The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 31 - Mark Rosney

Feb. 17, 2010 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

58:22

Edition 31 - Mark Rosney

Howard is joined by Mark Rosney from Para-Projects, Mark is one of the authors of ABegginers Guide To Paranormal Investigations.

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for returning to the show, and thank you very much for the email traffic and your messages of goodwill and support about my shoulder injury.
	It's a long story, I'll keep it very short.
	You might remember on the last edition of The Unexplained, the last full edition, I told you the story of how before traveling to South Africa, I slipped on the ice in London and injured my shoulder very painfully.
	Well, we thought at the time I hadn't broken anything.
	Now I've had an MRI scan and we find that I have got a break and some muscle damage and potentially I might need an operation for it.
	I think we're all hoping and praying, me most of all, that I don't have to.
	I'm having these cortisone injections into the shoulder and we're hoping that's going to do the trick.
	But wow, what a start to 2010.
	Thank you for your good thoughts about that.
	Thank you for the donations to the show through the PayPal link at www.theunexplained.tv.
	If you want to make a donation to this show, there is a very good reason for it.
	And I'll tell you quickly why you should.
	At least think about it.
	Independent media is becoming, I won't say squeezed out, but it's becoming difficult for those of us who are in the independent sector here.
	You know, we're not supported by big organizations, big corporations.
	Now, in America and Canada to an extent, there is a great diversity of radio programming because there's so much media there.
	That is not the case in Europe, where more and more power and more and more control over broadcasting seems to be centered in fewer, fewer hands.
	Business-wise, that's not a bad thing, but we need to keep the independent sector alive.
	So if you find a webcast or a podcast, something that you like out there, please, please support it.
	It's very, very important that you do, because it's all about diversity, different voices, and different stories getting out there.
	So please go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, if you would like to make a donation.
	The Pocket Gods.
	Mentioned them before, they are the band discovered by British broadcaster John Peel in 2005, who recorded a song about me on their last album.
	And I've done the intro for their new album, which is out on the 1st of April.
	Please give that your support.
	I did the intro and the outro to it.
	I rather like Richard Burton on The War of the Worlds, but I'm not quite in that man's league, I don't think.
	The album, I've got a review copy of it here.
	It's very good.
	So it's The Pocket Gods.
	The album's called Plan Nub Behind the Fridge.
	I'm on it.
	I also get a credit for myself and The Unexplained.
	And guys, I hope you do really well with it.
	Plan Nub Behind the Fridge by The Pocket Gods out on the 1st of April, 2010.
	You can get it on download, or you can buy the disc.
	Put the name into a search engine.
	That is that.
	On this show, we're going to be talking about a beginner's guide to paranormal investigation by Jebby Robinson, Rob Bethel, and Mark Rosney.
	Three paranormal investigators who between them have 35 years or so experience in the northwest of England.
	This is a good book.
	I get a lot of publishers sending me books and suggestions for please interview my client about his or her book.
	This one was a no-brainer.
	As soon as I got the book, I realized we have to have these guys on.
	So we're about to, I'll have Mark Rosney, one of the three authors on here, to talk about this guide.
	It's everything from cryptozoology to ghost hunting to UFO spotting and how to get the good stuff.
	How to get good, reliable, credible information.
	And also a few reality checks in here, just flicking through the book.
	It's very good.
	Beginner's Guide to Paranormal Investigation, Mark Rosney coming soon.
	Just to tidy this up, you remember that we did a little edition of The Unexplained that we put on the front page a couple of weeks ago about the lights in the sky over Norway.
	Richard C. Hoagland will be coming on the show very soon to present his findings about this.
	They will, as we say here in England, I think blow your socks off when you hear them.
	He's just been presenting them to an expo conference in Los Angeles.
	And as soon as he gets back, he's going to come on this show.
	So that is, as they say on television in the UK, still to come.
	Okay, let's get to a beginner's guide to paranormal investigation.
	Author Mark Rosney is online to The Unexplained.
	Hello, Mark.
	Hello, Howard.
	Thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
	Now, I just was saying a little second ago that I do get a lot of books sent to me and a lot of publishers getting in touch saying, we think it'd be a very good idea of you to get in touch with our author and put them on so that they can promote the book.
	Not all of them get on here, I have to say, but I've just been saying that yours was a bit of a no-brainer because it is so good.
	It is a beginner's guide to paranormal investigation.
	I think it's about 400 pages or so, but very comprehensive.
	Actually, it's more than that, isn't it?
	No, it's 300 pages.
	What gave you the idea for it?
	Well, it's funny how this came about, actually.
	We were involved in a program called Spook School, and one of the publishers at Amberly actually chanced on one of the episodes and rang us up out of the blue and said, would you like to write a book?
	So we'd always have this burning ambition to write a book.
	And so we said, yes, yes, please.
	And so then they said, what sort of book would you like us to write?
	So what sort of book would you like to write?
	And I said, well, one thing I thought would be very useful would be a beginner's guide, you know, because there's a lot of people starting out in paranormal sort of investigation or they're interested in the paranormal.
	And I remember the pain that I went through when I first started.
	And I'm sure the lads are the same, you know, Rob and Jebby, the co-authors of this book.
	And we sort of thought, well, wouldn't it be great if we could write the sort of book that we would have liked to have had when we started out?
	And that was the premise of how the book came about.
	I think it's a great idea.
	And, you know, you guys are experienced.
	You've been on television.
	According to the blurb about you here, you've been going for 35 years.
	That's not bad, though.
	That's pretty good.
	What is it that draws somebody into an interest in the paranormal like this?
	I know I want to talk because I've been interested all my life in these things, but what is it that drew you in?
	Well, personally, I had an experience in 1978.
	It was New Year of 1978.
	I remember very well.
	And it was basically I had a UFO sighting.
	I actually witnessed this weird thing just flying through the sky over the skies of Runcorn, and that really got my interest.
	Now, what I actually saw turned out to be a re-entering Russian booster rocket, but it piqued my interest in the paranormal.
	And all of a sudden, I wanted to find out as much as I could about it.
