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Nov. 24, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:07:47
Edition 183 - Dr. David Clarke

Dr David Clarke - British Journalism Lecturer and acclaimed investigator of paranormality...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very, very much for the hundreds of emails I've had recently.
I'm going through all of them and please know that if I don't reply to you personally or I don't mention you on the show, I am seeing your email and I am taking on board your guest suggestions and the points you make about the show.
I'm going to get into some of those and do a few shout-outs coming very soon.
Time is limited.
We've got a good guest this time.
So thank you very much.
First off, to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, the man who maintains the website and the man in charge of our poll.
If you haven't taken part in the poll, please do.
It's on the homepage of the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
The information that you provide to us is vital for our future.
If you want to leave a donation, you can do that too at the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
And that's also the place to go if you want to send me a message.
There's a link there to do that.
So, having said that, let's do some shout-outs.
First off, Nigel got stuck into the Robert David Steele debate that is ongoing, does not stop.
He says he thought Robert David Steele's main point was just to put the UK down.
Well, I'm going to listen to the show again, Nigel, and see if I hear that about it too.
Barry in Battle Creek, Michigan thought that I was defending the establishment in that show.
Barry's a fan of this show, but I'm not sure, Barry, whether I was defending the establishment.
It's just not something I would do, but I'm going to listen to it again.
Jeff says of Robert David Steele, he's arrogant, his rhetoric is cheap.
Eli Morland says, loved Robert David Steele.
Mon in Ontario also loved that show.
Michael Hayes liked the show, but didn't think that Robert David Steele really gets the concept of constructive criticism.
Dot, Dorothy, thought Robert David Steele was brave to come out and say the things he's saying.
Stephen Walker, on a different subject, wants to know if I'm on Facebook or Twitter yet.
There's an unofficial Facebook page, Stephen.
I haven't seen it yet.
But we are going to do our own.
Phil Samuel, keep doing the show, he says.
Marty, enjoyed the Roger Stone interview about Richard Nixon.
Rob, interesting thoughts on open source.
Jesus Alvarez, thank you for your email.
Karen Bozell, thank you.
Ken in Boston, hello and thanks for your email.
Jill Bedford in California.
Suggesting Mike Dooley.
Thank you.
Jill.
Alexandra in New Zealand.
Good to hear from you.
Troy in Worthing on the south coast of the UK.
Wants me to do the Paul McCartney conspiracy that we mentioned on one show, the John Lennon prophecy show way, way back, about four years or so ago.
This is the idea that Paul McCartney actually died and was replaced by somebody else.
A conspiracy, if ever I heard one.
US Army veteran Travis in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Thank you very much for your kind email.
Tim in Cambridge, nice email.
Lee Smith, thank you for yours.
Chris in Winnipeg, thank you for yours.
Joe wants me to get Travis Walton on here, who was often on the Art Bell show, of course.
Don in Vancouver, hello.
Rachel Rhodes, a Brits living in Bel Air, Maryland.
Good to hear from you, Rachel.
Scott enters the debate about me interrupting guests and says I need to interrupt guests for two reasons.
One, to stop them from rambling on.
Two, to keep the subjects changing because not everybody will agree on every subject and you need to keep the interview fresh.
He says, please carry on with your show.
Thank you, Scott.
And a profound email from Claire to end, I think, Claire says, and these are interesting words.
She says, every day, we see too many people focused on their smartphone, their brains being entrained by God only knows what, to do God only knows what.
In regard to what Mr. Steele had to say, I just can't see the still physically viable people, the young people, being able to think past their think pads in order to create a real world.
I think there's a very important point there.
Thank you, Claire.
And it's one that troubles me greatly.
I love technology.
We're talking because of technology.
But I think so many people are enslaved to their technology to the point where they don't live a real life and don't participate.
And I think in the future, what do you think?
That is going to give us one big problem in this world, if that hasn't started already.
And that is my fear for this world.
Okay, let's get on now.
Our guest this time, a British guy, senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, got a PhD in folklore and has loved since he was a boy investigating folklore and the supernatural.
He had quite an acclaimed book, the UFO Files, out a few years ago about the release of the documentation from Britain's National Archives, the Ministry of Defence papers, about UFO sightings.
But this man has investigated many things and I thought he would be a very good guest to have on this show after I heard him on BBC National Radio recently.
So let's get him on now in the north of England on this chilly November day.
David Clark, thank you very much for coming on this show, David.
Thank you for inviting me.
Now, Dave, this is a strange position to be in.
And you and I are both in the UK and both in the same position because we come from straight, hard-nosed journalism, in-your-face kind of stuff.
And yet here we are in our part-time talking about the paranormal, the unexplained, the strange, and the weird.
What is it about you that made you want to go there?
That's a very good question.
I'm sure I can answer it.
Other than the fact that I just absorbed it from a very early age.
You know, one of my first memories, you know, sort of of watching TV programmes like Space 1999, which is now a cult hit, reading newspaper stories about things to do with the Bermuda Triangle and Flight 19, going to see Steven Spielberg's close encounters of the third kind, buying the unexplained part work that was hugely popular in the 1980s.
For our friends in America, which makes up a lot of the audience here, a part work, I think probably you got that phrase there, but it's basically a weekly magazine.
It builds up into something you can put in.
If you want to spend the money, you could buy the binder and put them all together, couldn't you?
Yeah, that's right.
I don't think they publish them very, I think there are a few of those types of things you can still buy, but that was sort of like a phenomenon of the 80s and 90s.
I think we got me interested in the subject.
Well, I think one of the things that we do share, and I think it goes for anybody of our sort of generation, is that we had those Gerry Anderson shows, like you mentioned, Space 1999 and the puppet shows that preceded them: your Captain Scarletts and Joan 90s, and all the rest of it.
Now, I interviewed Jamie Anderson on the BBC a few weeks back, and Jamie is Jerry Anderson's son.
Jerry Anderson died, I think it was earlier this year.
Yeah, very recently, and a big, big loss.
But his son, Jamie, is now hoping to go back into puppet shows of that kind.
And he's got a concept, and they're going to do it.
They're raising money for it now.
Excellent.
And they're not going to be puppets with strings.
They're going to be electronically controlled for the new era.
But very, very exciting stuff.
And to get to the point, really, here, which I'm going all the way around at the moment, sorry about that.
But the point is those shows fired in us the willingness to look beyond what we see.
Yes.
Yeah.
And also with me, it got me interested in journalism.
You know, how I ended up as a journalist was partly as a result of being interested in all this material because I was reading about these fantastic stories and things that are supposed to have happened to people.
And it made me want to go and talk to those people and write about it.
So that, in a roundabout way, got me interested in sort of learning how to interview people, doing shorthand, and eventually ended up working for a newspaper.
What's your shorthand speed there, Dave?
Well, it was 100 words per minute.
Oh, me too.
Are you Pittman or T-Line?
