July 18, 2001 - Art Bell
36:48
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Now, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania comes Linda Molten Howe. | ||
| She is a crop circle investigator, actually investigator of all things kind of strange and unusual. | ||
| That's Linda. | ||
| And she recently hopped off to Laos, something she probably should not have done. | ||
| It's a very dangerous place, remaining with a lot of pretty wild life in the area, and a lot of landmines that were planted, frankly, by both sides and remain there. | ||
| So it's a very dangerous place to go. | ||
| Nevertheless, she went. | ||
| She also is very much on to the story that we brought you last night about the incredible occurrences at the radio station in Tennessee, WJKM in Hartsville, Tennessee. | ||
| A remarkable story with photographs of those birds that apparently were scorched out of midair. | ||
| It's just a remarkable story. | ||
| Here from Philadelphia is Linda Moltenhow. | ||
| Linda? | ||
| Hi, Arch. | ||
| Hi there. | ||
| And I do have some developing you today about that story. | ||
| But first, I would like to let those viewers in Arizona know that I'll be in Phoenix Friday night, July 20th, day after tomorrow, to speak about my latest book, Mysterious Lights in Cross Circles. | ||
| The location will be the Vision Class Bookstore at 2212 North Scottsdale Road, just south of Oak Street. | ||
| I will have lots of color slides and video excerpts of Mysterious Lights, Cross Formations, and Scientific Research. | ||
| The program by Mishka Productions begins at 7 p.m. | ||
| And I would like to meet close listeners there. | ||
| For tickets and information, I have a phone number that you can call for ticket information to this Mysterious Lights and Class Circles presentation this Friday, day after tomorrow. | ||
| On July 20th, at the VisionQuest bookstore. | ||
| And that number is 480-70-8543. | ||
| Again, 480-90-8543. | ||
| And can you introduce yourself to me? | ||
| Now, I have updates on that strange Harkville, Tennessee energy burst that damaged the transmitter, phone lines, computer equipment, and killed at least 60 birds at 10.45 a.m. on July 6th at Country Music Radio Station WJKM and the surrounding area. | ||
| Today, I learned from Ted Randall that dead burned wings were found all over Hartsville City Park, and that is a diameter of at least a mile. | ||
| In fact, in the afternoon of that same day, power surges and gimmicks were reported at an insurance company more than a mile from WJKM. | ||
| Oh, look, yes, and this afternoon, I talked with Ted Randall and Dave Flewy, owner of Dave's Covert Surveillance in Hartsville, who provides electronic camera and video security monitoring equipment for businesses. | ||
| My news reports about the Hartsville phenomena are posted in the environment section of my website, www.earthbiles.com, along with several photographs of some of the many dead birds found scattered all over the large, mile-long city park. | ||
| On July 6th in the afternoon, Jay Flewy was in an insurance company mile away from WJKM later in the afternoon when more electronic interference occurred. | ||
| Again, huh? | ||
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unidentified
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The only thing that I noticed was that the lights had dimmed once. | |
| The computers kind of flickered. | ||
| And I said, what in the world was that? | ||
| For one of the girls in there. | ||
| And she said, oh, we've been having this problem all day. | ||
| I don't really know what time it was. | ||
| It was probably in the late afternoon sometime when this happened. | ||
| She mentioned something about that the electrician was already out here once. | ||
| And when I was there, actually, the electrician came in and looked at the breaker box. | ||
| And this insurance company is how far from the radio station and the newspaper? | ||
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unidentified
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It would probably be willing to say maybe a mile and a half. | |
| A mile and a half? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, a mile and a half. | |
| And had they had any computer equipment actually go out or? | ||
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unidentified
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No, it wasn't smoked. | |
| Yep, there was nothing there that was smoked. | ||
| It just there was a real groaning sound like Ted had described. | ||
| It was like a. | ||
| So they had a morning impact out there, as there had been at the radio station and the newspaper at the center of town. | ||
| And then you're there in the afternoon and you're experiencing first-hand scene lights. | ||
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Hearing what the electrician has to say. | |
| They couldn't figure that out. | ||
| It baffled the heck out of them. | ||
| Ted, you're there. | ||
| Why do you think the grounding efforts that you've done are not working? | ||
