The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 196 - Whitley Strieber

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March 9, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:03:49

Edition 196 - Whitley Strieber

A return visit with the California-based author and visionary...

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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.
	Thank you very much for all of your emails and the donations and your guest suggestions and everything else and also thank you for your ideas about my ongoing chest infection.
	It is slowly getting better, but I think you may hear me once or twice wheeze a little during this show.
	I'm back at the doctor tomorrow.
	So hopefully he'll have some good ideas about this.
	I've had to wait long enough for an appointment.
	But don't get me started about the NHS in the UK.
	It's under so much pressure now, but at least we have it.
	I want to do some shout-outs.
	So we're going to do quite a few of those this time.
	I hope I can get around to your email.
	If I haven't, please believe and please know that I've read it, seen it and taken it on board.
	Always good to hear from you.
	If you want to get in touch with the show, all you've got to do is go to the website www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
	And the website designed and created and maintained and honed by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who does a top job for us.
	That's the place to go if you want to make a donation to the show.
	Your donation's utterly vital for what we do here.
	It is a shoestring operation.
	So please keep those coming.
	There's a PayPal link there.
	And also, that's the place to go if you want to send me a message.
	Okay, let's get round to the shout-outs before the special guest on this edition, the return of Whitley Streeber.
	Always interesting, always hotly controversial, and I'm sure this time he is not going to disappoint on any level.
	Whitley Striber coming soon.
	Shout-outs.
	Hi, Howard.
	Tony Topping made me laugh because I knew exactly what he was talking about.
	It's all based on time manipulation, like he said.
	Didn't appear to me that he was faking it, otherwise he's an intel agent with some really good information, says Roger.
	Thank you for that.
	A controversial and interesting guest.
	Some of you thought that I was a bit hard on him.
	I was merely trying to ask some of the tough questions that I know that you would ask.
	And I apologise if I came across that way.
	That's not the way I intended it at all.
	Georgia, thank you for your email.
	Good ideas about chest infections, and I certainly need them, Georgia.
	Thank you.
	Jake, kind comments.
	Kevin and Glasgow, nice to hear from you.
	Stephen Cardiff, Land of My Fathers, about Uri Geller's connection to John Lennon.
	Always interesting.
	Uri's talked about it a bit, but boy, would I like to talk to John about that.
	If only there was a way.
	Chris, longtime listener, wants to know how to make a donation in US dollars to the unexplained.
	PayPal on the website, I think, will make the conversion, but I think somewhere along the line there will be a fee that might fall at this end of the transaction.
	I'm not sure.
	But there is a way to do it.
	Kieran, talking to me about slow load times for the show on Android phones.
	Kieran, I wonder if that might be to do with your phone and your end, because I've tried the show on a number of Androids here, only on UK networks, and it seems to load okay.
	But let me know if you're still having problems.
	David Kroll from SpeedVids.com.
	There's the plug for it.
	See, I said I'd do it, and I've done it.
	Emails about coincidences.
	Life is full of them, David.
	I know what you mean.
	Claire.
	Claire says some compliments.
	I thought I was going to be bored to tears listening to Eric von Daniken again, but your interview with him was way different from any I'd heard before.
	A lot of good response to Eric von Daniken.
	One of those classic all-time great guests, I think.
	Hello, Howard.
	Just wanted to tell you that you're doing an outstanding job with the show.
	Even more pleased to hear that you're on the mend.
	I'm doing my best, Matt.
	In Carbon Hill, Alabama.
	What a great location.
	Curtin Chantal.
	Nice to hear from you.
	I was listening to your back catalogue edition 143 with Ty Bollinger.
	During the show, you suggested that we should all read Game Theory of Politics by Michael Laver.
	I did a quick search on it and couldn't find it.
	Can you point me in the right direction?
	Mick Laver, just to give you a little bit of back information here, was my lecturer.
	He was my tutor at the University of Liverpool, and that is where he wrote the book.
	I don't think he's working there now, but I have a feeling that if you get in touch with the University of Liverpool, who have a thriving politics department, they will know how to find him and the book now.
	Good luck with that.
	Let me know how you get on, because Mick Laver, I thought, was just excellent, and the book was real food for thought.
	Somewhere I've got it still, and I must look it out.
	Matt gets in touch, suggesting Dean Henderson.
	Thank you, Matt.
	Dan Taylor, suggesting a guest about HARP.
	I've got to do that.
	It's been years since people first started suggesting I do a show about that, and I need to get round to it.
	Just got to find the right person.
	Stephen Yorkshire, thank you for your great suggestion.
	Dave Stevens in the UK, good suggestions and nice comments.
	Clint in Leicester, do I know anything about sleep paralysis?
	Maybe I could talk to a researcher about that.
	I know that I suffer with it, as it seems you do, Clint, as well.
	I have it quite a lot.
	Pete in Southampton, thank you.
	Good to hear from you.
	EC compares me with Art Bell.
	Whenever anybody does that, I always say I am not worthy.
	Apparently, the great man is going to be coming back to a venue somewhere.
	If I hear any more about it, I'll let you know.
	But that's what I'm hearing.
	Keith in the UK, good to hear from you.
	Sherry, thank you for your donation and the email.
	And the same to Mary Mailer in America, and good luck with your doctorate.
	Mary, it's not an easy thing to do, but it's a great achievement when you do it.
	Corey in Milwaukee, suggesting Jeff Wise about flight MH370.
	It's one year on, exactly, and they still don't really have a great idea as to where this plane may be and what happened to it.