	Now, in those days, and I know this from personal experience, it was very hard to be able to make reports and verify reports like that.
	If we talk about UFOs for starters, there were very, very few people who were involved in this field.
	And from what I found back then, because maybe we're about the same sort of age, it wasn't always easy to get hold of them.
	There was no internet, there were only newsletters, and it wasn't the network that it used to be.
	But it was.
	Or rather, it wasn't the network that it came to be.
	That's right, yeah.
	I remember trying to report my sighting.
	I happened to chance on, there was a thing in a newspaper saying, you know, Bufora Hotline.
	And I think they were the only organisation going in Britain at the time.
	That's right.
	I tracked down a lady called Jenny Randalls, and I think she's still around, too.
	Oh, she is, yes, yeah.
	Okay, so here we have a man who's got a bit of a track record, but one sighting that turns out not to be what you thought it might have been.
	Actually, if that had been me, that might have put me off.
	Well, I've got this sort of like a perverse sort of thing in my mind.
	You know, I like to solve problems.
	I've always been like that.
	So to me, going into the paranormal, if I get an answer either way, I'm happy.
	Not a lot of people are.
	Some people feel quite crushed if they find out a solution to some sort of paranormal activity, alleged paranormal activity they'd be having.
	But I like to solve problems.
	That's my remit for the whole thing.
	So what did you do then?
	After 1978, well, I just read everything I could possibly lay my hands on.
	And much to my parents' annoyance, by the way.
	As they said, it was a stupid thing to get into.
	You should concentrate on real serious things.
	But as I say, I persevered.
	And it was after, I think it was about 10 years later, I think my first proper case was in 1988.
	And again, that was a UFO case.
	I was heavily involved in UFOs at that point.
	And I only became actively involved because I got quite frustrated with some of the stuff that I read.
	You know, people were basically saying, oh, I've investigated this this way and that way.
	And I was asking questions like, you know, well, have you looked into this?
	Have you looked into that?
	And the books I read, there wasn't any detail like that in there.
	And a few of the people I actually met that were investigating, they'd missed some very, very big things.
	It's avenues of research to look into.
	So that's why I got involved.
	It was out of sheer frustration, I think.
	And you said this first case was in 1988.
	Tell me what it was.
	Right.
	Well, it was a friend, a fellow investigator from Runcorn.
	And I wouldn't like to mention his name unless I get his permission.
	So he's retired out of the business now.
	But yeah, it was a very, very strange case, actually.
	He'd gotten wind of somebody that claimed that they'd seen a UFO flying overhead, very, very low, and something had fallen off the UFO and ended up in a field.
	And this chap retrieved the object and then he hid it because at that time, you know, there was a lot of paranoia going on about men in black and black ops and military people coming in.
	And do you think that kind of stuff really does happen?
	I'm not sure about that.
	Okay, so he's this guy who says that he's found something, hides the something and wants it all to go away.
	That's right, yeah.
	And he kept very quiet, but as the grapevine goes, any sort of place, my friend actually found out the name of this chap.
	And so he went down to his allotment because he was, you know, that's where he'd actually seen the thing.
	And anyway, so this chap started.
	First of all, he basically dug up a lot of earth and then he pulled out a box and then inside the box was another box and then he pulled out, you know, opened the second box and then he pulled out this metal object which basically was the head of a spoon.
	No joke about this, just the head of a spoon.
	And now what he'd actually seen was he'd seen a fireball meteor fly overhead and that's when I came in because I did some checking on the astronomical aspects of the whole thing.
	And then he'd gone out into the field.
	Basically his perception had seen something drop off but he hadn't.
	He'd actually seen the object go over the horizon.
	And the first thing he found in the field was this bowl of a spoon.
	That is the problem though, isn't it?
	That's the number the problem that we've got with investigation of all these phenomena, but UFOs particularly, I think.
	That people want to believe that it's something.
	And so they find something that's what they think is evidence, in this case a bit of a spoon.
	They put two and two together and make 105.
	And then you have something that really is not worth the time that people give it.
	Well, that's right.
	This is something we try to get across in everything we do because we do a bit of training as well as the TV work and our investigations as well.
	And we'd like to take our witnesses on the journey with us so that if we do actually prove something conclusively, we'd like to show them that things aren't necessarily connected that appear to be connected.
	All right, this guy with his head of a spoon, presumably you had a conversation with him at some point.
	When you find out that it was the head of a spoon and when you found out that this wasn't really something that was unexplained or unexplainable, I guess you've got to be really diplomatic when you talk to him.
	This is part of the job that a lot of people don't realise, actually, about power investigation is that we should be witness focused.
	We've got to look after these people because they've had an extraordinary experience.
	Or maybe they haven't had an extraordinary experience, but they believe they have.
	And we have to manage their expectations.
	And that is a very, very hard part of it.
	And I think that only really comes with experience.
	And so how did you get through that situation?
	Your first time you found out that it wasn't what this man thought it might have been.
	You discovered this was the head of a spoon and not some paranormal UFO Interplanetary metal, so then you've got to have a conversation with him and tell him that.
	Yes, we had to break it very, very gently to him, and he didn't actually believe us, unfortunately.
	And this is the weird thing as well.
	I remember talking to another expert.
	I went to a conference a few years after that, and we were talking about, you know, we've had bad experiences, we've had with witnesses, etc.
	And I mentioned this to this other researcher, and he said, well, hang on a second, how do you know it wasn't, you know, an alien spoon?
	And I was just like, I put my head in my hands.
	I thought, oh, my goodness, you know.
	Well, I guess the fact that it had Sheffield Steel stamped on the back might have been a clue.
	I'm not sure.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, I think it was hallmarked as well, though.
	Okay, so the guy didn't believe it.
	I guess that's fairly common because we have to think that people's pride comes into this, doesn't it?
	Oh, it does indeed.
	Nobody likes to feel like they've been fooled.
	But the way we sort of work is that if we basically say it's something, you know, it's not paranormal, it's something else, that should be provable, that should be testable, and that should be demonstrable to your witness.
	So as much as we can, you know, we like to take the witness on a journey and show them how to...