Which one?
T-Line.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
You see, there were two.
I'm anywhere near that now.
No, me neither.
I probably do about 30 words a minute.
I still use it, you know.
If I'm sitting there doing a radio interview and I don't want the person in front of me to see the point, the little aid memoir that I'm writing down, the little guide for my memory that I'm writing down, I will do it in shorthand.
Yep.
This man does not know what he is talking about, which you can write in shorthand in about a quarter of the time, and you know what it is.
I'll come unstuck the day that the other person on the other side of the desk also reads shorthand, won't I?
That'll be the problem.
I'll tell you one of the other shows that I didn't realize until quite recently I'd absorbed a lot of these cultural references from in Doctor Who.
I'm sure American listeners will be familiar with Doctor Who.
But I read a piece in Fortian Times, I think it was a couple of months ago, and it was a guy that was actually looking at all the Fortian references and all the sort of paranormal references that there were in individual Doctor Who episodes during the 1970s and 1980s.
And I was amazed.
I mean, there's things about the Loch Ness Monster with the terror of the Zygons.
There was all kinds of ancient astronaut references, you know, the one with the Sphinxes and the mummies that were supposed to have come from outer space and spiders from Mars and all kinds of things and all related to things that were supposedly going on in reality, you know, like Bermuda Triangle, the Marie-Celeste, all those sorts of things I was reading about in paperback books at the time.
It's very strange.
I watched the last episode of the current series of Doctor Who, which is with Peter Capoldi, very advanced, very, very good, very well acted, amazing special effects, of course, a great export earner for Britain.
And then last night, the night after I'd seen that final episode of the current series, I watched on one of the digital channels here, a 1966 episode starring Patrick Troughton.
Oh, yeah.
And you know, I thought this is going to bear no relation to what I saw on the recent episode.
The strange thing was, apart from the fact that the sets were a bit rickety, they were very well acted, but you could trace the lineage.
Both of the shows featured the Cybermen, and you could trace the lineage of ideas back to 1966, which is extraordinary because we're talking about half a century almost.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that was before I was born.
Only just.
My parents told me about it, Dave.
But, you know, amazing to have that background.
And the journalism thing, I think, will always stand you in good stead.
I didn't want to be a journalist.
I wanted to be a disc jockey playing records on the radio.
And the first place that I worked in Liverpool, Radio City, said to me, come on now, you've been to a comprehensive school, got yourself a couple of A-levels.
A smart lad like you doesn't want to be playing records on the radio.
And I thought, yes, I do.
And they sent me away to train as a journalist.
And I'm eternally grateful to them.
And I told the boss of the radio station now that I don't know what I'd have done without that training because it stood me in good stead for everything that I do, from writing a letter to making a phone call to everything that I do in my life.
Goes back to me working in a tough newsroom in Liverpool and having been schooled in writing by guys at University College Cardiff, where I trained to be a journalist, who'd been on Fleet Street newspapers.
Yeah, well, very much the same with me as well.
And that has framed much of how I write about the subjects that I write about.
What I find really difficult at the moment is that people just rely so much upon second, third, fourth, fifth hand stories recycled on the internet.
And nobody seems to sort of do any original research.
You know, as me as a journalist, I just, somebody tells me something, I just want to go and find the person who supposedly saw whatever it was that they saw or had the experience of what they experienced or get, if they're dead, find the, you know, the, if there is any, documentary evidence from the time that it happened.
Not what somebody said years later or 30 years afterwards, they said something about this or they remembered this or they'd spoken to somebody who said that.
There's so much of this stuff in the paranormal sort of world that is just, it's not reliable.
It's urban legend, a lot of it.
A few of the people that I've spoken to is a guy called David Paul Lidis who investigates missing people and there's a guy here in the UK who writes books about UFOs that are copiously written and staggeringly researched, hundreds of pages each of them.
I know you mean the guy from Birmingham is a police detective, yeah, ex-police detective.
Amazing research this guy does.
He has original documents in each of the books and he goes back to source whenever he can.
Now, let me tell you, it's something that I've banged on about for a long time here on this show.
A lot of people writing books these days are just people who go back to secondary sources and they're not really reflecting what actually happened.
They are reflecting the views of somebody else at some other time on Something that once happened.
And I don't think that's particularly valid.
It's not, no.
And also, they're overlaying it with what they want to believe happened.
And often, when you present them with what actually happened, or what the, if you go back to the original sources, what at the time that person said happened, they won't accept it.
It's like, no, no, no, no, this is the version that has come down to us.
And this is the one I want to believe.
And I am not going to accept any changes to that interpretation.
It's like on the subject of flying saucers, the very first sighting, the Kenneth Arnold sighting, which is now seen as canonical.
Along with the Roswell incident, it's that that kick-started the whole thing.
I'm pretty convinced that what Kenneth Arnold saw was a flight of pelicans.
I've read all the arguments.
There was somebody who posted a, I think it was some three or four or 500 page sort of examination of all the sort of all the technical and mathematical detail of where he was flying and what direction he was looking in and all this sort of thing.
And if you were to read the background of it, he actually said at the time when he landed that it resembled a flight of geese, what he saw.
But because he was a pilot and people think that pilots can't possibly be mistaken, you know, that they know what they're looking at, et cetera, et cetera.
People say, you know, he must have seen something completely extraordinary.
But if you look at how he described these objects, and they weren't flying saucers, they were sort of batwing-shaped objects that were sort of reflecting the light from the mountains up in Washington state on Mount Rainier.
And where was I going with this?
I was going to say, that he may have seen something quite ordinary under extraordinary circumstances.
And it's become this legend.
And people then started seeing flying saucers all over the world.
And again, this was created by the news media because he said right through his life that he didn't see flying saucers, that they were like flat plate-shaped objects or like batwing-shaped objects because some news editor got hold of it and it became flying saucers.
That got into the news.
And then people all around the world were seeing flying saucers and are still seeing them.
And that, to me, suggests that much of it is created by the media, much of what we think we see.
And yet, there's a fascinating interface between journalists and journalism in the media at the very birth of ufology, and that's at Roswell, where we get somebody on a military base authorizing the release of something that goes out to the local paper and the local radio station, and that's primary reporting right at the very beginning of it.
And they say that something extraterrestrial appears to have landed.
And then somebody from Washington comes down.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing the whole thing.
I'm really compressing it all.
And stamps on them from a great height.
And suddenly the story changes.
And hey, it becomes a weather balloon.
Well, in the new book I've just finished writing, which will be my last on UFOs, I've given a very similar story just to compare with the Roswell incident, one that happened in Scotland in 1962, which very few people know about.
And it was almost identical to the Roswell incident.
And you've got a Shepherd out on the Scottish Highlands, middle of nowhere, and he's out stalking or whatever they do in those parts of the world.
And he came across what looked like a crashed spaceship on the Moors up in Scotland.
