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Jan. 5, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:49
Edition 138 - Lionel Fanthorpe

This time a New Year visit to the UK's most famous paranormal investigatorLionel Fanthorpe...

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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 first edition for 2014 of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for your emails over the holiday period.
I'm getting through all of those, and I'm going to do some shout-outs and also address some of your points in the next edition of this show, probably.
But this time around, we have a very special guest.
More about him coming soon.
But what a weird start to 2014 this has been.
Not only the weather is odd.
Here in the UK, we have the continuation of the storms that we had before Christmas.
For about a month before Christmas, the UK was battered on and off by storms and very high power winds that have caused flooding and damage to property and all sorts of stuff.
And over this holiday period, we've had more of that.
And as the new year has begun, there are many parts of this country that are underwater.
As I look out from where I'm recording this now, I can see a field that is pretty well flooded.
And we have more rain and more wind on the way.
What is happening?
But the one compensation of all of this, if it is, we've had temperatures of about 11 degrees Celsius, 52 Fahrenheit, very early in the morning here, which in January, end of December, beginning of January, well, I won't even say unusual, totally unprecedented in the UK, so something weird's going on with our weather.
When I walk down the road here in the area of London where I live, and I hear ordinary people getting into a car talking about the activities of the jet stream causing our weather problems, then you know there's something happening.
Plus, in Canada, they've had ice storms, which I know have gone on since before Christmas.
Into the new year, New York and Boston have been affected by severe snow.
So our weather here in the northern hemisphere is all over the place.
I'm just waiting for reports, and I hope I don't get them, of severe fires that sometimes hit the likes of Australia at the beginning of the year.
So the weather starting this year in turmoil.
A lot of weird stories too around from the news.
One that I picked up at the end of last week that hasn't really been touched by the UK media.
This is the story of the crop circle at Salinas in California in the Salinas Valley, this enormous, very detailed crop circle that is about an acre in size.
If you can imagine that size and scale of crop circle with intricate detail in it, a lot of questions being asked about it, and then suddenly overnight, the crop circle was mowed away.
And nobody is taking responsibility for getting rid of it.
The landowner says he didn't do it.
Somebody did.
And there is a lot of talk about that.
I hope to get Linda Moulton Howe to give me an update on this very soon here on The Unexplained.
So watch this space.
In the British newspapers today, the Daily Mirror is reporting professional Bigfoot hunter Rick Dyer has finally released images of the creature that he claims that he slayed over a year ago.
And guess what he says?
Or it's being said this creature is, it's being said, Bigfoot.
Dyer insists that he shot and killed the legendary beast Bigfoot in September 2012, but until now has failed to produce anything more than a poor quality piece of footage to prove his claim.
The images show a close-up shot of what appears to be Bigfoot's haggard face, which is almost completely covered in hair.
He was speaking apparently to KSAT television.
He said, every test that you can possibly imagine was performed on this body from DNA to 3D optical scans to body scans.
It is the real deal.
It's Bigfoot and Bigfoot's here and I shot it and now I'm proving it to the entire world.
Well, if you see those pictures, you tell me what you think about that.
Just one of a few things that have appeared in the news over this holiday period.
So we're getting to a rocking start to our odd and bizarre year of 2014.
We're going to talk on this edition to a man who you will probably know if you live in the US or UK.
Very well known.
His name is the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe.
Very well known in the UK for a thing called 40 and TV.
Very well known in the US for his appearances with the likes of George Nurrie and Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM.
I've known him for about 10 or 12 years now.
But I've never had him on the online version of The Unexplained, so this is going to be a first.
We're going to cross to his home in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, way to the west of London, about 200 miles or so, and catch up with the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe very, very soon.
Just to say Happy New Year and thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
He's the guy who designed, maintains, and keeps the website rocking for you, gets the show out to you as well.
So well done, Adam.
Martin, thank you for the theme tune.
Get in touch soon.
We want to be progressing with our update of the theme tune.
So it'd be nice to hear from you if we can.
And above all, thank you to you for all of those emails and I'm working my way through them.
Thank you for the great response.
And if you've donated to the show over Christmas, the new year, thank you very much.
Please keep those donations coming so we can develop this show.
Okay, let's get now to Cardiff, capital of Wales, and talk to the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe.
Lionel, nice to talk to you again.
It's a real pleasure.
It's been a lifetime interest of mine to investigate the paranormal and the unexplained.
So when a friend gives me an opportunity to discuss it, I'm always there.
Well, now, listen, that's a fact, and we'll discuss your prolific involvement in all of this.
I called you at the introduction to this show over UK's Mr. Paranormal, and I think in many ways you are, because I can't think of anybody else who's been involved in it to this degree.
It is a lifelong interest of yours, and you do it so very well, Lionel.
Oh, thank you.
You know, I've been telling listeners to this show that you and I actually haven't been on the online version of this show, but I had you on national radio and a few local radio stations a number of times, so we've known each other for years.
Yes, we have.
The first time we met face to face, though, was in Cardiff, where you live.
I was going to Real Radio in Cardiff.
They're training journalists.
And I think I'd interviewed you on a national radio station a couple of weeks before that.
And so I was...
Do you remember that?
Yes, I do indeed.
I was known as the real radio reverend, which always amused me to some extent.
Whether they had any Urzatz radio reverend as opposed to a real one.