	Some people pointing the fingers at the pilot and co-pilot.
	Nobody really sure.
	Scott Hathaway, kind comments, thank you.
	Jim Houston in Ohio, good suggestion.
	Steph Young, a British author.
	I'm going to get on that.
	Neil Hopkins in Shropshire, UK, thank you.
	Dan Dent, paranormal entertainer, he's described as.
	From Ghostwalk Zurich, thank you for your invitation to Switzerland.
	I've been there twice briefly in my life and loved it both times.
	Once to the Italian part and once to the French part.
	Just lovely.
	And the cleanest, clearest air that you'll find anywhere.
	And Michael Fisher in Florida talks about Steve Bassett.
	A lot of you liked Steve Bassett a lot.
	He says, Michael, this is, as for Mr. Bassett's comments concerning beings we are currently interacting with, let me be succinct.
	Bullocks.
	Pure bullocks, says Michael Fisher in Florida.
	Michael, good to hear from you.
	Thanks very much.
	You know, you are perfectly welcome wherever you are and whatever you think to get in touch and tell me about it.
	Just go to the website www.theunexplained.tv, and that's the place you can send me an email with guest suggestions or thoughts about the show.
	Right, let's get on to the guest this time.
	Special guest Whitley Streeber.
	It's about the third time we've spoken to him and always good to speak with Whitley.
	So thank you, Wickley, for taking time to come on The Unexplained.
	Well, it's a pleasure to be here as always, Howard.
	Whitley, for a lot of us, recent years have not been easy.
	And going back over your chronology from this last 10 or 12 years or so, and I hope you don't mind me talking about this because I know that you've written about it, but it hasn't been the easiest time for you and Anne, has it?
	It's been horrible.
	Anne is, at the present time, completely incapacitated.
	She's got a brain tumor and a stroke and has to have 24-hour nursing care.
	She can't eat.
	She has to be fed by tube.
	She has no use of her left arm.
	She cannot walk.
	So, yeah, it's a pretty bad time.
	I'm so sorry to hear that.
	And it seems to me that the one thing that keeps it all churning over for you, keeps it all going, is the fact that you guys are so solid.
	Well, it's a deep love affair, and I don't mind helping my wife.
	It's not a chore.
	It's done out of love, and there's a lot of joy involved in it, although my body is protesting because there's a lot of lifting and so forth involved.
	And I have arthritis, and I had minor arthritis.
	It ain't minor anymore, however.
	So how are you getting through the days?
	With difficulty.
	It's hard.
	I have a lot of support from the nursing.
	Fortunately, in the U.S., you don't get any support whatsoever from Medicare or our equivalent of national health.
	You have to have private insurance to have nurses.
	And fortunately, we do have that.
	Otherwise, I think we do, like a lot of older folks do when they get into this situation, which is in this country, they kill themselves.
	Yeah, it's a terrible, horrible, harsh reality.
	But at least we have that safety net here in UK, Whitley.
	At least we have, you know, it gets a lot of criticism, and it's very cash-strapped at the moment, but at least we have the National Health Service, so we have a backstop.
	Well, you do, and we don't here, really.
	I mean, we have what looks like a backstop in Medicare, and it's fairly good for hospitalizations and so forth and so on.
	But when it comes to something like this, it doesn't offer any support.
	The only support they would offer her would be to send somebody in to bathe her twice a week and no other support at all.
	Well, for what it's worth, and it's easy to say, isn't it?
	But, you know, you have my good thoughts and the good thoughts I'm sure of everybody aware of your work listening to this.
	Well, thank you.
	We have a new book coming out next summer called Alien Hunter 3.
	I don't know if it's going to be published in the UK.
	I have a major new nonfiction book called The Supernatural, A New Vision of the Unexplained, which is coming out in February of 2016.
	It's written with the chairman of the Department of Religion at a big university in this country, Rice University, Jeffrey Kreipel.
	Jeff and I have been friends for a long time, and he is certainly the United States leading authority on modern myth.
	And we've teamed up together to write a book that the publisher is calling the most important book on the paranormal written in 100 years.
	Wow.
	So we are trying to make sure it is exactly that.
	You must be enormously fired up.
	And the one thing about you is that you're not afraid of collaborations.
	You worked with Art Bell on the book of the movie the day after tomorrow.
	I like collaboration.
	I think it's fun, and I enjoy my collaborators.
	Unlike, I hear a lot of stories about collaborations that always end in an unhappy divorce between the collaborators, but that has not been the case with me.
	My collaborators have all remained close friends.
	I wonder if that's to do with ego, Whitley.
	Having interviewed you and talked to you, and I know you as a person that I've done interviews with, and we've spoken quite a number of times on radio and online.
	It doesn't seem to me that you buy much into the ego thing.
	You don't do that.
	No, well, I'll tell you why.
	I may have once bought into that, but the lady who's on the cover of Communion is not fond of it.
	And here's what happened.
	My brother came up to my country house in upstate New York from Texas when he was a young lawyer, and he was fairly jealous of it and enjoying being there.
	And I was showing him around and feeling very proud of myself.
	And we were walking down to see the place where I had had my original experience in the early evening.
	And suddenly I heard a voice in my head that said, arrogance, I can do anything I wish to you.
	And it was very clear.
	And I thought, how strange.
	And we kept on walking, and we went down into the field.
	No sooner had we gotten there than we saw this object moving across the sky, a bright object, which at first I thought maybe it was a distant airplane.
	And no sooner had I had that thought than before our eyes, it literally hopped from one spot in the sky to another instantaneously.