And he went down into the local police station and said, I've found something.
I think it's a Russian Sputnik.
And the reaction he got was, ah, you know, the quality of the whiskey in this part of the highlands is not all that good, that sort of thing.
And it took them some time to get up there.
And they sent the REF mountain rescue team from Kid Lost to have a look at this thing.
And they came across this wreckage.
And they said, yeah, it's definitely some kind of spaceship.
And they removed it from the moor and sent it off to London.
It was never seen again.
And the Shepherd was told not to talk about it.
The mountain rescue team were told not to tell anybody about what they'd seen.
And they even had to remove any reference to this discovery from their rescue logbook.
Now, what's that if that's not the Roswell incident?
And yeah, it wasn't a spaceship, what they found.
They thought it was a spaceship simply because of the fact it was 1962.
And if something was crashing from outer space, what did people think it was?
A Russian Sputnik.
And that's what they thought that they'd found.
And it's only when you actually look at the archive documents now that are available at Kew, we find out that what they actually found was the gondola that was attached to an absolutely enormous American spy balloon that they were releasing dozens of these from a base on the east coast of Scotland.
And the idea was that they would go up into the upper atmosphere, they'd drift over the Soviet Union, and the cameras in this gondola would take photographs of nuclear test sites and missile sites.
And the balloon then would release the gondola over the Pacific, and the American Air Force would then retrieve it and see what was on the photographs.
But this is before we had the U-2 spy plane.
So nobody understood that kind of thing, or that anybody could have the wit to do that.
And of course, it was in somebody's interest.
It was completely covered by the official secret site.
Anything to do with this spy balloon program, anything to do with the U-2 was absolutely above top secret.
So that's why, you know, news of it and anybody talking about it was immediately cracked down on.
And like now, we're talking in 2015, but you go back to the 40s and the 50s, you know, people did as they were told.
And we were fighting the Cold War against the Russians.
Anything remotely military was covered by the Official Secrets Act.
And it was the same in America as well.
And very much in the Powers that Bees interest to have it believe that it was something strange, spooky, or extraterrestrial, rather than have people on the scent and starting to say, is this some kind of spy gizmo?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm sure exactly the same scenario happened with the Roswell incident.
And then this press release was then, you know, sort of stamped upon.
I just don't think, I don't see any big mystery about that at all.
If you are A journalist or a press officer, you'll know that, like that guy on the Roswell base, at the time that they found that material, it was literally a week or two weeks after Kenneth Arnold's sighting.
The newspapers were absolutely full all around the world, stories about flying saucers.
So, you know, anything that was found that was mysterious, you know, wreckage of any kind would have immediately got people thinking, ooh, is it one of those flying saucers?
And that is exactly what happened at Roswell.
How fascinating.
And if you're in command of that base, perhaps the first thing you will do is latch onto something that you've seen in the media recently, and that's flying saucers as the nearest and safest thing.
The only trouble is that if we're talking about Jesse Marcel and Jesse Marcel Jr. at that base, Jesse Marcel, of course, went to his grave knowing things.
Jesse Marcel Jr. says that he played with exotic material, strange metal, when he was a kid.
What explains that?
Could that just have been part of some secret process that the government didn't want us to know about and the exotic material was ours and not theirs?
Well, there's lots of things that could appear exotic in 1947 if you'd never seen them before.
you know there's all kinds of theories that this thing that they found was part of some experimental balloon programme the mogul balloon programme that used all kinds of exotic materials that people would not have seen in rural New Mexico and also you've got to compare what Marcel said to what the other
But if you look at the American Air Force report that they did on this in 1995, they interviewed a guy called Captain Sheridan Cavett, who was actually with Marcel when they went out to the ranch and examined this stuff.
And he tells a completely different story.
He says that the stuff that he found was quite obviously the remains of a weather balloon with one of these reflector things attached to it.
So you believe, Dave, that there's a powerful element in all of this of us wanting to believe that because we've seen movies where there is, in fact, I saw an old 1950s movie about a space person coming to Earth only last night that we want to kind of believe this stuff.
I want to believe it.
Yeah.
And, you know, people say seeing is believing.
I think it's the other way around.
I think believing is seeing.
And I think if you believe in something, then if you find something or you observe something, even something quite ordinary, if you believe that something extraordinary is here and is happening, you will interpret the ordinary thing in an extraordinary way.
And there are hundreds of examples of this.
Whereas we've got no examples at all of real extraterrestrial objects that have crashed that we can go and point at in a museum and say, ah, that came from Alpha Centauri.
You know, so you've got to go with what we know and what we've got evidence of.
And with Jesse Marcel, it's quite obvious that he was one of the few people back in 1947 who believed in alien contact and alien beings.
Because there's an account of the, you know, when they found the wreckage and they sent it to Fort Worth and it was identified as a weather balloon by a meteorologist called Irving Bell.
And if you read his account, he said that as they've got all this stuff laid out on the floor and he was saying it's a weather balloon.
And he said that Marcel was looking at it and saying, oh, no, it's definitely not a weather balloon.
I think it's something from outer space.
So he was obviously far gone as far back as 1947.
And between 1947 and 1970, think of the amount of films about aliens that were on TV, that were released or on TV.
Think of the newspaper stories that Jesse Marcel will have read and absorbed.
So that when Stanton Friedman came and interviewed him in 1978, all that material, you can't help influence your memory of something that happened 30 years before.
Well, it depends on which way you look at it, doesn't it?
If you put the mirror up to all of that, then you either have phenomena reflected by the media and films or the phenomena reflecting the other way around, if you see what I'm saying.
It's either who plants the idea where first?
And that's the academic debate, isn't it?
It is.
Yeah, I know people will not accept anything that I'm saying.
They'll say, you know, all this popular culture stuff all came later and that these real things happened and that we've made films and TV programmes about it.
I don't accept that for one minute.
I am very firmly on the on the I'm coming completely off the fence here and I think all these things all come from the human imagination.
They come from film, they come from popular culture, they come from books, they come from science fiction and the idea that in 1947 that there were no cultural influences, that Kenneth Arnold was a complete virgin, that he'd never seen anything about fantastic flying machines or anything of that kind when he saw his whatever they were in 1947 is complete nonsense.
You only have to go back to the 1920s and all those pulp science fiction films, pulp science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories, for instance, were full of images of fantastic flying machines, cigar-shaped ones, saucer-shaped ones, full of images of people being abducted by aliens, being examined on tables by aliens, etc, etc.
People were absorbing that back in the 1920s, even before the 1920s.
H.G. Wells was writing about War of the Worlds, the man of the year million.
What will we look like in a million years from now?
But what about, Dave, what about Betty and Barney Hill, the most famous abduction case, the first, the granddaddy of them all, where this couple were taken somewhere, they say, and they later drew a map that included stars that we didn't discover until a lot later.
How could they have known?
That's not the case, though.
