MYSTERY WIRE — A worldwide wave of media coverage about the UFO mystery has attracted new audiences who previously paid little attention to what’s flying around in the skies.
One of the premier investigators of past UFO cases has written a guide for how anyone with an interest in UFOs can learn to investigate cases.
Private UFO organizations have compiled voluminous case files over the decades, befuddling sightings of unknown aircraft, and close encounters with unknown beings.
Similar cases have been investigated by secretive pentagon programs and the world is awaiting the release of a Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force report to Congress.
For boots-on-the-ground investigators like Richard Lang, who’s spent three decades interviewing witnesses claiming they had direct contact with unknown beings, there’s a point at which the wild stories no longer feel outlandish.
“Next thing you know, I’m out there interviewing some lady that’s talking about, you know, being taken up into a ship and being examined and all that,” Lang said. “And, and I’m like, Well, you know, I can remember being in those first couple I did I remember I was thinking, I just got to get out of this. I just want to go home and get away from that lady because she’s nuts. And then you’d interview another one. And then after the interview about 10 or 12 of them, you’re like, wait a second, you know, these guys are telling the truth.”
Lang is a trained investigator who worked for two federal agencies, and has written a book that teaches newcomers how to investigate their own UFO cases.
His book is called “UFO Investigation the Methodology for a New Age” and is described as the “culmination of investigative methods, interview techniques, case assessment and reporting applications that Mr. Lang has developed during his 30-year quest to understand the UFO Phenomena.”
Below you can read the transcript of the interview between George Knapp and Richard Lang. The video of the interview is at the top of this page.
George Knapp
Richard Lang, can we start with a little bit about your background? You know, a lot of people call themselves investigators. And it’s just an all-purpose term, whether they’re qualified investigators or not. But you’ve actually worked with some pretty impressive, including three letter agencies and federal agencies where you really do have to do investigations, right?
Richard Lang
Exactly. In my book I outline is this kind of all started for me, I was, I’m a commercial pilot, and I was just about to graduate from Embry-Riddle in Florida with my degree in aeronautics. I’m flying up the coast one night, and it’s all outlined in the book. And I basically heard these airline pilots talking to the air traffic controllers, about this huge UFO that was hovering out over the ocean, in their flight path. So that’s kind of how I got started in it. During my, you know, basically, when I finished college, I went to work for a commercial bank, and I had a really good job, I got paid well, I got a lot, you know, six, seven weeks a year vacation. So I used that to kinda do my exploration, if you will, with the UFO subject. And so essentially, I started doing investigations for MUFON. And at the same time, I’d gone and gotten certified as a registered as a private investigator, I took the classes just to learn how to do it. And, you know, during the time of the 9/11 period, when I was working for the bank, I actually left my bank and went to serve in the airports. Initially I was County Deputy US Marshal, and we were basically securing the checkpoints in Charlottesville. And I got a chance to go work for Homeland Security. And so for a couple of years, my job was basically to work with all the law enforcement agencies in central Virginia, anybody that had anything to do with airport security, everything from the bomb squads, the state police, the ATF agents, FBI agents. And basically, we’re at work to secure our airports and protect them from terrorism. And a lot of people say, Well, you know, what about UFOs? Well, not one word was ever mentioned about UFOs during that time, we were pretty busy worrying about terrorism.
George Knapp
So did you get your work with the US Marshal’s office, did you learn, I mean was it part of your job is to find people who don’t want to be found.
Richard Lang
Well, the part of what we were doing, essentially, when I went to work for the, I went to the police academy, and I was a volunteer reserve guy just doing public service when 9/11 happened. I basically went full time and worked in the airport. And we were … See, essentially, when you’re working in an airport environment, that’s technically legally federal property. So they had us all go through the process of being sworn in as US Marshals so that you can make arrests on federal charges in the airport. So that’s kind of it. So yeah, police academy I’ve done, when I was with Homeland Security, we did I mean, half our time, we spent training on different you know, all kinds of things just like anti terrorist activities. And a lot of a lot of work with implementing law enforcement into the airports and working with regulatory issues and all that kind of thing. I was actually part of that anti terrorist group, anti terrorist task force that we worked through the federal, you know, through the US Attorney, and one of my jobs was I was a key speaker. And I would go out and talk about, you know, terrorism and try to help police understand how the aircraft are attacked and things like that.
