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Aug. 26, 2011 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:40
Edition 66 - Whitley Strieber

As Hurricane Irene bears down on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard – we speak with the creator ofclimate disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow world-renowned visionary, author and broadcaster WhitleyStrieber.

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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.
Welcome to my world, as a singer once sang, who was at Jim Reeves back in the day.
And it's a weird world at the moment as I record these words.
The United States Eastern Seaboard is staring down the barrel of Hurricane Irene.
I was up at half past three this morning to go and do my day job reporting news on radio in London.
And it was one of our main talking topics on air, without a doubt.
And the scale of this thing potentially enormous.
I know that ABC News, for one, was part of a crew of people who flew over Hurricane Irene.
Underneath it were temperatures in the ocean of 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now, that's going to act like a pressure cooker fueling this thing.
So the authorities in New York and Washington and other parts of the Eastern Seaboard have taken this really seriously and declaring states of emergencies.
Six states, I think, so far have declared those, as I speak these words, their right to take precautions for what is just the latest in a catalogue of weird phenomena.
Not only have we seen storms of various kinds, but also earthquakes through this year.
If you're in the eastern seaboard of the United States, you know you had one of those very recently.
Now you're getting this storm.
And the year started with a quake in New Zealand, with a quake and tsunami in Japan.
What a strange year this has been.
Plus, also, I think that events in this world seem to be speeding up.
And very much I've been thinking of and rereading a book by Art Bell, my radio hero, American presenter of shows like this one, the guy who inspired me to do the things that I've done, called The Quickening.
And the theory of the quickening in two seconds, this doesn't really do it justice, is that events are indeed moving faster and that time is proceeding at a faster pace.
Anyone you talk to during this weird world year of 2011 about the pace of events will tell you.
In fact, the first person to talk to me about this this very morning was my taxi driver into work who said, I can't believe how fast this year is going.
And it wasn't just a conversational opening gambit.
He really believes that.
And I think it's so.
It's been a strange world.
And as I speak these words as well, Libya's Gaddafi is still at large.
They can't find him.
The rebels believe that they have won control of the country and it almost certainly seems they have.
But the man who put that country under tyranny for 40 odd years remains at large.
They've invaded his compound.
They think he might be in tunnels underneath it.
But again, as I record these words for you, we don't know.
What a strange world this is.
The guest this time is a very special guest who I've been trying to get on the show for a while.
I spoke to him on the old radio show a couple of times and have spoken to him on radio a few times over the years, not for about five years now, so it's really good to reconnect with him.
In the United States, we're going to talk to Whitley Striber.
I think I only have to say those words and you'll know who I'm talking about.
Man who's written horror books, the man behind the great movie, I always think it is The Day After Tomorrow, and the man who created Dreamland, a radio show in the United States and the great unknown country website.
So a pleasure to reconnect with Whitley Striber.
I was going to get round to your emails this time round.
By the looks of it, we're not going to have time for it.
So next show, I promise to give you some shout-outs and mentions.
I have had some really good emails from brand new listeners.
All I can say to you is, please, this is the new media.
This is the way we talk to each other these days.
If you like this show, tell your friends, spread the word online, any way you like, and let me know what you think of the show.
Suggestions for guests, always gratefully received.
I've had some very good ones that I'm working on lately.
Go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
Created by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
You can send me a message that way and also make a donation to the show.
Thank you very much for those which continue to come in.
Gratefully received.
Vital for developing this work.
Right.
To the United States.
A man who needs no introduction whatsoever, so I'm not going to give him one.
Let's get into the conversation now with Whitley Streeber.
Whitley, nice to welcome you back to The Unexplained after all these years.
Well, I'm glad to be back, Howard.
It's always a pleasure.
Well, it's been a very long time since we last spoke, Whitley.
I think it's probably three or four radio stations that tally of stations that I've had you on in London and across the UK.
Now I'm here in my very own format and on my very own domain.
And I know that you were a pioneer in all of this.
You know, you were doing this while I was still just doing news shifts on radio in London.
This is something that you started reaching people directly, wasn't it?
Yes, I did.
About 11 years ago, actually, with Dreamland, when we were still on the air on regular broadcast radio, I opened up a website and soon discovered that the number of listeners on the website was so large that I actually didn't have to do the show live every Saturday night.
And I gradually backed out of that.
And they weren't making any money on it anyway, even though we had 350, 360 stations.
They still weren't, you know, it was just, it's a night where it's very difficult for them to make money.
So eventually we parted ways.
And now the on a podcast of Dreamland has a quarter of a million listeners a month.
Which is incredible.
And just as you said those words, a great big clap of thunder.
That's absolutely appropriate.
But this is the way to reach people.
I've come from the mainstream media as, you know, I know that you've had long connection with it and you worked with Art Bell for a good long time.
And I guess you and he are still connected.
We come from the mainstream, but we've all decided, I think, that our future is not in the mainstream because what we're doing right now is going to become the mainstream.
In fact, the mainstream as we call it now, that terminology is not even going to be applicable.
You're not even going to be able to use it because it's not going to be relevant.
Well, that's right.
What's happening is both good and bad, the media is Fractioning.
It's fracturing.
It's breaking up into thousands and thousands of slivers.
And the great, enormous mass media is under pressure at every level.
And as people go more and more toward the sort of sliver that they're interested in, the same thing happened in the magazine business for a long time before the internet came along.
And that was that people went more and more from general interest to specialty magazines.
But now in that business, what goes around has come around.
