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Oct. 19, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:14:01
Edition 178 - Linda Moulton Howe

Multi award winning investigative journalist talks about Energy, Ebola and Extinction...

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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 Return of the Unexplained.
Happy autumn to you if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, although summer seems to be clinging on a little here, albeit tinged and tainted with storms, because we're set apparently very soon to get the back end of Hurricane Gonzalo, which has already whipped its way across the Caribbean or the Caribbean, depending on where you're hearing this program.
So, you know, we're waiting for that now.
But at the moment, I can tell you that I'm recording this on a day in autumn when temperatures are around about 20 degrees centigrade, which is, what, 68 Fahrenheit thereabouts, which is not the way it's supposed to be, but I'm not complaining.
However, it is starting to look a little bit like last year when we had weather like this and then we had a whole winter of storms and no snow and no ice, which I didn't mind, but it caused a lot of problems, flooding and stuff for people in various parts of this country, because of the amount of rain we had, together with some very high winds at times.
And it all started around about, you might remember if you're in Britain, this time in October.
So we'll watch and we'll wait.
But no more talk of the weather.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Yes, I'm going to do some shout-outs this time.
Not going to be able to mention everybody, but please do know that when you email me, I do see your email and I do take it on board.
And if you make a guest suggestion, I get on to it.
Which is where I come to something that I've said before here on The Unexplained.
We try and get as many big-name guests as we can here.
Some of them, when I contact them, they don't bother replying to me because they think this is just a podcast.
But the funny thing is that the listening numbers for this podcast are higher than some streaming services and some radio services.
So, you know, that's the laugh.
If these people are looking for audiences, this could be one of the ways where they could get them and get their message out.
So if you have a particular favourite big-name guest you want to hear here, please cascade them with emails and let's see if together we can get these people on.
I'm not going to name any names here, but you can think of some of the people that I've mentioned over the last couple of years who I email and contact and they just don't simply bother getting back to me in any shape or form.
I've even tried phoning some of these people and they never bother returning the calls.
So if you can help me with that, because, you know, we're a small show, but we punch well above our weight.
You keep telling me that.
Thank you very much for all of your support.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work on designing the website and getting the show out to you and all the stuff that he does that I could not do without.
And also, thank you to a man who's been a big help to me over the last year or more.
His name is Roger Sanders.
Now, if you listen to some other shows, you might have heard him name-checked.
I have mentioned him here before, but I want to just say, Roger, for your help in finding some of my American guests, quite a few of them, and also hounding them to make sure they come on here when I haven't got time to do that.
I just want to say thank you here, publicly, right now.
Roger Sanders, thank you very much indeed.
Something else.
The survey that we've been wanting to do about your listening habits and whether you would like to see this show expand and how you like to see the show expand.
Now, Adam has been devising a mechanic for this.
So as you look at the website, either now or not very long from now, you will see a survey.
And please, if you can get time, go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
That is my website.
And if you can fill out that survey and return the data, it will only go to us.
We will only use it for our purposes.
We will not pass it on to anybody else.
That's my absolute guarantee to you, because I hate it when organizations do that to me.
But it will help us to develop.
So the survey is coming to the homepage of the website, theunexplained.tv, very soon.
Guest on this edition, a return from Linda Moulton Howe.
It's been a big 2014.
We have a lot to get into here.
Like I say, I love to hear from you.
Please email me if you have a guest suggestion.
If you want to get in touch with guests that you'd like to hear on this show and recommend they come on here, that would also help me.
So please go ahead and do that if you'd like to, because all the support this small show can get is very welcome.
And thank you very much if you've made a donation to the show recently.
Your donations are very, very vital to what we do.
And if we've got any chance of expanding, then it will be at the moment that way.
Okay, your emails.
Let's get to some of them now.
Apologies if I don't pronounce your name right.
Ges Verkal in the Netherlands, suggesting David Huggins, a 70-year-old outsider artist who's had a lifetime of encounters with otherworldly beings.
Says Geis.
Thank you very much for your email and nice to know that we're being heard across the water in the Netherlands from the UK.
Dave in this country suggesting Dennis Wise.
Dave, thank you.
I think I told you that I've emailed him, so let's see if he gets back to me.
Gaspar in Guadalajara, Mexico wants me to be a guest on his show.
Gaspar, let's see if we can work out the logistics for that one.
Anthony in Toronto says, why did Malaysian Airlines not take control of MH370 if it's equipped with uninterruptible autopilot, which we talked about on the show about 9-11 and it being remote-viewed, apparently?
At least one of those planes had that ahead of its time.
Well, I think the fact about it is, Anthony, that if nobody knew that there was a problem with that flight, how could they have taken control of it, assuming that is that they have the technology to do that, if you see what I mean.
Gord in Ontario wants a forum on the website.
Well, maybe in 2015, Gord, if we can expand this show and the way that we do it and if funding allows to do that.
But good suggestion, and thank you.
We have thought of that and we will do it when we can, promise.
Nice email from Taylor in Texas who says that my voice has guided him through many trips to work, morning coffees and beach sunrises, which sound really nice.
Sent me a fabulous photo taken while kayaking.
I'm not sure if the anomalies on that photograph are what they appear to be or if they're down to lens artifacts.
I think you need to get a professional to look at that because it's fascinating stuff.
Kevin Good asked for a shout-out.
Loves the show.
So Kevin, thank you for listening.
There's your shout-out.
Denise in New York doesn't want me to change anything about the show.
Ulysses Castillo suggesting Robert Schwartz.
I've emailed Robert, Ulysses, no reply from him yet.
Lee says about Dick Olga, the remote viewer.
What a load of tripe he was talking, says Lee, remote viewing things that are yet to happen.
If it hasn't happened yet, then it's just imagination, says Lee.
Okay.
Martin in Lancashire, some nice comments.
Thank you.
Osley Dias, some good thoughts about remote viewer Dick Olga.
He wants to thank Adam Cornwell, by the way, my webmaster, for the great website.
Lewis, a very kind email about what you say the show has done for you.
Thank you very much.
Moving email for me, Lewis.