George Knapp
I was just thinking, as I read through your resume on the back of the book, it’s like, you know, you were trained as a private investigator, you’re a pilot. So you know a lot about things that are flying around in the sky. You work with the marshal service and Department of Homeland Security have a lot of ideas, you know, personal experience in how government works. It’s like a perfect background to become a UFO investigator. You cover a lot of bases there.
Richard Lang
Well, exactly. And the thing is, is that as the, you know, I look back on my career, I’ve really spent a lot of time actually working with individuals, interviewing people that have had experience, you know, experiencers abductees and I think in the book I said, I had interviewed over 30 people that were, you know, where I spent an in depth amount of time working with them trying to understand their abduction experience, you know, so, you know, over a period of 20, some years, you’re out there every weekend interviewing people that have been involved in these kinds of things you start to, you know, you start to realize there’s certain resonant details that seem to come into place, going from one person to the other, these people don’t know each other, they’ve never been, and had any contact with each other. Yet, when you talk to them, the little details of their stories seem to all match up. And so over a period of, you know, 20, some years, my own perception of reality changed as far as you know, what I think and believe is possible.
George Knapp
Let’s talk about our time. So, you know, it’s perfect timing for your book, “UFO Investigation Methodology for a New Age” seems like a perfect time for that to come out. Because of all the millions of people who are now drawn to this topic, who really didn’t pay attention to it before the wave of media coverage, the revelations that have either leaked out or been drugged out of the government and the military, there’s a lot of interest that did not exist before. And suddenly, our topic is somewhat respectable. It’s amazing. So I would think there’s a lot of people who want to learn how to dig into this stuff on their own. Is that what your intent was with this book?
Richard Lang
Yeah, well, essentially, when I originally started working on the book, It was really designed for people that, like advanced training for investigators, and UFO researchers. And, you know as it evolved and it came together, but I’m actually pretty comfortable and feeling really good that we’ve gotten the book out to a lot of people that weren’t really that involved in UFOs. I mean, they know a little bit about it, they’re interested in it, but they never investigated cases, or did any kind of research. In the end, they really liked the book, because there’s a lot of stuff in there I guess that you know, it helps him understand how the whole thing is, is like, it’s very complex and how it’s coming together. And especially with one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few weeks, and I’m actually getting ready to try to get another book together that’s just about disclosure, and the declassification. And I think what we’re gonna see is, and we’ve talked about, we touched on this a little bit in the book, but basically, in that second chapter, I kind of gave an overview of how this all started, how the secrecy started. And what the bottom line was that during the Truman and Eisenhower administration’s they started farming out this research to private corporations, defense contractors. And I think, somewhere along the line, they probably lost control of it, because some of these multinational corporations and the military industrial complex have a great deal of control over the research and technology now. So when we’re looking at how disclosure is going to come out, you know, we’ve got this thing at the end of the month, the Director of National Intelligence is under a Congressional mandate to basically report on how this stuff’s going to be declassified. But I like to think of it, there’s really two prongs to it. First one is the government. And the government is under order, you know, and they’re subject to Freedom of Information requests, and that kind of thing, where they’re going to come out and do a certain amount of the declassified and disclose a certain amount of information. But what we know that’s evolved over the years, a lot of this research that’s been done has been done very quietly, through private corporations, defense contractors, multinational technology companies. And so a lot of the stuff that’s been going on is being held by them. So when the government comes, says, we’re going to disclose what we know about UFOs, you’re going to get about half of it, because the other half of it is proprietary information that’s being basically held used by a lot of big multinational corporations, if that makes sense.
George Knapp
Well it does. I mean, you know, I’ve been covering this territory for a long time myself, and I’ve always, you know, I’ve come to a conclusion a long time ago that probably the most sensitive information, the goodies, are in private hands, not in government hands. So you can ask the Pentagon Hey, where’s the crashed saucers. And they honestly don’t know. I think, you know, it’s not a monolithic organization. There’s stove pipes. They don’t know where this stuff is. And they don’t have it. There might be a very small group of people still left inside who know. But in general, if there’s bodies, if there’s saucers, if there’s crash debris, that’s not in their hands. Do you agree?
