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April 7, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:16:57
Edition 200 - Celebrating 200 Editions

Some of our greatest guests - plus a new conversation with Astronomer Heather Couper andAstronomer/Astronaut Nigel Henbest...

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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 edition 200 of the Unexplained.
And as I recorded those words, I really couldn't believe that I was saying them because I know I've said this before, but I well remember sitting exactly here, 199 shows ago, recording edition one, and thinking, I wonder if anybody's going to hear this.
And I wonder if anybody will email me to tell me that they've heard it.
And they did.
You know, it ticked both of those boxes.
So I'm very delighted that the show's developed and that I've learned more about recording techniques and I've learned a great deal more about the guests and about you and the kind of things you want to hear.
Now on this edition, we're going to do things a little differently.
There'll be no shout-outs and there won't be a guest in the regular sense.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to look back at some of my favorite interviews and also bring you a new interview with Heather Cooper, the famous British astronomer, and her writing partner Nigel Henbest, who is in training to be a Virgin Galactic Astronaut.
That project is still on track on course, and we'll hear more about that in this edition.
So we're going to look back, first of all, on some of the great guests that we've had here, including people like Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut, and the father of modern ufology, Stanton J. Friedman, who I've interviewed a number of times, and it was great recently to get him on The Unexplained.
What an interesting man he is, and what a depth of research he's done over the years.
We've had them all on this show.
We've had psychics and mediums and scientists and people who believe that they are pursued by creatures or agents.
People who investigate UFOs and people who, in the purest sense of the word, investigate space, and people who investigate weather.
People who investigate weather manipulation.
Just about everything has been fair game for this show over the years.
Now, I couldn't have done any of it without a lot of help from you.
With your support and your donations, please keep those coming if you can.
But also Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who joined The Unexplained way back in 2009 when we were both working at Radio City in Liverpool.
And he volunteered to help me with this, and I couldn't have done any of it without Adam's guidance and support and the things that he's taught me about how to create a show like this and how to get it out to people.
So, Adam, thank you very much indeed.
Okay, let's look back before we get to the interview with Heather Cooper and Nigel Henbest at some of my favorite guests on this edition.
We're going to start with a man who walked on the moon, Edgar Mitchell.
And he told me on the interview that I did with him back in 2010 about the sort of training that he'd had to go through.
I scored pretty high on all sorts of tests, so not a dummy, and very much devoted to the mission.
And so it all worked for me.
And at that stage, when you were selected, at what stage did you become aware that you were going to be sent on a big mission?
Well, I'll have to tell you our protocol a little bit.
When we were first selected in, the 19 of us that went into our group, we were asked to choose a technical specialty in the space industry that we wanted to serve our time in, kind of an apprentice job.
I, along with Fred Hayes, Apollo 13 astronaut and a shuttle astronaut, Fred Hayes chose to be associated with the lunar module and help build the lunar module.
And so we were the astronaut representatives to go to Grumman Aircraft Factory on Long Island in New York and be the astronaut representative during the building and testing of the first lunar modules.
So in other words, you had an input into the whole thing?
Yeah.
But it was just a choice.
I thought that would get me a little closer to going to the moon, which it did.
Then when we finished that assignment with delivery of the first lunar module, flight test lunar module to Cape Kennedy for testing on Apollo 9, we were freed up to start into the crew cycle.
So I got selected then as backup crew, which was essentially a training assignment, backup crew on Apollo 10.
Fred got went to Apollo 11.
Now, our procedure at that point in time was three flights later, if you served a backup position, and which they used as a training session, then three flights later you were eligible to become a prime crew.
Well that meant I would be eligible for prime crew on Apollo 13 and Fred on 14.
Okay.
However, I served my backup on Apollo 10 with Gordon Cooper and he retired, wanted to retire from the program shortly after that assignment.
And Alan Shepard, who had been grounded for a medical problem for a number of years, my near syndrome, an inner ear problem, had that fixed and he wanted to take Gordo's place, which he was selected to take the place.
However, headquarters in Washington said, Alan, you have been grounded and not training for a number of years.
Best you take a little more training time with your crew.
And so we switched missions with Jim Lovell and Fred Hayes and that crew.
They had 14, but they took 13, got the bad machine.
And we took 14, got the good machine, and flew the Apollo 13 mission.
Boy, they got the bad machine and how.
But of course, you were training up for 14 while that drama, which I remember when I was a little boy following, we all did around the world, the sense of drama about that thing.
Obviously, you'd have been seeing that as somebody training up for the next mission.
When you watched the dilemma of the ground crew and when you watched the fate of those guys up there, how did that make you feel?
Well, you see, because I was the most experienced lunar module pilot on the ground at that point, in training, ready to fly, I went to the simulators and was practicing in the simulators everything they had to do in space with the damaged machine because the lunar module was the lifeboat, the recovery vessel, to get them back.
