All Episodes
Previous Next
April 1, 2012 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:48
Edition 78 - Ian Shircore

This edition features British investigative journalist Ian Shircore who haslooked into not one but scores of the biggest conspiracy theories. They include whether the Duke ofEdinburgh is a shape-shifting lizard, the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana and Pope John-Paul 1.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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 Return of the Unexplained.
I can't tell you how good it is to be able to be back here now.
Interesting story in the last few weeks.
You might remember I told you a long time ago.
I don't mean this to be, by the way, a constant report on the state of my health, but I got a bit of a virus, which a lot of my colleagues at work got.
And it made me lose my voice.
I couldn't speak for a while.
Well, the story of that is that I didn't know this was happening, but it went to my ears.
And I've had enormous problems these last couple of weeks with my ears.
I ended up going to a specialist and I was off work for about a week or so, not on the radio in London.
And it was really, really scary.
My hearing went down.
It was very, very dull.
And now I've got ringing in the ears.
And that's why I haven't been around for the last few weeks because I've been so worried about this.
I've been trying to get better, basically.
So at the moment, I'm well enough to do this now, which is fantastic, because I've missed you.
But you've been there through all this period.
Thank you very much for the emails that you've sent me.
So many nice emails and so many concerned emails from people saying, first of all, you know, how are you?
Which is nice.
You don't know me to be concerned about me.
And also about my dad, who I can give you an update about him.
He's doing okay.
He's still in the home in Southport on Merseyside.
They're looking after him very well.
I spent a couple of days with him a few weeks back.
And, you know, he's quite feeble now, but he's still with us.
He's a fighter, you know, in Liverpool.
At the time he was born, they made him really tough.
And, you know, he's a tribute to that generation.
So that's the state of play with my dad.
Lots of plans for new shows very soon.
We'll get onto those as soon as possible.
Please keep the guest suggestions coming and your feedback about the show.
If you want to give me feedback, just go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
And that's the website designed by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Some really good news in the last couple of weeks.
I've heard from Martin.
You might know if you listen to this regularly, I often appeal for Martin to get in touch.
He's the man who made that theme tune, which I think is really excellent.
And that's why I've used it for the last couple of years.
He made that for me as a gift to me some while ago, and I was so touched by that at the time, and I have continued to use it.
But I kind of lost touch with Martin, so Martin, if you're listening now, it was a real pleasure to hear from you, and please don't lose touch again, because I will always be very grateful to you.
Right, this show is about conspiracy theories.
I'm going to talk to Ian Shercour, who's got a book out at the moment about conspiracy theories, the ones you might believe and the ones you may not believe.
He's looked into quite a few of the popular ones and the less popular ones and has some fascinating stories.
So let's get on to him at Woking in Surrey.
Ian Shercour, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
Hello.
Good to be here.
Nice to talk to you.
You are here by recommendation.
You're another guest who my listeners recommended you.
I think one of my listeners in the northwest of England heard you on a talk show there and said, this guy is a natural for the unexplained.
So you've got fans out there.
Ah, that's good.
That'll be BBC Radio Merseyside.
It is Radio Merseyside up in Liverpool.
It is, yeah.
I think you talked with an old friend of mine, Billy Butler, there.
Yes, lovely guy.
Ah, yeah.
I'll tell you what, he's been around for a thousand years as Bill, but he's still going strong.
We love him.
Now, tell me about you.
I'm an investigative journalist.
I've been nosy all my life.
And two and a half years ago or so, I thought I'd better put this nosiness to some purpose.
I'd written dull books before, six or seven dull books before.
I thought, let's write an interesting book.
Let's write a book about conspiracies on the one hand and conspiracy theories on the other.
And the in-betweens where you can't be sure whether the conspiracy is real or not.
Very honest and revealing of you to say that you wrote dull books before.
What sorts of books were you writing before this?
Oh, business books, books about applied psychology, NLP.
Originally a book about metal detectors and treasure hunting for kids, but that was...
And everybody's doing NLP.
God, I've got friends from the media who are doing NLP now on the side.
It's the thing.
Yeah, I did two books on that with someone who knew what they were talking about in the late 90s.
Actually, we better tell people what this is.
It's neuro-linguistic programming, isn't it?
That's it.
That's right.
Which is a very sophisticated, very refined form of positive thinking, I suppose, to a large extent.
There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the sort of short form of it.
Yeah, no, I've got a friend who's tried to tie it all into broadcasting and gave us a course a couple of years ago.
I have to say, I didn't really understand very much of it, but that's just me.
But a lot of it is quite sensible because it's based on the links that there are that we tend to ignore between the body on the one hand and the mind.
And I used to start introducing people to those connections by saying, for example, if I say something horribly racist or sexist, don't you actually feel a physiological reaction to it, a prickling on the back of your neck or something like that?
Something that's not just anger, but it's actually a sort of visceral reaction to what I'm saying.
And yet those are only words.
I could write them down.
You would have the same reaction.
So it's interesting that your mind is actually going, uh-oh, and making your body react, I suppose, in the same way as written pornography.
If your body reacts to written pornography, connection.
But we'll stop there.
Yeah, well, it's the kind of thing, I mean, on a more mundane level, perhaps.
Is it like the smell of sticky toffee pudding, which is a great British delicacy dessert here, conjures up for me images of school trips and brings a physical response with me?
And I feel a feeling of pleasure connected with just the thought and the smell of sticky toffee pudding.
Yes, I think that's where the sort of thing that it builds out from.
They've taken it a lot further.
It was invented in California in the mid-70s, and there have been some very, very smart guys working on it for many, many decades since then.
So probably what I know about it from 10 or 12 years ago is probably overtaken by events now.
