Interviewer

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T.D. Barnes

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Interviewer

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Interviewer

I want to go through the whole thing in like a linear fashion today to how this all started for you and to everything you saw along the way. But for people that aren't aware, just high level. You were an engineer with a top secret and a Q level clearance working on special projects at Area 51 and for NASA during the height of the space race.

T.D. Barnes

Actually it was for the CIA.

Interviewer

For the CIA?

T.D. Barnes

I was with NASA before I was

Interviewer

Area 51 at NASA. Before you were at Area 51?

T.D. Barnes

Yes.

Interviewer

Okay, so how did this all start? How did you. First of all, how did you get into NASA? What were you doing for NASA?

T.D. Barnes

I was on the Air 15 tracking station, 45 miles from Area 51. And we were tracking the X15 XB70 bomber, the lifting bodies that became the space shuttle. The lunar landing vehicles that landed on the moon.

Interviewer

Oh, wow.

T.D. Barnes

We were doing all those projects and I was hypersonic flight support specialist. I had experience in the army. I was surface air missile guy in the army intel before that. And I had experience tracking high speed vehicles. And they brought me to NASA to track the X15, which was a Mark 7 aircraft.

Interviewer

The X15 is what it was called.

T.D. Barnes

Yes.

Interviewer

And you were doing tests with the lunar module for Apollo 11.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I got to do the Apollo 1 capsule. Actually. This is actually I left NASA. I was at the Flight Dynamics Laboratory for the CIA. We were getting our hand on a MiG 21 that we were going to fly to Area 51 and build a black box so that we could evaluate it. So they sent me to the Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright Patterson to develop the black box, you might say, for the testing of the MIGs. And they were testing the Apollo 1 space capsule in the laboratory that I was in. And they had it for the sample they had doing vibration tests. They had it on a vibrator, just vibrating the deck out of it 24 hours a day. Then they had a big old mercury oven that they'd put it in and vary the temperatures. They could run up to 5,000 degrees and head back down. So they evaluate, you know, the capsule itself, you know, fifage your wish, stand vibration in the heat, that sort of thing. And that's the same one that ended up burning up on the cave and killing three of the astronauts.

Interviewer

Is that the one with Gus Grissom?

T.D. Barnes

Yes.

Interviewer

Oh, wow.

T.D. Barnes

But they were testing it there at Wright Patterson while I was there for another purpose.

Interviewer

Yeah. What was the story on how that fire started again?

T.D. Barnes

It was oxygen. They used pure oxygen and.

Interviewer

Sure.

T.D. Barnes

And a spark ignited it. And that's all it took.

Interviewer

Yeah. One of the crazy things, I actually had Charlie Duke on the podcast a couple months ago and I was asking him all about the radiation stuff, you know, because that's one of the big questions now with getting back to the moon outside of like Earth orbit is going through the Van Allen belts or whatever. And I was asking, I was like, what kind of testing did you have to do? Like how much protection did you guys have? And he's like, we never really talked about it. You know, that's like one of the big things that the lunar, the moon conspiracy. People like to poo poo it because of the radiation belts, you know.

T.D. Barnes

Well, we went through some of that even there in Nevada. I was not participant through this, but we, we actually developed a nuclear powered bomber. And yeah, and you know, the shielding for the pilot was prohibitive. And then when we built the, the A12, which I was part of, we were doing stealth. It was our first stealth plane. And we experiment with all kind of procedure to confuse the enemy aircraft radar. And we tried ion guns. And for them you had to have shielding for the pilot. And even though they would have worked Ion guns. Yeah, we had an A12 plane. This is the A12 for listeners don't know. That was a CIA version that later became the SR71.

Interviewer

Oh, the Blackbird, Okay.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, the Blackbird. But we used an iron gun. We tried all sorts of things as we were developing stealth on it, but the weight of the protection for the pilot made it ineffective because weight was our biggest enemy.

Interviewer

And what did they use? Lead. Would they have to use?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, it was lead. So, so we. So it did not work. That did not work out.

Interviewer

Yeah. That's very interesting. You know how those astronauts didn't really have to train much for that kind of stuff, you know, because that's the, the, from what I understand is those Van Allen radiation belts are extremely dangerous because of all that radiation.

T.D. Barnes

Absolutely.

Interviewer

Okay, so from the point you were doing that work at NASA and then you went to Wright Patterson, you're doing some testing there. What specifically were you doing at.

T.D. Barnes

Right, Pat again, CI Special Projects.

Interviewer

CI Special Project. How much of the stuff that you did was like, you can't, you still have to keep locked in your mind and you can't talk about, like how much can you talk about?

T.D. Barnes

Almost all of it's declassified.

Interviewer

Almost all of it's declassified.

T.D. Barnes

2013. Well, actually 2009, the CIA flew me and some of the pilots back to Langley and that's when they declassified, wicked teller wise. Where we had worked and what we did back in the 1960s. That's when my wife even learned about Eric Fitzwone. I jumped on a plane Monday morning, disappeared, come home Friday night. She had no idea.

Interviewer

She had no clue.

T.D. Barnes

No clue.

Interviewer

Where were you flying from?

T.D. Barnes

Las Vegas.

Interviewer

Las Vegas. Is this what Obama went out, came out and said Area 51 was real? Was that, is that, was that 2009 when he was declassified?

T.D. Barnes

I don't know, I don't remember. See, if Obama, it probably was because that's when they brought us back to Langley and brought the wives with us and it was a big deal and we got to meet the directors and all that sort of thing. And then I continued going back to Langley up until Covid for different purpose. More oral history.

Interviewer

I love the CIA pin you have there, by the way.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, not a lot of people recognize that.

Interviewer

Well, you came in wearing the hat.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, they keep me supplied with goodies like that. I come back about every three months. Well, we would have reunions in Las Vegas with the guys that worked out Area fifth one. I was the president of the association. See, I always sent people to attend our reunions, just to listen to US war stories after hours. And they'd bring the store. Actually set up the CIA store in there.

Interviewer

Yep. They have a gift shop there.

T.D. Barnes

Gift shop. Yep, yep. We'd buy everybody be a. Wearing caps like I'm wearing.

Interviewer

Okay, so Obama's first public acknowledgment of Area 51 wasn't until December 2013.

T.D. Barnes

That was when the. That was the official declassification.

Interviewer

Oh, the official one. Okay, so they brought you in before that?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, bro. Well, what they're doing is dedicating the plane. It put one of the planes up on a pedestal at CIA headquarters.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And that was the event. That's when Michael Hayden was director. And they brought us back for the dedication of the plane.

Interviewer

Oh, so this was planned, all this. So when Obama said this in 2013, it was prepped?

T.D. Barnes

Yes.

Interviewer

You guys had been working behind the scenes to get all this information to them.

T.D. Barnes

I'll give you a story. We. We turned. The CIA turned over airfield we've been operating for over 20 years. No one knew about it. And in 1979, we turned it over to the Air Force and we stored all the records we had at CIA at Norton Air Force Base. And 25, 30 years later, when CIA got ready to start declassifying this stuff, Norton had lost all the records. So they contacted the historians, called me, and they said, td, we got a problem. We don't know what the hell you guys did. So what we did is they encouraged me to create a website, which we did. And we had all of our pilots, all of our engineers, contractors, everyone write up stories, their bios, we call them, of what they did at Area 51. And that's how the CIA started reconstructing what we did out there. Because back then, it was compartmentalized. That. No, we didn't talk to each other. It was just that classified. So. And then the CIA would have a document. You know, they got a lot of documents that generated there at Langley, but they wouldn't know what it meant. It'd be a project stamped with a project name or something. They wouldn't know what the project was. So the fact that it's amazing. I'd put it on the website and draw comments from people that worked on that particular project, and that's how the CA would learn what that project was all about.

Interviewer

So walk me through the process of how you got recruited to go to Area 51.

T.D. Barnes

Mine was quite an interesting. My route to airfield was different than anyone else. I was in the army at Fort Bliss, Texas. I'd been just about every missile school and radar school they had. And I did over two and a half years of nothing but school. Going to college at night and going to school during the day, one missile after another and had gained a reputation for myself because we're shooting hundreds of those things out at White Sands.

Interviewer

Shooting hundreds of what?

T.D. Barnes

Missiles.

Interviewer

Missiles?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. Air defense missiles. Started out with Nike hx, Nike Hercules and then ended with a halt missile.

Interviewer

What year are we talking here?

T.D. Barnes

We're talking about 59, 60, 1960.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

And 1960 they were getting ready to build the A12 spy plane out of area to fly at Area 51. And they discovered in Turkey that the picked up reflection out of Soviet Union that they had a new radar called the talking. And they need to know if this talking radar would be able to track this new plane that they were getting ready to build, the Blackbirds. And this was in 1960, before the Cuban Missile crisis. The Russians had already moved into Cuba. They had moved in all sorts of missiles and what have you. They moved in a talking radar which made the CIA very happy.

Interviewer

Talking radar.

T.D. Barnes

Talking radar.

Interviewer

PAUL King yeah, talking.

T.D. Barnes

So they moved one into Cuba which it made it a lot easier for them to probe you and see what it could do. So we during Project Palladium was the project name of it.

Interviewer

Project Palladium.

T.D. Barnes

They were flying a ghost plane, C97 loaded with electronics and they flying to Cuba and that plane to turn on its radar. I mean the, the Soviets turned on the radar.

Interviewer

So I got the project a remote controlled plane.

T.D. Barnes

No, no, this was C97. It's loaded with the. I got fly on two of the missions out of because my reputation in the army with missiles and radar. They recruited me to help evaluate the talking radar.

Interviewer

Whoa, look at that thing.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, that's, that's what we say, that's electronics. So we flew out of Biggs Air Force Base next door to Fort Bliss where I was stationed. In this grove plane. We had CIA people in the NSA and you don't know who all was in there but electronic type people. But we flew towards Cuba, made them turn on that radar. They scared the death of us. Cubans were and the Russians were. Once they turned it on, then we started probing it, sprucing it with all type of signals, making it think it was coming, going 10 planes, one plane, whatever we wanted. But the object was off the coast of Cuba. We had a submarine that released a bunch of balloons with all different size and shaped spears on it into the air. And what the object was to see what was the smallest spear that radar would be able to detect. That's what was, was going to see the sensitivity of it. So this, so that's what we were collecting the data. But actually the submarine and the balloons was what the target was. Meanwhile, they would launch the MiG 15s and get at your out of Homestead Air Force Base here in Florida. They'd launch the F1 hundreds to get between the Migs and us. And we would get what we wanted and haul back to Fort Bliss and biggest Air Force base.

Interviewer

Oh wow.

T.D. Barnes

That I got due to it. Anyway, that's how I got involved with the CIA. That's my first encounter while I was in the army. Okay. Long story short, I stayed in the army, end up deploying the first combat missile unit ever deployed during the when they put up the Iron Curtain. And they sent one one battalion to Key West Florida because the missile crisis was heating up. And they sent my battalion to Germany, West Germany on the Czech border to monitor the Soviets kind of cross the Czech border.

Interviewer

Oh, wow.

T.D. Barnes

So anyway, that was. And then I, while I was there, the CIA showed up at my door. They needed something. They needed me again.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And I end up only stayed 18 months in Germany when it's supposedly 36 month had my family with me and I ended back up and ended up back in the States.

Interviewer

What? Were you aware of the declassified project or Operation Northwoods?

T.D. Barnes

No, no.

Interviewer

Did you read it after it came out?

T.D. Barnes

No, no, I'm not familiar.

Interviewer

So Operation Northwoods, I believe included in that was, and I believe this was under Helms. I, I, if I remember correctly, Richard Helms, one of the things in that project was a plan to fly a remote controlled airplane over Cuba so Cuba would shoot them out of the sky and we would have a pretext to invade Cuba. And also in there was this crazy thing that I only learned about recently, which was to use laser beams or some sort of like projection technology to project like a giant 3D Jesus Christ. Over Q over Havana to tell them to rebel against their government.

T.D. Barnes

I hadn't heard.

Interviewer

Have you heard of that? No.

T.D. Barnes

Heard of that one.

Interviewer

It was limit.

Sponsor Voice 1

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Interviewer

He was a general. He was not the head of the CIA. Helms was the head of the CIA there. Okay, but. Okay, so you're saying Ler was, he developed it, he developed that specific project or that was Mongoose.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I'm familiar, yeah, I'm familiar with the manager, the general.

Interviewer

Right. Okay, there you go. If you go down, it says Northwoods. Yeah, the the look up the CIA. The. The CIA Jesus over Havana thing. That. That one's crazy.

T.D. Barnes

Okay. I'm well familiar with Operation Mongoose.

Interviewer

Okay, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Mongoose is different, right? Mongoose is.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. That was a Bay of Pigs.

Interviewer

That was the Bay of Pigs, right, exactly. But Northwoods was wild. Like, Northwoods was very, just like very sinister type of. Type of project.

T.D. Barnes

I don't. I don't doubt it.

Interviewer

Deceptive, you know, like very deceptive. And. And using. Using technology to project fake things in the sky. Like a Jesus type thing that would. That would make sounds and stuff.

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T.D. Barnes

We made over supposedly 600 attempts to assassinate Fidel Cassidy. Yeah, I mean he was on our target list.