	Then I saw three figures standing like misty off in the corner of the field and watching us.
	He didn't see the figures, but he certainly did see that odd light.
	And I thought to myself, well, perhaps this is some sort of a lesson is developing.
	And I thought, perhaps I'm being too egotistical about all of my achievements and successes.
	And the next thing I knew, the next morning, my bank called and said, Mr. Streeber, your bank account has disappeared.
	Disappeared.
	Disappeared.
	It's gone.
	I said, what do you mean, gone?
	The lady said, we have no record of your account at all in our computer.
	And we've got some checks that have come in today, and we don't know how to cash them.
	Now, you being Wickley Streeber, I would have assumed would automatically have thought, is somebody trying to disappear me?
	Well, I didn't know what to think.
	But I did think to myself, I did seem to remember that voice saying, I can do anything I wish to you.
	And I thought, and then this is a lesson.
	I'm being taught something here.
	And from that day to this, I have worked very hard on ego because I think ego is a tool that we can use in life.
	But too often we let the tool use us.
	And I don't, I am very interested in not letting that happen.
	Well, in my radio career, humble though it may be over here, I've worked with a number of people who've been enormously successful in the broadcast medium.
	Some of them have quite large quotients of ego, but from what I've observed, and I've not really done the ego thing either, Whitley, because it doesn't get you anywhere.
	Whenever I've been tempted or whenever I've strayed from the path, something up there has always pulled me back and ground my nose into the dirt just to remind me who I really am.
	So I'm not impressed by the ego thing.
	But those I've observed doing that always have to confront the realities of life in the end.
	You may think that you're flying up there in the stratosphere and you'll continue to go great places and see new vistas, but something somewhere will always pull you back in the end, I think, whoever you are.
	Well, we have better places in ourselves to live from the nego.
	I want to talk with you about something we haven't talked about, and I do want to get into the new book about the supernatural and comprehensive definition of what that is and a new look at that.
	I want to ask you about the abduction thing, because you and I, we've talked about so many things and we've had conversations that have ranged over a lot of ground, but we've never actually went there.
	Everybody else has gone there in conversations with you.
	I never did because there were always other things to talk about.
	But from the biographies of you, we're told a story of you being abducted in 1985, and that's starting off a chain of events.
	I think just so we have it here as a journal of record, tell me the story.
	Well, in late December of 1985, I had a close encounter experience.
	And basically, I woke up in the night with this thing happening.
	And I was in a completely different place than I would have expected to be.
	And I kept thinking it's a nightmare.
	And I kept trying to wake up from it.
	And I could not wake up because I was not in my bed.
	And there were these strange beings around me moving rather quickly.
	I thought I was in a tant at first.
	Then I had a little round room.
	It was very confusing.
	Soon I started to hear a voice, a super calm female voice that was obviously a recording saying, what can we do to help you stop screaming?
	And not much was the answer.
	So this was your conscious self reacting as most of us would with fear.
	I was wide awake by this point.
	And apoplectic with fear by the sounds of it.
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, because I was in a place of, it was impossible to be in.
	And I was, it was just appalling.
	And then they did various things to me.
	They raped me and left me injured with an injury in the side of my head.
	Lord, so you had physical signs of this.
	Oh, God, yes.
	I went to the doctor a couple days later, and he took one look at me and said, you know you've been raped.
	And I said, I thought something like that had happened.
	Unfortunately, in my book, Communion, I described it very discreetly as a rectal probe.
	And the result of that has been I've become an international laughingstock for having been raped.
	And you want something that causes emotional distress.
	That's something that causes emotional distress.
	There's a very popular intellectual radio show in the United States.
	It may be present in England too.
	I don't know, called the TED Radio Hour.
	Yes, we're aware of TED and TED talks, yeah.
	Well, and just a couple of weeks ago on national public radio, there was this comedian called John Hodgson making jokes about me and about this event that took place 30 years ago, and they're still making me a laughingstock because of it.
	And the heartlessness and the cruelty of that is fascinating to me.
	And do you believe that there are perhaps thousands of other people in this world who've been through what you went through, but not as brave as you were to talk about it?
	Not as foolish.
	Okay, well, you know, bravery and foolishness, there's a very fine line, gossamer thin line between the two, isn't there?
	I was thinking earlier today about that question of why I did this in the first place.
	And it's a really good question in my mind.
	I did it, wrote about it, I mean, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
	It was the most fascinating thing that had ever happened to me.
	By the time I started writing in, I guess, April or March or April of 1986, I was just possessed with this experience because it had just been so unexpected and so remarkable.
	I thought people would be excited and fascinated to read the story.
	And I wrote the book, Communion.
	It's a book about perceptions.
	It's not a book of claims.
	I don't really know what happened on that night.
	I only know what I remember Perceiving, and that may not be what happened.
	I have no idea.
	Because when you have an experience at that level, you can't know.
	You can't absolutely cannot know.
	And if you say that, well, this is what happened and that's what happened, you're fooling yourself.
	Because you really mustn't.
	You must say, this is what I felt, this is what I experienced, this is what I perceived, not this is what happened.
	But you wouldn't be human if you didn't scream the questions, who did this and why?
	Well, I did that.
	And one of the beings at the initiating part of the experience had been someone I was familiar with.
	I had known him in college and in high school, for that matter.
	In fact, even in grade school, we'd known each other a long time.
	He had joined the Central Intelligence Agency.
	And I saw him.
