Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files on Radio Wasteland

Chauncey: All right. Mack. So tell us … let’s talk about your show, Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files. Just the fact that it’s associated with the military definitely makes it interesting.

Mack Maloney: I was never in the military but the two co-hosts that I have, that we have on the show, Commander Cobra and this guy named Juan-Juan are both military veterans. We talk to a lot of veterans. We have them call in and tell us their stories of UFO sightings, of paranormal activity that they experienced while they were in the service. And we also get into archival stories. Stories from the 50s, 40s, and 50s, about military interacting with UFOs. There’s plenty of stories out there to tell having to do with UFOs vis-a-vis the military. So we never really run out of them. So that’s basically what the show is about.

Chauncey: In your estimation, did veterans and military people, do they experience more paranormal, more UFO stuff than the general population?

Mack: Well, I think, once again, it’s like we were talking about with the celebrities and with rock stars. I think because it seems like the more you travel, the more likely you’re going to have some kind of a UFO experience, and so it seems that way. And we talk to them a lot. But the interesting thing too, and another thing we do on the show, is we have this petition trying to convince the military that anyone who had a UFO sighting while they’re in the service, a lot of stories that we hear is that a superior officer will come up to them and basically threaten them into silence. You’ll lose your pension, you’ll be demoted, you’ll whatever. They’ll make it hard for you if you talk about what you saw.

So what we’re trying to do is to have the military give these people blanket immunity and have them come out and talk about what they saw. And if that ever happened, we would have all this … we’d have a tidal wave of more information, more data about UFOs, and we believe that the more information you get, and the more scientific approach that you take to UFOs, that puts you that much closer to figuring out exactly what’s going on.

Chauncey: How do you even get that to happen? How do you even petition to have that happen? I mean I understand how-

Mack: We just talk about it a lot on the radio show and at some point, we’re going to actually going to file a petition and try to send it to the Pentagon and see what they say. We know that it’s pie in the sky, but that doesn’t mean you don’t try, you know?

Kara: Right.

Chauncey: Right. Yeah. Yeah. So is there any … of course there are sightings by pilots and stuff like that, but is there anything that stood out to you as being a consistency across a lot of the stories that maybe most people aren’t really noticing. Something that you said, “Hey, this is wild that a lot of these guys are saying this.” Anything like that?

Mack: We talk to a lot of military pilots and airline pilots because a lot of airline pilots are simply military pilots who have moved on to another job, but they see them all the time. And pilots, in our opinion, pilots are the best witnesses of UFO events than anyone else because they’re flying around up there all the time. They’ve seen everything. They know what Venus looks like in the daytime. They know what the moon looks like. They know what oil fires look like and when they see something that they don’t know what it is, then you know that’s a UFO.

The downside of that is, as we said before, in the military you’re certainly not supposed to talk about it openly. Same thing with airline pilots. We have a good friend of ours who’s on frequently, flies for American airlines. He says, “you know, we see these things every once in a while. We don’t know what they are. They certainly don’t look like anything of this earth,” but they know that if you actually put a formal … if you talk about the sighting in a formal manner-

Chauncey: Yeah. If you leave a paper trail, yeah.

Mack: Paperwork and so on. They know when it’s the next time for you to get a promotion, if you are up against someone who never put in a UFO report, they are going to get it. So that’s why a lot of airline pilots are tight-lipped about it. But one quick example just to show you, that more airplanes in the sky equal seeing more UFO reports. Someone told me that after 9-11, the number of UFO reports made by military pilots went up. It skyrocketed and had nothing to do with 9-11. What it had to do with was after 9-11, we had a lot of jet fighters flying around for two or three years afterward, so they’d be in place in case they had to prevent another 9-11 type event. So once again more eyes on the sky, more UFO sightings.

Chauncey: And probably more willing to talk about something that you weren’t sure what it was because of the fear of-

Kara: If you see something, say something.

Chauncey: Right, exactly.

Mack: And never since that, they call it the Tic-Tac video that the Navy put out at the end of last year. I think that … and they have actually told their pilots to report these things to actually make, fill out a report. Now the Navy’s going to be in charge of those and they’re going to be classified. We’ll probably never see them, or we’re not going to see them anytime soon. But at least releasing that video and talking about it, I think is one step in the right direction, but still, a long journey to go.

USS Nimitz ‘Tic Tac’ UFO: Declassified Video from History.com