So I practiced in the simulator everything they had to do before they had to do it.
And, Edgar, was it just like the movie where you had to work day and night, really, practicing with this thing, and the air filter was the big problem, wasn't it, to be able to filter out the carbon dioxide?
I let the engineers work on that one.
I was more concerned with the flight maneuvers they'd have to do with the lunar module.
And that was what I did.
Now, it so happens, if you remember the Apollo 13 movie, Ken Matchingly was a command module pilot on Apollo 13 that got bumped because he had been exposed to measles by one of the astronauts' children.
So he and I were the two senior astronauts in line there during the Apollo 13 recovery.
And we both were in the simulators and working on the problems of how do we get him home.
And so we both eventually then went on to go to the moon in a different flight than we were initially closed.
I was supposed to go on 13, went on 14.
He was supposed to go on 13, went on 16.
Did you feel, this is a struggle, I'm looking for the word, but did you feel lucky that you avoided that experience of going on 13?
You know what I'm saying?
Well, I have to look at, of course, I have to look at it that way because I got to land on the moon and do the first science mission on the moon without a shepherd.
So, yes, in my career, that was a lucky thing to do.
Fred Hayes stayed on, then through shuttle flights after that, because he was one of the test pilots to test the early shuttle spacecraft.
But he didn't get to land on the moon, and I did.
We were close buddies and very close buddies then.
But I consider myself very lucky that I was able to help he and the crew get back safely to Earth.
But then I got to take over and do the first science on the mission on the moon.
We just called it Apollo 14 instead of 13.
What a tremendous responsibility you had, though, when you were practicing those maneuvers.
You had to absolutely get it right because the margin for error for those guys coming back on 13 was so slim, wasn't it?
Yeah, we didn't have much room for error, but we had thought about, okay, we might have to use the lunar module as a lifeboat, but nobody really took that too seriously.
But we thought about it, and we had the protocol in place.
We just had to practice and make sure we could do it, and that's what I was doing in the simulator during that period.
And Ken was doing in the command module simulator, was learning how to bring the command module back through the atmosphere with virtually no power, with a limited amount of power, because they had lost virtually all of their power during the explosion.
I mean, it was absolutely miraculous to be able to use the lunar module to do as much as it did.
Did anybody really believe that it was capable of that?
You made it do things it wasn't designed to do.
Oh, yes, it was an initial, the initial backup plan was the lunar module could be used to move the old stack around in case of emergency, but it was never taken very seriously and it wasn't a high-priority item, but it was in the back of the mind of the designers and the planning back in the early days.
Well, not many of us get the chance to speak to a man who's actually set foot on the moon.
Edgar Mitchell did that, and I was delighted to be able to speak with him back in 2010.
Richard C. Hoagland was a pillar and mainstay of Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM for many years.
He's still on Coast to Coast AM with George Newy and does many other things these days.
I finally got to meet him in Liverpool in 2009.
I'd been able to get him onto the list of speakers for the Beyond Knowledge Conference, where quite literally, he blew everybody's socks off with his presentation about the rings of Saturn.
So after his presentation, which he delivered flawlessly without an um or an uh and with amazing pictures, he held the audience absolutely enraptured for two hours.
The man who brought us the face on Mars, the man who brought us those revelations about the moon and NASA, is now talking about Saturn, Saturn having within the rings, the B ring of Saturn, something that is clearly, well, to my eyes and the pictures that were taken on July 26th, not natural, not normal, shouldn't be there.
I'm glad you agree.
Because any reasonable observer, when they look at those images, which are official NASA images, can only come to one conclusion.
Something artificial was built in the rings of Saturn a long, long time ago.
It probably is the reason that the rings of Saturn are so incredibly splendiferous, a word that's not often used, but in this case is totally appropriate.
And it probably had to do with a technology that some extraordinarily advanced ET culture was attempting to use at Saturn to do something very important.
So we have here in the rings of Saturn a construction of some kind that is geometrically perfect, which shouldn't be there because the shape and the appearance of this thing, pictures of this thing taken by Cassini, the probe on the 26th of July.
And I thought, okay, well, that's Richard.
Here we have another face on Mars here, some more artifacts on the moon, you know, more structures on the moon.
This is really interesting, and that'll get him a few headlines, and it's another brick in the wall, really, literally.
But much more than that.
I think it's a breakthrough.
There's no possible way to explain away this geometry in the B-ring.
There's just no way.
Once you posit that that is real, it's ancient, it had a purpose, then you can begin to explore what that purpose might have been.
You begin to explore implications of people that may now know this physics, that have rediscovered it or back-engineered it, whatever you want to call it, and are using it in some kind of enormous political chess game to threaten the major space powers into doing What they will.