	Not only did I see him there that night, but he told me a lot of things about what was then the super secret stealth aircraft, about its exhaust manifold being defective and would cause the planes to burn, which did happen later during testing.
	Some of them did burn for that very reason.
	And at that stage, if my memory serves me right, we didn't quite know about the stealth yet, did we?
	No, they were completely secret.
	I didn't know about them until that night.
	Now, however, as I began to get this thing together in my mind, I thought to myself, I've been attacked.
	And I had written a book a couple of years before called War Day with another collaborator, actually James Konectan, also a good friend.
	And War Day had elicited a lot of political response.
	Ted Kennedy had adopted it and read from it on the floor of the United States Senate and had contributed a blurb to it for publication purposes and so forth.
	And some months after the book's publication, one of his staffers called me and said that the White House was very angry about it because it had resulted in the derailment of a plan that they had had through FEMA,
	the Federal Emergency Management Administration, to harden the American industrial infrastructure against nuclear attack because they felt that someone in the administration wanted to bring on a limited so-called nuclear war because, as they were saying at the time, the Reagan administration was saying, a limited nuclear war is winnable and survivable.
	But of course, not for the people under the bombs.
	That's another story.
	And the whole point of War Day was it's not a winnable and survivable situation at all.
	And so he said, just be warned that the administration is after you.
	Now, in my understanding of American politics, that usually means a so-called political tax audit.
	And so I wasn't really worried because my taxes are all too simple, sadly enough.
	But then I thought to myself, my God, maybe I was drugged and maybe this fellow was part of it.
	And he was the only one who I actually knew.
	And that's why he's the only face I can remember.
	The others all looked like aliens, but they weren't aliens.
	They were trying to drive me crazy and drive me insane.
	And so I began to look him up to find him.
	I hadn't talked to him in years.
	And the damnedest thing, he turned out to have been dead for months.
	He died, had died the previous March.
	And that was the first inkling I had that there was something really very off here.
	And there's still something very off.
	I mean, forget the idea that it's aliens from another planet coming here to study us, which is what the UFO people put out.
	That's nonsense.
	It's something to do with us, something to do with us.
	And we have to look at ourselves within and that the world around us out without in order to even begin to understand this.
	In any case, after the book was published, we began to get letters.
	We got thousands and thousands of letters.
	My wife, who is a brilliant and very fortunately also a brilliant woman and a very fast reader, began reading these letters.
	They were coming in at the rate of 10,000 a week at one point.
	And we had hired a secretary and they were just going through them by the dozens.
	And she was keeping a chart of all of the outstanding, notable statements in the letters.
	And one day she came into me and she said the thing that has been the defining core of everything since.
	She said, Whitley, this has something to do with what we call death.
	And I thought about my friend that night and all of the letters where the visitors, so-called the alien scientists, show up in the company of the dead.
	And the dead always look entirely real and physically normal like he did.
	This is a remarkable, powerful change of being that's taking place here.
	It has to do with the dropping of the veil between the living and the dead.
	And speaking of supernatural, we seem to have come down to that book, A New Vision of the Unexplained, is about the dropping of that veil and the reconstructing of mankind in an entirely new way, which is happening now.
	Now, traditionally, we've tended to explain the things that we can't explain by creating some kind of paradigm, but having a separation between us here on terra firma and strange and woo-woo phenomena, are you trying to unify those things, bring us closer to the phenomenon?
	Well, we're trying something a little different, actually, because we've been actually Doing that for years, especially for the past 150 years, as this has been building.
	This isn't something that happened recently.
	This goes back all the way across human history.
	And in some respects, our hunts to the numinous world is about this process of awakening.
	And where we are now, though, is this.
	We need to take a phenomenological approach rather than what we do.
	What we do is this.
	We take a look at a certain phenomenon, a certain experience.
	Somebody describes something like I've just done.
	And then we say, oh, well, I either believe that or I don't believe that.
	It's true or it's not true.
	That is not the way to get ahead.
	We make no progress that way.
	If we step back and look at it in a much more phenomenological manner as a whole phenomenon, the person, his place in the culture, the experience, its relationship to other such experiences going all the way back across history,
	and then we begin to see trends and suggestions of possible new ways of questioning ourselves and the world around us.
	Is that another way of saying that what we believe is real around us is a tailored hologram for us?
	Well, let's say this.
	We need to put on hold any really final decision about what is real around us.
	Because the real, we need to include in the real, what we do is this.
	Most scientists and intellectuals will exclude anything from the real that cannot be related to present theory.
	And this has been going on for years, for hundreds of years.
	It's not new.
	It's one of the ways we have of thinking about things.
	But it's not enough.
	We are far more complicated and far more ambiguous, as is the universe around us, than that methodology allows.
	We have to drop that methodology and come to a new methodology that encloses the ambiguities more successfully.
	And what I mean by that is this.
	When somebody reports a ghost, well, ghost hunters may go with electronic instruments and try to find out if there's a ghost there.
	But no scientist will ever even entertain the notion.
	However, it's possible to look at that person, at his surroundings, at his background, at the description of the experience that a humanist might, a member of the humanities, might understand quite differently and say, well, this person is acting in such and such a tradition.
	And why?
	Why do we see things like this?
	Why do we even have gods?
	Why did a flash of light, or does a flash of light from time to time change the world?
	St. Paul on the road to Damascus experienced a flash of light and a voice in his head.
	The world changed because of that.
	This is not to be dismissed.
	It's powerful, important human experience.
	And to say that, well, that must not be real is to beg the question.
	It may not be real in a conventional physical sense, but it is certainly very real in what it does to us.
