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Oct. 1, 2010 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:46
Edition 44 - Heather Couper

This show features an old friend - world-famous British Astronomer Heather Couper - Heathertalks about her lifes work and her views about life on other planets - including the latest discoveryGliese 581G.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast completely independently, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for returning to the show.
Thank you for all the emails which continue to tumble in, making guest suggestions and many good points about the show.
Thank you for the donations as well.
I had one email from a guy who made a very good point, and I agree.
He said, how come, Howard, every time you go on and do one of these shows, the first thing you do is pass around the begging bowl.
Well, I'm sorry for that, so I'm going to keep the plug for the donation section of the website very short.
Just to say that we depend on donations on this show, if you want the work to continue, please make one.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv and you will see how to donate there.
See, done.
And the same website, www.theunexplained.tv.
If you want to communicate with me, send me a guest suggestion or whatever.
Now, we've got some great shows coming up.
I have lined up.
Well, let me tell you, Lorna Byrne is coming soon.
Lorna Byrne is a lady who sees and experiences angels.
She is in the process, I understand, of being offered a big book deal with the people who published the Da Vinci Code.
I mean, a massive, ginormous book deal.
So this lady clearly is going to be one to watch, I would say.
Very well known in many places.
I hadn't heard of her until somebody pointed her out to me.
But Lorna Byrne coming soon.
David Icke, also coming soon.
Being able to nail down a conversation with him.
And also a Richard Hoagland special will be coming in the future.
So a lot coming your way on this website.
Sorry I've been away for a few weeks, but had to make some money to live one way or another.
So I've been doing some news work in various places in London on the radio.
So that's what I've been up to.
Right, guest this time, an old friend, somebody I first met in a radio studio in London, and we became friends about two decades ago when I was a mere boy broadcaster.
This lady is called Heather Cooper.
Now, if you're in the US or in the UK, you may well have heard of Heather.
She's never off the TV, has written many books, and for my money, is the most personable, communicative astronomer there is.
So without further ado, we cross to a place that is about 25 miles or so, 30 miles north of London, sort of northeast-ish.
Geography was never my strong point of London.
And we get on Heather Cooper, astronomer extraordinaire.
Heather, thank you very much for making time to come on The Unexplained.
Hello, Howard.
I'm really delighted to come on the programme.
Hey, I've been trying to get you to come on here for a while, but I know you're a very busy lady.
You've got lots of irons in many fires.
Yes, the latest iron in my many fires or whatever, or irons in one fire.
I'm doing a fantastic trip to the Caribbean on the Queen Mary.
That's in about a month's time.
And I'll be going down with the planetarium on board the Queen Mary.
It's the only cruise liner to have a star theater on board.
So I should be delighting, I hope I'll be delighting, the cruise passengers with views of the night sky and lovely things you can see in the sky and telling them all about astronomy and space and all the things they can really sort of learn about the universe.
Now, are these people who have, do you think, some astronomical interest already?
Have they booked for that reason, or are these people who are generalists and you're going to have to build it from the ground up for them?
Oh, it's going to be ground up with Howard, absolutely.
It's going to be people who, you know, they've saved for their wedding anniversary.
They've saved for a fantastic birthday celebration.
It just happens that there's me thrown in.
The Queen Mary team have actually said, well, we've got this planetarium on board.
We want to have trained astronomers really illuminating the night sky.
So there's loads of other entertainment on board.
So if they get bored with me, they'll be able to go to the nightclubs and bars and everything like that.
Plus, of course, when you're not lecturing, you can have a great time, can't you?
I'm looking forward to this, absolutely.
I mean, I've been to the Caribbean before, odd enough, to cover things like solar eclipses.
There were a couple there.
There was one in Aruba a few years ago, which we covered.
Well, basically in practice, we're doing a very special programme about the British eclipse in 1999.
But when you go to the Caribbean, it's great fun, except that everything wakes up about four o'clock in the morning.
So you get the guy who's selling the bread from his bread sort of van, and he's got a great loud sort of horn that hoots.
And I think I'd just like to go to the Caribbean again, but get back to the Queen Mary and just relax in my cabin, or stateroom, as they call it.
Oh, you've got a stateroom.
How stab is that?
Don't want to be my baggage handler.
I think I've got a very, very minor one, but I can't wait for it.
I really can't.
I remember doing one of these Caribbean things.
It was a radio show from there, and they gave...
Oh, wow, yeah.
And they gave Chris and I the two staterooms, which apparently were used by directors of, what was the cruise line, Carnival Cruises.
And they were only available to directors or VIPs.
And I have to say, I felt so out of place in mine because it was furnished like something from, how can I put this?
But it was furnished in the style of Hugh Hefner.
Let's put it that way.
With lots of playboy bunnies on the bottom.
Well, sadly not, but certainly the silken bed sheets and leather everywhere and all the rest of it.
But I found that my stateroom overlooked the pool.
So we were doing our shows really early in the morning.
And as you say, in the Caribbean, everything begins early in the morning.
And we were doing our shows at weird times.
In fact, we were almost up in the middle of the night doing shows because of the time differential.
And so I was trying to sleep during the day and I couldn't because they had the exercise classes going and everything else.
And in the end, I just decided this was too big and too ostentatious for me.
And the service was fantastic.
They were nice people.
In the end, when you got that, you were so shattered.
You felt like a holiday.
No, I tell you what I did.
We had a guy working with us, a technical producer called Mike Osborne, who is now working, helping to create the breakfast show on Heart Radio in London.
And Mike, great friend, was in a cabin way down below, and I did a swap with him.
And he loved the stateroom.
And I loved the quiet cabin down below.
But that is to digress.
You are just too modest.
Oh, well, I know my place, you know, Heather.
I always have.
Now, you and I have known each other for a long time because we first communed in a radio studio in London on a station called LBC on a show done by a man who's a legend, Clive Bull, and also another one called Mike Carson.
I think there were two shows that you were on.
It was fantastic because we were working literally through the night, and I was taking a taxi in from where I lived in Greenwich.
And then we'd go into Pylon to the studio, there's a little sort of Square in sort of the city of London, and you know, it was amazing to think people were actually up listening to you, but they were because you know, you have this weird idea of complete seclusion, you were just talking to Mike Carson or somebody like that, and occasionally you flip into the studio.
Um, and you know, it felt just so sort of um it felt like being in somebody's room, and yet there were listeners out there.
Oh, and lots of them, you know, a huge, huge show, lots of people in London and the southeastern these days, of course, on the internet, listening all around the world.
But this is this is the theatre of the mind that is talk radio.
I was the young boy newscaster who would come in and out, and I have to admit to you now that I was absolutely captivated by your voice, as I still am.