So how do you find yourself being a reverend, a man of the cloth, and also a man who's interested in things which, you know, were dismissed until not very many years ago as being the work of the devil.
Some people still say that.
Oh, I think they do.
And see, I've always looked at it this way: that the universe is God's creation.
Not only his creation, but he sustains and maintains it.
And I believe that one of his greatest gifts to all of us, whether we belong ostensibly to a religious group or not, is this gift of curiosity.
Because if we have within us this need to search, to experiment, to know, to find out, then whether we're doing it in a laboratory with different chemicals to see what happens when you mix them,
or whether we're doing it in some unexplored territory in the heart of the Amazon jungle, or whether we're doing it in the kind of area that fascinates you and I so much, the unexplained.
And I think that whether you've got two chemicals on a bench in the lab, or whether you are in a haunted house with various pieces of equipment which will record electrical movement or which will pick up temperature changes or anything else that's just a little out of the ordinary, then I think we're exercising the same gift of curiosity.
And after all, isn't this gift of curiosity the way that progress is made?
That if people like Newton hadn't been curious about what pulls apples to the ground, we'd never have got the laws of motion.
And assuming that there is such a thing as God, and that we can have another debate about that another time.
Oh, yes, of course.
And there are people all over the world who say, absolutely, yes, God exists, and absolutely, God doesn't exist.
So, you know, that's a debate that will go on for as long as we're on Earth.
I think it can, and I think it's right and proper that we should be able to debate it.
I think that being open-minded and to take the great subjects of philosophy and theology and of life itself, and to be able to talk to a friend, or to talk to anyone about it, anyone who's curious about it, and the theist can say to the atheist, now, what are your grounds for assuming that there is no God, no creative power at the back of the universe?
Just as the atheist is entitled to ask the theist, well, what are your grounds for believing that there is such a God?
And I don't know that you saw it, but recently, there was, within the last few weeks, there was an amazing program in which various new telescopic devices have been reaching out into the furthest corners of the known universe,
and various computer reconstructions of the interrelationship between the galaxies came up on the screen, and it suddenly reminded me of when I studied biology years ago at school, it looked just like a diagram of the human brain with the neurons and the paths between the neurons along which the electrochemical thought processes work.
And just for one wild moment, I looked at these galactic images and thought, what if what we think of as a stellar universe is actually a gigantic brain of infinite size?
That's a fascinating thought, Lyle.
And if you think about it in those terms, and I never have before, then we are in many ways then a microcosm of that macro universe.
We are simply a miniature representation of what is happening out there.
That makes sense.
Well, it does to me, but I thought it was just because this brilliant presenter had computer-created his ideas of the interconnections between the galaxies, and I suddenly thought, you know, as one does, I've seen that before in another context.
Darn it, that's a brain.
And so, as you say, we could be microcosmic copies of that macrocosmic intelligence.
And that really does make you think.
As a reverend, and you must explain to me what kind of reverend you are, what church it is, and how all that came about for you.
The two things, though, are still a little at variance.
I know you would say that they dovetail perfectly, but to a lot of people looking from the outside, from the external, the two things that you do do seem to be at variance because there you are investigating the paranormal.
Whereas the Bible, for example, has what claims to be the complete explanation for everything.
Those two things pull you in different directions, it would seem.
No, I'm a very modern liberal theologian.
And whereas, shall we say, fundamentalist Christians who have this sort of straightforward traditional idea about the Bible and about the information in it, whereas a liberal theologian who looks at it from a modern perspective would say,
well, these are a very interesting collection of some 66 ancient books, and they can be examined and, in the nicest sense, criticized and judged.
The thing that I find is that, for me, the most important aspect of God is this aspect of truth and honesty.
We admire truth and honesty in other human beings and friends and colleagues.
And I'm quite sure that the God, as I perceive him to be and conceive him to be, is almost a personification of truth and honesty.
And so that our ability to research, to look at things, to look for the truth, shall we say, behind the ancient texts Is a very important thing.
And I don't accept anything.
Oh, yes, I mustn't argue with that because it's in the Bible.
I said, look, there's an interesting story.
It was written by a guy who lived 3,000 years ago in a completely different culture.
Now, why did he write what he wrote?
And I try and approach it, you know, from my point of view, I approach it from that angle.
You were asking earlier what got me into the church and what just I mean, I would regard myself as a very independent Anglican priest.
I was ordained as an Anglican priest some 30 years ago, very nearly.
But I do reserve the right to do things in my own way, in my own style.
And I think that the heart of all true religion is doing whatever you can to help other people, and particularly those in need.
If I conceive of God as being a sort of supra-parent in that vastness which is beyond our physical universe, and I think of myself as a parent with a much-loved family, nothing gives me more happiness than to see members of my family getting on well with each other, loving each other, helping each other.
If God is this supra-parent that I believe him to be, then nothing is more pleasing to him, nothing is more important as religious observation in which we care for each other, in which we help each other, in which we accept each other.
And so when Jesus tells us, inasmuch as you've done it for one of my brothers or sisters, you've done it for me, that I believe to be absolutely central to all ethical and moral and theological teaching.
If that makes sense.
It does.
And it also speaks to the fact that we are all, and I suspect this is the case anyway, we are all to some extent connected, whether we are connected under God or whether we are connected under something else.
We have to accept that as human beings, we are linked and that what we do has consequences and what we think has consequences.
Absolutely.