	So are we saying it's all in the mind?
	Absolutely not.
	That's the exact opposite.
	It is not all in the mind.
	There is something out there.
	Right, so the imprint is coming from outside to within, not from within to the outside.
	Science increasingly is assuming that the human being is meat and the mind is a consciousness is a side effect of the high level of neurological activity concentrated in the brain.
	What I think is more true, and if you say that, then you have to exclude all of this other experience as being spurious, anecdotal, as they say, which means that it's isolated, like St. Paul's experience is isolated and anecdotal and therefore has no meaning.
	But in fact, if you look across history, there are many examples where flashes of light, or in Moses' case, a burning bush, in St. Teresa of Avila's case, a little alien, apparently.
	These things have an effect on us.
	So to ignore that effect and pretend it doesn't exist is to ignore the reality around us.
	And that's what we must not do anymore.
	We must find a way of looking at it because there is something there inside and outside the mind.
	I think that the better way of looking at us is to say that we are embedded in the unknown and that unknown knows we are here and is acting in relationship to us in some way.
	It could be that everything that happens to us is simply a side effect and that the unknown doesn't really care very much one way or another about us.
	I don't know.
	But it is there.
	This is not all in the mind at all.
	But the part that's in the mind is terribly important.
	So could we extrapolate from this that there is such a thing as, as many people believe, God or a universal entity or force, maybe like a Star Wars force, that imprints itself upon us?
	I think that it's much easier to, and much more truthful at this point, or I should say rather than truthful, more accurate at this point, to say that there is simply something there that we are embedded in.
	There's some sort of larger consciousness that apparently extends outside of the physical.
	And beyond that, I don't think we can say anything.
	I think it's perfectly possible to be an atheist and still be completely comfortable with the idea that there is something outside of ourselves, that consciousness doesn't end with the brain.
	Is it a two-way traffic?
	It's necessary.
	Well, give you an example.
	Atheists take things a step farther.
	They say there is no God, and then they also say we are just meat.
	But it's not necessary.
	You don't have to say there's a God in order to believe or in order to explore the idea that consciousness may not be entirely contained in the brain.
	I don't have to believe it at all.
	In fact, I'm very dubious about the idea of God personally.
	And I guess what I was trying to ask, and not to you very well, is it a two-way traffic between us and the force?
	In other words, can we influence the force?
	You know, you hear all of these people, and it's happened in my own life, where you program for a thing and you want it badly enough and it comes to you.
	Can we have an impact on the force?
	Well, if it is a force, I don't know.
	I don't know what it is.
	It came into my life in the form of these little ferocious little beings who turned out to be incredibly wise and to have they spent 10 years with me on a nearly daily basis.
	I went through a kind of school and they were many different levels of manifestation.
	And so I don't think of it as a single force at all, but rather as a level of reality that is richly populated.
	And whether or not it's hierarchical, I don't know.
	I never saw any sign of any hierarchy.
	You said you had 10 years of this.
	You were then obviously compliant in the process.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Once I got past the initial shock and what I regard now as an initiatory awakening, I think that they'd been trying to wake me up to their presence for about six or seven months when the December 1985 thing happened.
	And they hadn't succeeded.
	They were beating me over the head, and I was just ignoring their existence because they just weren't in my reality.
	They had built the groundwork when I was a child.
	And eventually they broke through the shell of the filtering system that had built up around me over the next 25 years.
	And they did that by roughing me up physically so much that I just couldn't ignore it.
	I mean, when you have to go to the doctor after some kind of an occult experience, you have to know that it was something more than something in your head.
	You know, I mean, your doctor says to you, Whitley, you've been raped.
	It took me 25 years even to say those words to my wife.
	I was so humiliated by it.
	And I have to tell you, every time I get laughed at on the television or the radio, it's humiliation.
	The humiliation comes again and it's evil.
	And how do you withstand that?
	Because look, I interviewed you probably 12 years ago for one of the various programs that I was doing.
	And I was working for a radio station in London.
	And the boss of the radio station, I'm talking about the chief executive, had heard that you'd been on.
	And he said to me, what have you had him on for?
	He was not impressed with the idea that I'd been speaking with you.
	So you obviously know that you encounter a certain amount of opposition.
	How do you tough that out?
	Well, I have no choice but to tough it out.
	They all, without exception, have failed to understand what I'm trying to say.
	In a part, it's my fault because my writing is too vivid.
	They assume that I'm making claims when I am not making claims.
	I am trying to describe perceptions.
	These are two very, very different approaches.
	And you are a hugely creative man, this we know.
	Do you feel that do you get accused of blurring the line between fiction and fact because you deal in both?
	In my own mind, I do.
	How do I know?
	That's what I say in communion.
	That's why I say in the frontest piece of communion, the one sentence that's in large type right at the beginning of the book that everybody ignores.
	The human mind winks back from the dark.
	They don't understand what that means.
	It means that we're not just in here.
	We're also out there.
	Isn't there a piece of literature, isn't there a quote from something?
	I don't know what it's from.
	I stared into the abyss and the abyss stared back?
	Well, exactly.
	That is a quote.
	And it is not for me, unfortunately.
	I wish it was.
	But it is so deeply true.
	But let's talk, let's change the direction a little bit and talk about an assumption.
	There is an assumption around that, oh, well, there's so many stars out there.
	Now we know that the universe is full of planets.
	There must be billions of intelligent species out there.
	Now let's refocus a little bit on planet Earth.
	Planet Earth is a water planet.