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unidentified
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I believe because the grounding efforts to the radio station and normal grounding on the telephone system and all of that, the grounds were burned in two. | |
| I was telling Linda, we have a static drain choke on the tower. | ||
| We also have a lighting choke. | ||
| Did it burn those up? | ||
| No. | ||
| I believe a lot of the energy entered through the antenna system, but there was, it's not just a cut and dry thing. | ||
| In other words, you're not dealing with everything's properly grounded. | ||
| I mean, Dave will account for that. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Everything is grounded and grounded and grounded and bypassed and grounded some more, you know. | ||
| So it's not a lack of a ground, you know. | ||
| I don't think so either. | ||
| It was also suggested by a physicist that it was probably a lightning strike that would do this. | ||
| And my comment was, is that, I mean, I've dealt with lightning over and over again, putting stations back on the end and repairing all sorts of damage from lightning. | ||
| And I've seen dead animals and things around tower sites. | ||
| But there was no lightning on Friday. | ||
| Well, they were talking about clear day, clear sky lightning, a phenomenon that takes place. | ||
| But even then, these birds were from one end of city park to the other, which is how many square. | ||
| At least a mile in diameter. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| I actually picked up one of the dead birds several days after I had, apparently this had happened. | ||
| Ted had told me about it. | ||
| I went down there and did some investigating. | ||
| I mean, it didn't look like a lot of the trees that had been burned, looks like kind of like sunburn, is what it looked like. | ||
| It didn't look like kind of like microwave radiation burn, because I've done a lot of experimenting with that. | ||
| It did not look like microwave. | ||
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unidentified
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No, it did not look like microwave radiation. | |
| It looked like that there could be a possibility of electrostatic discharge. | ||
| When I looked at the bird, it looked like it had been fried. | ||
| And, Pet, this morning at 4 a.m. on, you had another power surge at the radio station that caused more problems. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I'm just very curious. | ||
| Did you lose power in Hartford this morning or do you know? | ||
| Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. | ||
| And I called the Sheriff's Department. | ||
| I knocked out audio cameras and had to reach out my clock. | ||
| It was about 4, 4:30 in the morning. | ||
| And I called the Sheriff's Department. | ||
| She said it only went off for a couple of seconds. | ||
| Over here, it went off for about a minute. | ||
| And did anybody know of anything that occurred? | ||
| No. | ||
| Sheriff's Department didn't know either. | ||
| No, and I've not been able to get an answer that there was a gentleman from Tri-County Electric out to the station today that said they're replacing all the wires, all the feed to City Park. | ||
| And he couldn't tell me why they were doing that. | ||
| And I asked him why I went out this morning at 4.30. | ||
| And once again, he didn't know anything about it. | ||
| We made the decision that we're moving all the computers and everything to Cedar Vine Manor. | ||
| And we can't continue this. | ||
| This morning we lost a couple of networks cards and we were down for a long period of time. | ||
| Well, baby, I wonder what that would have caused you there with your cameras and whatnot. | ||
| So we've got to move. | ||
| We're just going to have to get it out of there until we can figure out what the problem is. | ||
| And the bottom line is that there was a dramatic upsurge of this on July 6th that caused so many problems, but you had been having these power surges before July 6th, so you've been since July 6th. | ||
| Franklin has something that falls in the category of seismic activity, whatever the source was. | ||
| And even today, July 18th, you have yet another power surge that causes even more equipment problems, and you're going to have to move, and yet no one has an answer to the power surges before and after July 6th. | ||
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unidentified
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Well, maybe it's just that we haven't asked the right questions or tickled the right person to get the answers. | |
| Somebody knows what's going on. | ||
| And to create that kind of energy field would take something just astronomical as far as the energy that would take to generate that kind of energy. | ||
| Today, I talked about the July 6th incident with Professor Michael Kelly, electrical engineer and physicist at Cornell University, who researches the Earth's ionosphere and was a consultant on the construction of the HARP facility in Bacona, Alaska. | ||