I must go back and...
Very important.
You were there first.
Okay, so you have the discipline then of a journalist in order to pursue a book about conspiracy theories.
And you decided to cherry-pick, is it the 50 greatest conspiracy theories of all time so far?
It is 50.
It's probably not the greatest.
And to be honest, there's some we can talk about later where I absolutely chickened out.
Well, no, we'll talk about it now.
Extraordinary rendition, for example.
I thought that is too big, too horrible, and there are too many people who I really would not want as my enemies involved in that.
And it's too current.
And that's pure dark politics, isn't it?
So as we say in the UK, you whimped out of that.
Yeah, I did, exactly, precisely.
But the 50 I chose range quite deliberately from cases in which it's very clear to me, and I felt I was able to make the case in a few pages, that there was something very dark and sinister that needed to be investigated further.
I'm thinking about things like the first chapter about the death of David Kelly, the dodgy dossier weapons scientist, right through to the, if you like, the other extreme, the accusations that I think David Icke came out with some years ago about the possibility that the Duke of Edinburgh was a shapeshifting lizard from outer space, which I don't give much credence to, to be honest.
But all right, let's take that one as an example then, and we'll dip into some of the others because this is all great, fertile territory for a long conversation, I think.
But the Duke of Edinburgh, shapeshifting lizard.
David, I know David Icke.
David Icke has said this in a number of platforms.
He said it in some very credible arenas and, you know, he believes it.
What did when you investigated this, what did you find?
Well, to be honest, I didn't find very much.
But then I suppose, in a sense, very often when you go looking, it's a human thing that you tend to find what you're expecting to find.
So to some degree, not expecting to find any evidence.
That was exactly what I found.
I mean, I think, I don't know, you may know whether I had got the impression that David Icke wasn't actually taking this line anymore.
The last few things I've seen from him have been actually very lucid and clear and of a much broader appeal in terms of...
He's moved on to more real world things, really, about politics, the people, the power within us.
And you hear very little about shape-shifting lizards.
But what I would do, if I was a journalist investigating that, and I wonder if you did, is I would first of all try and find somebody else who could corroborate that.
Just one story of somebody saying, actually, I saw the Duke of Edinburgh or anybody, in fact, turn into a shape-shifting lizard or, you know, become a lizard before my very eyes, which I think was one of the claims.
I think that would take you some of the way down the track, I think.
I think that would take you about 98% of the way down the track if you could find someone.
Difficult, of course, to actually find out who you should be asking about that.
I know one thing that is very evident is that whatever David actually feels about it now, he started a ball rolling there, which has gathered quite a lot of momentum.
Certainly on the internet, there's a lot of evidence of people talking about lizards and a lot of people put up video clips, don't they?
You've probably seen them of newsreaders with membranes, films of membrane apparently going across their eyes at the end of the news broadcast, things like that.
Well, I can remember, and since it isn't possible to defame the dead, I remember David Icke, this is a long time ago, talking about doing a talk show and being in the makeup room.
Maybe you've heard this, being in the makeup room with the late Prime Minister of the UK, Edward Heath, and Edward Heath turning into something before his eyes in the makeup room when they were both left together.
And maybe somebody else has heard that story, but I've definitely heard that story.
I think that's wonderful.
I haven't heard that.
That's one for you to research for volume two, then, I think.
All right.
One of the greatest conspiracy theories of all the conspiracy theories is one that I was, in a way, obliquely, tangentially involved in myself.
I broke the news to London in 1997 of the death of Princess Diana.
And it seemed to me, although I was so busy on that fateful day in August 1997, I was so busy covering the story and trying to find people to talk to and doing news bulletins every 15 minutes with solemn music playing in between them on London's Capitol Radio.
Even within that great flurry of activity, I thought to myself, this is a very strange time for this woman to die in these circumstances like this.
I thought that was a bit odd too.
What did you come up with?
Well, I couldn't have, this was one I absolutely couldn't avoid.
Not that I wanted to, but as soon as I started formulating plans for the book and started mentioning more or less under my breath to people, oh, I'm doing a book about conspiracies and cover-ups and so on, I found I would get pinned to the wall at parties by people coming up and going, yeah, yeah, interested in all the political stuff and so on, but what about Diana?
So I did spend quite a lot of time looking at the circumstance of Diana's death.
And I was helped, of course, as anyone who looks at it is, by the existence of the Operation Padgett report, which was produced by the police originally as an internal document, but then made available to the inquest.
And I have to say, I think that's a good piece of work.
That's not to say there aren't loose ends in it, obviously, but it's 800 pages of really quite impressive, careful evidence gathering and detective work.
But more or less came out with the finding, the conclusion that it wouldn't have been in anybody's interest to do this.
I think that's right, yes.
What I found very interesting was some of the detail of that, which never really, in the flurry of activity and excitement around the inquest, didn't get highlighted a lot.
I mean, for example, Muhammad Al-Fayyed was saying for a long time, I think maybe he still says, that Diana was pregnant at the time of her death.
Now, there were a couple of fairly plausible witnesses to the inquest.
One, the pathologist who carried out the autopsy on Diana, who said, I have seen inside the womb there was no baby.
And the other, more anecdotally, was her friend, the Honourable Rosa Monckton.
And she and Diana had been on holiday on a small boat in the Greek islands only about 10 days before, mid-August.
And Diana had been complaining about period pains.
And Rosa Monckton mentioned this quite clearly at the inquest.
Pretty conclusive.
Well, those two things together, I think, are fairly conclusive.
And against them, I would say, you know, I haven't seen any evidence on the other side of the equation there.
But what about, I remember when I did the unexplained show on radio on a national station in the UK.