Richard Lang
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that you know, a lot, the fourth chapter of my book I talk a lot about the project that we did with Bigelow and BAASS and NUFON. And you know that there really was to say, you know, when I tried to convey that I’d looked at it from different perspectives, first of all, the part that I was working on basically managing an investigation team that’s funded by BAASS to go out and interview these people. And then in their world behind the scenes, they were doing research that was completely different than maybe what we were doing. And when we made our deal with them, in the beginning, it was clearly agreed that, you know, basically, we were selling them information about, you know, case reports, and that any research they did was proprietary and private information, and they didn’t necessarily share it back with us. And I think that’s what most of these defense contractors and these corporations are doing, you know, they have deals, they get information, a researcher, you know, the book that Philip Corso and Bill Burns wrote about, about basically how they took all this this technology that they had found in crash refuges, and they divvied it out to private corporations to do the research. Well, you know, fast forward 50 years, these guys have made trillions of dollars on that technology. And they’ve developed some technology that’s clearly out of this world, and they’re under no obligation to hand it over, give it up, if that makes sense.
George Knapp
We’ll circle back around to BAASS here in a minute. Let’s talk first of all about disclosure, the UAP Task Force report a lot of excitement about it, a lot of anxiety and criticism, even before it’s come out from UFO world. Because it is not thought to be disclosure. I mean, it’s one of the first topics you address in your book is the idea of disclosure, because if you’re teaching newcomers about the topic, you have to address the elephant in the room, right? Give me a sense of what you expect from that report, whether you find it disappointing, even though we have yet to see it out, or whether you find it at least encouraging that it exists at all?
Richard Lang
Well, I think it’s one of those things where once you open that can of worms up, you’re never going to get the lid back on it. So anything that comes out, um, you know, what, what we’re seeing now is all of a sudden that all the video, you know, cockpit videos are being put on TV, where, you know, the F-18s are chasing Tic Tac around over the ocean and stuff like that. So they’re starting to let that stuff out. Well, once you let it out, you can’t get it back, you know. So the more information that comes out, it’s like the public is, you know, people are pretty smart, now they’ve got the internet and a lot of resources. So once they acknowledge this stuff is real, then a lot of people like you said, that were kind of making fun of it, or just didn’t want to think about it, or gonna start paying a lot of attention to it. And I think going forward, it’s just like, once you start prying the lid of that open, a lot of it’s going to come out, in, and then once it does come out, then you’re going to have all the issues that are going to have to be dealt with, like one of the things a lot of people in the UFO community are saying, and it’s not, I’ve seen it a lot. I was actually at a conference last week. And a bunch of people were talking about that. These are people that have been involved with this for a long time. They’re like, Oh, this is really just the start of a false flag event. And basically, you know, in my point in the book is that, well, if you’re going to have a false flag, if you’re going to point the finger at the extraterrestrial bad guys, first, you gotta admit that they’re for real and that they exist. So that element, but then, um, the, one of the things that I think about when I talk about declassification, one of the things that always fascinated me is when they built the Greenbrier. They built this huge facility underneath the hotel, to house Congress. Well, it was done very covertly and the money was all laundered to build this place by the local railroad company. So basically, they put a new wing on the hotel, and the same time they were building the underground facility underneath the new wing. So this operation started back in the Eisenhower administration, and it ran for 30 years, like, you know, ready to go. Well then, The Washington Post, published an article about it, and basically blew their cover so the government declassified it, and now you can actually go there and take a tour for 40 bucks and they’ll show all around. It’s really interesting. But what I thought was so interesting about it is when they declassified it, all of a sudden, all these, like the state and county started doing investigations because these guys, you know basically built this huge facility in the most prime real estate in the country. And because it didn’t exist nobody paid any property taxes or anything like that on it right. So the next thing you know, there are all these lawsuits and tax liens that are coming up because now they found out about it. And I think when we start declassifying and disclosing stuff, you’re gonna see a lot more of this kind of thing where, you know, stuff that didn’t exist now is going to be you know, it’s going to be a big legal problem.
George Knapp
Yeah, I was told that directly, there was a Congressional investigator who came out to Area 51, in the early 90s, with the idea of, Hey, I’m gonna go out there and find out where all the stuff is, because he thought it was true. And then he didn’t find it. But he was still convinced that maybe billions of dollars had been siphoned from legitimate national security programs to keep this cover-up going. And what he told me directly is when this comes out, people will go to jail. There might be reasons for the cover up that are very personal, not some gigantic conspiracy, although that can be true, too.
Richard Lang
Well, I think that’s what you’re gonna see is a lot of this stuff where people have, you know, there’s clearly I mean, it’s well documented back in the Eisenhower administration, how they funneled that money, I mean it’s all disclosed now, they secretly funneled the money through the railroad and used it to hide everything, so they could pay everybody and build everything. And then once it comes out, you’ve got this financial nightmare to deal with it. It’s the same thing with a lot of these people, like you said that have been involved in this stuff, they’re not going to be in a hurry for this to come out in the open because some of them are going to be in big trouble, probably.