| That was built to transmit bursts of microwave energy at the ionosphere in order to study it. | ||
| Professor Kelly looked at myEarthBios.com news report about HARTS Bill while we were on the phone, and this was his first reaction. | ||
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unidentified
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All right, we're going to do it. | |
| And how much energy would it take to cause all of the effects that were noticed in both of those buildings? | ||
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unidentified
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Oh, shoot. | |
| About the only thing I could think of that could have that sort of energy density is just like time man-made. | ||
| We're excluding nuclear weapons. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| Took a lot of energy to use. | ||
| It would be not too easy to calculate that. | ||
| So whatever happened in Hartsville, Tennessee was a lot of energy concentrated where those two buildings were. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, we call it in. | |
| And in the work that you've done with exploring the ionospheric layer from RSE and other places, have you ever consulted or been involved with any information directly about what the Pentagon may be working on in terms of EMT pulse weapons? | ||
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unidentified
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No more than you would by reading the paper. | |
| Do you know of anybody who has even experimented in a military way from the pulses of energy from satellites or planes? | ||
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unidentified
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No, I guess to the extent that there are directed energy weapons programs. | |
| And, you know, those are, I guess, thought to be space-based weapons. | ||
| That doesn't work much of that. | ||
| So, you know, directed energy beams, they don't do great. | ||
| So they're sort of vapping-related things. | ||
| You can put a lot of energy into something like that, but it's pretty hard to propagate it in the thick atmosphere. | ||
| You know, laser beams should be used because their light goes through the atmosphere. | ||
| But this is not a laser beam. | ||
| So. | ||
| And it wouldn't be a laser beam because. | ||
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unidentified
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Well, laser beams, if they're going to be energy intensive, they've got to be tiny. | |
| This obviously wasn't tiny when it covered a big area. | ||
| So the laser itself couldn't be used to transmit an enormous amount of energy that could sort of burst over a wider area. | ||
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unidentified
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No, the laser beam can carry its energy, and the reason it's susceptible is that the energy is focused in a very tiny place. | |
| That doesn't mean there's a lot of energy there. | ||
| If you focus a joule of energy down into a few microns, it'll burn a hole for anything, but it's not going to have a huge effect. | ||
| It's got right in a one little spot. | ||
| So you've got to be careful when you talk about energy density. | ||
| There can be high energy density, but almost no real energy. | ||
| Is there anything about the witnesses' descriptions, both in the newspaper building and in the radio station, of hearing what sounded like a power hum surge followed by the light, and then another surge followed by light again? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, anything that sounds like to me that I've heard of would be ball-like, localized plasma bar that God knows how it formed. | |
| It's a real mystery. | ||
| And it, you know, it can sort of waft around eerily, supporting itself by electromagnetic forces, I guess. | ||
| It's a very mysterious thing to me, anyway. | ||
| And I wouldn't be at all surprised if that didn't make a sound. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Would it cause a flash of light in the building as that woman said it was like seeing a block of light on the wall opposite of her? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, that sounds more like a flash of lightning. | |
| Ball lightning could do that if it's moving around. | ||
| It could go in and out of your field of view and carry that effect. | ||
| And what would provoke the formation of ball lightning on a clear, sunny day? | ||
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unidentified
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I know, but it happens. | |
| It's rare. | ||
| But sitting there with a lightning rod, one or seat in the arrow, that's all that power is. | ||
| It's never going to happen. | ||
| That would happen on a radio station, I would think. | ||
