kind of way, of everyone in the alternative media.
It’s like everyone’s copying everything to everybody else and the whole thing goes around in a circle like a big hamster wheel. And everyone’s interviewing everybody else. And everyone’s copying all this stuff around. And it stays in this alternative comedia. [snaps his fingers] ‘Alternative comedia.’ How about that for a Freudian slip!
T: [laughs]
BR: The alternative media… [laughs]...
T: [laughs] That’s Perfect.
BR: Perfect eh? In the alternative media, like the eddy in a river, kind of going round and round and round and round and round, absorbing a lot of energy and a lot of attention, it’s not actually traveling anywhere, and they’re not really making the world a better place in a way that they would like to.
What they’re doing, is they’re communicating with their friends and the whole thing kind of becomes incestuous. It’s like a larger version of two people sitting in a coffee shop or a bar, saying, ‘This is what I heard. What do you think?’ And the other person says, ‘Yeah, I agree! This is what I heard.’
And they’re talking about this, but outside, nothing is changing, nothing is happening, and nobody is listening. They’re kind of satisfying their own need to vent off about it, and to talk about it, and they’re building relationships through it, but it’s not actually making any practical difference out there.
Now, there are some people who are doing stuff. There are people who have hands-on opportunities to change things in the real world. There are people who are working on a similar hands-on basis, but they’re operating in what could be called the spiritual universe.
There are a lot of people out there, a lot of people out there, who, through a variety of techniques, are assisting in paving the way that we’re all following in a, in a... – [sighs] very hard to find the words – in an etheric sense. They’re allowing us to roll forward into an optimistic timeline rather than a pessimistic one.
It’s clear to me that things have changed over the last two years. When I was deeply involved in Project Camelot in the middle of 2008, Kerry Cassidy and myself assembled a whole bunch of data points. We had 14 or 15 separate major data points that really pointed to the facts that there was something very serious going to happen towards the back end of 2008, possibly linked to or following soon after the American election.
We had Bill Deagle, a very intelligent, very sensitive, very passionate man, who called us when we were in Australia, on the verge of tears, it was something like the fourth or the fifth of October 2008…
T: Mm-hm.
BR: …and he spent his whole night living through what he could only describe as a vision of a nuclear attack on an American city.
And, bless him for having the courage to come forward and state that. Now, he’s a very intelligent man, but after that he was kind of lumped together with Blossom Goodchild as a kind of narcissistic fantasist who was always unconnected with reality and who was broadcasting a whole bunch of unrealistic stuff that never could’ve happened, never would’ve happened and which we should never have listened to in the first place.
And I don’t have that view of him. I do think that people who have visions... and I know this isn’t actually anything connected with the question that you were asking, but it’s an important topic to touch on, it’s connected with what we were talking about before.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: And it sort of fits in a little bit with channeled information and people who have dreams and people, people who have visions.
And they see something, or they experience something, and then they wake up in the morning or they wake up out of wherever it was that they saw, and they thought, ‘Oh my God. What is this that I just looked at? If it’s real we’re in big trouble. I‘d better tell people.’ And then that’s what they do. But the problem is, here, is that, what people are looking at, may not be what it is that’s going to happen.
It’s not as linear and it’s not as simple as having a video on your computer and you just go forward another hour to see what’s going to happen at the end, and then that’s where the story line’s going because you’ve got all this thing that already exists in digitized form and so you can just move forward and see what it is that’s coming. Reality’s not like that. I don’t believe reality is like that. It does not already have the software encoded.
We are actually writing the software as we go, and I firmly believe that we do create our own reality, but I do think that there are morphic fields that are created by our thoughts, there are things that we can manifest, positively or negatively, according to how much we believe in them, how much we fear them, how much attention we put on them, how much power we give them, both ways, positively and negatively.
I do think that this reality we are all part of, is something that we really do co-create, and every now and then, somebody comes up with a vision that is so alarming. But all they're seeing is, they're seeing something that might happen. It's like, my answer to what people say about Bill Deagle’s vision was, I think he was right, but that happened on a different timeline. And that's not just a glib answer. I really do think that. I think it did happen, but it did not happen to us.
And that kind of sounds half crazy, but a number of years ago, there was somebody called Chet Snow, Dr. Chet Snow, you can look this up. He wrote a book called ‘Mass Dreams of the Future’ and this was basically an experiment in what is known as ‘hypnotic progression.’