Now, I'm very much of the opinion that if you can go into a situation with positive thoughts, it can not only influence your own feelings and your own behavior, but it will have a powerful influence on the behavior of a group or even the behavior of a nation.
I've got pinned up in my study a photograph from way back when the great John L. Sullivan was heavyweight champion of the world.
And when John L. Sullivan got into the ring, he would look at his opponent and would say in a voice that could be heard all over the stadium, I'm John L. Sullivan, and I can lick any man alive, including you.
And he then points to the opponent, who he shortly afterwards knocked out.
Now, if you take what I call this John L. Sullivan attitude into everything that you do, let's just go back to the point that you made to me before the broadcast, that sometimes there will be something when you're doing a lot of complicated and skillful work in a studio, something may have to be done twice or something may have to be rechecked.
It's not an easy job, requires a lot of skill.
And you go into your studio or you go into a location in order to meet someone, do an interview, do a broadcast.
And at the back of your mind, though you may phrase it differently, is to say, as John L. Sullivan once said, I can defeat any problem that gets in my way.
I'm going to win this.
But you know something?
That was very much the attitude.
It's funny you should say that.
The attitude I had to you brought up something that we discussed just before I hit record here.
I had just a small wiring problem to do with a thing called, let's not get too technical about it, but it's called a telephone balancing unit in the UK.
It's a thing that allows you to record telephone calls into a broadcast mixer at broadcast quality.
And I had a little connection problem here that I had to fix.
But my mindset, we were due to be starting this recording at 2 p.m.
UK time.
And it was 1.59 UK time, and I just thought everything's going to work.
And then I discovered this connection thing.
And my attitude to it was, that's okay.
I'm going to get around this, and this thing is going to be working within two minutes.
It was.
And you did it, yes.
Now, in the days when I was doing a lot of competitive martial arts, I found that this, when you were in a physical contest, in a judo competition, the feeling that you had, and this is pretty close to John L. Sullivan as a boxer, you look at the guy in the other corner and you think, I can take him.
I'm stronger.
I've got more skill.
I'm tougher than he is.
I'll beat him.
You sometimes get into a competition situation, especially a big open competition, and the guy, I go just on 15 stone.
The guy in the other corner is 20 stone plus, a foot taller, and he's got a reach like a gibbon.
And you look at him rather dubiously and you think, I don't think I'm going to win this one.
And you don't.
So you must, I've always thought this.
It's very, very hard to do in practice, but the theory of it absolutely works.
And a lot of people have different organizations or different theories that they work to.
There's a thing called Silver Mind Control that my sister has studied and I've done a small study of.
But there are lots of things like that that tell you that if you believe a thing is Going to happen, and if you program for it hard enough, then it will.
And in my life, and by the sounds of it in your life, that has been the case.
Yeah, it has.
And if only we knew more.
You see, I think this is an area of research that could pay huge dividends if we could get one of the major universities to really take it on and see whether this will, this mental assertiveness, it will overcome things.
And probably more than 50% of that mental influence is what it does to the body.
If I sort of look at it without over-personalizing it, but technically, from a medical point of view, I'm diabetic.
I've got the type 2 diabetes that hits a lot of us as we get older.
And I've also had heart operation for a thing called arrhythmia, where the heart beats at the wrong speed.
And I've got a jolly little gadget in my chest called an ICD unit, which is an internal cardiac defibrillator, so that if the clockwork seems to be going wrong, the defibrillator kicks in and puts me back together again.
But at 79 next month, I still feel 25.
And you still sound it.
Thank you.
Great.
That's very kind of you.
But I've got, you know, I've got an awareness of cases of someone who's got maybe a similar problem who will say, well, I've got to take it easy.
I've got to just, you know, nothing will ever make me take it easy.
I've got to go for it, whether I'm broadcasting or doing television presentations or whether I'm investigating a haunted house, whatever it may be.
I've got to get stuck in there and do it.
I can't imagine you half doing anything, Lionel.
You always like to throw yourself into whatever you do.
Hence the fact that you have, well, one figure I read, you can tell me whether it's right or wrong, but I've seen it on the internet in a number of places.
You are reputed to have either collaborated on or directly written 250 books.
Now, that's not somebody who is of any mind to slow down, I think.
Definitely not.
And I'm working on a...
But I'm working on a story at the moment with a science fiction story.
It's been commissioned for me by a Spanish publisher.
And I'm working on this as hard and fast as I can go for him.
Of course, it's lovely when you're an established writer to get a commission.
And being given a commission by a publisher is the equivalent of being a small dog to whom somebody is holding out a juicy boon.
Does that include an advance?
Did the publisher give you money to do this up front?
No, no, I'm on a solid standard 7.5% once we get the completed manuscript in.
Wow.
A lot of publishers do give you a good advance, but I don't mind either way.
I know he's a good, honest guy, and he'll pay me when he's sold a few, so we're well away on that.
And it's another thing that Patricia and I co-write a lot of our stuff, and we're very interested in the moment because we've got some books up on Amazon, on Kindle.
And this is the there's our science fiction trilogy, which is The Black Lion, The Golden Tiger, and Zotala the Priest.
That's just up on there.
And another one we've done called Two Pyramids Decay.
And another one, the historical novel that we wrote called Garon of the Veneti.
So there, you know, we're not stopping.
As soon as one is up there, we're doing another one.
Well, that's three.
I had a look.
Funnily enough, you mentioned Amazon.