	And then sometimes we can demonstrate it.
	For instance, I think it's in the book, there was a time when a paranormal team from Liverpool went into an old lady's house, and this lady thought that she was experiencing poltergeist activity.
	Whereas when the team went in, they realised immediately that it was just air in the pipes of her radiators.
	Oh, no.
	So they could prove it because they actually basically took the thermostat timer back an hour and manifested the activity an hour earlier, which was quite satisfactory for her.
	I think that's, you know, case closed.
	Now, the one good thing about that is that it teaches you to be methodical.
	It teaches you a method.
	It does indeed, yeah.
	And this is the thing that we try to go across in the book.
	Hopefully we've succeeded to say that, you know, you've no stone left unturned.
	You've got to look into all the possibilities.
	But come on, when you find out that it's something perfectly innocent, like the air in somebody's radiators, it must feel disappointing for the investigator, let alone the person reporting the phenomenon, for the investigator to find it isn't really what you thought it might be.
	The hope must always be in your heart that it's something else.
	Well, and again, I was harking back to what I first said, I like to solve problems, so if I get a solution either way, I'm quite happy.
	And I think it's a healthy attitude to have in the panel because if you're going with any sort of expectancy, then you're going to find that you're going to colour anything you see.
	You know, your perception is going to be coloured.
	If you're expecting to find ghosts in an alleged haunted property and you're getting experiences there, like knocking or banging or whatever, or even hearing footsteps, then if you go in with an expectancy, that's what you're going to get.
	That's what you're going to come out with.
	You're going to sort of believe that everything you've experienced is a ghost.
	Whereas it could be the footsteps, could be transmission of sound through a party wall.
	And in fact, the fact of the matter is, whatever field of investigation it is, whether it's ufology, whether it's ghosts, whether it's cryptozoology, whatever it is, there is an overwhelming probability that there will be a rational explanation for the thing.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	And I think that's what any budding investigator needs to learn from the outset is that I would say right across the board, it's probably about 96%, 97% of everything that is going to be reported to you will turn out to be something mundane.
	So the enjoyment of the thing has got to be in the process, like you told me, that you enjoy solving puzzles.
	So the enjoyment has got to come from that.
	If you think that you are going to blow people's heads off with some amazing findings, well, the chances are you might one of these days, but most of the time you're not.
	Well, what we found was that if you do act methodically, then you're not self-deluding yourself, and you actually do raise your chances of finding something anomalous.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Well, it's, well, how do you put this?
	Although the percentages is very, very low, if you imagine that if you go in and you've not been thorough with the investigation, you haven't done controlled sort of measurements before you go in, for instance, on a ghost investigation, and then you, I'm just trying to think how to best put this, and then you walk away with your results and then you get them checked by somebody else and then they say, ah, but it could have been this, it could have been that.
	But if you're methodical, it sort of drives you down an avenue towards any, you know, the phenomena that you do pick up being more genuine, if you know what I mean.
	So by being methodical, you actually drive yourself towards the more paranormal aspects of a case.
	I totally get where you're coming from on that.
	Now, one thing strikes me immediately about that, and I don't know what you think about this.
	I'm sure somebody's said it to you before.
	But you say that if you do things methodically and you're thinking along these lines, then perhaps there is a paranormal element at work in that these things may be attracted to you.
	Do you think there's any play in that?
	Any mileage in that?
	Yes, well, as I say, we're very open-minded.
	I mean, we don't draw any conclusions at all in our investigation.
	We take things a step backwards.
	We're actually looking for phenomena rather than saying we're looking for ghosts or looking for UFOs or phantom big cats or anything like that.
	We look for phenomena first, and to label that phenomena, that's a bit further down the line for us.
	Now, there are three of you involved in this group.
	I mean, you're Mark Rosney, there's Rob Bethel and Jebby Robinson.
	You're the three authors of this book.
	And, you know, I have to say again, it's a very good book.
	We'll talk a little more about it and what's in it in a while.
	You're a group, and that kind of sounds like the Scooby-Doo team in a van going around looking for strange things and ghosts.
	How does it work?
	How did you get together?
	And how does that process work of you being a group?
	Yes, well, we started off in a group called Mara, which was formed in 1996 in Liverpool.
	And that's where we first met.
	And as I say, Mara ran its course, unfortunately.
	It eventually folded.
	And so we decided to go ahead and do our own thing.
	And because the three of us worked very, very well together, we thought, you know, it's a logical step forward, you know, because we like to keep the team small, so there's only three of us because it's more manageable.
	And as I say, because we know each other very, very well, you know, we work very well together.
	We've got different skills and different things to input into it, which overlap very, very nicely.
	You know, it's formed a nice roundy team, we find.
	Go through the process then.
	Who are you going to call Ghostbusters?
	You get to hear about something.
	You get a report of some anomalous phenomenon somewhere.
	What do the three of you do?
	Right, well, the first thing we do, obviously, is there's something we call the investigation lifecycle, which is very, very, very, very well documented in the book.
	Now, first thing we will do is we will listen to what the witness has got to say.
	And now, depending on whether it's a ghost investigation or it's a UFO case, they're done slightly differently, mainly because with the UFO cases, the minute somebody's out of that sighting, the clock is ticking.
	And to actually satisfactorily investigate that thing, you've got to investigate it as soon as humanely possible.
	Ghost investigations tend to be, you know, you tend to have a bit more time involved because what tends to happen is somebody will have an experience, and it's usually in a place where there's been a history of experiences.
	So you know that if you go there, you know, it's not a phenomenon that's going to disappear.
	Understood, but why is there this time factor with UFO reports?
	Explain that to me.
	Right, well, it's all due to most UFOs turn out to be identified flying objects when you look into them really deeply.
	So we need to look at things, for instance, like aircraft movements in the sky, police helicopters.
	You need to think about things like there's things called laser light shows, which are basically like effects lighting, which is fired up towards the sky and it bounces off low clouds.
	And of course in Liverpool there's Chinatown and there's Chinese lanterns.
	They've often been mistaken for UFOs.
	Yeah that's right.
	There's a whole host of things that you need to check.