	It has on its surface, we regard the oceans as being so huge, we think of the abyssal deep.
	This is actually a very thin film of water on the surface of this planet clinging to it.
	Given the rate of radiation of water molecules out into space that Earth has, which we have measured, this planet should have had its oceans dry up a billion years ago.
	But they're still here.
	We don't actually know why.
	Let me tell you another thing about this planet.
	Its moon Is perfectly sized in terms of its mass and orbiting the planet in such a way that it slows down the planet's rotational winds just enough to create variable weather and to allow things like large complex life forms to evolve.
	If the moon wasn't there, the rotational winds would be too fast and the planet, large life forms would never have evolved.
	So actually, it's all the Truman show.
	It's more than coincidence.
	Yeah.
	Oh, it goes beyond that.
	We're in a 90,000-wide mile envelope going around the sun in which a planet like ours can thrive without being either burnt, have its oceans boiled away or frozen solid.
	That's not a big envelope.
	Not only that, if you've ever been in an eclipse, you notice that for some strange reason, the moon perfectly eclipses the sun.
	Why?
	Why is it like that?
	Absolutely true.
	A little farther away, a little closer.
	I stood on the roof of a building in central London when we had a very big eclipse in the late 1990s.
	You might remember this very famous one.
	I think a lot of us in the Western Hemisphere were affected by this.
	But you stand there, and it was, I think, 11 o'clock in the morning, and you go to total darkness.
	The sun was up there.
	It was sort of autumn time in London.
	And I stood on the roof of the Met Office here, the main weather forecasting center in London.
	They'd allowed me to go up there and broadcast from there.
	And you're right.
	One disk covered another.
	Right.
	The elegance of that.
	And then you look at the way the solar system is formed.
	The gas giants are like a barrier that prevents big, rough stuff from coming into the and getting involved in the inner planets for the most part.
	That's not perfect, they're not a perfect barrier, obviously, but they suck up a lot of the big asteroids and comets and so forth.
	Then the moon, if you look at the moon, you see it's covered with craters, and that's because it takes a lot more hits.
	The immediate area is cleansed by these objects, protecting planet Earth.
	Now, if this is all an accident, and it may be, I would submit that planets like ours are probably incredibly rare in this universe.
	If it's not an accident, then somebody built the darn thing and did a pretty good job of it.
	And if we ruin it, I have a feeling we'll find out who that was.
	Do you think that whoever the creator might be, if there is a creator, the creator is actually watching and waiting to see what we do?
	In other words, whether we play out the drama, whether we learn our lessons, whether we fix it.
	If somebody created this place, they're bound to be interested in it.
	And if they are interested in it, they're bound to be concerned.
	But it's also quite possible that it came about simply because the universe is so large and it is a random event of extraordinary rarity, meaning that we are essentially alone.
	And everything we are seeing here is us in one way or another.
	And I find that possibility extraordinarily fascinating.
	I don't believe or disbelieve anything, but I do find that possibility to be very fascinating and very compelling because of the fact that the dead and the so-called aliens are so intimately involved with each other.
	Let me tell you a story.
	This happened in the South, in the United States.
	An FAA investigator and his wife, that's a federal aviation administration investigator and his wife were at home.
	Their old dog was asleep on the hearth.
	It was evening, night rather.
	Their little seven-year-old boy was upstairs in bed.
	Suddenly, the dog became extremely restless, very unusual, because the dog had already been out and he was a creature of habit.
	They took the dog out again, and as the wife opened the front door, she saw a ball of light, an orb of light, fly out across the trees and disappear.
	She turned around and called to her husband, you're going to get a call soon.
	I just saw a plane going down in flames.
	The next moment, the seven-year-old came running down the stairs saying, mommy, daddy, mommy, daddy.
	George, his older brother, just not the real name, came into my room with a bunch of little blue men and he said to tell you that he was all right.
	And they began making frantic efforts to get a hold of me, and they did.
	I'm not that difficult to get a hold of, actually.
	And the father related this story, and he said, Mr. Streeber, is there any reason for us to believe this is true?
	Because our older boy was killed in an auto accident a week ago?
	And I said, yes, it actually happens a lot.
	It's a fairly common experience.
	And he cried on the phone, and I don't blame him.
	I cried too.
	But here's the point.
	Is this aliens, really?
	I somehow don't think so.
	I don't know.
	Could be that they come from a world in which the veil between the living and the dead has already fallen, in which case they are already heavily involved with us, just not with the physical level yet.
	Do you fear, Wickley, that there is a truth so convoluted and so beyond our ken out there that we're never actually going to put the bits together and make the picture?
	No, we're making the picture now.
	It's coming together.
	It will Come together, definitely.
	That's what this whole, all of this that's happening is about.
	We have just gone through the most nightmarish century in the history of the species.
	I would say since about 10,000 BC, the inception of the so-called Younger Dryas, when there was a 2,000-year planetary upheaval that almost extinguished the human species, that was probably worse than this.
	But the upheavals of the 20th century, the extraordinary, self-destructive collapse of the best civilization that we have ever formed, the Western civilization, was an unprecedented horror.
	And we still don't know why it happened.
	It started at the beginning of World War I with a single bullet fired into an Austrian archduke and didn't end until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
	And now another battle has started between the West and Islam, which where did that come from?
	And, you know, we weren't in, we weren't, we had no quarrel with Islam until after the last quarrel was ended.
	And it's as if we have to have some sort of a quarrel.
	In any case, we have been distracted by all of this, the result of which is behind our backs, the planet is failing in profound ways and quickly.