| any reason why the birds' wings, as opposed to their feet or something, why the birds' wings would burn off? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, you know, like a lightning rod itself or any object that's pointed, like the tip of the, anything that has any pointedness to it, when an electric field's around it, it concentrates on that point. | |
| And you can imagine the feathers would have that property. | ||
| So if this was some sort of discharge, then the tips of these wings would be more susceptible. | ||
| And of course, the top of a radio tower, because the electric field gets concentrated by the fact that things are pointing. | ||
| In a further development, reporter Christy Overstreet at Channel 5 in Nashville told Ted Randall that on Saturday, July 7th, the day after the mysterious power surge in Hartsville, an equally mysterious seismic disturbance was confirmed in Franklin, Tennessee, about 18 miles from Hartsville. | ||
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Lippy Valley Authority yesterday reported to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency that there was indeed seismic activity in the county on Saturday, July 7th. | |
| Between 10 and 10.30 that night, 100% called authorities to report what they thought was either an earthquake or an explosion. | ||
| TBA reported that seismic activity registered 2.6 on the Richter scale with an epicenter of four miles southeast of the city of Franklin. | ||
| And it happened at exactly 10.05 p.m. | ||
| And that was as afternoon, Art. | ||
| Holy smokes, Linda. | ||
| You know, I'm not a physicist, but I don't. | ||
| Look, ball lightning or lightning itself would be more localized. | ||
| It wouldn't cover a mile. | ||
| Yes, the size of this that has grown as they have examined the park area around the station. | ||
| For people who might not be familiar with Hartsville, it covers many acres, this downtown Central Park. | ||
| And the radio station covers five of the acres sort of in the center of the park. | ||
| And at first, they thought that the fried birds were confined around the perimeter of the station. | ||
| In fact, they have found these birds from one end of the city park all the way to the other, covering a mile. | ||
| And clearly, now the days of Floyd being in the insurance company in the afternoon when they were still experiencing power surges that the electrical people who were out there were completely baffled and could not explain. | ||
| So far to date, no one really has a complete, successful explanation for what has happened. | ||
| And everyone agrees that if this is a natural phenomenon, let's say, it needs to be understood because if this effect on birds, what about the kids that might be playing in the jungle gym and the monkey bars? | ||
| There's a big and elaborate kids park right nearby. | ||
| Linda, hold on. | ||
| We're going to take a break here at the bottom of the aisle and we'll be back. | ||
| When we come back, we can talk about loud. | ||
| Yeah, let's do that. | ||
| Linda Montow is here, and the mystery deepens in Tennessee, to be sure. | ||
| I'm Marthelle. | ||
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This is Coast to Coast A.M. Listening to the strangest story of wondering where it all went wrong. | |
| Oh, so long, so long. | ||
| Oh, so long, so long, so long. | ||
| Part of the most... | ||
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All my dreams are gone Fear from far away Jesus don't feel the reason I feel the wind and the sun and the rain I feel the day to come | |
| on, baby I feel the pain of my head I feel the way I'm going to never die I'm going to be the baby I'm there Want to take a ride? | ||
| Call our bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033. | ||
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| And to call out on the 2003 International Line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903. | ||
| This is Coaster Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nine. | ||
| For my money, what happened at Tennessee was some sort of Tesla device or weapon. | ||
| And I guess I can do that on the talk show host. | ||
| I can stick my neck out. | ||
| Linda Molten Howe will be right back. | ||
| All right, once again, Linda Molten Howe, who is now going to tell us a little bit about Laos, because that's from whence she has just come. | ||
| Linda, it's all yours. | ||
| Well, first of all, one unexpected thing that started the trip was we went from Philadelphia to Chicago and then up over the Pole. | ||
| And you can watch the map, the electronic map in your seat in your house. | ||
| And as we were dropping down over Asia, all of a sudden, the pilot came on the loudspeaker in that too casual, too quiet a voice that makes me nervous when I hear a pilot trying to sound casual. | ||
| And he said, ladies and gentlemen, I just wanted you to know that we've put an inquiry into the Beijing Airport because we don't think that we have enough gas after fighting these headwinds to make it to Hong Kong. | ||
| And the next thing we hear is, yes, we have received permission to land in Beijing, the old Beijing. | ||