	Mostly aircraft I think and if you leave it days or weeks, finding that information is much harder.
	The other thing you need to check off is there's weather information as well.
	And sometimes actually checking that retrospectively it's not easy.
	So how long would you say you have?
	Do you have a month?
	Do you have two weeks?
	How long?
	It depends on what's been observed.
	I would reckon a case would probably go cold after about five days.
	This is interesting.
	I don't know whether you've heard about it.
	I'm sure you've heard about the case, but there are some developments in an investigation in North Wales.
	I've had some contact with somebody about this.
	In the Beryn Mountains in 1974, I believe there was supposed to have been a crashed UFO.
	Now, that, of course, is 35, 36 years ago now.
	What do you think their chances of being able to uncover anything new about that case would be?
	Quite difficult, I would imagine, because it's, I mean, there's all sorts of things happening there.
	For instance, your principal witnesses will be getting older and the memory won't be as reliable as it would have been fresh after the event.
	It presents a whole range of problems unless somebody's found some very, very conclusive physical evidence, e.g.
	if they found, I believe that was a crash retrieval incident or alleged crash retrieval.
	So if they found some exotic metal, for instance, that couldn't have been made on Earth, that would be quite interesting.
	Okay, well, watch this space.
	And of course, there's the other case of the base, the American military base in the southeast of England, in the east of England, rather, where there was supposed to have been in 1980 a landing, some kind of phenomenon.
	There are people who say this is all rubbish now, and there's evidence that proves it.
	But we're coming up to the 30th anniversary, and I know for a fact, as you will know, that there are people who want to take this further this year.
	That's right, yes.
	In fact, I know one of the people involved, in fact, I'm a good friend of Larry Warren.
	Larry, who was on this show, and you know, he says what happened, what is claimed to have happened at Rendlesham Forest really did happen, and there is far more to it than most ordinary people know.
	Yeah, I mean, Larry's a very interesting character, you know, and he's very, very sincere as well.
	So I actually do believe that he did have an experience.
	Now, his bottom line is that he doesn't know what that experience was, but he knows that he did have an experience.
	And he also knows that the experience was of a kind that a team of people would actively debrief him afterwards and encourage him and everybody else who saw it to keep their mouths shut.
	So that's a factor in this thing.
	But 30 years have gone by, and I know that there are people now who want to get a reunion going and try and take this thing forward, try and get some new evidence out there.
	But as you say, there's a time factor.
	That's right.
	Yeah, it's, I say, you know, when time has passed by, it's just like Roswell.
	You know, it's like, I don't think, is there any principal witnesses left alive now from Roswell?
	But, you know, there's the same problem with that.
	Although, you know, people, you know, they signed affidavits and things, you know, they told, they went on about, you know, their own experience and things, it is all still circumstantial.
	Unless you get some proper, hardened physical evidence or you get the government to sort of say, hands up, yeah, okay, you know, something really weird did happen there.
	I think we're going to be running around in circles forever on all of these cases.
	But still worth keeping the thing alive because there were some very active, dark security matters involved in that particular case in eastern England.
	And that's something that needs to be explained.
	Why were the people like Larry Warren so aggressively debriefed?
	And in some cases, if Larry is to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt him, warned that it was very important for them not to say very much about this for fear of whatever.
	You hear this story a lot, don't you?
	You do, yeah.
	Well, with Rendlesham, at the time, it was a secret location for nuclear warheads.
	So I can imagine That's why maybe the security forces clamped down very, very heavily on anything there.
	Because if suddenly the MOD or the American military say, well, you know, we can't even keep our base secure.
	We don't even know what this was.
	It came in, came out, disappeared.
	Huge security implications.
	I can understand that.
	That's something that I hadn't thought about.
	What do you think about the MOD's decision to stop taking in public reports of UFOs or at least responding to them?
	We talked about that on this show about two months or so ago.
	The Ministry of Defence in the UK have decided we're not going to take public reports.
	We're not going to respond to them.
	End of story.
	That seems extraordinary.
	It might just be down to the fact that a lot of the sightings, as I say, do turn out to be very, very mundane.
	And with the recent glut of fireball sightings, for instance, I can imagine the cool desk being absolutely inundated with millions and millions of these.
	So quite simply, it's a waste of somebody's time to go into these things that happened.
	A rational explanation.
	On the ghost side, now you're in the northwest of England.
	I know Liverpool because I'm from Liverpool and I go on about that an awful lot on this show, but we're all very proud of where we're from.
	Always seems to me that Liverpool has more than its fair share of ghosts and apparitions.
	Yes, it does appear to be that way.
	I was quite amazed.
	In fact, I'm even more amazed every time Tom Sleman, a local writer, comes out with yet another volume of ghost stories.
	But it does appear to be quite a high concentration of alleged paranormal activity.
	My dad was in the police in a place called Bootle, which is just north of Liverpool, for those who don't know that area.
	And he was in the police in the days when they used to cycle round.
	And he would be in the dead of night cycling round on his own through Bootle.
	And he tells some hair-raising stories, one in particular about a cemetery in Bootle.
	And he saw a man in a cap and an overcoat appear behind a gravestone.
	My dad gets off his bike and says, what are you doing here?
	Walks up to this man who disappears in front of his eyes.
	There's a story for you.
	I'll have to tell that one to Rob because Rob actually lives in Bootle.
	And there's another thing that I've been trying to get a handle on for years.
	My dad, when he retired from the police, went to work for an electrical company called Comet.
	And they had a warehouse in a place called Concert Street in Liverpool, which is now a club, but used to be a music hall and was incredibly haunted.
	I have personal experience of doors opening, the temperature being sub-zero almost, it felt like, in the summertime, and many, many people being too scared to go upstairs there.
	You know, that's just one.
	But I haven't heard of anybody investigating that.
	All right, that sounds very interesting.
	I'll have to tell you more about that.
	Oh, yes, please.
	When we finish doing this.
	When it comes to ghost investigations, then, as a team of people, para-projects, as you are, what do you do?
	How do you go about it?
	Well, if we get to the investigation stage, we will go in there.