And the internet has killed off most of the specialty magazines, while the general interest magazines have survived by the skin of their teeth, many of them, but they're beginning to come back.
So eventually that will happen.
But in the meantime, we're here.
And we are here.
And, you know, I, for one, and I was only saying this at the top of this show, I ain't going anywhere.
I want to develop this because it is the future and it has got the mainstream media on the run.
The only problem is, of course, being able to turn a buck from this stuff.
Now, that is a difficult thing.
Being able to cover your costs, the problem that I've always had with this, I subsidize this out of my own pocket because I think it's worth it.
And I think that one day it's going to be even bigger than it is now.
And you just have to live, don't you, with the exponential growth of the thing.
This year has been another great year with my webmaster, who's a very talented young guy.
He's only 19 years of age.
He kill me for telling you that.
But he is genius is not too fine a word to use on him.
So he's helped me to see the potential and possibilities.
And we did things like I spoke with Edgar Mitchell, Apollo astronaut, a man who's got a great reputation in these circles.
I know Edgar well.
He's been a friend for years.
Well, I had to wait a long time to get him, but it was tremendous when I got him on there.
We put the interview online, and people found it because they do.
And within hours, we'd crashed the website.
And Adam, because he's so good, found me extra server capacity in different places all around the world.
And we were back online within an hour or so.
But that is the capacity that we have going for us here.
And that, I think, is the future.
And even here in the little United Kingdom and Europe, which is a little behind you in the United States, I just think that all this stuff has great potential.
And it's not just because we want to develop a business and get our voices heard on air.
It's not about for me developing a business.
It's about getting these messages and these words out there.
Sitting on a news desk in London, and you and I have talked about this before.
I used to think there are many stories that journalists laugh at, and they don't cover them properly, and why aren't they?
So I started doing them on the radio for 3 million people in London on the biggest breakfast show that they then had in London, the biggest morning drive show.
And that's gradually how I got here.
But this ain't about me.
This is about you.
Weird world.
One thing that has struck me very much in this last week or so, and funnily enough, I got into a taxi cab to go into central London at four o'clock this morning as I always do weekdays.
First thing the driver says to me, hasn't this year gone fast?
And I realized that what he was saying to me wasn't just a way to open a conversation with me.
He really thinks that.
And a lot of people have said that to me recently.
And it all ties into this book that I've actually got right here by my side now, Art Bell's book, The Quickening.
Events in this world, in this year of 2011 particularly, seem to be moving at an incredible pace.
Oh, yeah, they certainly do.
And it's an increasing pace, which is, you know, we are, and this is inevitable.
Just the way the society is, so much more knowledge is being added to and processed by human society every day that things are changing faster and faster and faster.
And it's going to reach some kind of singularity sooner or later.
It's bound to.
What that will be, I don't know.
However, I did notice the other day that in the book of Revelations, the moment of the last judgment is chapter 20, verse 12.
Boy, I bet that's going to be seized on if it hasn't been already.
I don't know if it has been.
I think people might be too scared to seize on it.
But it seems that events are moving faster and our capacity to take them in with our human brains.
We're just about keeping up with it now.
But natural events, I was at the top of the show going through some of the stuff that's happened this year.
We had, I went into work, was it March one day, and suddenly broke all around us, earthquake in New Zealand, in Christchurch, terrible consequences of that.
Japan, of course, the earthquake and tsunami and those who perished, the many, many who perished there, and they're still financially and in every other way paying the price for that.
Well, they've also got problems with radiation.
Helen Caldecott, the founder of one of the great science advocacy groups lived in Vancouver, and apparently she's moved from Vancouver because of concerns about radiation there.
And that's not over yet.
What happened in Japan was a disaster that so far has just begun, the dimensions of which have just begun to be understood.
Well, true enough.
If I was on the radio in London, I wouldn't be allowed to say that I don't think nuclear power is the way to go.
But I'm in my own domain and my own space now.
And by the sounds of it, Whitley, you agree with what I'm about to say, that nuclear power is a disaster waiting to happen.
We've already had a couple.
God knows what the biggest one will be.
Well, we had a couple of nuclear reactors shut down in the United States a few days ago because of a minor earthquake in an area where no one expected one.
And out here in California, where I live, there's a nuclear reactor a few miles from here built on a fault line, not very earthquake-proof, right in the middle of essentially the Los Angeles basin.
And if it was destroyed, it would conceivably ruin life in this part of Southern California.
And yet there they sit bouncing over, bending over backwards to avoid doing anything to improve it or to make it safer.
So it's not just that nuclear power is intrinsically unsafe.
It is, but it can be made safe.
But if the companies work so hard not to do that in the interest of today's bottom line rather than tomorrow's disaster, then we shouldn't do this.
It's something that we can't do as a species.
We're not good enough.
Because the companies aren't up to it.
The companies aren't up to it, and also they don't tell us the truth, I don't think.
In Japan, we think that Japan is this great technologically advanced nation.
I mean, I grew up buying transistor radio Sony from Japan because at the time, they were the best.
We thought that they had better nuclear technology and systems in place that would remove any possibility of the kind of thing we saw happening.
They know they live in a zone that is prone to quakes, but they couldn't handle it.
And at one point, I was watching NHK reports on the television, as we all were around the world.
We discovered NHK, the national broadcaster, in Japan.
There goes another thunderclap here in London, by the way.
We discovered them.
And it was appearing that their very nice and very polite scientists actually couldn't figure out what was going on.