Thank you very, very much for that.
Stephen emails to say that he likes my shows, but I shouldn't interrupt the guests as much as I should.
Sorry, it's the news training where you want to keep people on point.
I think that's why I do it, Stephen, but sorry.
Mark in Michigan with guest ideas, including Michio Kaku, who I keep, he's one of the people actually that I do keep emailing and contacting and even phoned once recently, but no joy there.
So if you have any ideas how I can get hold of Michio Kaku, I would love to get him back on this show.
Lee in Liverpool thinks that he heard Art Bell's voice on an old edition of Captain Scarlet.
Really?
Thank you for that, Lee.
Jody in Preston loves the show.
John in Birmingham, good suggestions, which I'm working on, John.
Thank you very much.
Brian Inspokane, Washington, wants a search function on the website.
Findlay emails about numbers, recurring numbers.
I've had that experience too, Finley.
I know what you mean.
Oud Arne Scarbo in Norway, some great funding ideas.
Sorry if I mispronounced your name, okay?
But, you know, I do my best, but I think it's Oud Arne Scarbo.
Let me know if I'm right.
And Stephen found my show five weeks ago and hasn't stopped listening.
That is nice to hear, Stephen.
Thank you very much for your emails.
If you'd like to email, go to www.theunexplained.tv and there you can follow the link and send me an email contact to this show and I would love to hear from you.
Now, before we get to Linda Moulton Howe in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I want to let you hear something that I did only yesterday, an interview about Comet Siding Spring, which has passed, actually as I record these words, it's probably in the process of passing, very close to Mars.
So I spoke to my old friend Heather Cooper, very famous British astronomer, about Comet Siding Spring.
And before we go to Linda Moltenhow, let's just hear a couple of minutes of Heather Cooper.
It's amazing.
It probably happens once every one million years, and it's very, very exciting.
This is a comet that's going to go and literally buzz past Mars at a distance which is about a third the distance of the moon from the Earth.
And it's incredible.
It's going to be a really grandstand view if you happen to be on Mars.
Which, of course, we do have a presence on Mars.
That's the exciting thing, isn't it?
That's the exciting thing.
I mean, you've got two probes on the Martian surface.
They're roving probes.
And they'll have a look.
They'll lock up in the sky and they'll see the comet.
And then you've got three American orbiting probes.
You've got a European probe as well, which is excellent.
Mars Express.
And the Indians have just joined us.
So they joined us a couple of weeks ago.
So tremendous interest in Mars, which is fortuitous because this thing was only discovered, this comet, was only discovered last year.
That's right.
And we just happen to have all of that hardware up there ready to look at it.
Absolutely.
What are we looking for then?
What we're looking for, well, first of all, let me actually put in a great plug for the British.
It was discovered in January 2013 at Siding Spring, which is an observatory in Australia.
It was discovered by one of my best mates, Bob McNaught.
He has this habit of discovering comets, so he discovered it, named it after the observatory, which, by the way, is situated in the wonderfully named Warrumbungle mountain range.
So there you are, there's a whole clutch of telescopes there.
Comets basically are dirty snowballs.
They're lumps of ice laced with bits of rock.
And when they come in from the outskirts of the solar system, they heat up and they develop an enormous head of steam.
And then the sun pushes back a great tail of this expanding steam and also a tail of dust which is caused by the little bits of rock on the comet.
So what they've had to do around Mars is to change the orbits of their space probes slightly to get out of the firing line of the steam and dust which is coming off this comet.
Imagine the views they're going to get.
And the exciting thing for astronomers is this comet is, obviously, It hasn't made many appearances in the inner solar system.
And what astronomers are saying is, hey, this is so cool because we really want to know about these virgin comets right in the outer parts of the solar system because they're made of material which hasn't been corrupted by the sun and the planets and things like that.
It's material left over from the formation of our solar system.
Heather Cooper, who says that Comet Siding Spring may give us clues as to how we got here.
So very, very fascinating stuff and a great way to observe that comet, which was discovered apparently by a Brit.
Okay, let's get to Albuquerque, New Mexico now and say thank you very much and welcome again to the unexplained Linda Moulton Howe.
Well, it's always nice to be with you, Howard.
I love England and I think you do great work.
Well, that's very, very kind of you.
You know, we do our best over here.
In some respects, we're a little behind you.
And there would be people over here who would say that in some respects we're a little ahead of you.
So I think it's a bit of a balance and it probably balances out equally, probably.
Right.
A lot of stuff happening.
I think we both, in emails that we've trafficked between each other lately, we've reflected the fact that the world has been a tremendously unstable and changeable place this year.
You know, there's never been a shortage of stuff to talk about or think about, has there?
That's right.
We are in a phase, I think, of transition globally that maybe even the sharpest economists and people didn't see coming the way it is now.
And it's made more complicated because we have all the destruction of ISIS.
We have the sudden emergence and destruction from the Ebola filovirus.
We have all of the signals that are coming economically that all of Europe is headed for a deflationary spiral that Japan has basically been trying to get out of for 20-some years.
And that the United States is both looked at as you act, you clear this up, you help the world.
Meanwhile, all of these problems are greater than any one nation's ability to solve anymore.
And if that were the definition of what I think the transition is, that's it.
The problems from climate change, the impact of climate change on earth life, all the way to going to inside of cells where something like an Ebola virus, it's called a filovirus, can do what I just read from a PLOS medical blog.
Here is, and in a way this also sums up your question about all of these changes on the world that are happening.
Here is a quote from a science writer at one of the medical blogs, quote, Ebola is only a seven-gene infectious particle.
It's called a filovirus.
It is so streamlined, it isn't even a cell.
It isn't even alive.
It can reduce a human body to a puddle, inner barriers dissolving into nothingness within days.
How does the Ebola virus, so much simpler than influenza, simpler than the HIV retrovirus, do this?
How can a little virus on the cell and how can the ISIS in the Middle East be causing so much turmoil to the point that I now know people who are saying to me, I'm never flying an airline again.
We can't go that direction.
Well, we can't.
We can't.
Yeah, we've got to bring to bear what are the facts in all of these rapidly changing areas.