I remember, I can't even remember the guy's name, but there was an author who came on and he put together a very credible sounding case.
I mean, this was not some flyby night person.
This was somebody who'd really done his research who said this thing was an arch conspiracy that had part of its genesis in the south of France somewhere.
And there were people down there who knew what had happened and some of whom have been shut up permanently in some cases.
Yep, there have always been a lot of rumors circling round it.
And it's not impossible, you know, that the accident could have been an accident, but that the ripples that flowed out from it have touched on and in some cases thrown light on various other dodgy dealings of one sort or another.
Conspiracy spread a long way.
The biggest thing about this one was the driver of the car in which Diana died in that tunnel near the River Seine.
This was Henri Paul, who was said to have been in the pay of the Secret Service, who was said to have been alternately either drunk or not drunk, depending on who you believe, but to have had a very, very colorful past.
Yes, I mean, there's all sorts of strange detail about him.
He had $350,000 in 13 or 14 different bank accounts.
In fact, when he died, he had $2,500 in his pocket.
But basically, one of the problems is if you want to arrange an assassination of a particular individual or couple and you want to do it neatly, cleanly, surgically, like people normally would, it's very difficult to do that by setting up a road crash as the means of carrying out the assassination.
And one of the reasons for that is that plans change.
Well, in the last hour or so before the fatal journey that Diana and Dodie made, the car was changed.
The car they'd been using all day was sent off from the front of the hotel as a decoy.
Whereas the point of departure was changed as well.
They went from the back of the hotel.
The driver was changed.
Henri Paul wasn't supposed to have been driving.
That's why he'd gone off and had some drinks during the evening.
But if you're a real conspiracy theorist, you'd say, aha, well, there's proof on three grounds at least of a put-up job, a done deal.
Okay, yes.
Bear with me a moment.
So having changed the car, changed the driver, changed the point of departure, they get into the car and they head across Paris, not on the obvious route, it's true, but on the route that most trained or professional drivers and security trained drivers would have taken to avoid the possibility of being slowed down around the Champs-Élysées.
And then they're going along, and then at the last minute, it appears, there's a decision to go down the Pont du Lama tunnel.
That is unexpected.
It's not the route that people would normally have gone there.
And so you start thinking, well, hello, perhaps that was Henri Pole taking them to a prearranged place of destiny.
On the other hand, it's worth standing back from that and thinking for a moment, well, we're used to suicide bombers and we're used to all kinds of motivation for people doing dreadful things these days.
But since that car crash could only have performed the function that we're assuming it was meant to perform, if it was a very big and thorough car crash, then Henri Paul himself would inevitably have died in it, as he did.
And that would make him Europe's first suicide mercenary.
There are not a lot of those around.
True enough, I can't dispute that.
I mean, you know, okay, you can invent possible motivations, but they start to get pretty unlikely.
What about the claims of Muhammad al-Fayyid, you know, some of which he's actually made on live television, unfortunately enough for those of us actually carrying the sound feed of this, about the, how can we say this, about the arch plotter, the key person behind this being extremely close to Diana, and, you know, which always seemed to me to be completely outlandish and totally outrageous.
But maybe the man was speaking from grief.
But did you unearth anything about that?
No, I didn't, to be honest.
There are a lot of the things that people think were suspicious about the crash in the end turned out to be not particularly suspicious at all.
Like, for example, The fact that it took an hour and three quarters after the crash before Diana arrived in the hospital.
Now, that, on the face of it, sounds outrageous, and you think, what on earth was going on there?
But the answer to that is that the French way of dealing with road traffic accidents is to have trained doctors rather than paramedics in the ambulances.
The ambulances are more like a small mobile hospital, and the strategy is always to try and stabilize road crash patients on the scene and then move them very slowly to hospital afterwards.
I have never heard anybody explain that as clearly as you've just had.
I've heard that before, but thank you very much for that because an awful lot of people point to that fact that it took such a long time to get her to a hospital.
If it happened in southwest London, then you would expect to be in hospital within 15 minutes or whatever.
Oh, absolutely.
It's a different way of looking at things.
We tear through town at 60 miles an hour, blues and twos.
It's all get them to hospital as soon as possible.
Even when Diana had been partially stabilized and they decided it was worth trying to move her, the ambulance took 25 minutes or so to travel less than four miles.
So it was traveling eight miles an hour.
So it really is a completely different approach.
And I think, I mean, it's not conclusive, but it's an interesting bit of background that I turned up there.
So it's relevant, I think.
Two other things that are as well known as the case itself.
One, the white Fiat car, and two, the flashing cameras of the Paparazzi on motorbikes.
I don't doubt that the Paparazzi were flashing their cameras.
I do doubt that that really would have caused the accident.
I think they might have contributed to it.
But the white fiat is problematical.
One thing about it, if you and I were sitting down to plot an assassination of this type and we were trying to ping a very large loaded Mercedes off the road, would we choose a tiny fiat panda to do it with?
I think probably not, actually.
I mean, that's only circumstantial.
I think you probably pick something big, powerful, and with the ability to get away quickly and discreetly.
But it is amazing, isn't it, that this thing disappeared?
Very strange.
I mean, one of the characteristics of, I was going to say all the best conspiracies and conspiracy theories, not really, but let's say the most interesting things, is that even in the cases like this where I don't actually, in the end, believe that there was a mega conspiracy, there are always these loose ends that don't tie up.
And I can, you know, you can absolutely understand why people worry away tugging at the loose ends and going, well, that doesn't fit.
I mean, the 7-7 bombings in London, basically, I buy the official story about those bombings pretty much wholesale.
But the details around it, there are four or five things that are completely inexplicable.
