Friends,
With the release of The Man Who Challenged Empire now only three days away, I thought I might spend the next few days opening a small window into my own archives.
Nearly twenty years ago, I hosted a radio program called Beyond with Nila, devoted primarily to two subjects that had profoundly altered my own view of the world: the events of September 11 and the UAP (UFO) phenomenon. The conversations were long—typically two hours—and deliberately so. I wanted guests to have time to develop an argument, explain the evidence behind it, and venture well beyond the increasingly abbreviated exchanges that pass for serious inquiry in much of today’s media.
Listening to some of those programs again after all these years has been a fascinating exercise. What struck me most was how many of the questions raised then remain with us today.
Over the next few days, as a prelude to Friday’s documentary, I shall dust off a few voices from those old broadcasts and share brief, roughly fifteen-minute excerpts. Think of them less as trailers for the film than as fragments from a twenty-year conversation that, for me, never really ended. If you'd like to hear these shows in full, I would be happy to share the original two-hour interviews upon request.
I begin with my interview with my friends Cmdr. Ted Muga, USN (Ret.), and his wife, Nelisse. Ted brought an unusually broad professional perspective to the discussion: a degreed structural engineer and a former naval aviator who flew jets from aircraft carriers during Vietnam and later commanded Boeing 707s for Pan Am. His grounding in both engineering and aviation gave him a formidable lens through which to examine the events of 9/11 from multiple perspectives. Both he and Nelisse became deeply involved in questioning those events, with Nelisse emerging as a particularly vigorous activist.
Tomorrow, I shall reach into the archives again for another conversation—this one with my friend Dwain Deets, a physicist and aerospace engineer who served as Director of NASA’s famous Dryden Flight Research Center.
I offer these excerpts for the same reason I made Bob’s film: not as a substitute for anyone’s judgment, but as an invitation to exercise it.
Twenty years have passed. The voices remain. So do the questions.
Here’s a snapshot of Cmdr. Ted Muga and Mrs. Nelisse Muga… 👇