Well, I'm captivated by yours, Howard.
That makes two of us.
But I had a very fascinating question the other day, by the way.
Vaguely, apropos nothing, and my friend said, what do newsreaders do between the times they read the news?
Go answer, please, Howard.
Oh, God.
Well, how long have we got?
I mean, we were supposed to be talking about astronomy, but I'll tell you in my 30-second answer is, of course, you're running around interviewing people, you're clipping items, things that maybe come from our colleagues at Sky News or that we generate ourselves.
There is a lot of copy to write and literally, especially these days where you're helped by technology, you're incredibly productive.
But, you know, if you don't write it and produce it, it will not get done.
So in commercial radio, certainly.
And in some outlets of the BBC, if you're reading the news, most people don't appreciate this.
You're also producing it.
Well, that's very, very good.
That was about just over 30 seconds.
I say, 45.
And actually, Howard, you had your newsreader's voice on.
I detected it.
Hello.
Exactly.
Well, let me settle there.
I've got a nice cup of black coffee here.
I'm trying to wake myself up.
Now, let's clear one thing up first before we talk about you and your story, which is fascinating.
But the one thing I want to clear up is one of my colleagues yesterday in London said to me, I just mentioned that I was talking to you.
He said, oh, Heather Cooper, I've seen her on TV, which everybody says, of course.
He said, what's the difference between an astronomer and an astrologer?
Basically, astrology is the superstition of the stars.
It's complete mumbo-jumbo.
It's basically, admittedly, it predated astronomy proper, which is the science of the stars.
Basically, astronomy is all about what the stars are made of, how they move in space.
It's about things like black holes.
It's about the whole nature of the universe.
It's all to do with the properties of the stars and how gorgeous they are, how exciting they are, how hot they are, how far they are, what amazing things they do, like exploding, like nurturing our solar system like our sun does.
Astrology, on the other hand, is actually what precedes it.
Because in the very ancient past, we're talking now, sort of almost, well, we're talking prehistory, people looked at the moon and the sun in the sky, looked at the way they moved, and thought that actually influenced people on Earth.
And in China, they took this extremely seriously, and they thought that anything untoward that happened in the sky, like the sudden appearance of a comet, like Halli's comet, or maybe a sudden appearance of an exploding star, they didn't know they were exploding stars, they thought they were new stars.
They thought, ah, the emperor thought there is insurrection in the provinces, and they sent out a whole army of people to kill off the people in the province who were insurrecting.
So basically, astrology is meaningless mumbo-jumbo trying to, if you like, put human values onto the heavens, which don't actually have any currency whatsoever.
Well, you sound fairly sure about that.
We sound very sure about that.
But equally, you know, I'm a Gemini, okay, and I was born in.
When was your birthday?
June the 10th.
Oh, I'm June the 2nd.
God.
You had to be a Gemini.
You had to be a Gentin.
Oh, Howard, don't take it seriously.
I've studied astrology, obviously, because I have to actually rebut it.
And I am a Gemini with Sagittarius Rising, which is the ideal combination, I am told, for somebody who is a communicator.
It couldn't be better.
But honestly, I'll tell you the most wonderful story I've ever heard about astrology.
It was in the very early days of when people had these, you could actually send your birth details into a company, and they would actually assess your personality profile by computer.
This is very, very early days of computers as well.
But anyway, it happened in France.
And a chap called Michel Gaukelin, he said, if you want to look at your personality profile, just send your birth details in, your time of, your birth dates and all that sort of thing.
We'll calculate your personality profile, which goes with your birth time and everything like that.
So everybody sent off for this.
They thought it was fascinating.
And they got their personality profile.
And as it turned out, the personality profile was exactly the same.
This was what Gokulan had done.
He'd actually sent off exactly the same personality profile for everybody.
Everybody assessed it, and they all said, yes, this is absolutely me.
It's incredibly 100% accurate.
And their partners assessed it well, and they said, yes, it's very accurate indeed.
And what Gokulan had done was to send everybody the personality profile of a French mass murderer.
Well, that sounds fairly convincing.
The only thing is...
They want to, especially now when we don't have too much organized religion, people want to believe in something which is bigger than them.
And astrology is awfully convenient because it's kind of out of this world.
And yet, Heather Cooper, because I'm going to get emails about this now, you've opened a whole can of worms, but I asked you to.
You display all the characteristics of a Gemini.
You're very youthful.
You are eternally young.
You're a great communicator.
And those are the things that Geminis are.
And if you look at the media, for example, the number of people that I work with who are Geminis is quite phenomenal.
At one station that I worked at, Smooth in London, we had Mark Goodyear, we had the program controller, we had somebody else.
We had about four people in the on-air side of it who were Geminis, vastly outweighing the number of other star signs.
Well, let me put it a different way.
First of all, if you're a Gemini, you're probably not a Gemini.
Because ever since the constellations were invented, the Earth has wobbled a bit.
And as a result, where the sun sits in your so-called birth sign has wobbled back a sign.
So I hate to tell you, mate, you're a Taurus, and so am I. Oh, no.
So we're gluttons or whatever they are.
Nothing against Taurians.
So Taurians aren't even Taurians, then?
No, they're actually Aryans.
And so it all goes back.
And what I'd like to do, I really would be fascinated to actually see this research done.
Yeah, I mean, I tend to bond, like you do, with summer people.
You know, they're people who are born in June, July, that sort of thing.
And I guess it's really what your parents were up to in September the previous year.
So maybe that's what I want to be looked into.
I should say they're more and not a biologist.
Oh, heaven.
Okay, now let's get seriously into the astronomy and take one final small little diversion because I want to ask about you.
For many, many years, and still, to a very large extent, the most famous astronomer in the UK is, of course, Sir Patrick Moore, wonderful man.
You know him.
I know him.
He did the sky at night, still does it for so many years.
I think it's the longest-running program on BBC television in the UK.
And yet, I think, was it in the 80s, in the 70s maybe, suddenly this girl appears.
I use that term, and I hope you're not going to kick me for it.
But this young lady appears who is also talking about astronomy, and that person is you.
Now, when I was brought up, and I think we're a similar kind of age, Heather, it was harder for a girl to do stuff like this.
Science was not a girl's thing.
So was it difficult in your case to be able to do what you're doing?
No, it wasn't, oddly enough.
I actually wrote to Patrick Moore when I was 16, because I thought about, well, my mother actually said, look, dear, you were really interested in astronomy when you were a small kid.
Why didn't you think about it as a career?
So I wrote to the great man, and I said, P.S., I'm a girl.
Is this a problem?
And so he wrote back to me, and the first thing in his letter said, Dear Miss Cooper, let me reassure you on one point.