And the same with 9-11, same with a lot of the major ones.
Let's talk about 7-7 because I was on duty that day on the radio for 13 hours, actually in a studio very close to Edgware Road Underground subway station in London.
So very much part of my life.
What were the things that didn't add up?
The number two bomber, Tanwir, I'm sorry, I've forgotten his name.
You know, Mohammed Siddiq Khan was the supposed leader of the group of four bombers.
The second one was at the, supposedly anyway, at the Aldgate bomb blast.
And there was, basically, he disappeared.
He vaporized more or less, which doesn't happen in anything short of virtually a nuclear explosion.
So when the people who had the horrible job of analyzing what had gone on the scene later in the day were counting, they identified seven bodies at the scene.
And in the inquest, they described the state of these bodies and where they were.
They were mapped for the inquest and so on.
But there should have been eight bodies if the bomber was among them.
But two separate people said there were seven bodies there and these were all identified as victims.
And nothing was found of Dunray until, I think, several days later, a chunk of spine, basically, was found on one of the seating areas.
And a lot of people said, well, normally you don't, if a bomb goes off, you normally have particularly skull remnants and so on.
They're parts of people that don't often disappear to absolutely nothing.
And so there were some questions about that.
Now, I understand very clearly that with things like 9-11 and 7-7, which are very live and urgent still in a lot of people's lives, I don't, you know, it's not a parlor game.
I don't like speculating in any kind of loose way driven purely by intellectual curiosity about issues like that.
But that business at Allgate, the bodies, is slightly strange.
There's also the extraordinary thing that the fourth bomber, the guy who wasn't in the tube and ended up on the bus that blew up, was trying to telephone the other three on his mobile phone over and over again 20 minutes after the bombs had gone off.
And that seems extremely strange if he'd known what was happening and what time it was going to happen.
I mean, the telephone records there, there's no argument about that, that he was doing it.
One of the problems, as you sort of alluded to there, is that whenever you investigate something like this, which for us here in the UK is very close to home, you always have to be conscious of the good taste and decency factor and the fact that you don't want to upset people who were deeply disturbed by this, involved in this.
And there may have been 50 odd victims, but indirectly there were thousands.
And that's a difficulty, isn't it?
Yes, absolutely.
And I take your point, absolutely.
There are other cases that I've looked at, like the death of the ex-England cricketer, Bob Woolmer, or David Kelly's death, where I am convinced that there really were bad things going on.
And we can come on to either or both of those later.
And people have said to me, wait a minute, there are widows involved, there's family involved, you shouldn't be trying to reopen those cases.
To be honest, if there is clear-cut evidence, then I think you should.
I don't think you do families and relatives and friends of victims any favors at all by sweeping it under the carpet or by not trying to reveal the truth.
And in the case of Dr. David Kelly, the scientist who was found dead and supposedly, we're told, at his own hand, only recently there was a group of doctors who wrote, I think, to the Telegraph or The Times open letter calling for a full investigation, a new and fuller investigation of his death.
Absolutely.
I mean, the most basic thing is we have a fantastic coroner's inquest system in this country.
And everybody in the last few decades who's died a violent, unexplained, or unexpected death has had the benefit of a coroner's inquest, except for Dr. David Kelly, because the Hutton inquiry, which could have been constituted as an inquest, wasn't.
Politicians have taken the view, and I've run audio clips, soundbites of many of them, that nothing would be served because the inquiry, the Hutton inquiry, did all of that and you wouldn't get any more out of an inquest is what they say.
Let me give them one example.
Three years or so after the Hutton inquiry, Norman Baker, the Libde MMP, put in a freedom of information request to the police, asking them to confirm or deny that there was a complete lack of fingerprints on David Kelly's knife, the knife with which he was found, the knife with which he supposedly cut his wrists.
And the freedom of information request was duly honoured.
And the answer came back, no, there were no fingerprints at all on the knife, nor on the bottle of water that was nearby, nor on the packet of tablets, nor were there any gloves, which might explain the lack of fingerprints.
And anybody who's watched Hollywood movies knows that one of the things that bad guys do is they remove the evidence, and the evidence is fingerprints often.
Well, one of the things good guys committing suicide don't do is wash up after them after slashing their wrists and before dying.
I mean, that is a really, really awkward thing.
And the fact not only that there were no fingerprints, but that it didn't come out at the inquest and the police didn't mention it, sorry, inquest, at the Hutton inquiry, and that the police didn't mention it then because nobody asked, that is extremely sinister, very ugly, not the sort of thing that we would normally expect, I think.
And the problem is that as time passes, if you think about the JFK case as one, you know, November 1963 wasn't it.
If you think about that, as time passes, the water actually gets muddier, doesn't get clearer.
Oh, yes.
I mean, in Kennedy's case, of course, it's become the focus of academics and engineers and would-be sleuths and everybody under the sun.
I mean, I did a count.
At the time I was starting to write this book, there were 3,000 separate books about the Kennedy assassination.
And it's probably 3,500 by now.
And there are so many apparently contradictory factors in that.
I mean, I sort of feel that has passed into history to the degree that I don't feel the compunction that we were talking about just now about discussing it and probing and picking around there.
And there are some very odd things.
Most of the people involved, obviously, are dead now.
But there's some very strange things about that.
The latest, one of the things I picked up in my book was that a few years ago, a fingerprint was found in the Texas Book Depository sniper's nest, a single fingerprint, which was identified on a 14-point match as matching a chap called Mac Wallace.
Now, Mac Wallace was a hoodlum convicted in 1949 or 1950 of murder and a friend since about that time, oddly enough, of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Now, if it turns out that eventually that that really was Mac Wallace's fingerprint in the sniper's nest.