Now, I am going to simplify all of this, because I cannot do justice to this book, but hypnotic progression is the same principle as hypnotic regression, except that rather than asking the subject to go back and see what happened ten years ago, the progressionist asks the subject to go forwards to see what will happen in ten years’ time, or twenty years’ time, or a hundred years’ time, or a thousand years’ time.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: And it’s a very interesting topic. And he collected a whole bunch of deeply-experienced reports, which is why he called this book ‘Mass Dreams of the Future.’ He collected, I cannot remember the number, but the first time I recall it was something like twenty-five hundred people. There are a whole bunch of them. But they didn’t all agree. He found that he could divide them, very broadly, into four different categories.
And it was almost as if the people who he used as his database for this research project were looking, between them, at four different timelines. Some of them were looking in one direction. Others were looking in a slightly different direction, and others were looking in a slightly different direction again. And at one extreme, there were people who really saw, in detail, an optimistic bright future for the human race, where we had solved all our problems and were really living in some kind of Golden Age that would follow this, after maybe a bit of a bumpy ride.
And then there is another group of these research subjects, who just saw everything going into the worst possible scenario you could possibly imagine, nuclear war, the whole works, everything you can think of. And what's quite interesting is that a number of people who had ET contact experiences have also been alerted, apparently, if we take these experiences at face value, they've been alerted by these non-human intelligences to similar possible future timelines.
And going back to Bill Deagle again, this is where I draw attention to his use of the word, when he describes himself as a ‘prophet.’ And a lot of people get very upset by that, because they think that he is thumping his chest and saying that he knows the future, or that he is some kind of Biblical character or whatever, and that is not what he means.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: He is using the word ‘prophet’ in the way that it is traditionally used, which is that a prophet is somebody who says, ‘Listen guys, we’d better shape up, because this is where we are headed. And if we don’t change our ways, we are going to wind up in this place and it is not a good place. And to show you that it is not a good place, I'm going to describe to you exactly what that place looks like, and I promise you, you don’t want to go there…
T: Mm-hm.
BR: …so you had better shape up now.’ That is what a prophet does. That's basically what all the Biblical prophets did. They were issuing warnings. And it is not the same thing as being a clairvoyant, like Nostradamus, who would stare into his candle flame and say, ‘This is what I see and there is no way out of it.’ And [unclear], this is not doing justice to him.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: So, I think that there is a role for the prophet, in inverted commas. I think there is a role for people to say, ‘Listen, we got to shape up and wise up here, otherwise we are going to wind up in this place and it is not a good place.’ But I do not believe that the future is fixed. I really don't believe that the future is fixed. And somebody called in, to... No they didn't call in, they emailed in to... – I think it was the Jeff Rense show with Lindsey Williams, to be truthful, I can't quite remember – with something that was so profound that I nearly stopped my car, because I was listening to it when I was driving. I nearly wrote it down.
And this person said, ‘The powers that be know that we collectively, the human race – this is my paraphrase – are the engine that generates the future. We all co-create this, and we are the people who are doing it, totally unconsciously, all the time. All the time we are giving our vote to what will happen tomorrow. We are giving our vote to what we will see on the news tomorrow. We are giving our vote to which of Chet Snow’s four basic future timelines we are going to wind up on.’
And then this person said, which I thought was really insightful, they said, ‘That's why they try and control our beliefs and our subconscious all the time, because we are the people who are actually creating the future for them.’
T: Hmm, exactly.
BR: And I thought, ‘Wow, what a powerful thought is that!’ And I don’t know whether it is true or not, but the concept sure works for me, because just as is true in the principles of personal development, which is that we get what we expect and if you want to know what you expected, look at what you got, the same thing might kind of work in a collective unconscious basis, to do with everything that we experience in the world. And this is kind of what I mean by the responsibility of knowingly co-creating our future together.
And we can only do that on the back of good information. And this might well be one of the reasons why we are lied to all the time, not just so that we don’t march on Washington and demand that the trillions are returned from the secret space-program and re-invested in environmental repair or education or whatever. It's not about that.
It might be that they're lying to us, so that what it is that we are all co-creating, with all the power, the huge power of our unconscious, is what they want us to create. And here, unapologetically, I am going to reference what it is that I have often referenced before, which is what it was that Admiral George Hoover, who was in the Office of Naval Intelligence, who’s now died, who spoke to the editor of ‘UFO Magazine,’ Bill Birnes, when he was a very old man.