Being a girl is no handicap at all.
So, Patrick.
So you were given the go-ahead from the very top.
I ignored it.
He said, he carried on in his letter.
He said, for astronomy, really good maths are essential, as all astronomy is mathematical.
Then in brackets, he puts, let me again reassure you, I am the worst mathematician in the world.
So in fact, Patrick is not a professional astronomer, which you do need absolutely brilliant physics and maths to be.
And I actually chickened out when I was 18 when I left school.
I actually went off to become a management trainee for the Top Shop chain, which, you know, I guess your colleagues in the States will know about as well.
It's an enormous retail chain, extremely trendy.
It's a place where everybody buys their clothes.
So I actually started off my career in fashion retailing.
Right.
And how did you get yourself back on track into astronomy?
Oddly enough, going to my local library, I'd been promoted very rapidly.
And I became the assistant to the director of administration, which was, oh, God, it was so boring.
It wasn't true.
And I went to the library to look up books on retail management.
And I suddenly thought, ah, when I was last in this library, the astronomy books were just kind of opposite.
I wonder what's happening in astronomy these days.
And I picked up this book by the great science writer and science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov.
And it was called The Universe.
And I read it from cover to cover.
And essentially, it was a sort of history of astronomy, but it went all the way from the Aborigines and how they looked at their star-studied skies.
They saw so many stars, they couldn't even join up the dots.
They just were blanked up by stars in the Aboriginal deserts.
It was brilliant.
To the later stuff, which was all about black holes, exploding stars, the expanding universe, the Big Bang.
And I thought, wow.
And I thought, I've got to get into this subject.
I really have, by whatever means.
And I actually joined up with a local astronomical society, you know, very minor thing where backyard astronomers would look through telescopes and say, oh, my telescope's bigger than yours, as they do.
And I got really hooked.
And then I learned from colleagues there was a very minor job going as a phototechnician at Cambridge.
Got into that.
The guys at Cambridge said there's no job at astronomy for you without a degree.
So I struggled to get a Math C level in six months in evening classes, got the lowest past grades, got accepted at uni.
Did my degree, struggled, got an upper second, wasn't bad, in astrophysics at Leicester, which is the best uni in Britain to do astrophysics.
Why is that?
It's just basically because they got involved very early on with the idea that rather than using telescopes on the ground, you could actually send instruments up into space.
And they have a very, very good space science department which uses instruments above the Earth's atmosphere which can detect radiations and stuff and data from objects that send out stuff like X-radiation that can't actually penetrate the Earth's atmosphere.
So that space science department is doing brilliantly.
It's been going for about 50 years now.
And so it's inspired an awful lot of people, including astronauts like Jeff Hoffman, who participated in the repair mission, the first repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
He was actually a research fellow there.
Far, far, far grander than me when I was a mere undergraduate.
So yeah, I went to Leicester.
And you were in the right place, obviously, at the right time.
I was absolutely very encouraged by my prof, who was wonderful.
Jack Meadows, still a lovely guy, still very much alive and well.
When he retired, he had a retirement party, and he was sitting at my feet, and he's so tall and sundry.
And he always muses.
He has this lovely voice, which is very musy.
And he said, he said, Heather was my best student.
But, but.
Oh, but.
She was hopeless at mathematics.
And he was absolutely right, I was hopeless.
And I did enough to get a good enough degree.
Then I went on to do research, because to be a proper astronomer, you have to do research into a very, very small area of a very big subject.
So I started to carry on, I wanted to become the world leader in research into clusters of galaxies, which are basically whacking great conglomerations of big star cities.
But I got so bored.
It was just...
And I just thought, I just don't buy this.
And me and my best mate, Nigel Hembest, he was doing research at Cambridge and he was finding equally the same thing.
We thought, you know, this is a fantastic subject.
Nobody's really promoting the kind of very exciting things that are going on, like people are discovering exploding stars.
People are finding new things about the planets in our solar system by sending space probes to them.
Nobody's actually telling people this in the media.
So we thought, right, we're going to quit research.
We're going to become, we're going to go and join the media.
And the first one of us to get a job in London is the one who dictates that move we had to make to London.
I got the job.
I became the senior lecturer at the planetarium at Greenwich, which is a titchy little planetarium, not like the great big things you've got in the States or anything like that, but a little 48-seater one.
And really that's what started my media career, because suddenly the media sort of took interest in the fact that I'd taken over this little planetarium and I was in London.
Meanwhile, Nigel moved down as well to, we share a house, we're not an item, we're actually two incredibly good pals.
And he managed to get, we started off getting a consultancy with new scientists and one with nature.
And then the wretch, he then had five consultancies, one for every single day of the week.
Oh, wow.
And I was thinking, I'm only talking to eight-year-olds, so I quit.
And then that's when I deliberately just went into the media.
And I guess the rest is history.
And now you are seen and heard everywhere, radio and television.
Your series are seen on television.
The Americans know you.
And you have done a great deal, certainly in this country, to popularize astronomy.
When anybody thinks we need to talk to an astronomer for any news story that breaks, well, we go into the contact file and your name and number are always there, which has, of course, happened within the last week or so, where we had a news story about a new planet.
And they're telling us that this planet has conditions similar to Earth, but unfortunately is a very, very long way away.
I guess you got some phone calls about that.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, it's great fun.
You never know where the news media is going to jump.
And that's the fun thing.
I've got an ISDN line, which is actually a broadcast quality line, which comes out of It's actually two cottages knocked together in the wilds of the Chiltern Hills, which is the nearest Hill Range to London, to the west, halfway between London and Oxford.
But it's actually a farmhouse, and it's heavily beamed.
It's 18th century, late 18th century.
And the acoustic is to die for.
It's beautiful.
And with this ISDN line, it sounds as if I'm in the studio.
So radio producers know this very well.
So they phone up with bizarre stories.
I mean, you never know.
You can never second guess how the media is going to jump.
And Radio Wales in particular is very inventive.
And the other day they picked up this fabulous story about a Danish experiment to send basically a manned rocket into space.
A very narrow rocket with only standing room for one man who could actually hold a microphone in one hand to tell people how he's getting on.
What, a microphone in one hand and a parachute in the other?
What on earth is going to happen?
The other one with a vomit tube.
Oh, Lord.
And this was a real story, because what I would be doing if I saw that story on the news-wise is checking the date and the source.
I know, but I did.
It was not the 1st of April.
It's real.
Absolutely real.
So the Danes are planning a manned space mission.
A manned space mission launching off the coast of Sweden, as it turned out, literally in the middle of a sort of a drilling rig.
And they didn't get it off.