What was he doing there?
What was he doing there?
And what does that say about the connection between the 35th president of the United States, JFK, and the 36th, Lyndon Maines Johnson?
I mean, it's an absolute dynamite finding.
On the other hand, you know, people can make mistakes about things.
The evidence is all very old.
There are many, many other things that are interesting that haven't been highlighted all that much before about Kennedy.
I mean, I'm interested in the fact that if you go to YouTube, I have these quick links in the book, shortened links, Where you can go very quickly to autopsy reports, see them for yourselves, or watch a bit of video.
And I have a bit of video in there that you can see on YouTube, which shows the two bodyguards who normally rode on the step on the steps either side at the back of Kennedy's limousine, open top limousine, being told to stand down and get away from there, get back, not ride in the usual position on that day in Dallas.
It's earlier in the parade, but they were told to stand down.
Now, when the shooting happened and the cars sped off towards the hospital, Kennedy, as we all know from that crucial piece of film that was filmed by Abraham Sapruda.
Sapruda film, yeah.
Exactly.
As we all know from that, Kennedy was there fatally injured and exposed in the car with still no Secret Service agents, bodyguards on him protecting him.
In a car further back, Lyndon Johnson was crushed to the floor and stayed there until they got to the hospital under the weight of a big Secret Service bodyguard who later said my job was to protect him with my life and my body.
And I did that.
And the contrast between those two is, well, let's say provocative.
Interesting.
Well, completely.
And the only thing that's absolutely clear, well, reasonably clear, about the Kennedy assassination is the person we were told did this and did this alone.
That's not very likely on the evidence that we've seen.
And, you know, we're using new techniques to look at things like the magic bullet that's supposed to have gone on this amazing trajectory through Kennedy, but not only through Kennedy and then out through the car again, I think.
I mean, all sorts of stuff.
But the problem with it is, as we said at the beginning of this little section, is that so much time has gone by and 3,000 books have been written about it that we're never going to find out the truth.
No, absolutely not.
I must say, the more research I do about the 1960s, the more I discover how many people Kennedy had absolutely infuriated one way or another.
So that I am tending more than ever now towards not being surprised that he was assassinated and not being surprised that people have suggested that it was the mega conspiracy of all time involving the CIA,
who he'd upset over his lack of support for the Bay of Peaks invasion of Cuba, the straight down the middle mainstream American military, because he'd snuffed out their plan, Operation Northwards, to have a fake terror campaign in the US as an excuse, and blame it on the Cubans, as an excuse for attacking Cuba.
He'd obviously upset the mafia.
I mean, he only sneaked into office by a tiny, tiny margin after the mafia had done some energetic vote rigging in Illinois and also down south.
And of course, the mafia thought he was going to be their boy in office and were furious when it turned out that he wasn't.
Castro, of course, would have been keen to see him dead, just as he would have been keen to see Castro dead.
I think there's an awfully long list of people who All right.
Well, we have to leave that one back in November 1963, knowing that we're never going to get anywhere with that.
The granddaddy of them all, of course, is 9-11, something that I was directly involved in, because not only did I cover it from the London end, I also went out there a couple of times on anniversaries of it to cover it from there and met a lot of the people who were directly involved in this.
But funnily enough, as the years have gone by, I've spoken to more people with conspiracy theories about it who point out those things like the passport that was found in the wreckage.
I mean, the number of taxi drivers in London who've mentioned, what about that passport that was found there?
Perfect passport.
How could that be?
A smoking gun, perfect passport pointing to one of the people involved in this thing, or they told us were involved in this thing, found lying on the ground amongst a lot of vaporized debris.
There's a perfect passport pointing the finger at one of these people.
How convenient is that?
Well, I mean, that is extraordinary.
Anyway, if it's coincidence, it's an extraordinary coincidence.
I mean, they estimated it was between 1.4 and 1.5 million tons of rubble on that site.
And in the middle of it, but not hidden in the middle of it, found very quickly, was Muhammad Atta's passport.
Now, that is quite remarkable, but the list of things that were quite remarkable about 9-11 is as long as your arm.
I think the problem really is knowing where to start with that.
Someone sent me, or in fact, Billy Butler in Merseyside sent me last week a copy of an affidavit that he'd just come across that was submitted a couple of years ago, three or four years ago, by John Lear, a vastly experienced airline pilot, son of the man who invented the Lear jet.
And this affidavit takes 10 or 12 pages full of technical argument and equations and things to come to the conclusion that whatever anybody said, it was impossible that two aeroplanes could have hit the Twin Towers.
Now, I think most people, even most people who subscribe to the various conspiracy theories, do actually start off from the assumption that what everybody thought they saw and videoed and so on was real, that whatever the other circumstances, there were aircraft, they did hit the Twin Towers and they were involved in bringing down the Twin Towers.
And I must say, that one just made me catch my breath and think, oh, heaven's sake, you know, where do you start?
Indeed, when there's so much footage of the, not that footage can't be faked, but I would think that this stuff was Shown live at the time and is very much in the public domain, has been seen from loads of angles and has been analyzed by many people.
That would be a problem.
What about the theory that these planes somehow decanted their passengers?
And these, I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh about that because there are people who seriously believe this.
And they might be right, who knows?
But they decanted their passengers.
And what hit the Twin Towers were empty planes, and those people disappeared.
Well, there are two flavours of that, aren't there?
There's the one where those people disappeared and were never seen again, i.e.
real people, a couple of hundred real people bumped off because otherwise their presence would have proved something wrong with the story.
Or the one where somehow the people who got on the planes were fake identities and so on.
So they didn't actually have to get rid of two plane fulls of people.
I don't know.