If you look at the star map, that so-called star map has been completely demolished.
I can refer you to where it's been demolished, but you see, this is it.
You get people saying to you, ah, what about this?
What about that?
Because they've read something like the Betty and Barney Hill star map, and they've been completely convinced that that's evidential.
But the thing is, you've got to do your research, and you will find that that piece of evidence just simply does not stand up.
And the idea also that Betty and Barney Hill's story, again, came completely out of the blue and that their descriptions of aliens were something that had no cultural precedence is completely false.
Yeah, but the bottom line is they were not the kind of people to be susceptible to being swayed by books that they'd read or silly movies that they'd seen.
These were intelligent people, academic people.
Well, intelligent people are just as possible for an intelligent person to believe in weird stuff and to have bizarre experiences as anybody else.
But only by NBC.
So all I can tell you is that the accounts that I've read about them is that they were serious-minded people and they would not be motivated in that way, in any way consciously, that anybody could be aware of.
It's not conscious, though.
This is the thing.
A lot of these things are unconscious.
And Richard McNally, psychologist at Harvard University, who did a study of alien abductees.
He came up with a recipe for the type of person who is likely to become an alien abductee.
And Betty and Barney Hill tick every box in that recipe.
You know, yes, they were intelligent.
Yes, they were well-read, but they were easy to hypnotize.
They had a very sort of, particularly, Betty Hill was interested in a whole range of paranormal things.
And after that experience, she was seeing UFOs virtually every night.
You know, in the 1970s and 1980s, she almost had like a cult built up around herself.
What about the people who said more recently that they'd seen the Phoenix lights?
And that area is still apparently beset by phenomena of some kind.
Are they all deluded?
Are they all wrong?
I wouldn't use the word deluded.
People are just people.
And you see something unusual in the sky.
And it is unusual.
I'm not taking away from the fact that people have extraordinary experiences.
What I'm questioning is how those experiences are interpreted.
And if you see something or you have some experience that you don't understand, where do you go to interpret it?
You go to the internet, you go to the media, and you go to ufologists, and you go to almost like the people who act as the priests of this paranormal sort of belief system.
And they will tell you, ah, you saw a strange light in the sky.
It's flying saucers from outer space.
You had a strange experience.
You lost a period of time.
Ah, you've been abducted by aliens.
So, you know, go back in a time machine, three, four hundred years.
People will be telling you that you'd been taken away by witches in the middle of the night.
There's nothing different.
The people who have these experiences, it's not a matter of people being unintelligent or intelligent.
They are all people, ordinary people.
It doesn't matter whether you've got a degree or PhD or whatever, you're still capable of having some weird or unusual experience.
So there is a part of our brain, Dave, fundamental to all of us.
We have this desire innate to explain.
We're hardwired to explain the unexplained.
That which we cannot explain, we have to find an explanation for.
So if the only explanation we can find is maybe something that derives from something we read in a magazine or saw on a movie, that's the template we'll put over the circumstances that occurred to us.
That's where we'll go.
Absolutely.
Every single time.
Yeah.
And that's why.
Every single time.
Every single time, without exception.
You go back to the turn of the last century when people were seeing strange objects in the sky and lights in the sky.
They didn't say, oh, it's the Martians or it's the Flying Triangles or the reptilians.
They were saying it's the Germans.
They knew about the fact that the Germans were making Zeppelin airships.
So when they saw a searchlight playing on the race course in Scarborough or on the east coast, it's them Germans.
They've come over in the Zeppelins.
Glad you mentioned Scarborough, because as you know, there is a councillor in Whitby, not very far away from there on the Yorkshire coast.
It's in my book.
It's really, OK, well, I've interviewed him.
And he says...
Simon Parks, who says that he's had regular contact, very close and very personal contact with beings.
And he puts a very cogent case.
That man is remarkable to interview.
Why is he wrong?
Why is he wrong?
He's not wrong.
He actually believes that those things happen to him.
But the question you have to ask, we were talking about being a hard-nosed journalist earlier on.
Where is the independent evidence?
If he's been removed from his, he's got a wife, he's got three kids, he's a driving instructor, he's very well known in Whitby.
Has anyone in Whitby seen him being lifted out of his car and taken into outer space?
No, because all these things, in my view, happen inside his head.
And he's got a very interesting head.
I went to a lecture that he did.
I listened to all his stories.
I've seen him on the Channel 4 documentary.
You know, I don't think he's making all of it up.
I think some of it's imaginary.
But I mean, some of what he says, though, can be demonstrated to be false.
For instance, one of the things that he claims is that he remembers seeing an alien either when he was in his mother's womb or when he was a tiny baby, I think six or nine months of age.
Now, that, that having a memory of something of that kind at that age, psychologists tell me is completely impossible.
They might be wrong.
They might be wrong.
Well, they might be wrong, but we rely on scientists to that they provided us with Skype, for instance, which I'm talking to you on at the moment.
We know that Skype works, you know, that that has been produced by the same sort of scientific community that is telling us that it's impossible to have that kind of memory.
But learned people once told us the Earth was flat.
Well, they did.
But, you know, we can now demonstrate that the Earth isn't flat by scientific method, can't we?
Because we can go into outer space and we can look back at the Earth and see that the Earth isn't flat.
It's round.
You see what I mean?
But at the time when they were propounding their views, we believed that the Earth was flat because they were telling us that.
Similarly, if scientists tell us that we cannot recall things that were experienced so very young, then we have to take that on face value.
But sometime down the track, they may be proved to be wrong.
There are no absolutes, are there?
Well, there are no absolutes, no.
But what I'm saying is that as far as we are aware, based upon, don't forget, when you were talking about when people were told centuries ago that the Earth was flat, we didn't have science.
There was no such thing as science.
We do have science now.
So to refer back to things that were said in times when we believed there were demons and devils and this kind of another, you can't use that to say, well, things that are said today, we shouldn't accept because scientists said that the Earth was round before we were able to travel into outer space and see that that was a fact.
You see what I mean?
So the kind of deductions and the kind of logic that scientists use to predict things has been proved over and over and over and over and over again.
Whereas those kinds of pseudo-scientific beliefs and superstitious beliefs that people used to have back in medieval times, there is absolutely no proof of any of those.
They're all based upon people believing and rather than actual being able to demonstrate those things actually happen.
In fact, see what I mean?
I do.
You investigated the release of documents by the Ministry of Defense.
They've done a couple of two or three, I think, releases recently of their formerly classified UFO files.
10 New Orleans is 11.
10.
Is it really?
Gee whiz well, it's overtaken me then.
You know, I've interviewed Nick Pope, who, of course, worked for the Ministry of Defense for a while, and never really says anything untoward happened, says one or two things may be questionable, but that's about as far as most of us get.
What do you think of those documents?
The accounts I read of what was in them, certainly when the newspapers took an interest for the first couple of releases, disappointing.
I don't think they were disappointing at all.
