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July 8, 2011 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:00
Edition 61 - Mark L Cowden

This amazing show features a conversation with American-born Belfast-based audio-visualtechnician Mark L Cowden who recorded what is claimed to be the first full two-way conversation betweenspirits and humans...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for coming back to the show.
Hope you enjoyed Edition 60 with Nick Red Fern, who's made me think afresh about a lot of stuff I thought I had a view on.
Nick Redfern, well worth investigating his work.
Top guy, we'll get him back on the show soon.
Thank you very much for the great slew of emails I've had in recently.
We'll get back to all of you as soon as I can.
Saleen, nice to hear from you.
Ed, good to hear from you again too.
David, suggesting Bob Lazar.
Have you heard of Bob Lazar?
Bob Lazar is the guy who says and has been saying for about 15 or 20 years that he worked at Area 51.
Puts out a very credible story, but he has been much dismissed over the years or dissed as we say here in the UK.
We'll try for that, definitely, David.
Jeb in Latovia, United States.
Jeb, good to hear from you.
Phil, thank you very much for your email.
Good to hear from you.
Going through the list here, Me High in Germany, nice to hear from you.
Thank you for the things that you said about the show.
Linda, good to hear from you again.
James, suggesting David Wilcock, we'll try for that.
Neil, thank you.
Mark Musick in the United States, suggesting Douglas Wellman, who's done some research on a man who's very dear to my heart, the Howard Hughes, the famous eccentric American multi-millionaire, the man whose name that I have lived with as my name for all of my life.
And as a small child, people would say, is your name really Howard Hughes?
I still go to America, and when I arrive at passport control, they say, Howard Hughes, are you putting me on?
But I love having this man's name because apart from being eccentric, apart from being odd, the guy achieved a great deal.
If you've never read anything about him, I recommend that you just go and find out some details about his life and times because he was an aviator, an engineer, an inventor, a filmmaker, a golf player, I think, at one time.
He did it all.
And for a lot of that time, he was very, very accomplished.
So apart from being odd and strange in his later years, he did a lot that perhaps has been forgotten.
Anyway, Mark Musick suggests that I talk to Douglas Wellman.
I'm going to try and do that definitely, Mark.
If you know him, if you can put me in touch, I'd be really grateful.
Coming soon on this show, we're going to be talking about UFOs and ufology quite a lot.
Not on this edition, but in the following two editions, if it all comes off.
We're going to have Micah Hanks on here, and we'll also have a guy who says that he was an abductee.
Those two and many, many more other famous names have all contributed to a great new book called Exposed, Uncovered, and Declassified UFOs and Aliens.
It's a kind of smorgasbord collection of stories of ufology and extraterrestrial contact, the whole nine yards, a lot of new stuff in there.
And, you know, I don't plug books all the time here, but I think this is a good one.
And we're going to talk to two of the people at least involved in this in the next couple of shows.
But on this show, I have a great story for you.
So what I recommend you do, if you can, if you're not driving at this minute or doing something else, I recommend you get yourself a drink of whatever you like to drink, pour yourself a cup of coffee, sit right down and be prepared to be amazed by Mark L. Cowden's story.
Never heard of Mark L. Cowden?
This is a guy who's an audiovisual technician who says, and this thing is documented, that he recorded the first properly recorded conversation two-way between our world and the next one.
Assuming there is something that happens to us after we die and we go on, to quote Selim Dion, this guy, Mark Cowden, recorded a conversation and has written a book about his experiences of contact with the other side.
Fascinating stuff.
Can't wait to get him on.
Just to say, if you want to contact this show, go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
That's www.theunexplained.tv, the great website designed by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Very busy guy because of his good work these days, but doing fantastic work for us.
Same address.
If you want to make a donation to this show, it will be gratefully received to allow us to proceed with our work here and do all the development we want to.
Thank you very much for all of your contributions, for all of your suggestions, all of your emails.
Email me if you have any guest suggestions, any comments on the show.
I love to hear from you.
Thank you very much for taking time and thank you for taking time to listen to the show.
Right, let's get this amazing story.
Sit right back and enjoy this.
This is Mark L. Cowden.
We're going to get him on The Unexplained right now.
Mark, thank you very much for coming on.
My pleasure.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Really good to have you on here, Mark.
Your story that we're about to hear now, I find amazing.
But I've got the advantage of having read the book that you've written about this.
We're going to tell some of this story and hope to do it justice within the next 50 minutes or thereabouts.
I think before we talk about you and put this all into context, let's hear a couple of short clips, two of them I think you have, from the recording of this conversation that you say is between this world and the next.
So if we can, Mark, we're going to spin those out now, right?
Okay.
For the first time in my life, I've heard it.
He wants to talk to us.
He wants to talk to Mary.
Leave me.
Well, there we are.
You hear those things.
They sound to me very plain.
Just tell me very briefly, and then we'll wind it back to the beginning and talk about you.
What you say they are.
Well, there's two clips there, and the first one actually isn't from the conversation, so to speak.
The first one is from another location that I used, a method I've developed with musical instruments to record the voices.
And the second one is from the hotel, the apparent haunted hotel in Northern Ireland where the live conversation took place.
Okay, and that's what we're here to talk about mainly.
Live conversation between this world and the next.
Is it the first time that that's ever been done?