George Knapp
Let’s talk about the UAP Task Force report for a moment. Now, we’ve got some hints about what’s included. Some of it is leaks of video and photo material that we’ve reported on, that were in the UAPTF report, briefing document, some of it, the hint that we got about New York Times, there’s not going to be a statement that these are space aliens, of course, they had two people working for six months to get their heads and arms around this gigantic topic. I think the fact that the report exists at all that Congress asked for it, that the Pentagon is producing it, regardless of what’s in it. I think that’s an important step. If they do not dismiss the topic outright. It’s swamp gas, it’s weather balloons, that kind of thing, which is the typical response we’ve got from the Pentagon for 60, 70 years. I think that’s a big step forward, don’t you?
Richard Lang
Yeah. And, you know, I don’t, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the thing with the New York Times that basically, you know, it’s my understanding that so we’ve got this leaked document. And, you know, we know these things are like flying around our bases, but we really don’t know where they’re from, and all that, which, you know, I mean, I don’t see how they can really put that out there with a straight face, because they know, they know damn well what’s going on. They know a lot more about it than they’re going to tell you right now.
George Knapp
You do mention disclosure at the beginning of this book and the concept of it. Do you anticipate that there is ever a formal statement from our government from the president from the Secretary of Defense? Yes, these are non-human intelligence from somewhere else, we’re trying to figure it out? Or would you say we’re going to have to get bits and pieces as we’ve been doing for a long time?
Richard Lang
Well, the whole idea of disclosure, I remember a couple of years ago, a bunch of us were talking about that and in a group and, you know, there’s basically two routes you take one is the Okay, here it is, here’s all the dirty laundry, here’s what’s been going on for 60 years. And here’s what we know. And you know, we’ve been in contact with three different extraterrestrial societies and boom, or they’re going to feed it to you one crumb at a time. And that’s the 100 year plan. So I really don’t know. When I saw the thing with the the congressional mandate to disclose the information I was encouraged because I think once you start, once you open this can of worms up like I said, once you get this started, you’re not I know, it’s a big train, and it’s going to be moving real fast. You’re not going to stop anymore, if that makes sense. But yeah, I mean, personally, the 30 plus years I’ve spent doing this in not only in interviews, but a lot of times as you know people tell you things that that are going on behind the scenes, sometimes you can’t talk about or you don’t talk about it, but there’s clear evidence that not only do they know about this, but they’ve been involved with some of these these extraterrestrial societies for a long time. I think, wasn’t it Edgar Mitchell who said before he died that we’ve been involved with, you know, something to the effect that for 60 years, we’ve been in contact with aliens, other alien races, and they’re getting tired of lying about it kind of thing you know.
George Knapp
Let’s talk about one aspect of investigations that you have worked on that have stirred up a lot of controversy. You work with MUFON for a long time in a variety of different roles and special teams. Tell me about that work, the special teams, and then we’ll get into BAASS.
Richard Lang
Well, initially I was originally with MUFON, and I was like I said, I have a lot of disposable income, I had the time, you know, and like anything else, money means everything. So you know, we were working on cases, well, then one of the big things that sort of kicked it off was the Discovery Channel was wanting to do some shows about UFOs. And so we had gone to, one of the cases that I worked on, we went to Fayetteville and filmed some guys that had said that they were basically involved in an abduction experience. And so what I’ve learned to do, and what I try to train people to do is, we use a lot of videos, the video camera’s probably the most powerful thing that you can have when you’re doing this kind of work. And so, you know, I’m out there, and I’m, you know, video camera, I’ve got, um, you know, I interview five or six guys that are involved in this thing. And we get back and start putting it together. And it’s starting to look like they’re all corroborating each other’s stories. So anyway, we sent the video, and some of the preliminary reports to Discovery Channel producers, they loved it. And so they made a TV show about it, a whole full hour TV show about it. Well then …. we worked together and did a lot of specialized training. And then you know, that it was just kind of a like a precursor for the whole CIP project, if that makes sense. That’s how it started, though.
George Knapp
Somewhere along the way, BAASS is created, it’s a front for the DIA, the DIA puts out this very confidential contract, BAASS is created, gets the contract under a program called AAWSAP and you and MUFON, became sort of an adjunct to that. Can you describe that relationship, how it worked? And you already said it was sort of a one way street. MUFON would tell about cases and BAASS would take over? You never got any information back this way, right?