And George Hoover said that the biggest secret was our tremendous ability. We had powers to manipulate reality that we didn't know we had. And that the ETs had that power under their control. And this was our destiny, to be able to manifest those powers, to control those powers, to utilize and deploy those powers, and if we ever did that, then the powers-that-be would not have the power that they have anymore.
And so, this is why we are continually made to believe how powerless we are, how small we are, how mortal we are, how we need to be afraid, how we all are this animated hunks of meat, how there is no hope. In a sort of collectively disempowering way, we are not permitted to realize how magnificent we are, because if we all did…
T: Hmm.
BR: …then it would be all over. We would be in that golden future tomorrow.
T: Mm-hm. Absolutely. I think that one of the most important lessons from this oil crisis is, we as individuals need to be as responsible with our information, even when our leaders and our media are not.
BR: That's a very, very good, concise summary. That we have to be as responsible and smart and accurate as we possibly can do. And not just be an alternative analogue to Fox News or the National Enquirer. We just can't afford that luxury of getting things wrong at such a critical time. And the paradox, of course, is that there are no controls over this and there shouldn't be controls over this, either. We do need to have free speech, we do need to have freedom of expression.
We do need to have blogs and forums, where anybody can say anything they want to, but at the same time, there is some kind of a leadership role to be had about encouraging people to be accurate, to be careful, to check their facts, to be cautious, to state their references, to distinguish between facts and personal opinions, to cite their sources, and all be each other’s teachers in this process. That if we forward any information to anybody else, it needs to be presented as a gift…
T: Mmh.
BR: …so that they can take that and then make something even more of it, rather then saying, ‘Oh my God, I don't know where this came from, but it didn't sound good, and I guess I'm gonna...’ [laughs]
T: Share it with everybody. [laughs]
BR: Well yeah, either share it with anybody or just sit in a corner and get depressed about it, you know.
T: Mm-hm.
BR: Because that's what powerlessness does, the feeling of powerlessness either… It's like, left with a piece of powerful information that makes us feel frightened, the extroverts communicate it to everyone they can do [laughs] and the introverts are on their own, feeling depressed.
T: [laughs] Mm-hm.
BR: And it is like, neither is necessarily the best option here, you know. We have to kind of do what we can do, to support and encourage everyone we are communicating to. It's like, ‘Okay, this is the best I got, make it better before you forward it along.’
T: Mm-hm.
BR: If I haven't found the reference, then you find the reference and then forward it along. Let's work together here, so that the alternative database of information, which we are trying to put there together, to counter the absence of the database of good information that were given by the authorities...
T: Mm-hm.
BR: It has got to be good information, otherwise there is nothing we can do with it, apart from wheel spin, get anxious or just go off down completely the wrong direction and waste our time.
T: Absolutely.
BR: That was a conversation-stopper, wasn’t it? [laughs]
T: [laughs] I was going to ask you how do you know a source is to be trusted? But I didn't want to put you on the spot.
BR: Oh, but that is such a good question. Kerry and I had a standard answer to this in Project Camelot, which we agreed upon, very closely, and we communicated on our site and to a lot of other people about it a couple of years ago.
T: Stop.
BR: That we used our intuition...
T: Stop, stop. The train is coming, my apologies.
BR: The train?
T: Yup. Hold on.
BR: Wow. [laughs] You live next to a railroad?
T: Yeah, we get a train about three or four times a day. I was wondering when it was coming. I am glad it came now and not earlier.
BR: Is this where we make jokes about the light at the end of the tunnel and the oncoming train?
T: [laughs]
BR: I have no idea where I was.
T: [laughs] Well, I asked you...
BR: We were talking about... No, I know what I was talking about.
T: Okay.
BR: We were talking about sources.
T: You were talking about you and Kerry.
BR: I am saying that a couple of years ago, what Kerry and I would say was we would follow our intuition. And that's what we did. Now, what I am starting to feel now, is that there needs to be more to it than that. It's a good answer, but it's not a good-enough answer. We were wrong a couple of times. In the meantime, I kind of looked to the left, to the right of me, and I see other people who were working really hard in the alternative media arena.
And they themselves are using their intuition, and guess what? [laughs] Well, they're coming up with this different one. And then, you're on the receiving end of this, or there were times when I or we have been on the receiving end of this. And somebody else was using their intuition, they were intuiting that I am in the pay of the CIA or something.