Interviewer

The resilient sob.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, yeah, we had the acoustic cat. You probably heard that story. Oh, see, I was won't spy on the Cubans, so they rigged his cat with. They put an antenna on his tail and imprinted a receiver and trained him where he would go close to some guys talking in the park and over monster their conversations. They worked on this cat and got him all ready, turned him loose, attached the cab, run over him, killed him. That's one of our famous. That's in our. Our little list of skeletons that. That's why a story to widen them.

Interviewer

Well, you know, I'm familiar with our mutual friend Annie Jacobson. Did a whole book on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Darpa.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

Who worked on spy birds. Like birds that are. That are remote controlled, that are designed to spy and listen to stuff.

T.D. Barnes

Oh, well, I was there. If it's one. In 1958, we did a Project Alkaline. It was actually a bird. It was powered by a chainsaw motor. Whoa. And it could. It could fly a thousand miles, taking photographs and uploading them to a U2 plane or a satellite chainsaw motor. Chainsaw motor. It looked just like a bird. Project Alkaline. Look it up. It's.

Interviewer

That's bonkers. Project Alkaline.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, that's. That's 1968.

Interviewer

Yeah. So what drives me crazy, what keeps me up at night, is reading that kind of stuff and imagining what they're doing in 2026.

T.D. Barnes

You know, you can only imagine because we didn't have computers then, Right?

Interviewer

Exactly.

T.D. Barnes

Because, you know, I went through a transition while I was at NASA. We started transitioning from electron tubes to transistors and converting to the metric system. Everything was changing at the time. We just getting into. Well, Chuck Ger had been not long since he broke the sound barrier. We were getting into Mach 3 flight, which is a totally new ballgame. We had to invent everything. The plane get up to 2,200 degrees. The fuel tank get up to 600 degrees. Windshield, 600. So everything had to be invented. And we used titanium for the first time. Right. And another interesting thing about that titanium was processed there where I live now in Henderson, Nevada. And pretty inferior. We had a lot of problems with it. So we ended up getting our titanium to build the Blackbirds out of Russia through a third party. So we built the spy planes to spy on Russia using Russian titanium.

Interviewer

That's hilarious.

Sponsor Voice 3

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Interviewer

Okay, so back to Area 51. So how did you actually get. What was the process like when. When they actually recruited you, did they have to interview you? Who was there? Any specific? Like, what were the specifics about you, why they picked you?

T.D. Barnes

Okay. All of NASA, they had what they called Seven Sisters. That was six Air Defense radar sites in the region and my site only 45 miles away. Every time the flew a plane out of. Out of Area 51, of course, the top secret, the FAA would notify the airport, regional airports. There's going to be something flying today. Don't say anything. Air Defense Command notified the Seven Sisters. We're going to have something flying today. Monitor, but don't say anything. Because when, you know, we're flying at Mach 3, which 2,200 miles an hour, so we could cover most of The United States in two or three hours. So NORAD controlled our flights. There's no flight plan or anything. NORAD tracked over and then notified the sector that we'd fly into. We got a top secret plane flying into your sector monitor. Don't say anything. And we might even fly all the way to Florida and back and just NORAD is notifying everybody, you know, keep it quiet or this top secret.

Interviewer

How high, how, what's the altitude?

T.D. Barnes

17 miles. 90,080. Our cruise, mostly we cruise above 80,000. We could go to, we could go to 90.

Interviewer

And what, what altitude do commercial planes fly at?

T.D. Barnes

Typically about 35 to 4. 35, 40. 35 to 40. So even when we start flying to U2, it was 13 miles up. Right. And at that time nothing flew above 35,000. So when we started ordering components for the U2 and A12 with ordering out temperature for 100,000ft, of course the vendors said what in the world you need that for? You know, that sort of thing.

Interviewer

So how many of you were brought out to Area 51 and what year was that?

T.D. Barnes

Okay, I went out and actually in 68. 58, 68, 68 off the NASA the reason that brought me out, okay, back to Seven Sisters. You know, we were tracking it as they were developing the A12 through Mach 1, Mach 2, Mach 3. Lockheed was doing this. They need to certify the speed of my radar site was the only one been tracking the S15. We had a velocity recorder. Most radar sites don't have this. So they would contact me. I had a clearance. Most of you guys didn't. On NASA, you know, he didn't need clearance. I still had my clearance and said notify me, we need you to track this plane today. I wasn't really the radar operator. I was above that. But anyway I would go in and operate it because I had a clearance. Shut the door. No one came in.

Interviewer

I wouldn't even let a radar operator in there.

T.D. Barnes

No, no.

Interviewer

And just because nobody knew about that

T.D. Barnes

plane, no one knew. And we, we weren't told always that we're going to have something flying today. And they didn't tell words. Of course we knew, you know, 45 miles away. We were tracking that thing all the time. Skin track. We could skin track it for a few miles but we didn't have the beacon code so we couldn't track it in longer distance. But we always watching for it on our spare time because before the A12 would take off on a sortie, the chase planes F101s would take off first weather flights and ahead of it. So we would be watching for them and we spot them say, oh, that big, that fast dude, Drake off any minute now. We'd be waiting and we'd track him for a few seconds and he'd be

Interviewer

gone, you know, right now. Is it true? We talked about this briefly before we started, but Annie Jacobson said in her book, during the first jet propelled airplanes that were tested off of Groom Lake, they, the CIA pilots would bring monkey masks into their plane. And in case. And the reason she explained this to me is because if they come into visual distance with a commercial airplane, they would wear the monkey mask. So the person that saw it wouldn't be able to rationalize it or explain it to anybody when they're at the bar and they think they're crazy.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, actually this was at actually Edwards or. Oh, Edwards or Mor Ek, I think it's called, Before Edwards, before Edwards. And actually it was for even other Air Force planes, pilots because they'd see a plane with no propeller on it. Right. And what the world is that, you

Interviewer

know, Even Air Force pilots.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, even the Air Force. So some guy had found down in, I think it was San Diego or close to Disneyland anyway, he had found a place that sold mushy suits just out of joke. They, it was a joke. But they decided to wear those and they, and they wore them and guys to see them and they go back, I just saw a monkey flying a plane with no propeller and they'd laugh him out of the place, you know,

Interviewer

so they just did this for fun. This wasn't like part of the.

T.D. Barnes

No, it was just for fun.

Interviewer

This wasn't protocol.

T.D. Barnes

No, it wasn't proto.

Interviewer

Oh, interesting.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. It was just someone clowning around and he had a cigar. The first one. He had a cigar. Monkey smoking cigar. Of course that's folklore now down in NASA and Edwards, you know, everybody knows about it. That was a big joke back then.

Interviewer

So when you, when you were at Area 51, how much time did you spend there total?

T.D. Barnes

I was there about actually area 51 about five years.

Interviewer

About five years starting in 60, 68.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, yeah, they brought me out there. The reason it brought me out there is before they retired the A12, you know, that was our first stealth plane. We made it a stealth plane. And they need to get some radar cross session at Mach 3. And they didn't have any operators that was qualified nor radar out there at the time. So they actually brought one of my Nike radar out of Fort Bliss, Texas that I had much Cool. On and used out at White Sands, whatever. Out to Area 51. And they brought me out right at the tail end of oxcart to get Mach 3 radar cross section track of the A12 because they were becoming so fast that if you didn't pick it up on the horizon at 2200 mile an hour, radar could never catch it. You know, you couldn't physically move your radar. Whoa. So you had to have someone that qualifies for high speed tracking. And they brought me out especially for that. And then I stayed on for these for the stealth and the. And by that time we were moving into other stealth projects. And CIA was really, really big on stealth. They fathered stealth. It wasn't anyone else. And. But then we were getting our hands on so big equipment. The MIGs and radar. Six day war. Israel capturing. All this Russian equipment during the Second Day War. And as we were developing stealth, we needed to know what these Russians would be seeing. So we got our hands on their radar and used it at Area 51 to track whatever we were tracking to see how effective we were.

Interviewer

That's incredible.

T.D. Barnes

And we reverse engineered the talking radar that was in back to the Cuban flight. We determined. Yes. That radar would be able to pick up the Blackbirds in time for the Russians to launch their missiles. They would be able to shoot us down. So we'd never flew another flight over Russia. We learned that radar could do that.

Interviewer

That's incredible.

T.D. Barnes

So that's what that mission determined was. Yes. It would get us before that. Before time they could see us. They didn't have time to even arm the missile or launch them. We were gone.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And they would shoot missiles at us or Vietnam and they would actually catch up occasionally with the plane. And they had a proximity fuse on them. And they detonate. And we outrun the explosion. It'd be behind us and it couldn't

Interviewer

catch us in the Blackbirds.

T.D. Barnes

No Blackbird was ever hit. We had one Blackbird hit by missile. That was Dennis Sullivan, CIA pilot. And he didn't even know he'd been hit. They landed at Kadena.

Interviewer

Whoa.

T.D. Barnes

And they found a piece of metal in his wing that lodged in the wing.

Interviewer

A little piece of shrapnel.

T.D. Barnes

The piece of shrapnel.

Interviewer

Wow.

T.D. Barnes

That's the closest we ever came. Get shot down.

Interviewer

That's bonkers.

T.D. Barnes

We outrun them. You know, that was the thing.

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Interviewer

What other kind of crazy stuff did you test there or did you met or did you do radar testing with.

T.D. Barnes

We did a lot of proof of concept. You know, we. We actually became a laboratory when the, you know, CIA was there for 20 years when they. We had every radar known to man just about. And the people all kind of qualifications. All of us had different qualifications that they recruited for out there. And the. So we stopped flying planes. When the A12 moved out in June of 1968, we retired the Blackbirds and SR71 took over. But the Air Force did at Beale Air Force Base. They were never air 51 anyway. We were still there, but we had all this equipment, what we were doing. You know, we're still doing the Soviet MIGs. We're getting different Soviet equipment in there. We'd tear it down, see how they built it, put it back together and then flying it. And during have donut, which was May 21st. Give you a little background on that. Yeah, we went out of the Korean War shooting guns. In the Vietnam War shooting missiles and sending planes over there with no guns, F4s, whatever. And the 9:1 kill ratio was 9 to 1 against us. They were whacking us out of the sky in Vietnam. In Vietnam. And the Russians had came out with this new MiG 21 mystery plane. And we thought it was that plane and was desperately trying to get our hands on one. And the Iraqi defected with a brand new MiG21 to Israel, and then Israel loaned it to us. And that was have donuts. And so the Air Force brought in the Navy did. First they brought in, flew against it everything they had in their arsenal. On the first try. We got 100% kill against the Navy. Everything they had with the MiG, with the MiG.

Interviewer

Whoa.

T.D. Barnes

The Air Force came in, same thing, 100% kill. Within two months. Yeah, that's it. Within two months. The Navy realized what the problem was. It wasn't the plane. Our pilots didn't know how to fight against it. We were sending our pilots into Vietnam with no training against the MIGs. And we realized it, take the MIGs, the pilots, 10 missions in Vietnam before they learn enough that they might survive the war. So we decided, let's give them those 10 missions in the United States, in Nevada. So the Navy within two months or started Top gun school. And we got our hands on some eggs. And then the Air Force started Exercise Red Flag, and we started training our pilots before we sent them to Vietnam. Once we did that, we totally turned the kill ratio around since then. And then we started getting the squadron of MIGs at Tonopah Test range here in Nevada just offside of, just off of Area 51, right. And we'd fly them against our pilots out at Nellis Gurney range, give them experience against the MIGs. Our pilots flying the MIGs actually flew. We flew them like Russians. These Russian technique. We sent our pilots to different countries that was flying. The Soviet marriage had been trained by the Soviets, and they flew with these guys. Like Somoia was one place we went. So we learned the Russian techniques once they came back. That's how we flew. They flew the Russian national anthem before we left, before they took off. So they're thinking, you're Russian today, you're Russian.

Interviewer

Whoa.

T.D. Barnes

And they flew like Russians to give our guys the really shame experience out on the range of real Russian techniques. And once we started that, that was the Red Eagles, we called them. And once we did the Red Eagles, we've lost only one plane in surface to air, air to air combat since Vietnam, and that was during Desert Storm. We had a big fox bat 25 mark, mig 25 foxbat, shooting down one of our F18s. But we, we quit losing play.

Interviewer

So it was not the equipment. It was the. It was the.

T.D. Barnes

The flyers, the training.

Interviewer

The training. Did you guys ever recruit any Russians that were trained to fly this. These things or any Russian pilots. Do you guys ever get those? No.

T.D. Barnes

No, we. We used to. Israeli.

Interviewer

Israeli, yeah, Israel. So the Israelis knew how. They were defectors.

T.D. Barnes

They're the first one to get their hands on the planes and equipment and then to give it to us. And I got to tell you a funny story though.

Interviewer

Please.

T.D. Barnes

The Mig 21 trophy. Tore it down. See how they built it, put it back together and we flew it. You know, we had to have it back to Israel in 30 days for some kind of celebration or whatever. But we wanted to evaluate the engine on it first. And we had it tied down. And out of every 51, you know, was right off the atomic bomb testing range. So we were on our security badges. We wore dose amateurs and film badges and everything for radiation. And we're getting ready to test this plane. And someone said, you know, we better gather up the film badges. Someone get one sucked into the engine.

