1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:09,720 There seems to be more talk now about flying saucers and unidentified flying objects than 2 00:00:09,720 --> 00:00:11,360 ever before. 3 00:00:11,360 --> 00:00:15,560 This book, Incident at Exeter, has just been published. 4 00:00:15,560 --> 00:00:20,080 It's the new focal point of our national debate about unidentified flying objects. 5 00:00:20,080 --> 00:00:25,440 It's written by a distinguished columnist with the Saturday Review of Literature. 6 00:00:25,440 --> 00:00:27,120 His name is John Fuller. 7 00:00:27,120 --> 00:00:28,960 He's the author. 8 00:00:28,960 --> 00:00:31,920 He's invited him to come on and tell us his side of the story. 9 00:00:31,920 --> 00:00:32,920 So would you all agree? 10 00:00:32,920 --> 00:00:33,920 Mr. John Fuller. 11 00:00:33,920 --> 00:00:38,920 I think they've added my band. 12 00:00:38,920 --> 00:00:50,920 Somebody dropped a bottle over there. 13 00:00:50,920 --> 00:00:54,960 John, how'd you become interested in the subject? 14 00:00:54,960 --> 00:00:58,840 Well, the interesting thing was that I knew nothing about the subject. 15 00:00:58,840 --> 00:01:04,120 I was a complete neophyte on the subject, but I was stuck for an idea for my column 16 00:01:04,120 --> 00:01:07,520 one day that I do for the Saturday Review. 17 00:01:07,520 --> 00:01:11,720 And I happened to pull a little clipping out from the New York Times. 18 00:01:11,720 --> 00:01:13,240 I decided I'd take one case. 19 00:01:13,240 --> 00:01:18,160 I was tired of seeing these cases appear on the paper and then dropping. 20 00:01:18,160 --> 00:01:19,840 I took one case. 21 00:01:19,840 --> 00:01:21,320 I started to follow it down. 22 00:01:21,320 --> 00:01:25,640 I did a short piece and started to review about it. 23 00:01:25,640 --> 00:01:30,480 The book magazine read it and then Pustum read the look piece and the Saturday Review 24 00:01:30,480 --> 00:01:32,520 and asked me to do a book on it. 25 00:01:32,520 --> 00:01:35,520 And I am a complete non-USO expert. 26 00:01:35,520 --> 00:01:37,920 But I'm a good reporter. 27 00:01:37,920 --> 00:01:38,920 Good. 28 00:01:38,920 --> 00:01:39,920 Good. 29 00:01:39,920 --> 00:01:44,920 John, because I've interviewed a lot of people who have seen them and they're usually cuckoo 30 00:01:44,920 --> 00:01:45,920 clocks. 31 00:01:45,920 --> 00:01:46,920 You know, that's right. 32 00:01:46,920 --> 00:01:49,240 And I think I'm not worried about that. 33 00:01:49,240 --> 00:01:50,240 No, no, no. 34 00:01:50,240 --> 00:01:53,520 They're funny to have on and they tell you about little people running around and getting 35 00:01:53,520 --> 00:01:54,520 off of them. 36 00:01:54,520 --> 00:01:59,160 And here's two that might have. 37 00:01:59,160 --> 00:02:04,000 But you are the first man of the Fourth of State, the man of letters, that I have ever 38 00:02:04,000 --> 00:02:07,640 met who claims he has seen one. 39 00:02:07,640 --> 00:02:14,360 Well, frankly, if I didn't have a licensed pilot who was also a very cynical newsreel 40 00:02:14,360 --> 00:02:19,720 cameraman with me at the time, I would have never told anybody about it. 41 00:02:19,720 --> 00:02:21,400 Would you see, John? 42 00:02:21,400 --> 00:02:27,400 So one I saw was much less dramatic than the cases that I documented in the book at Exeter. 43 00:02:27,400 --> 00:02:29,400 Well, in New Hampshire. 44 00:02:29,400 --> 00:02:30,400 Yeah, Exeter, New Hampshire. 45 00:02:30,400 --> 00:02:31,400 Yeah. 46 00:02:31,400 --> 00:02:32,400 I know that incident. 47 00:02:32,400 --> 00:02:37,640 And two policemen, the original incident, which I started to, I went up there, if I could 48 00:02:37,640 --> 00:02:39,400 debunk the story, I was going to debunk it. 49 00:02:39,400 --> 00:02:42,840 If I could, they'd get a little ghost story about a New England town, you know, with the 50 00:02:42,840 --> 00:02:45,840 reactions of people with psychological feelings. 51 00:02:45,840 --> 00:02:46,840 That would have been fine too. 52 00:02:47,280 --> 00:02:53,080 But I got up there and I found that this case checked out so thoroughly and was documented 53 00:02:53,080 --> 00:02:59,120 so completely by really tough-minded cynical officers, police officers, one of whom was 54 00:02:59,120 --> 00:03:01,400 an Air Force veteran. 