We have to depend upon accurate news for you, for me, for everyone to be trying to bring to bear the pressure of fact because everything is changing so quickly and you can't succumb to fear.
All right, we've got a list of stuff to talk about.
We are going to get into Ebola because I remember reporting Ebola 20 years ago on radio in London and it was just something seemed to be odd and quirky and scary, but an awful long way away from us, so we didn't have to worry about it too much.
And that was just the fact of it.
So we'll talk about that soon.
One of the things on your website, earthfiles.com, that I noticed, is something that I was reporting on my radio show, which is like a street broadcast show yesterday morning.
It's been talked about off and on during the weekend.
That is this thing that looks like the space shuttle, but with a lot of black tiles on it.
It's a top-secret mission.
It's been up in space for a very long time.
It's called the X-37.
And yet nobody is talking about what this thing has been doing.
Because they can't.
It has been one of the best demonstrations of how the United States government can keep a secret, not only for two years while this was up orbiting the Earth, but for the last 60 years on the whole ET UFO phenomena.
And when you come to X-37B, I've been talking with some people who have Air Force backgrounds just in the last 24 hours.
What could it have been doing?
And basically, it seems to me it breaks down into three areas.
One, we need to have something that can go up to where satellites orbit.
And if we needed to do something that would bring that satellite, let's say it's the United States satellite, we need to bring it in to the X-37B to have it repaired.
This would be the definition of creating a very sophisticated orbital test vehicle that could take off from Vandenberg, go up to where we have a troubled satellite, capture it, and bring it back to have it repaired because it's such an expensive satellite and it's only going to be used for military.
That's very important.
This has absolutely nothing to do, as I understand it, with the commercial network world or weather world or anything else.
This is purely military, so you have to think about it in those terms.
So one, repairing a really important top-secret satellite.
Now, if you can do that, you can also take out satellites that might be perceived as a threat.
And thirdly, is the idea that we must monitor.
Now, remember back in the 1950s to 60s when we had the super stealthy plane that was a secret for years.
And what were we doing?
We were trying to spy over perceived enemies and take photographs.
Eventually, today, everything is that much more complicated, and they need something that they can control because the X-37B is entirely an android.
An android means there is no live human in it ever.
This is all controlled from ground people on highly sophisticated, classified missions.
And the very fact that it is so flexible that it can go exactly where they need it to go, where there are orbiting satellites, or it can go exactly where they need an image from space, high resolution, close on the ground, that, as far as I know, these will be the three major new developments of X-37B for the American military.
Now, you know, some of those things are no great big surprise.
We always assumed these things were being done.
What is the shocker really here for some of us is that it once again proves to us that your government, the powers that be or the government behind the government, whoever the hell they are, have technology far in advance to the technology that we actually see day to day.
And here is yet more proof of that.
Yeah, it is.
It's very true.
And that applies, of course, to what does our government have from 60 years of back engineering extraterrestrial technology that has been described by whistleblowers now for at least a decade or two, and that we sit at a time where part of this huge transition that we opened the program with also includes the issues of energy.
We are on a planet that is either going to kill itself in its desperate race of nation to nation over fossil fuels, which are causing problems, or we're going to suddenly, miraculously is what the governments will probably try to convince us, we will miraculously shift to maybe fusion.
That announcement this week that Lockheed may have some kind of a very special capsule that could put a fusion energy device in airplanes, my gosh.
And everyone is saying, well, where did this come from?
And scientists are attacking and saying that Lockheed is misrepresenting.
And others are saying, no, we are close to a public revelation that there is in the wings, so to speak, waiting in the wings is going to be the next age, the next age of energy that will not be dependent upon fossil fuels.
Well, it isn't proved yet.
And even Lockheed said yesterday that they were putting up this astounding breakthrough headline because they need help.
They want more sophisticated scientists.
They want collaboration.
They want more money.
They're basically saying, we think we've got this, but we don't have it at a stage that can be applied to the whole planet.
So the invitation here is that there might be somebody in Russia or China or somewhere who might have this expertise.
And is that a kind of come on down invitation?
Come and join our project?
I think so.
And once, Howard, this became a reality that could be applied to the whole planet, it is a new age.
It would be a new age.
It may be that just around the corner, that all of the legitimately dire predictions about how bad the planet could be in another 60 to 90 years if everything kept going, suddenly, wow,
if we have a new energy source that all nations could use because it has to go global, you can't have one nation or one plane using a carbon, a, what do I want to say, not polluting with carbon in the atmosphere.
It just has to go global to save the planet from the dire predictions that would happen if we kept going.
So all of a sudden, I don't care how much controversy there is about the Lockheed headline, I think they would not have put that out with all of the words that are in it.
And I read the entire article and press release.
It sounds like they are getting ready to introduce to the planet something that could change all of our energy processes, get us away from fossil fuels.
That would start helping the atmosphere, the oceans, the climate, and what all of us have prayed for, a new way to live on Earth that is more in balance with the nature around us instead of killing it.
Sounds good.
The only problem with that is leaving aside where that technology might have come from to give us such a great leap forward so really quickly.
Is that really true that that just emerged from sort of nowhere?
Well, I very, very much doubt that.
Problem is, governments like ours over here, and we've talked about this before, are pushing this towards fracking, which you've got in the United States and which we're about to get over here.
The government's really way, way dead keen about that, giving incentives to local authorities and telling people this is going to be great because it's going to find resources that we didn't even know 20 years ago were there.
So they're not all singing from the same hymn sheet is what I'm saying.
Yeah, and what is really working against stopping fracking is that the United States has moved from someone dependent upon the Middle East oil to a nation now that is going to be a supplier, that we now have the lowest gasoline prices in,
I don't know how long, and that the political system in the United States is now touting that fracking has relieved us from dependence upon the Middle Eastern oil, and yet fracking is clearly causing problems in places like Oklahoma.
I do not think that there's any doubt.
I do not think that is a controversial statement.
I think fracking is causing problems that relate to some of the increased seismic activity, Oklahoma being at the top of the list.
Well, what are the price of trade-offs?