That was a wake-up call for the world, wasn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
But of course, the world won't really wake up.
It never does.
Do you think we'll get to a stage where we will be more enlightened about the things that can cause a risk to our existence and we will stand up as a species?
Most people are extremely passive, profoundly passive.
The people who listen to a program like this are very unusual people.
They're not passive.
They'll stand up.
Right.
Okay.
Well, you say that they're unusual and different people, and yet the evidence that I get from emails, and you get more emails than I will get because your operation is much bigger than mine, they're increasingly ordinary people doing ordinary jobs.
They tell me about them.
I've got people who work in the British National Health Service.
I've got a London Underground subway train driver who listens to this.
They're ordinary Joes who are starting to think that what the mainstream media is giving them is not enough.
Well, yeah, it isn't, because it isn't enough, because decisions are made all the time in the mainstream media by people who don't know what they're doing at every level, not just in terms of the unusual, because the world is very much more complicated than it used to be and getting far more complicated every day that passes.
It's one of the problems we have in the United States in politics is that people are desperately in need of believing that anyone can run a big country.
And so, you know, they gravitate toward people who are as who are like them, relatively uneducated and relatively opinionated and relatively actually incapable.
That's why we ended up with George Bush as president.
So he wasn't an aberration then.
No, he ruined the United States.
America's always had a great love of that sort of person.
They haven't often reached the White House until recently.
The sort of common man, people who have pretended to be like that, like Bill Clinton, have reached the White House.
But it was only pretense.
He was actually an incredibly brilliant man.
George Bush really was a dullard.
And what about Ronald Reagan?
Because Ronald Reagan has been real.
He turns about.
Sure, no, he was, I mean, he almost traded on that, didn't he?
Yeah, he did.
And he lost a great American city because of the way he set up his government in the Hurricane Katrina event.
And he lost, probably let 911 happen either through ignorance or negligence or some kind of nefarious plotting.
I don't know which.
And then he made his great mistake was taking the West into Iraq and you too.
I mean, with Tony Blair.
My God, I mean, that man has no explanation for what he did, except that it was perhaps some sort of secret religious fanaticism that motivated him.
Well, Wickley, you say he had no explanation, but let me tell you that here in the UK, you know, as recently as a month or two ago, he's always got a book out or he's doing a tour and he's still explaining.
Well, he'll explain for the rest of his days and none of it will work.
Because the bottom line is this.
When he went over to Crawford, Texas with George Bush, you understand, I have friends who know the Bushes quite well.
He and George Bush prayed together.
Shortly thereafter, Tony Blair committed the UK to Iraq.
And I've always thought that it had to do with a decision that they made, that this was necessary to put the screws to the Islamists.
Simple as that.
I don't know what else to say because it was so absolutely inexplicable in any other way.
Certainly covering news, I'm always amazed at the people who we lionize and laud for a while and support and back.
And then suddenly we decide, actually, that's not such a good idea because for whatever reasons, they're not so nice anymore.
Like Saddam Hussein, we suddenly, we subordinate him for years.
I mean, the British trained his army.
And then we decided, bad man, got to deal with him.
Lots of other threats around the world, like killer, those going on in the Korean Peninsula.
We've got to deal with Saddam Hussein.
So we deal with Saddam Hussein, kind of.
We're still dealing with it now.
The British also created Iraq.
I mean, you know, all these countries, the casual drawing of these lines has caused a lot of trouble.
And now we have Gaddafi.
Sure.
Now we have Gaddafi, and as we record this conversation, they can't find Gaddafi.
We don't know where Gaddafi is, but the British were complicit in trying to rehabilitate this man.
Not so bad after all, despite the Lockerbie jet bombing And the murder of a woman police constable outside the Libyan embassy in London during the 1980s.
You know, we decided not so bad after all, and we're going to bring him back into the fold because it suits our purposes.
And now we decide, well, that's not so.
He's another bad man, so we've got to get rid of him.
And we're busily saying that we're not putting troops on the ground out there.
But, you know, we are involved.
We are committed.
Well, we are indeed.
and here we are, and we're doing...
But the Roman Emperor Trajan went into the area that is now Iraq and had the same experience exactly that Bush did, because the same people, the same people of the same tribes exactly lived there then that live there now.
And what happened was they faded his approach.
He conquered every city.
He was very happy.
He went back to Rome and had a great triumph.
And then the letters started to come in from the people he had left in charge that everything was falling apart.
And sooner or later, he lost the whole area and died of a heart attack.
Bush, to his credit, didn't die of a heart attack.
And we spent a lot more of our wealth there than the Romans ever spent of theirs because they knew that they had made a mistake and they left.
We've made the same mistake and we've stayed.
But in the end, once all of the Western troops are out of Iraq and out of Afghanistan, they will revert to what they were before in some form.
All right.
Now, I studied politics with a guy at Liverpool University who had worked for the American government.
He'd had his time in Washington, so he knew about U.S. government and politics.
And we talked about the various ways that America faced the world or didn't over the years.
And for many, many decades, long, long time, actually, more than decades, America's policy was isolationism.
We didn't interfere in other people's affairs.
Do you reckon that not only for the states, but also for Britain and other countries, maybe that's the right way to go, to let people make their mistakes and develop as they will?
We have no choice.
We're destroying our own wealth by doing this.
And the West, we have a real adversary coming along.
It's called Mother Earth and Her Climate.
And Mother Earth is not pleased.
And we are going down into a climactic disaster punctuated by one bout of extreme weather after another in the world.