You know, I haven't heard it done with the kind of clarity that you're claiming here, but hasn't somebody else done this before?
Yeah, there's mixed opinions on that.
I'm not here to say that I'm the absolute first person that's ever accomplished this.
But the thing is, in the modern world, I think we're the only people that have it on video.
it's been broadcasted on television.
We have recordings from the past that are apparently of this type of phenomenon.
And, you know, these come from people who I would consider the grandfathers of this type of research.
And I'm not downplaying those in any way.
I think they're legit.
But the problem is, is they were made, they were groundbreaking, and then people sort of forgot about them.
So a lot of the people that I would consider my audience at the minute don't even know about those recordings or that they even existed.
So even in the book, even though the title is The First Life Conversation Between Worlds, I do also talk a little bit about some of the recordings that were made in the past and as well as the recordings that I made.
All right.
This stuff, as far as I've read and know, has a history almost as long as the history of recorded sound, doesn't it?
It does, yes, yes.
There's been examples of people recording this type of phenomena.
When they were out, there was one guy who was out just recording bird sounds, and he took that home, and when he listened to it, the voice of his wife, who was deceased, was on the recording.
And, you know, some of the best examples of it were accidents that led to, which was pretty much the same way with me.
The first time that I experienced it was an accident.
And, you know, that got me hooked.
It was like, if this is possible, then is there a way we can control this?
All right.
Now, you're talking to me from Belfast, great city.
I'm from Liverpool, very similar to Belfast, too.
Fantastic places.
But your accent is not Irish.
Tell me about you.
No, I'm originally from a little town called Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Hey, isn't there a song?
An Okie from Muskogee, something like this.
Lovely.
So what brings you over here?
Well, I was a musician.
I was a vocalist in various rock bands throughout the 90s.
And in that capacity, I traveled around a lot.
And one of the places that we visited was Ireland.
And we were playing the post-grunge Seattle music, which only had a limited lifetime.
So whenever that phase of music was over and the band disbanded, we all went our separate ways.
And I wanted to see a little bit of the world and meet some interesting people.
So I'd come back here, which was only supposed to be for about six months.
And 13 years later, I'm still here.
It gets to you, doesn't it?
I worked in Dublin for a while, and I found that place really hard to leave because it has a charm.
I love Ireland.
But anyway, you said you were in a rock band or a couple of rock bands.
Anything that I would know of?
Any names that I would know there?
I've worked in music radio for most of my life, so I've heard of most of them.
Well, we were in one Seattle band called My Mother Madness, and it was a post-grunge band.
We did a couple of albums.
We weren't huge.
We weren't massive, but we did do the Turing Circuit.
And the thing about that type of music is most all the bands were kind of indie bands.
So some people would know them and some people wouldn't know them.
And, you know, I think the whole style of that type of music was people didn't want to get too big.
And, you know, we saw what happened to Mr. Kirk Cobain when that did happen.
True enough.
And it was very much anti-success, anti-establishment, anti-big record labels that whole era, wasn't it?
Yeah, yeah, it was a little bit of an unhappy existence, I think, at times.
All right.
How did you get into all of this then?
Presumably, look, reading the book, I see a guy there who's always been a thinker, who's always thought there is more to this life than we see.
Am I right about that?
Absolutely.
Even when I was a child, you know, growing up in Oklahoma, there was always this feeling, you know, and it's just that no matter what you're told, no matter what you see on the media, no matter what your religious upbringing is, there's certain things that you buy, and then there's certain things that you don't buy.
And with me, there was a lot of things that I didn't buy.
I always felt that there was more to life and even death than meets the eye than I've been led to believe.
And, you know, I'd like to think Ireland was an accident, but I don't think it was an accident.
I think I came here at a time in my life when I was at a crossroads.
And let me tell you, this is the perfect place to find spirit because the spirit of these people does not die with the physical body.
That's totally true.
And isn't it strange there's a kind of dichotomy there because Ireland, as I know it, of course, there's a lot of Catholicism there.
There are the two religions, of course, up north, and a whole variety of other people as well, of course, from every corner of the world these days.
But Catholicism is very deep in Ireland, and yet there is such an interest in spirituality like this, which, of course, the Catholic Church, and indeed, you know, the Church of England, Church of Ireland, have condemned in the past as being the work of the devil.
Indeed, let me tell you, there's a couple of Catholic priests, which I won't give names out, but they're my best customers.
They come to me for DVDs, and they find this fascinating.
Isn't that interesting?
There was a guy, I would love to have talked to him in life, called Father Malachi Martin.
I don't know if you ever heard of him.
He was a New York Irish priest, as far as I can recall.
He's sadly dead now, but he dealt with an awful lot of this stuff and allowed into his thinking and consciousness an awful lot of concepts that a lot of people in the Catholic Church don't.
If you ever come across him or his writings, I think you will be amazed at that.
But that's, by the by, for right now.
You became an audio-visual technician, yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, after with my music experience and that, and a lot of the software that you would use for music editing, as you know, would transfer over to video editing and things like that.
So I was in Belfast, and I saw an advertisement where they were looking for an audiovisual technician for a media company.
So I chased up this advertisement and went in for an interview.
This company turned out being in an old linen mill from the early 1800s.
And the building was just phenomenal.
It was huge, untouched.