55 00:03:01,400 --> 00:03:06,040 It came so close to him and it was so enormous that he dropped on the ground and pulled his 56 00:03:06,040 --> 00:03:07,040 gun. 57 00:03:07,040 --> 00:03:13,360 Now, police officers of this caliber do not do this, if they see something, you know, 58 00:03:13,360 --> 00:03:14,360 in the sky. 59 00:03:14,360 --> 00:03:24,360 Then I found that I unearthed 60 confident, reliable people whom I checked out as to character, 60 00:03:24,360 --> 00:03:27,840 confidence and capacity for observation. 61 00:03:27,840 --> 00:03:28,840 And I grilled them. 62 00:03:28,840 --> 00:03:29,840 I interrogated them, tape recorded everything. 63 00:03:29,840 --> 00:03:34,840 If I hadn't had a tape recorder, I would have buried the story. 64 00:03:34,840 --> 00:03:35,840 It is a... 65 00:03:35,840 --> 00:03:41,960 I can't help feeling, Merv, that there is a remote possibility that this could be the 66 00:03:41,960 --> 00:03:43,680 biggest news breaking history. 67 00:03:43,680 --> 00:03:44,680 I don't say that. 68 00:03:44,680 --> 00:03:45,680 I say it's a possibility. 69 00:03:45,680 --> 00:03:55,520 Was this not the case, John, where the object was coming in on high tension wires? 70 00:03:55,520 --> 00:03:58,440 They were consistently reported above high tension wires. 71 00:03:58,440 --> 00:04:01,840 I discovered later that the original police incident was near high tension wires. 72 00:04:01,840 --> 00:04:03,640 I didn't realize this was the time. 73 00:04:03,640 --> 00:04:08,000 Do you believe the story that they are manned by space creatures? 74 00:04:08,000 --> 00:04:12,040 Merv, I'll say this. 75 00:04:12,040 --> 00:04:13,040 I'm very cautious. 76 00:04:13,800 --> 00:04:16,880 I don't make ratch statements. 77 00:04:16,880 --> 00:04:21,920 I say that there is over-fueling evidence that they exist. 78 00:04:21,920 --> 00:04:29,440 I think this has to be accepted now, because in the US, icecraft. 79 00:04:29,440 --> 00:04:31,320 That, I don't think any longer be denied. 80 00:04:31,320 --> 00:04:35,400 You had Dr. Heineck, the head of the astronomy at Northwestern. 81 00:04:35,400 --> 00:04:42,000 He made a statement to the Optical Society of America, not long ago, that he had to 82 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:47,880 admit that the evidence was so overwhelming that he was bound down by it. So I think there's 83 00:04:47,880 --> 00:04:54,680 no question that they exist. I think the theory that holds up the most, or the least 84 00:04:54,680 --> 00:05:01,120 holds on, as you consider everything, is the interplanetary theory. But I can't go beyond 85 00:05:01,120 --> 00:05:06,360 that because, you know, I don't know, no one landed on my line yet. What did you see, 86 00:05:06,360 --> 00:05:17,400 can you just clarify? What I saw was a jet fighter plane chasing a dull hind's disc 87 00:05:17,400 --> 00:05:25,160 from the northwest of the southeast at 4,000 to 6,000 feet, moving at approximately 4 to 88 00:05:25,160 --> 00:05:34,360 500 miles an hour. And the disc was about five plane lengths in front of the jet. And 89 00:05:34,360 --> 00:05:42,520 we kept it in sight for about 20 to 30 seconds as this luminous disc moved in front of the 90 00:05:42,520 --> 00:05:48,400 plane. The diameter of the object, again I worked with the pilot on this one, we talked 91 00:05:48,400 --> 00:05:53,320 it out for two hours before we would have accepted what we were seeing, you know, that 92 00:05:53,320 --> 00:06:01,040 we wanted to document it, was about one third the diameter of the plane's fuselage, plane's 93 00:06:01,040 --> 00:06:06,920 running lines were right. Now this is a small one. Because, and the reason why I don't even 94 00:06:06,920 --> 00:06:14,240 play this up deciding up, actually, even in the book, is that the type of documentation 95 00:06:14,240 --> 00:06:19,160 I was getting from solid people, now these are taciturn, laconic Yankees, and they're 96 00:06:19,160 --> 00:06:27,120 a tough, tough out, the New England guy. Whereas