And the evidence gathered by Cassini, particularly that tetrahedral, whatever it is at the edge of the rings, that spaceship-looking thing, to me says we're dealing with an ongoing geopolitical drama that is playing itself out and has many real-world implications, which is why we've got to stop lying to ourselves about what's out there and figure out who is behind it and how it's relevant to our current life today.
Then you got to a stage in the talk.
I mean, I'm trying to compress a few fascinating hours into a few minutes here, which is really unfair and really difficult, but let's give it a try.
A technology that can affect time, which is fascinating to all of us.
You know, the person who says they're not interested in time shifting is telling lies, I think, probably.
But also something, and this is where I thought, oh, no, Dick's coming, I'm stuck here a bit, where the Nazis may have had experiments with this or may have done experiments with this.
We know they did.
We have documented proof.
When the wall collapsed, a number of the so-called satellite states opened their files, Czechoslovakia being one.
Farrell has, Dr. Joseph Farrell, has excellent sourcing about Nazi history and the engineering and political background through the Kamlar projects of something called the Nazi Bell, which when you look at the eyewitness testimony of one general in particular who was charged by the Czechs with shooting 60 scientists and engineers at the end of the war as Germany was collapsing to preserve the secret of these experiments,
it's clear the Nazis were looking at torsion as a technology that ultimately they hoped would help them win the war.
It was called war decisive because it's a technology that kind of follows Arthur C. Clarke's famous maxim.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?
I mean, whoever is operating with this physics and this engineering now can run rings around us.
And my model says it came from that bifurcation at the end of the war when the Nazis, as opposed to being defeated, took their real toys, went somewhere, and have had 60 years of uninterrupted whatever to develop extraordinarily advanced versions of their primitive experiments at the end of the war.
And they had technology that's absolutely fundamental that you can see there on Saturn, but is fundamental throughout the universe.
And as you say, potentially for 60 years, you believe they have been doing something with it.
And perhaps what we call UFOs or things that appear in our skies or weird blips that appear in pictures from moonshots or from shuttle missions.
This is what these guys are using.
I think that most of them are this.
I think that real aliens are very rare and far between because the pattern of the sightings, the phenomenology of the UFO phenomena, bespeaks of someone intensely interested in terrestrial affairs.
Who would be more interested in directing, controlling, manipulating terrestrial affairs than someone who is a terrestrial who actually wanted to go on and rule the earth like the Nazis tried to do?
And that makes a lot of sense for a very basic reason, to my very small brain dick.
The fact of the matter is that somebody, if there was an alien civilization out there and they wanted to dominate everything, well, maybe we'd be a little small and a little too thick, unclever for them.
You know, maybe they wouldn't be interested in playing those kinds of games with us.
If you have the universe at your disposal, why bother?
The only people who care about what's going on in planet Earth are people from planet Earth.
And I think, I mean, look, in the wildest extrapolations of this model, remember during the 60s there was a spate of movies and television shows.
I'm thinking of the Bond films.
I'm thinking of the man from Uncle.
I'm thinking of similar, you know, get smart even at some level.
And they all talked about a third force that threatened mankind and had to be dealt with by the world governments in collective action.
Even during the height of the Cold War, we had Russian agents and American agents collaborating in, I think, the Bond films, no, it was Man from Uncle, to defeat Thrush.
Was that, as Hollywood is so often, a telegraphed inside message that this in fact is the larger geopolitical reality we're facing, trying to deal with, and not very successfully?
But these people, the Nazis for one, got their hands on this technology.
Where did they find it?
Where was it?
How did they find it?
They developed it.
It turns out that in 1924, a Nobel laureate named Gerlich, who was an expert in magnetic spin and gravity, began a series of experiments that led him, I think, inevitably into the torsion field.
Because it's not that hidden if you know what you're looking at.
I mean, in Einstein's relativity, you have to accelerate mass up to near the speed of light to get relativistic time dilation.
In torsion physics, all you do is spin a mass.
And if you have an appropriate detector next to this spinning mass, it will show you a change in the quantity of time.
Kozarev, the famous Russian astrophysicist I talked about, who basically invented this field and was put in the gulag, by the way, by Stalin for decades.
And when he came out, he had all these insights because he had a lot of time to think.
You know, when you're in prison, there's not much else to do but think.
He crafted a completely coherent alternative view of what he called the flow of time, which is basically the torsion field, the ether, and how it affects chemical processes, nuclear processes, geological processes, star processes, how it makes stars shine.
He put it together as a coherent theory.
His papers are on the web.
Just Google Cozarev, Torsion Field Physics.
You will have a ton of careful, documented science to read and to ponder as you look at what we're seeing in these images from NASA.
So what was developed, stumbled on, created, found, whatever by these people is something that is also out there on Saturn.
Much older, much bigger than it is.
Much older, but it's something That is so fundamental that it is the absolute power.
We're talking about the absolute power here.
It is the unified field theory of everything, and you turn it into engineering, and you become God.