What would be the price of trade-offs in Europe if you suddenly, in England, for example, or Germany or any other country that might be able to try this, fracking is going to cause problems with your, we'll call it the surface to underground relationship.
There's no question about it.
Well, well, Linda, that's more of a problem over here, isn't it?
And we have had some claimed difficulties already with experiments that they've done.
And, you know, I know that area very well of the northwest of England where they've been trying this out.
And if it affects the seismology, then we do have a problem.
And the thing that makes it more difficult over here and in Europe is the areas we're talking about are smaller.
You can do something in Oklahoma or you can do something in some desert in the United States or somewhere else.
And it can be a long way from people's homes and from where people live.
That's one thing.
You tried doing it over here.
You're always within, you know, 50 miles of a community or less here.
Right.
It's a very good point.
It really is.
And England doesn't want to be like Japan with a potential of more Fukushimas.
And when you Look at the alternatives that are currently on the game board.
You either go a lot more nuclear because wind power and solar power still don't cut demand, and that you've got nuclear versus fossil.
In many ways, the arguments for continuing with fossil versus proliferating nuclear power plants on countries, I see why fossil keeps prevailing.
Yeah, well, we're going to get nuclear as well, I think, here.
And that depresses me no end because however much they tell us that it is safe technology here and it's streaks ahead of what they had at Fukushima, I just don't buy it.
I don't believe it.
I haven't got a PhD.
I'm not a scientist.
I've just got a gut feeling.
And the gut feeling says to me, I don't like this.
Yeah, and the Times of India in this spring of 2014, they released an article that was picked up by like The Guardian and several other major, we'll call them mainstream newspapers.
And the Times of India with a reporter in Japan, they broke a story that Fukushima, TEPCO, decided to start putting hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive water from Fukushima because they can't make enough of those tanks fast enough to keep up with all the water.
But you haven't heard anything about this.
No, it's gone.
I tell you what, ISIS, ISIL, whatever they're calling themselves today, you know, they've kind of swept Fukushima right off the agenda.
Nobody seems to care about it anymore, but it's still going on, isn't it?
If that is all true, and you can't get an honest statement from the Japanese government or TEPCO, if hundreds of thousands every day of gallons of radioactive water have been going into the Pacific Ocean since this spring, and this is now nearly the end of October, what is that doing to sea life there?
And what can we as human beings on this planet do about this?
You can report it.
You can investigate it, Linda.
That's what you do, but you are in a minority.
But what can you do?
If the news cycle is the news cycle and this story's way, way down the agenda right now, if it's on the agenda at all, if politicians do the things that they do, even though we live in democracies, I very much doubt whether there's a whole lot we can do about this until, of course, people start to die.
Well, exactly.
The drama seems to always get the news attention these days.
But one, I don't know, maybe one bright light.
I have been doing an awful lot of radio and some TV on a lot of these issues.
And what I am finding for the very first time, and I can say that definitively, when I used to be on what it wasn't just coast to coast or dreamland, but other radio stations and have been doing a lot more,
excuse me, because there appears to be an increasing demand on radio in the United States to reach out beyond the Rush Limbaus and the voices that are so predictable and that they are all political, 100% political.
They're not dealing with facts.
And so when I have been talking about Fukushima or Ebola recently or the sixth mass extinction or what is going to be happening, let's say in Brazil, Brazil could turn into something that would look like the scrubby pine barrens of New Jersey at the end of this century because the wind bands are changing as the climate is changing.
When I used to report on any of it, I would get these blasting emails or phone calls calling me a communist, that no one wanted to hear this news.
Today, I get hundreds of thank yous now from people who are in universities, who are in hospitals.
They are professionals.
They are as frustrated as you and I. They are frustrated by the fact that the actual reality of what is occurring in all of these complicated facets that the public needs to know in order to make any kind of educated determinations on, let's say, a next election, a new bond vote, whatever it is, people are beginning to say thank you.
Please, please keep giving us more information that we aren't getting in other news sources.
Well, I'll tell you something, Linda.
You and I spoke a long, we've been speaking for a very long time in my various radio guises, the London radio stations that I worked for, and I worked for the biggest ones here.
I can remember I had a phase with a radio station called LBC when it was owned by, it's been owned by, like a lot of radio stations, commercial ones, they go through different ownerships.
And I was there for one of my phases there during the ownership of a company that doesn't exist anymore.
And one of the things they got me to do for a year was to do an early morning news magazine show, a 6 to 7 a.m. thing before a guy called Mick Ferrari came on.
And there were people who liked it.
It was quite snappy.
I set it all up myself.
I even wrote my own news into it.
It was a real tough gig, and I enjoyed it.
I mean, in the end, they didn't renew my contract.
I didn't continue there.
And, you know, that company, of course, doesn't exist anymore.
However, that's not the point of this story.
The point of that story is the fact that I used to get emails from people, and this is a decade ago, saying you have that Linda Moulton how-on, or you talk to this person.
Every so often I'd filter in somebody like you just to try and help the audience to think a bit out of the box.
And I would get these emails from people saying, oh, you're talking about climate changing and you're talking about the weather, for God's sake.
I wonder if those people who used to email me then looked at the news over this last year, at the beginning of this year, when we had serious once-in-a-lifetime flooding where people were kicked out of their homes.
And why?
Because we didn't have a proper winter last year.
We had gales, we had heavy rain, we had very, very mild temperatures.
It was spring right through the winter, all the way, and it started this time last year.
That's why I remember.
It started in October and it went all the way through till January, February.
We just had mild weather and we had storms and we had a lot, a lot of rain.
Nobody complained anymore about water shortages because, you know, through this last summer, we've had more water than we can handle.
Now it's mild again, and a lot of people are asking, are we going to get to more of this or is it going to be a return to the old-fashioned British winters?
But what I'm saying is people are now coming to realize these things are real.
Yes, and it is happening because the warmer the air is, the more moisture it can hold.
It's just a physics fact.
And the computer models 20 years ago were predicting that by around 2012 and beyond, that the storms would be worse in terms of the amount of water coming down in some places and more drought in other areas, which is the problem now with the Amazon rainforest in northeastern Brazil.