We recently had a horrific drought in Australia, which was interrupted, but not necessarily ended by a gigantic period of flooding.
Last summer, Russia caught fire because of the fact that there was such a terrific drought there.
And the result of this was that wheat prices went up all over the Middle East, which imports most of its wheat and lives on wheat from Russia and then the Ukraine.
And they stopped exports.
And the result was the Arab Spring because every people were hungry and they could no longer afford food.
And they saw these leaders just like the French aristocracy right before the French Revolution living as they had always lived while they were starving and they just got angry.
Now in Texas, there is a drought there that is an absolute historic record.
And if it does not break by October and November, you will begin to see parts of the state having to be evacuated.
But if it does break, it's quite likely to break in an incredibly violent way.
And as you said those words once again, Whitley, and I promise not to refer to it again, but my flat has just been my apartment, has just been shaken by another rumble of thunder over the park.
This is really, really, really strange.
But these are serious events.
And as we record these words, neither of us knows how this is going to pan out, but Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.
They're saying it's going to be the biggest one in a generation.
Well, it actually isn't.
The hurricane has gotten too large too quickly, and its winds will diminish.
Now, I say that knowing that the onshore waters are colder than normal.
The waters close to the shore of the Atlantic seaboard are colder than normal because of the fact that Arctic melt is flowing down the Atlantic seaboard and bringing colder water with it.
And of course, these things are so unpredictable.
It could strengthen.
It could hang out beyond that water, strengthen, and then go rolling across it.
But one thing it's going to bring is a great deal of rain.
It will bring a lot of rain to the whole Atlantic seaboard, and that's going to be the main problem.
And that's why they're so worried in New York City, because those low-lying areas of lower Manhattan and other places, and places like Battery Park that I know so well, and even down towards Wall Street, they're so very close to water, and it doesn't take a very big rise in that for places to flood.
Well, you know, it's even more so in Brooklyn.
There'll be flooding in parts of Brooklyn almost certainly.
Manhattan is fairly well drained, actually, because it's a big rock and the water flows off of it.
But I lived there for 25 years and saw one or two floods, usually involving the subway.
And that could happen again.
But the real problems are going to be in the Carolinas up through Virginia, I would think, although you just never know what will happen.
In any case, it's typical of the kind of things that happen now.
We end up with storms like this that seem at first to be benign, but then which strengthen so quickly.
They are complete character changes, like Hurricane Katrina did.
As Hurricane Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico, it seemed like a manageable affair.
But it turned out, of course, that it hadn't been managed properly because, and this wasn't entirely George Bush's fault, years of corruption and bad practices by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which is charged in our country with upkeep of things like levees and dams and so forth, many of them, and they were in charge of the levees in New Orleans.
The levees just didn't hold.
They couldn't.
They weren't properly maintained.
And the Bush administration, like the previous Clinton administration, had blown off monies for maintenance of these levees.
In this United States, it's always very political.
Clinton did it because of indifference.
Bush did it because they'd voted Democratic against him, in other words.
And it took, was it the mayor of New Orleans to go public and say words that you don't normally hear politicians saying to berate the people who'd failed that city and failed that area for so long?
We've never heard anything like it.
I'll tell you something else we don't hear, though, because of the news cycle and the way that it works, you know, we cover our news stories, we get our headlines out of it, we fill our news bulletins, and then we move on.
That's the nature of news.
We don't get to hear about what's going on there now.
Well, it's a little bit better than it was.
If you go to New Orleans as a tourist, you won't even know it happened.
You have to go out of the French Quarter and out of the old town area down into the Fifth Ward, and then you'll see vast stretches that are abandoned and will always be abandoned.
It'll never come back.
And there's no reason for it too.
everyone fears another storm.
You know, the levees still aren't in good enough shape to, And of course, because where's the money coming from to build them properly in a recession like this?
No one's got it.
Nowhere is the answer.
That's terribly frustrating.
If you want to rebuild the levees in New Orleans, get a shovel yourself and go start work.
Or indeed, as many people did, they just left.
There was a huge displacement of population.
People went to other cities.
They made new lives.
Again, we don't hear about them.
Well, they're living.
A lot of them moved to Texas and stayed there, bringing bad weather with them now instead of drought.
They can't escape it.
What do you think is causing this then?
Is it the traditional now accepted causes that were revealed by Al Gore and others, the way that we're living our lives and burning fossil fuels and doing all the rest of it?
Or do you believe there's something more sinister than that?
As some people believe that we're having our weather messed with?
Oh, no, I don't think so.
That business about HARP being the cause of all of our woes is absolute nonsense.
And the reason it's nonsense is that the people who advocate that say that, well, all it takes is a small introduction of energy to cause a domino effect.
And that's how they use it to change the weather.
But the truth is, climate does not work like that.
If you have energy being expressed in climate, it's because there's an imbalance that's continuous.
You can't.
The difference is this.
If you set a leaf on fire in a forest, you might could easily burn down the whole forest.
But that's not true of the air.
You never have a spreading conflagration like that in the air unless the energy is continuous.
In other words, if the energy stops, the thunderstorm you're having in London will go away.
In other words, there has to be a lot of cold air, hitting a lot of warm air, in order for there to be a storm.
So no, it's not caused by that.
We can't actually control the weather that well.
I wish we could sometimes.
But this is such a long process, isn't it?
It has taken us thousands of years to get to this point.
And the Industrial Revolution speeded it up and really brought us to climax point, to tipping point.
What can we do now?