| And we came down that runway, and I was struggling to see out any window I could, this strange, mysterious city that we have so many human rights issues with. | ||
| And when the airport plane pulled up, it really was sort of strange because every direction that you look, everything had the same kind of rectangular shape in little buildings, and there were some military trucks out along the street, something you wouldn't normally see, let's say, in an American airport. | ||
| And when they pulled up to stop, the pilot had asked for the front door to be open for some fresh air, and I hurried up there, three or four other guys from Australia did, just to look out the door and to see. | ||
| And pretty soon, the Beijing airport, he came up and he said in English that it was absolutely mandatory that they must close the door. | ||
| And the stewardesses from America were saying and protesting and saying the captain wanted the door open. | ||
| And all of a sudden, the Australians and I were looking at each other and saying, look, we've lost one airplane to them. | ||
| Let's not get them involved in taking this airplane. | ||
| And after a while, they shut that door. | ||
| Nobody understood why the door had to be shut. | ||
| But we did get our gas, and we did get to leave and fly into Hong Kong, which is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen on the planet. | ||
| Oh, isn't Hong Kong beautiful? | ||
| Absolutely gorgeous. | ||
| And a city that they could describe as being the largest mall in the world because it actually has silver, gleaming, clean escalators that take you from the bottom of the city to the mid-level to the high. | ||
| And I was so impressed. | ||
| I went into the botanical gardens in the zoo, and they were so clean. | ||
| Absolutely, everything was immaculate. | ||
| The city is extremely well ordered. | ||
| And it had, to me, the tone for the rest of the trip, which was even though flying to Hanoi and then into the N Tian Laos, and we were going into a communist country that is one of the poorest on the earth, there was still a quality of the same thing of people who were extremely innocent and sweet and always wanting to help. | ||
| And it sort of broke my heart when we got into Chippen from Vientiane to see some of the bombs that are propped up with skull and crossbones on them with the letters USA. | ||
| And they're all over the place. | ||
| And as we began part of our trip, we also saw those big clamshells that opened up the U.S. dropped 24 hours a day for 11 years on Route 9 going through Laos to the Vietnam border and the Chehochi Minh Trail because that was the transportation access route that the Viet Cong were using during what they call the American War when | ||
| you were there, not the Vietnam War. | ||
| They call it the American War. | ||
| And to be in a land and to head off on that Route 9 and see the faces of these people who are so beautiful and there is an innocence and they never had anything really to do with the war, but they took the repercussions of the droppings of all of those bombs and the bombies. | ||
| And I wanted to point out some ironies and to start out with a discussion that I ended up having with a man from Australia who was a little bit more. | ||
| One little note, Linda. | ||
| We would not have been in Lawrence and Cambodia had it not been for the crown being there. | ||
| Yeah, but what I'm saying is that when I realized that the land that we ended up going through and the people suffered such a destructive consequence for those 11 years simply because there was this Route 9 trade route, it breaks your heart. | ||
| It really breaks your heart. | ||
| And the trail of the most recent sightings have been as recently as in the last couple of months there and in the fall where people have seen what they describe as being between six feet and 15 feet and the 15 feet was described as five meters and may have the arm and the hand extended of a creature that has a human face, | ||
| long hair extending from the top of the head down to the back, mid-back, that glows or is kind of a reddish color, and that a man only 30 meters away, about 90 to 100 feet, watched a very tall, | ||
| one of these hairy creatures in a village called Villa Bouille in that area, reach up to a leaf and bring the leaf down over its head in a rainstorm, like using it as an umbrella is the way the interpreter translated the explanation. | ||
| And these are the kinds of descriptions from traps to being seen in the jungle and going all the way back to GI descriptions during the Vietnam War. | ||
| And in terms of the research that we have been doing for, this is a Discovery Channel series. | ||
| It will be called Asian Enigma. | ||
| It will begin, the first broadcast in the series will begin November 21st on the Discovery Channel. | ||
| And this whole trip in Laos will be in one of the programs having to do with our search for what is variously known as the wild forest people of Laos. | ||
