Interview with Russ Estes
By, Richard Thieme

RE: I haunted the edges of UFOlogy and the paranormal world for many years. It was my hobby – haunting sites, the paranormal. Then 12 years ago I semi-retired and said this will give me time to do some projects that I want to do. In 1989 I decided to do a 13-part documentary on the paranormal. I started looking at anomalies, beginning with what I knew best – hauntings. People kept asking me about UFOs. People interested in the paranormal are interested in just about all of it. They kept referring me to various groups. It went to a series featuring UFOs to a series dedicated to UFOs to the hell with a 13-part series. It blossomed.

I did not exclude what you call “the marginal stuff.” I went for all of it – because of curiosity. I have always been intrigued by the human mind. I’m a people watcher. I talked to people involved in UFOs back in the fifties who are still involved. The contactee movement, ridiculed by “serious” UFO researchers except one group is talking about Mars and Venus and the other group is past that.

The first thing that struck me was the chauvinism. How easy is it to become a guru in this field? Very easy. How easy is it to become a star? My God, is it easy! Anyone can get up there and start blathering about anything and they’re a star. It’s akin to religion, unfortunately. It’s built on a strong belief structure, and the belief structure is more important that the facts, at least to most of these people.

RT: Now, “these people” refers to the true-believers?

RE: Yes. The true believer-thing is the first thing that struck me. This strong belief structure and this bond to religion – it was a religious experience for these people. Seeing a flying saucer was the basis of their reality. Then I went to see what the scientific community was finding. I was appalled that I had the door slammed in my face again and again.

RT: By people doing research or people who refused to dignify your questions?

RE: People who refused to dignify my question. If I said flying saucer or UFO, the door slammed immediately. Now, I have spent more than 30 years in the entertainment industry, I pride myself on having a name in the field, people do know me out here, people know I am credible, not an extremist – the door is slammed in my face.

I went to JPL and even wrote a 4-page letter giving them things a producer would never give them, including the right to review all footage and have last artistic license on it and determine what would be seen. They still slammed the door in my face because it concerned UFOs.

RT: What’s your view of Philip Klass?

RE: A nice man with a great sense of humor.

RT: Yes, I agree, but he also struck me, in the context you are discussing, as an atheist, like Madelyn Murray O’Hair, just as attached to NO as true believers are to YES ...

RE: The “debunkers” are just as fanatic as the true believers. And they viciously attack people. Their ad hominem attacks are vicious.

I went to a PSICOP convention in Seattle a few years ago and brought my cameras, this is the last time that publicly Carl Sagan was the keynoter, he looked horrible, I could not interview him because his people protect him but I interviewed a ton of others. To see 1400 PSICOP people have John Mack as their guest speaker - and Mack made a major mistake and brought in an abductee. 99% of the audience are in three piece suits, a majority of them with advanced degrees, each one a hard core PSICOP debunker, and the abductee made the mistake of saying, who out there believes in Jesus? Dead silence. Not one hand came up. Everybody is looking all around their seats and then it breaks into laughter. She said gosh, I guess I’m in the wrong house.

Mack is so tied into Eastern religion and expanded knowledge that he overlooks anything that modern psychology has to offer. Our book, the Abduction Enigma, was my pet project. For years, I have been looking at these people, and they’re giving the right answers all these years, but not applying it to themselves. I have two hours of Mack on tape saying things that are so damning to the belief of abduction but they don’t apply to them. He says, the quality of the abduction depends on the quality of the researcher, but can’t see that it applies to him. This man with great intelligence who comes from money and never had to work a day in his life will turn around and say, not one of my subjects showed any psychosomatic or psychotic tendencies. They came to me not knowing what they were going to find, and I said, didn’t they come to you because you’re known for abduction research? Well, it could work that way, he said, but not in my case.

RT: That reminds me of David Jacobs who does what biblical scholars call eisegesis rather than exegesis. He brings his conclusions to the text and finds them in it, rather than entering the text to see what is disclosed. He turns questions into answers he already has.

RE: Because he’s David Jacobs. They’re just like fundamentalists. And if you really look at these people like Budd Hopkins – he brought Jacobs and Mack into this, and they all disagree as to what it is, but they will never put each other down by name, they talk about the other theories being wrong.