	We're very, very instrument-based, so we don't take psychics mediums with us, and there's a very good reason for that.
	It's not that we're down on psychics and mediums, it's just that unfortunately not everybody can experience what a medium claims to be experiencing, so that any evidence that comes forward from a medium will be circumstantial.
	And unfortunately, we're trying to push the envelope out a little bit and to try and get tangible evidence for the existence of paranormal or the non-existence.
	And so we have to base, we rely on instrumentation.
	So we will set up video CCTV system, sound systems, put microphones everywhere.
	And then we'll do a sweep with EMF meters, temperature gauges.
	EMF meters being for electromagnetic effects.
	That's right, yes, yeah.
	Now we're sort of in two minds as to whether this is useful or not because we've never really had any sort of like corresponding EMF meter readings with any alleged activity.
	But we still persevere because a lot of other people say that they do.
	But the one interesting thing has actually happened to us is battery drainages on equipment.
	There's one meter in particular, it's called a 2G meter.
	It's a little black device.
	It's an old-fashioned needle swinging meter thing.
	And that tends to go to what we call full-scale deflection.
	The needle goes right off the scale just before we have unusual activity.
	Now, isn't that interesting?
	That ties in with a lot of people who've said to me and have said on this show and in other places that ghosts or whatever they are actually suck energy from people and from equipment.
	Well we've actually found something quite interesting.
	This is something quite hot actually for us.
	What we found is that they're not actually, well the actual device only goes full scale deflection because there was a reduced current in the circuit.
	And we've actually taken the batteries out, we've measured them actually in situ where the activity is happening, they're as dead as a doornail.
	You take them somewhere else and all of a sudden they've got full charge again.
	So the energy is not being drained, it's just being inhibited.
	I have never heard that before.
	That's fascinating, man.
	It's amazing.
	It's cutting edge.
	We've had four reliable instances of this where we've basically taken readings of the batteries before they've gone into the device and taken readings in situ and readings afterwards.
	And there's been no drain whatsoever.
	It's just been inhibited.
	I know a guy called Christian Dion.
	He's quite a famous medium, was born in Blackpool, now lives in Los Angeles and is making a good living doing all of this over there.
	I've known him for many, many years and I can remember him telling me about how equipment, recording equipment, old-fashioned analog tapes, and I have personal experience of this with him, either they behave oddly, the speed varies, or they don't work at all.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	And we've had this.
	I mean, there's one incident in a place, I can't actually mention the name of it because the owners don't wish the people to go to the place anymore because it was quite popular at one time.
	They bought it as a house now and they just want to keep it there.
	But anyway, it's a place up in the north and it was heavily active every time we went in there to investigate it.
	And we had one incidence where just over two minutes we lost absolutely every single piece of equipment including handheld camcorders, you know, which were just battery powered.
	So the mains mains equipment went.
	The the mains didn't actually go but just all the equipment, you know, all the you know the demolitors went dead and the the microphone feeds went dead but the power was still there.
	And say the camcorders went as well and again this 2G meter just went off the scale.
	What do you think?
	What's your best guess as to what might be happening there?
	Do you think this could be something to do with the we know that human beings are far more powerful than orthodox science says they are.
	Do you think it could be something to do with the collective energy as you as a bunch of people going there expecting perhaps to see or record something and you yourself are affecting the equipment?
	Well this is one thing we're looking into and we certainly don't really out and in fact I'm sort of leaning towards this now that living people actually do cause the phenomena.
	Now what we found is that the phenomena actually occurs if you're in one of two different states and that is if you're quite anxious or if you're incredibly relaxed.
	And what we tend to find is that every single investigator will tell you that we just went for a tea break and all hell broke loose.
	And it's exactly that.
	You know, you relaxed, you know, you've had an intense sort of session, just sat there concentrating, looking at screens, or you've been doing sweeps of rooms with EMF meters or temperature gauges.
	And then you come back, sit down, have a cup of tea, put your feet up, a bit of a breather, and all of a sudden the activity occurs.
	And usually when you've switched all the equipment off as well, I might add.
	Well, to a skeptic, that would sound very convenient.
	It would, wouldn't it?
	Yeah, but it does happen that, you know, you ask any investigator, they'll tell you exactly the same thing.
	Well, a couple of shows back, we had a guy from the Northeast Ghost Inspectors, well, what used to be called the Northeast Coast Inspectors, and he told a story exactly like that, of how he went to a location and they'd done more or less what they were going to do, and he wasn't even recording, and he turns around by himself and sees a ghost.
	Oh, right.
	Or something that he certainly cannot explain.
	That walks through, I think it was a cart.
	It actually walked through a cart and disappeared.
	And that exactly, that's the kind of story that you're telling.
	That when you've been through the period of concentration, when you've done everything that you went there to do, and then everybody's relaxed, suddenly it's like a portal or a gateway is opened.
	How strange.
	It is, isn't it?
	But it's certainly linked to the mood, you know, to how you're feeling.
	And as I say, if you're relaxed, you tend to get more phenomena.
	So that's one of the things we actually put in the book as well, to say that, you know, take things seriously by all means, but don't forget to have a little bit of fun along the way as well.
	Well, here's something.
	This is a good point to bring this reflection in.
	something I wanted to get to a little later, but let's do it now.
	The fact that you published this book and you would like people to get involved in this, isn't that going to dilute...
	Isn't this going to dilute it?
	You're going to get all sorts of people who are not really sincere in, people who are playing at it, the kind of people who go out at the weekend and maybe they bought a metal detector or they've got one for Christmas and they do it for a few months and then they go away.
	Isn't this going to trivialize what you do?
	Well, not really, because the thing is that everybody's doing this now.
	I mean, with the popularity of shows like Most Haunted, for instance, you know, there's thousands and thousands of groups out there in Britain alone.
	I think somebody said there's a new group being formed every 90 minutes somewhere in the world, actually.
	And is that a good thing?
	Well, it's one of those things that it's.
	I've got a good analogy, but I'll come back to that in a minute.
	But anyway, if you imagine that everybody's doing it anyway, and they're doing it all their own different ways, or they're all starting out and they haven't got the experience that longer term people have been doing.