They were disappointing if there was part of you that wanted to believe these things were real.
Well, they are real.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, I did know what you said.
Yeah, if you have convinced yourself that alien people exist who are coming here and have been coming here since...
And it was created around 1947, 1950 by largely by a guy called Donald Kehoe, who wrote a whole series of books, Flying Saucers Are Real, etc.
And he said that what had happened is the aliens exist, that they're interested in us for some reason, that they're watching the Earth, that when we let off atomic bombs in 1945, suddenly they decided that they were going to come here in more numbers.
And that's why suddenly people started seeing flying saucers in 1947.
There was no Roswell crash at the time that he was writing this.
And they were coming here because they were worried that we would, quote, upset the balance of the universe because of our nuclear experimentation and Nagasaki and Hiroshima and all this kind of stuff.
Well, that indeed is what Robert Salas, former U.S. Air Force man, told me on this show a few weeks back, that he worked for the U.S. Air Force in the 60s and he was at a base, there were two of them, that were effectively brought to a standstill, nuclear missile bases by something that hovered over the base and neutralized everything for a while.
Well, I'm not going to get into the arguments as to his particular statement, but where is the evidence for this other than what he's saying?
And he says a number of other people who served with him.
But again, I only have his word for that.
Yeah, well, exactly.
And there are so many people who, for example, just connected to the Roswell incident alone, who have claimed to have been, you know, to have seen the bodies of the Roswell aliens or to have been in some very high military position.
And they, I mean, Philip Corso, for instance, the guy who wrote the day after Roswell, you know, who claimed that all the all the things like stealth technology and a lot of the sort of high-tech stuff that we now rely on, we didn't invent it.
It was all back engineered from the aliens.
And I just think that is an insult to the human race.
It's like people who think that human beings couldn't possibly have built the pyramids, that we had to have aliens come and help us do it.
I just think it's a terrible indictment on the human achievements.
So how do you believe we were able to be so advanced in that era then?
Talking about the pyramids, the Egyptians, and a civilization that some people are saying also existed, not quite parallel with them, but around about the same time.
How did we get to be so clever then and then forget all of that stuff?
We've always been clever.
We've never forgotten any of it.
You know, we are today.
You know, the recent photographs that have been shown of this cave that they found in Indonesia, where they found all these fantastic, wonderful paintings that people tens of thousands of years ago, you know, way back before any written records, they were making the most incredible artwork.
So if they were able to do that, if they were able to produce that kind of advanced artwork, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60,000 years ago, why then is it a mystery that people were able to pile rocks and stones into pyramid shapes in the Egyptian desert only 2,000 years ago?
Extrapolating from what you've been saying, we are alone in this universe.
Do you believe that?
Absolutely.
Yeah, I was listening to Brian Cox last night.
I don't know if you saw it on, it was on BBC4 talking about the highlights of British TV from the 1950s science fiction and science programmes.
And I saw his series, The Human Universe.
And one of those programmes was all about the possibility of alien life.
And I know there was quite a lot of controversy about it because people were saying, you know, why did he say that we were the only intelligent life in the Milky Way?
And you've got to listen to how he explains that.
And I agree with him.
I think, as far as we're aware, as far as we can know, and I don't think we should waste time speculating about things we don't know, we are the only intelligent, advanced civilization in this part of our galaxy.
What about those people who say that they have seen the pictures from the Mars rover of the Curiosity and they think that they're fragments of something that used to be there?
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Well, regular geometry, fragments of perhaps buildings or machinery, whatever.
Well, there's a well-known phenomenon called Paryidolia.
Have you heard of that?
Is that making sense of things that you see when they don't make sense?
It's seeing what you want to see into random patterns.
So, you know, if you look at the moon and you stare at the moon long enough, you'll see the man in the moon.
You know, it's a basic human thing that we don't like randomness and we don't like the fact that the universe is a chaotic place, that things don't happen because there's some great intelligence out there that's interested in us.
This goes back to this thing about the UFO myth and the idea that there's this alien civilization that is interested in us and that somehow is interested in stopping us from destroying ourselves with nuclear bombs.
I just think that's complete nonsense.
Why would an alien civilization from who knows where be interested in whether we destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons?
It's not going to the fact if we laid waste to this complete to the planet with nuclear bombs, you know, somebody living in Alpha Centauri or wherever wouldn't wouldn't care.
Why wouldn't they be interested in that?
It's not going to affect them.
You know, it's just nonsense.
It's human.
All these things go back to human beings and the human imagination.
So there are no aliens.
Away from the aliens and the UFOs, because I think we very clearly get where you're coming from here.
Thank you for it.
People have asked me for it.
People might say he's got a complete closed mind.
I haven't got a complete closed mind.
I am totally open-minded, but I think there's a difference between having an open mind and a mind that's so open that your brains dribble out, you know, that you'll believe anything because you want to believe in aliens so much that you don't need any factual evidence to prove it because you already believe it.
It's this thing about believing is seeing.
Do you describe yourself as a sceptic?
Yes, but all a skeptic is, is somebody who is a doubter, somebody who is looking for hard evidence to prove something.
A sceptic doesn't mean somebody who just will not believe.
Understood.
Yep, no, understood.
And very, very valid point, if I may say so.
Away from the aliens.
It came to me.
If somebody came to me and said, right, an alien spaceship crashed somewhere last night and we've got evidence of it.
And I'd say, right, okay, let's see the evidence then.
And they bring in the wreckage and you could get the wreckage onto a table and we could say, right, okay, we'll get Brian Cox.
We'll get somebody from North America.
We'll get somebody from, we'll get all the top scientists, get them around a table, show them the wreckage, let them examine it.
And if they say, yeah, this is definitely something that's off-earth, it's not human, that would be proof, wouldn't it?
And to say, oh, well, that happened in 1947, but the CIA is hidden it all.
And that's why we can't see it.
60 years have passed and they've got this hidden away in some hangar somewhere and there's some huge conspiracy and Rupert Murdoch's involved and everybody else is involved and anybody who says anything different is part of the conspiracy.
I mean, that's just nuts.
There's no other way to describe it.
Okay, well, you have a very compelling mindset, Dave.
Now, away from the aliens and the UFOs for just half a second.
You must have had the human experience of thinking about somebody, the phone goes, and it's them.
Do you just say, oh, well, that's, you know, a bit of deja vu there?
Yeah.
Well, yes, but I think it all comes down to, you know, the incidence of coincidence.
And if you read Richard Wiseman's book on paranormal...
Yeah, there's a perfectly good explanation as to why occasionally you will think of somebody and the telephone will ring.
And that is a perfectly natural thing to happen in terms of the odds of that happening.
Because the way he would say is that you only see it as significant when it happens.
Do you see what I mean?
So the numerous hundreds and millions of times that you will think of somebody and the telephone won't ring, you know, you will immediately forget that as being unsignificant.