They were going to do it, first of all, with a dummy on board, just to work out what the G-forces would be and things like that.
But I love it, you know, crazy stories like that that come out of the blue.
But inevitably, the only thing is, I mean, how would I, I know you're tired at the moment because you've been doing a morning shift.
And you know what happens?
Breaking news stories inevitably break overnight.
I think a lot of it is because they break in America.
That's exactly right.
And the same with this story about this new planet.
Is it Gilles?
Giles?
How do you say that?
Gliese.
Gliese 581.
Yeah, it's named after a German astronomer.
The star is so obscure it doesn't merit its name like Betelgeuse or anything like that.
Well, interesting, isn't it?
Because I'll tell you exactly how that story developed.
I was on duty that morning.
Yeah.
And those stories appear as little paragraphs.
First of all, it's written quite innocuously as a little paragraph.
And I'm sitting there thinking, well, you know, I do the unexplained.
is right up my street.
And I also think if what we are being told by the couple of scientists, I think, were they American guys But I mean, he's pucker.
He's good.
And that's, by the way, just an aside.
I always check stories to make sure that it's not put up by some raving loony.
And Steve Oak is a very, very solid astronomer.
Well, he is certainly the one that we had sound bites of.
And I began to think, well, what are we talking about in the news this morning?
Well, we had the Labour Party conference and there were a few other things around.
And I just said to a colleague, I said, look, if this is what we are being told, actually, the Labour Party conference and all the other things we're talking about don't really matter.
I agree.
And the whole thing is that this is actually a more serious observation.
The media is run by arts-educated people and especially.
Like me.
Like you, yes, naughty person.
But also politically savvy people.
I mean, so many people I know have done PPE at Oxford, which is Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.
And their sole aim is to get into the media.
And they think the most important stories are political stories because obviously politicians hold the power.
And they, by having it rub off on them, they are recipients of that power.
And, you know, I think it's no sort of...
Probably the radio station or the television station almost has more power than the politicians.
But this story moved itself up the agenda in a fascinating way.
Normally these space stories, they hover around the news agenda during the day.
They slip up and down the agenda.
And probably in the review of what's happened during that day, it'll appear later on.
But it'll never be very much of a story.
Now, I was interested to see that on the day of the Labour Party conference, and it was a big day at the conference for what it was worth.
This story actually shot up the agenda, and I began to think, because I do buy into some conspiracy theories, and I know you're going to hate me for that, but I do.
I began to think: are we being prepared for something here?
Is this a piece of knowledge that it is now the right time for us to know?
I don't think so.
I think it was actually cumulative.
I will say there was no conspiracy theory here.
It's actually a combination of, well, I'd say it's a combination of Steve Voked, a very, very respected person searching for planets around other stars.
And this has become very, very hot over the last 10 years.
I mean, up until about 10 years ago, we hardly knew of any planets beyond our solar system.
Now we know of about 500.
But they tend to be great big blobs like Jupiter because the only way you can detect these planets is by the gravity they exert on their parent star.
So the star basically wobbles a bit because it's being pulled by a massive planet.
In the case of Steve's discovery, first of all, he was using a very highly publicized telescope, which is the Keck telescope on Hawaii, one of the biggest in the world.
Secondly, Steve is very, very, very dedicated to trying to do meticulous observations to pin down planets which are similar to the Earth, which means you've got to actually look at a very, very tiny wobble on the star, because the Earth produces a very tiny wobble on the sun.
So that was what he was doing.
And then I think the real contributing factor, and I know this is absolutely a really, absolutely riveting thing for everybody in the media, if the Daily Mail plugs it, then it's news.
And I know every single radio station, television station in Britain looks at what the mail's output is.
Well, the mail is, yeah, if you're in the United States or another part of the world, you won't know this, but the mail is pitched exactly, precisely at the middle ground.
It's precisely pitched at journalists as well.
And it gives you bite-sized chunks of wow information you need to know.
So the first thing I did when I heard about this story breaking, I mean, I got the phone call at 7.20 in the morning and I thought, oh my gosh, not another planet around Pisa 581, because there were five already, and this was the six.
I simply just logged into Google News, and there it was, Daily Mail, three hours ago.
David Derbyshire had done a piece, a very good piece.
And, you know, there it was.
And, you know, that's the great, I think the secret actually is the Daily Mail runs the media.
Okay.
So that made all of us, including me, sit up and take notice.
Of course, I have a bit of an interest in this anyway, but I would have done the story if I hadn't had an interest because it starts to have some credibility.
And also, it's fairly easy to understand.
You said that we're all arts educated in the media.
Most of us, I think, are.
You're right.
So the scientific facts of it have to be credible.
And there's got to be a hook line.
It's almost like a pop song.
There's got to be something you can grab hold of.
And the something to grab hold of is we may not be alone because this planet apparently has conditions, unless you tell me different, that could foster life.
Well, exactly.
It is.
That is the real driving factor.
And inevitably, it comes into all this discussion about planets around other stars.
Could there be other life out there?
And in the case of this planet, well, it's got similar gravity to the Earth, so it means that an astronaut could actually walk around on it.
It's got, it's cold.
It's very cold.
The star that it circles is much, much colder than our Sun.
This planet is much nearer in.
The temperature, if, again, this is, well, nobody quite knows what it is, but they're sort of talking about minus 12, but then it gets to minus 12 in Aberdeenshire, and the Scots can do it, so maybe we can as well.
So it could potentially harbor life if the conditions are right.
And that's what people, I mean, I have to say this, that inevitably when you hear these researchers, and there are quite a lot out there who are trying to discover planets around other stars, when they send out their press releases, it's always prefaced with, yes, it could be suitable for life, because they know what, that's what hit the headline, that's what always hits the headlines.
And it did.
And one of the people I saw interviewed, I'm not sure of the guy's name, but he did look like a bit of a folk singer.
He looked like he was almost a member of Steel Ice Bahan or something like that.
And he said, oh, yes, but they said to him, would you now try and contact anything that might be there?
Would you be actively trying to either go there or send out signals beamed at this place?
And he said, well, you don't know what you're dealing with.
And no, I wouldn't.
What's your take on that?
Do you think we should be trying to make contact with anything that might be there?
Well, yes, I mean, we've been trying this for the last almost 60 years now.
A marvelous guy called Frank Drake, American, based in California, he started listening in to possible signals from avian civilizations back in, golly, 1955, I believe.
He's lovely, he's still alive and well.
And eventually he set up the SETI Institute.
SETI is search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
And we had Seth Szostak from SETI on this show very recently.
Exactly.
Now, Seth is absolutely divine.