Richard Lang
Well, yeah, essentially what happened, and I have to say that the guys at BAASS that I worked with were really credible stand up guys. And you know, I’m not going to get into the, you know, who they are, where they are, what they’re doing. But some of these guys were real sharp. I mean they’re very well educated individuals that really had a lot to offer as far as investigative technology. And so when we started out, basically the program was designed where we actually, we had money to spend. So we actually hired people to be investigators.
George Knapp
Which is what you’ve always wanted, right? MUFON always needs money.
Richard Lang
Yeah, that was, it was great, because basically, I was hired full time to basically be the coordinator and manager of the program. And we had another individual that was like the Operations Manager. And we’d send somebody out in a case we had money, she’d make hotel reservations, and flight reservations, and they had visa cards and all that kind of thing. So, you know, it was very well organized and structured. So when the guys went out to work on cases, everything was taken care of financially, and they were all paid 100 bucks a day plus 40 bucks a day per diem and, you know, we had a team of one of the I think one of the significant things was the dispatch operation. We had about a dozen people that worked as what we call dispatch operators. And essentially, with the CMS system, which is where the power in all this stuff is, with MUFON they have what they call a CMS system, it’s like a database that they’ve been building for, I don’t know, 30 plus years, since the around 1970. So you’ve got this incredible database of all these case reports, investigator reports. And that’s where BAASS, that’s what they wanted is they wanted to get into that information, and look at those cases. So essentially, what we did is we hired these dispatchers, and there was always somebody on duty 24 hours, seven days a week, and what they do is they would, at night if a case came in, they would look at the case, they would actually contact the person verify the contact information, the phone numbers, all that kind of stuff to make sure that they were legitimate, because there are some scammers that do put some of that stuff out once in a while. But essentially, they would go through there, verify all the information and try to clarify points as far as what happened and how it was all set up. And then they would evaluate the cases, because you’re dealing with stuff like an 82 year old grandmother who’s sitting on the porch and sees a light in the sky. And then you’ve got an airline pilot who has a close encounter with something in his flight path. So there’s a dramatic difference in like what’s going on out there. So what part of what these guys a big part of what they were doing is they were going through their in column through these things and picking out the really good cases. So the bottom line is we get four – 800 cases a month come in, and we’d end up with probably 40 or 50, um, that were really high quality cases that we actually worked on.
George Knapp
And then how did it work from there. So the cases come in, MUFON is the contact point of contact, you sift through the best of them, and then do you go out? Do you and your team do the initial and pass it on to BAASS?
Richard Lang
Well, basically, what would happen was, they would send me what we called significant reportable events, and they were usually about 35 to 45, 50 of them every week. And so those cases would be forwarded on to BAASS. But then what I would do is I would go through those cases and pick maybe eight or nine of them that I really thought were interesting, and we could get some, you know, we could develop some good data on. And I’d deploy investigators to go out and meet the people and actually investigate the case. So they do that they’d go out, meet the, you know, the people that made the report, interview them collect as much information and data as they could. And then they come back to me and send it to me and I you know, I basically have the narratives in the, the witness reports and any photographs and video and anything that they had material evidence, and I put that together in a very comprehensive report that would be sent to BAASS every week. And they’d usually get six or eight of those reports from me every week, plus, they had the opportunity to look at the other 30 or 40 of them that were coming in. So that’s kind of how it worked. So every Friday we get on a conference call and go over all this stuff, you know, I I was the point of contact for MUFON. And essentially, the way it was structured, was that nobody at MUFON was allowed to have any contact with them but me, because we didn’t want all these guys bugging them and calling them in the middle of the night. So every Friday, I would meet with these guys, and there was four or five guys in their world on their team, that we’d spend a couple three hours together on Friday afternoon on a conference call and just go through all this information, talk about it and all that kind of stuff. So we were free to pretty much go where we, as far as I was concerned, I could send anybody anywhere I want anytime I want, and they’d never interfere with it. Nobody ever said Well, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. And we were free to do whatever we want. We were getting paid to do it. Well behind the scenes our deal with them was basically that, we’re a proprietary company, we’re private. And we’re going to … we may go back and look at some of these cases again, but we’re not necessarily going to share our findings and our research with you because that’s we’re paying you to give us the information, that was the deal.
George Knapp
Can you give me your assessment of whether you thought that was underhanded. Since it’s come out and been public, you know, the UFO folks will tee off on it as they always do on everything but that in some kind of a deep dark conspiracy that MUFON sold out. Seems to me you got resources that you always needed to have boots on the ground, go places, investigate things. The difference was you were sharing information with BAASS, which at the time, you had no idea that that was a DIA project, right? AAWSAP?
