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October 16, 2013: UFO and Paranormal Research - Tobias McGriff & James Fox

Oct 16, 2013
3h 11m
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell welcomes Tobias McGriff, a historian of the strange and founder of Blue Orb Ghost Tours in Savannah, Georgia, alongside filmmaker James Fox, director of I Know What I Saw. The conversation opens with McGriff recounting how he tracked down Fred Hart, a previously silent eyewitness to President Jimmy Carter's 1969 UFO sighting in Leary, Georgia.

Hart reveals for the first time that the luminous, color-changing object appeared in the east, contradicting decades of claims that Carter mistook Venus in the western sky. McGriff explains that Carter's sighting was actually the first in a rash of over three dozen UFO reports across southern Georgia between 1969 and 1975, documented through painstakingly recovered newspaper archives.

Fox joins to discuss his upcoming film 701, named for the unexplained cases from Project Blue Book. He shares details of the 1994 Ruwa, Zimbabwe incident where 200 schoolchildren witnessed a landed craft and beings who communicated telepathic warnings about environmental destruction. Fox describes flying in four of those now-adult witnesses for their first reunion in 20 years, capturing emotional testimony on camera.

Key Moments

  1. Transcript

    Cold-knocking Fred Hart in Leary, Georgia: McGriff describes driving four hours to Leary unannounced, asking peanut-mill workers for directions, and convincing Jimmy Carter's UFO-witness Fred Hart to talk after Hart asked, are you from the government?

  2. Transcript

    Hart's account of the Carter sighting: McGriff relays Hart's eyewitness account of an object two to three miles up that changed colors, looked liquid but moved like a solid, hung for ten minutes, then dissipated - and Hart's anger at the Venus explanation.

  3. Transcript

    McGriff's own daylight encounter: McGriff describes turning porcelain-white in shock after a Savannah experience, then learning from a voodoo-village elder that he had encountered what locals call a hag - a shapeshifter that targets the depressed.

  4. Transcript

    What 701 stands for: Fox explains that of 12,618 cases the Air Force investigated through Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, exactly 701 remained unexplained - including the 1964 Socorro, New Mexico encounter.

  5. Transcript

    James Fox on Art Bell launching his career: Fox tells Art that hearing Art's nighttime broadcasts in the mid-90s, around the 50th anniversary of Roswell, drove him to make his first UFO documentary against his journalist father's pleas to reconsider.

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