I mean, he's a very, he's a pillar of the SETI community and indeed at the SETI Institute, along with his colleague Jill Tata, who is the...
Jodie Foster Jodie Foster and she is actually Really?
Yes, is based on.
You can see it, absolutely.
And she shadowed Jill for about six months and just got all her characteristics.
It's quite spooky, actually, seeing a friend of yours portrayed in a Hollywood movie.
But yeah, this has been going on for years.
And it doesn't just involve listening into signals.
Many stars have been targeted.
We've even sent out signals of our own, deliberately, to see if anybody responds.
But trouble is, radio signals, light, all these things are all part of what's called the electromagnetic spectrum, which is basically a load of waves which travel at the speed of light.
But the universe is so vast that even traveling at the speed of light, these signals would take four years to get to the nearest star.
So it's a big, big place.
So what people are doing is trying other alternative ways of trying to search for life.
Now, one fascinating idea is that there could be life on Mars, and I strongly believe there is life on Mars.
Me and my best mate, Nigel, did a book a few years ago where we went all over the States, basically interviewing people about the planet Mars for a very, very popular and down-market book.
And we came of one researcher who'd worked on the Viking space probe back in 1976.
And that was a probe, a very, very sophisticated probe, only the size of a filing cabinet, which landed on the Martian surface and probed the soil for signs of life.
And basically there were four experiments, three out of four, all tested negative.
But there was one that actually tested apparently positive.
So we found the guy who'd done this, a guy called Gil Levine, who's based on the Beltway, just outside Washington.
And we said to him, what was so special about your experiment?
Why do you think it worked?
And he showed us his data.
He was very wary of being interviewed by us, actually.
He'd been on some show the previous night on television where he'd been on with UFO spotters and people like that and really felt a bit bruised by the whole experience.
And he showed us his data.
He said, this is exactly the kind of test I do in air conditioning systems.
He's actually an air conditioning engineer where I look for the signals coming out from bacteria which could cause Legionnaire's disease.
Okay, so this is how you look for microbial life.
Microbial life on Mars.
So he did his Legionnaire's disease test on Mars, and it came out with the same sort of signal.
In other words, what he did, he got the soil in the experimental container.
He fed the soil a nutrient like sugar, and just in the way that if you feed a baby sugar or something like that, it goes and gives off gases at various ends.
And same goes for the microbes in the sample.
It gave off gases, and it gave up gases not in a way that's like a chemical.
You get a sudden surge and it dies down again.
It built up as apparently the microbes multiplies.
Now, people have poo-pooed the experiment because they regard Gill as merely being, I quote, a sanitary engineer.
But on the other hand, I saw his data.
I was pretty convinced.
When I say I think there's life on Mars, we're not talking about little green men.
We're talking about little green slime.
Okay, but here's a fascinating thing, though, Heather.
If there was that kind of life on Mars, could it not pinpoint the fact that perhaps life is evolving into something that might turn into little green men, or indeed that there was life of that kind at some stage in the past?
It could well have evolved in the past, and certainly there's a terrific amount of evidence that suggests that Mars was much warmer and much wetter in the past.
In fact, there's some data that point to the fact it could well have had oceans, but it's just too far from the sun.
It's almost Geddy on for, well, two-thirds of the way again out from the sun from where we are.
So it's just that bit too cold.
So any evolution may well have got squidged completely.
But there is some very tantalizing evidence at the moment that you have pockets of methane which pop up.
And they seem to be correlated with the seasons on Mars, which means that during the spring you get extra methane emissions.
Now, some people would say, well, yeah, you get methane from volcanoes.
But it turns out these pockets of methane aren't actually correlated with what else you expect from volcanoes, like sulfur dioxide and things like that.
So they're looking at these pockets of methane and thinking, well, could it just be water causing reactions or could there be some very primitive form of life?
And I think now, in the last five years, a lot of Martian researchers are actually coming to the conclusion that there could be a very primitive form of life on the Martian surface.
And as you say, maybe in the past, there was something much more significant.
Okay, now this brings me to a subject that's been very controversial on this show and some others in the United States.
The Martian moon Phobos.
And I know you're going to, yeah, I knew I'd get that reaction when I said the word.
I spoke to a man who you know, and I've known him for many years.
He's a friend, Richard C. Hoagland, in America, about Phobos.
He's got one take on it.
I also spoke to Olivier Vitas, senior space scientist at ESA, the European Space Agency.
He has another take on it.
Richard Hoagland's take on it is that Phobos is some kind of spaceship, really, that has been used by some civilization as a craft or for other nefarious purposes of whatever type and then abandoned, but within it are chambers and it's hollow and all the rest of it.
Meanwhile, Olivia Vitas says that is not true.
It is just simply a chunk of rock hovering around there.
There's been tremendous controversy about it.
As far as I understand, there has been within the last month, it may still be ongoing, a conference in Italy about Phobos.
I haven't seen or heard any results of that conference, but there has been.
What's your belief about it?
Oh, Phobos is just a natural rock in orbit about Mars, almost certainly.
People used to think it was a captured asteroid, because Mars is very, very close to the asteroid belt, which is a load of debris between Mars and Jupiter, which never formed into a planet because it was disrupted by the mighty gravity of Jupiter itself.
It's very low in density.
In fact, I think your colleague at the European Space Agency said it's like as if it's porous.
It's not porous in that sense, but it is just very, very low density rock, and almost certainly a natural moon which formed around Mars.
And in the next few years, we're going to be sending probes to that moon, and they're going to actually look at the surface.
They're going to sort of zap it with laser beams and things like that.
So I think the controversy is going to be over for all and sundry quite, quite soon.
Interestingly enough, the first person to suggest that Phobos was unnatural or artificial was an amazing guy called Josef Shkrovsky, who was a terrific Russian astronomer and physicist who was a great expert in cosmic waves.
And he, I think, somewhat facetiously put forward this idea, which Richard Hoagland has jumped upon, but there is absolutely no evidence.
If you look at it, it's a very, if you look at it in close-up, it's a natural cratered-looking body, and it's just made of very, very low-density rocks.
There's nothing suspicious about it.
All right, well, what about the claims that there are chambers within Phobos?
And also, if you look at the surface of Phobos, you can see things which look more regular than random.
No, it's rather like the famous one, the so-called the face on Mars.
Well, that was Richard of Course as well.
That was Richard, of course.
Yes, I know.
Well, I talked to Michael Malin, whose image of the face on Mars.
Michael is an amazing guy, or Mike, as he's known, actually, in the States.
He's very, very difficult to get an interview with, but I managed to get him because his very nice sidekick, whose name I forget at the moment, I feel very bad about this because he's a lovely guy.
He said, oh, gosh, you've got to be interviewed by Heather.