Before we started recording, I just went onto Amazon.
I do with a lot of people who write books just to see how you're represented there.
And the roll call, there were four or five packed pages of your books on Amazon.
I had no idea you were so prolific.
But let's not lose the point about this new commission, this new book.
What's that about?
Well, it's on the lines, set in the remote future.
And there is a very evil galactic empire which is taking one planet after another under its control.
And we have a hero by the name of Brian, B-R-I-O-N Brian, and a group of freedom fighters who are doing their best planet by planet.
And where we've done something which Pat, I think, is different is that he discovers, back here on Earth, a time portal which will enable him to go back and find a hero or heroine who would be the ideal person to deal with the enemy, the galactic empire, on any particular planet.
If I just give you one example, and of course the whole novel is how he pulls up one hero after another to deal with a particular difficulty.
There's one planet which is very icy, very frozen.
It's like the, it's a bit like Antarctica on Earth.
And the conditions are such that he needs a man who can cope with that kind of sub-zero temperature.
And when you're rescuing a hero from the past on Earth, if you take someone away before he had finished his life, then you will alter history.
Because he won't have been here.
Suppose you snatch an athletic hero or a warrior hero when he's in his 20s.
And then the seven or eight battles that he would yet have had to fight on Earth in real history, he won't have been there so that history will change.
And the guy who's flying the spaceship will find that they are now no longer part of a history that got changed.
Which is the classic dilemma, Isn't it of the time traveler if you watch the Back to the Future movies, which I still love?
I love them.
That is the one thing that if you change anything back in the continuum, then it's going to have knock-on effects all the way down the line.
So we try to get over that.
Really?
We try to get past that by one of the freedom fighters.
We're way in the future, a couple of thousand years in the future.
And he has got very advanced medical and biological technology, and he is able to create biological replicas of the hero or heroine that they want to take out of the past and bring into their world to use.
What a great concept.
So you're not actually taking the person, the being, whatever, the creature out of that space and time.
You're taking a replica.
Yeah, you take the real person that you want with a skill, and the bioreplica is placed in the position in which the hero died, and you've got to snatch him at the moment of death.
For instance, on one of the watery planets, he wants the magnificent channel swimmer, Captain Matthew Webb, who was drowned swimming Niagara in the whirlpool.
So he does a biological replica of Webb.
They go through the time portal, snatch the real Web, put the replica in to be drowned, and take the real Web with them, revive him in their medical center after they fished him out of Niagara, and take him to this water world where they need an amazingly strong swimmer to get to a particular point to make things go right.
Now, Lionel, listen, you have me hooked already on this.
What's the title again, Tommy?
It's going to be called...
I've got to get this absolutely right.
Galactic Conquest.
Great title.
If you get to the point of doing deals about this, I think one of the things you should do, apart from a movie deal, because it sounds to me like it would make a great movie, you need to read an audiobook.
Do an audiobook.
Yeah, definitely.
I'd be very happy to do it as an audiobook.
Just put that idea out there then.
You know what they say about putting ideas out there?
One other thing they say, though, is that fiction, of course, is often linked inversely or directly to the truth.
So the things you've talked about, you may not even know that, may be capable of happening or may have happened already.
Oh, yes.
I think this is a fascinating concept that fact and fiction blur.
And one of the things that I'd like to share with you is something that I've worked out over the ages with the five possibilities that can explain what you and I investigate in the way of paranormal phenomena.
And category one would be what I call the Shakespearean stroke Dickensian ghost.
Anybody from Hamlet's father on the battlements to Charles Dickens', you know, Scrooge and Marley.
Then there's perhaps an extraterrestrial influence.
Then, and this is what made me think of it, when you were drawing that very important line between fact and fiction and the interlink, what if there are parallel universes, the so-called worlds of if?
And the classic case of that was the schoolmistress who was working in Eastern Europe and normally got on extremely well with her students and suddenly found that while she was writing on the blackboard, they'd all crossed the classroom and were peering out of the window.
She goes across and sees herself walking through the school garden, which was what had attracted the attention of the kids.
And so when you've got this doppelganger effect, it could well be that in a parallel universe, her timetable was slightly different.
And in the parallel universe, this was a free period, and she was strolling in the garden.
Whereas in our reality, she had a class and was teaching them.
Then there's that lovely theory about natural recordings.
Just as you and I can record a program like this one, for example, on video or DVD, so what if there were crystalline formations, quite natural, in the fabric of a building, and that those natural recording devices absorbed an episode, especially if it was an emotional one?
Because so many ghost stories are hinged around murders or suicides where there's been a great gushing of emotion, and that's cut its way into the fabric, and then when somebody sensitive goes past, then he or she can re-read that event like you or me watching a DVD.
Well, that is a possibility, isn't it?
Because if you think there are lots of rocks in this world that contain iron, our bodies contain iron quite naturally, so why wouldn't it be possible for us to work like a tape recorder and for the piece of rock to work like the recording medium?
Yes, I certainly think so.
And when you get very repetitive paranormal events and reports of, shall we say, something like a phantom army seen over a sad old battleground where a lot of men lost their lives, then that could well be a recording.
I was told a story in Hawaii years ago.
We did a show, and I know I've talked about it on this show before.
I'll tell you very briefly.
We did the Chris Tarrant show, which was a big entertainment show in London.
We used to go around the world with that, and at our peak, we went to Maui, Hawaii, and I met a lot of very spiritual people there.