The first time I was shocked was in 1992 when I interviewed Richard Haines Ph. D. – of course I was told he was a past JPL scientist who specialized in what he considered the only true sightings, by professional pilots, and it was an interesting interview. He agreed to participate only if not portrayed in the same interview with Phil Klass, there is that much hatred. So it was a nice piece, very straightforward, rather scientific, I’m rather happy because this is what I was looking for. After I finished, I described to him something my wife and I had seen – a triangular vehicle, very silent, very large. But you have to understand that I live in the high desert of southern California 26 miles from Edwards AF Base. There’s all kinds of strange stuff flying around here. I didn’t see a spacecraft, I saw a black project that someone is testing around here as they do regularly. But when I told Haines about this, he said, well, you know, they show you what they need to see. I said, what? He said, you needed to see that and they knew it. “They” were the extraterrestrials that he had a firm belief in. He wouldn’t say that on camera, of course.

I don’t want to sound super cynical because the bottom line is, I do believe, there’s a possibility we have been visited by extraterrestrials.

I usually don’t share my background with the UFO people. I’m a television producer and this is what I do. But I also titled my first documentary “the quality of the messenger” which is a guideline to the research that I went through. The first thing I believe is, do not allow anyone to insult your intelligence. Deal from the things you know to be true and your circle of influence. If someone is feeding you something that you know to be false, let the red flags come up. Well, I spent six years working for NSA. I don’t run around saying that because the first thing you notice is the paranoia in the UFO field. Everybody is CIA. I said, be afraid of NSA if you want to be afraid. They didn’t know what I was talking about. Then they started to flash their credentials and degrees and you know what? They were all bogus.

RT: People like [X, a well-known UFO investigator]?

RE: Oh, the Lyin’ King?

RT: What kind of state of mind would I have to be in to lie to you about the basic things he lied about–

RE: Absolutely. Your experience with that guy was not an isolated event. I always considered him one of the most pompous idiots I ever ran into in my life. I said there is something fishy about this guy, he is so pompous, so full of himself it’s unreal. We have this guy on tape swearing to things later revealed as lies. He’s a fool.

There are a lot of people like that, compulsive liars. Anytime these guys start parading their credentials, the red flags go up.

RT: So who is real?

RE: The people you don’t know, the people you don’t hear. The ones who are researching on their own as so many of us are and who are not making themselves public and are not going out and speaking in the cottage industry. That’s the sad part about it. You never found me as a keynote speaker at one of these things. I won’t do it, I don’t need it.

RT: You could be king.

RE: Anyone could, you tell them what they want to hear and you can be king.

RT: It’s not the money.

RE: That’s another question you hear, why would anyone do this? They do it for the spotlight.

RT: Psychological gain.

RE: And everyone has a different idea what money is. Or if you’re a scientist who could never make it as a scientist ... so-and-so’s credentials look good, right? But years ago, the man could not make it as a scientist. Yet he considers himself the only true scientist in the field of UFOlogy.

RT: Perhaps we could use a skunk works model, or a “new paradigms for computer security” model of exploration ....

RE: It is a sad commentary that is next to impossible to draw out more than three names who could give you that kind of research.

RT: Who are they? Jacques Vallee?

RE: I don’t know about Vallee. I have heard him speak and every time I tried to interview him, he was “just leaving the field.” I don’t know. I can only look at him from what he’s written and say here’s a guy who seems to have it on the ball. I don’t know what the inner person is, his motivation. Every time I have tried to get to him, he is “leaving the field.”

RT: So bottom line, what do you think?

RE: I sound much more cynical than I am. I am very cynical but I still believe there is something there.

RT: What’s the basis for that?

RE: Sadly, I have to look at these other folks who are involved with this, and a lot of these people, brilliant as they may seem, know nothing about our own technologies. They assume so much and their assumptions become overwhelming. They assume you can’t even get near Edwards when you can drive around it and take a tour and go to AMES and be blown away as to what we are doing right now that answers so many of the questions of UFOs.

Like stall speed fighter technology. They take a fighter and use a way of diverting the backwash out of it and slow it down to 45 mph and turn it around and go off somewhere else. They’re doing it right now. Think of a human being on the ground looking up at a F16 jet fighter ten thousand feet above them slowing down to 45 miles per hour which is below stall speed, in effect hovering, turning on a dime and shooting away. What would that look like to someone on the ground?

RT: When did that technology show up?