Well, without the leadership of the United States, unfortunately, nothing.
The British have been in the forefront of this, and the Europeans have.
Even the Chinese are doing a better job than the United States.
But right now, I think that this nincompoop from Texas, Rick Perry, is probably going to be the next president of the United States.
And nothing will be done.
And anything that has been done will be undone under him.
he'll be the worst president we've ever had, even worse than George Bush.
And you have to wonder if that happens, if the American people are really no longer capable of governing themselves, that they would...
He's an absolute idiot.
And yet, I think he'll be in the White House in two years.
That's a bit of a worry, but then politicians never fail to amaze either side of the Atlantic.
I'm not entirely sure about the political class over here.
Well, I don't think you should be.
You have what I think the old word for the government that you've got now is a gimcrack government.
It clanks along with two basically ideologically opposed parties running the country.
And trying to smile and be friends.
Right.
Well, if there's any country in the world that can make that work, it's Britain.
Yes, I mean, we know how to diplomatically do things over the cabinet table, I think, if you see what I'm saying.
Yes, but the masters of that sort of thing.
Diplomacy and politeness, I think, are certainly things that we have here.
But of course, we got a wake-up call here.
These nice, smiling politicians, when we had riots on our streets, they didn't know how to cope with that.
And we had a conflagration that I know got well reported in America, started here in London, spread around the country overnights.
It spread to places like Manchester.
And for a while, truly the politicians didn't know what to do about it.
And they weren't sure.
They were, in fact, controlled by the mob because the mob decided when it should stop.
They say we put more police on the streets and all the rest of it, but truly, I think the thing just burned itself out.
The enthusiasm for behaving like that on the streets, they just got tired of it and they stopped.
And I think the politicians breathed a great big sigh of relief.
Now they're considering ways to deal with this.
And the first way they've considered dealing with this is, you know, people are getting stiffer sentences.
They're going to jail.
And the Prime Minister says we're going to provide more prison places if we need them.
We're going to toughen up the law and all the rest of it.
That's stage one.
But I think somewhere down, down deep in our society, we've got a problem.
And you saw that this summer here in England.
Who would have believed it?
Well, what happens is this.
People are constantly bombarded with things that they, messages about things they would want, iPads and whatnot.
And they can't get them because they have most of the people in those riots, not all of them, but most of them were looking at a future that is really pretty hopeless, where they're never really going to be able to work or do anything at all with themselves.
And there's a sense of valuelessness that comes with that that leads to anger, especially in young men.
Because here he is, he's born, he was raised up in the world, he's young, he's ready to get out there and do something with his life.
And instead, what happens is he's ignored and no one wants him, no one cares.
And he's poorly educated.
He's morally indifferent.
He's got nothing really going for him inside himself except this empty frustration.
And so of course it comes out in riots.
It can happen again.
It could happen in any country in the West.
It happened in France a few years ago when in the Ben Louis there were so many riots from the Muslims who were disadvantaged similarly.
It could happen in the United States, and it almost did happen in Philadelphia after the riots in the UK.
It became very difficult to successfully walk the streets of Philadelphia without being mugged.
And that wasn't reported much because there's this copycat effect and the media here has been educated in the copycat effect recently.
And they don't report those things as readily or as elaborately as they used to.
It was in the papers, but not all that much.
And eventually it died out.
But that's the news reporting things.
Now, I think that one of the problems we've got, and I think that this summer, England is not a country where you expect this kind of thing.
We just don't tend to get it and never on this scale.
One of the problems is, and I don't know whether we're ever going to deal with it because there are too many vested interests going on, but we make everybody feel that they can be a rock star.
They can run a company.
They can do whatever they want.
And many of those people are simply never going to be equipped for that.
This is not, you know, I don't come from the right side of the tracks.
I worked for whatever I got, and I didn't get that much, but I worked for it.
Unfortunately, and this makes me sound like such an old fogey, that message has disappeared.
And now people think because they see it on the TV and they read about it in the magazines and they get told about it everywhere, they can be anything they want to be, whatever they personally are equipped with.
Well, they're deceived into believing that.
By whom?
By the vested interests behind the media, you think?
I don't want to put words like that.
Well, no, they're deceived into believing that so that they'll be buyers.
Right.
Because unless people buy and participate in capitalism, the economy can't expand.
And we're in a situation where we can't survive without expansion.
We don't know how.
We don't have economies that are designed for that.
And quite frankly, it's over.
We can't expand.
The planet is full.
And it all ties back to, I wanted to get you back to the weather, the climate.
It all ties back to that because this insatiable drive to expand means that we use up resources.
It's just the sheer number of people.
I'll tell you, and this will sound improbable, but it shouldn't.
It shouldn't.
The truth of the matter is that we are stuck here on Earth.
If we are going to continue to prosper, the only way to do it is to find out, figure out how to get out of here.
And I don't have personally any idea how to do it.
There has been very little research into it.
But we need a means of travel, a means of propulsion, perhaps, a means of moving into parallel universes, something that gives us the ability to expand in ways we have never before imagined or dreamed of.
But all we have are jet and rocket engines, which are something from the distant past that have absolutely no relevance in terms of human survival in this universe.
If we can't expand into the universe, we're going to take a terrific hit here on Earth.
There will be, in 100 years, more than a billion people less on this planet than there are now.
And in those upheavals, every civilization that we know and that we understand will be profoundly changed, and some of them will be wrecked.
I think that this country probably will be broken up by then.
I doubt very much that it will still be a coherent single unit.