I read one of her books when I was a teenager, and I felt very old at that point.
But I got an interview with Mike, and Mike said, yeah, we photographed the so-called face on Mars, and this was part of a load of features which Richard Hoagland and others said look like artificial structures.
It looks like a face and everything like that.
Well, if you look at some of the photographs, especially the ones that are claimed to have been clarified after they were declarified by NASA, if you look at some of the pictures, it does indeed look like a big face.
No, it doesn't.
Mike was furious because he was then told with the Mars Global Faber, which is the space probe which he actually more or less did all the photographic stuff on, he was told by NASA to take a close-up of the face on Mars, and he was pretty peed off, I can tell you.
He told me this very, very forcibly.
And he did take a picture of the face on Mars, a really high-resolution picture of the face on Mars.
And he showed it to me, and I looked at it in close-up, and it was absolutely obvious.
He'd taken it from several angles of light, and it was very obvious what it was.
If you go to Arizona and you go through the desert, you see these things called mesas, sandstone, basically big sandstone rocks.
That have been weathered down at the top, isn't it?
Isn't that right?
And it's just that they are just eroded sandstone rocks that you get on Mars.
I mean, probably eroded by the wind on Mars.
And it was just perfectly obvious.
If you look in high resolution, and that's the key, it's nothing like a face.
It's an eroded sandstone mesa.
And as I said, Mike was furious at having to take that picture to NASA, but NASA were obviously persuaded by public opinion that there was life on Mars.
And in fact, when I was making a TV program about Mars, it was a TV pilot programme, which never got shown, we were doing a probe, we were doing a programme, I should say, about the Mars orbiter that was going there, and it got lost.
And the conspiracy theorists, brought up your conspiracy theory again, said that it had been destroyed by the Martians, who didn't want us exploring their surface.
Well, if I am correct, Heather, though, haven't there been a number of probes to Mars that have disappeared or not functioned in very mysterious circumstances?
Not very mysterious.
I mean, this particular probe was basically, as people have told me, was basically a meteorological satellite which just went, it took a year to get to Mars.
They didn't actually sort of command it to do anything until it got to Mars, and then they had to send a command saying fire a rocket, fire a little retro-rocket, and go into Mars orbit.
And the poor thing had basically seized up in the cold flight all the way from the Earth to Mars.
It tried to fire its retrorocket.
Either it made the whole thing blow up, which is one idea, or it just sent it into an orbit or basically into a position where it couldn't look at Mars at all, so it got lost.
But yes, you're right.
There have been several probes that have languished on getting to Mars.
The really classic one was one which was going to land on Mars.
And it turned out that NASA had basically the contractors who were building this probe were building it in feet and inches, whereas NASA was working in metric measurements.
And the two didn't speak to each other.
I've heard that.
That was a dreadful one.
They crashed.
But the really amazing one, which nobody knows about, actually, was one called Mars 96, which obviously went to Mars in 1996.
It was a Russian probe with European equipment on board.
And the story about that one was that it went on board a Proton rocket, which is the Russian rocket, which has four stages.
So you have the first stage fire, second stage, third stage.
The fourth stage didn't fire properly.
And that was the one that was carrying the probe itself.
And that then, it didn't actually leave the Earth.
It went into orbit around the Earth and then started to come down into the Earth's atmosphere.
And apparently, the actual probe which was contained in this fourth stage of the rocket was actually powered by plutonium.
So it was radioactive as well.
Plutonium power source to feed the experiments because it's so cold out at Mars you need to have a radioactive source.
And nobody knew where it landed.
And there were all kinds of rumors.
Apparently part of the rocket carrier came down somewhere in the Pacific.
But I talked to my mate Jim Oberg, who's a great expert on Russian space probes.
And he said, Heather, I know where that probe went down, and I know where the spaceship is.
I know where the actual space probe is, the plutonium thing.
Okay.
And he said, if you look at the data for the night that it came down, certainly a bit of it fell in the Atlantic, but something came down before then, in the Pacific, I mean, something came down before then, and there was a great fireball that was seen over Chile that night.
And almost certainly, I would say, there is a plutonium-powered Martian space probe lurking in the forests, the Amazon forests of either Chile or Peru.
Nobody's found it yet.
And I assume they're looking for it.
No, nobody's looked for it.
Nobody's looked for it, huh?
No.
I mean, I'd love to make a TV program about that, you know, the search for this plutonium-powered space probe.
And, yeah, that was a fairly spectacular one.
That's been fairly hushed up.
Well, by the sound of it, I'd never heard of anything like it.
What a great programme that would be to do.
That would be great, wouldn't it?
Absolutely.
But yeah, I mean, Mars has been cursed.
And in fact, in our book, we've actually got a chapter, something called The Curse of Mars.
But believe me, there's no conspiracy theory here, there are no Martians, just, I suspect, rather boring green slime.
All right.
Are we being visited by extraterrestrials, Heather Cooper?
Period, no, absolutely no way.
How do you know that?
Because when you when you go on, I've stopped doing it, I just got to sort of ugh.
When you go on a TV program to discuss things with UFO people, I mean, it just gets to the fact that you know they're hallucinating.
But there are some really credible individuals.
I remember meeting a guy in London who was visiting the UK probably 10 years ago, and I was able to get him into a studio at Capitol Radio.
Stanton Friedman.
Stan Friedman has given his life to this.
Now, he's not wacko.
It's sad, isn't it?
I mean, I just do find it very sad because I do think there are very strong medical things to be brought up against people who claim to see UFOs, and in particular, very sadly, people who claim to have actually been abused by...
Betty and Barney Hill, the most famous abduction case in all of ufology.
Now, these people...
Let me come up with what I think is the best evidence against UFOs.
When you think about it, and I think they're marvellous, you've got an army of people all over the world who are absolutely passionate about astronomy.
They are not paid for it.
They're backyard stargazers who go out every night and they ogle the sky.
They either do it with the naked eye, they've got binoculars, or they've got a telescope, but they know the night sky.
My brother-in-law is one of those people.
He's in Worcestershire in a place that doesn't have light pollution.
He's got a little hut and he's got a great big telescope.
Wow.
Well, those are the people who never, ever report UFOs because they know the sky and they know the natural things that happen.
I mean, I do remember a Marvelous report of somebody was observing a shower of shooting stars, meteors, and he noticed this very strange object and he said, oh, I saw a fuzzy meteor.
And then people sort of said, well, why was it fuzzy?
He said, well, actually, if I look more carefully, I think I can remember it was flapping and it made a noise like, ooh, woo.
He discovered an owl.
That's a bird, right?
But what about the claims of people, and we had his representative on this show, like Billy Meyer.