RE: 1994 is when I saw it. I don’t know when it first showed up. They talk about the SR71, they don’t realize it’s 1950s technology. They don’t know what we have much less what they have. It takes work but it’s not beyond the reach of the average citizen. All it takes is the right curiosity and knowing where to find your answers. Which is the first thing you’re supposed to learn in school. How to find answers. How to use the library.

But what did I personally do to get jazzed on the belief? I went through the back door. If I couldn’t go through the front door of science I figured the best way was to go through the back door. So I started approaching the colleges and dealing with the professors who are getting the government contracts. The ones who really turned me on are the theoretical physicists because they’re the ones who will say, everything is possible. They started turning me on to their friends, and boy, did I meet some of the strangest people. At UCSD I met a physicist who brought along a friend working at Sandia labs who was working on the nuclear engine projects and he wanted to know if I could help them generate good PR to get more money to fund these projects. There is so much bad publicity. It wasn’t earth-shattering, but he said, we have built these atomic engines for ages, we have motors the size of desks that could power spacecraft indefinitely. Nuclear propulsion that people say “could exist” – does. Already. People who are not in the UFO field like this tell me their views about UFO phenomena, that it is strongly possible, that yes, even though these alien beings would have the same problems in space travel that we do, it is very possible that we have been visited. Was it by design? Most likely not. Could they have just tripped over us? Yes. Does it happen on a daily basis? Most likely not. But could it happen? Yes. Could it still be happening? Yes. Could abduction have happened? Sure, but most likely they would take people the way we do, you’d never see them again.

Look at what the government said when it got out of Blue Book. They didn’t say UFOs didn’t exist. They said it did not impact our national security.

But if we look for this core group of serious individuals inside the known UFO people, we come up with zero. There are so many con men.

I have gone through this field from coast to coast. For two years I went to every conference they had. It was educational. Talk about what’s-his-name, talk about pomposity! A futurist, of course. Unbelievable self-importance. I made those trips and interviewed those people. Originally I started out as a neophyte and tried to keep an open mind and smile and interview and ask the same questions of all the people, the camera running. I would talk and talk and nod and nod and red flags popped up and I would go check it out and I was saddened. Every time. Every time.

RT: When credible people tell me their accounts privately, it’s the way they tell the small details that has such an impact. These are the people who have convinced me over time that they have had the experiences that they had, whatever the explanation.

RE: I feel the same way.

RT: I exclude abductees, who for me – the few I actually met – seem symptomatic. Of something unhealthy. I mean people who claim to be abductees.

RE: I have met every type of abductee. You name them, I met them. Including the ones who had wild sex with reptoids and loved it.

RT: Wouldn’t you? The right kind of reptoid, of course ...

RE: I have met so many non-functional abductees bust also totally functional abductees. I have met them all and interviewed 99% of them. My conclusion is the book, The Abduction Enigma.

RT: How about the folklorist, Eddie Bullard?

RE: Another one. He speaks the truth, until his beliefs get in the way. He has a spectacular voice. He is brilliant and for the longest time he was a true believer. I have an interview with him at the SCICOP convention in Seattle and like so many, what he says depends on the audience. Very balanced in that interview too, and then, at the end, I still believe we must look at alien abductions. He believed it then. He argued the differences between folklore, pop culture, and the alien abduction.

RT: He still does.

RE: There are no differences. There are things people forget so readily because it’s convenient to forget them. They forget that Betty Hill described the aliens as creatures with noses bigger than Jimmy Durante’s. Most people don’t know what “schnozz” or “schnozzola” meant. I talk to believers between 18 and 35 who don’t even know the reference. People forget to look at things through the eyes of the time, they tend to look at it through the technologies that we know today. They forget what it was like back then. The “schnozz,” back then, meant a gigantic nose. But today, she says oh, they look just like Whitley Streiber’s grays, so that’s what sticks and makes her story valid.

RT: How would you get the best people together? how would you protect the boundary?

RE: It’s nearly impossible. What happens to some of the people who you find very credible to start with – this goes hand in hand with the obsessive part of it – some of these people get so involved that it occupies a great portion of their life and some of these people can’t afford to do that. They find themselves running low of money and then make “alliances” with frauds, there are people who will join with the devil to get what they think is going to be the answer, but they know they’re in bed with the devil so they lose their credibility at that point due to whatever earthly problem they have. Like a so-called researcher leading you to take out a second mortgage on your home, suddenly you’re partners with a con man. Then the die is cast.

And yet, as I said before, I sound more cynical than I am. I am very cynical but I still believe there is something there.

BACK