I mean, I tend to disbelieve that.
On the other hand, I mentioned Operation Northwoods, the false flag operation that was planned by the American military against Cuba and that got within two signatures, Kennedy and Matt Namara, the Defense Secretary, within two signatures of becoming American policy.
And the plan for that did include something that sounds a little bit like that.
It involved loading a plane up with people flying it somewhere, decanting the people off the plane, and then flying the plane, pilotless by radio, out towards Cuba and blowing it up and blaming the Cubans and claiming that lots of people have been killed.
So if you like, there's a precedent for that sort of thinking.
I don't know, actually, to be fair, I've never seen anybody actually take that whole storyline, as it were, through from start to finish and follow up the details of who was on the flight.
I mean, we know the names of the people who are on the flight.
Their families know that they didn't come back.
I'm inclined to think that's fanciful.
Well, to fake this up, you would have to do it on a scale that not even the US government or US big business or the industrial military complex or anybody could do.
One of the things that never added up for me, though, and I still find a bit of a problem with it, is the lack of footage of a plane going into the Pentagon.
In one of the most camera-up locations on Earth, and I have said this before here, how come there's so little footage of a jet plane going into that building?
Again, again, you're absolutely right.
That is a very good question.
I mean, the hole that was punched in the building was very small.
The fuselage width was only 12 feet or so, which makes the small hole not completely implausible, though there's a question about where did the engines go?
Because the engine blocks weighed three tons each.
But the key question about that is, yes, what about all those cameras?
Why isn't there anything?
Now, supposedly, there were dozens and dozens of cameras which were immediately, the film from which was immediately.
That's the story, isn't it?
That's why we've seen so little, because for national security reasons or whatever odd reason they might have had.
Yes, indeed, there was footage, but it's all lying in somebody's safe deposit box somewhere or in storage or who knows where.
And oddly enough, the very kind of underlying decency of the Americans would, I think, have makes it surprising that we haven't, that at least some of that hasn't been declassified and brought out,
because the Americans have been actually very good over the last few years about declassifying all kinds of things that previously they would have wanted to keep hidden for 50 or 100 years.
I mean, I know obviously 9-11 is only 10 years ago, but no, I don't have an answer to that one, and it is curious.
But as I say, one of the things you learn from working on a book like this is that in all kinds of different circumstances, what you assume would have happened didn't necessarily happen.
And even in the most clear-cut cases, there seem to be waving loose ends that you just can't reconcile with any kind of normality.
And maybe the biggest and the oddest, and perhaps for me it always will be, is the provable fact that thousands of people who should have been at work that day in the towers weren't there.
Yes.
How can that be?
Somebody knew something, it seems.
Now, was that straightforward?
Was that perhaps that Israeli intelligence was incredibly good, knew that something was about to go down, tried to get the message to the powers that be, failed to get the message to the right people, but was able to get the message to some people?
Well, certainly there had been this build-up of signs that something might be going on.
I mean, Mossad had recently handed over a list to the Americans of agents who they identified as potential terrorists who had sneaked into America in the previous few months.
And they included four of the names on that Mossad list were among the hijackers.
But I don't, again, Mossad is very keen, very often, to intimidate the rest of the world by demonstrating just how smart it is And kind of frightening off Israel's enemies by implying that it has almost a psychic foreknowledge of almost everything that's going on in the world.
I would have thought, it's not necessarily true, but I would have thought that Mossad would very probably have made more of that if they had actually had more precise information that they'd have.
Unless, of course, and here comes another conspiracy theory, somebody'd encourage them at a very high level not to make more of it.
But that's a whole other story.
Talking of Israel's enemies, by the way, just as somebody who's researched this stuff, do you believe that the Iranians are planning a nuclear bomb?
I haven't looked at that.
I'd assume they had.
It'd be a good one for Volume 2.
It kind of looks like they are, but of course, the evidence that we have is purely circumstantial.
Although a number of scientists do seem to have met rather unfortunate ends around that program.
Well, yes, which might mean that they are preparing a nuclear bomb, or it might just mean that the Israelis are extremely worried that they might be preparing a nuclear bomb.
And just better be sure.
What is it?
Forewarned is better than forearmed, or forearmed is better than forewarned, really, I suppose, in that case.
Okay, let's think of another famous guy.
Do you ever look at the moon landing?
Have you looked at the moon landings?
I have looked at the moon landings.
I find the moon landing questions very interesting because most of the points that people raise about the moon landings are pretty easily demolished, or if not demolished, countered, let's say.
The shallow crater where the lander came down is easily explained by very hard rock under a thin covering of dust on the surface.
I'm not worried about that.
The fact that the cameras don't show stars in the background is not surprising because there is so much light bouncing around there.
You can see the blazing reflections off the spacesuits and the equipment and things like that.
The contrast, it makes sense that the contrast is so extreme that you wouldn't see the light from stars any more than, you know, we've got a clear, sunny day now.
If I look out of my window, I can see the moon because it's big and bright, but I can't see any stars.
They're there, but I can't see them because of the contrast with the ambient light here.
And what about the one that I love and have always loved and the one that says there are so many horrible foul elements of radiation in space that you'd actually never live long enough to get there?
The Van Allen belt.
Yeah.
I think there's a...
I mean, they got lucky six times, of course, because they did go there and back six times.
True enough.
But, you know, if there had been more, I think it's solar activity it's key to, isn't it?
If there had been different circumstances in the cosmic weather at the time, they might not have been so lucky.
And maybe one of the biggest things to show that all of this really did happen is the fact that if it had all been a fake, there wouldn't have been an Apollo 13 where it all went wrong.
What would be the point of that?
Well, that would be elaborate, wouldn't it?