	The oceans are warming much more quickly than had been believed possible.
	The Greenland Sea is warming much more quickly.
	Something is wrong in Siberia with the permafrost and these enormous explosions keep occurring, creating gigantic craters in the permafrost as if methane beneath the permafrost is turning into gas and then somehow being ignited and exploding.
	There was a fire off the coast of Siberia last summer, underwater fire.
	Apparently a lot of methane was released from methane hydrates under the ocean and caught fire when it came into contact with volcanic plumes.
	This isn't going to last.
	You talk about things like that happening, and you're talking about a planet that's not going to be like this for long.
	You're having terrific violent weather in the UK and we are in the eastern United States now too, both for the same reasons.
	That is that the Gulf Stream has weakened dramatically in its flow over the past 20 years.
	And now that's resulted in the jet stream in the air dipping down into areas where it does not usually go.
	And every so often one of the tabloid newspapers here will give you a little diagram about that and then they'll move on to something else.
	But you're right.
	We've had two winters now where the eastern seaboard of the U.S. has been beset by snow.
	And here in the UK, we've had largely, not entirely this year, milder weather and a lot of rain and wind.
	A lot of rain and violent weather.
	So, you know, this is the book I wrote, Superstorm with Art Bell, which was just laughed off the stage of the world as being so extreme that it couldn't be true, turns out to be entirely true.
	Everything in it, you can read, if you want to find out what's going to happen next, just read Superstorm.
	It's there.
	I mean, look, how many times have I watched that movie?
	love it.
	But...
	But the naysayers will say to you, Whitley, the doomsday scenario hasn't happened.
	We're still here.
	It's still okay.
	It's happening right now.
	It's unfolding right now.
	It will become undeniable over the next five years, if not sooner.
	And what about the people who will say, well, yeah, we're marched up to the top of the hill and marched down again so many times?
	There are people who keep reminding me about something I put on the air in London before anybody else because I'd heard Art talking about it, Y2K.
	We were all built up for this great year 2000 computer crash because computers couldn't crank over the dates and we were told that it would be hell.
	It would be hell when we hit January the 1st, 2000.
	It didn't happen in the end.
	And of course, I built people up for it in London.
	Art built people up for it in the US.
	Ultimately, it didn't happen.
	Well, I thought it was a nonsense.
	I told Art that myself.
	I said, it's not going to happen.
	I said, you're selling all this storable food, and people don't want to return it.
	And after the day after Y2K didn't happen, I called him up and I said, how are you doing?
	And he said, well, I don't think I'll be selling any more storable food.
	But, you know, he believed it implicitly.
	And I said, it's not going to happen because it's a fixable, it's a relatively easy fix.
	And we've known about it now for about four years.
	Therefore, the major systems are not going to go down.
	And they didn't.
	Of course, people I've talked to about that when I've raised the subject of Y2K said, well, yes, of course, the world was alerted to it.
	So the Boffins and the experts got to work on it.
	And we were going to fall into this trap.
	But because of people like Art alerting the world to it, we were able to get onto it and fix it.
	So it never happened, but it was going to.
	I don't know what you make of that.
	Well, it was a real phenomenon.
	There was an enormous amount of effort put into fixing it.
	And it was fixed for the most part.
	And there were a few minor problems, but basically, most of the big computer systems in the world were fixed.
	Right.
	So it was a...
	No, but I can assure you that the environmental situation is beyond repair.
	You can be certain of it.
	Of course, there are people I'm sure you will think they're not helping the situation, like Alex Jones, so-called conspiracy theory broadcaster going on air saying that climate change is a hoax.
	I heard him say it only yesterday.
	It's a lie.
	In his case, he knows it, I'm sure, to be a lie.
	Just like the Koch brothers and all those other people.
	Rupert Murdoch.
	Well, we'll see in the fullness of time, won't we?
	We will indeed see.
	And we are seeing if we look at the totality of our lives, and I can tell you that I've just been through the British winter here.
	And when I was a child, British winters were damn cold.
	They were icy.
	And we really, you know, I've got what we call pullovers here, you know, sweaters.
	And for the most part, this winter and last winter, I haven't worn them, haven't needed them.
	So there's something going on, I think.
	I wonder if you have any thoughts on John Podesta, former White House insider, outgoing White House insider.
	He's been trying for a long time, John Podesta, to get a release of documents about this that are classified and illegally at this point classified.
	He said, hasn't he, and went into the media very recently saying that his one great regret during his tenure was that he wasn't able to get those documents that would prove one way or the other whether there was anything else out there released.
	Well, they probably don't prove whether or not there's anything else out there, but they do show that the United States and UK governments have made efforts to understand and have come to the conclusion that there is something unknown.
	There's a report that was already released in 2006 by the Ministry of Defense called the Condine Report, not the Condon Report, C-O-N-D-I-G-N, Condine report.
	In it, it's a 408-page document.
	In it, in a discussion of the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident, it says there are plasmas unknown to science which are capable of altering the human mind and making people think things happened that didn't.
	And that is an admission of the reality of this.
	It's as simple as that.
	And it's the sort of thing that you're going to find if such documents are ever released by the U.S. government, that they've known for a long time that there was something like that going on, but they can't identify what it is.
	A few days after John Podesta tweeted that his greatest regret after leaving as a presidential advisor was that he had not gotten that documentation released, the White House released a statement saying there was absolutely no evidence of an alien presence on Earth.
	And I don't think either one of them is lying.
	I think that probably the White House's evidence is, the government's evidence is about something, but not necessarily that.