Richard Lang
No, no. And I mean, there was the, you know, the recent disclosure about how they had crashed records that they were working on. I mean, I would have been on my knees, begging them to go over there and work for if I knew that was going on, trust me. But everything that I had to deal with them was totally done on the up and up. I mean, when we, I was part of the project team, when we originally put the whole thing together. And we agreed from the start that, you know, we were going to send them this information, we were going to investigate these cases, we were going to do this and they were very clear in indicating that they weren’t sharing their information back with us and they were paying us $56,000 a month for that information. And you know, I thought it was a great deal. And the problem is just like anything else, there are people at MUFON that just came out of the woodwork, you know, and I remember listening to somebody on a radio show one night, and she’s going on and on about like you said, all this crap that you were talking about, and I’m thinking like, you know, I was there every day, I was involved in every bit of this. And all this stuff she’s saying it’s just complete crap, you know, but she, she got her, you know, she got our our in the public limelight for it. So…
George Knapp
I know you mean, yeah. And she continues to peddle that line too. Let’s go back to the book. So you have very practical advice for people. What equipment they need, that helps in an investigation, how to approach witnesses, can you give me sort of the highlights of what you have in the book, why it would work for just any individual who wants to have hands on experience, and investigate a case in say, their hometown?
Richard Lang
Well, when we were working on the, you know, the CIP project and all that, there was a point where they revamped the handbook, the investigators handbook, and I did some of the section on the equipment. But you know, that was like, 20, you know, 12 years ago. And in my book, the equipment that I’m talking about in the book, I’d say probably the primary thing is the video camera, you know, I’m trying to get these guys, there’s a whole chapter in there, not only on how important the video is, but how to use it, how to get people to interview and all that kind of thing. So I’d say that’s one of them. Then some of the other equipment just, you know, practical, common sense things that they need to have, and with them, and not only that, but haven’t packed and ready to go when when you know, something happens because sometimes these things happen pretty spontaneously, and you need to have everything ready to go when the case breaks. Part of the book that, I think one of the most important things in my book is there’s a couple of chapters in there. One I talk, it’s called perception of reality. And as you well know, that when you start to deal with these kinds of cases, there’s a lot of what they call high strangeness that’s involved, the anti physical stuff. Eric Davis and Jacques Vallee had written a paper that’s in my book, that they gave me permission to use it in my book. But basically, it’s a model for investigating anomalous phenomenon. And in some of this stuff, there’s a section and they call the anti physical layer. And that’s where you get into all these things that you see in case reports where things reappear and disappear. And, you know, three objects converge into one or one breaks up into three, you know, things like, you know, you see these reports where a UFO or a vehicle just goes right into the side of a mountain with no crash or impact or anything, it just goes right in there. Just like if you dropped a rock in the water. And, and in there’s, there’s a whole bunch of that kind of stuff listed in my book, that I think that people that are going to investigate this stuff have to get their head wrapped around that. And it’s not easy to do, because some of its pretty, pretty way out there. And you know, I did a, there’s a chapter in there about multi dimensional consciousness, different states of consciousness, you know, different states of reality. And you say, wow, you know, that’s really getting he’s getting a little unhinged. But, you know, if you look at that project that they did, you know, the CERN project where they got the particle accelerator, built underground and all that. I remember watching about 10 years ago, they did an interview on 60 minutes. When the guy is talking about all this stuff they’re doing and I’m thinking, you know what, these guys are trying to figure out what’s going on and other dimensions, you know, and my friend was with me, and she’s like, you know, you’ve had too much wine tonight, you know? And at the end of the show, the guy goes, Yeah, we’ve actually been able to identify 12 dimensions of reality outside our time space reality. And I’m like, yeah, you know? Well, that’s part of what’s going on here. So the average, you know, and I had put together some slides back about the time this, you know, I think we were still running, we’re just finishing up in the CIP project. But I had put together these slides, and there was a section in there about multi dimensional consciousness and some of these other, you know, talking about different states of reality and stuff like that, and had these slides. So I went up there to, I was in Pittsburgh in a conference. And there was about maybe four 450 people in there. And I, when I went in there, I thought, you know what, I’m gonna get beat up when I start talking about this stuff. These guys are gonna make fun of me or give me a bunch of crap, you know, and, and so I did my presentation. I was like, shocked, because all these people caused me What, man? Yeah, that was your right on with that. That’s really what’s going on. That was the best part of your presentation, you know. And so, over the last, you know, over the last 10 years, when I do my speaking and stuff, I use a lot of those slides. And that seems to be the part that most people seem to be most interested in. And it’s really the key to unlock all this stuff.