Interviewer

Film badges?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, our security badges with all the film stuff on it.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

You know, all kind of check on them. We gather them all, about 25 of them. And always like to say we gave them. Anyway, we shrink. Crank that engine up and it's just a screaming. That old plane sitting there tugging. And he gets right in front of. Golly. He sucked every one of our badges through the engine. Every one of them. And we had to have that thing back to Israel. And fortunately, some of the. Right. Pat. Pat Whitney guys. Inchy guys based out of Florida here.

Interviewer

Wright Patterson.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. No, no. Pratt Whitney. Pratt Whitney.

Interviewer

Pratt Whitney, yeah.

T.D. Barnes

They built the engines for the. All the Blackbirds.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

And the Navy, and they were stationed here in Florida. Anyway, some of their guys were still out of the area from the Blackbirds. And they tore the plane down and buffed out all the dings and stuff. No, get it flying where they would get it back to Israel. Still flying.

Interviewer

That's insane.

T.D. Barnes

That's one where we call them OS moments.

Interviewer

Wow.

T.D. Barnes

We had a lot of those.

Interviewer

So obviously this is the late 60s, early 70s, when you guys are doing this. And this is. Was the. Was the lure of Area 51 in the air yet after Roswell happened and. And the whole.

T.D. Barnes

Absolutely not. No one knew about it.

Interviewer

So nobody knew what Area 51 was.

T.D. Barnes

And it was associated with UFOs. Everyone knew it was out there. No secret. They just didn't know who was out there. Supposedly we were flying the U2 to start with, and it had NASA stickers on it, decals. It was the NASA High Altitude Research Project. We were Next door to atomic bomb testing. Their base camp supplied all of our logistics. Or film badges. We use the same film badges they use on the top of bomb range. Or the security badges. I'm sorry.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And. And haircuts, banking, anything like that. We lived out there all week.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Flew out on Monday morning, came on Friday night.

Interviewer

Did you guys fly out on those JANET flights?

T.D. Barnes

No, that was before janet.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

That was for the janet. I was special. I got to fly out on a Queen Air. And we had it parked right off of McCarran International.

Interviewer

It was like a turbo prop or something.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. And it was sitting in a little block building at the end of the Runway of McCarran Air Force International. We had a gate. We come in off the street. We didn't even go into, onto the airport. We go through that gate, open, go into the building, open the doors, push our plane out, hop in, and take off without a word.

Interviewer

Wow.

T.D. Barnes

But most of our guys flew out of Nellis Air Force Base, and they were in the most classified area of the base. The F111 was the thing back then as a bomber.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

And. And they. We flew out of that area. And it was funny, you know, we all wore civilian clothes. We carry briefcases in those days. We cared for. Our pocket is full of pins and slide rules and that kind of stuff. And go on the base. And of course, we didn't exist as far as. I mean, no one saw us, you know.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

We'd go on the base, and we'd go into the. In their hangar there, they had a Coke machine, and we might go in there, get it, grab a Coke or something, be some airmen in there. And we'd walk in, they'd almost knock the door down and get out. I don't know what they'd been told about us, but they've been, because we did not exist anywhere.

Interviewer

Wow. Were there any areas there, like, any big hangars or buildings that you never got to go into or look at or.

T.D. Barnes

I was able to basically later on know originally when it was just the arts cart guys, the A12 guys, they go all over the place. But once we moved in and started bringing in the MIGs, then they couldn't even come into my building. And one place we couldn't go into was the CIA's communications building. They had a community. There were certain areas you didn't go into, but basically we had the run of it till later. And then later, other projects started coming in. And I say this was. I don't know if I got into this now we started doing prototypes when we start flying. I think I stopped before I got into that. We started doing prototypes, Lockheed, Boeing, different Northrop competing for a contract with the Navy or the Air Force or whomever, and they'd build their prototype up in their region and fly it on their test ranges, which was a reason for a lot of UFO sightings in Seattle and in California with them testing a new type of plane that no one had ever seen before.

Interviewer

On private test ranges.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, on the company's test ranges.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Once it got ready to present it to whoever the customer was, they'd bring it to Area 51. Well, CIA, we still had our special projects team there and all of our equipment. And we at the time had become a laboratory. We had data processing systems and that sort of thing, which was unique in those days. And. And what it basically was, we'd had two customers, whoever's going to buy the plane or platform or where they called it, and the vendor, and we were there in the middle, says, show us what you got. And we had the men and equipment to put it through all the paces and see if it could do what the. What north of whoever.

Interviewer

You were like the inspectors.

T.D. Barnes

We were the inspectors. We proved whether it worked or not. Wow. And that's still one of the biggest functions out there. You know, we. We quit flying planes with the A12.

Interviewer

So who were like, the biggest contractors that were out there? Because basically Area 51 is all run by contrast. I think EGG is one of the biggest ones. Right.

T.D. Barnes

EGG had the special projects. And. And we were embedded in ECG Special projects.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

The CIA people were. And the Lockheed at that time was the prime contractor. It was building the planes at the time. But you had Magnavox, you had Sylvania. All your TV companies were into electronics at that time. You'd have Texas Instruments building all these components. And so you had people coming out to Area 51 from the contractors, and they had to. Of course, they were cleared to be out there. And, you know, it might be out there one day or a week. They didn't stay out there.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Just. And the people like that could not live in state of Nevada. The only one that could live in Nevada was the CIA people and support, like cooks and, you know, that sort of thing. And everyone else had to commute out of state because at that time, when they did the YouTube, there wasn't but 263,000 people in the whole state. Wow. And they didn't want a bunch of strangers showing up. And who's that so everybody commuted out of California, out of Burbank and March Air Force Base. And they commute up on Monday morning, go home on Friday night. But we were able to live in Vegas because we were different.

Interviewer

You had a different level clearance.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. And we did not interact with each other. The pilots and stuff couldn't come into my building.

Interviewer

Oh, really?

T.D. Barnes

Oh, they couldn't.

Interviewer

They kept it very stove piped.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. They didn't have a need to know. Even within. Within my group, as we grew and got more projects, you know, customers, there's 23 of us, and we worked together and we played together. We all had cruisers on Lake Mead on weekends. Our families played together and we worked.

Interviewer

You guys all stayed in your own little bubble. We didn't reach out.

T.D. Barnes

We didn't trust anyone else, you know, that sensitive and. But we'd get up to work, maybe we'd have different customers, would be different projects. And you didn't ask your buddy there, hey, who are you doing that for? How that work? Or what is it? You'd help him. He'd say, hey, Joe, I need a hand. And you go give him a hand. But you didn't ask any questions.

Sponsor Voice 3

Right.

T.D. Barnes

And I got to think about this while back, you know, I know these guys for all these years. None of us knew each other's background even then. We never asked.

Interviewer

Never asked.

T.D. Barnes

You never asked. And I got to think about it, you know, I think I'm the only one still living, have her special project. Really. But very few of them, I could tell you what they did before they came to Area 51, and they didn't know what I did.

Interviewer

Fascinating. I always wondered what it was like to be able to do stuff like that, that's super compartmentalized and live with your significant other, your spouse, and. And not have to tell them anything.

T.D. Barnes

You're going back to recruitment. Mine was different because I'd been involved in stages.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

So I was cleared and they knew me, so that wasn't a big deal.

Interviewer

You're already in the system, in the system.

T.D. Barnes

But like your pilots, they. When they seeking pilots for the CIA, they went to the Air Force that went to top pilots. So they go through their pilots and they'd send them back to Langley and they might meet in some motel or rest or something, and they had no idea who was interviewing them. And they'd give them tests. They go through multiple tests and stuff and then progress and send them back. Then they'd bring. If they pass, they'd bring them back again. And these guys, they thought that both of them thought they had been questions to become astronauts. They had no idea. Wow. And so when they finally accepted Guy and we had 11 of them that we accepted, only one out of four qualified met our qualifications. Even though they were the Air Force's top people. And the way they intelligized, I said, okay, we want to offer you a job. They said, what is it? I can't tell you. Where is it? Well, I'm going to tell you. It's west Mississippi. And you won't be able to take your family Las Vegas without your family. No way, Jose, you know. And that stopped pretty soon because the wives just when they found out their husband. No way. But anyway. But the guys did not know what they're going to be flying until they arrived out at Area 51. They opened up the hangar doors. Here's what you're going to be flying. And we had one guide with the A12 in particular. Turn around. I'm not going to fly this thing. And he went back. He quit. Yeah. And went back in there. What we did is how we got them. They had the sheep dip out of. We called sheep dipping out of the Air Force into the CIA. But then what they did is resigned their commission. They went on contract with the CIA. Most of those were contracted. A lot of people don't realize that about 40 to 60% of your intelligence agencies are military. And they. They convert over to civilian status while at the agency.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

And then you go back in uniform. That's the same with our guys.

Interviewer

Yep.

T.D. Barnes

And so they shipped that when they became civilians. The reason for that, when we start flying the U2 and A12 flying over enemy territory, if they got shot down using uniforms. Act of war. So it had to be civilians. So Area 51 was a civilian facility. It was not military at all. We had Air Force guys there because CIA didn't know how to run an air base. And that's what it was. We call it facility, but it was an air base. So we brought in the Air Force squadron. They worked for the CIA. They were not allowed to report up to chain of command. I don't care. General May. No one could ask them what they're doing or where they're working. They reported only to Air Force officer that was attached to Dick Bitso FC headquarters. Right. Him only Jack Edford.

Interviewer

They were not allowed to answer to anybody else, no matter how to the Joint Chiefs.

T.D. Barnes

Nobody. Nobody. No one could touch them.

Interviewer

And how much did the President know about this stuff, do you think?

T.D. Barnes

Very little. And for good Reason possible. That possible that I believe.

Interviewer

Yeah, easy for you to say.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, easy you say. I've had a majority broke in four places. I had a lot of hard time talking.

Interviewer

Wow. So the President doesn't know much.

T.D. Barnes

No. And he doesn't want to know much.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Only what he needs. The Congress doesn't need to know. I tell you how. Let's talk about secrecy a little bit. The when Truman, Harry Truman became President Roosevelt died. He did not know we had the atomic bomb.

Interviewer

Wow.

T.D. Barnes

Only a few people in Congress ever knew we had the U2 plane. Even though we've been flying in that since 1956.

Sponsor Voice 3

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Until Jerry Powers crash got shot down in 1960. That's when it exposed the program. Of course the Russian U added right.

Interviewer

But foreign intelligence knew more than the President knew.

T.D. Barnes

That's crazy. But, but we used civilian pilots and, and we never called Area 51 Air Base. It was a facility our. Everyone used pseudo names. You didn't use your real name? Now my group used codename. My codename was Thunder.

Interviewer

Thunder.

T.D. Barnes

But. But the pilots all had pseudo names that they actually use on all their paperwork, everything. And the CIA got these names off of gravestones in Europe. So the palace never used their real names.

Interviewer

Why gravestones in Europe?

T.D. Barnes

I don't know. It's just. I don't know. But that's just where. That's where you got them.

Interviewer

That's awfully creative.

T.D. Barnes

There's a lot of things that I won't say strange but unique. Like when they hired security people for out there. The CIA, they went to Pennsylvania and hired 20, hired 30 women. 26 of them came out of one little coal mining town in Pennsylvania. Now can you imagine those guys? I mean they're coal miners, right? And now the security guards. Las Vegas was run by the mob back then, right. These guys hung out in Stardust Casino. At one end of the bar would be our security people. At the other end was the mobile. Just fun. Of course in general knowledge back then, you know, later on. Right. You learned all this, you know.

Interviewer

Right. That's wild man. That's like the Twilight Zone.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, but the, but anyway back to recruiting the pilots. We had one in particular. He offered him the job. He said well I need to check with my wife. Okay, go check with your wife. He came back, they weren't there. If he had to check with his wife to accept the job. Top secret job, they didn't want him. Interesting.

Interviewer

Very interesting.

T.D. Barnes

And a lot of your, your listeners are, are familiar with Marty Knutson. He flew the U2 plane and later became head of NASA at Dryden and the but martyr news and they brought him out to for the U2 plane. He wouldn't even get off the bus. He said I'm not gonna fly this thing. He ended up flying it. But he. He did.

Interviewer

He ended up doing it.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

Pull up a photo of the U2 plane.

T.D. Barnes

It's bonkers. Not gonna fly that thing.

Interviewer

Yeah. So what, what was the year they discontinued the U2?

T.D. Barnes

It's still flying.

Sponsor Voice 2

It's still flying.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. No way it's still flying. They built the the A12 to replace it.

Interviewer

And I thought we used more drones now.

T.D. Barnes

Oh, we're using. Well, they're not. I think we're down to just recently. Within the last month I think satellite reduced down to three U2s.

Interviewer

Three U2s.

T.D. Barnes

But we still got them and we still need them. There's certain conditions where you need them. Let's talk about the flights a little bit. U2 flights. There were places when the U2 couldn't fly, so like China. So we organized a squadron of Taiwanese pilots Altadena to fly the U2 head American commander, Colonel Slater, who later became our commander out at Area 51. But when we needed to fly into territory like China, we used Chinese pilots. When we flying over Soviet Union out of Turkey, well, there are times when it got really, really sensitive and the President wouldn't authorize a flight, but we really needed that flight bad. So we had recruited five, actually four. We had five UK guys, former pilots stationed to the CIA in Turkey. So when the President would turn down the CIA flights, they said, what are you using? Brits?

Interviewer

Send some Brits.

T.D. Barnes

We're going to fly it anyway. The President would say, I didn't fly it.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

I didn't fly it, but we flew it anyway.