It looked exactly like it looked in times when it was producing linen for the world, except for the little office that we were in.
And went in, did the interview, got the job, and started the next week.
And from probably the first couple of days I started this place, the manager was, he was one of the old-time Catholics like you talked about there and very superstitious in regards to anything paranormal.
But he lived there during the week and commuted home and the weekends.
And this guy was going crazy.
I came in one morning and he said, oh, you know, this place is haunted.
I come down here, I hear noises, I smell smells in the hallways, and there's never anybody Here.
And this went on for a good couple of months to the point where it almost drove him crazy.
And he ended up leaving the company for, I don't know if it was because of that or for other reasons, but anyway, that pretty much left me to run the company until the owners found new management.
So people who are familiar with Belfast would know that July is a bit of a touchy month for commuting across the city sometimes, especially back whenever I was first here.
So I decided to make use of this guy's accommodation in the mill and kind of live there throughout that month because I was really green and foreign at that time.
And Belfast was a bit intimidating to me at that time of the year.
So I just decided to stay there.
And then that's when things started happening to me in the mill.
I started experiencing various things.
And you would hear doors and you would hear the noises.
And I found this fascinating.
I wasn't quite as superstitious as the manager was.
I would kind of explore these things.
And did you feel presences?
Did the temperature drop?
All those classic signs?
Well, the thing about an old mill is the temperature is always, you know, haywire.
Anyway, you're in an old stone building.
So I didn't really think much about that because there would have been drafts and there would have been cold temperature drops and things.
But when doors slam in your face and things like that, you know, you kind of take into it a little bit.
But we have a process of editing, video editing called ingesting, where you ingest the footage.
And it's basically you program the computer to work the camera and it puts the footage onto the computer.
And then once that's on there, you can edit it.
Well, I would do this at night to save time.
Program the computer to ingest the footage.
And then when I would come in the next morning, they would be ready to edit, or it was supposed to be ready to edit.
So you're basically doing what I will do once we finish this interview here.
I'm going to take the raw recording and dump it into my computer and go away while that's happening.
Yeah.
Well, there was about a week when I would do this, and I would come in in the morning, and the footage on the computer would be contaminated.
It would be about two, three times the speed that it was supposed to be, and it was just unusable.
So what I would do is I would delete the footage and reprogram the computer, and it would work perfect.
It would work fine during the day.
So this process went on for about a week to the point where one morning when I came down, not only was the footage contaminated, but the camera had rewound itself and recorded over the footage.
Hold on, hold up.
The camera rewound itself.
Is there any function on that camera that would allow that to happen?
Some microprocessor-controlled thing that allows rewinds in that way?
Well, you know what?
I'll say that I don't know of any way that this can end.
And sure enough, a listener will probably call in and say, well, you know, this could happen or that can happen.
But as far as you know, the way that I had it set up, no, the camera couldn't just rewind itself.
Well, maybe, and even if it did rewind itself, it wouldn't record over the footage, you know, like it did.
And if the power went off for a while, then the whole thing would stop.
Yeah.
What it essentially did was it erased the footage.
So I didn't have the option of re-ingesting it.
I had to work with what I had on the computer, and it was important footage.
I couldn't just delete it.
So I went ahead and listened to it to see what had happened and what I could possibly do to correct it and salvage some of it.
And when I did that, there was a couple of messages on the recording.
When you say messages, spoken words.
Spoken words, yeah.
Calling my name, asking for help.
Wow.
What did that make you feel?
Well, I needed a second opinion, to be honest with you, because there's a bit of yourself that thinks, nah, I'm going crazy here.
Well, the first thing that, I mean, I don't know who you know, but the first thing I would think if it was something that happened to me, it's somebody who knows me in this business.
And they're having a joke on me.
Yeah.
No, I didn't think there was any possibility of that because I was pretty much the highest rank on the pecking order as far as technology goes.
There wasn't anybody there that knew how to do that.
That's kind of why I took over the manager's position.
I was the technician.
The other people there were just kind of interns or what have you, and I was the only one with access and keys to the building.
So, you know, whenever I turned the thing on, nobody else was there.
The building was locked when I come in in the morning.
Nobody else had got there yet.
So there was no other possibility of anybody else tampering with it or anybody that even knew how to tamper with it.
But I did go in and get a couple of work colleagues.
One guy listened to it, and he said right away, it says, Mark, help me.
Mark, help me.
And the other girl, who's a local girl with, again, a strong Catholic background, she just listened to about five seconds, threw off the headphones, and ran out of the room.
As I might have done if I'd heard it.
The thing with a lot of these recordings, though, and I've done interviews with quite a few people who do this stuff, mostly they're happy amateurs.
They're not professionals in sound and vision like you.
But you have to play the recordings back three, four, five times in order to hear the phrase that the person is telling you is being said.
I'm guessing these recordings weren't like that.
They weren't crystal clear, but they were clear enough that an amateur ear could hear what they were saying.
And this was embedded into the corrupt footage.
So you heard this background that sounded a bit demonic as something would when it slowed down too slow.
But then you heard embedded in that a real-time voice saying, Mark, Mark, help me, help me.
And that's pretty much what got me hooked.
I knew the place was haunted.
I knew that there was things going on, but then to actually get a message on the computer that's calling your name, you know, then that kind of just, it's something that you have to be very careful who you tell about because people would just think that you're crazy.