Have you heard of Billy Meyer in Switzerland?
The guy who's taken photographs of UFOs, has been on UFOs, he says.
I mean, so many of them are faked.
I mean, the classic book was apparently published in 1954.
I've seen some ancient copies of it by a guy called George Adamski.
And it all started back in 1947 when an Air Force pilot in America, a U.S. Air Force pilot, said he'd seen what seemed to be a flying saucer.
And a lot of pilots do report these things.
I know a lot of pilots.
My dad was an airline pilot.
And I know that they're not actually terribly used to seeing things that are unusual.
And George Damsky capitalised on this.
And he published this book.
I forget what it was called, but it was filled with fake photographs.
And when he died, they actually managed to sort of go into his archives and look at how he'd faked them, you know, sort of with a sort of flattened top hat sitting on a sort of wire and things like that.
But what about, for example, there was a British Midland, I think it was, crew flying over the English Channel, and I think maybe they were over Belgium or somewhere.
This was back in the 90s, and they said that they saw something as big as a battleship in the sky.
And there was another one very, very recently.
I tried to talk to the man, but I saw footage of him on television.
A captain of a Channel Islands plane, I think it was Orini Airlines, whatever.
And he said that he had seen something, and it had shocked him to the point where he had to land the plane and go straight for a cup of tea to calm down.
Well, I have to say, everybody I met who claims to have seen a UFO does seem to have something.
Let's say, well, this is going to generate loads of emails.
However, wait for it.
I basically don't think they are quite on this planet.
So I'm afraid I'm not sure.
I understand what you're saying, but if entire flight crews, not just one person, if entire flight crews, all the people on the flight deck, what's that, two or three people, say that they have seen something and this has happened, then surely they must have seen something.
And how can you explain that by natural phenomena?
Well, I can.
One fascinating thing talking about flight crews was one classic flight which the astronomer Paul Wilde was on.
Paul Wilde was an Australian astronomer, a radio astronomer using big radio dishes to survey the sky.
And he happened to be on a flight going from wherever it was, Sydney to Melbourne or what have you.
And he suddenly noticed this weird object come into the plane.
It came down the aisle, literally came out down between the seats.
It was a glowing sphere.
It was quite frightening.
And it came right out and it left the plane at the tail end with a bang.
And because he was a physicist, he was actually able to calculate from its brightness how hot it was, from the way the brightness fell off, how hot it was inside.
And what he had actually observed was something which actually is quite common on planes and around planes.
And it's a phenomenon called ball lightning.
And it's not very well understood.
In fact, a colleague of mine, Mark Stenhoff, has published a book about it.
But it's still very, very rare.
I saw ball lightning myself at the age of eight when I lived just outside London.
And this was ball lightning within the plane?
Within the plane itself, yes, which it can be dangerous.
You sometimes see it on ships, and it's known as St. Elmo's Fire.
But it is very, very rare, and it's very difficult to explain.
And because people don't understand it, they need to put a convenient label on it.
And unidentified flying object, UFO, it's a good one.
All right.
Well, let's leave that aside.
Do you believe, Heather, that there is intelligent life like us somewhere out there?
I'd like to, but I don't know.
I mean, I really don't.
I mean, Frank Drake and his SETI team and people like Seth Szostak and Jill Tarter, they've been searching for years and they haven't picked up anything yet.
And, well, maybe the whole fallacy of their argument is that they're looking for the wrong thing, they're barking up the wrong tree.
What they're trying to do is they're listening in with radio telescopes for radio signals on the premise that if there is intelligent life, it will communicate by radio.
In the way that we do, and that's exactly what I said to Seth Szostak.
How do you know that they will use frequencies like we use?
They may have another way of doing things.
Well, exactly.
And that's the whole point.
And the fact is, the other thing to consider is that as far as life in the universe goes, almost certainly we are new kids on the block.
The sun is about 5 billion years old.
The universe is about 13.5 billion years old.
So, well, basically, we're a long down, way down in the pecking order of when life might have started.
Life could have started 13 million years ago.
Life, intelligent life on Earth, were we talking about human life, dolphins and that kind of thing.
Well, dolphins were around about 100 million years ago.
Humans, only about a million years ago.
So who knows what technology, really intelligent and advanced life, life that's been around for maybe billions of years, what technology is it using to communicate?
We cannot second guess that, just in the way that we couldn't second guess computers back in the 1950s.
Understood.
Do you believe that there was ever a race that came to Earth and helped us along the way, like helped us build the pyramids?
I'm talking about the Anunaki here.
Eric von Daniken, who perpetrated all these ghastly myths and rumors about people helping life along and stuff like that.
Plus people who say that the...
I mean, there's a guy I talk to here, and I do respect him greatly.
He puts a very cogent case, and he's just in the middle, or just finished, I think, a big tour of America, Michael Tellinger, who says that these beings were around and they used sound.
And the whole purpose, for example, of Stonehenge is to do with sound.
It's a sound receptacle.
I don't believe a word of it.
No, Stonehenge, again, it's very difficult.
One of my friends got the first post in the world as professor of archaeoastronomy.
It's a fascinating thing.
It actually looks at why you have monuments like Stonehenge or the Avenues in Brittany or many, many stone circles in the northern hemisphere, northwest Europe.
But they are obviously aligned on things like eclipses.
They're obviously aligned on risings and settings of the moon.
Some people go so far as to say they're actually aligned with stars.
But because they were built so many thousands of years ago, we're talking about 5,000 years in the past, what you have to then second guess is, okay, what was the motivation of those people?
Exactly.
Why would they be interested?
Why would they do this and how?
We don't know, because of course this is all prehistory.
It's before the Rishian record started, and it's almost impossible.
What Clive did, my friend Clive Ruggles, who was professor of archaeoastronomy at Leicester, he went off to study tribes in Africa who were building similar monuments, not necessarily out of stone, but out of wood, today, to look for their motivations.
But, you know, you cannot second guess what these people were thinking about.
All we know is there are some significant astronomical alignments, and you have to know what motivated people, but without written records, it's almost impossible to find out.
As an astronomer, what is the one thing that you would like to discover?
I think it has to be life in the universe, really.
To find out we're not alone and to find out basically what a more advanced race could teach us.
And if you, Heather, were the first person to discover that, say you were perhaps with a colleague or whatever, and you found this out and you have pretty good scientific proof of it, how would you break the news or would you hide the news?
There are protocols in place and they keep changing.
The SETI community, which is a very wide community, not just people looking at radio waves that might be coming from the sky that are artificial, but looking at things like the intelligence of dolphins and chimps to work out basically what intelligence is composed of.