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Interviewer

Do you remember like the first time you heard the story about flying saucers and Roswell being connected to Area 51?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. That was actually when the air. No one ever talked about UFOs while the CA was there.

Interviewer

Not even jokingly or was it on your mind?

T.D. Barnes

Not UFOs. We were concerned about being seen. You know.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

That was a big concern because we had. We had a no fly zone called Eel Tide that was large enough. No fly zone around Area 51. That our planes could take off and land without anyone ever knowing was a big deal. And that's the reason, like in the latest book I wrote about secret skies, we were able to fly the MiGs there as well. And no one ever knew it. We had a no fly zone that we could do all kind of flying.

Interviewer

Secret skies by TD Barnes and thick.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. Had lots saying that. But. But the. But we flew. What was your question?

Interviewer

Just being aware of the lore of UFOs and flying saucers. Roswell.

T.D. Barnes

We tried to prevent being seen. So we painted the U2 black. It was silver. And every now and then the sun would hit it 13 miles up in the air.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And it flash. And people see it. It was a ufo. So we painted black to hopefully they wouldn't be able to see it. And the weight of the paint. We lost 1500ft of altitude.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Just putting the paint on. Wow. But we were very conscious of not being seen. Not because the UFO thing.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

But only after their force took over in 79 that people learned, realized that, see, I had been out there for over 20 years. No one knew what we'd been doing. And we're not. We're not talking. It's still classified. And that's when their imaginations run wild and they start putting the aliens out there, the flying saucers and that sort of thing. But that's all speculation. But up until then, no one had ever associated anything with Eric.

Interviewer

51 you guys never thought about it, never talked about it, nothing like that?

T.D. Barnes

No, and that's a good point. We still don't. You know the. We flew over almost 18,000 missions with the Blackbirds. No telling how many of the U2s. You know, all these flights we have reunions. Used to 6, 700 of us there. And we'd sit around after hours drinking beer. War story. Not one time have I ever heard a pilot Talk about UFOs.

Interviewer

Really?

T.D. Barnes

Never. It never entered our minds.

Interviewer

That's wild because that was the time, you know, during all the nuclear testing and stuff like that, when that was ramping up was when you hear the most reports of it.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, but that wasn't pilots. We flew all these missions. We had guys in Mir space station and the iss, Gordon Space shuttle people. They never saw any of that. You never heard of someone out having to go out and wash the windshield of a plane to get the nose prints off of it from a plane. From a pilot looking for UFOs. It never entered our minds. We saw stuff. Yeah, but no big deal.

Interviewer

So I'm sure you're familiar of the Bob Lazar story.

T.D. Barnes

Oh yeah.

Interviewer

What did you make of that when

T.D. Barnes

you first heard about it? It's anyone's ever been out see through it. I mean it's really why every aspect of it is there's no way he could have been out there. No one ever went on Area 51 that they wasn't cleared, first of all. And everybody and their name wasn't record. It just didn't happen to get into Area 51. I don't care. Even the President, he had to be vetted. We have colonels and stuff that would need to come out, that really need to come out there. But they would have a very, very hard time getting out, getting clearance to go out there because they didn't have a need to know.

Interviewer

Right. I heard Richard Helms went out there once and had like a big seafood party or something.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, yeah. Of course. Nick Bissell came out there all the time. I worked with Dick Bissel when Helen. His menstruated assistant, I guess you'd call her. She and I remained close friends at first for years and years. That's. Or that. But she was the first woman to ever spend the night at Airfields one.

Interviewer

Oh, wow.

T.D. Barnes

And. But she wrote a lot of the history, declassified history about the projects to. Helen did.

Interviewer

So I think Bob said that he was there in 88 and 89 and he said he was there during December. So he said he was Interviewed in October of 88. And he worked all of December.

T.D. Barnes

Of 80.

Interviewer

Of 88.

T.D. Barnes

I know all the security guards. There's a few. Well, I don't know, maybe one or two left now, but I've known all the years.

Interviewer

And you asked him. Did you ask him?

T.D. Barnes

Oh, yeah, yeah, we talked about it. Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, we talked about what a fake. Because no one came out there that didn't go through security. Don't know what I should tell a relative that worked out there after me. And she was in security and. And she run the med. You had to be on her manifest. I can tell you on the JANET flights, first of all, you got to be on a manifest. Ever get on the plane, other words, you're already approved. And then you got to have the right badges. If you're not on that manifest, you don't get on there. I don't care who you are.

Interviewer

And she said that he was never on a manifest.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, and. And the guards too. I'll give you an example. We had a lot of transit traffic out of Area 51. People never knew that it was there. One night, I was a fellow named Calvin Dawson, and I was working on a radar late in the evening, just after sundown, and C130 landed. And usually they would land and they would come up to security and security come out and check them. And for the off the plane, you know, they had to be their badges checked and all the manifest. Well, this plane, instead of going up for security, circled and went onto the lake bed out behind our radar sites. And we're standing there, what in the world's going on? And security came out there to meet it. And we're watching. All this was very unusual. And pretty soon we saw the guys march right by us in formation. It was Chinese. They had brought a squadron of Chinese out there. They did not know they had the Area 51 they'd never seen. But they stayed there for three months. What we've done, we've trained them to drop sensors out of C130s over China. And they were staying at Area 51 and using our dry leg bed for. For their training.

Interviewer

No way.

T.D. Barnes

And they never knew that at Area 51. That's why that was the black batch. You look them up. Black batch? Black batch, that's declassified.

Interviewer

So I think Bob's story, he says that he was going to a place called site 4. Have you ever heard of that place?

T.D. Barnes

Oh, yeah.

Interviewer

So site 4 is real.

T.D. Barnes

Been there many times. Yeah, we had. We had a microwave. It's another little dry, dry lit bed a little bit south of us.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

But site four was actually another side. We had a side four, but it was north of us. And that's where we had all the Soviet radar. We moved the radar from Slater Lake. We had a little spring right off of Groom Lake and a few trees and shrubs. We planted all of our Soviet radar there. And as we increased, we moved them to site four. That became. And we had an airstrip there as one of our remote sites. But that was Soviet radar was there.

Interviewer

Okay, so there was two ciphers.

T.D. Barnes

Well, Papua was never cipher. Oh, he Bob the star story is false.

Interviewer

So there's no underground base hidden in a mountain.

T.D. Barnes

Absolutely nothing. That is just a bare mountain with a microwave tower on top of little dry lake bed. Yeah, yeah. History funny from day, day one because

Interviewer

you know, even Annie talks about some of like the super secret tunnel stuff that was going on.

T.D. Barnes

There wasn't any.

Interviewer

There was no tunnel like the tunnel.

T.D. Barnes

Absolutely none. Annie had a lot of problems in her book.

Interviewer

Did she really?

T.D. Barnes

Put it this way. She became Persona non grata with anyone that ever worked at Eric Fitch 1.

Interviewer

Did she really?

T.D. Barnes

Absolutely. Wow. All the little, little midgets and stuff.

Interviewer

Well, I. I would assume. Okay, so. So if you are her and you're kicking all these hornets nests that are close to the top, most top secret things in America and talking to all these retired generals and Air Force people and CIA people after she publishes that book, I would imagine they would make her Persona non grata. Like they. Because they wouldn't be happy about some of that information that came out.

T.D. Barnes

Actually, there's nothing declassified in her book. Mostly just unreal.

Interviewer

There's nothing declassified.

T.D. Barnes

No, I mean everything declassified.

Interviewer

Everything is declassified. Right, right, right, right.

T.D. Barnes

But she said my living room base commander sitting there, she interviewed him. All the people, most of the people that, that worked out there, President of the organization. She did most of her interviews in my living room. And we gave her access to the top people. I mean the. Every story. Yeah, we brought her back. I brought her back to Langley and took her through CIA headquarters. We gave her access to everything. And then what she did is mixed the atomic bomb range with Area 51. All that stories about atomic bombs and stuff. That's D.O.E. that was AEC back then. We were DOD MCI. Two different ballgames.

Interviewer

So D.O.E. was not involved in Area 51 at all.

T.D. Barnes

DOD was.

Interviewer

But what about D. What about the Department of Energy?

T.D. Barnes

No, no, absolutely none. Never allowed on the place. And. And he started Interviewing all these guys that worked for the atomic bomb out on the atomic bomb site.

Sponsor Voice 3

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Associating it with Area 51. But apples and oranges had nothing to do with.

Interviewer

Interesting.

T.D. Barnes

Those guys were Never at Area 51.

Interviewer

That's gotta be a very hard job to do as a journalist, is to try to unravel the secrets of the American empire.

T.D. Barnes

Not really. She was looking for what she put in it. Well, I'll give you an example. We had. He was, I think 90 year old engineer out at the atomic bomb range. She kept interviewing him and said, give me something juicy, give me something juicy. And he made up a story and she put her book and, and you. And you know, Bill, there was ABC Nightline,

Interviewer

her interview with ABC Nightline. Who's in?

T.D. Barnes

Bill Li.

Interviewer

I'm not familiar now.

T.D. Barnes

Anyway, he, he was ABC Nightline in New York. He was in my living room and Annie Jacobs was there. He was asking a question about that. Why did you put all this in your book? And she said, I'm a journalist. And he told, said it to me, so I'm allowed to say it, I'm allowed to use it.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

And he told her. So he told her what he, he. That's what she told ABC Nightline is because I'm a journalist, because he said it, I could use it. It didn't have to be true.

Interviewer

Interesting.

T.D. Barnes

But a big part of that when she started mentioning up the Atomic Energy Commission stuff because she actually was, I shouldn't say too much here, but she was looking for dirt.

Interviewer

Did you. What did you think about it?

T.D. Barnes

So their book, you gotta give her credit, she's number four on the bestseller list because that's the kind of stuff that sells well.

Interviewer

What did you think about her story of the Roswell crash when she says that she spoke to an EG&G engineer named Alfred O'. Donnell. He was pseudonymous in the book and she recently released his.

T.D. Barnes

That's what I'm talking about.

Interviewer

That's who you're talking about.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, and I know him well. He told me later. He, he said she just kept pressing me for something juicy and I finally just told her a wild story and she used it.

Interviewer

Really?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

He's still alive?

T.D. Barnes

No. Yeah, I need to hold on.

Interviewer

Well, so his story was that he told her was that the crash at Roswell that they found, the alien bodies were basically children that had had surgery done to them to make them look, look more like aliens. And it was the Mangala Nazi, the Mangala dude who did it. And she asked the CG Engineer. Why wouldn't the US Government let this out? Because this would make the Soviet Union. Un. Soviet Union look terrible. And his answer to her was because we were doing the same things he.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, he told her the same that we were doing at Area 51. That's what got us mad at her. And she accused us. And I. I. Well, I got right in her face. I said, you're accusing me and my relative of this very thing. I said, you know better. And she said, well, he told me that. Because he said, I can use it.

Interviewer

Well, why would he tell her that if he knows she's writing a joke?

T.D. Barnes

Because she kept bugging him. He told me. He said, she just kept bugging me. Give me something. Give me something juicy. So he gave her something juicy. He was never airy. Fitz1. He was atomic Energy guy.

Interviewer

That seems like a crazy thing to tell someone writing a book, you know, why would you.

T.D. Barnes

You know.

Interviewer

You know, she. If she believes you, I mean, I'm sure he could tell that he believed her. Like, was there a laughing afterwards?

T.D. Barnes

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. But because he said it

Interviewer

very odd,

T.D. Barnes

and that's what really got us really, really, really angry. The accused us of doing that sort of thing. I mean, I was furthest thing away from what we were doing, you know,

Interviewer

and badge on his jacket.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, of course I was. Anytime I dispute any of this, I'm one of those paid guys, you know?

Interviewer

Yeah, that's everybody nowadays.

T.D. Barnes

Oh, yeah.

Interviewer

Anyone who says something you disagree with online, they're automatically paid for.

T.D. Barnes

Oh, yeah.

Interviewer

By a foreign intelligence agency.

T.D. Barnes

But. But Raul's, you know, that was nothing but balloons. Nothing there.

Interviewer

You think Roswell was balloons?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

What do you think about the things that the pilots are reporting now, or they had been reporting since 2014? I believe it was when the thing came out with Ryan Graves and Commander Fravor, who were seeing these things, these tic Tac things. I think Ryan Graves specifically described an object that was a cube with a sphere inside of a sphere.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, my.

Interviewer

And this was right after they upgraded the radar in their jets.

T.D. Barnes

Exactly. That particular radar is a new radar. And supposedly it was even having problems seeing flocks of birds as a bogey. So. So in my opinion, they were doing the same thing that we did during Project Palladium. They were spoofing that radar to see what its weak points were, whoever they is, you know, because that's what we do. Every new system comes out, you evaluate it to see if anyone can spoof it, and that's. So either we were testing a new spoofing system called, you know, atomic warfare type stuff. We were either doing that or we were testing that radar system because you got to keep in mind that no other radars had that problem. It's just Princeton and maybe, maybe one other in that test. But it's not universal. And, and you got to remember the source of this. It started in 2004. They did this filming and when they got through, they put the film in a locker. In 2007, Harry Reid. Now Harry Reid. Very well. He's from Searchlight.

Interviewer

For people out there, who is Harry Reid?