Or they were intuiting, you know, that they're correct. Actually, I am going off here in a wild tangent. But the thing that gets me really, really exorcised is when I see people zooming in on the handshake between myself and David Icke, who’s got arthritis…
T: [laughs]
BR: …and his hand looks like a crooked claw because he can hardly move it, and they think, ‘Ah, they're masons.’
And if you ask them, these highly motivated sincere people, they are not being paid by anybody, they're just saying, ‘Well, intuitively I do not really trust those guys, and look now about the evidence’ and they are wrong! And so, intuition isn't actually the thing that establishes truth. It gives us a direction to go on.
And I think that one has to use this like one uses remote-viewing data. This is how the military used to use remote-viewing data, and I'm sure they still do. Their remote viewing program has gone underground, literally. They're still doing their stuff. They are using psychics to give them intelligence about what is happening anywhere and any when, but it's only part of the data matrix that they’ve got.
What they do, is they get their best guys onto something, to say – just to use an example from the cold war – that the Russians are building this giant nuclear submarine in this steel hangar in Wladiwostok. ‘We can't see inside with our satellites, but the psychics say that there is something really happening in that steel hangar.’
So then, they know where to deploy their agents on the ground, to really find out more information and to try to get the inside story from some of the guys who work there or whatever it is, and it just helps them to target their intelligence-gathering capacity in more detail.
I guess I'm making a mountain out of this mole hill. But I am just saying that once you intuitively think that something is correct, don't stop there. Then go gathering facts, gathering data, talk to people to see whether they agree, don’t let your ego get in the way, don't start thinking, ‘Well, you know, I am the greatest, so I must be right, and everybody else is wrong, but that's okay cause I am the messiah.’
It’s like, that does not work either. We have to work together on this and we have to be willing to be wrong. And that is like looping right back to what I was saying about the alternative media response to the oil-spill thing here. There is the opportunity – and I am getting watching this with great interest – there is the opportunity for some of media commentators to say, ‘You know what? I really got that wrong.’ Or...
T: Mmh.
BR: ‘The guy who gave me this inside information, you know what? What he said wasn't true. I do not know whether he was lying or whether he was misinformed, but it just was not true and I bought that story.’ And so, there is a real opportunity for the alternative media community to learn from their experiences here.
This is all part of life’s rich journey. It's all part of a learning experience and a maturing experience. And what is really interesting for me, personally, and I guess to some degree this has been a kind of personal interview, a couple of years ago, we visited Richard Hoagland. I got a lot of respect for Richard, I like him a lot, he is good guy. And he has been in this business now for the best part of twenty years, still standing, still defiant, still defending his view, still very articulate.
He is doing a great job for us all. And he told us, he said, ‘Look.’ He said, ‘I don't listen to sources.’ And that's when he told us that this is because the lie was different at every level. He said, ‘Even if you talk to someone who is sincere, somebody who is talking to you over the table with tears in their eyes, somebody who is begging you to believe them and who is absolutely... No, we don't know where they got their information from and it doesn't actually mean that it's true.’
And this is why Hoagland’s set of protocols for handling information are very logical and very data-based. And he allows himself to think out of the box, but he does a lot of fact-checking. And I really respect and admire him for that. If somebody just turns up and says they got this wild story, he won’t accept that as data, but he will put that into context as a way of maybe giving him some prompts as to where to look for data. And then he goes for the data anyway.
I'm not saying that we all have to be clones of Richard Hoagland. We should never be clones of anybody. But that's just a way of illustrating how dangerous it is, just to listen to unsubstantiated sources. And going back to Project Camelot here, we had always intended to present personal stories in the context of a compelling human story.
For example, when we interviewed Bob Dean, somebody who we greatly love, I am proud to count him as a close friend, he is a wonderful man, he's not paid by anybody, because he is just a wonderful guy to listen to.
T: [laughs]
BR: He is a character. But I absolutely believe him, when he talks about how he was given this document to read in 1964, when he was working at SHAPE headquarters in Europe and he spent all of his evenings working through, burning the midnight oil, reading this document out of the safe, at any opportunity he could do, because he was given access to it by his superiors, who he was working for, who were very concerned about the information.
This sounds so authentic to me, that I really do believe his story. But, primarily what we are doing is we are representing Bob Dean and saying, ‘Listen to Bob, listen to the story.’