And potentially, which is what excited me tonight, and I'm going to let you go because we must be very tired after all of this.
Is that perhaps if the media handle it properly, and I'm not sure if they will, but I hope they do, this is the biggest news story for decades.
It should be.
But remember, there's a cover-up in place.
It's going to be brave souls who look at these pictures and who independently can think a coherent thought without an authority figure telling them what to think and ask really probing questions.
How can you have structured, repeating geometry in an environment, the rings of Saturn, where everything is moving at high velocities?
There's shear effects, there's smearing.
There should be no geometry.
And we're seeing buildings of a humongous, gargantuan, bromidian size.
Things that look like massive, gigantic, enormous skyscrapers, and the only reason we were able to see them is because of the conditions at the time the pictures were taken.
The shadowing, the once every 15-year equinox where the rings of Saturn are edge onto the sun, so even a slight bump gives you a nice long shadow.
In essence, it was able to magnify Cassini's resolution by a factor of maybe 100.
And that's why we're seeing this geometry at that low-incidence grazing sun angle.
Richard Hoagland, who'll be back on this show very soon.
Stanton J. Friedman is a man who is rightly called the father of modern ufology, a man whose depth of research is pretty remarkable.
He told me, when we were finally able to speak on The Unexplained recently, the story of how he tracked down and spoke to Jesse Marcel, the man who was right at the epicenter of what happened in Roswell in 1947.
Called information in Homa, Louisiana, wherever it was, and got a number for Jesse Marcel, and he talked to me.
I gave him the station manager's name, Bill Allen, and explained that I had had a clearance for 14 years, and I was very interested in this subject.
So he told me his story.
Well, I found out later, Jesse was one of the few who couldn't deny his involvement.
His picture was in newspapers.
His name was all over the place.
I didn't know that at the time, you'll understand.
I didn't know anything about the Roswell incident.
And so he gave me some names of people.
He didn't have a precise date, but I shared that information with the colleague.
And then a few months later, I'm in Bemidji, Minnesota, everybody's favorite town, giving a talk at a college.
And somebody came up to me afterward, ever hear of a crash saucer in New Mexico?
Well, yes, tell me some more.
And they told me the story, the Barney Barnett story out west of Roswell.
And then my colleague, Bill Moore, found a story in your English Flying Saucer Review about a well-known English actor, Yuey Green, who commented in an article that while driving across the United States from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, he heard on the radio about a crashed saucer in New Mexico.
And he could pin down the date.
It wasn't a trip you made very often, and the roads were lousy, to be frank about it, at that time.
And he could pin down the date, first week in July.
I have no idea that Huey Green was, if this is the same Huey Green, he was very, very famous.
He was a sort of Ed Sullivan character in the UK.
He was Canadian, originally Canadian.
Yeah, originally Canadian.
Well, his son was living in Canada at the time, I believe, and that's how we got the date.
Okay.
So going to the newspapers at the University of Minnesota, my colleague found the story.
Early July, and headline stories, gave us a lot of names.
In the next year and a half, Bill and I tracked down 62 people in conjunction with the case.
The old-fashioned way.
You know, we didn't have the internet to go by.
You spent a lot of money on phone calls.
And sure, every once in a while I got lucky.
I checked with editor and publisher.
Oh, there's a newspaper in Roswell.
What did I know?
The Roswell Daily Record called, asked for the editor from 1947, long gone.
What do you need?
Well, I've got this article about a guy named Walter Howe Taught.
His name is spelled four different ways in the newspapers I had.
Before I can finish this sentence, he says, oh, his wife works here.
What?
Wow.
That's how it happens, though, isn't it?
One connection leads to another, and you can't do that online.
No, no.
And so I talked to the wife, talked to Walter.
He was a great source of information.
He was the public relations officer for the base, but he also had been a bombardier during the war and was a good enough one.
He was chosen to drop the instrument package at the time they set off the fourth atomic bomb.
Well, fifth, I guess it was.
You pick your best people to do that because without the instrument package, this was Operation Crossroads in the Pacific in 1946.
So Walter was more than 20 missions over Japan, outstanding reputation in town.
I checked around, and he gave us names, and he had a base yearbook, which was helpful.
And so we worked very hard.
Also, we had the name of the rancher, and I called information in New Mexico, and I said, I'm trying to find somebody, last name Brazil, not a common name, B-R-A-Z-E-L.
That was a rancher.
And she says, what city?
I don't know.
Southeastern New Mexico.
Well, let's see.
Oh, I do have one in Carrizozo.
I said, is that in southeastern New Mexico?
I didn't know.
Has he worked?
She said, yes.
Well, it turns out that was the rancher's son.
And he had just gotten his phone two weeks earlier.
That may sound strange to people, but New Mexico has a lot of land and not many people.
And sometimes in life, things are brought to you.
There's a thing called serendipity.
You know, there's happenstance serendipity.
Things just fall into place.