T.D. Barnes

He was sinister senator.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

And he stayed forever. His land, my land and his land joined his. Searchlight had a business down there. I knew him for years. And Searchlight would call him Pinky. He's a politician. Harry Reid always believed that we had alien spacecraft out of Area 51. When he became a senator, he bugged us to death wanting to come out and see it. And we got nothing. Here he is a big believer in UFOs. In 2000 anyway, he got $22 million passed through a defense bill.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

Snuck it in for UFO study. Opened up that little office in Washington D.C. to study UFOs or UAPs. Gave part of the buddy to Ralph Bigelow in Las Vegas.

Interviewer

Right, right.

T.D. Barnes

Ralph Bigelow bought the Skin Walker Ranch where all the supposed cattle mutilations are going on, all that kind of stuff except it for a while. And last I heard, he's studying life at your death.

Interviewer

Yes.

T.D. Barnes

Robert Bigelow.

Interviewer

Robert Bigelow is, yeah.

T.D. Barnes

So that's where $22 million went, or part of it. And it was, it was not approved through the standard or anything. It was just slipped into the bill.

Interviewer

Interesting.

T.D. Barnes

But Harry Reid was a big believer in UFOs and for always. And he, I think he's behind all this UAP stuff that's going on today. But going back to your Tic Tac, I really think that that was because they're seeing all shapes and stuff. That has to be electronics.

Interviewer

You think so?

T.D. Barnes

Oh, yeah. Our capability now is, you know, I don't know firsthand, but we can generate, make the enemies see a whole battalion of tanks or ships out on the ocean.

Interviewer

Like spoofing capabilities.

T.D. Barnes

Spoofing capabilities. We went into Venezuela, took us what, 48, 48 minutes. We didn't even know was there. We went into Iran. They didn't know we was there until the bomb dropped. We got capabilities you can't even imagine. Now look at what we're doing without Computers. We use slide rules now. We've got AI and got computers. It's just unbelievable. But what I think is, with the Tic Tac thing.

Interviewer

Yep.

T.D. Barnes

Is that. It is. They were either testnet radar, because you can't imagine all the different shapes and stuff they're seeing. You know, they're just seeing all kind of shapes and stuff. Well, that could be testing the capability that radar. What's this sensitivity to this or that or whatever.

Interviewer

There was a. An article that came out in the war zone, and I think Jeremy Riss is the one who told me about this. And there was a. A patent for some sort of radar spoofing thing or some sort of balloon that looked exactly like what Ryan Graves described. With this. With the sphere with the cube inside of it touching all the four corners.

T.D. Barnes

Yep. You know, they got Nephis now, I think they call it as a spoofing technique.

Sponsor Voice 2

Nemesis.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. And right there.

Interviewer

Yeah, this is it. This is from the war zone.

T.D. Barnes

But, but, but like I say, with palladium, we released all these different shapes and sizes, and we had the water disturbance just like to describe in the Tic Tac. We had the submarine.

Interviewer

It deployed out of a submarine.

T.D. Barnes

It deployed out of a submarine with palladium. One of the F15 pilots got on radio and he said, I see the target.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Well, we thought he'd seen the submarine. We don't know what he saw.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

But we dove the submarine. Emergency. Dove that submarine. Thinking he's seen it. You.

Interviewer

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

T.D. Barnes

So we call it disturbance. So they're seeing the same thing today. They're seeing disturbances in the water, all kind of shapes and stuff.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And even back then with the spoof radar and. And they're still there today.

Interviewer

It's just like. I get that. I agree. It makes so much sense that if they had just upgraded their radars, that we would be trying to test some sort of secret technology against our own. Our own flyers, our own pilots. Right. Our own navy, to see how capable it is, to see what they think about it, to see how the. The radar track can track it. But to me, like, the fact, the way they all describe those Tic Tacs moving from like point A to point B in an instant. It sounds like it's a laser pointer. The way it moves so fast.

T.D. Barnes

Is that electronic it to be? You know, I don't think it's physical.

Interviewer

You don't think it's physical?

T.D. Barnes

I don't think it's physical.

Interviewer

You think it's some sort of a hologram or something.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. Let me talk about knowledge of what's going on when like, like with the U2 and the A12 pilots, we never ever told them what their mission was. Ever. All we they do, at some point they just flip a switch, turn here, turn there. They never knew what their mission was.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Those guys, if they're doing a spoofing test, they weren't told they were going to be tested. They'd be expecting it, I wouldn't imagine. Right. They'd be expecting it.

Interviewer

Sure.

T.D. Barnes

Those pilots wouldn't be told. No one would know until. Except a few people that needed to know. But they wouldn't tell the pilots or the people on the radar. They won't. They won't. Surprise. They want it to be authentic. Right?

Interviewer

No. Yeah, that makes, that makes total sense. So if that thing was a. A non physical thing, like a projection of some sort, how would it just make a disturbance in the water?

T.D. Barnes

That could be a submarine.

Interviewer

It could be. Okay, so you think a submarine could be below it, maybe projecting it? Interesting.

T.D. Barnes

Could we always use submarines? That's how we got put them out in the ocean.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

We did that with palladium. So that would account for your submarine, your disturbances in the water, how you got them in the air. I don't know whether they're using physical flames now or electronics because it just well be everything is electronic now.

Interviewer

What about like plasma ball stuff? Is there any, is there anything that you're aware of like using plasma or

T.D. Barnes

anything like that now we tried using plasma as the stealth technique even on the A12s. Another story that was project wasn't Melody. Anyway, we had a project and we used an arc welder to provide the electricity for this thing. We damn near blew the barn doors off the hangar. It exploded, that's the end of that. But we were, we were experimenting with plastic plasma. We were experiment guns, everything for stealth back in the early days.

Interviewer

Wow. Yeah, there's. I mean there's so many well documented stories from folks during the 50s that were working on physicists that were working on anti gravity. You have Ed Witten, who is doing this, a lot of people in North Carolina who were very involved, very actively working on anti gravity stuff. Townsend, Brown, all these people, this electrogravitics type stuff, anti gravity. And then all of a sudden it all went black. And people speculate pretty unanimously who are into this stuff, that this was grabbed by the private sector or intelligence and it went black to be studied, not in the public. So have you ever witnessed or heard of anything like that being tested or tinkered with.

T.D. Barnes

I've never seen it, but I heard that Northrop had developed that they had a floating coffee table. I don't know if this is true or not. This is several years ago, but you know, of course that kind of stuff was going on and the, and now, you know, I don't know a lot about this either. But they, you know, radar is kind of obsolete now. You use acoustics like the down pilots in Iran. Iran.

Interviewer

The heart, the murmur, Ghost murmur.

T.D. Barnes

They were trying to put these wind turbines in the, on the Nevada test site, generate energy and they got disapproved because the noise would interfere with what was going on in Area 51.

Interviewer

Oh, wow.

T.D. Barnes

No telling.

Interviewer

Yeah, we definitely have those underwater too, right?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

Like when that submarine imploded, that was looking at the Titanic, allegedly. They, they could, they heard it from like the other side of the earth with their underwater acoustical detection.

T.D. Barnes

Exactly.

Interviewer

And I'm sure like all the stuff that we see and hear about that's happening in the skies, I imagine there's got to be way more happening beneath the ocean. Oh yeah, but nobody's going to be able to see that. I heard a story of who was telling us the story of the submarine thing. Oh, who was the gentleman that was in Maguire? Bob McGuire was just in here telling us a story about a, a submarine pilot or captain of a submarine, nuclear submarine, where they had this crazy like thing on their radar or on their sonar, whatever you call it, on the submarine that like flew past their submarine and made a crazy sound and like the people were aware of it like. Oh, we call that a fast walker. Those happen from time to time. And you know, I've heard other stories from, from Navy pilots and submarine pilots or submarine captains of like weird anomalous objects that are like really big, moving really fast around their subs and stuff like that. But it's crazy because there's no camera. You can't like, you can't get a visual on it. You just get this, like this reading, no telling. It would be a great place to hide secret technology.

T.D. Barnes

Oh yeah.

Interviewer

You know, if we had some sort of crazy stuff that we were working on, we would. The ocean is the perfect place to hide.

T.D. Barnes

It's perfect. You know, like sound travels forever, you know, certain frequencies, you know, and it just be perfect for anything like that.

Interviewer

So do you believe at all that there is any sort of like UFO that is non human?

T.D. Barnes

I got no reason to believe that. No, no. You know, I think we had found, of course them Thought of them crashing all the time, that doesn't make sense. If they were able to get here, they wouldn't be crashing. Plus there's never been any, as far as I know, any real crash material found that they could determine was alien.

Interviewer

Well, there's lots of stories of that

T.D. Barnes

kind of stuff, a lot of stories. But you know, where's the proof? And you know, the people, the people really don't. Most people don't believe that. You gotta, you gotta be looking for that kind of stuff to see it. You go outside, you see all the time, you'll see something you can't identify. But most people think anything about it.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Because we got millions of objects in orbit, you know, space junk. Thousands, thousands of satellites, planes flying, air drones flying everywhere. So there's. Flying everywhere.

Interviewer

So do you think that, do you believe the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the universe is.

T.D. Barnes

Oh yeah, I say yeah, elsewhere, but I would be surprised. Like a human. Yeah. It could be worms or it could be, you know, whatever the habitat.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Was because we got, we got sunlight, we got water.

Interviewer

Exactly. We have a certain kind of pressure atmosphere.

T.D. Barnes

Exactly right. But you know, everybody visualizes the, them being human shapes and stuff. There's no reason to think that.

Interviewer

Yeah, we evolved specifically on this planet to be adapted to these conditions. Other water world, other, other, other Goldilocks planets are water worlds.

T.D. Barnes

I got no doubt there's life elsewhere.

Interviewer

My thing is like if we're looking for life in the universe and we know that this planet is just absolutely teeming with life, and it has been for millions and millions of years. Well, wouldn't the best place to look be our neighboring planet Mars? You know, like, wouldn't that be the most likely place?

T.D. Barnes

Yep, it would. And I think that I'd be surprised if, if they don't find some kind of sign of life. It may not, you know, may be very pre prehistoric or whatever. You know, that's not like humans or anything.

Interviewer

A lot, a lot more simple.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

What so then if that's the case, what is your view on everything that's happening in these congressional UFO hearings? Trump releasing these UFO files, most of which was already available. All this stuff, you know, in this, in those UFO files, there was a crazy story from one of the Apollo missions where might have been Apollo 11. Actually. No, it wasn't 11. It was one. I forget which one it was.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I think, I think it was 11.

Interviewer

Well, they explained seeing things, weird UFOs that were not explainable.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I don't know what they're seeing. There's no and.

Interviewer

And you have all these people giving testimony in front of Congress, like military, like legit military people saying that they, they have seen or witnessed non human entities, biological entities.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I can't believe that.

Interviewer

Why, why then?

T.D. Barnes

I don't know.

Interviewer

Why are they all doing this?

T.D. Barnes

Because I know all. You know, I worked astronauts and high flying reconnaissance crews and everything known most of my life and none of them have ever encountered anything like that. So people make up stories, they like 15 minutes of fame. So part of that, some of me believe it, but I just have a hard time believing any of that. So it's almost always the same people too. You don't have the general population, you don't have people out in the streets looking for UFOs or the media going crazy looking for it or anything like that, right?

Interviewer

Well, the mainstream media, certainly not. It's just like why do they waste all this time in Congress and with all these people traveling all over the, from all over the world in the country to come witness these things, going to skiffs and do this stuff. Is it all just a distraction? Is it all just theater?

T.D. Barnes

I think, I think that a lot of people were just, that's their thing. They're looking at sky everywhere, wanting to see something.

Interviewer

So you think these people really believe it?

T.D. Barnes

I think they do. But, but most people, like I said, the people, the astronauts and people I worked with, that never even enters their mind. They never talk about it. Wow. It's just, in fact they laugh about it, you know that they see things. Of course, we all do, but we don't have that frame of mind that hey, what is that

Interviewer

right. So when it go, when it comes to these spoofing capabilities like you were saying, are responsible for the Tic Tac and some of these other things that could be projections off of submarines. What, what are the like the in. Obviously, obviously you probably aren't up to speed on all of the most current research or the most current technology. But if you were just to speculate just what wildly. Right on, on what. What could be the current capabilities or limitations of stuff like that right now.

T.D. Barnes

It should be satellites too.

Interviewer

It could be what?

T.D. Barnes

It could be satellites or submarines.

Interviewer

Satellites.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. And, but yeah, we can, I don't know how far we're going with. I do know that we got technology now where they can make a. I won't say camouflage, but make something disappear. You can't see it.

Interviewer

Cloaking it.

T.D. Barnes

Cloaking it. Yeah, yeah, we got cloaking capability now and that Sort of thing. And no telling what all we got. But again it's what we. The big publicity. Now they're going with Congress and stuff. Again, it goes back like look at who Congress people are. Washed out lawyers or people who couldn't make it on the outside to get elected.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And they, they're not experts on anything but protecting the jobs.

Interviewer

That's true.

T.D. Barnes

And look at Harry Reid.

Interviewer

Yeah. And it does seem too like I get the view that the people, these, these, a lot of these, not all of them, but a lot of these Congress people are more interested in like becoming like celebrity influencers, you know, than they are anything else and actually doing their job.

T.D. Barnes

The UFO community make the big deal about having a Senate hearing.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

If you look at that Senate hearing, there was four, four Senators. Four senators in that room. And they probably were UFO believers.