| And they come in many shapes, many heights, but there have been lore about these creatures going back all the way to the first and second centuries. | ||
| In Chinese literature, there are descriptions about, quote, gigantic apes in the far south of China. | ||
| A Ming Dynasty dictionary mentions a yellow-haired ape with a human face and with human feet that they called Sing Sing. | ||
| And this was known in the area that extended down from China to what we would know today as Vietnam and Laos. | ||
| And in the war, there were very important stories that came out of the Vietnam War, in which in one, there was a downed helicopter and it had four crew members. | ||
| And the four crew Members were found dead, obviously as a result of the crash. | ||
| But there were four North Vietnamese soldiers, and when they were examined, there was not a single bullet or any combat wounds on the North Vietnamese. | ||
| But each of those North Vietnamese had their backs broken. | ||
| And when the rescue patrol was doing the examination, some of the Laotians that were with them looked around and murmured what was translated as the hairy, meaning was responsible. | ||
| And then, in 1868, there was another incident. | ||
| It was only about 100 kilometers north of this first helicopter crash. | ||
| And this time it was a U.S. fighter plane. | ||
| The pilot was shot down. | ||
| He had ejected. | ||
| And he was found hanging by his parachute in a tree above the river. | ||
| He was very badly wounded, sort of semi-conscious. | ||
| But our guys got there in time for him to tell them that the two North Vietnamese that were found dead near the foot of a tree near him, where he was hanging in his parachute, they, again, had no visible wounds. | ||
| And the pirates said that, quote, a big guerrilla had killed the two Vietnamese below, and their backs were also broken. | ||
| Now, these are the sort of the context and history of many reports. | ||
| And then there is the famous Minnesota Iceman, which is a very complicated and amazing story. | ||
| But it's because of the work of a Dr. Bernard Huffelman back in December of 1968. | ||
| He heard about this farm in Minnesota that was supposed to have some kind of a humanate creature frozen in a block of ice on a farm. | ||
| And he got the science writer back then, Ivan Sanderson, to go with him to that farm. | ||
| And the scientist, known really basically on a worldwide basis as the leading cryptozoologist of the day, he spent three days doing meticulous notes, drawings, even photographs, did measurements as best he could through the ice. | ||
| And he wrote up in a book that was published called L'Homme de Neanderthal et toujeur vivant, which is the man or the Neanderthal man is always living. | ||
| And it was about this creature that he described as being a hominid, meaning it would walk on two legs. | ||
| And he got an artist to take all of the sketches that he had made in the ice and then try to take the laying down position and raise it up, as artists can do, reconstituting the lying down position for an erect position. | ||
| And this drawing from Dr. Hovelman's work in 1968 is a drawing that Bang Productions out of Hong Kong arranged with one of the Laos Department of Administrative Departments to have distributed in one of the villages that we went to. | ||
| And it is so interesting because both in our work and in other scientists' work, people have a positive reaction to this carry hominid. | ||
| And all of this is to say that there is a current as well as a past context for these tall Bigfoot Sasquatch type creatures. | ||
| And they are mostly described in an area that is near the Vietnam border on the Laos side that climatologists and geologists tell us has remained unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. | ||
| Even the ice ages did not touch it. | ||
| And when you start moving into this country, there is a primeval feeling about it. | ||
| It's as if anything could be up in those rugged mountains, and the villagers will tell you that no one goes into those mountains. | ||
| And it was in 1992 that a team of scientists trying to explore in that very difficult area found three mammals that had never been identified before. | ||
| So even in the decade of the 90s, mammals have been being discovered there that no one knew. | ||
| And one of the reasons why the UXO issue is so important is because there was all of this bombing along the road, and so much of the land now is considered off-limits to everybody. | ||
| Including you, I take it. | ||
| Well, we... | ||
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unidentified
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Ha, ha, ha. | |
| And it was an amazing ride. | ||
| It was actually fun in a strange, rugged sort of way. | ||
| And I did get to see Leeches up close for the first time, not on me, but on the road. | ||
| And the Laotians could demonstrate how if you put your finger down anywhere near them, they will make their strange looping crawl right to anything that is warm-blooded. | ||
| But we were lucky. | ||
