Simulcast on YouTube, Facebook & Twitter | Tuesday, August 11, 2026 @ 8:00 PM EDT (GMT-4)
Martin Willis welcomes historian Matthew Bowman, author of The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America. Published by Yale University Press, the book examines the famous 1961 New Hampshire encounter that became the model for the modern alien-abduction story. Bowman explores the Hills’ reported experience, the controversial role of hypnosis and the case’s connections to civil rights, religion, government secrecy and America’s growing distrust of institutions. Was this an extraterrestrial encounter, a psychological event or a mystery that remains unresolved? The book’s distinctive angle is excellent for your interview: Bowman treats the Hill story as both a UFO case and a window into American history, without making the conversation depend entirely on proving or disproving an abduction. Yale University Press describes the Hills’ experience as the template for later alien-encounter stories and emphasizes their lives as an interracial New Hampshire couple and civil rights activists.
Upcoming Virtual Zoom Lecture August 18th: https://portsmouthhistory.org/event/lecture-three-ways-of-looking-at-ufos/
BIO: Matthew Bowman is Associate Professor of Religion and History at Claremont Graduate University, and was appointed the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies, with a joint appointment in history and religion, in 2019. He is a specialist in American religious history, with particular interests in Mormonism, new religious movements, and the development of the concept of “religion” in the United States. He teaches courses on North American religions and Mormonism in the department of religion, and on the history of the United States in the department of history.
Prior to his arrival at CGU, Bowman held positions at Hampden-Sydney College and Henderson State University. He received his PhD from Georgetown University in 2011, and has regularly appeared in the national media to comment on Mormonism and American religion. He has written for the Washington Post, Slate, The New Republic, and the Huffington Post, and has appeared on MSNBC and NPR.
At the top of the first page of National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena 1988 
Rabbi Michael “Moshe” Rothschild joins Martin Willis for a thought-provoking conversation about UFOs, extraterrestrial life, disclosure, and what confirmation of nonhuman intelligence could mean for religion. Rothschild recounts his own close sighting of a bright orange plasma-like object and explains why he believes some UFOs may represent nonhuman intelligence. They explore whether extraterrestrial life would challenge Judaism, possible interpretations of Ezekiel’s wheel, Kabbalah, consciousness, alleged abduction experiences, government transparency, whistleblower protections, and former Israeli space security chief Chaim Eshed’s controversial claims concerning a Galactic Federation and extraterrestrial cooperation. The conversation ultimately asks whether humanity is ready for disclosure and why an advanced intelligence might choose ambiguity instead of unmistakable open contact.
Filmmaker Luigi Vendittelli, director and producer of S4: The Bob Lazar Story, joins Martin Willis for a spirited and sometimes heated examination of Bob Lazar’s extraordinary and controversial claims. Martin remains deeply skeptical, while Luigi spent four and a half years working with Lazar and believes important parts of his story deserve serious consideration. They discuss Lazar’s disputed education, Los Alamos employment, alleged security clearance and work at S4, inconsistencies in his descriptions of the Sport Model, Papoose Lake, Element 115, the reported test flight, the lack of independently verifiable evidence and whether Lazar should truly be considered a whistleblower. It is a candid conversation between two people with very different perspectives who are willing to challenge one another without pretending they agree.
UFOlogy has always attracted its fair share of academics, and some have managed to incorporate it into their fields of study. Fields such as astronomy, psychology, sociology, history and folklore studies lend themselves easily to the subject, and the literature is filled with books, papers, and articles, often in peer-reviewed journals, by professionals in those fields. Two famous examples are Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Dr. Jacques Vallée. Some were drawn to the subject because of a personal experience (Vallée had a sighting as a teenager) and one of those was Julliard professor of humanities and folklore, Peter Rojcewicz. He focused on Men in Black stories, wrote an article that was published in an academic journal in 1987, and then made the news when he lectured on the subject.
Retired NASA aerospace engineer Greg Martins joins Martin Willis to discuss his 35-year career at Goddard Space Flight Center, a childhood UFO sighting and his claimed extraterrestrial encounters through dreams, meditation and out-of-body experiences. Greg also explores consciousness, the Akashic Records, “home planets,” Oversouls and the experiences described in his book, Star Journey Home. Martin approaches these extraordinary claims with an open mind and gentle skepticism.
Former senior NASA official and space policy expert Mike Gold joins Martin Willis and special co-host, astronomer Marc D’Antonio, for a candid discussion about NASA, UAP and the stigma that continues to discourage serious scientific investigation. Gold explains that NASA’s UAP Independent Study Team was never asked to examine historical cases or analyze UAP evidence; instead, it was tasked with determining whether NASA should investigate the subject and which agency resources could be used. He discusses proposals to employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to search NASA’s enormous archives, add UAP to NASA’s confidential Aviation Safety Reporting System, and independently examine unexplained imagery from the Moon, Mars and space—including the unusual triangular formation photographed during Apollo 17. The conversation also examines allegations of altered or withheld NASA imagery, professional threats faced by academics who merely ask questions about UAP, and why Gold believes stigma creates a national security vulnerability by providing potential cover for adversarial drones. Gold says disclosure should be viewed as a continuing process of releasing and objectively examining data, and he believes increasingly significant material may emerge as the government works through declassification. The discussion concludes with commercial spaceflight, SpaceX, America’s competition with China, manufacturing human tissue and pharmaceuticals in microgravity, the future of Mars exploration, and why greater government transparency could help restore public trust. Join us for a thoughtful, science-based conversation that follows the evidence without assuming the answer.
In our last blog, about a boy who claimed he’d been hit in the chest by a paralyzing beam of light from a UFO, we wrote, “Reports of people suffering physical effects after being zapped by UFOs appears often enough in UFO literature that an author could devote an entire book to them.” Proving our point, we stumbled upon a similar case involving a policeman as we were looking for material for this week’s blog. Whereas the former case only had a single witness, the case we’re looking at this week has multiple witnesses.
Filmmaker Darcy Weir joins Martin Willis and UFO Jack for a candid conversation about psychic phenomena, remote viewing, UFO experiencers, whistleblowers, and separating credible evidence from compelling fiction. They explore Project Stargate, Phil Schneider, Travis Walton, Bob Lazar, government disinformation, secret technology, CE5, Jake Barber, and strange entities reported in cases such as Voronezh and Pascagoula. Visit PodcastUFO.com to explore hundreds of historical UFO articles by Charles Lear and support the show for an ad-free experience.
In last week’s 
Astronomer and veteran photo/video analyst Marc D’Antonio joins Martin Willis to examine highlights from the 40 UAP files released by the government on July 10. Marc analyzes several intriguing images and videos, including possible aerostats, balloon clusters, fast-moving objects, and the widely discussed “star-shaped UFO.” He explains how infrared sensors, diffraction, parallax, camera movement, and missing metadata can make ordinary objects appear extraordinary—and identifies one case that remains a genuine puzzle. Marc also shares his own unexplained observation of two satellite-like lights making a dramatic 40-degree turn.
Historian Samantha Graves briefly shares a new r
Reports of people suffering physical effects after being zapped by UFOs appears often enough in UFO literature that an author could devote an entire book to them. In 1980, there was such a report out of Foxboro, Massachusetts, that was looked into by local investigators. A detailed