Interviewer

Right. Well also one of the crazy things to me is that Podesta is one of the big people promoting this stuff. And also why am I blanking on his name again? You know who I'm talking about? The bald guy from the nsa who, who said that the NSA is not spying on Americans. James Clapper.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. Oh God.

Interviewer

James Clapper is one of the biggest people behind this too, which is very, very fishy to me. So. I don't know. I don't know.

T.D. Barnes

It's a mystery. You know. I don't deny that people see such stuff.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

But you got to be wanting to see something that's. Make something out of it to believe that there's.

Interviewer

Yeah. Consciousness and belief has, certainly has a lot to do with it because I

T.D. Barnes

look up the sky all the time. I see a satellite going over, whatever.

Interviewer

Me too. I never see the. I never see UFOs.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah,

Interviewer

I don't know if I'd want to see one either.

T.D. Barnes

I was at a dinner here recently and this is pretty prominent businessman and he thought I was a UFO believer for some reason. He started off a conversation. I saw four grays today.

Interviewer

Four grays?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I saw four grays. And he realized I wasn't fog. Later he shut up.

Interviewer

That's a hell of a way to start a conversation.

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Interviewer

ECMs and ECCMs. Can you explain what those are?

T.D. Barnes

Electronic countermeasures. That's what the, your planes use to spoof radar or hide from radar.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And ECCM is what a missile we use. It's electronic counter counterbasers.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

It's the means they're getting through, through the ecm, getting around it. And that's one of the things I did on my flight to Cuba, was record the ECM that the MiG 15s were using. Because we were just developing and getting ready to deploy the Hawk missile. And we. Raytheon was designing the ECCM up to date. You know, we have to keep up to date with the technology. And they wanted the latest ECM that the Russians were using, and I was able to record that on that flight. So Raytheon should use it for the Hawk missile that they're getting ready to deploy.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

But that's an ongoing thing. You're always, you know, you're always changing ecm and both sides are. It's a cat and mouse game. Right?

Interviewer

Right. And it's. That's very much tied to all of these. All of these things that you think could be projections or, or balloons or laser projections or whatever.

T.D. Barnes

It's all the time. All each adversary is Trying to outdo the other. You come up with something, you. And then they'll come up something to defeat it.

Interviewer

Yeah. Did you ever, did you guys ever suspect or have any. Did you ever know of any sort of like foreign folks that were in Area 51 that could have been from other countries helping the US like from Russia or China or anything like that?

T.D. Barnes

Not really out of the area. Not, not helpless. It's. The only exception would be the, the Israeli colonel.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

That had flown the MiG 15 first and brought it over. He trained our pilots. Right. And. But other than that. But let me tell you, talking just a little bit more on that. When we're flying against everything the Air Force had in the Navy. I'll give you an example. The F84s that they brought in, fly against. They use National Guard out in New Jersey. Those pilots flew. They've told me, you're going to fly to Nellis Air Force Base and you're going. It's a top session mission, the top secret mission. You'll be flying a foreign adversary. Don't say anything. Those guys came in and they flew against our MIGs at Area 51. They never knew that they were at Area 51.

Interviewer

Interesting.

T.D. Barnes

They thought they were Nellis. They didn't have a need to know. So a lot of times we, even out there, if you didn't have a need to know, you'd see something flying. You didn't ask and you didn't tell what it was. You know, it'd be. We developing stealth and not so much in my day later on. And I was aware of some stuff that they were testing out there to make it more stealthy and, and people see it working out there.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Let's see it. And you say, boy, I didn't see. I didn't see anything. Right, you didn't, you didn't want to see it.

Interviewer

Well, I'm sure you're familiar. Are you familiar with the, the Paul Benowitz story?

T.D. Barnes

No, I can't place it.

Interviewer

So. So Paul Benowitz was a, a UFO researcher. He was part of mufon, which is like the Mutual UFO Network, like a UFO community of people. And he was a, he was, I forget his profession, but he was a, he might have been a, like an engineer or something like that. Anyways, he was just an enthusiast, right. And he lived in New Mexico and he was constantly seeing, witnessing UFOs flying over the mountains and like coming down at random times or whatever. And he was talking about this in his, in the UFO meetings that they were Doing like this MUFON group would have conferences and stuff, people come up and talk and explain their experiences or whatever. He was explaining this. And the story goes that at the Air Force base right across, across those mountains where he lived, there was a guy there named Rick Doty who was a counterintelligence guy with the Air Force. And he found out that Paul Benowitz was doing his job was to do recon and see what people were seeing and try to like throw off people, throw people off the scent of what was really happening. So he discovered Paul Benowitz and he went and met with him. And what he did was he asked him everything he knew, try to figure out everything he was seeing and what he believed it was. And what Rick Doty did was he convinced Paul. Like I think what you're seeing really is alien UFOs. This is crazy. You need to really follow this threat, try to pull this threat and figure out what it is. Because they were concerned, the Air Force was concerned that the Soviets were trying to infiltrate the MUFON UFO community to see what they knew, because they knew that that was probably some sort of secret technology or whatever. So they were using Paul Benowitz as like a conduit of disinformation to poison the well of the MUFON UFO community to make them think this really was extraterrestrials and not super secret advanced technology.

T.D. Barnes

Very possible.

Interviewer

And it ended up driving this guy crazy and he ended up going to like a, a psych ward or something and he, I think he died there. But you know, the fact that they would go to, and I think this was in the 80s, late 70s, early 80s maybe. And just the fact that their counter intelligence psychological operations that they were doing was so robust back then, it makes you wonder like what is it like now in today's day and age where information is just everywhere, constantly non stop,

T.D. Barnes

you know, going back to the government releasing the UFO files. Yeah, there's absolutely no way the government's ever going to release any classified documents. They'd be crazy too, you know, like your spoofing techniques or that you're even spoofing or any of that. That's unit to the enemy, right? You just, you just don't do that, especially bunch of UFO people.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

I mean you just don't, you don't give away secrets. And for, for good reason, right? I mean China would love it, Russia would love it.

Interviewer

Right. Well, I mean the story goes is most people suspect that those, those countries have the same kind of stuff that

T.D. Barnes

we have and you don't tell Commerce. That's the worst place to work, right? Exactly. Tell a secret.

Interviewer

Let's pause. I got to take a pee real quick.

T.D. Barnes

Okay.

Interviewer

We'll be right back.

T.D. Barnes

I did a deal back with the D.A. they invited me there for the. Give a presentation to the workforce. When they. They put a big logo in there at the entrance like you got at ca, The DA went in, they invited me back, and I gave a presentation to the workforce. Me and one of the YouTube pilots. And when the director was the first one to walk across the logo, and me and Tony Barbatra, the U2 pilot, were the second and our wives were the second ones to walk across the logo.

Interviewer

A dia. Wow.

T.D. Barnes

Which is quite an honor.

Sponsor Voice 3

Wow.

Interviewer

And that's so. So that was when they were grilling you and getting. Trying to get all this information out of you about all your experiences, where they're going to declassify this. And you were saying this is what led you into writing their books?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I had already. Not that time. I hadn't read the books. No, that's when we started all that. Yeah, we went doing all the work for us, just telling the story. But we did that for 10 days. But the CA sponsored it. But I've been in many, many panels and stuff at universities and stuff, where Dr. Robarts, he's the chief historian CA. He and I become these real personal friends. But anyway, we've appeared at universities all over the country, talking like we're talking today.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Giving discussions to the students and stuff.

Interviewer

Let me ask you this. When you wrote your books, I assume you had to get them reviewed by the CIA.

Sponsor Voice 2

Yeah.

Interviewer

Was there anything that had to be redacted or left out?

T.D. Barnes

Not a thing.

Interviewer

No, really, Everything was clear as far

T.D. Barnes

as, in fact, they were learning. They didn't know whether it's classified or not. Yeah, they didn't know about it.

Sponsor Voice 3

Wow.

T.D. Barnes

I'll give you an example. Robarts called me up here a while back. Well, it's been several months now. They came across a document that had Project Red Flag on it. And you go back in the UFO lure, they've known about Red Flag. They always associate it with something to do with UFOs, alien stuff, red Flag. Anyway, he. He called me.

Interviewer

Grab your headphones.

T.D. Barnes

Are we on there now?

Interviewer

Yeah, yeah, we're good. Yeah, we're on. Can you say this on the air?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

Okay. Sorry, I didn't know it was on there.

Interviewer

Oh, yeah. Is that okay? Do you want us to delete anything?

T.D. Barnes

Okay. We were talking about the CIA still learning stuff about what went on there, if it's one.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

And Project Red Light has always been a topic that people had seen, knew about, did associate with UFO activities, aliens and stuff, or they didn't know what it was. And Dr. Robart from CIA called me up and they said, you know, we had documents here with red flag or red light on it.

Interviewer

Yep.

T.D. Barnes

What is that? What was that? Well, we had two projects. One was U2 program is frog horn. And then with a 12 it was red light everything. When we bought supplies, like commissary supplies or fuel for the planes or anything, we couldn't tell the vendor where it was going, what it's for or who it's for. So he stamped it Project Red Light or Project Frog Horn. And they knew not to ask any questions. No questions. And that's what those doctors were. They were actually invoices and stuff, you know, accounting or whatever for fuel, commissary items and stuff that for the facility out there.

Interviewer

Oh, wow.

T.D. Barnes

But the CI, they didn't know what that was and. But you had almost be boots on the ground to know a lot of that.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

We assigned the project name to almost everything we did.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

Maybe just one flight would have a project name if it's a special flight.

Interviewer

So this just popped into my head on the subject of all this technology. You're aware of the spoofing technology and all of this stuff and the ECMs and the ECCMs and the TIC Tac stuff. The Tic Tac stuff's interesting because this is stuff that you're hearing third party. Right. Through pilots that said they saw this with their eyes, they're giving testimony. We have no reason not to believe them. But what about when it comes to events where it's like a mass public sighting, similar to the Phoenix lights, where they were all seeing these giant triangle shaped light formations in the sky. And that's on video. It was on photos. What do you think that was?

T.D. Barnes

I have my. I. I'd be inclined to think it might be flares or something like that, but I really don't know.

Interviewer

Flares.

T.D. Barnes

It could have been some flare activities for some reason. There's no telling.

Interviewer

Yeah. In those perfect V formations. Like you think flares would be able to stay in that, in a formation and hover like that?

T.D. Barnes

Not like that. They would wouldn't. No, no, not like what we're seeing. And

Interviewer

that one on the right is crazy. Top right, Steve. Up, up, down. Right there. Yeah, right there. I think that's A rendering. Oh, that's a rendering.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

Damn it.

Sponsor Voice 2

H. Trying to stick with the non replicated stuff.

Interviewer

I don't know if this is authentic either. 29 years ago. Yeah. In 1997.

T.D. Barnes

It's hard to say.

Interviewer

Very interesting.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. I had no idea what that was. Yeah, a lot of people did see that. And a lot of the sightings, no one's seen them, but maybe one person. Those you have to kind of question. But where you got a mass sighting like that? There's probably an explanation, but yeah, I think.

Interviewer

Do you think like the. The deepest, blackest research projects that are going on in regard to propulsion or you know, any kind of spoofing technology, all that stuff. Where do you think it would be? Do you think it would. Would be buried? Would it be in these private contractors or do you think there are any? Because I imagine if they're what Area 51 was when you were doing it. I imagine now with how every books and movies have been made about it and people talk about 24 7. I imagine they would move that stuff out of there and put it somewhere else. Do you have any idea where they would put it?

T.D. Barnes

No, no. That, that kind of stuff would mostly be done companies.

Interviewer

Yeah, private companies.

T.D. Barnes

Pratt Whitney that I talked about with the engines. They were right here in Florida. And you wouldn't believe the number of explosions engines blew up and that sort of thing as we were developing those engines. Yeah, you know that was. Didn't happen overnight. And the engine itself could take the plane up to 100,000ft and faster than probably what it would go. Our biggest challenge was heat. The plane got so hot that we had set a limit on our cordura. You know it just. We had used from positives even. And it's at some of the edges that get up too hot over 2200 degrees. But you know, everything had to be invented about that plane. You know the fuels hydraulic, you feel like got the 600 degrees. The windshield would be 5, 600 degrees.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Everything was hot. Right. And that's your limitation on speed even today. So that makes me question. There's a lot of this stuff that's zipping around that you. That's almost impossible. That would generate meteorite like speeds.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

The heat of the sun.

Interviewer

They would have to figure out if that stuff is physical. They would have had to figure out a new way of propulsion or a new way to. To. To apply a new level of physics. Right. To where they can bend space time around them.

T.D. Barnes

You know, even with X15, you know we. We generated While I was only up, we generated eight astronauts in Air 15. This is right at your shepherd. And all of them made their initial flights, but there's 15. Anytime we went over 50 miles up, well, it got extremely hot coming in. And we would lose communications with it as it came through back into the atmosphere. And the iron field around it would block communication. So we would go through two or three minutes and not be able to communicate with the plane, just like they did with the space shuttle and all of that. We did the same thing with X15

Interviewer

because of the speed it's going, the

T.D. Barnes

temperature, the temperature, the temperatures you got up to and about the X15 a lot of years. Probably don't know about much about it. Everything that went to the moon in Apollo, we tested first. In the S15. The flights weren't testing the plane. We were testing equipment that we were sending to the moon, hydraulic systems and different things. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Those missions were so interesting. I always said that my time on that program was much more interesting than Area 51.