Nobody could believe that scientists were doing computer models that I interviewed one, I know it was 15 years ago because it was about five years before I moved from Philadelphia to Albuquerque.
And she said that she ran the computer model about seven times.
She went to other colleagues.
She said, I cannot believe what the computer model is showing me for the end of this century from only the data that we have now.
And it was that the entire rainforest in northeastern Brazil would be gone.
And the reason, changing wind patterns.
It's now October 2014.
Howard, scientists are being able now to measure the changing wind bands.
They are all saying that if the current situation continues, there won't be a Brazilian rainforest at the end of this century, and that is taking out one of the biggest lungs of the earth, and what would the consequence be?
This is absolutely real climate change.
And to deny it is to put your head in the sand and allow the hurricanes to come.
That's why we have to be concentrating on at least moving toward something else besides our complete and total dependence on fossil fuels.
And China, right now, China is without doubt, it's showing us.
The skies there in all of the cities.
Even the people wearing masks, it isn't doing very much good because the pollution is so thick.
You know, in China, in places like Shanghai, isn't it?
They've had some terrifying days this year.
That's right.
So this is one big problem, but it is now not the only problem.
And my attitude has always been, you don't back away from problems.
You try to understand what the facts are and the truth so you can try to deal in an intelligent way.
And right now, what is happening with Ebola?
It falls into the category of what some people in the United States are calling the October surprise, but it's been festering through the entire year of 2014.
The first major case that kept spreading came in March.
And in fact, this 2014 Ebola outbreak is the biggest since, and it's called a filo virus, F-I-L-O, and I'll talk to you a little bit more about that in a minute.
But this is the biggest filovirus, Ebola virus outbreak, since its first emergence in 1976.
And more people have died this year of 2014 than in all of the previous Ebola outbreaks combined.
Am I right, Linda?
I don't know whether this number is right, but I found it somewhere yesterday that the total so far of victims to Ebola in this outbreak is about 5,000 and rising.
Is that right?
It's 4,000.
As of October 14th, World Health Organization and CDC numbers, 4,555 cases official in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria.
And now you can add the United States in the death toll number.
And that is what I was giving to you, the 4,555 are the cases of death out of what is estimated to be a total number of cases that are now about 9,300.
So the current death toll rate, which WHO earlier this year was reporting at 50%, they have now revised it up to 71%.
And some doctors are saying, depending upon the region in Africa, that it has gone as high as 90%, which is, that's typical also of past Ebola outbreaks in some areas.
But what is different, this has gone beyond Africa.
This is Spain has had three cases.
France may have one.
The United States has one death and the two nurses that are now in isolation in two different hospitals.
And that what we have seen in just two weeks is that we are used to thinking in terms of a patient in a hospital that could be quarantined in a room.
And we have never been made to think about the nurses, the doctors, and the people that are keeping that patient alive until now.
And even the head of the CDC, Dr. Friedman, and others have said that what was underestimated, what was not prepared for, what every nation needs now to be prepared for, are constant drills that would happen maybe weekly where nurses and doctors who might end up with an Ebola patient,
that they would have to keep going through these drills about how to put on and take off the, well, what they referring to as the protective or radiation type garb.
And this morning, on Meet the Press and some of the news programs here, they had on Dr. Fauci from the National Institutes of Health explaining that what they are now going to do, they're going to start trying to get to every hospital.
There's over 6,000 hospitals in the United States, and they're going to try to start doing drills in which the neck is definitely covered, that the garments will be complete from head to toe.
There will be no skin exposure as there was in the original that would allow the neck to be exposed because, Howard, this is very important.
It was assumed by doctors that this Ebola virus could not be transmitted through the air, and therefore, if you had neck exposed or some other, that you were not going to get it that way.
But now they know that if there is a sneeze or a cough, mucus will translate through the air.
It could go on skin, and the nurse who contracted her case of Ebola from Mr. Duncan at the Western Presbyterian Hospital in Texas that has made so many errors,
that she speculated, this came from a speculation from her, that maybe when she was taking off the garb that she thought was protecting her, that the glove, the little finger of the glove, may have touched, just grazed the skin on her face.
And I took that question to a very, very good doctor at Baylor here in the United States, Dr. Geisbert.
He received a $26 million grant this year to try to come up with a vaccine based on the work that he's been doing on the Ebola filovirus.
And I said, how is it possible that if it can't be transmitted by air and it needs to be in body fluids, how could just the brushing of a latex glove that had touched Mr. Duncan's body or something and just touched the nurse's face?
And he said, we don't have an answer to that.
It is puzzling unless this is the difference in this new Ebola strain.
This is coming from Dr. Geisbert.
If this particular strain of Ebola is able to replicate itself as an RNA, filovirus, replicate more rapidly with more quantity than has ever been seen in an outbreak before,
then it means the sheer volume of the RNA in the cells that are programmed by the Ebola programming of the RNA, that the volume itself on the end of a glove that could touch skin could simply be volume is causing these infections.
Well, when you think of that and you say, well, how in the world does this work?
We know that in HIV, that's a retrovirus, that the HIV virus, the retrovirus, is very stealthy.
It's sort of like a hacker in a computer system.
And HIV retrovirus, which is also working through RNA, it kind of gets into the cell and reprograms the DNA through the RNA that is at the heart of the HIV retrovirus.
But when you jump to the Ebola philovirus, F-I-L-O-V-I-R-U-S, it's also working through RNA, similar to, in a way, what the retrovirus starts out with, but this is the difference.
The HIV virus takes over inside of cells by being able to stealthily reprogram the DNA.
But the Ebola virus, which starts out, it is an RNA virus, it gets into the cell and it's sort of like a pirate taking over a ship at sea.
The RNA of Ebola attacks the monocytes and the macrophages, usually first.
And these are cells that are traveling around the body that are looking for invaders.
And the RNA in this Ebola uses those cells, takes over, like a pirate, what's called the translating apparatus.
Normally, the DNA is using RNA to take its messages.