Yes, actually, there are two, maybe three more points along those sort of lines.
One is my main, the thing I take as being almost conclusive is the number of non-Americans who would have to have been bribed or threatened or somehow suborned to support it.
I mean, the television feed from the first moon landing came in at Canberra in Australia and then at the Big Parks Observatory in New South Wales.
And they literally split the feed between ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Service, and Houston.
I know people who would say that the quality of the feed was deliberately degraded, the one that went to America.
Yes, okay, they could say that if they like.
All right.
But still, you need to have a lot of Australians in on the plot for that to work.
You also, I'm afraid, need to have a lot of Russians in on the plot.
And anyone as old as me who grew up in the Cold War knows that the Cold War was very hot and bloody around the edges.
And the Soviet Union would have given thousands of lives without a second thought to blow a hole in the moon landing story any way it possibly could.
And just the fact that there was silenced from Moscow.
I mean, remember, Moscow had been ahead in the space race.
They put up Sputnik 1, the first satellite, and the West was dumbfounded to find that the Russians were ahead of them.
The Russians would have done anything to discredit the American moon landing things.
And of course, because they weren't that far behind themselves, they had the tracking equipment to know to their chagrin that it was going on.
So the silence from Moscow, I think, is almost conclusive there.
The one other thing that's very interesting that I mentioned in the book that hasn't been publicized much is, have you heard about this speech that William Safar wrote?
William Safar was the, for about 35 years, was the lead columnist on the New York Times, great American journalistic hero.
But before that, when he was young, he worked as a spin doctor in Nixon's White House.
While the Apollo 11 mission was en route to the moon, William Safar was given this job of writing the speech that Nixon would have to give if it turned out they got to the moon all right, but they couldn't take off again.
And he crafted this beautiful speech that said things like, those who came in peace to explore the moon will now remain in peace on the moon, rest in peace on the moon.
And then at the bottom, it had this cynical Little note, very cynical little note saying, before delivering this speech, the president should make sure that he has telephoned personally to the widows to be.
Good point.
Geez.
Now, I don't think.
Follow protocol.
Yes, exactly.
But I don't think they'd have bothered to fake that up, hide it.
Again, what would be the point?
Okay, the one that always struck me, and I was much younger when this thing, well, we both were much younger when this thing happened.
Pope John Paul I, back at the end of the 1970s, the Pope who was, how long was he in office for?
No time at all, really, and died quietly and very, very mysteriously.
Extremely, yes.
Oh, I'm glad you've picked that one up.
I love that.
I mean, the number of eyebrows that have been raised down the last few decades about that, but nobody's been able to pin anything on anybody.
And neither can I, to be honest.
But I did enjoy doing the research on that because I was just astonished to find that the Vatican had given two completely and totally contradictory accounts of how he'd been found, how he died and how he'd been found.
One involving him sitting piously, being found dead, sitting piously in his bed, reading the meditations of St. Augustine or somebody like that.
It wasn't St. Augustine.
I can't remember.
I'm not really a religious person myself, but the sort of pious pope you would expect.
And the other one, he was halfway across the room, face down on the floor, etc., etc.
Now, either of those could have been true.
But the fact is, it's the Vatican giving these accounts, and they can't both be true.
So one of them, somebody was window dressing, or as we say in English, lying in their teeth.
And isn't it true that there wasn't a proper autopsy on the body, that they had him cremated before there could be?
Yep.
And there was even doubt about whether they'd actually managed to get a death certificate worked out at some point.
It was extremely strange.
And he did have, when he arrived, he was, I think, 64, 65 or something like that.
No age at all, I now think.
But he was younger than most popes, and he looked younger, and he was a smiling kind of guy.
And a lot of people in the Vatican were actually radically opposed to him.
He had incredible, from what I've read, incredible plans for reform.
He did, although on the key things like birth control, there was no reason for them to actually fear that he would immediately change things on that.
He was more likely to be reforming the finances, and that may have been a fatal mistake on his part.
And moving one or two people out of jobs that they quite liked.
Yes, exactly.
But I found this wonderful quote.
If you look at videos of him, you can see how informal and modern, the most modern pope we've ever seen so far he was.
For example, he really upset all the people in the Vatican when he started making his first speeches because he used the word I. And they were scurrying around, getting to the transcripts of all the speeches, crossing out I and putting in we, the papal we, because while the Pope can not get anything wrong, in that case, they all knew better than him.
So that's one with a great big question mark over it, and will always be for me, and by the sounds of it, definitely for you too.
Of all of the conspiracy theories...
tell you about this wonderful line that he he one of the people who disapproved of his election said they have elected peter sellers and you look at the picture and he looks a little bit like peter sellers so So I now think of the Pink Panther and so on when I see footage of Pope Jumpo.
Sorry about that.
Huge question mark, though, over that for both of us.
And, you know, I don't think we'll ever, there's another one that we'll never find the answer to because those who might have the answers to the questions probably aren't with us anymore.
Of all of the conspiracy theories you looked into, which is the one that you thought looked the, if a conspiracy theory could be credible, is the most credible?
Marilyn Monroe certainly wasn't a suicide.
Who done it, though?
That's the question.
Yes.
Can tell you how they did it, though, I think.
Because, again, there's one of these quick links from the book to the autopsy report.
The autopsy report makes it clear her body was absolutely loaded with barbiturates, enough to kill several people.
But her digestive system wasn't.
So although there were lots of empty pill bottles around her, she hadn't killed herself by swallowing the pills.