And if it is one, it's going to be a third world country.
That's a hell of a prediction.
How do you make that up?
Because of the fact that the electorate's imagination has failed.
The American electorate is becoming inept at choosing its leadership.
And it's doing that because it feels trapped.
It feels like there's no place to go.
And so the siren song of the extremists is what everybody listens to.
And they are wrong.
And they will fail.
It's As simple as that, and the country will fail with them.
The commitment, the commitment of American wealth and energy in the wars in the Middle East was a disaster of epic proportions for the United States that, if not handled correctly, will not stop unfolding until this country is divided between a few thousand very,
very wealthy people and millions of people living at or below the starvation level.
Believe me, it will happen this way.
You and I have a very dangerous situation.
And then you'll have the Canadians north of us moving along pretty well.
Thank you.
Really, the Canadians are going to do okay out of this?
Well, they're not going to— And unless there's some kind of climactic upheaval that overwhelms them, the society is going to remain fairly stable.
Yours is much more problematic.
I don't know what will happen to Britain.
Britain has been in an incredibly long downward spiral since it became obvious in the 50s that the empire didn't work anymore.
And you've never really figured out what to do next.
Well, we tried the European thing, and we thought that was the way to go.
And I love the idea of having a European passport and being able to go and work in France or Germany if I want to.
And now that seems to be unraveling for us.
Well, I think Britain was wise not to join the Euro because it was always an idiotic idea from the beginning.
The minute I saw that being reported in the Financial Times years ago, I thought to myself, this can't work.
And it can't work because of the fact that the northern tier of European countries is economically much more productive than the southern tier.
Therefore, they can't have a single currency.
But they did it anyway, and now they're paying the price.
So they're going to have to back the Euro currency with a Euro bond, or the Euro currency will collapse eventually.
Stopgap measures won't be enough in the end because there will be another cycle during which it's discovered that the southern tier of countries cannot stop becoming more in debt because they're systemically unable to.
The choices are going to be for those countries, continue to increase debt or put people out on the street and let them starve.
And that is going to cause upheavals all through Southern Europe over the next three or four years.
But isn't that kind of breakdown inevitable?
Because you cannot continue to print money ad infinitum.
There comes a point when your currency is not going to be worth anything.
Plus, we have all sorts of other problems building up for us here in the UK and in the States.
Those of us who are supposedly been saving for our pensions, we haven't saved enough.
And what we have saved is being eroded every single day.
That's going to put a lot of us on the streets anyway.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
It's going to be very hard.
And the elderly are particularly vulnerable in these societies.
And I include all of them, the Northern European ones and the Americas too, because they are unproductive and they are a burden.
In the United States, so many of them vote that the politicians so far have been afraid to end our entitlements.
But there will come a time when it is impossible not to.
Well, they had demonstrations in France when they proposed upping the retirement age.
We're going to do that here, come what may, because we're told by our government we just have to.
And we're told, well, you know, people are healthier these days.
You're more able to work.
The only problem is we've got a massive unemployment problem in the 16 to 24 age range.
And we're telling people simultaneously, you're going to have to work into your late 60s, not your mid-60s now.
You know, those of us who do media and stuff like that, we can go on for as long as we've got our health and a voice.
But in most professions, people tend to retire around about 65 in this country.
And now we're being told, you can't do that anymore.
You don't need your health, just a voice.
There was a guy here called Paul Harvey.
Oh, what a great broadcaster.
And we lost him, too.
He was toward the end.
He was just basically a head that talked with that wonderful Paul Harvey voice right up to the end.
I mean, you know, as long as his brain was going, he was fine.
The rest of him was just nothing left, Howard.
So you've got plenty of time ahead of you.
Don't worry about it.
God, I hope so.
But Paul Harvey, I loved, and I only discovered him towards the last 10 years or so of his life.
And I used to, there was nothing I would love more than to go for a short break in New York, stay in some hotel, and I used to love to order the room service breakfast because they don't do it anywhere like they do it in the States.
You've got Mr. Coffee in the corner.
You've got beautiful fresh orange juice and, you know, the whole panoply of an American breakfast.
And then I turn the radio on and I have Paul Harvey telling me what's going on really in the world and then concluding with the words, good day.
I loved him and we miss it.
There's nothing like that now.
Nothing like that.
You know, the other side, there's another side to this coin.
And the other side to the coin is we live on a planet filled with billions of people, every one of which wants to survive and be happy and prosper.
And they're all extremely clever.
So it might turn out that things turn, things are not so bad as they seem.
And that, you know, well, for example, if you go to parts of Africa, they have been on an upswing now for a long time, not the whole continent, certainly, but more and more countries in Africa are becoming very livable places.
It's kind of under the radar because in the news we tend to look at only what's wrong.
But in Central Africa, across the whole band of center of Africa, there are countries that are coming along.
And eventually even Zimbabwe, Mugabe is himself pretty old.
He's in his 80s.
He's bound to die sooner or later.
And maybe that country will begin to pick itself up and in some vast, somewhere down the vasty halls of time, return to the prosperity it knew when it was Rhodesia.
I know Africa quite well, know South Africa particularly.
There is a consciousness in Africa now.
Africa is very self-sufficient, doesn't really need the rest of the world.
They do report news from the rest of the world, but they see things these days from an African perspective.
And I reckon, you know, like we have to, in the music charts, we used to say this one's a one to watch.
Africa actually is one to watch Africa's development and it's got endless resources.
Sometimes they're not being used properly.