	I'm actually tripping off my words.
	I know what you're saying, but you've got lots of new people coming into this.
	And in a way, it's fresh blood, it's new views of it.
	So that's why we thought writing a guide might be quite useful to actually get people up to speed.
	It's a bit like when archaeology first started.
	That started off as a hobby, a pastime that people used to do in Victorian times.
	And they used to just go out with a trowel and shovel and pickaxe.
	And some of the finds were actually completely destroyed to try to get them out.
	And after a while, it sort of gravitated towards science where they got a bit more disciplined about things and got their act together and started forming professional bodies and things.
	So I think that's probably going to happen.
	Although there are professional bodies out there at the minute, the SPR and a few other things, unfortunately, they're not sort of, you know, they're actually looking at these new people and saying, well, you know, I'm going to dismiss everything you put forward, you know, straight away.
	So all these TV shows, some of them I'm a bit skeptical about, some of them I quite like, I have to say, and I watch, and all this activity and all this involvement by all of these people could actually be a good thing because you're dragging this out of the closet.
	It's becoming more than something that is just practiced by a few odd people at weekends.
	This is going to be something that becomes a part of the mainstream.
	Yeah, it'll be attracting all sorts of people to the phenomenon.
	And these people might have skills or abilities that might actually push us forward to get some answers at last.
	While we were setting this up, I asked you if you could come up with a few little spooky stories.
	And I know that you've got a couple, so fire away.
	All right.
	Well, when I first started out in 1988, I was working as a freelance lighting and sound engineer at the time.
	So I worked on a particular show.
	I don't know whether you know the theatre in Liverpool.
	It's called the Neptune Theatre.
	Oh, I do.
	I know it very well.
	It was a youth theatre, wasn't it, for a while?
	It was, yeah, that's right.
	Unfortunately, its doors are closed at the minute.
	I don't know why, but it's been quite busy So there's been no shows like that.
	They put on some very good Productions back in the day.
	Oh, it's amazing.
	Well, I got called in to help a friend out.
	My friend was a stage manager for a particular show called The Devil Rides Out.
	It was a musical adaption of Dennis Wheatley's novel.
	And so I got called in at the last minute to help out with some sound stuff that they needed doing and eventually ended up working on the show.
	And now I've been to that theatre many, many times before and I knew it had a bit of a spooky sort of heritage to it.
	Obviously there was the tragic death of one of the owners, the Crane brothers, who he hung himself from the upper circle, I believe.
	And ever since that event, there's been all sorts of things being reported there from just the usual sort of like hearing footsteps when you're the only person in the theatre to the cold spots backstage to creepy feelings that people feel downstairs in the underfloor sort of like rooms to the actual full-blown apparitions of young children and also a Susie's figure that people attributed to Mr. Crane.
	So it had a bit of a heritage to it.
	I turn up anyway and of course we're putting on this show which is dedicated to devil worship and witchcraft and everything else.
	And it also involved the casting of a pentagram on stage, which the technicians did.
	It took many, many attempts because we'd all been working for three days and three nights solidly without any sleep at that point.
	But it was only after that thing had been cast and an usherette who was also happened to be a white witch came in the next day and saw this pentagram on stage.
	And more importantly, it'd been cast upside down, according to the white witch.
	Well from what I read, that's asking for trouble, isn't it?
	Well, that's right.
	All hell broke loose anyway.
	I mean, you name it, it happened.
	I mean, equipment failed.
	Lights actually switched on that weren't even plugged in during the show.
	My sound desk went absolutely haywire on a number of occasions.
	But the thing I can't readily explain at all, even if I think really hard about it, was one particular incident when the smoke machine went off all by itself.
	Now, smoke machines come in different varieties, and this particular smoke machine works by spraying vegetable dye over a heated coil, which then converts the dye into mist, into a sweet-smelling steam.
	And now, unfortunately, when this thing went off, it wasn't even plugged in.
	It was absolutely stone-cold.
	How could that be?
	Exactly.
	It defies physics.
	It really does.
	If you sprayed that device when it was stone cold, all you would get would be a patch of vegetable dye on the floor.
	And for that to actually go off, I find incredibly perplexing.
	I just couldn't understand it.
	Now, we know that Liverpool is full of comedians, the best in the country, and quite a few pranksters.
	Are you sure that somebody was not having a joke on you all?
	No, absolutely.
	I mean, there was a tech team there, and tech teams are very honest with themselves.
	If something goes wrong like that, we want to get to the bottom of it, obviously, because if it's spraying out steam and it shouldn't be, we want to know what.
	At the very least, it's health and safety.
	Plus, of course, you've got other shows to do, and you want it all under control.
	That's right, yeah.
	I mean, but it got worse anyway.
	As people got to hear about, you know, the actors and fellow technicians got to hear about things happening there, the activity seems to increase up until the point where the White Witch then said, what we need to do is actually bless this circle with salt water.
	And first of all, the director said, you can't do that, health and safety reasons.
	But the second night, we said, okay, we actually got her up on stage beforehand, before the director came.
	And she did her little thing, and it calmed down.
	The whole thing calmed down.
	It was up until the last act, the last performance when she didn't have time to do the blessing, and then all hell broke loose again.
	And two of the actors, whilst they're on stage during one of the scenes, saw an extra person in the lighting box.
	Oh, wow.
	And they completely corpsed on stage then, you know, the Fruit Alliance.
	And I'm not surprised.
	Massive graphic fire doors were opening and shutting.
	It was amazing cold spots everywhere.
	And again, the last performance, the smoke machine, went off yet again.
	And it had to be dragged backstage.
	It was completely switched off.
	So whatever it was, whatever was causing this thing, knew that you were all concerned about it, knew it was the last performance, and knew that if you're going to go out at the end of a run, you might as well go out on a bang.
	Well, absolutely.
	But again, going back to what you're saying earlier about could people be causing this phenomena?
	Well, I think, well, maybe that's probably the most likely solution for this.
	Or could people fuel a phenomena that's already there?
	Yeah, there is that as well.
	And these are two sides of the argument for this.