But when you think of somebody and the phone rings, immediately you think, ah, ooh, you know, ESP.
I was thinking of them and they rang me.
You see what I mean?
It's psychological.
What would you say to people who will email me to say to you that the world is a very boring place if all there is is what we see?
Oh, I totally disagree.
I think the world is the most amazing, wonderful place.
And it's not just the world, it's the universe.
They were talking about this again, back to Brian Cox.
It's like people have this idea that if we accept what science says, that somehow we are disenchanting the universe, that the universe becomes uninteresting or boring by explaining it in a scientific way.
But exactly the opposite.
I just think people are lacking in imagination if they think that way.
Do you get involved in conspiracy theories?
Have you looked at those?
I have, yes.
Okay, all right.
Well, there is a person I interviewed about a year, 18 months ago called Dr. Judy Wood.
If you want to buy Judy Wood's book on Amazon, it'll cost you, well, it did when I last looked, about $400 because so many people want this book.
And she puts a very compelling case.
She is a former professor of physics.
And she puts a very compelling case that the Twin Towers on 9-11 were brought down by some kind of directed energy weapon, and they couldn't have collapsed in any other way, and certainly not the way we were told.
What do you make of that sort of stuff?
Well, I just think it's, I think there's, I think conspiracy theories are one of the worst things ever to have happened to human beings.
I just think, I blame the American government for kicking them off so strongly in the first place with all the business in the 1960s with the Watergate and Nixon, because I think that's just encouraged people not to believe anything that they hear from the government.
And the fact is that a lot of what the government say is true.
But because people distrust them so much, you know, nothing that they now say, nothing that they say, some of which we need to know and we need to take on board.
But did you never think when you watched those towers come down, and we all did live, wherever we were, if we could get to a TV, we got to a TV.
They came down in such a regular, fast, and as Julie Wood says, in a cloud of dust, not in a cloud of what, you know, rubble.
You would expect rubble and a lot of crashing and clattering.
They came down smoothly in a cloud of dust.
How can, did you never ask that question?
How could that be?
No, because I'm not an engineer.
Well, she is, and she worked out that those buildings came down faster than by the laws of physics as we know them, than they could.
I don't know anything about her, but it just seems to me there's people out there who are prepared to make, who just get themselves obsessed with things to an unhealthy degree.
And I just think it...
How helpful would it be to governments who want to stop people from being from politically agitating About things like austerity, climate change, what we're going to do once the oil runs out, et cetera, et cetera.
If you distract people into all these stupid conspiracy theories like about 9-11 and aliens and all the rest of it, they're not out on the streets protesting, are they?
What about that for a conspiracy theory?
You know, that if you distract people with all these silly, stupid ideas, like, You do believe in them.
Yes.
Well, no, I'm proposing that.
I'm playing devil's advocate here.
I'm saying that is my conspiracy theory.
I agree with George Monbiot.
I just think all this nonsense about 9-11 and the American government being run by aliens and stuff, I just think it's a very useful ruse that keeps people from thinking about the real things that affect their lives on a day-to-day level.
You worked for two great newspapers, the Sheffield Star and the Yorkshire Post, both of which have done some fantastic work over the decades, journalistically.
You can't honestly say that you believe everything that politicians tell you.
No, no, no, because one of the things that I tell my students, I can't remember who the quote was, but whenever you're speaking to a politician, you should always be saying, why is that lying bastard lying to me?
And of course, a great quote that I was reminded of this week by somebody I interviewed on radio, that Mark Twain said, politicians are like diapers, like nappies.
They have to be changed often for the same reason.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
Yeah.
But what I'm saying is you can reach a point where you become so cynical and so distrustful that facts glaring people, they're just staring people in the face.
For example, climate change.
There's absolutely no doubt that that is a fact.
And yes, you can find Maverick scientists.
95% of scientists say absolutely no doubt it's happening.
It's been caused by human beings.
So you could find 5% of scientists who have a different view.
And going back to the lady that you were talking about with the 9-11 business, 95% of engineers will say there's absolutely nothing unusual about how those towers collapse.
Yes, you can find somebody in that 5% who will say the opposite, who will say, oh, yeah, you know, there's something unusual about it.
There's got to be some kind of conspiracy.
But at the end of the day, if you have been an objective reporter of events, you've got to go with the 95.
And unfortunately, I mean, you'll know this working for the BBC.
There's this idea now that I really dislike in journalism, that you've got to have balance, that you can't have somebody going on and saying, yes, climate change is a fact.
You've then got to have somebody like Nigel Lawson coming on who knows absolutely nothing about the climate at all.
But simply because he's a well-known celebrity and has got a strong view on the subject, yeah, we've got to have him to balance what somebody who spent their entire life studying the subject.
Isn't that called democracy?
Well, it is, but it's a difficult thing, isn't it?
Because if you've got people who it's like the thing about the thing about politicians, it's like politicians, the reason we distrust them is our own fault, because we don't want to know the truth.
We want to be peddled fantasies.
It's like, you know, why don't politicians tell us the truth about something that's going to happen in 20 years' time?
Because they're thinking, oh, well, you know, if I tell the truth, I'm not going to get elected.
So we get the politicians we deserve.
That's my view.
Well, on a completely different subject, politicians need to be getting real with us about the situation many people will face in their retirement, both sides of the Atlantic, because there ain't enough money to look after this burgeoning population of older people.
And it's a place that politicians, they do go there peripherally from time to time, but they're not really grasping what is the biggest difficulty that this generation, next generation one after it's going to face.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And if, you know, so when you ask me about conspiracy theories, I think that I think people who are wasting their time messing around with these 9-11 conspiracy theories and, you know, we never went to the moon and, you know, all this kind of stuff, you know, those sorts of people back in the past would be out on the streets protesting, throwing Molotov cocktails and demanding, you know, better wages and rights for women and all this kind of stuff.
And we're distracting ourselves with stupid things when we should be getting on with demanding that we get things that we deserve.
Does the world not worry you at the moment, though, that you talked about distractions?
And I had an email from one of my listeners called Claire, basically saying that a lot of the young people today, a lot of people today, are distracted by computer games.
And I suppose you can go down the same track and say shows on the television about baking and dancing, which seems to be mostly all there is on the TV, along with a few talent shows these days.
Everybody's eyes are rightly off the ball.
That's a big problem.
Plus, media seems to be being dumbed down.
And that's not just me saying that.
I think there is evidence for that.
And a lot of the big organizations, I was listening to somebody the other day saying that the audience for CNN is ridiculously small now, so small that some cable operators in the U.S. are apparently taking CNN off.
What does all of this mean for the dissemination of information and for truth getting out there?
Yeah, well, people have always wanted to be entertained, haven't they?
All the way back.
But I just think you can reach a point where entertainment takes over.
And, you know, as you know, I mean, doing proper detailed sort of investigative journalism is expensive and it doesn't make for good television.