I've talked about them before.
One of the stories that I was told, though, and I was told this in absolute seriousness by a person who looked me right in the eye while she told me the story.
In fact, it was a guy Who told me the story?
He was a member of a band there playing traditional Hawaiian music.
And he said there had been a plan to build a golf course on Maui because Maui is quite an upmarket place.
A lot of people love to go there for holidays.
Great place for leisure.
But there was a Japanese tourist who was on this golf course, and the way it was reported, because it was built, but it was built on a burial ground.
And this Japanese tourist playing his golf saw a massive standing army appear before him.
I don't know if there's anybody listening in Hawaii who can give me some more detail on that story, because it's a lot of years since I was told it.
But that was the story.
And I was told that in all truth and sincerity.
And that speaks to the idea of the things that happened in the past can imprint themselves on the present.
Yes, and I'm sure that they can.
And of course, this also brings us up to the possibility of very close to this whole idea is one of time travel that you can either go back or forward.
There was a very odd case that a guy told us about it had happened at Maidstone, and we were being driven around in the studio chauffeur-driven car to go from one location to another because I was presenting a series.
Was this when you were doing 40 and TV?
It was either then or shortly afterwards when I was doing a kind of a one-off on the paranormal.
It was about that period.
It could well have been one of the 4TN TV drivers.
But he told us a true story of how he and his friend had been on this road between the M4 and turning down south for Maidstone.
And he said they saw a motorcyclist coming out of a side road, braked hard, God mustn't hit him.
And they heard the crash as they hit him.
And they got out and they actually saw a dent in the driving side front wing.
Then you can imagine it's pitch dark.
They've got their torches out of the car.
They're looking everywhere to try to find this injured motorcyclist.
They couldn't find the man or the bike.
So being good, honest blokes, they drove on into Maidstone, stopped at the first police station they came to, said, look, we're terribly sorry, and it wasn't our fault, but we think we may have killed a motorcyclist who collided with our car.
And an old constable standing at the back of the room, just having a cup of tea, as he'd just come off duty, called across to the desk sergeant, I shouldn't bother to note this one down, Serge.
I've been here over 20 years, and this is the fifth or sixth time when an honest witness has come in to tell me about that accident.
He said, as far as I know, the motorcyclist was killed in the 1930s, and somehow, and they were explaining to him and showing him that their car was dented.
He said, somehow, those two time periods seem to click into each other, and he rides to his death again, but we have never found him or the machine.
Now, that is one of the most amazing things I have ever heard.
And what makes it even more amazing is the physical evidence, the dent in the car.
Yes, that was the thing that so impressed our driver friend who told us the story.
And so some phenomena, it may be that there are things like time quakes or like earthquakes, but they affect the fabric of time.
And of course, then it brings us up to that other mystery that you and I would have investigated many times, which is the Deja Vu experience.
You're in a strange place, you've never been to before, and suddenly, whoops, I know what's around that next corner.
I was doing some lectures in Yarmouth a few years ago on the paranormal, and one of the audience, a most amazing man, said, may I tell the story?
Because we were dealing with Deja Vu in that particular lecture, and he said, may I tell you the strangest thing in his experience?
I said, oh, please do.
And he said that his grandmother had been an American lady.
She'd met his grandfather when he was working in the States, and they'd fallen in love and agreed to marry.
And she had come over to Yarmouth, to that part of Britain, on the east coast, and they were driving round together looking for a house.
He was pretty well to do, and they wanted a big house with a few acres of land.
And as they approached one of the houses that they knew were up for sale, she suddenly clutches his arm and said, I've been here before.
She said, round this next corner, there's a summer house.
And lo and behold, there was the summer house.
And she said, when we get a little further, you'll find there's a big rockery on the, and there it was.
Everything she, she said, I know I've been here before.
They reached the door, rang the bell, butler answered, looked at the lady in amazement, shock, and said, do forgive me, madam, I didn't mean to stare, but you are the lady who haunts this house.
Oh, my lord.
And he went on then to tell me that they bought the house and they married and they had a very long, happy life there together, raised their family there.
And she, while still living in the USA before marrying his grandfather, had dreamt of the house, never been to Britain before.
But that was how she was able to say, there's a summer house, there's a rockery.
And while she'd been dreaming of it, people who were living there had seen her as though she were a ghost.
And that's one of the strangest things that I have ever come across.
That is amazing.
But again, earlier today, I was listening to a great archive edition of Art Bell's show when he was doing Coast to Coast A.M. in the States.
And I know that you're familiar with Art Bell's work.
He is the master of this genre of broadcasting, as far as I'm concerned.
He was doing a special with a man that I'd like to get on this show called Dr. David Anderson, who's worked extensively on time travel, knows a lot about physics.
At the time this thing was recorded, and I think it is easily more than 10 years ago, he was working on a mechanism using some form of electromagnetism to time shift, to be able to go forward or maybe even backward in time.
But the one question that none of them could answer, none of the people on that show, he couldn't answer it, Art Bell couldn't answer it, the callers couldn't answer it, how do you define time?
What is time?
Yeah.
Oh, that's a tremendous question.
And are we, so to speak, like fish in water, and the water is time?
Is it part of the medium in which we're living?
And does it flow past us, or do we battle our way through it?
And I have often felt that Shakespeare comes closest to the truth when he talks about the subjectivity of time.