	They don't know what it is.
	And Podesta is right about the fact that classified information that's been classified for more than 30 years should be, by law, released in this country.
	And it hasn't been.
	Do you think it ever will be?
	I think Hillary Clinton probably would release it if she became president.
	I don't think any Republican presidential candidate would ever release a bit of it at all.
	And I think Obama, Barack Obama, is too uneasy, too uneasy a president and too unsure of himself to do something like that because of the implications being so unknown to him.
	One other thing I wanted to ask you about, Whitley, and I know our time is short, so I'll keep this short.
	You also write and talk about somebody who visited you, I think it was in a hotel suite, and revealed to you a number of truths about life, the world, and everything, which you say have unfolded since this incident, which I think was 1998 and the present day.
	What were the major milestones of those things that you were told that have revealed themselves or are in the process of?
	Well, among the things, the book Superstorm is based on some explanations of the structure of climate change that he discussed and talked about and which were considered completely ridiculous at the time, but have now been generally accepted as true.
	There was some very interesting discussion about intelligent machines and high density memory being using gases as a method of managing high density memory.
	And this is being worked on now.
	And I think that his comments about intelligent machines were very interesting.
	And they continue as we move toward much, much more information access and packed computers.
	In other words, computers that not only possess a great deal of information, but possess sophisticated means of accessing this information.
	We are beginning to see some of his predictions again come true in that area.
	Quite a few predictions he made that have come true, and none, as far as I can tell, that haven't.
	As for you, Wigley, do you worry about this technological world that we live in?
	Only this morning I read in one of our newspapers here something that people have been talking about in the States for a number of weeks, actually months, the fact that your smart TV may well be monitoring what you say.
	There was even a story I heard from America only yesterday that isn't there a new interactive Barbie doll, they say, that may potentially report back on what kids are saying to it.
	Do you worry about these things?
	I do.
	Privacy is the border around the individual.
	And when that border is breached, a person's vision of themselves is compromised.
	This is why privacy is, we instinctively treasure it so much.
	And the invasion of privacy at every level by government and by industry is just reprehensible.
	It's grotesque.
	It is an invasion of the greatest invention, of the greatest discovery of Western civilization, which is the discovery of the individual.
	And this assault on the individual is, as I say, it's tragic.
	But in the meantime, we're all being told how cool it is to be part of a greater community, whatever that community may be, and we've got to share, share, share.
	There has been a device, or I should say, a type of microscopic device that has been invented recently, which is thinner than a human hair, can bind with neurons in the brain, and can receive signals from the outside.
	This is the beginning of human-machine interface.
	You could conceivably have a situation where you would be in your mind, suddenly able to access the vast knowledge in a computer system the same way we do now through our fingertips with Google, but just by thinking about it.
	That's not today, but it probably is tomorrow.
	And they'll be telling us why that's such a great thing.
	And sitting here hearing about that now, I don't think it is.
	At some point, we will have disappeared.
	We will disappear as selves.
	Gee.
	Well, that's a scary outlook, and that's a very trivial way of me summing it up.
	It is frightening indeed.
	Are you on any level optimistic?
	Because they say the human spirit is the strongest thing.
	It is the thing that can survive all things.
	Are you on any level optimistic about our future?
	With all of these threats and problems and crises and adversities we face, will we come through it?
	Can we?
	The probability is high that on some level in a thousand years there will be a human presence still on Earth.
	What condition it will be in, I don't know.
	We're going down two paths at the same time.
	One is three paths, excuse me.
	One is a path towards environmental disruptions that will be very damaging.
	Another is a path towards scientific breakthroughs that could have a surprisingly powerful impact, not only on those disruptions, but on our lives at every level you can conceive of.
	The third path is this path toward a more inclusive and much larger vision of ourselves.
	And this is the path I work on.
	This is the path of the book Supernatural.
	And it is where I think we need to go because both of the other paths are going to present us with challenges that are of extraordinary importance and power, challenges to the viability of the individual and also to the survival of the species.
	The third path will help us find new direction.
	It's a good point to park this conversation, Wickley.
	Always a pleasure to talk with you.
	We never run out of things to talk about.
	Look, I know that in your life you're facing such challenges.
	And, you know, I just send you my best and warmest wishes from over here.
	And I'm glad that you made time for me.
	In the midst of everything that all of your work and your personal challenges, do you get time for yourself?
	Do you get time to relax and stare at the walls?
	Ever?
	We'll leave that for later.
	Well, my best regards to you, Whitley, and I'm looking forward to our next conversation.
	Please take care and give my love to Anne.
	Same to you, Howard.
	Thank you very much.
	Always controversial, always for sure interesting, Whitley Streeber.
	And we'll have him on again.
	I'll put a link to his work at my website, www.theunexplained.tv, the website designed, devised, and kept rolling by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
	Thank you, Adam.
	If you want to get in touch, that's the place to get in touch at the website www.theunexplained.tv.
	You can send a donation.
	You can send me a message and your thoughts about the show.
	Whatever you want to do, you can do it there.
	It's a one-stop shop.
	Thank you very much for all of your support.
	Hopefully, I'm going to be a little healthier next time.
	You and I speak together.
	This chest infection has been around me for about four or five weeks now, so it needs to go.
	Its time has been and gone, I think.
	So hopefully, I'm going to be much better than this very, very soon.
	But thank you for all of your support.
	Please keep it coming.
	And until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
	Please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I'm in London.
	This has been The Unexplained.
	Thank you.
	Take care.

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