The DNA goes to the RNA and sends messages about how to make proteins.
But instead, in Ebola, these RNA viruses come in, they take over these particular monocytes and macrophages, and suddenly the cell is literally filled with RNA Ebola messages.
And what happens?
There is a complete interference with a collapse of the blood clotting ability of the body.
That's why the organs and the internal structures of the body begin to bleed because all of these replicating RNA Ebola viruses are taking and interfering with the blood clotting.
And then it's my understanding from Dr. Geisbert, they're not really sure, but they think that it also can swing the other way, the interference.
It may be the human body is trying to counteract the interference with the blood clotting mechanism that the Ebola RNA viruses are doing so effectively.
And the body swings overclotting.
And if you overclot, no blood will go through The veins and the arteries.
There is a complete collapse of the blood vessel system, and ultimately that means the heart has nothing to pump.
And the cause of death in many Ebola situations is called hypotension.
The heart literally has no blood to pump and it stops.
Okay, now, am I right in saying from your researches, Linda, you can tell me that reports over here that Ebola mutates every single time somebody gets it.
Is that correct?
No, no, no, no, no.
In fact, this is one of the big mysteries in talking with Dr. Geisbert at Baylor.
When they had isolates of the first Ebola outbreak from 76, and with each outbreak, there have been three or four sort of major ones, mostly in Africa, well, only in Africa up until now.
And when they would compare the isolates of the virus, the filovirus of Ebola from 76 to 86 to 96 to 2006, he said, what amazes us is how little change there is, even though this is an RNA virus that cannot proofread its instructions.
The HIV retrovirus can proofread its instructions going into the DNA.
The Ebola cannot.
What the big difference is, is the quantity of these RNA viruses that are suddenly pouring into a cell and shutting down things like clotting.
Now, exactly the question is, well, how could something that some doctors, even in the 80s, said that the Ebola filovirus is potentially vulnerable to being mutable a million times more than a retrovirus?
So why wouldn't it?
Well, I've talked about this with a couple of doctors.
Nobody has an answer, Howard, to these questions.
But this is an interesting speculation.
But that's the crux of it, then, isn't it, Linda?
Why is this thing that is supposedly from what you've just said eminently defeatable?
Why is it giving us such a big headache now?
Why is it starting to get out of hand, as some people are claiming?
Because this one, this particular virus, may have replicated more RNA viruses faster in greater volume than they had seen ever before.
And that the answer to the, or the speculation to the question of why wouldn't it change constantly from 1976 to 2006, it may be in this regard.
Ebola has been self-limiting in the fact that it kills its victims so quickly.
And when a virus kills its victims so quickly, it is self-regulating.
The source of its ability to spread, this strange thing that is not a living thing but can do all this damage.
It might go through 300 people in a village and kill them all, and then the village would burn them or bury them, and that would be the end of that outbreak.
And because it all happens so fast, say in a modern urban community like ours.
Because it moves so fast, then somebody who has Ebola would not be able to come into contact with as many people.
It's simple arithmetic.
That's right.
This one has been spreading first in Western Africa because the families were handling the bodies as part of their burying ritual.
There was a ritual of the sociology.
And in handling the bodies, they were spreading the Ebola virus.
Dr. Geisbert said that it is possible that this is a self-constraining RNA virus in this regard, that it may have produced a million different Ebola viruses between 1976 and 2006,
but none of those mutations had the impact or had the ability to replicate as the one that we know as this particular filovirus, and that in nature, it is the successful model that keeps on going.
So we now, after from 76 to 2014, we've got a model in an RNA replicating virus that has been successful every single time it has emerged, and then it has gone back to another mystery.
Where does the Ebola virus hang out in between outbreaks?
Nobody knows.
It is another speculation that it might be bats that appears to be the current biggest medical speculation, but no one knows that for certain.
And the fact of the matter is that, look, you're talking, you're laying out information here that you have gleaned.
Problem is that the politicians and the powers that be in the media have not really leveled with people, haven't taken an interest, haven't explained things to people.
What has that done?
Well, it's the thing that peeves me somewhat.
It's provided fuel for conspiracy theorists and people who have their own agendas to say Ebola has been enhanced, Ebola's been reintroduced.
In America, there are claims that the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, hasn't been on the case.
Claims that people who could have been stopped from getting into the United States and might have Ebola have found it easy to get into the United States because of so-called open borders.
The problem is, it seems to me that the conspiracy theorists now have the upper hand.
They are the people who are being listened to, and the vacuum is in government and is in mainstream media.
We need information.
Yeah, it's complicated.
And the people who run for office are not people interested in understanding the difference between a filovirus, a retrovirus, a normal virus.
They really don't care.
They just want their titles in their offices, and they just want everything to work.
When things break down, they then look for some kind of a scapegoat.
And unfortunately, today, as you and I know so well, the web is misused and abused by all kinds of factions.
And that this whole idea of a conspiracy using the Ebola virus, I personally think is nonsense.
It is part of the world that we're living in, that there can be things like HIV, which is a retrovirus working through RNA to DNA, that there are things like filoviruses working through RNA, but simply replicating in volumes in ways that can literally interfere with the clotting of a blood system.
And once you do that, Howard, once anything can interfere with the clotting mechanism of blood going through veins and arteries, you are messing with blood pressure.
When you mess with blood pressure, death is not far away unless the blood pressure can be rebalanced.
This is an organism that can interfere, and that's why so many people die when it is in their cells.
Would this be a major problem if there had not been airplanes flying from Western Europe?
That's the question that so many political people are dancing around.
I understand, I really do, the arguments that are made by the health people who want to be able to fly back and forth on fast and rapid airplanes in order to stop the Ebola outbreaks in Western Africa, and I think the analogy is true, you have to go where the fire is, not where the embers are coming down in the ground.
We, you, England, France, Spain, and the United States, are like the embers coming from the fire in West Africa, with the airplanes being the mode of transmission.
And I understand the people who say, shut the borders down, do what has happened in some of the European airlines.
They are refusing flights from Western Africa until the Ebola is stamped out in this current round there.
So I think that I lean toward temporary closure.