And it's the same with science.
And that's why occasionally you will see really good science programmes, stuff that like Brian Cox does, the sort of the natural history stuff the BBC does with David Attenborough, you know, and that stuff costs, you have to invest in it.
And it's far cheaper just to show all these trashy programmes.
And, you know, there are entire channels, aren't they, completely dedicated to just showing these trashy UFO documentaries, you know, some of which I've been involved in.
And I've drawn the line under it now and I've said, right, enough is enough.
You know, I'm not doing any more of them because, you know, you're told, oh, yes, we're going to do another, we're going to do a new look at the Rendlesham UFO incident, or we're going to look at Roswell and we're going to get to the facts and this, that, and the other.
And you just think, oh, yeah, yeah, here we go again.
Well, you talked about that thing called balance That is ingrained in all of our media here.
Programmes about Roswell and stuff like that, and Rendlesham Forest.
Because of the requirement to balance, they provide you with lots of chilling interviews with people who knew people who knew people back then.
They tell you chilling stuff.
And then at the end of it all, you get the clincher that undoes it all and says, But you've got to bear in mind this, this, and this.
And you go away and thinking, well, I've learned nothing from that.
Yeah, because they always look at the mystery in the same way.
Is it false or is it true?
It's that tired old thing where they've got to have somebody who's a debunker and they've got to have somebody who is a believer.
And the entertainment is provided by the clash between the people who have got different points of view.
Do you see what I mean?
Whereas a different way of looking at it is the way I try and look at it is losing, it's asking, why did this happen?
Why do people believe this?
Looking at the actual people.
Again, it's back to this journalism thing.
I'm not interested in aliens.
I don't care about aliens.
If they came here, yeah, fair enough, and landed and were here, you've got to interact with them.
But until we've got any evidence of them, all we've got are human beings.
And it's human beings that I'm interested in.
Why do they believe all this weird stuff?
What's led them to believe in it?
People have odd experiences.
Well, of course, they might be believing in it because some of it might have happened.
Yes.
And again, it has happened for real.
No, but may have an extraterrestrial or paranormal origin.
Well, let me give you an example.
This is something that happened in Australia in the 1970s.
There was a woman there who believed that she was being abducted by aliens and she'd seen UFOs coming down and creatures coming out, etc., etc.
And her story was investigated by two Australian ufologists who were sort of quite objective people.
And they said to her, this was happening to her on a regular basis, get into touch with us when something happens.
And one night they were out in a car.
And as they were driving along, she saw a flying saucer.
And they stopped the car.
The flying saucer landed in front of the car and she saw a creature emerge from this thing and she was about to be abducted.
Now, you would think from the description that I've just given that this story would provide the absolute undoubted evidence here.
You've got somebody who was being abducted by aliens and you've got two other independent witnesses sat in the car whilst this was happening to her.
What did they see?
Absolutely nothing.
She was sat there in a trance and this was all happening in her head and they were watching it happen and they were seeing her interact with these aliens.
Now, when you say, you know, like, are these people deluded?
Did something happen?
Clearly something happened in that case, but it was happening to her.
She was having a real experience.
Anybody else who'd been there at that time wouldn't have seen it or felt it?
They would have seen her sat there gazing into space, wouldn't they?
You see what I mean?
Then why you mentioned Stan Friedman, Stanton Friedman?
The point I'm trying to make is I'm not, nothing that I'm saying is suggesting that people are lying or deliberately deluding people, you know, or mad.
Some of them might be.
There are liars who make up stories for a variety of reasons.
But I just think the vast majority of people who have these experiences are having a genuine experience.
I think is happening in their heads.
And that's why there is no...
Why are they giving up so much of their lives then in the pursuit of the investigation of that which is not from our planet?
Why are intelligent people, you know, Stan Friedman's got a great background in industry and other things, and Paul Hellier was in the government in Canada.
Why are they bothering?
And now you're going to say you've got to ask them.
If you're a journalist, you'll say how, and you've got to ask them.
But I'm asking you.
To be absolutely honest, well, Stanton Friedman is an entertainer.
You know, he may have been a nuclear physicist, but when was he a nuclear physicist?
40, 50 years ago?
You know, he makes his living out of flying saucers.
He's not going to turn around and say, oh, well, they don't exist.
Yeah, I've been spending 40, 50 years on lecture tours telling people about them, but I've now seen the evidence.
I've heard what David Clark's had to say, and I've now changed my mind.
And I'm now going to go and become a monk or something.
It's not going to do that, is he?
It's in his interest to promote UFOs.
The same with Nick Pope.
You know, he's left the MOD, you know, as if he was like the first person to have done that.
But he's now got a new career on the UFO circuit in North America.
Again, he's not going to turn around and say, oh, well, I don't actually think there's anything involved in this.
But to be fair, I mean, he's never actually come out and said UFOs and aliens exist.
He said that there are some cases that came over his desk that there are legitimate questions about.
But, you know, most of them there aren't, and they can be perfectly easily explained.
Well, you may say that, Howard, but I've interviewed Nick Perk where he's actually told me that he believes in aliens and that he thinks the Randallsham Forest incident is the best example of aliens.
So I'm sorry, but I don't believe a word that Nick Perk says about anything.
I know he wasn't there, but you weren't there either.
It all depends upon who's interviewing.
If he's been interviewed by a sceptic, he'll say something skeptical.
And if he's been interviewed by somebody who believes, he will say something.
Just don't take my word for it.
Just listen to his interviews.
Okay.
On something on a completely consistent list.
You are, exactly.
And delightfully so, if I may say so, Dave.
Finally, and I'm squeezing this into the very back end of this, and we need to do more about this.
But the Loch Ness Monster.
Now, you've been researching something that I've never heard of that apparently happened in the 1930s and is amazing.
It's on your latest blog.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the Loch Ness Monster is ufology in a pond, isn't it?
Because something is seen in a large body of water.
Lots of credible witnesses, such as police officers, MPs, people of high standing in the community, say that they've seen something.
You know, people go to the lock and look for it.
Some of them see it.
Some of them don't see anything.
Some people think it's real.
Some people think it isn't.
Some people Think it's a delusion, it's ufology in a pond, isn't it?
And even if we went up to Loch Ness now and we drained the lock, we took every single drop of water out of it, and there was no monster in the bottom, people would then come back and say, Ah, well, yes, whilst you were draining the lock, the Loch Ness monster got on a bus and went to one of the other big sort of locks in Scotland, and it's in there.
And once you put the water back in, it opts back into Loch Ness.
You know, you cannot disprove the Loch Ness monster, and that's why it's so similar to other belief systems like ufology, because there is absolutely no way of disproving that UFOs don't exist.
And what about this bid in the 1930s?
I'm using a journalistic word, their bid, this effort in the 1930s.
Some radio stations banned that word, by the way, bid.
But what about this effort in the 1930s for people to go up there and capture it?