Well, sometimes you work hard, too.
I was trying to check on, there's a famous picture of General Roger Ramey, head of the 8th Air Force, and at that time Colonel Thomas Jefferson DuBose, taken in Raimi's office with some phony wreckage.
And I thought, you know, many of the World War II United States officers, military officers after World War II, were West Point grads because everybody else got out, you know.
The United States didn't have a big standing army back in the 30s, to say the least.
And so I called West Point.
I always like to look for people with unusual names.
It makes it a lot easier to find them, frankly.
Easier than Smith or Jones.
Oh, boy.
And so I called West Point.
Yes, I mean, Thomas Jefferson Dubose.
There can't be a lot of them around.
And yes, he's still alive, and he is in Florida.
They wouldn't tell me his exact address, but I located him.
I called him.
He was in his mid-80s.
Explained that I had seen the picture and was very interested, and I'd like to send him some background information.
My parents were retired in Florida.
I knew I'd be going down there to see them.
Could I stop by?
And he said yes.
So I met with him in person.
Great old guy.
He was sharp, to say the least.
And he told me his story.
And everybody else was dead, and nobody's going to come back to him.
He was a retired general when I saw him, had loads of flying time, set up the Air Force search and rescue teams.
So I met with him in person, and standing three feet away from me, he tells me that he took the call from General Ramey's boss, General McMullen, giving him three orders.
I want you to, this is after the press story went out.
I want you to get the press off our back.
I don't care how you do it.
I want you to send some of that wreckage to Washington, which is where McMullen was, today with one of your Colonel couriers.
And I want you never to say anything about that.
That's an order.
Do I need to put it in writing, Colonel?
knew each other, both West Pointers, incidentally.
So the three elements...
Get us some of this material so we can see what it is.
And then continue the start of the cover.
Dubose have complained.
I said, look, when a two-star general tells a colonel what to do, this is right after the war, he does it.
How high do you want me to jump?
He doesn't say, well, I don't think that's a good idea, general.
Come on.
You know, there's a real world out there.
So I found DuBose.
I talked to him.
I met with him twice, as a matter of fact.
And some of that's filmed, and we had to edit it a bit, but he talked about some of the women at the base.
I won't go into that.
Okay.
But there is an entire DVD, again, on my website, www.stantonfriedman.com, which has first-hand testimony from 20-some Roswell witnesses.
Stanton Friedman, a pleasure to talk with him recently on The Unexplained.
Larry Warren is a fascinating man, an American living now in Liverpool.
And when I was doing some broadcasting there, I was able to get him into a studio at Radio City in the big tower in Liverpool.
And he told me about his experience of being at Rendlesham Forest and the risks of speaking out about what he knows.
You come out of the military and you've gone through the black hole Disneyland and you come out the other side, you lift honorably, and then you come back in the real world and you're kind of not right, you know.
When you say not right.
Well, you know, you're just kind of wild, you know.
And you're dealing with things that there's no one to go to to deal with because there's no, you know, how do you deal with a UFO?
Probably the best documented military UFO experience in history, even bar Roswell.
Sure.
I mean, when Paul, Nick Pope worked for the Ministry of Defense and is now an independent consultant on all of this, and he's told me many times that if anything was the real deal, this was.
This is it.
I'm biased, but Roswell, God bless those fellas.
They're all passed on, most of them.
I can say that if we walked into a court of law with the evidence and such things were decided, I believe we would win.
I mean, but what do we win?
Because it's such a bizarre phenomenon.
It does affect people daily.
Well, let's face it, if we assume, and it is a big leap, but we've talked about it many times here on this show, if we assume the powers that be both sides of the Atlantic and around the world know the agenda, know there is something else wherever it may be from, they don't want that information out there.
So I presume one of the things that they would try to do first is to discredit people like you.
And how do you do that?
Well, over the years, we've seen you try and make their stories appear trivial.
Well, or like BS, or you adopt a character.
In the old days, they'd pop you maybe with a nice gun from a roof.
maybe three of them like Kennedy, not one.
And nowadays...
No, I think there was a lot of political issues at the time that the mob whacked him on a contract.
All anyone has to do is go to Daily Plaza and it answers your question right there, where the angles came from.
But Jim Mars is brilliant on that.
Jim Myers is one of the worst people conspiracy theorists, for want of a better word.
I've talked with Jim Mars a few times.
I think he's the best.
And of course, he's coming to the Beyond Knowledge Conference in Liverpool in September as well.
And he will be worth it for the admission fee alone.
Oh, absolutely, man.
He is.
You know, the guy was a big newspaper man in Texas.
And he's also dealt with Randall Schim in his book, Alien Agenda.
And, you know, the guy's just, he does his homework.
There's no bias.
He knows it is what it is.
But the Kennedy thing, I have to say, Jim inspired me when we were working on this book we did, Left at East Gate.
