January 9, 2002: Technology Advances - David Brin | Spacecraft Artifact - Jim Hughes
Podcast: The Art Bell ArchivePublished On: Mon Feb 10 2025
Description: Art Bell interviews Jim Hughes, a Florida man with a physics degree who placed a classified ad asking nine million dollars for what he claims is a piece of a UFO drive mechanism. Hughes explains that 44 years earlier, a friend witnessed a cigar-shaped craft hovering over a New Jersey dump and throwing out metal fragments. The piece, roughly pyramid-shaped and two inches long, was tested at Lehigh University as indium antimonide and at another lab as pure antimony, yielding conflicting results. Hughes recently noticed a layered structure in the artifact that aligns with his personal theory of anti-gravity.In the second half, science fiction author David Brin discusses his novel "Kiln People," set in a future where people copy themselves into temporary clay golems each morning to be in multiple places at once. Brin argues that Americans have always managed to have both freedom and security, and that the panic after September 11th threatens to create a false choice between the two. He credits the passengers of Flight 93 with demonstrating the power of citizen initiative over institutional doctrine.Brin also shares his ideas about uplifting dolphins to intelligence and speech, the coming century of empowered amateurs, and why he believes intelligent life in the cosmos is rare based on two billion years of Earth history showing no evidence of prior alien colonization.
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