Is it interesting to do something that fascinates researchers like you and me?
And time goes like lightning, and we don't seem to have been talking for two minutes.
And yet, if you're waiting at a bus stop on an unpleasantly cold evening, because your car is in for a service, the three minutes which you're waiting for that bus, you're looking at your watch, you're looking at all the closed shops around you, and you're shivering and pulling your anorag on a bit tighter, and three minutes might three hours before the blessed bus gets there.
Or as my dear Liverpool grandmother used to say, an unwatched pot never boils.
It's absolutely right.
Or rather, a watched pot never boils.
I know that marvellous old saying that you made.
But you see, just as we were talking earlier, it's amazing how things come around in a circle about the power of the mind.
And you were talking about that, you know, the silver process.
And I sometimes wonder whether the power of the mind can actually move time, can affect time.
And perhaps time is not as universal as we believe.
That for one person, time may seem to be protracted and extended and never going to finish.
And for another guy, it's all there and gone in a split second.
You imagine a victim in a torture chamber being interrogated by the most horrible means imaginable.
Every second of agony seems to be a thousand years long.
But for the guy who is sitting in the theater with a friend that he thinks the world of, and they're enjoying a great play together, they suddenly look at their watch and say, good lord, there's only another ten minutes left in Act 3.
And it's so good and so entertaining that it doesn't seem to have taken any time at all to go through the whole fabric of a really good Beckett play.
Now, I'm wondering whether, just as if we think about time for a moment as a rippling stream, then there will be fast-moving passages like the rapids, and there will be gentle pools where it's hardly moving at all.
And I'm wondering whether time does this to us, but that we have some form of mental control as to whether we are in the slow pool, hardly moving, or whether we are rushing over the stones in the rapids.
Now, that's really interesting.
I can remember a tiny little incident from my own life, and a lot of people will relate to this one.
I can remember more than 10 years ago driving on the M3 motorway, very, very late at night.
It's midnight.
The section of motorway is not lit.
And right in front of me, right across the carriageway, I see the wreckage in the third lane, the far right lane.
We drive on the left here in the UK, just to explain.
I see a car, a Volvo, unlit, lying sideways.
Well, I'm in the middle lane, so I'm not going to hit that.
But immediately in front of me, lying sideways in the second carriageway in which I am, is a wheel from that car, which had obviously spun and lay sideways.
Now, I had a little tiny Miss Anne micro, smallest car you could get back then.
And I literally had about two seconds to decide what to do.
Whether I went into the third carriageway and maybe hit more wreckage, whether I swerve off to the left and possibly hit stuff coming up on my left, which of course they shouldn't do, but people do on the motorway.
Or whether I just decide to take this tiny little car over a complete tire and wheel.
Now that decision and the thought process had to take because it was looming up on me.
I was doing 60 miles an hour, 65 probably in a 70 zone.
I had two seconds to decide, and yet I went through all of the options and made a rational decision in the space of two seconds.
Time, in other words, my perception of it at that time, because it was important, slowed right down, and I made a decision.
Decision was to go straight over that wheel.
It was the right decision.
The car suffered some damage, but the other possibilities were too bad to comprehend.
They would have been very nasty.
So I got through that, but it took me two seconds to rationalize it.
So there you have that whole idea of individuals' experience of time can be different.
But overlaid with that is this whole idea that time is this unfolding circle.
It's rather like that, we lost Noel Harrison this year, but the windmills of your mind, it's like some kind of spiral.
And it's possible, if you can unlock it, which I know Dr. David Anderson was investigating, to be able to go back or forward around those spirals.
That is what I'd like to do.
That is so important.
And if only we had, as I said, if I ever won one of those lotteries in which you had not only millions, but hundreds of millions, so that I would have a worthwhile sum to invest in the research.
That is what I would like to do, to research powers of the mind and what time travel really might be if only we could control it.
I'm sure you've heard, and a lot of my listeners keep asking me about this.
I know Art Bell did shows about this.
He was the one who did most.
Of John Teter, the man who claimed to have been a man from the future who'd come back to our time zone to be able to get hold of a computer part that they needed in the future to fix something vital.
And this person called Teter apparently posted on the internet and then disappeared.
That was a fascinating story.
I never totally believed it, but it was a fascinating story, yeah?
Yeah, there are episodes of that kind which, like you, I would describe as totally fascinating.
And whether we have people from the future going back into the past, as he was doing to find his computer component, He's one of the people that we rescue from the past in order to do a big job, is Leonardo da Vinci.
Now, Leonardo had so many ideas that were centuries ahead of his time that I wondered seriously whether the man calling himself Leonardo da Vinci had actually come from a period very similar to ours.
I mean, when you think about his designs for helicopters and his designs for weaponry in particular, that was way ahead of his century.
And where do the ideas come from?
It's when he had so many.
There was all his knowledge of human biology.
There was all of his knowledge of machinery and the way that things operate.
Almost like the guy who'd gone back to retrieve the computer component.
Is it possible that people like him and there were others who take Archimedes?
Now, his knowledge of engineering might simply have developed from a brilliant mind with which he was blessed.
But what if he had come from a period when the things he appeared to be inventing were already part of everyday life?
So it would be worthwhile researching people who seemed so far ahead of their time and then just trying to discover whether there was any episode in their lives in which they seemed to have been someone else,
as if a person from another time had suddenly found himself in ancient Italy or in Sicily or in ancient Greece and would have done the best he could to take advantage of the technology that he brought with him.