Well, they would think you're having a joke or you're nuts or something.
In that situation, I would guess you have two choices.
Choice number one is to get the hell out of there and go and be somewhere else for your business.
Choice number two, you would feel, as I guess you did feel, impelled to do something about it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm the thinker, as you mentioned before, and I'm the one that always reads a higher purpose into something.
You know, and it started all coming together there because for a while I question, what the hell am I doing in Belfast?
What am I doing here?
I don't even know where I am.
I don't even know these people, the culture.
You would never understand it, even if you were here 100 years.
And then all this stuff starts happening in the way that I think anyway.
And I just thought, this is it.
This is what I'm supposed to do.
I must be one of these people that has a knack for working with this type of stuff.
So I basically just investigated this instance in particular for about another six months, incorporated a few friends that I have who would be spiritual, a bit clairvoyant-minded.
And we ended up tracing back who the voice belonged to.
And I don't want to say too much because of the stories in the book, but we did trace it back to a little eight-year-old millboy who was killed in a machine accident.
And he just didn't know what was going on, didn't know where he was or what had happened.
And I was the key holder.
I was the one person that was in and out 24 hours a day.
And he kind of formed a connection with me and left me a message.
And we investigated that and did what we could to help.
All right, so we have here a case, classic case really, of a haunting where somebody passes very quickly.
Somebody very young doesn't have a great handle on what precisely happened to them, because presumably this awful accident happened really quickly, and asking you for help to try and sort it out.
Yeah, I mean, when people hear eight-year-old, they're going to think there's no way, but back in those times, the legal age to work in a mill was 10 years old, but there was so much poverty that oftentimes people would lie about their child's age and get them into the workforce at eight, you know, possibly younger if they looked a bit older.
And it wasn't, you know, health and safety wasn't an issue back then.
And it was just, it was a common occurrence.
You know, this was just the sad fact is to the people around this boy, his death would have been a 10-minute inconvenience in production.
Well, look, the one thing we do keep over here is pretty good records of births, marriages, and deaths.
So I would imagine that's where you start first, is it?
Yeah, we didn't even have to go back that far.
We just went to the records of the individual mill, and we were able to see when accidents happened.
We were able to verify that, yeah, there were kids of that age there.
We didn't get exact names or anything, but he did tell me where to find his name.
And I did go to the particular floor in question, and on the wall, I saw a name written where he told me the name would be, and his name was Darren.
Hold on.
So this entity gave you information that linked to something in reality?
Yes, this information wasn't via recording, though.
This was via the clairvoyant.
Once I started working with the clairvoyant in the location, and her name is Christine, she's a character in the book, but she trained me on the spiritual aspects of this.
You can only go so far with technology, and that's where the godfathers of this research came to a dead end.
The key to this is your own inner spirit.
That's the power source.
That's the antenna.
That's the transmitter.
You can develop all the groundbreaking technology you want, but you will not record anything unless you acknowledge the spirit inside yourself and do this for a greater purpose.
And Christine was teaching me how to do that.
And while I was in training, so to speak, with her, she would receive various messages and translate that to me.
And one of the messages was, he wants you to find his name.
And basically, that was a little exercise.
And they gave me basic coordinates in this big complex.
And it was up to me to use my intuition on where I thought this name would be.
And I walked straight to it.
Right.
Well, that's amazing.
Now, in that situation where you're being guided by a clairvoyant, you're discovering something new in your life.
I would think 50% easily of the population wouldn't have the intestinal fortitude to take this any further.
No.
Clearly, you did.
Yes.
Yes, it comes down to, and that's where, you know, that's why you watch all these paranormal television shows and you see the camera shaking and you see somebody saying, what was that?
But you never really ever see anything because people are interested in the science, they're interested in technology, and they all want to be the first to show something groundbreaking on camera, but they don't want to do the inner work.
You know, they don't want to develop their own spirit.
And they don't see a greater purpose to this.
But with me, I was always spiritual first.
I had the belief first.
I had the hunch that there is something more to this existence of ours than just going into a hole in the ground and then that being it.
You know, music taught me that.
The way that great music touches you, the way that the great artist, even say Elton John, when Elton John plays a song, it touches millions of people.
That to me is spirit communication.
You know, that is verification to me that there is something inside us that can be touched that's greater than just flesh and blood.
At any stage in this process, did you ever feel that perhaps some of this stuff, you know, they talk about poltergeist activity revolving around teenage kids.
Did you ever feel that some of this stuff was somehow emanating from you?
Well, I believe that I have seen what you're talking about with other people, but in regards to me, I believe that my beliefs and the frequency that I was resonating on must have been more visible to them than a standard person.
That's why I was the one that this was kind of leeched onto.
I was the one that was contacted because the way that I operate.
I think that's true.
Some of us are more sensitive.
In my own case, there's a building in Liverpool, and as a teenager, my dad worked some of the time in this building.
It used to be a music hall, an old-fashioned British music hall.
And the story goes that a girl of 17, I think or so, got locked in there one night, and she was so scared she threw herself or fell from the balcony there.
Now, this place, my father was terrified of it, but not nearly as terrified as everybody else who worked there.
At the time, it was one of these comic discount electrical warehouses.
And you go upstairs, and I would feel the temperature drop.