Interviewer

Really.

T.D. Barnes

Every flight was a nail biter. Sometimes it worked, like I said, sometimes it didn't. We always had another pilot sitting on the console right beside me. But we'd have a mission in case the pilot got in trouble, which happened quite often. Your cockpit filled up with ammonia or something. And the pilots up there were, you know, scared, you know, what. What's going on? And the pilot on the ground, his job was to sell a. Settle down, Joe. It happens all the time, remember? And it settled the guy down. Meanwhile, we're frantically trying to figure out what's wrong. What's wrong because we got to bring this guy back. So every flight. But we were testing everything that went to the moon. We tested in that workhorse. Wow was the X15. Because once we. One or two flights, we drew up in the fringes of outer space. One mission, I remember we got up at 4 o' clock in the morning during one of the meteorite showers that comes around every year. I think it's November anyway, our mission was to collect some meteorite dust. We'd put some little things on the wing and we went up and flew up into the meteorite. High enough to collect a little bit of meteorite dust. That was one of our missions.

Interviewer

Interesting. Why? What was the purpose of it?

T.D. Barnes

Just to see what it. What it was. Something out of space. Say we're going to Mars or the moon or wherever it came from.

Interviewer

Yeah, very interesting.

Sponsor Voice 2

So.

Interviewer

So you took this plane up with equipment that was Used for the Apollo missions.

T.D. Barnes

And.

Interviewer

And like, for example, where would you put the equipment?

T.D. Barnes

It would replace something in the plane. It may be the. Something in the hydraulic system or they change the plane out. And that. That plane there could. We'd launch it. It went over Utah.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And. And it would land at Edwards. And you time it. It drew up. And it drew up 250,000ft or so.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And it has to slow down. And he'd be drinking coffee seven minutes after we launched him. But would bring him up on a B52. And we always had a dry lake bed in Nevada that we'd launch him over in case the engine didn't start. He could land on that dry lake bed. Oh, wow. So we always launched him over dry lake.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And we tell you a story. One of our lodges that was at mud lake up at Tonopah. The engine didn't ignite. He landed on the dry lick bed. It was on a Friday.

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T.D. Barnes

They went out with a flatbed truck, loaded up the plane. There's 15. They couldn't cross Death Valley on weekends in 18 Wheeler. There's 15 sit in my driveway all weekend. And I didn't take a single photograph. We did not take photographs back then.

Interviewer

Whoa.

T.D. Barnes

There is photographs but in your driveway. My driveway all weekend. You know, we lived in Beatty north. North of Las Vegas. Yeah. Where the tractor station was. Sit there all week. But we thought nothing of it. It wasn't a big deal to us.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And I look back now, give me things, have me sit on top of it or something.

Interviewer

Also one of the crazy things about the technology that was used on the Apollo missions is that. And one of the things that people don't realize is that the temperature in the sunlight on the moon is like, I believe, 250 degrees Fahrenheit.

T.D. Barnes

Yes.

Interviewer

And in the shadows, it's like negative 250 degrees Fahrenheit. And they stayed there for I don't know how long, a couple days or something like that. Like, how in God's name were they able to do that back then that many years ago?

T.D. Barnes

You think about. And what was amazing is the computing systems we had. We got much more my iPhone than we had for the whole program.

Sponsor Voice 1

That's right.

Interviewer

The computing power on the iPhone is like. I think it's a million times the computing power in the iPhone than all of the computing power of the Apollo missions.

T.D. Barnes

Let me tell you another story. F15. We had an old mod we called a mod two radar. That was the same radar that we gave Russia during World War II, during the Lend Lease program. NASA had got a hand me down from the Air Force. They'd use this radar at the Cape, Cape Trinadrel. And we ended up with on 15 range. That radar was so old that you pull out a chassis and the insulation on the wires would crumble down on your console, so you didn't dare touch it. And during a mission, a lot of times we had a strobe that would black out. We used oscilloscopes for stropes then. And you knew where the bang on it could get to come back on. Of course, you didn't lose flight. You know, we're still tracking.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

But you didn't have visual. But we were using so outdated equipment and putting the guys up in the fringes of outer space. That's so crazy. It just. It was great. It was crazy. But we were using old mod2 radar for those missions and slide rules. Right.

Interviewer

And also like the footage. Right. Like, how did they get those film reels through the Van Allen radiation belts? Undamaged. Right. If there's things are so dangerous and you're going out there, you're getting all this footage and you're bringing it back and it's on film. And reels like film gets damaged very easily. It's not. You got to protect even going through like airports, tsa like bringing them through the scanners that can damage film. So no, these things went through the damn Van Allen radiation belts undamaged.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, we wore those temperatures out there protect us from, you know, so we don't figure out any radiation. And we never, we never got any speakable enough to be concerned about. And today right now, as, as we speak, they're getting bills passed to give compensation to people worked at Area 51 right. From radiation. And they show in the, in the propaganda they put out to show above atmospheric atomic bomb test going on. They weren't, we didn't have those, they had already stopped that. But we, but our guys where they

Interviewer

were detonating him in the outer atmosphere.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, they're showing that now to justify them getting compensation. And that wasn't happening then in Air51. So the whole story, but what I'm getting to is we worked out there, they had atomic bomb tests while I was working out there. And we'd have to evacuate. Oh really during the day of the test. And we come back out as the mushroom. You know, they were underground but every now and then you'd have a cloud from the dust and stuff and the sheriff would stop the traffic on the road till the dust passed through over into Utah and then let them go because you had a free car wash out of it.

Interviewer

Oh wow.

T.D. Barnes

And we come back out mid dust at brush the dust off of her desk and that kind of stuff. We'd have a little bit damage every now and then from a test, you know, when it's in the atmosphere in particular. But our guys that worked out there, almost all of them lived up into the 90s. I'm one of the younger ones. We never had any problems. We worked out there. And now today, now they did have problems later when they had the burn pits. We didn't have of those. Yeah, but as far as the radiation, we never had any radiation.

Interviewer

Right. Well, I mean the, the, the, the, the problem with it or the reason that people are so confused by the public, which, you know, they don't have the full picture. Right. They're not scientists. We're just people that are trying to read online and watch videos and make it and rationally kind of understand this stuff is that you can watch videos from now till Friday of astronauts, modern day astronauts talking about we, how we have to develop. We have to develop more technology and more protection before we can send astronauts into beyond the Van Allen belts. So it's like why are we having such trouble figuring this problem out now when we didn't back then?

T.D. Barnes

You know, it's like much wonder.

Interviewer

Yeah, it's very strange. Right. Like there's very few technologies that don't advance exponentially throughout time. Right. If you look at, you know, just look at the, the time between the Civil War and World War II and we went from shooting muskets to detonating fusion devices. So like if we went to the moon in the 60s, why do we go backwards? You know And I get, I get, I get the, I get the argument right. It was the space race. It was just a performative thing. We wanted to beat the, so we wanted to beat the Russians, be the first ones there for. To prove that America was superior and all this and.

T.D. Barnes

But still, you know, a lot of people don't know this. In the early days, all the Area 51, we'd run into periods when we really wouldn't have a project between the MIGs and the stealth and stuff. So they would loan us out. We call it the black world. And they'd loaned us out, some of us to the white world that was atomic bomb testing for particular problems that they were having that they needed our expertise for. And. But we were over there and work in the white world. So I got to sit through I think it was five atomic bomb tests, underground tests. Oh wow, I got to participate and I've got to go back into ground zero that have underground. They'd have a tunnel in a mesa. Most of them had some, you know the drill. But you go back, we go in and set up the experiments that usually universities would have a grant and different ones. It wasn't just military or you know, maybe you might have one or. But most of those universities doing research maybe for X ray shields or who knows, you know medical. And you had up towards ground zero you had your experiments that was looking for high temperatures or force. Then further back you learned different experiments for different type of radiation that travels at different speeds and all that kind of stuff. And they're setting up these stations, you know, with their sensors and whatever. And when they set off the bomb of course they had assimilations all up and they had all these cameras and stuff and high speed tape recorders to capture the moment that the bomb exploded detonated. But we go down and help them set up the experiments and in these bigger like. Wasn't a tunnel, I mean a big metal deal cylinder. Anyway we set these up after the test went off. We could go back down and pick up some experiments after the test. The radiation hadn't traveled that far yet. When the bomb went off it started detonating sections of the, of the tunnel so that the heat goes through as far as it needed to for those experiments. But it start blocking off stuff so that you didn't wipe out all the experiments. That you were doing. Right. It's just a series of explosions.

Interviewer

Oh, really?

T.D. Barnes

But I was able to go back in after. After a bomb went off and retrieving experiments way, way back at the end of the tunnel.

Interviewer

Oh, wow.

T.D. Barnes

But we never got any radiation. Okay. That's the thing.

Interviewer

Yeah. That was another question I had. Like, you see those videos they have of the nuclear bombs going off and blowing out these, like, fake towns they build?

T.D. Barnes

Right.

Interviewer

You see the houses being shredded? How do those cameras survive if the house is literally being incinerated?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. I had for a long time two of the mannequins that we built. The Japanese city out there.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And put mannequins in it. Cars in the driveway.

Interviewer

You were there doing that?

T.D. Barnes

No, I. I ended up with two of the mannequins. Buddy of mine had gotten them. He was surely out there sometime or other, he had got those mannequins and he gave them to me. And I had those things for the longest time. And I finally donated them to the Atomic Testing Museum.

Interviewer

No way.

T.D. Barnes

And they put them in the basement. They've never seen a lighter day. Wow.

Interviewer

You should not have.

T.D. Barnes

But they had. But it's woman and a child. Yeah. And had AEC stamped on the back of it and all that kind of stuff.

Interviewer

No way.

T.D. Barnes

I wish I hadn't done it. And that. These days, a lot of us worked out there. We started trying to find a home for stuff that we collected, you know, from. From back then. Yeah. And we found the museum's the worst place in the world to go with it.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

They just bury it, put in the basement.

Interviewer

Wow. These mannequins right here.

T.D. Barnes

Huh?

Interviewer

Similar to this.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. Mine didn't have clothes on.

Interviewer

Okay. Nude mannequin.

T.D. Barnes

Okay. One belt.

Interviewer

Oh, they even put food in pantry.

T.D. Barnes

Oh, yeah. We had the whole works. Because we need to know what would happen. The atomic bomb test. Right.

Interviewer

Do you know how the cameras survived?

T.D. Barnes

No, I don't. That. I don't. I'm not sure they survived very long.

Interviewer

Right. And the. Was it. What Would that have been shot on film, Steve, do we know?

Sponsor Voice 1

Oh, yeah.

T.D. Barnes

They didn't have digital back then.

Interviewer

That would have been on film.

T.D. Barnes

It'd be on film. Yeah. And the trailers, they had Polaroid film cameras. Just rolls after rows of them. And they had drills. And they've tried to time those where they were. That camera would click just as that bomb exploded. So that he could get whatever data they were looking for.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

And so I got to see some little drills.

Interviewer

So look. Look at that. The Camera doesn't even move.

T.D. Barnes

I've been back after those areas many times.

Interviewer

Well, that one moved a little bit.

T.D. Barnes

You go on tours out there today?

Interviewer

Oh, really?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I've been down there several times.

Interviewer

Wow. How far away was that city from the actual detonation?

T.D. Barnes

I don't know. I don't know.

Interviewer

Wow. Oh, it's not far. You can see it right there.

T.D. Barnes

You'll see a. Some of those films. You'll see the atomic cannon. I think that's a shot from the atomic cannon right there. When I deployed to Germany with the Hawk missile unit, we went on the move on one event we ended up protecting. We had an atomic cannon in Germany right out of Bamberg.

Interviewer

And what's an atomic cannon?

T.D. Barnes

It's shooting neutral bomb just like that had aimed right at Russia. Oh, and my. My unit moved to the atomic cannon to defend it. I mean, assimilated maneuvers. You know, I got to see the atomic cannon not only at the test site, but the, you know, they still got it museum piece, but I got to see one in actual setup in Germany. Oh, wow.

Interviewer

So why were we blowing holes in the atmosphere with. With nukes? Why were we doing that? That was like Starfish Prime. I believe it was.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. Ecm.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

Electromagnetic emp. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, we were really into EMP at that time. And that's, that's. That's something we need to fear of. I've written a few books on emp. I got exposed to some of that.

Interviewer

Oh, really?

T.D. Barnes

That is. That is more we're using today selectively. But you could put a detonated atmospheric bomb or EMP device and wipe out the electricity in the whole United States.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

I mean, I mean, it's. It's horrible. And we got that. The Russians did that, and we did it both. We set one off in, I think, the Johnson Islands, and it traveled all the way to Hawaii. Knocked out a lot of electricity in Hawaii.

Interviewer

Oh, wow. Yeah. And one of the scariest things about that is I think we have these interceptor missiles in the United States, in Vandenberg and in Alaska, that are supposed to be intercept. They're supposed to shoot these warheads out of the sky before they hit us. So, like, I assume that's going to cause an EMP if it explodes the warhead before it's detonates. And also, like, what is the chance that I think we have 44 of these interceptor missiles?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. Not every, not every warhead would be emp. That's like kind of a special.

Interviewer

Oh, really?

T.D. Barnes

Device.