Now, the coroner, incidentally, the same coroner who later had to deal with the Bobby Kennedy assassination, the coroner, Thomas Noguchi, came to see Marilyn Monroe's body, thought, this is a very high-profile case,
I need to be very careful about this, and spent his first few minutes looking all over the body meticulously carefully for an injection wound of any sort to see whether possibly she'd been injected and couldn't find one, but that was the first thing he was looking for.
So that rules out two of the major routes of estimation of a large amount of poison.
And the suspicion, very strong suspicion now, is that she was actually killed at the forcible insertion of a heavily poisoned suppository.
Dear Lord.
I mean, that is as secret service as you can get, isn't it?
Absolutely.
But there are not a lot of roots into the body other than mouth or injection.
And actually, it would be ingested, you know, without going into great detail, very quickly that way.
Yes.
And it was a mafia method.
They employed a pharmacist full-time just outside Chicago, in Illinois, whose job was to make up little packages like that and send them out to mafia families all around the Country.
So, who do we think did this?
Because the two Kennedys who'd shared her, well, not exactly shared her, but they'd been with her alternately, hadn't they?
You know, the president and his brother, they kept it in the family.
They did that with a lot of the women.
There were many things that they, and she was very, I don't want to say unstable.
That's not fair.
She was a loose cannon.
She could have said a great deal that could have been deeply, deeply damaging to both of them and all the plans that they had.
So, you know, their names are in the frame, but who else?
Well, the mafia, because it was a mafia-style killing, and it makes sense anyway, I would have assumed that probably it was the mafia who actually carried it out.
On somebody's behalf.
Well, yes, and that's the question, really.
Whether they were doing it on behalf of the Kennedys, to spite the Kennedys, to frame the Kennedys.
And the Kennedys who had connections with the mob both directly and indirectly through people like Sinatra.
And through their father.
He had very dirty hands.
Also, of course, the CIA and the mafia in the 60s, early 60s particularly, were so closely entangled, as we know from some of the anti-Cuban plots, that it's quite possible that for some reason the CIA got the mafia to get rid of Marilyn Monroe.
But the one thing that you can be sure of, I think, now is that she did not commit suicide.
And this, sad though that is, is why we love conspiracy theories.
Have you got plans for a book two?
I think so.
I think I've left out so many interesting ones that book two's pretty well compulsory at some point.
You mentioned, by the way, let's just polish this one, put this one to bed before we finish.
You mentioned Bob Woolmer.
Now, this is a very, very recent one.
It's very much a British case.
So for our American listeners, explain who Bob Woolmer was.
Cricket.
I won't explain cricket because that would take the rest of the programme.
That's a jolly English spot.
That's a jolly English sport.
That's a bad way, didn't it?
Straightened out baseball.
Bob Woolmer had been a player, an international cricket player for England, pretty talented too.
And he'd gone on to be the coach of the South African national team and then later the Pakistan team.
And five years ago in the West Indies, there was the World Cup where the teams from, I think, 16 nations were involved in the finals of the World Cup there.
And on St. Patrick's Day, the strong team from Pakistan that Bob Woolmer was responsible for went crashing out of the competition at the hands of a bunch of part-timers from Ireland.
And in Ireland, this was cause for pouring a pint or two of Guinness.
In Pakistan, it was taken as something of a national humiliation.
And that night, overnight, Bob Woolmer died in his hotel room in Jamaica.
The police immediately announced that he'd been murdered, then that he'd had a heart attack, then maybe he'd been murdered, then they weren't so sure about anything at all.
And six months later, the inquest jury were so befuddled and confused by all the conflicting evidence that they gave an open verdict.
In other words, nobody could say whether Bob Wilmer had died of natural causes or been murdered.
And for us in the media, the story then more or less went away.
Yes, that's right.
And it shouldn't have done, because there is one simple piece of evidence that, because it's written, I've been able to actually put into the book.
And that is, you can see there parts of the last two emails that were sent overnight on the night Bob Wilmer died from his laptop.
The first is written in kind of casual, casual English, slightly public school style to his wife, ends up, you know, of course I had a dreadful day.
Yours probably wasn't any better because you'd have been watching it on the television.
Never mind, love you lots.
Bob.
And the second one, written at about five o'clock in the morning to the president of the Pakistan Cricket Association, is written in chichi non-first language English.
Very obviously wrong.
The prepositions aren't quite right.
It says, I would not like people to make personal remarks at me.
Well, however drunk or ill or tired a native English speaker was, you know, you just, your prepositions hang on even if you're crawling in the gutter.
It simply wasn't written by him, and therefore it must have been written by whoever killed him.
And therefore, they must have been connected with cricket, which had its big scandals in the background about match fixing and illegal betting.
And I mean, this was a murderer who murdered a very prominent person and then hung around long enough to write an email before leaving the scene.
Now, that open verdict just can't stand.
I know it will be upsetting to Bob Woolmer's family and his widow, but that has to be reopened.
And the International Cricket Council that looks after cricket for the world needs to get a proper investigation going on that again, even though it's five years later.
It must not be left closed.
You should write an entire book about that.
I might do.
I think you should, definitely.
Ian, pleasure to talk with you.
If people want to know more about the book, how do they do that?
It's on Amazon, of course.
In fact, that's probably the best way, Particularly for your international audience.
A quick reminder of the title.
It's called Conspiracy: 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe.
Available as an e-book or a page.
Lovely, lovely.
Let's talk when you do volume two.
Thank you very much, Ian Sherkork.
Pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you, Adam.
Ian Shercourt.
I'm always going to love my conspiracy theories.
And if you want to know more about him, I'll put a link to him on the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell for keeping the faith at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for getting the show out to you, devising and updating the website.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
And above all else, thank you to you for your kindness and your support and your concern.
It means an enormous amount to me.
Thank you very, very much.
▲
Export Selection