Boxes would move, doors would fling themselves open, and most people who worked there wouldn't go upstairs because of that reason.
And I felt, age 17 as well, when my dad used to take me there late at night when he'd go and do security checks there, I felt I connected with something.
I've never really spoken about this too much, but I felt that girl, somehow because I was the same age and because I was there and because I was kind of interested in these things, connected with me.
But my story is nowhere near as complex as yours.
Yours is amazing.
Well, no, I'd like to hear your story as well, because it's fascinating that somebody, you know, a journalist with your background, who, when you're looking at it and doing the research on the internet, there's really no reason why you should be doing these type of shows or that you should be interested in this type of thing, but you are.
And the same with me, but I am.
And, you know, we're coming into an age when more and more people are going to be, you know, these type of people.
They're going to be searching for these type of answers.
And we're not out to prove to the world.
We're not out to be the first to do anything groundbreaking.
We're here to connect with people like ourselves and change the small circle around us.
But the one difficulty of doing the stuff that you had to do at that point, that you felt impelled, as we've said, to do, is the spirituality can take over if you're not very careful, and you can end up doing things in a non-scientific and not verifiable way.
I imagine you had to keep yourself truly grounded.
Well, yeah, you do.
But the thing is, is you do want to go just the spiritual route, but in the world that we live in, that's not really possible.
Well, for very good reasons, I work with newsrooms full of people who don't buy into any of this stuff in the main, but are there to be convinced if the evidence is good enough.
Well, that's true as well.
I mean, I'm not one to really, to be honest with you, I don't care if anybody believes it or not, but even to verify it with yourself, evolution has taken over in our modern world, you know, and the electric bill and the debt crisis and all the things around us do and have had an effect on our own spirituality.
So in this world, I believe that you do have to do 50% technology, 50% spiritual, you know, or it just won't work.
That sounds like a good mix to me.
Okay, so here we are.
You've had the messages.
You're now being helped by a psychic medium, clairvoyant person involved in all of this stuff.
What do you do then?
We basically go on an investigation.
We try to get to the bottom of it.
We try to help this young boy.
And at the same time, we go on a training exercise.
So it's basically on-the-job training.
You know, I'm learning about all this stuff.
And, you know, it is a lot of information to take in in a couple of months' time.
For my whole life, everything that I've seen, everything that I've heard, I'm starting to get verification that it's what reality is is far beyond that.
And it is a life-changing experience, and it just blew my mind.
You know, it got me interested in this.
And Ireland is the perfect place to train in this type of stuff because the history here is amazing.
And so that's what got me started.
We ended up investigating the young boy, and we even took it as far as the clairvoyant told me he's ready to go.
And, you know, I had my first experience with somebody, quote unquote, crossing over to the light, so to speak.
So this boy was anchored to that place and needed help to get to what comes next?
Yeah.
See, back in those times, you know, religion ruled the world.
And what I have found in a lot of these hauntings, especially here, is the people tend to stick around out of a fear of what's coming next.
You know, you could have stolen an apple back in those times, and it was the same penalty for killing somebody.
And a lot of times in these people from these religious upbringings, something would happen or they would die.
They would just stay right there.
I've never heard that before.
That's fascinating.
It's the fear of retribution.
Yeah, yeah.
It was driven into the people.
You know, it was we've been in prisons, we've been in all sorts of places when it was just as simple as staying close to home was a safer bet than what could be possibly waiting for you if you advance forward.
All right, so what came next?
Presumably, you want to try and get a dialogue going with this entity and then also help the entity to go where is required.
Yep.
Yep, we started, I started learning about meditation, and I started incorporating pendulum dowsing because I was new to this, and the mentor, Christine, we were trying to work out ways that I could verify if I was doing things correctly or I could basically get a second opinion, so to speak.
And she introduced me to pendulum dousing, which was basically a tool to receive information, psychic information, if you're not a full-blown clairvoyant or psychic like I wasn't.
So we would start meditating.
We would start just connecting to the location, connecting to the little boy that was in the location.
And as time advanced, I started getting better at it.
I started perceiving things better.
I started knowing what needed to be done and what I needed to do.
And over a period of time, I would cross-reference this with what the pendulum was telling me.
And it just seemed like all part of a plan.
Like, this boy was going to be my entrance into this type of work.
And eventually, we got to the point where she said he's ready to go.
And we both went in and we connected to the place.
And I was expecting fireworks.
I was expecting like a scene out of the Highlander where electricity comes from the sky and you get this big verification that you've done this great deed.
And it wasn't anything like that at all.
It was just poof, you know, and that was it.
And she said, he's gone.
And I was almost a bit sad.
It was like losing a family member.
I had got so used to this kid being around.
And all of a sudden, he wasn't there anymore.
And as well as being told that by the clairvoyant, did you feel it?
I did feel it a little bit.
Not in the way that I thought I would feel it.
It was more of a kind of a sorrow, you know, like you've lost somebody.
And this isn't flippant, but did he say goodbye?
No, no, didn't say anything.
He got his chance, and that was it.
So that's unfinished business for you anyway, isn't it?
Well, it was at the time.
It's not now, because I understand how it works now.
And also, as far as technology goes, from that point forward, not one computer ever malfunctioned again.
Now, isn't that interesting?
You know.