George Knapp
Richard, could you share with our viewers, one case, one big case that the tip that comes into MUFON. You pass on the information to BAASS that both of you may have investigated or one or the other. A case that might ring a bell with the public.
Richard Lang
Yeah, there was a really famous case actually, that I think Discovery Channel Canada had done a show on it after we did it. But basically, it was a case where this individual he was a nurse practitioner, a nurse practitioner, you know, well educated man, he worked in a psychiatric hospital, he’s driving home, right around Christmas time, listening to Christmas music. And all of a sudden, he notices this light in the sky. That’s out there, but seems to be kind of closing in on him. So it’s a country road he’s winding around. And finally, he gets to a point where this thing is like, very huge, and it’s right almost on top of them. And he can only see the bottom of it. This was up in New York, upstate New York. So this object basically comes right over his car, and there’s a beam of light that comes down, hits the car. And the next thing you know, he’s sitting there in the dark, the headlights go out the dashboard, lights go out, his cell phone’s dead, the radio goes off, he’s sitting there in the dark, trying to figure out what to do. And I remember him saying he was like, you know, I wasn’t sure if I should get out of the car and run or what, but he was starting to get really scared. Well, at some point, he finally was able to get the door open. And he still had the seatbelt on. And he looked up out like that. And as soon as he did it, boom, it’s gone. just disappeared. And, you know, I asked him, I said, well did it fly away or what? And he goes, I don’t know, I just closed the door. And all of a sudden, the car was running again, I just got the hell out of there. I was scared to death, you know. And so we went out and interviewed them. And the first thing we noticed was that when you walked up to this car, it had this electrostatic field around it, like if you ever open a cleaner bag with a wool sweater in it, and that static clinginess. You could walk up to that car and put your hand out and 8, 10 inches away, you could feel the static cling on it. It was like charged. So we did a bunch of we did a bunch of you know, tests on the car. And basically, the car had a huge magnetic field. It was like, you know, it’s like when your kid in science class and you put a magnet on a nail and you leave it on there for a while pretty soon the nail gets magnetized, well, that’s the whole front of the car was magnetic. And you know, we had some different instruments, one of them was a simple compass that will point to the field, you know, and the car was really heavily charged. And so the first, initially, I sent the investigator out to check it out. And then you know, I’m communicating with them. So at that point, I got on the plane and I flew out there too. I got there about a week after he did and we went back the second time in the car still had a pretty heavy magnetic field around and it was dissipating. But it wasn’t as strong as it was at first. But after three weeks it was still well defined. And when I was interviewing the guy, one of the things that that was probably most interesting of all, was, you know, as I said, He’s in the car, it’s dark, and he’s scared. And then when this object took off, everything in the car came back on. And I said, Okay, so he goes, Yeah, the lights were on, the dashboards were on, I could hear the radio going again. motors running. I said, Okay, so you mean the motor started up, right? And he goes, No, no, no, no, no, it didn’t start up. It was just running. I’m like, What do you mean? I said, you know how when you start the car, you hear that starter motor kick in and then starts, he goes, Yeah, that’s not what happened. I’m like, What happened? He goes, it was like you’re watching a movie. And you push the pause button. And then you push the play button, and motor was just running again. And that was probably the most interesting concept of the whole thing. And some of the old guys, the old time investigators, a bunch of them have contacted me over the years wanting to talk about that, because that’s a really critical part of the phenomena.
George Knapp
It’s as if time just stops for that period. Exactly.
Richard Lang
And that’s what I think that’s how I would explain it.
George Knapp
You told us that you’ve personally investigated 30 or 40, abductee cases where you get to know them and interrogate them, have a Q&A back and forth, get a sense of whether they’re telling something real. Is this an explanation for what’s called missing time?
Richard Lang
Yeah, I think so. I mean, a lot of cases when you look at the case data, a lot of times you’ll hear people say that when they have an encounter all of a sudden, like if you’re at night, you can hear the crickets and the dogs barking and all the night noises and all of a sudden silence And I think that’s what’s going on is basically, you know, sound is a function of vibration. If you stop time, you’re gonna stop the sound, if that makes sense. And I think that there’s something, you know, I’m not saying I completely understand it, but I know that’s something that that’s one of those little things you got to pry open and figure out, but that’s definitely a factor in this this, if that answers your question,
George Knapp
How often do these abductees or experiencer cases where you get to know the person and hear their story? How often do you have people who are just making stuff up?