people would give me testimony and I would 97 00:06:27,200 --> 00:06:30,720 check them three ways against the middle, ask them the same question three times, try 98 00:06:30,720 --> 00:06:38,960 to trap them, try to throw them off base. And they would say, I was riding down Route 99 00:06:38,960 --> 00:06:43,360 88, 11 o'clock at night, I saw pulsating lights down there and I thought there was an accident 100 00:06:43,360 --> 00:06:49,120 down the road. I speeded up to get near the car and suddenly I realized that this was 101 00:06:49,120 --> 00:06:56,160 an enormous craft hovering silently, 10 or 20 feet above the road, which would wobble 102 00:06:56,240 --> 00:07:00,880 and hug her without a sound and then shoot up into the sky with incredible speed. Now 103 00:07:00,880 --> 00:07:07,360 I got so much that I wanted to go to the paper court and cross examination math bases that 104 00:07:07,360 --> 00:07:11,120 I went back to Look Magazine when I got halfway through the research and I played them these 105 00:07:11,120 --> 00:07:16,480 tapes and I said, listen, I might have gone round the bank. You know, I could have flipped, 106 00:07:16,480 --> 00:07:23,120 right? And so I said, will you send a senior editor up there to check my research? He went 107 00:07:23,120 --> 00:07:28,240 up at the end of three days, he threw his hands up in the air, Gary Zimmerman. Then Reader's 108 00:07:28,240 --> 00:07:34,320 Digest magazine picked up the short look article, the book is much, much more detailed, much more. 109 00:07:34,320 --> 00:07:39,920 And I read your look story. Yeah, well, it fascinated me. I mean, I don't get this fascinated 110 00:07:39,920 --> 00:07:48,880 over a story. And I get bored with lots of them. But so then Reader's Digest picked up the look 111 00:07:48,880 --> 00:07:54,160 article and they sent a researcher on the job for four or five days to check my research. 112 00:07:54,960 --> 00:08:02,320 So no story has been documented so much. And let me ask you this, John, UFO history. You say that 113 00:08:02,320 --> 00:08:07,280 one of our Air Force fighter planes was chasing it. Yes. What is our Air Force to you? Our Air 114 00:08:07,280 --> 00:08:13,360 Force will give us no information at all from the local base. They will hand out very stereotype. 115 00:08:14,240 --> 00:08:20,000 But you said you talked to the pilot. No, I had a pilot with me, a licensed pilot 116 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:26,320 with me on the ground who verified the altitude speed. He was both the pilot and a newsreel 117 00:08:26,320 --> 00:08:32,000 camera. He was not the Air Force pilot. Now, on the other hand, I got much off the record stuff 118 00:08:32,000 --> 00:08:37,920 from Air Force officers, radar men, Navy men, and sportsmen, Coast guardsmen who 119 00:08:38,160 --> 00:08:46,000 verified all these happenings as they went along. The radar reports, some radar reports, 120 00:08:46,000 --> 00:08:50,720 one Navy report, not at sportsmen, but another place was clocked at 3,000 knots in the atmosphere. 121 00:08:51,760 --> 00:08:59,360 Now, the Air Force is making a very bad mistake because they are going to, I caught them in an 122 00:08:59,360 --> 00:09:05,200 enormous fabrication in this, that's not, that's a little rougher word, I'd say, 123 00:09:05,200 --> 00:09:11,120 an enormous confusion of the exeter case and presented it to the Colonel in the Public Information 124 00:09:11,120 --> 00:09:16,880 Office in Pentagon and he said, are you calling me a liar? And I said, no, I'm not calling you a 125 00:09:16,880 --> 00:09:22,160 liar. I want to know how can you justify these statements made by your office, these statements 126 00:09:22,160 --> 00:09:29,440 made by your local men and the complete discrepancies. And he said, sir, you were talking to an officer 127 00:09:29,440 --> 00:09:33,840 of the United States Air Force and stamped off. Well, that's not intelligent thinking. I don't 128 00:09:33,840 --> 00:09:38,960 just fascinating subject, and I recommend to you, John Fuller's Incident at Exeter. I'm sure it's 129 00:09:38,960 --> 00:09:42,240 a great book. We'll be right back.