| It was the beginning of the rainy season, but we had a lot of dry air. | ||
| We had gorgeous sunsets. | ||
| We were not in a lot of physical discomfort. | ||
| We were moving, however, on a road that on either side, you had this sense that if you decided to get out of the road and go in any direction, you might run into problems. | ||
| And during a stretch where the driver was having trouble even getting this multi-geared Soviet truck through a very muddy stretch where it was low and there was some water gathered, we all got out and we were walking along the road and it was so muddy in this one particular stretch. | ||
| And I thought, well, I'm just going to go six feet or eight feet off to the right up on some grass. | ||
| And as I moved up on the grassy shoulder, one of the Laotians came up behind me. | ||
| And simultaneously, I knew that this person was behind me, but in front of me, coming faster than I thought it was possible to move, was this slithering turquoise and black snake moving at a tremendously rapid rate. | ||
| I had to jump over it. | ||
| And as I jumped over the snake, the Laosian came running up, said to me in English, that is one of Laos' most poisonous snakes. | ||
| So when you left the muddy road trying to get out of the mud just to go up on the shoulder, not going too far because you didn't want to get into UXO, I even ran into a poisonous snake. | ||
| So it is a land that is truly art. | ||
| It is as it's as untouched and primeval as any place that I've ever been. | ||
| Well, if the climatologists, Linda, say that it's been untouched for all this time, it hasn't changed as everything else around it has geographically, from a climate point of view, then is there any reason to expect that one of these creatures could still be there? | ||
| If the land of time hasn't touched, then why not? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the bombing and the UXO, depending upon the intelligence of these creatures, might affect the fact that people are not going into the world. | ||
| But these creatures, with sensibilities of their own, maybe different kinds of eyesight and hearing, they may be able to work around some of the stuff that was dropped there. | ||
| And I think it would be very interesting. | ||
| It's short. | ||
| I've taken just a short from a very long conversation with this demolition expert from Australia who was based in Chippenham. | ||
| And here are two big ironies. | ||
| One, 30 years ago, he was working in the Australian Air Force loading bombs to be dropped on the very area of Laos in Vietnam in the Ho Chi Minh Trail. | ||
| And now he's back 30 years later working for a group to help a corporation that wants to open up a copper mine in Laos where there is the purest copper they say that they've ever found. | ||
| And so for money as a motive, he is back digging up bombs. | ||
| As he said, maybe some of these are ones that I loaded in a plane 30 years ago. | ||
| And the second thing about this IRA, that if we had met him before we got into that Soviet truck and took off for this nine-hour, unbelievable trip on Route 9, going up toward the Vietnam border, and having to come back the next day when we finally met him, we might not, we said to ourselves, if we had heard what we listened to that night over drinks and dinner, we might never have made the Route 9 trip. | ||
| But it was extremely worthwhile. | ||
| And this fall, when I know the broadcast date, everybody is going to be amazingly entertained by this trip. | ||
| We did find some hard evidence. | ||
| We are working on scientific areas. | ||
| And all of this has to be saved for the actual broadcast in the fall. | ||
| But I'd like to just share a brief excerpt from a man who has lived around bombs and demolition issues his entire presidential. | ||
| Very short, very short on time limit. | ||
| Yes, and this is his answering me, what are the bombies, those big open clamshells that drop 200 to 250 of these things in the air where they would explode into shrapnel. | ||
| And here is Tom Roberts from Australia working right now in Lowell. | ||
|
unidentified
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Bombies are sort of a French derivative, a French word that Laos Us for Blue 26s. | |
| They're usually about 200 to 270 come in a CBU, a cluster bomb unit container, quite two big clamshells. | ||
| When it comes off the aircraft, the clamshells are blown apart and all these little bomblets are thrown through the air in a great big pattern the ground. | ||
| They air arm, when they hit the ground they're supposed to go off. | ||
| Some of them are designed to go off maybe an hour later or a couple hours later. | ||
| And on top of that, there was a very high failure rate, probably up to about 20% of all the ones that were ever dropped. | ||
| So there is a hell of a lot of them still lying around the place and the areas that they bombed. | ||
| In about nine months, we found about a thousand lots in about 46 hectares, I think, we cleared. | ||
| Something like that. |
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