Because one explanation for that, maybe, I don't know, but it's one that my small brain has just come up with, is maybe some of this is DNA memory already within you and perhaps brought back from a previous civilization.
I'm talking maybe pre-Egyptian.
Yes, yes.
And perhaps that's how it comes.
Now, I think this is amazing because we don't, you've touched on something so exciting and interesting here that we just do not know how much ability we do inherit.
That, again, is an area for research.
When you've got the six or seven-year-old who can sit down at the grand piano that his little fingers will hardly reach and play as if he was a man of 30 who'd been a concert pianist since leaving university.
And where does that come from?
It's got to be inside the bloke's head.
And it's got to have been inherited.
And you find the same thing with some of these incredibly able students.
And again, thinking of the DNA, the number of incredibly able mathematicians who are from India, and you'll find a youngster of perhaps nine or ten who is given a place at Oxbridge,
and then the maths professors who are setting the final papers cannot devise a question which is hard enough to test him because he knows everything they know and the dickens of a lot more.
Now, is it something in that DNA, especially when so many of them come from the same area of the world, is that inherited DNA, that genetic power, coming down from some very early mathematician and, you know, his descendants?
And maybe that reacts also with the desire of many people from that continent to make sure that their children have a better life than they did.
Consequently, education for a lot of people in India, Pakistan, and many other countries in the same region, education is the key to being able to get out of the situation that your parents were in.
Yes, absolutely.
So that there is, as it were, an enthusiasm for education, an enthusiasm for learning and knowledge and skill, with the most altruistic motive that you want your youngsters to do better than you did yourself.
I mean, Patricia and I are just delighted beyond words that both our daughters got their PhDs and went on to good careers.
And whereas we both left school pretty young.
But you created for them an environment where mentally they could flourish, I'm guessing.
Well, that's what, you know, when you love someone, as we do, that's what you try to do for them.
And if that's, you know, taking your idea there, that where there is enthusiasm, where you want to do the best you can for your children, and this Enthusiasm for learning plus the natural ability of the young man or woman concerned.
And it links in so much with these brilliant Indian mathematicians.
Again, you'll find somebody who's got tremendous talent for music.
And I just wonder whether, when we're looking into this DNA inheritance, whether or not it can account for some of those fascinating cases which are sometimes ascribed to reincarnation.
that it isn't quite reincarnation in the sense of a migrant soul being born again, so that someone who was a great musician in the 18th century is now reborn into our 21st century and still has his musical talent or her musical talent.
But it's one of the...
isn't there, about to what extent does DNA inheritance account for apparent cases of reincarnation?
And of course, the fascinating case from the U.S., I did a show on this during the last year.
I think it was either that or the year before.
My God, my perception of time is questionable now.
But the man who claims to be the reincarnation of Edgar Casey.
Right.
Yes, that's a fascinating one.
And you did the program on that.
I did.
I did.
And amazing.
What did I think?
I thought there was a lot in it, but again, it's another one of those things where my personal jury was out.
I couldn't decide.
But then I always stay here on the show, and I genuinely believe it.
It isn't for me to decide.
It's for the listeners when I put it out there to decide.
I thought there was an awful lot of positive evidence for it.
That's what I came away with.
Yes.
See, I agree with you that when I'm putting something forward, we're exchanging ideas with a fellow researcher like yourself, that what we can do is just to lay before our listeners the facts as we have them and any opinions that we may suggest.
But we're very much in the position of barristers who are presenting a case to a jury and saying, it's your opinion that matters.
We have combed through the evidence and we're trying to present it in the best way we can, but in the long run, and the thing that really matters, is what the jury thinks.
And our listeners are a very important jury.
They are.
Let me wind you back a little bit of time travel, 20 minutes or so, because you were telling me that there were five potential explanations for most paranormal phenomena.
We got, I believe, to number four.
So there was one more.
Yeah, well, what we had here, the five were that they were either the Shakespearean or Dickensian type of ghost, you know, which is really a departed human spirit that's come back, or that they may be extraterrestrials who are behaving in ways that we don't fully understand, and we therefore wonder if they're paranormal.
Then we looked at the parallel universe phenomenon, which was number three, where I talked in particular about doppelgangers, where if something has or hasn't happened, then what goes on in that universe will differ.
But occasionally, these parallel universes can drift close enough together so that we can perceive what's going on in an alternative.
The next one we looked at was the natural recordings in the fabric that we talked about.
And then the fifth and final one was time travel.
Right.
And that's, I think, nearly all the honest reports that I've had over more than half a century of paranormal phenomena have been, shall we say, understandable or explicable under one of those five headings.
that again, very happy to discuss that in further depth if anybody's got yet another Do you remember, I think the lady's name was Neil.
And she was over in Paul and conjured up a thought form of a jolly little monk, which other people could see.
And then it ceased being quite so pleasant and friendly and became sort of the look on its face changed from a pleasant smile to being something cunning and crafty and mischievous.
And she had to call in the help of several very high-powered llamas in order to get rid of it.
She, having created it as a thought form, was unable to get rid of it.
It became independent.
And if we think about that sort of phenomenon of a thought form being the mental equivalent or the psychic equivalent of the normal process of birth,
that just as a plant produces a seed or a cat produces a kitten or a human being produces a baby, so the mind can actually create something.