Richard Lang
Well, I used to say that I can interview somebody for 20 minutes and tell tell whether they’re scammers or not, you know, just because you there’s things that you can ask them and you just, you know, you do this for a while, you get the sense about what, what, what they’re thinking and what’s going on, particularly like, you know, if you go out interview somebody, the first thing out of their mouth is now listen, if I get on Larry King Live, I got all of the rights to the patent is and everything for it, right? And then of course, you know, you’re completely wasting your time, you know, but most of the time when you interview somebody like that they’ve had that they’ve just been scared to death. And I remember a long time ago, we interviewed somebody that was like, I probably shouldn’t, he was a member of congress and his brother had a farm. And the guy’s like, Look, I’m gonna tell you what happened. Because this scared the crap out of me, and I just want to talk to somebody about it, but I’ll deny I ever talked to you, if you put this out in public. That’s a guy that you want to pay attention to. Because there’s nothing in it for him. You know, he just wants to get some help to try and understand what happened to him. But he’s not, you know, he doesn’t want anything to do with any publicity or anything.
George Knapp
One last question, sort of a broad one. So the public now knows some reporting that we’ve done and others have picked up on that AWSAAP was the name of this program, that’s where the $22,000,000 secured by Harry Reid and others goes to BAASS and AWWSAP to investigate not just things flying around in the sky. But all the other high strangeness that you mentioned before. There is a periphery a paranormal periphery, it’s not just as simple as some advanced airplane flying around, things happen to the witnesses associated with the things they see in the sky. It’s not just as simple as that. AATIP, which came later, really just looks at military cases, but not the high strangeness stuff, because it’s just too weird for a lot of people a handle. AAWSAP, which ended way too soon, they looked at all of the evidence, no matter how weird it was, no matter where it led, is that the approach that will work, that will eventually help us figure this out?
Richard Lang
Well, when we were working with BAASS, the prime objective there was they were looking for cases that had to do with, they were trying to figure out how the propulsion worked. So if we had a case about a cattle mutilation, or, you know, some aliens that landed on the front porch or walking around on the front porch, and why, they didn’t care. But if we had a case where something went over a building, and it blew out the HVA system, would set the burglar alarms off, or turn the automatic lights on anything that had close proximity to the ground, or had any kind of effect on the ground. That’s what we were really looking for. But in terms of the whole thing, as far as if you’re going to really, you know, if we’re really going to disclose what’s going on here, there’s a very high strangeness, there’s a very high strangeness element, that’s not easily, um, it’s not easy to get your head wrapped around it. And I think that’s going to be one of the problems with disclosure is if you want to really get into this and explain what’s going on. These people are, you know, when you start talking about multi dimensional events and time, you know, time warps, and, you know, time dilation, stuff like that, they’re gonna be like, whoa, wait a minute, you know, it’s like, I didn’t learn anything about that in Sunday school, you know. So that’s going to be one of the challenges I think.
George Knapp
It is an exciting time right now, just to have the UAP Task Force, no matter what they say, at least they’re not saying it’s swamp gas, that this is legitimate, it’s a legitimate mystery that deserves to be investigated. And hopefully there will be a permanent program. But as an investigator, you know, you have to follow the evidence where it leads and if there’s some really weird stuff that includes a UFO in the sky. You gotta figure it out. You got to look at the whole entire picture, don’t you think?
Richard Lang
Yeah, exactly. I mean there’s a chapter in my book called perception of reality, and that’s exactly what I was trying to get across is that the, you know, when you start doing this kind of work, when I started doing and I was fresh out of flight school, had a degree in aeronautics, which is a very scientific physics type background. You know, next thing you know, I’m out there interviewing some lady that’s talking about, you know, being taken up into a ship and being examined and all that. And, and I’m like, Well, you know, I can remember being in those first couple I did, I remember I just was thinking, I just got to get out of this. This, I just want to go home get away from that lady, you know, because she’s nuts. And then you’d interview another one. And then after the interview about 10 or 12 of them, you’re like, Wait a second, you know, these guys are telling the truth. And if they are, that means a lot of the stuff I learned in physics in college isn’t what we thought it was, you know, and so that’s what I mean, when you investigate the, the crux of my book is to try to get these guys to change their perception of reality so that they can, you know, because you’re only going to get so far with cameras and magnetometers and radiation detectors. If that makes sense.
George Knapp
Absolutely. Richard, thanks very much for your time.