It was nine and a half years of work, about $100,000 of traveling, this and that.
So if people say you're in it for the money.
That can't be it.
There was a drive.
And you asked me briefly, Howard, about how one goes forward with it.
So I was living with all kinds of this stuff.
It goes back to that.
And I saw how it happened to me wasn't: I want to go out and be in newspapers and television and documentaries and write books and all this.
What a deal I got.
I was kind of confused, and I didn't feel my family were the type people, very conservative, that I could talk to about it.
So what I did, and I told some friends of mine, we were drinking some beers, and they just started laughing and all this.
And I thought it was the funniest thing I've ever come up with.
Nowadays, 30 years later, like, geez, man, we're so sorry.
We had no idea.
But as time went on, I found this newspaper article about a couple in a nearby town I lived in and about an experience they went through and it listed where the guy worked.
And I had just had teeth and oral surgery and I just had to call this guy and I said, listen, I need to talk to somebody.
Bada bang, boom.
And it got it all sprung from there.
One guy knew this guy and Freedom of Information Act people.
And I gave them the information and they said, we'll see what we can find.
And long and short of it, an actual document, the HALT memo came out because of my information.
It's an actual document.
You're saying that you were the spur.
I'm the guy.
Getting them to release the information that they did release from the deputy base commander.
I'm the guy.
Yeah, you're talking to him.
I just wanted credit where it was due.
It came out because of me.
The HALT tape came out because of me.
And I never held on to it for money.
I was offered five grand by the National Inquirer, that rag, to sell that thing when it first came out.
And I said, I remember my father saying, is that yours to sell?
Is your name on it?
I said, no.
And he said, don't do it.
And so public record.
There it is.
What about the other people who are involved in this, though?
Why have they not been more public with their stories?
Well, they've been public.
They just haven't written books.
And a lot of them have federal employment.
A lot of them are frightened.
A lot of them are messed up.
But I will tell you, my co-author Peter Robbins, who will also be at the Beyond Knowledge conference, has just done a radio show with another primary witness, very important, named John Burroughs.
And these guys are profoundly affected by these events.
John was involved in not only the first night, but the third night, which was mine.
There weren't two nights.
It was three nights of activity, which I've always said.
Now it's verified.
So you have all these guys in their own way, and still there's a silent majority, because I've seen what's happened to fellas like myself.
I mean, we've had federal interdiction into all kinds.
What they do is they hurt you financially.
They hurt you in all kinds of ways.
Well, there are stories that these people, if they want to, and I don't necessarily buy into all of this, can go into the computer databases.
They can affect your creditworthiness.
They can even make you cease to exist.
Well, they denied I ever served in the Air Force, and my military record to this day is classified.
Now, if that doesn't say something, I will tell you another thing.
And here's some things that debunkers can challenge, which they never do.
I've never been caught in a lie on this thing ever.
I mean, I've put myself out.
Take me down, baby, and they don't do it because they sit there and snipe from their armchair.
And that's the safe haven, especially with this crazy internet thing.
Every coward can dance on that.
Well, here's my name, Larry Warren.
I live so-and-so.
I'm easy to find.
Come and bring it on, man.
Bring your facts, and I'll bring mine.
But they don't, and I've been doing it 30 years.
So you're telling them, go ahead, make my day?
Make my day.
I've said this for years.
It never happened, so it's a waste of energy.
Larry Warren, man who says he was part of what happened or didn't at Rendlesham Forest back in 1980.
Finally, somebody who's been a big supporter of mine over all of these years of doing The Unexplained.
When I was doing a radio show, this man used to bring his family in on a Saturday evening to be part of the show.
Uri Geller, I'm talking about.
Last summer, one of our many conversations, I went to his magnificent home in the Thames Valley, and we spoke about his secret life, the work that he apparently did for secret services.
When the BBC approached me to do the secret life of Uri Geller, I kind of smiled and I said, you know, go ahead, but nobody's going to talk.
But when they brought Vikram Gayanti in, Oscar-winning director, he managed to get to these people.
Kid Green was a CIA kind of operative that time or one of the important scientifically educated who knew about bacteriological warfare and so on.
So he was in Virginia and I was in Palo Alto and one of the scientists calls him on the phone.
Remember, there was no Skype then and no iPads and no mobile phones.
They were just old-fashioned telephones.
And he said to him, he said to Kid Green, I have Ori Geller next to me.
He can see things that are far away from him.
And Kid Green said, no, he can't.
And the scientist put off says, yes, he can.
So Kid pulls a book off the shelf.
It was a scientific book.
It was an anatomical book.
And he said to me, well, Uri, I have a book in my hand and I'm opening to a page.
What is on the page?
So I took a piece of paper.
I was handed a piece of paper and I drew something that looked like scrambled eggs.
But the word architectural came very strongly into my mind.
So I wrote architectural on my drawing.