Interviewer

So you can't just detonate a warhead in the atmosphere and have an MP effect.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, no you wouldn't. Oh yeah. There's. They're special device.

Interviewer

I thought, I thought a nuclear warhead, no matter what would, would have a residual EMP effect.

T.D. Barnes

Not to stem, not, not like a EMP device is designed to take out all your electronics.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Just a regular atomic bomb test would not necessarily do that.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

It's more force and. Right. That sort of thing. But EMP device, it looks for Nantenna and you know if you got it inside a 10 building or something, you're okay. It's looking for Nantana. And it'll go wherever. Once it gets in, it travels everywhere.

Interviewer

Oh wow.

T.D. Barnes

And just in seconds it would, if it hit one hit over the United States and you got in our electrical grid, it would go wherever that electrical grid, even in old Mexico, Canada, wherever it went. And it wiped out everything. Wow. It'll wipe out your TVs, your, your cars if you got these little electronic starter deals. Yeah.

Interviewer

The older cars with electronic starters.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, yeah.

Interviewer

Well no, all cars now have electronic starters.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

There's only the old ones.

T.D. Barnes

The old ones would survive.

Interviewer

The old ones would survive, right?

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. But it wiped out all, everything electronic. So you can imagine all of a sudden you don't, not only you don't have lights, but you can't pump free water into your big cities. Wiped out your motors. You flush your toilet and it doesn't refill.

Interviewer

It'd be Mad Max in short order.

T.D. Barnes

It's bad time.

Interviewer

Yeah, Very bad time. I mean we see a little bit of it here. When we get hurricanes down here in Florida, it wipes out the power in most of Florida for, for, you know, weeks sometimes.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

And it's happened here recently and it's, it's crazy to see how people start to freak out and panic. The grocery stores are empty.

T.D. Barnes

Imagine iPhone's not working.

Interviewer

The things you don't even think about in normal everyday life that become like the most sought after things like toilet paper. You would never think about that. But toilet paper is gone.

Sponsor Voice 1

Yeah.

Interviewer

As soon as we get loose power, no one has toilet paper and there's no running water. It's crazy.

T.D. Barnes

No more deliveries.

Interviewer

Yeah. That's your priorities change very fast. And just, you know, losing power is not a big deal from a hurricane, but a frickin EMP that's like that on steroids.

T.D. Barnes

My, I did a three book series on emp. Actually four and that had. So it's still very, very popular. But Mostly with your preppers, the people that prep for that kind of event. I had many, many of them contact me. Said, man, I never thought of that. It'd be things in it that.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

For example, when everybody started running out of food, it happened. My story takes place in Nevada. Course, the first place the Raiders go to look for food is the Mormons. Because they know the Mormons store of food for such an event.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

So they instantly become the target.

Interviewer

That's why the Mormons are armed to the teeth.

T.D. Barnes

They prepare for. I forget, I think it's a three year supply of food or something like that.

Interviewer

Wow.

T.D. Barnes

And. And the, the people would realize that. And that makes them an automatic target for people starving to death, you know.

Interviewer

Yeah, I've heard stories. I've had people tell me these stories about like, like literal, like militarized Mormon militias in Mexico.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, Mormons are well, they've always been well prepared.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

But the preppers, I had a lot of preppers contact me. Man, I never thought about them and you know, never thought about, about that happening or this happening.

Interviewer

Right. Have you heard the stories of some of the folks who have, like Bob Solace, who worked at Malmstrom Air Force Base where they held the intercontinental ballistic missile sites in northern Montana, I believe it was, where there was multiple incidents where these guys would have their whole entire site shut down and all the nukes would be disarmed in a way that they had never seen before. And it was corresponded with this great big ball of light showing up. This big red ball of light showing up at the front gate on the top surface level. The security guards would phone them down, like we got some crazy ball of light down here. And all of a sudden, systematically, every nuke would go offline.

T.D. Barnes

I've heard something about that. I don't know if it was real or I don't know.

Interviewer

Yeah, there was multiple people, multiple Air Force guys who were in charge of those, those nuclear sites, like Malmstrom, for example, who. You know, those guys aren't kooks. Those guys have to be like tip top level, psychologically sound individuals. And they recorded this hat reported this happening. And then like days, days later being visited by Boeing contractors, like asking them questions and all this kind of stuff.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I don't know on that.

Interviewer

No.

T.D. Barnes

You know, like this drone stuff, that craze about military and over the military installations, you know, it's making a big deal out of that. Of course, the military is flying drones.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

And they're.

Interviewer

Oh, you're talking about the New Jersey Drones.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, and all that, you know, and you know, it's making a big deal out of that. Of course the military is not going to reveal what they're doing. They should either be flying drones for a reason or they could be testing anti drone technology which would require drones in the air.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

So it could be one or the other. But you know, going back to the release of all this, no one's ever going to admit any of that because you can't afford to. I mean, the military.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

Well, that's survival, national security.

Interviewer

Yeah. It's just, it's, it's crazy because how do you expect us to like, how do you expect the public to believe all the, you're selling us, you know, when we know their secrets, we know like there's stuff going on but like you just still can come out with, just come out with bogus lies. Like at some point the chickens are going to come home to roost. I feel like, you know, like you're just gonna lose all the trust of the public because you know, you want to be the, you know, number one military in on the earth and you're going to do that at the expense of losing the trust of the people.

T.D. Barnes

I don't know whether they would or not, but a lot of the people, the media, that's a big story. The media loves to run with this. That's it, you know, that's their news cycle. And for good reason, you know, but the government's got to keep his secrets.

Sponsor Voice 2

Of course.

Interviewer

Of course, yes, that's a, it's a, that's definitely a double edged sword. The government does need to keep his

T.D. Barnes

secrets for sure and you know, for obvious. And I'm a good friend of George Knapp, he's one of my best friends.

Interviewer

He's great.

T.D. Barnes

I'm a huge fan and we wait all the time. But you know, he's really upset that government won't tell him what's going on. And I keep telling, look, if we

Interviewer

didn't have a CIA, we might be fucked.

T.D. Barnes

I keep telling George, George, they can't tell you you that.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

There's no way they're going to tell you that.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

And, and you know, he said, well, they're hiding something. Damn right they're hiding something. They got to keep us safe.

Interviewer

Yeah, no, totally, it's totally true.

T.D. Barnes

This AI thing scares me to death because, you know, they're trying to put reins on AI.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

Which is out of the box. There's no way you're going to put it back in the bottle? Yeah. Just no. And if we try to pull put controls on it in the United States, China is going to keep right on going. Russia going to keep right on going.

Interviewer

Well, it's already getting out of control here. Like that thing just came out with that new Claude that they released where it's like, it's like capable of hacking the nsa. The problem is like if people can get their hands on this and figure out how to use it for whatever means possible to where like the government at some level. Right. Like the, the institutional level of CIA or NSA or dia. Right. If, if some really smart engineers or programmers, some rogue cartel of programmers can get their hands on this stuff and use it to hack the government. That's a huge problem.

T.D. Barnes

It's big problem. It is a major problem. But you know, we were doing, we were getting into AI even while out of the area.

Interviewer

Oh wow.

T.D. Barnes

We did not have computers. Okay. You couldn't buy. The Atomic Energy Commission had a great computer which was a supercomputer.

Interviewer

Like this was a vacuum tube computer back then.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. We got access to it because we needed to store data. But we had all these systems and we might have a one of a kind mission out there and we couldn't afford to lose any data because we had all these radars that would be tracking their. So we actually designed our first computer by hand. We hired a computer programmer out of. Think about it in a minute. Anyway, we hired a programmer, he came in and we physically built a computer and all it could do was we programmed that. Here's what we specked out of this system. This system. You should see this.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

And then if you didn't see that had anomaly it would alert us. So you might say it was AI system. It was looking for something that should be normal and was able to tell us if it wasn't normal.

Interviewer

Oh, interesting.

T.D. Barnes

So we should fix it and not lose that data when we had the mission.

Interviewer

Oh wow, that's incredible.

T.D. Barnes

So that was our, you know, it was very primitive but we, we designed our first AI system.

Interviewer

Yeah. The future of this kind of stuff is going to be very frightening. I have a feeling it's going to be, it's going to be so sci fi that it's going to be almost hard to comprehend for most folks.

T.D. Barnes

Even back in Apollo we could have sent a system to the moon. Could have without a man.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

And done the very everything that we did.

Interviewer

Exactly.

T.D. Barnes

The only reason we put a man in it to Flex was funding. You couldn't get funding. You couldn't get money out of. Out of Congress. Unless you put a man in it. And really, if you put a man in it, you had to put an air conditioner in it. You had to put a window in it. We could have. We were already flying planes out of NASA at Dryden, unmanned planes in the late 60s, you know, we were already that.

Interviewer

I thought the reason we put the man on the moon was because we wanted to be able to. We were racing to be the first

T.D. Barnes

person to put a man on the moon. We were, yeah. Yeah, we were. That was part of it.

Interviewer

Right.

T.D. Barnes

And the astronauts, you know, the parade around all over the country.

Interviewer

Yeah.

T.D. Barnes

But we could have done it without the astronauts knots.

Interviewer

Right. And it would have been much more efficient.

T.D. Barnes

Much more efficient. Much quicker.

Interviewer

Which is another argument, I believe, to why we haven't gone. Why. Why humans haven't been back to the moon since.

T.D. Barnes

Right.

Interviewer

Because that was a one time sort of performative thing to get humans there. But it's a waste of money and it's a. It's too risky to keep sending human beings out there.

T.D. Barnes

You don't need to.

Interviewer

You can get everything done with robots.

T.D. Barnes

You do everything with drones and your robots now.

Interviewer

100%. Yeah, 100%.

T.D. Barnes

That's. That's the future.

Interviewer

Yeah. Well, man, this has been a fascinating conversation, man. Thank you for doing this.

T.D. Barnes

It's been fun.

Interviewer

Tell me more about your books. Where can people find your books? Read your books?

T.D. Barnes

They're on Amazon. I got some with publishers, but the. Everything is on Amazon.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

Just Google my name.

Interviewer

Is this the latest one?

T.D. Barnes

That's the latest one that just came out this month.

Interviewer

Secret skies inside Area 51's Soviet MiG exploitation. This thing is a big boy right here. Over 500 pages.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah. It's full of photographs and stuff in the Station D. Area 51 was the first one. It was published by Beckle House. Same. Same publishers, that one.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

And it's pretty well worldwide. We didn't get a good start on it. Covid happened just as we came out with it and we had to cancel our premiere and all that kind of stuff. Oh no, but it's a much bigger. It's a large paperback book, but. But it's got a lot more. This one's just about the MEG programs.

Interviewer

Okay.

T.D. Barnes

But the other one was why we had an airship to one. Why did CIA get chosen over the Air Force? It tells about the battles we had with the Air Force. I mean we had some horrible battles. So the Air Force thought anything flying should have be wearing blue suit, right? And Air Force fought with NASA too. Charlie Yeager was a friend of mine, but we had a lot of battles. If you were in Air Force, you shouldn't be flying. And so we had a lot of issue, but we also had a lot of issues inside the CIA. So there was a co ops operations type organization. All of a sudden, here comes Science and Technology and we were competing with them for office space money and they didn't want us. But Area 51 was the genesis of the Directorate of Science and Technology. That's what started the Director of Science and Technology that started Area 51 because they realized we're onto something here. We're into electronics, we're into radar and aerial reconnaissance and that sort of stuff. So we had a lot of battles inside of CIA over dominance of the aerial reconnaissance. For example, getting our film developed. We took priority over everyone else to get our film developed. But then when the Air Force started flying and they wanted to use the same film developers, well, they wanted theirs instantly because they got a mission going on. They need to know right now. We weren't in that big a hurry, so we were gathered intelligence, different type human intelligence and that sort of thing. But they were operational. They need no right now. So we had a lot of battles over who controlled the films development and just stuff like that.

Interviewer

Yeah. It's also very interesting. I learned recently that even the newest telescopes that NASA uses, or not NASA, but like the. The biggest telescopes that we have that can explore deep space and explore the solar system, all of the images taken by those big telescopes has to be cleared through the Pentagon before they can be released into the public.

T.D. Barnes

I don't doubt it.

Interviewer

That's crazy.

T.D. Barnes

You know, when they take our photographs at the agency, they have to be cleared before they release them to us. You know, it's just us stand there in the. In the, in the emblem, you know.

Interviewer

Right, right. But something just basic like this, you know, just for scientific research, you know.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, I'd say where they would want to get those cleared. Yeah, I don't know why, but competition, you know, spaces are next frontier, you know. Yeah, that's space satellites, you know, our Space force. No telling what they're doing up there.

Interviewer

Yeah, no talent.

T.D. Barnes

No talent.

Interviewer

Well, thanks again, man. I will link all your books below.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah, just Google me. Just T.D. barnes.

Interviewer

T.D. barnes.

T.D. Barnes

Yeah.

Interviewer

Perfect. All right, well, it was a pleasure. I appreciate. I really appreciate your time, my friend.

T.D. Barnes

All right, had fun.

Interviewer

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T.D. Barnes

Really?

Interviewer

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Interviewer

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Interviewer

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T.D. Barnes

So I'm dripping. Could be the rain, could be the upstairs bathroom. Yikes.

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T.D. Barnes

Do we know if he's licensed or does he just stone a ladder?

Interviewer

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T.D. Barnes

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