It's not just entertainment, but this – rather like what I was saying about the intuition earlier – gives us directions to look, cross-correlate it with everything. We're not trying to beat anyone out of their head, saying, ‘This has to be true, because we are presenting the information.’ Many people have written to us, saying, ‘Look, this can not be true cause your witnesses are contradicting each other.’ It's like, ‘Yeah, we know that!’ [laughs]
T: [laughs]
BR: You think we don't know that? We know that! But we are presenting information, not in a deliberate attempt to confuse, but in a way to give people this important human dimension.
Because what we said, right at the outset, was that because we found ourselves in a privileged position to be listening to somebody telling an extraordinary personal story in the same room as them, and we're looking into their eyes and they're describing what happened to them and how they felt about what happened to them and the people they talked to... And sometimes the stories were really extraordinary.
And the reason why the camera was there was, it's like, ‘So well, you can't be here physically, but this is the best possible alternative. Just be here virtually. This is our experience. This is quite likely edited and what you see here, on your computer screen, is pretty much what we experienced when we were talking to the guy, so you can share this journey with us.’
And this was always our philosophy. That we were going on a journey, and we encourage people to come with us. And as we learn, we want other people to learn with us too.
We were never trying to misinform. We were never trying to disinform. We were aware that some of our witnesses could not possibly be correct about everything, because they contradicted each other. And then as we became more mature in our journey, we realized that some of our witnesses really weren't quite as reliable as we thought that they were, in the first place.
But we were honest to goodness doing our best with this. And one of the reasons why we've separated the focuses of our work is so that we can each work in a way that we personally feel most comfortable in working. And so, I am trying to put into practice the principles that I have been describing in this interview and Kerry does not have exactly the same view about this. And she’s entitled not to have exactly the same view.
But now what we have got, and there are a lot of people who do appreciate this, is that they got two different broad-based sources of information, that then they can go to as matches their own style and their own preference. And that's okay. That's absolutely okay to do that. And in the meantime, Kerry and I still have some joined projects together. We are not going to be working together in the same way as we used to. That is very, very natural that that should be the case. There is nothing wrong with that at all.
And the challenge, as always, is how the whole can be greater then the sum of its parts. How, as a microcosm of the alternative community, Kerry and I can work together to supplement what each other are doing, our different sources, our different ways of presenting information, our different ways of evaluating information, the different questions that we ask, our different ways of connecting the dots.
If, between us, that can be a positive service to the people who are not getting their information from the mainstream media or anywhere else, if people see this as a service and they don't see this as a confusing factor, then between us we will be doing our jobs here.
And, as I have said before, in this interview, and as I said before elsewhere, I encourage people to get out there, with your camcorders, with your dictaphones, with your digital cameras, going out there, do field-research, check things out, talk to people, find out what is happening.
But be smart, be careful, keep your maybe-box open, unlocked and with a lot of room for stuff in it. Be prepared to be wrong, be prepared to backtrack. Be as honest as you can do, be prepared to say to people, ‘You know what? I'm not quite sure about this thing that I said last month, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe that thing that I took a photograph of wasn't what I thought it was. Maybe it was something else,’ etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And that dovetails back to the question that you asked earlier, about the nature of responsibility and responsible media-reporting, responsible journalism. If we can be as honest and as smart as we can be, all the time, then we are in with a good chance.
T: I agree. Thank you so very much!
BR: All right!
T: [laughs] Well Bill, thank you so much for your time, your attention, your commitment. Thank you on behalf of all the members of the Forum, and thank you so very much for being the change that you want to see in this world.
BR: Well, thank you Tania. You have done a good job in this interview. Right. [laughs] T: [laughs]
BR: Now I know how Marcel Messing might have felt when, I think I asked him two questions and he talked for an hour.
T: [laughs]
BR: In my opinion, the job of the interviewer is to get out of the way and to provide the energy, and to allow the person they're talking to, to do their dance on the stage. And so, thank you for supporting me in doing that, and we are moving forward together.
We are all in this together. There is no easy escape. We are all on planet Earth. We are all on this little spaceship. We're not going to get beamed out of here. We got to take care of this place. We got a whole unknown future ahead of us with all of the drama and excitement and fun and problems and challenges, and potential delights that it all has to offer. And it's a wild ride, and I think it's worth it.
T: Absolutely, and enjoy it.
BR: [laughs] You are right. Okay, Tania, thank you. I do appreciate it very, very much. So this is Bill Ryan and this is Tania, and it's Sunday the 18th of July, 2010. And you know what? We got to do this again sometime.
T: [laughs] It was fun!
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Bill Ryanbill@projectavalon.net |