And guess what?
Kid Green had the word architectural written on the top side of his page with his own handwriting.
So if he'd been even remotely skeptical, then that will have changed his mind.
And this stuff is, before you say, if you're listening to this now, yeah, right, a lot of this stuff is documented.
There is film, so it's not just something that Uri is embellishing or making up.
But look, I watched this documentary because of my interest in you and your work, and you delivered on that.
But quite a number of times, in fact, a lot of times in that, you said, I cannot tell you any more about this.
And part of me thought, well, is that Uri adding to the Urigele enigma?
Or is that something that he's genuinely concerned about revealing things that he's not allowed to talk about?
Well, let me answer that.
You know that 90% of what I've done, I cannot talk about, but I can tell you a few instances that came out by mistakes.
For instance, a Russian top-secret plane with top-secret codes on board crashed in Zaire and it crashed into a jungle and it was covered by the canopy of the jungle.
Now at those times the satellites could not penetrate canopies of jungle and thick layers of cloud.
Today we can do that.
We have very amazing highly advanced technological satellites, means of getting under certain things.
So now President Carter finished his presidency and he was lecturing in a university and suddenly a student got up and asked him, President Carter, did anything unusual happen while you were the president?
And he stood on the stage and he suddenly said, well, yeah, a Russian plane crashed and psychics found the plane for us.
Wow.
There were instances where the American foreign relations, head of the American Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Cleben Pell, asked me to convince the Russians to sign the nuclear treaty.
Now this is a mega request.
So they took me to Geneva.
Let's just back up there.
They asked you to help convince the Russians to sign a treaty.
And they brought you in to do that.
Absolutely, the Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty.
And I was there with Al Gore, head of the CIA, Ambassador Max Kempelman, and Senator Cleben Pell, who was then the head of the American Foreign Relations Committee.
And they brought in Yuli Vorontsov, the Russian.
And my task was to get really close to his brain, to his mind, to physically.
So I sneaked up from behind him and I got like three inches away from his head.
And I telepathically, I know this sounds ridiculous, it sounds unbelievable, quirky, strange, bizarre, but I started bombarding it telepathically, sign, sign, sign, sign.
And believe it or not, Howard, they signed.
Now, obviously, I can't take full credit that I did it solely because there were other negotiators there.
But I believe that I was a major contributor to this.
So these are examples of things that I was asked to do.
I was also asked by certain FBI sources to convince Russian diplomats to defect.
By implanting the suggestion that they defected.
Yeah, to make them defect.
There were parties made for me in Long Island, for instance.
Very important Russian diplomats were invited there.
And my task was to mingle around and go to one or two of them and to project telepathically into their minds the idea, to convince them, to influence them, to defect.
The amazing and controversial Uri Geller, who's continued to support the unexplained.
Some of my favorite guests, by no means all of them, I could have included the Philadelphia experiment.
I could have included so many different things here, but those were five of my favorite conversations.
And I hope there'll be many more in future.
Thank you for your support.
Let's get now to Heather Cooper and Nigel Henbest, recorded in the last few days.
We're talking partly about them and their work with space.
Nigel is an astronomer and also training to be an astronaut with the Virgin Galactic program.
Heather Cooper, of course, very well known for all of her TV work and books in the UK.
Together, they've written a new book called The Astronomy Bible, a remarkable 400-page book with just about everything you need to know about astronomy.
So, here's the conversation.
Talk to me, first of all, would you, about the dynamic between you two guys, if you don't mind, because it seems that you are based together in a crucible of science, and this is your life, as they say.
Well, yeah, we met as students at uni doing astrophysics, but we decided, both of us early on, that we really wanted to tell people about all the excitement, because, you know, when I met Heather, she was somebody who really bubbled over with enthusiasm, talking about the stars and the planets and black holes.
She wrote was about black holes.
And yes, clusters of galaxies and things like that.
But yeah, I mean, we both decided, we actually got really bored when we were at uni, when we went and did postgraduate research.
I had a professor at Oxford, Professor Blackwell, I can say the name now, he's dead, thank God.
And I went out and I gave a popular lecture to the Astronomical Society in the city.
And the next morning, Professor Blackwell called me into his office and he said, Miss Cooper, I understood you were out on the town last night prostituting your subject.
We don't do that kind of thing in our department.
Oh, and what did you say?
I would have said bugger, but I couldn't.
But Nigel had an even worse experience.
I was over in Cambridge, and I didn't get on.
Well, when you do research, it's a one-to-one with your supervisor, really.
And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
And my supervisor was also, Howard, he was also the head of the department, and he was also the astronomer royal.
So when we fell out, I mean, well, one of us had to leave Cambridge and it turned out to be me.
But really, Heather and I were not cut out to be boffins.
We were just people who enthused.
Two rebels, then.
I see birds of a feather.