	But I thought it was quite significant that the activity calmed down when the White Witch managed to do her cleansing of this pentagram.
	And the one night that she didn't was when all hell broke loose again.
	So I think that's quite fascinating.
	Were you scared?
	Were you frightened?
	I was a bit perplexed.
	I think, well, you see, when you're actually working a show, you've got to be professional, you've got to concentrate on trying to get as much right as possible.
	So when your desk starts playing up or lights are flashing that aren't even plugged in, all your effort goes into making sure that everything else is going right.
	And you isolate the things that are going wrong and try and solve them as best as you can or quickly as you can.
	So when you're actually in a show, you haven't got the luxury of being afraid.
	But in between the shows, yes, I was.
	I was very uneasy in the theatre.
	Especially there was one night when I was actually downstairs in one of the understage dressing rooms and I was actually queuing tapes.
	Back in those days, we didn't have the luxury of mini discs or, you know, I was There.
	So I was actually queuing all these tapes up, ready for the run, and I couldn't stay in that room for more than two minutes because I felt like something was staring in the back of my head.
	I felt like there was a presence there.
	Now, I don't normally feel these sort of things, but I actually put that down at the time to the fact that I had very, very little sleep.
	But after saying that, no, I do really think there was something there.
	It's quite peculiar.
	Because people do, they say, have a sense about these things.
	I've certainly sensed presences.
	I've sensed atmospheres in places, and I've also experienced the most common thing of all is supposed to be the temperature drop.
	And I have to say, in my own personal case, I have experienced the temperature drop many times.
	Oh, on our investigations, I think that's one of the most common things that I think anybody will pick up.
	And again, when I was saying about discipline before, that's where discipline comes in, because when these cold spots actually happen, you know, it's great to actually get in there with some measuring devices and find out what's going on.
	Because one of the things about any phenomena is it's got a hallmark to it.
	You know, it's like, for instance, if you believe that that's a ghost trying to manifest itself, then obviously the temperature drop is a hallmark of that thing actually happening.
	So sometimes to actually understand the event itself, if you can measure the things that are happening around it, then you might get to some understanding of why a ghost actually appears, where and when it does, if you see what I mean.
	Absolutely.
	It's almost like you're filtering out every other factor, aren't you?
	That's right, yeah.
	So what we're trying to do is get useful information surrounding the event as well as the event itself.
	So that whenever we hit a cold spot, for instance, and we hit a fantastic one in Blackpool, and we were lucky we were being filmed at the time as well.
	And what we found there was that, now this is the remarkable thing, is that you know what these spots have, they're usually very deliminated, you know, they're very, very tight sort of thing.
	You know, within a couple of footsteps.
	Oh, literally, I mean, it's like a little pool, isn't it?
	It's like a puddle on a pavement.
	You're there suddenly and then you walk out of it.
	Yeah, I refer to it as like walking into a meat locker.
	You know, it's like instantly cold in a couple of footsteps.
	But what we've actually found is by taking skin temperature readings and also taking thermometers in there, we found that there's no temperature drop, there's no appreciable temperature drop between the cold spot itself and outside.
	But there is a skin temperature drop.
	If you see what I mean, so the actual air temperature hasn't changed at all, but your skin temperature drops by at least five degrees.
	So it's down to the people and their perception again.
	Well, it might be perception.
	It might not be.
	It might just be that whatever people are feeling, it isn't the cold.
	We know that, we've satisfied ourselves with that.
	But there is certainly a delimited space where you walk out of that spot and suddenly your skin temperature goes up by five degrees.
	So something is making them feel cold.
	What do we think the something might be?
	Right.
	Now that's where we have to leave it because we don't know.
	We don't know yet.
	All we're doing is gathering useful information, useful data that other people can look at.
	Mentioned in your book something that fascinates me and lots of stories around Liverpool about this.
	I know one personally, I'm sure you'll know loads.
	Time slips.
	People are fascinated in your area by time slips.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Well, there's one particular street called Bold Street, which had more than its first share.
	Now, there's a group of researchers called Parascience who have been looking into this a lot deeper than we have.
	And they reckon they've got about 70 very, very reliable time slip cases from Bold Street alone.
	Well, the famous one I always used to think was an urban myth.
	I mean, this has appeared everywhere.
	It's even appeared in paranormal magazines.
	But the story goes, doesn't it?
	There's an off-duty policeman or a retired policeman, something to do with the police, and he's walking up Bold Street, which is...
	It's a very atmospheric street.
	It takes you up to Chinatown in Liverpool.
	Bold Street is a street where there's always activity and a lot of people walk.
	It's a great place.
	Like it.
	Well worth seeing.
	But the guy is supposed to be plunged back, isn't he, into the 1950s?
	And this is supposed to have happened, I think, in the 70s or 80s.
	I think it happened in 1984, I believe.
	And he actually claimed he was plunged back into the 1950s.
	And he actually, being a police officer, he's a very good observer.
	And he noticed a few remarkable details.
	First of all, that street is mostly pedestrianised, although vehicles do come up and down it.
	Usually there's people all over the street.
	And the first thing that happened was he stepped out onto the street and he noticed that, A, it was cobblestone, which it isn't nowadays.
	And the second thing was he nearly got mowed down by a box van.
	And I think, I can never get these two right, but I think it was a Kaplan's box van, or the shop he went into eventually was Kaplan's.
	I can never remember.
	I'm bad for details like that.
	But anyway, it was an old 1950s box van with the 1950s company emblazoned on it.
	And then as he's walking across the street, he realised that everybody was dressed in 1950s sort of clothing.
	And he thought, this is really odd.
	And then he was walking towards what was then called Dylan's Bookstore, which is now called Waterstar, which wasn't a bookstore, you know, when he was looking at it.
	It was actually a haberdashery and I think it was called Cripps.
	And again, another 1950s store.
	And the way the story goes is that suddenly this guy flips straight back into the present day.
	He does, that's right, yeah.
	But not before seeing somebody else wearing contemporary 80s clothing coming out, you know, a young girl with a couple of shopping bags.
	And this girl was perplexed because the same thing had happened to her.