All right, so take us up to the point where you get yourself, last year, a dialogue with something.
Okay.
Well, once I started researching the EVP research and looking into, because I wasn't one of these paranormal people that knew all the television shows and knew all that stuff, I was interested in ghosts like everybody are, or everybody is.
But once I got the message on the computer and I saw that was possible, I started researching, started developing technology and working with different things.
And then I figured that I would have to probably hook up with one of these paranormal groups to get to different locations and check different things out.
And let me tell you, that was a whole kettle of fish, that was, because you open yourself up to all sorts of agendas, all sorts of mindsets.
And I wasn't going to find another person to work with that thought like me.
So I thought I'm going to have to keep the spiritual side under wraps and pretty much keep that to myself.
Hook up with one of these paranormal groups and just go and investigate some locations and learn about how they do things and learn about just working in different situations.
So that's what I did.
And no sooner did I do that than a guy named Andy Matthews, who's on various television shows, Ghost Detectives and Haunted Homes and things like that, he got a deal to do a BBC program in Northern Ireland, which investigated historical hauntings.
And he needed some people to be his investigation team.
So I, myself and this group, we got asked to be on it.
And again, it's just like the whole plan came together, just one thing after another.
And so we hooked up with him and we did a season of this.
And I started recording these voices and things.
And the very first episode that we did was in an old haunted prison.
And we recorded a voice saying, help me.
And they brought in a clairvoyant, say, a couple hours later who had no idea where she was coming, Marion Goodfellow, and no idea about the place.
And as soon as she walked in, she said, there's somebody here asking for help.
So immediately I recorded the voice.
She had the perception, and we had evidence right there.
And it just kind of, every episode got stronger and stronger, and we did a second season.
And it was the very last episode of the second season that we recorded the conversation.
Tell me about it.
Well, there's an old hotel in a little town called Carrick Fergus here in Northern Ireland.
And people who know the area would know that, you know, you can be having a drink in a bar, and that bar can be 800 years old.
You know, that's amazing.
800 years of emotion and history floating about the location.
Well, this hotel had a reputation for being haunted.
There was a room in particular that some people didn't want to sleep in, and some people booked it because they thought it was haunted.
And so we were given this location to go in and film the episode in, and it takes about three days to film an episode.
So we went in, and the local paranormal guys were walking around you with the voice recorders, practically begging for a voice, and nothing was happening.
We weren't getting anything, which verifies that you have to have the spiritual intent.
And then the Marion Goodfellow comes in, and Andy, and they sit on a bed in the apparent haunted room, and I'm next door with CCTV monitors, and I had mic'd up the room that they were in.
So I could see and hear them.
They couldn't see me.
And what would make this a live conversation would be that Marion, if she would report that she was getting a response, I would try to record that response, but she wouldn't know what I was recording.
But I would relay what I had recorded back into a person in her room who would say to her, and this loop would create the conversation.
It was a bit out there.
And, you know, I'll explain.
I'll actually tell you something I haven't said in any other interview, and that was the fact that the episode was filmed before we tried this.
You know, this was something that the producers and the directors kind of laughed off, and they said, okay, well, we'll just film the episode first, and then if we have any time left, you guys can try this.
And we didn't even know for sure if it was going to work.
We just thought if there is a location where this is possible, this would be the best that we would have.
So we'd filmed the episode.
We had a couple hours left.
So we tried it.
And about 10 minutes after Marion was in here sitting on the bed, she says, I can feel him.
He's here.
I'm getting a response.
And then I recorded voices on the recorder next door.
And within about 15 minutes, the responses were coming in so fast that I could hardly keep up with them.
And I probably relayed about 40% of what we were actually getting back to her.
And then this went on for about 45 minutes.
We had about a 45-minute conversation, but not just one, but about three different entities.
What about?
Everything you could think of.
One of them was actually speaking in a way that they would speak in times whenever he would have been alive.
Marion says, do you understand what we were doing here?
And I recorded a voice that said, it's just, like, you know, it's justice.
It's okay.
And there was another one that basically was having problems, like the young boy, problems moving on, and says, will you carry me?
You know?
And I relayed that back to Marion and said, will you carry me?
And she explained, you don't need to be carried.
You can do this yourself.
All you have to do is go forward.
And those are the types of responses that we were getting.
Now, I once interviewed many, many years ago, I think I was probably about 20, I think, of a university project, a guy called Alan Gold at the University of Nottingham.
Nice man and very, very involved in all of this stuff.
He said to me way back then that one of the ways to get proof that these things exist is to ask them a question, the answer to which everybody else involved in this thing doesn't know.
Right.
Did you try something like that?
Well, there was occasion when we would ask the date and we would ask them different things that nobody else would know.
And we didn't really get a whole lot of evidence that way because what we found is once we started recording and making contact, it was like they would, you know, imagine if you were sitting in a room for 200 years and never spoke to anybody and all of a sudden somebody could hear you.
It all comes pouring out.
Anything.
It just all comes pouring out.
There was an occasion at the Belfast Docks when we did record a voice in French that nobody there spoke French.
Really?
Nobody, and that was, we figured out that that's why they spoke in French because there was about 10 of us in there at that time and it was a bit chaotic.
I just had the recorder going.
We weren't even filming.
And picked up a reading on the equipment.