What weren't there bounty hunters who went up there?
Fascinating stuff.
There was.
Yeah, yeah.
And it was a huge story in 1933.
And when I started researching this, I went to the, again, to the primary documents.
I thought, right, National Archives of Scotland.
You know, I knew that they'd got a collection of material, including a file that was opened by the Chief Constable of Inverness and the Secretary of State for Scotland.
And, you know, the material in that file was amazing.
And I also found lots of material in the Natural History Museum archives in London as well.
And what I didn't realise, and again, this is going back to the popular culture business, is what was the big film in 1933?
The Loch Ness Monster suddenly, you know, was all through the headlines of Daily Mail, all these big game hunters and that heading up to Scotland.
What film was everyone going to see right around the UK and in North America earlier on in that year, around the spring of 1933?
It wasn't Moby Dick, was it?
Nope.
I have no idea.
Go on.
King Kong.
Oh, really?
Okay.
What does King Kong feature?
Have you seen the 1933 edition of it?
It was the Empire State Building.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But what happens earlier on in the film, you know, when they're on Skull Island?
So long since I've seen that.
Large dinosaurs.
That's a bit of a leap, though, isn't it?
Do you really think people would make a connection like that after seeing a film?
A movie?
Yep.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for instance, 1978.
You know, people were seeing UFOs on screen.
You look at the files, the Ministry of Defense files in the National Archives, there are reports from people who had literally come out of the cinema, who had looked up in the sky and seen flying saucers.
And what about these government reports then in the US and maybe in the UK that suggest that governments and people in the know know that extraterrestrials exist and they're coming here.
So we have to prepare people for this by putting it in movies and popular culture.
You think that's all rubbish?
That one.
Yes, yeah.
No, I think it's the other way around.
I think people, again, people.
You think the popular culture spawns the sight of it?
Yes.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And to people to think, ah, well, because people have seen things and there are these multi-million pound films, therefore that must be all part of this huge conspiracy to sort of prepare us for these aliens arriving.
So it's like a big feedback loop in which all these things are all feeding into each other and going round and round and round.
And there's absolutely no way of disproving any of these beliefs.
Has nothing weird ever happened to you?
Yeah, weird things happen all the time to me.
But I don't blame them on aliens and werewolves and, you know.
And we haven't even begun to talk about mediums and ghosts.
No, we haven't even started.
It's that all rubbish as well.
No, it's not.
None of it's rubbish.
All of it is fascinating.
You know, this thing about, you know, that if you're a sceptic, you must think it's all rubbish.
Far from it.
I'm fascinated.
The reason I'm here and I spend most of my life, you were saying about why would Stanton Friedman do this, that, and the other.
I've spent most of my adult life.
You can look at my office.
My wall is absolutely full of books, box files, everything to do with this subject.
If I thought it was all rubbish, why would I be wasting my time on it?
Dave, I did you a disservice there.
I know you were, because that's what we have to do, isn't it, as people who go and do interviews.
It's just that I'm interested in it from a different point of view.
You're interested in the human phenomenon that is at work here.
I don't care whether it's true or false.
Why does it matter whether it's true or false?
All that matters is to me is that people believe it and that the things they believe affect their lives and how they view the world in which they live.
And surely that in itself is a wonderful, beautiful mystery.
You know, and people have always been like, oh, always believed in weird stuff right back, you know, back into prehistory, back into the medieval period.
People believed in devils and demons and angels and et cetera, et cetera.
And we don't believe in that now, but to me, it's no less fascinating.
Why did people believe it at the time?
As a historian, as a social historian, that's what we're interested in.
People write books on witchcraft beliefs in the 17th century.
We don't believe that witches ride around on broomsticks now, but it doesn't mean to say that we shouldn't be interested in why people believed in witches in the 17th century.
And in two centuries' time, people, I believe, will be looking back now and looking at stuff like Roswell incident and 9-11 and they'll be saying, God, didn't they believe some weird stuff in the 21st century?
Why did they believe that?
And they'll look at the back of the book and they'll say, but there was a man called David Clarke who was well ahead of the curve here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not just me.
There are plenty of other people that take the same view that I do.
Perhaps they don't express it as forcibly.
Do you know what?
I've waited for a couple of years to do a show like this one.
I'm really delighted that we have.
Dave, pleasure to speak with you.
It's only fair that I give you a chance to plug the new book before you go.
Yeah, Britain's Extraordinary Files, which is out now, which is completely UFO-free.
Well, not completely, mainly.
There's stuff about Loch Ness Monster, psychic detectives, the Angels of Mons, First World War stuff, Death Rays, which is a fascinating topic.
So that's out now.
And my final book on UFOs, which is called How UFOs Conquered the Earth, is out next spring.
And that basically is a Gonzo journalism look at my life in ufology.
And it's the last thing I am ever writing on the subject.
Never say never.
Never.
Say never.
Dave, listen, a pleasure to talk with you.
One quick thing about the journalism training.
Because I'm a few years older than many now, but I was once a young Questing journalist being taught by these people.
I was very lucky to get the training I got.
I've noticed the way the language is changing, and this is nothing to do with the unexplained, really.
But why is it that journalists now write about a report into?
In the old days, we had investigations into and reports on.
These days, you hear news stories all the time that says a report into so-and-so says.
I see what you mean.
Yeah, it's like a style change.
It's a strange change of language.
Our language is changing, isn't it?
Yeah, it's evolving all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, and I have to keep on top of all this because, I mean, a lot of what we teach now to young journalists is all social media-based.
You know, I mean, I remember, it was only two or three years ago, there was a colleague of mine that teaches with me was massively into Twitter and he thought that, you know, it's going to completely transform journalism.
And I remember saying to him, oh, it's a load of rubbish.
You know, why would any, why am I not going to waste a moment of my time on Twitter?
Who cares that I'm eating a cheese sandwich as I walk down the road?
That sort of thing.
And now I've had to eat my words.
You're not saying you're not always right.
Is that what you just said?
I'm sorry, that's an old journalist trick there.
No, I think Twitter's the best thing since sliced bread.
I think it's wonderful, particularly for journalists.
I've tried to avoid it, but I think I'm going to have to get on that bus before very long, Dave.
I think so.
But you see.
The evidence was presented to me, you see.
I saw empirical evidence that Twitter was good.
So I changed my mind.
And thereby it became good.
Dave Clark, thank you very much.
Great to talk with you.
Thanks, Howard.
Been great.
Interesting man, interesting conversation.
David Clark from Sheffield Hallam University.
I'll put a link to his website, his blog, on my website, www.theunexplained.tv.
That's the place to go.
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Thanks very much, Roger.
And thank you to you, above all, for your continuing support.
Your communications don't let those ever stop.
And the fact that you've seen me through some very difficult times over the last few years.
Thank you for that.
More great guests coming soon here on The Unexplained.
Till next we meet here.
Stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
Take care.
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