Endless resources, human potential, wonderful people.
Africa has got an enormously good future if it works at it.
I think you're right.
Even Mugabe Zimbabwe.
Yeah, well, Britain did leave Africa with good ideas about government, and the countries that are working are the ones that have parliamentary systems.
God bless.
I've got my coffee cup here.
It's actually a royal wedding coffee cup at the moment.
I'm raising it at the moment, Wicky.
I have a new book coming out in January.
Tell me about it.
Well, I wrote Communion 25 years ago, and then I wrote two follow-on books detailing more experiences than Transformation and Breakthrough.
So it became a kind of trilogy.
Now there is a sequel to that called Solving the Communion Enigma, What is to Come, and it is a distillation of everything I've learned about this.
And I think it's going to be quite a surprise to people.
I don't think it has found a British publisher, though.
So I'm not so sure even that it will, because the British publishing industry is singularly uninterested in such things.
Well, there is, I do hear from publishers in the UK, and they send me their news releases, and I know they do listen to this show because they tell me, I heard so-and-so.
Would you now be interested in our new author who's got this book out?
But it's cottage industry here.
It's still developing.
It's not the big companies.
Yeah, very much so.
Very much so.
All right.
So without spoiling the, you know, without spoiling the story for people who are going to buy the book, what's the premise then?
Yeah, well, it's a big complex book, and it takes a look at all of the strange things that are happening on this planet now, from UFO sightings to close encounter experiences to crop formations to the strange undertone of these animal mutilations that take place and have been taking place all over the planet for so long.
And it looks at all of this as a single entity, as something that is manifesting out of a single something, process or presence or whatever you want to call it.
And it's the first time that this has all been looked at as a single thing.
And it turns out to have an incredible coherence.
It is.
What we are looking at is the manifestation of an enormous hidden presence on this planet, the nature of which, and the motivations of which, and the aims of which, we are very far from understanding.
So that's the premise.
Are we talking ETs here?
Because I know you had your own experience.
I don't know.
I wouldn't necessarily say that.
This is a very, very interesting universe.
And believe me, your own brilliant mathematician at Oxford, David Deutsch, has produced some very elegant and convincing equations suggesting that parallel universes must be physically real.
And if that's the case, who knows what they are or where they may be coming from?
And time and again, for example, people who have close encounters of the third kind simultaneously encounter these seeming aliens and their own dead friends and relatives.
I had that happen to me.
It's utterly incredible.
You encountered your own dead relatives.
No, no, not my relatives.
I encountered a dead friend on the first night.
And I go into this in great detail in the new book.
The first night in December of 1985, when I had the close encounter, there was a friend there, a man I known in high school, in college.
I found out six months later that he was actually dead and had been dead for over nearly a year when it happened.
And you hear of so many people.
I heard a story somewhere only a week or so ago, a story here in the UK, of somebody who met a neighbor and spoke to them and was later told that that neighbor had died the previous day.
So there are things that go on, and it was quite a credible sounding tale as well.
There are things that go on we really don't comprehend.
And at least there is more of an acceptance these days of these things.
The seeing of the dead with the visitors or the aliens or whatever they are suggests to me it's so common, but the UFO community blows it off because they don't want that.
You know, oh, that's got to be irrelevant.
We're talking about people, beings and structured craft coming from another planet.
We're not talking about something weird like that.
We're talking about something so weird, we've never been able to even articulate it.
We can't even really, we've never successfully talked about it.
And I'm hoping the book will be a starting place for a whole new kind of conversation about what's happening to us.
Because what's happening to us is, in fact, the most important thing that has ever happened to mankind.
And it is misunderstood.
Its manifestations are seen only in fractions, not as a whole.
So its importance seems diminished.
And it is generally ignored because people are passive to it because they don't understand and they don't see any relevance it has to their lives unless they are swept up in it, which happens, of course, all the time.
But it is terribly important and we need to refocus On a larger scale, in order to begin to understand it and therefore to gain from it what knowledge, useful knowledge, that we can.
More and more people, don't you think, Wickley, seem to be coming to the idea I am that the traditional idea, like you say, of structured craft and little grey men in the structured craft or whatever doesn't really cut it anymore.
There is more to all of this, and it sounds to me as if the work that you've produced is the most advanced explication, if that word exists and is the right one to use here, of that.
Well, I don't know whether it's the most advanced or not, but I'm certainly the only person who's talking about it in this way at this time.
And believe me, I'm not appreciated by the UFO people much because I have a different vision, a much bigger vision, and they want this to be something that it actually is not and cannot ever be.
I was privileged.
I've gotten a lot of good responses from readers and early readers.
Edgar Mitchell wrote a lovely statement about the book that's going to be on the cover, and I've known him for a very long time, and he's an extraordinary man.
You've had him on your show, and he certainly is.
It's a wonderful thing to talk to a man like that, I can tell you.
And to have him appreciate your own efforts is great, too.
And we all seek the answer, but life goes on and our lives seem to, one year moves quickly to the next.
The quickening seems to be happening.
My life is progressing like a flash before my eyes.
Do you get sad when you think that you're never going to be able to, as far as we know, you won't live to get the answer?
The answer may come in thousands of years.
Or maybe if the model that you're presenting to us exists and is so, then you'll just simply step over into another dimension and you'll understand it then, if I make sense there.
Well, ever since Diana inexplicably in a fit of pique turned Actaeon into an elk, I believe, men have been looking for an answer, and they've all come and gone and not had the answer.
And I won't get it either.