And whenever I went back and listened to it, it was loud.
It was probably the loudest, clearest EVP we've ever got, but it was in French.
And I said, there's something in French here.
And nobody there spoke French, and I played it, and nobody even knew what it said.
So we called a guy that was a French speaker and played it on the phone.
He said, what does this say?
And he said, it says, certainly here.
Certainly here.
Certainly here, yeah.
Wow.
That's a pretty direct message, isn't it?
Yeah.
Whatever it was was certainly there.
So that's kind of an example of what you're saying.
Nobody there spoke French and nobody there could have said that.
That's a very good example.
Now, in this conversation where all this stuff was coming pouring out, were you able to verify who or what you were dealing with?
I mean, the actual people, like the little boy.
Well, the thing about the hotel is the haunting did get blamed on a certain person, but you have to kind of take that with a pinch of salt because what's going to happen is in 800 years, there could be thousands of possibilities of who these hauntings could be.
But naturally, whoever the most famous person or former resident of the place is, that's who the haunting is going to get blamed on.
And so to answer that, no, we didn't get any solid proof as to exactly who it was.
Everybody's going to say, yeah, it was this person here, or Maude, I think they called the woman that was supposed to haunt the place.
And I think Button Cap was the name they gave to the man that was supposed to be haunting the place.
And naturally, everybody's going to say that's who it was.
But to be honest, I find that hard to believe.
I think there's probably thousands of possibilities of who these people could be.
Okay, two obvious questions that have to be asked, because people who listen to this show would expect me to.
Number one, you have to rule out, I would guess, that you're not being hoaxed, assuming that you are not the hoaxer yourself.
Number two, technical issues like, for example, if you use certain types of microphone, the leads can pick up spurious radio interference, RF, they call it.
So let's deal with the hoax aspect first.
Okay.
Well, as far as hoaxes go, we worked with an independent television crew.
They weren't connected to us in any way.
We weren't connected to them.
They weren't paranormal people.
They had never done a paranormal show before, and this was the first paranormal show ever to be done in Ireland.
So, being that they're completely independent from us and that the tagline on the show is labeled as factual, there's very, very serious consequences for this kind of fakery and this kind of tampering.
And this is the BBC we're talking about, and you know, they've had their situations in the past.
the regulators would come down on them and their own internal systems like a ton of bricks if there was any jiggery-pokery going on.
So I would say...
You are.
And you're talking about very serious consequences.
Okay, so let's rule that out.
Yeah.
And the thing about the conversation is I had a cameraman in my room who was also the director of the show, and there was a cameraman in Marianne and Andy's room and sound people.
They were filming us in real time like a hawk.
Didn't have long sleeves on.
There were no jokers up the sleeve, anything like that.
And to be honest with you, at that stage in the game, we were too tired to even try to contemplate faking something.
And we'd got so much groundbreaking evidence that we didn't need to.
So, no, there was no fakery.
And I do believe that this does go on in shows.
I've seen shows where I thought, you know, this is made up.
Well, there is some, and we have to say, some risible and ridiculous stuff out there.
And, you know, that's a personal opinion, but I think a lot of people might well share that.
Technical issues, let's just rule those in or out.
Well, this is my favorite question, and this is what all the intelligent armchair sound technicians, skeptics love to say.
Stray radio signals.
Well, let me say, I was a professional vocalist for over 15 years.
In that capacity, I've traveled around the world, and I've played thousands of concerts.
I have friends who are rock stars.
Not once have I ever heard of an occasion, even though it is possible, of myself or anybody I know having a performance interrupted by a stray radio signal.
I've used the cheapest of the cheap equipment.
I've used the most expensive equipment.
Never have I ever heard a stray radio signal in mine or anybody else's performance, and I know it's possible, but it's never happened.
So whenever I go into a location that witnesses have said they've experienced paranormal occurrences, they've heard things and they've seen things.
And I record for 15 minutes and I get a voice saying, please help me in response to somebody saying, is there anybody here?
I find it very hard to believe that this is a stray radio signal.
And, you know, you sound like a very sensible guy reading your book.
You're a guy, as we said, who thinks.
A couple of little quotes from your book that I liked.
There's one, if I can find it here, on page 25 of the book.
Let's see if I've got it.
Let's just flick through to page 25 because I underlined this one and I liked it.
You say, so it would appear that the only clarity we will ever achieve on what happens after the physical body ceases to exist is to actually communicate with someone who has passed on to the other side.
This has been the greatest fear of Christian leaders since the beginning of Christianity.
That's the crux of it all, isn't it?
Yep, that's why you've been led to believe that this work is a sin.
That's why it's taboo.
That's why every time you feel a sense of self-enlightenment, you feel guilty because you've been carefully programmed and designed to think and feel this way.
Religions wouldn't work if we had self-enlightenment.
You know, religions wouldn't do the job they're supposed to do and keep the population in check if we all were free thinkers in a way that we went and sought out these experiences and these answers for ourselves.
All right, there's your mobile phone.
All right, while you deal with that, I'm going to read another little quote from your book, and this is on page 49, and I underlined this one too.
And you say here, I believe that as much of the great knowledge we had in ancient times was lost or taken from us in some instances.
In other words, we knew stuff in the past.
I think a lot of us suspect this.
We knew stuff in the past.