Don't have airplanes coming in now.
Do charter flights for all the medical people in the supplies that need to go to Western Africa.
Make it a temporary ban.
Try to stamp out the Ebola virus as quickly as possible there.
Because once that is done, then the rest of the world can breathe a sigh of relief.
So, okay, let's be very clear about this.
What you think we need to do right now is to shut it down, turn off the tap, which has happened before because of the speed of this thing.
Okay, we're dealing with something slightly different here.
But that's the reason that Ebola goes away.
Now, in the period, if we're able to do that by taking measures like that, and I'm still waiting to hear that sort of stuff from politicians, but say we're able to do that, which looks highly likely, we then have some breathing space in which science must develop a vaccine.
That's right.
And Dr. Geisbert is working with colleagues.
They got a $26 million grant because all these different doctors and these efforts to come up with vaccines, the ZMAP being the first one that we heard about with Mr. Duncan, but they ran out of it immediately and they apparently did not have any way to ramp up the production of a lot of ZMAP.
And they don't even know if that was the answer.
It may have been more that the one doctor that had survived Ebola, that his antibodies, he did have blood that could go in to the female health worker.
And maybe that's what helped her the most.
Nobody knows.
But right now, there are at least, as far as I know, at least two different approaches to coming up with an Ebola vaccine.
And it's being ramped up by money and science because now it has been writ large in front of all of us.
This particular filovirus and behind it is the Marburg virus.
It's just as dangerous as Ebola.
And there have been all kinds of doctors for 20 or 30 years who have said, oh my God, if Marburg and Ebola got into air transmission, this would be the pandemic that everybody has warned about.
And so far as I know, there's no evidence that it has been transmissible by air.
But what about the people who go on the radio, Blinda, in your country?
What about certain people who go on the radio in your country and say that Ebola is airborne or it's becoming airborne?
But let me just finish this one thought because it's so important to give people something to hang on to.
If it is not air transportable at this point anywhere on the planet, and if they can ramp up these vaccines, perhaps these two approaches, the vaccine would then be able more rapidly to help Western Africa and Africa where Ebola has emerged since 1976 to have something that they could stop it in its tracks every single time this appears.
That's what we need.
And then you tackle it at source.
And, you know, I just want to chuck in my two pennies.
I think these people who go on the radio in America, and I'm not sure whether they're doing it for entertainment purposes or whether they think that it's really something serious, but they're saying that it's airborne and it's a conspiracy and all the rest of it.
I just think that's irresponsible.
I don't think that wouldn't be allowed in my country.
I'm very, very surprised that there are people who are saying that under the guise of free speech there.
I don't think that's helping.
It's not true.
It's not helping.
And it's not true as far as I know from talking with a bunch of medical people.
And Dr. Geisbert, who is one of the Ebola experts, he's the first to say we don't know.
Dr. Michael Oosterholm, when I say I don't know, meaning they don't know if it could, but there is no evidence that it is now.
And Dr. Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota did a huge op-ed in the New York Times in September, and he was raising the question as somebody with a tremendously vast experience in medicine on a lot of these fronts.
He was raising the question.
But people misinterpreted.
He was raising the question that all hospitals and medical people need to be prepared.
They have to start preparing themselves now.
You can't do it if it goes airborne.
You've got to take this seriously and say, we can stop such a horrendous pandemic if all of the medical centers in the West say, what would we do?
How do we prepare if something like Ebola or Marburg went air transport?
Not that it is.
There's no evidence that it is now, but it could change.
That's the way this whole world needs to be looking at this entire epidemic and saying, we have got to change.
We've got to upgrade how we would be handling something like Ebola, whether it's fluid or air.
And I think we need to look, and I want to move on because we've only got about 15, 20 minutes left, Linda, but we've got to look at the way that we deal with health crises.
Now, Ebola, I remember reporting on in London.
There was an outbreak in Africa in 1995, 1994, and it was just something that we reported because it was something that happened a long, long way away.
We put it in the news, and then it just sort of went away.
Maybe this needs to be a wake-up call now so that we tackle problems like this on a global basis.
Because if we don't, they will come back and bite us on the bottom in years to come.
And Howard, that's exactly where we began this program, that we are on a planet where the transitions now are global.
They are affecting everyone globally.
And whether you're in China or England or the United States, what we are doing at local levels is impacting people around the world.
That is the new state of this planet going forward in the rest of this century.
Let's talk also to the end of this program now, Linda, if we may, about mass extinctions.
This is something that I haven't done a lot of research about, so I want you to lead me in this one.
Well, I'll tell you, when I did an interview with the, he's the chief scientist for the National Audubon Society in Washington, D.C., and I did this at my news website, earthfiles.com, and I did it for Coast to Coast AM radio.
We reach probably about, I think it's fair to say, we reach about 4 million people in a week of a broadcast.
And one of my half hours at the end of September came when the National Ottoman Society put out a release that startled everyone because it said 314 North American bird species out of 566 studied for several years face extinction this century because
climate is changing faster than than the birds can adapt.
I remember reading that in a news press release that came to me from the Ottoman Society and thinking, my God.
Now I did this interview with the chief scientist at the National Ottoman Society and he gave me a story to bring it all into perspective.
His name is Gary Langham.
He's vice president and chief scientist and he said that in the year 2014, so we're talking about this year alone, first on the eastern, northeastern corner of North America,
that would go up also into Newfoundland on the Canadian side, that the Atlantic puffins that for centuries and centuries have been catching fish at the summer period for their new chicks, they were going out into the water and the Audubon Society set up videotape cameras to monitor this and they have it on camera for proof.
The puffins are great fishermen, and they would go up into the air, and they would go down into the water like they always have, and all of the fish that they used to have to feed their young were not there, and the puffin adults were getting whatever was there and bringing it back to their chicks, and the Audubon Society was monitoring and videotaping that none of the fish that the adults were putting down into the mouths and the
the throats of their chicks could fit.
All of the fish, the smallest fish that the puffin were trying to bring back to their chicks were still too big for the mouths and the throats of the chicks.