And I'm not too surprised about that.
But you're going to have a great time questing for it.
Well, it's been a wonderful life.
I mean, you know, it's been very hard financially because, you know, people don't buy my books.
That's why I'm not published anymore in the UK.
And they don't because they are led to believe that it's all nonsense and this is not true.
It's an inevitable outgrowth of people seeing something that is, I believe it wasn't it, Schopenhauer who said the truth is at first denied, then it is derided, and only after it becomes common knowledge is it accepted.
Some words to those effect, that effect.
And I'm just getting past the derision phase now.
I'm glad you said that because it brings me to something I wanted to ask you about, and I didn't want to start with it.
And a lot of my colleagues said to me today, you're going to talk to them about this.
But the day after tomorrow, I'm here to tell you I loved it.
I think I've told you that before.
And I've got the DVD and I still watch it.
Some of my colleagues derided it.
They laughed.
But as we look at these events that we're seeing now, actually, they're starting to think maybe there was some truth in this thing.
You know, if they're laughing, I would suggest to you that you go to my website, unknowncountry.com.com, and click on the Climate Watch section.
In the first part of that, you can click on two links that will show you the condition of the Gulf Stream a month or two ago and the condition of the Gulf Stream in, I believe, 2004.
And if they're still deriding this, then, well, they're fools because it's happening.
The history of climate on this planet is extremely clear.
It is, I say extremely clear, that's really not true.
It's quite clear, somewhat clear.
It's pretty clear.
That there have been times in the past, for example, in Europe, it was found that a massive change in climate at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, after the Pleistocene ended with the end of the Ice Age, there was a sudden return to very cold conditions in Europe.
And that occurred over a single month.
Over a single month.
And when the Little Ice Age started in the 13th century, it started over a single season also.
And that's a matter of historical record.
So when the flipping point comes, just like the movie, it may be really fast.
So there may be a character like that Ian Holm character in the movie who is monitoring all of this, knew it was coming.
And at last, maybe somebody's going to listen to him.
Too late.
Too late.
It's been too late for years.
Whatever is going to happen is going to happen.
We're going to experience this.
This is going to happen.
And we will experience the full effect of the unfolding of natural climate change.
It will not be interrupted in any way by any kind of human activity.
It simply isn't going to happen.
So is it time for me to move to the highlands of Scotland, you know, well away from the ocean?
I don't know because I don't know when it's going to happen.
But it's certainly closer now than it was a few years ago.
Whitley, a pleasure to talk to you again.
I used to love our conversations on radio, and it's been marvelous to connect in this way.
Can I ask you one last thing, only because my listeners ask me from time to time, and really I don't know the answer.
Do you know what's going on with Art Bell these days?
Sure.
Is he going back on radio?
What's going to happen?
I don't know whether he's going back on radio or not.
We talk on the phone fairly frequently.
He's back living in the United States with his new family.
He's very, very happy and very content.
And that's what's going on with Art Bell.
Well, good for him.
You know, he's a fellow Gemini, and I always relate to him massively.
And the whole thing about building your own studio, that's what I'm sitting in now.
And he's the guy who gave me the impetus to actually go ahead and do it because I heard him and I thought, you don't care about the rest of the world.
You want to do this thing, and you're going to do it on your terms.
And that's what I love about him because he's lived his life, Gemini Art Bell, on his terms.
And, you know, I may never talk to him, but I'd love him to know that I think that's a great thing to have achieved.
So whether he goes back on the radio or not, I'd love him to.
But I think he's achieved something wonderful.
And I know that you know him well and you've worked with him on a number of projects, including the original radio show.
So I just think he's the best.
Yes, I was on the radio show just a short time after it started.
And we've done loads of things together over the years.
And we're four days apart in birth.
So you're kind of Gemini, too.
So am I, for that matter.
Strange, isn't it?
We're supposed to be communicators.
I reckon we probably are.
Babbling away.
That seems to be what we are.
I got a birthday card once from somebody that said all Geminis are unemployed.
Whitley Streeber, delight to talk with you.
Your website, unknowncountry.com, yeah?
Yes.
Thank you very much, and I hope we talk again soon.
Thank you, Howard.
Another insight into the world of Whitley Streeber.
And if you want to know more about Whitley and his work, go to unknowncountry.com.
That's his famous website, one of the most famous websites in the world of its kind.
A great pleasure to catch up with him.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster, for his great work on The Unexplained.
Adam is at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool and has done some fantastic things for me lately.
And we have plans for the future.
Check out the website, triple w.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
There you can make a donation to the show, which we need to keep fueling this show and to give it some, what's that word they use in American television?
Top spin, momentum.
That's what we need.
We are the new media.
We are the new voices.
Let's make sure those new voices stay strong because if you're involved in anything like this, in any of these strange paranormal topics we talk about, anything that's slightly offbeat, anything that's not mainstream media, you know it's vital to have outlets.
And this new world and this new technology gives us, those of us who didn't have a voice before, a voice.
That's why it's vital.
I come to you from the mainstream media.
They've trained me.
I still work there.
But I believe this is the future.
And I believe that we together can make this happen.
That's my mission statement.
And I'm not just saying it because it sounds good.
Maybe it doesn't, but I'm not just saying it for effect.
I'm saying it because I truly believe it.
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Thanks to Adam in Liverpool at Creative Hotspot, as I say, for making this all happen, for getting the show out to you.
Martin, thank you for the theme tune.
And above all, thank you to you for being part of the family that is The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
We'll return soon.
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