And somehow, because life is technological and very fast, We've forgotten this stuff.
Is this what you're telling me?
Yes, it is.
Whenever I first landed in Ireland, I landed at 6 o'clock in the morning after about a 12 and a half hour flight from Seattle.
Within 15 minutes, people were waiting for me at the airport.
They took me to a place called New Grange.
Now, some people will know New Grange, some people will not.
It is, and this is historically documented fact, the oldest built formation in the world.
It predates the pyramids by hundreds of years.
Now, inside Newgrange, the temperature has remained the same for over 2,000 years.
Not a single drop of water has ever penetrated the roof.
Man can't build a roof today that lasts longer than 20 years.
And Christians will know they're always out fundraising to buy a new roof for the church.
But yet in ancient times, we were able to build these structures that are as perfect today as they were thousands of years ago.
So practical knowledge and spiritual knowledge, maybe we had more of it back then.
Yeah, and these places had to be built for a purpose.
You know, I've traveled around Wiltshire and all these different places, and you see these stone circles and stuff.
They're not just getting hundreds of people together and standing up rocks for any good reason.
They were doing this stuff for a purpose.
They were routing energy to certain places.
They knew a lot more about where we live than we know now.
And I think man today is a bit arrogant to think that we figured it all out.
And you get your James Randy's and all these people trying to convince other people that you live this miserable life, and then you go into a hole in the ground.
No, you don't.
I was going to say, actually, James Randy, the magician, was.
I don't know if he's still offering a million dollars to anybody who can prove a phenomenon exists.
Do you fancy taking up that challenge if it's still out there?
I mean, you know, I'm not going to play games with these people.
How can you prove the existence of something that science can't even explain?
So really, they're always onto a winner.
He's never going to have to part with his magic, assuming he is still offering that challenge.
He's never going to have to part with it.
If a street magician walks up to you and sticks his hands out and say, pick which hand the coin's in, I'll give you $50.
Well, I'm not going to play the game.
This guy's a professional at what he does.
Sounds to me like you've got too much other work to do.
And this is where, you know, it's our last few minutes of talking now, so I want to bring it to this because it's important.
I sense about you there's an awful lot more work to come out of you.
You're on a path here.
Oh, I've only just started.
Can you give me a little hint of where you're going next?
Well, this is a whole new world that's opened up to me.
And what I have found is that there are a lot of people in the world who are at the same place that I was when I started out.
And I do honestly believe we're coming into a time in our world and our existence when we're kind of coming back to some of this knowledge and some of these things.
And I would love to tell you exactly what I'm going to be doing in the future, but I don't know yet.
I just know that a door has just opened up, and I'm going to be getting with like-minded individuals, connecting with people like yourself, getting the word out there, and we're all going to be in a better place.
Well, listen, assuming there is a greater intelligence out there and stuff, as I have always believed exists, really does exist.
Who better to pick to do some of this than a guy who understands how the technology of communication, audio-visual, works?
You're the right candidate.
Yeah, well, not so much that, just real people.
I think real people are the people that need to take this stuff forward because real people are who people are going to relate to.
Oh, wow.
And I do believe that it's going to be mixed 50% spiritual and 50% technology because technology is going to have to be the seventh sense in the world that we live in.
We're going to have to learn how to work that into harmony with everything else about our magical existence.
In fact, I totally, completely agree with.
Completely.
Well, listen, if you're making more videos, you're looking for a voice for those videos.
That's one of the things I could do.
But I'm going to keep investigating.
And by the sounds of you, you've got a lifetime of investigation ahead of you.
Yes, yes.
I love your voice, by the way.
It wasn't a shameless plug pump for work, by the way.
Forgive me for that.
And I believe people who have maybe passed over would actually communicate with your voice as well.
It's a strange thing.
We have to talk again.
This is not over.
No, no, no.
All right, incredible.
What I want you to do now is give a nice big fat plug for the book because you deserve it.
Well, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me, by the way.
And, you know, I do a lot of these interviews, and you don't always connect with the person that you're talking to.
And it just makes the interview so much better whenever you do have that connection with the person that you're talking to.
Totally.
I mean, this is a special one for me.
Thank you for being the person that you are and for bringing a realistic approach to the guest that you have on and helping the message go forward.
And, you know, my book is out.
It's called Spirit Voices, The First Live Conversation Between Worlds.
You can get that anywhere.
You can get books.
It's on Amazon, Barnes Noble, W.A. Thank you very, very much.
And you know, some people you empathize with, and I feel that too.
Thank you very, very much for coming on.
Thank you.
Wow, that is a story.
Mark L. Cowden, a man who's an audiovisual technician who claims to have captured a conversation between here and there.
I hope you enjoyed and were intrigued by that story as much as I have been over this last hour or so.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This is The Unexplained, our website, www.theunexplained.tv.
You can email me through there and you can suggest guests for the show, make comments about the show, anything you like.
Good to keep in touch.
Please keep in touch with me.
Please recommend this show to your friends if you like it.
And thank you very much for supporting me and for supporting the show.
That address also is for making donations if you'd like to to the show to help the work continue and all the rest of it.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting the show out to you and for designing and updating the website.
Thank you very much to Martin for the theme tune.
As ever, Martin, I hope all is well with you.
And above all, as I say, thank you to you for being part of this venture that we call the unexplained.
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