And Howard, there was a 100% die-off of the Atlantic puffin chicks in the Northeast this year.
The scientists couldn't believe it.
Now jump to California.
The same thing happened there with the raptors.
They had monitors out because of the drought.
They were very concerned about what the food would be in a fourth year now cycle of drought in California.
And what they found there is that the raptors, first they were bringing things to the chicks that did hatch and they didn't fit and those chicks were dying, but then they saw something worse.
It was as if the whole raptor area, we're talking about the eagles, the hawks, and so forth, the raptors, all of a sudden in 2014 for the first time, they weren't even laying eggs.
They've not seen this before.
It was as if the raptors knew that they didn't have the food in the drought that would fit into the chicks if they had eggs.
So now, how does this translate into what is coming?
Well, the Ottoman Society put together a beautiful website.
You can go to my news website to get there very easily because I just have a hot link that goes right to all of this.
But when they started taking everything that they have been observing, this has just been hard, forensic, scientific data about what is happening to the cycle of life in all of these birds.
And they looked at something as classic and important in the United States as the bald eagle.
And when they projected what is happening to the raptors, and the fact that the raptors are now not even laying eggs, this is a fact from the Ottoman Society in this very in-depth report this year.
By 2080, we're at the end of 2014.
By 2080, there might not be a bald eagle left in North America.
Now, when you are struck with the fact that if just the statistical data of what I've just told you, that 2015 comes, the Atlantic toughins still don't have any food that'll go down their chicks' throats,
the raptors in California and other parts of the United States, they don't have food that will fit, if there continue to be 100% die-offs of the new chicks that would replace the parents that are struggling to try to have another generation, then these numbers, not a single bald eagle by 2080 begin to come into focus.
We can't believe it as humans.
We cannot believe that the Baltimore Oriole on the East Coast, this gorgeous colored bird, would be gone under some estimates by 2050.
That the bald eagle, the symbol of the nation, and when you go down this list at the National Audubon Society website and you read and you look at their maps and you, in my case, I had the opportunity to talk to their chief scientist.
They want to try to convince the human population that as the birds don't have food for their chicks, this is going to affect every human everywhere.
And that we are right now, unless something drastically changes, these paths of what they're calling the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth is being caused by starting in 1850 with the Industrial Revolution, the contribution of increasing amounts of carbon dioxide, and now methane, methane is going into the atmosphere at galloping rates.
And as the blanket keeps getting thicker around the Earth, NOAA two weeks ago released a news headline.
The first, no, sorry, the last six months, no, let me say it correctly.
It's January through June.
The first six months of 2014 around the entire planet were the warmest ever on record.
These are temperature.
This is hard data.
If the warming continues, not all life will die out.
Some life, especially things like fungi and roaches and grasshoppers and life, there will be life that will flourish in higher temperatures.
Mosquitoes.
When it comes to the beautiful, wonderful nature of Baltimore Orioles and eagles and trees, trees are not going to be able to run to their preferred temperature range.
The trees are dying out in Montana right now, up in the mountains at huge rates because of the temperature is warmer.
This means, Howard, we are on a planet.
The planet will be here.
There will be life here.
But it will not be the life that we knew in the last century if things continue the way they are.
Now assuming this is the case, and there is strong evidence that this is the case, and a lot of people are saying that it's not really filtering through to the mass population yet.
It's probably too late to do anything about it, isn't it?
I just don't want to go there.
I guess it's my own denial.
I keep praying that as people are getting in touch with me and thanking me for trying at least to report facts, that everybody on the honeybee, I had hundreds and hundreds of people saying, Linda, what do I do?
What can I do to help save the bees?
Another thousand people were emailing, what can I do to help save the monarch butterflies?
And people started planting milkweed everywhere in the United States.
I was getting photographs by the bunch all the time.
Linda, look, look at the monarchs that are coming onto my milkweed.
And what happened?
This fall, where everybody, every scientist a year ago, when I was doing all of those reports about the die-off of the monarchs and the end of the migration in Mexico, and all of these humans responded, which I think had a lot to do with what happened, they finally had an uptick, an uptick.
I'm not saying anything solved.
I'm saying they had an uptick in the migration numbers of monarchs to Mexico.
They did have monarchs in Mexico, and that migration is still going.
This is what always gives me hope.
It is the pressure of fact.
It is knowledge that strengthens us against policies of denial and lies by governments and 1% power greed that think that all of us in the 99% can always be controlled, we can always be lied to, the planet can be manipulated for their gain.
By God, if there is one thing about the transition that is happening around us, I think it is that the power greed 1% can't get away with so many lies anymore.
The rest of us are waking up.
It affects us in every niche of the planet.
And that may, ironically, this Howard may be what changes the 21st century, what changes the next 90 years.
Humans are starting to stand up and say, you lie, government.
We need facts.
And if you don't give us facts, we're going to start doing things on our local levels that will help from the monarch butterfly to us humans survive.
Positive message, and we haven't even begun to talk about political change, which is happening at a pace certainly in my country.
Linda Moulton Howe, we've got to do this again.
We always do, and we always will.
Your website, earthfiles.com, yep?
Yes, and thank you, Howard.
I really enjoy being able to talk with you about these important issues.
And I am, you know, very, very grateful to you, Linda, for allowing me to bring you and your message to people this side of the pond, which we've now been doing, you and I, for about in different places for about 15 years or so.
So, Linda, thank you.
Thank you for the space, and God bless you and everybody on this planet and every creature.
Well, we're right out of time.
Linda Moulton Howe, always fascinating in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
And thank you also to Heather Cooper, the astronomer, talking about Comet Siding Spring, which will have passed probably by Mars by the time you hear this show.
Thank you very much for your continuing support.
Please keep your emails and your guest suggestions coming.
Go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can do that really easily.
And also, if you'd like to make a donation, you can do that on the website as well.
Follow the link for that.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster in Liverpool at Creative Hotspot for his continuing hard work on the show.
Roger Sanders in California, thank you.
Martin, thank you for the theme tune.
Above all, thank you to you for keeping the faith with the unexplained.
More great shows coming soon.
Until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
Please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
Take care.
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