And they are very, very keen that were any of them, and I mean, I am a popularizer, I'm not an North Africi researcher, but these guys have actually developed a protocol amongst themselves to say if they discover alien life, the first people to know it would be the media.
They would just release their findings immediately.
And do you not believe that if that happens, you would be opening a whole can of worms and you would be giving people information perhaps that they couldn't handle?
Well, this is, again, I made a program about, well, called E.T. Please Call Earth a few years ago.
And, well, I was interviewing various of the researchers and they said, well, you know, it's interesting how people would react.
You'd find that people would actually, the stock market might go up or down.
People might sort of turn to religion and go back to church.
They might actually sort of, well, sort of bury themselves away, just as they did when Halley's Comet came by in 1910, when there was a little entry in a paper saying that Halley's Comet contained cyanide gas.
So when it was closest to the Earth, people literally blockaded themselves into their rooms in New York in case the gas poisoned them.
So people will react in various ways, depending, I guess, mainly on their belief system.
But I think, but as one of them so cynically said, and I think he's probably right, a week after the discovery, people will just go back to their everyday lives and think, oh, yeah, well, it's like whatever the Labour or Tory Party conference, they'll forget it ever happened, and carry on as normal.
I hope that's right.
Now, Heather Cooper, last question.
Thank you very much for giving me all of this time, by the way.
I love talking to you.
I always do whenever I go.
Last question for you.
Would you ever like to go into space?
If you were given the chance to be on some Russian mission somewhere, the Indians are even getting involved in space, you know, to have a place on somebody's spacecraft and to go into near-Earth orbit or maybe a little further up, would you like to do it?
Would I like to go into space?
The answer is probably no.
Unlike my best pal, Nigel, Nigel Hembest, who's actually paid for his ticket on Virgin Galactic.
I see.
He is actually going to be...
How much is it?
It's $200,000.
Lord.
I know.
And he thinks it's worth it to go up and be weightless for a while.
You don't go into orbit, because that's very, very costly.
But you go up and you're weightless for a period of time, which I can never remember, but I'm sure every of you will know better than me.
It's, I think it's something like six minutes or something like that.
And then you, or is it six seconds?
I forget exactly, but he's been very brave.
He's paid his money.
He's going up.
Richard Branson has not yet had the spacecraft itself, Spaceship 2, fly on its own.
It's been going up on the mothership, which is wonderfully, by the way, called Eve, after Richard's mum, who used to be what they used to call a stewardess with British Airways in the past.
And Richard was going to be the first spaceman of his Virgin Galactic team, and he's taken up his mum as well, I believe, as in her aces.
How fabulous is that?
Of course, the man is completely without fear.
I remember once seeing a TV program where he took some young people to the top of a balloon and had lunch sitting on the top of a balloon.
Something that would have made me die with fear.
And he just loved it.
It's true, isn't it?
I mean, he is a totally...
He's totally without fear in everything he does.
I mean, I am with fear, I must admit.
I know Helen Sharman, who was the first person in Britain to go up into space.
And she was extremely brave, extremely fit.
Though it's actually a rumor, you do not have to be fit to go into space.
Certainly, recent tests have shown that you can be absolutely brilliant at coping with space when you're in your 80s.
But, no, I mean, I don't really feel like being cooped up, having to train, being cooped up in a small tin can for a while.
I mean, if it was going to be a trip to Mars, now, you've got me on that one.
And a lot of people, I think, would like to go to Mars.
And a lot of people are saying that it might be a great thing, a one-way trip for people in their 80s who might not expect to live much longer, go to Mars and just go there for the experience and just basically say goodbye to life's mortal crew, Coil, when they're on Mars.
But yes, Mars would be very, very wonderful to go to, but I really just don't feel like going up into space for the hop.
I mean, I love flying, but to me, just going into space would be just popping up and popping down, no.
Although, one thing I would love to see, and I have heard the astronauts say it's incredible, going in orbit around the Earth and seeing many, many sunsets and seeing our blue planet just suspended in the blackness of space as a fragile blue sapphire gem.
You put that so beautifully.
Actually, I lied.
That wasn't the last question.
This is, did we go to the moon?
Of course we did.
This conspiracy theory is the one that absolutely tees me off absolutely amazingly much.
Some people saying it was reconstructed in a Hollywood studio.
No, it wasn't.
And I think that is a very horrid slap in the face to the bravery of the Apollo astronauts who did indeed go there.
I've interviewed several of them.
And one of my favourites, actually, one of my favourite astronauts is Al Bean, who, when he came down to Earth, he decided he actually had skill as an artist.
And I've been to his studio in California.
I've seen his painting, not in California, sorry, in Texas.
And I've seen his paintings.
And every time he does a painting, and they're beautiful, many of them are moonscapes, and he remembers how it was with his fellow astronauts, he gets out his moon boot, which is coated in moondust, and he very gently puts an imprint of his moon boot.
You'd hardly notice it.
So each picture is actually basically laced with moondust.
Oh, yes, they went there, and they did some fantastic work.
And when you think when they did it, we were literally hardly, we were infants playing in space.
It's a remarkable achievement.
1969, and we didn't have the internet, and we didn't have anything like the technology.
We had nothing.
I mean, it was primitive technology, and I think the bravery of those astronauts is remarkable.
And I think anybody who basically says it was a Hollywood stunt, basically they are insulting the integrity and the bravery of those incredible astronauts.
So I guess if you take an interest like you do in space, the best quote I suppose I could leave all of this with is quote from Casey Kasem, man who used to do the chart on the radio.
Maybe he still does in America.
And Casey Kasem used to end the American Top 40 show, which I used to love, with the words, keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.
Wonderful.
Isn't that everything?
I think he said it all in that.
Oh, Heather Cooper, thank you very, very much.
You know, I love talking to you.
Now, for people who haven't heard of you, and I can't believe there are people who haven't heard of you, but maybe there are, if they want to know about you, where on the net can they find you?
I've got a website, which is www.ww.hencoop.com.
Heather, thank you very, very much.
Thank you, Hars.
That was wonderful.
Always good value, always wonderful to talk to Heather Cooper.
And you'll find a link to her website on the Unexplained website, which is www.theunexplained.tv.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my fabulous webmaster, for his great work on this show.
Adam Cornwell runs Creative Hotspot, and they are the people who power this show.
Get it out to you.
So, Adam, thank you.
Thank you to Martin for the fabulous theme tune, which we use every time at the beginning and end of this show.
Martin, I hope you're doing well.
Must get in touch with you soon.
And thank you to you for listening.
Remember, if you want to get in touch with the show, www.theunexplained.tv is the website address.
Please visit the website and please make a donation if you can.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
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