	You know, she had actually gone in to think it was a habitashery.
	And all of a sudden somebody else had the experience.
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	According to the story, yeah.
	Now, it is according to the story, and I'd love to know whether that's true or whether this is an urban myth, because it is the greatest time slip story, isn't it?
	Oh, it's incredible.
	But something interesting happened to me and a friend, actually, when we were on the street, on Bold Street itself.
	And now, it might not be attributable to time slips or anything, but knowing the pedigree of that street.
	I was walking along and my friend was just looking at the floor and he always picks up pennies whenever he sees him for luck or whatever.
	Anyway, he found what he thought was a penny on the street, picked it up, and it was actually a half pence piece.
	Now they've been out of circulation for a long, long time.
	Are we talking about an original like sort of 1960s style or one from the decimal era?
	Decimal era.
	But I mean they have been out of circulation for years.
	That's right, yeah.
	So I find it quite perplexing for him to find one just lying on the pavement.
	He was quite perplexed as well.
	So now whether that's attributable to the time slips, I don't know.
	Well isn't there a story in the book about a time slip in Runcorn?
	Yes, that actually happened to me.
	Now this is when you have one of those experiences and you go towards the most logical conclusion you can possibly find.
	And the only thing I can actually find on this one is that I've actually experienced a time slip myself.
	Now I used to work in the civil service in Runcorn.
	Obviously living in Liverpool I used to catch the bus in and out to work, the express bus which goes along familiar routes day in, day out.
	And I did this for four years and I got very, very used to all the surroundings.
	Now one particular morning, I think it was in January 2008 I think it was, I was travelling along and we come to Asmore Industrial Estate and then all of a sudden I saw this old dilapidated house on the edge of the estate and I've never seen it before.
	I thought that's really odd.
	But it looked really out of place.
	It was very, very strange.
	Something drew me to actually look at it if you see what I mean.
	It was that out of place.
	And I thought, well, oh, you know, I'm very familiar with this area.
	You know, I'll have a look out for that tonight.
	It's just weird.
	I've not seen it before.
	So on the way home that night, unfortunately, it was too dark to see.
	But I looked out, I couldn't see it.
	Next morning, I travelled in again and I thought, right, I'm going to look out for this house now.
	And it wasn't there.
	Now, are you absolutely sure then, Mark, that you were going through the same place?
	Well, it's the same route.
	The routes are laid down.
	The guy, the driver, he sticks to the same route day and day out.
	Because he's got to.
	Okay.
	So what I would do, if I were you, did you do this?
	I would have researched to see if there was what you saw there in some previous era.
	Right.
	Yes.
	Now, as far as I can tell, and I've only gone back to the I think to the 1960s, but there are other maps which, you know, if I get the time, I will have a look in there.
	But there hasn't appeared to be anything there, really.
	It was mostly farmland before then.
	But the interesting thing was that when I was actually in work the next day when I hadn't seen it, a friend of mine suggested, well, perhaps it's just been knocked down in the day because they're very quick nowadays.
	They've knocked these houses down.
	That's possible, isn't it?
	So I thought, yeah, that's a possibility.
	So without actually getting off the bus and seeing the location, I thought, well, next best thing, why not try Google Earth?
	Because, as you know, the pictures that form the maps on Google Earth are years old.
	And I thought, well, if it's been knocked down yesterday, then it should be on Google Earth.
	That's fair.
	So I went to the spot where I'd seen the house, and there was nothing there, just a strip of grass.
	That's it.
	Wow.
	And how, and when you saw this, I'm fascinated by this.
	When you saw this thing, how do I put this?
	How real did it look?
	Very.
	In fact, it looked extraordinarily real, you see what I mean?
	I mean, I remember picking up quite a lot of detail on it.
	For instance, a lot of the tiles were off the roof.
	The windows were smashed.
	There was neck curtains flapping around in the breeze.
	Paint peeling on it.
	It looked really dilapidated.
	Now, sometimes as human beings, we convince ourselves of things.
	And the more we say them, the more we repeat them, then they become true.
	You're absolutely sure you didn't see this somewhere else.
	And the more you've told the story, the more you've convinced yourself that's what you saw.
	No, because I actually wrote it all down the night, you know, the night after I didn't see it, you know, the next day.
	I wrote it down and said, right, you know, this is important, this, because I thought to myself, I'm going to do some research.
	So I just basically cast my mind back on everything I saw.
	But the thing was, now, you know, you say about going into places where you can feel an atmosphere.
	Well, it's almost as if I felt an atmosphere with this as I was driving past.
	It's almost as if I was compelled to look when I did, you know, out on the building itself.
	So something, if we follow the train of thought, something wanted you to notice that place?
	Well, that's my gut feeling.
	But again, that's a very subjective sort of thing.
	But yes, I do believe that.
	Wow, Mark.
	Are you going to do more investigations on that?
	Are you going to try and get to the bottom of it?
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, I'll be going into our local library and I'll be doing some research on that when I can.
	But as I say, in the meantime, between that and now, the book came.
	So it was all hands to pump for that.
	Well, amazing story.
	And I wish you luck with the book, you know.
	It's very detailed.
	There are photographs and diagrams of a lot of the equipment that you need to use, depending on which field you want to go into, whether it's ufology.
	We didn't get around to talking about cryptozoology, but ghost investigation and all the others.
	I don't know of another book like this.
	I did buy an American book a couple of years ago about ghost investigation at an airport.
	I was not very impressed with it.
	I think this is miles better than that book.
	So I can only wish you well with it.
	Oh, thank you very much.
	And the book is A Beginner's Guide to Paranormal Investigation.
	Who's the publisher again?
	It's Amberley Publishing.
	Right, and you can find that on the net.
	And as a team of researchers, Para Projects, do you have a website, you guys?
	We do indeed.
	You can find it very easily by going to all thews.para-projects.com.
	Mark Rosney, thank you very much.
	I hope that wasn't too much of an ordeal.
	But thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell for his fantastic work at Creative Hotspot in the Ripple for putting this show out on the net, getting it out to you.
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	Go to the website www.theunexplained.tv.
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