When you're writing a book, when you're writing a play, when you're directing a film, you, the creative worker, actually make a character inside your head.
Now, what if when this lady Was doing her travels in Nepal.
She actually created, I think her first name was Alexandra, Alexandra Neal.
And she actually created something beyond what a writer can control and produce in his mind to go down on paper.
But this thing had a physical existence.
It was perceived by other members of the expedition, and it was incredibly difficult to get rid of.
Now, in our own lives, if we read entertainment stories, that I have to say I do, I'm not the world's biggest fan of entertainment news, but I do look at these stories just in passing.
The number of times I've noted over my lifetime where an actor, for example, who's been famous for playing one particular character who perished in a particular way, actually in real life perishes the same way or experiences the same thing as the fictional character experienced.
I don't know if you've been aware of cases like that.
I can't name names right now, but the number of times that that has just passed through my mind fleetingly.
It does happen.
And I think this was something that the good Saint Paul understood when he, in one of his letters to the young churches, says, whatsoever things are good, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are of good report, whatsoever things are decent and honest and worthwhile, think on these things.
I think that Paul knew rather more than I do about the power of the mind to create stuff.
And if, as you say, you're an actor and you're frequently called upon to, if you're a classic actor and you're doing Shakespearean stuff, and you are constantly called upon to play Hamlet or to play Macbeth or to play King Lear,
all of whom have tragic endings, then is it possible that what you are pretending in the best sense of the word, what you're pretending on stage may come back to you, may be reflected back into you, so that you are then doing it in real life.
The idea of thinking positively, thinking, well, there was a wonderful example of this in the days of This Is Your Life when Eamon Andrews was doing it.
He had a superb priest called Hessian who was, should have been, terminally ill.
He was very, very far gone with an awful disease.
And he was determined to carry on with his work.
And it was almost as though his desire to carry on with the charitable work that he was doing overcame the weakness of the body, whereas if he had just given in to it and sort of laid back and said, well, I'm dying and I can't do anything about it.
But he was determined to fight.
And that power of the mind, had he emulated a character from a Shakespearean tragedy and quietly lain down to die, he'd have gone.
But because he was determined, his work to him was more important than anything.
And he overcame a terminal illness in order to do the good work he'd been doing.
In our own lives, we only have to look at the case of Stephen Hawking, who's still with us.
Yes, what a man.
Oh, yes, what an object for admiration.
Completely.
Lionel, we're almost at the hour.
I want to thank you very, very much because there are at least another.
I've got my list here that I wrote down before we spoke.
There are another 12 or 15 topics on that that we could have covered, and I'd like to in the future.
Thank you so much for making time for me.
One quick thing to ask you about.
Don't know whether you've followed over the Christmas holiday and into the new year.
The story that hasn't really been reported in the UK, I'm sure they'll get round to it eventually, but this big crop circle that appeared at Salinas in California over the holiday period, the world's, I say the world, our media didn't pay much attention, but a lot of media did pay attention to this thing.
A lot of speculation about who created this acre-wide, very intricate pattern at Salinas, the Salinas Valley in California, and then suddenly the thing was mowed down and taken away.
And first of all, it was said that the landowner did it to stop all of this speculation and all of this attention on his land.
And then it was said that maybe some other force did this thing, took it away.
Maybe it was some security agency.
And as we speak at the moment, people are still speculating as to what this thing was when it was here and why this thing was taken away over this holiday period up to the beginning of January.
It's a fascinating question.
And crop circles as a whole, even though one or two of them are made by fraudsters with a strange sense of humor, I think they may well be signaling devices, messages.
How else could we tell beings on another planet that we wanted to communicate with them if we had a means of putting intricate patterns that nature could not have produced on its own?
Is that not going to raise the question in their minds, hey guys, is somebody out there and what are they trying to tell us?
Well, if you look at the pictures of this thing before it was mowed down, it was so huge and so intricate, so detailed that it would make you think, well, you know, I don't think a couple of guys on motor mowers could even begin to do this.
No, no, I'm sure they couldn't.
And I always tie this in in my mind with the real meaning behind the Nazca lines.
You know, the famous lines that go back into several thousand years.
Were they put there in order to be seen from above?
You see, the size of this Selena circle meant to be seen from above.
And who is up there to look at it?
Well, that was the point that was made about the Salinas formation.
That really you could only make any sense of it if you could, as a human being, make sense of it by looking at it from the Sky.
If you looked at it from the ground, you wouldn't have any great conception of what this thing was.
Fascinating.
Always happy to come on the show when you need me and always delighted to help.
Oh, thank you so much, Lionel.
And, you know, as ever, we always have, I mean, time with us flies by.
It does.
It does.
We always have interesting conversations.
Thank you so much.
And for next month, a very, very happy birthday.
And my best wishes to Patricia as well.
Thank you very much.
And ours to you and to all your listeners.
The warm and informed tones of the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe.
And you can see why he's so popular around the world and why he makes such a great guest on radio shows.
That voice, the warmth of it, draws you right in.
And I always tease him that a lot of people say that he sounds like Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies.
And that is a great compliment to him.
But he is a great teller of stories and a great researcher of research.
If you want to know more about him and his work, if he's new to you, then go to my website, triple w.theunexplained.tv, and I'll put a link there to his work on my website.
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My name is Howard Hughes.
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This has been The Unexplained and I will be back with you very soon.
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