Rebels with a cause.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, the whole thing about research and astronomy these days, on research and science, it's basically done by groups of people who all have to agree with each other.
And we're very much of the thought that mavericks are the best kind of people.
There was a wonderful astronomer called Fred Hoyle who came up the most crazy ideas.
Half the time he was right and half the time he was completely wrong.
But we need people like that these days to actually stir up the whole community.
And what is it about astronomers?
I mean, if we look back to Sir Patrick Moore, who was remembered in this last week in a BBC Radio 4 play about his life and time.
Oh, it was amazing.
It was amazing.
We really felt as if Patrick was alive again and talking to us.
It's quite spooky.
The actor did a wonderful impression, yeah.
The actor was incredible.
I mean, every nuance of Patrick's voice was there, and I remember it so well.
I mean, when I got my, I finally got my A-level to go to university.
I got a grade E in mathematics.
It was appalling, but it got me into university.
And Patrick actually, I was at a conference in Brighton, and Patrick actually bought me a double whiskey.
And, you know, he was wonderful to me.
And did he say with his monocle?
Did he say, this will give you Dutch courage?
I can imagine him saying that.
Well, he did.
I mean, he was a funny old cuss.
I mean, he hated women.
I was going to say that, Heather, and I wasn't sure how to work that in because it was part of the drama that was on the radio this week that he had a woman producer, I think, for the first series of The Sky at Night in the 50s.
And, you know, that was pretty groundbreaking in those days.
And he wasn't anti-women, but he was a little disdainful, wasn't he?
Yes.
And he particularly hated women newsreaders.
Did he?
Yes.
Okay, well, he wouldn't like today then, would he?
But, you know, there was no harm in him.
I was once told before the first time I interviewed him in Selsey in Sussex, where he was based with his own personal observatory right on the coast there.
I was told that I had to be a little careful because he was a little prickly.
Actually, I found him to be an absolute pussycat every time I spoke to him.
It's funny.
It's like Jeremy Paxman, who is actually a pussycat.
I know that for a fact.
I met him at a do at Somerville College in Oxford.
But when I went on Celebrity University Challenge, you could actually feel him actually sort of ranking him up to be a real fierce person.
And Patrick was like that himself.
And Nigel, what do you make of today's astronomers?
I mean, Brian Cox is a bit of a character.
He is the man of the moment, isn't he?
Everybody's doing impressions of him, and you know you've made it when they do.
What do you make of these people today?
Are they as...
But are they getting the message across as well as people like, you know, if we can talk about Heather with Heather there, like Heather has done and Patrick Moore did.
I'll get her hand over her ears at that point.
You know, the thing is that I think Brown is absolutely great because he comes across as a normal human being.
I mean, Patrick, bless him, was a weird eccentric, you know, with his monocle and the way that he spoke and his hair sticking up on end.
Grow out at night and look through his telescope and so on.
But I think in some ways, marvelous as Patrick was, he wasn't really a proper role model because people thought to become a scientist, you had to be wacky, you know, with the mad scientist image.
And people like Magnus Pike, if we go back further in the past, were a bit like that as well.
Yes, Magnus Pike, everybody's forgotten him.
He was on that song by Thomas Dolby called She Blinded Me with Science.
I went to see him speak at a school in South Wales years and years ago for a journalism training project.
Well, I actually happened to know his producer.
And he was working, I believe, at Glaxo or something like that.
And this particular producer, who will remain nameless, went up and watched Magnus and said, wave your arms about.
And that led to his distinctive style of waving his arms about and looked like a mad scientist.
Well, I saw him, his arms flailed around like a windmill.
Precisely.
But he captivated the audience, didn't he?
Oh, but I know, but that was all due to the producer who sort of wound him up.
Yeah, I think the problem was, Howard, that actually it was a freak show, wasn't it?
You watch people, I'm sorry, something unkind to Magnus and Patrick, but you watch them for the spectacle.
And I do remember in recent years, not saying anything against Patrick, but I had friends who watched the Sky at Night programme.
And I'd say, they said, fantastic programme.
I saw Patrick on the Sky at Night, and I said, what was he talking about?
And I'd say, well, I don't remember, but it's fantastic to watch Patrick.
See, I think something like Brian Brown Cox is much better because people listen to what he's saying.
I mean, okay, he's quite pretty to look at.
Well, I don't know.
I'm not a woman.
There are people who say that.
I mean, Heather, you would know.
I don't fancy him.
Not at all.
But anyway, come back to Earth a bit.
I mean, people listen to what he's saying.
And I think that's the main thing.
Because what we want is people get excited about what's out there.
So it's the message.
It's not the messenger.
But are you saying also that it's a bit of a help if you're an eccentric?
It doesn't hurt to be eccentric in this business.
Well, I think it actually doesn't help to be eccentric.
I think these days, with people turning off science and turning against science, people think, well, you've got to be a bit wacky to be a scientist.
What do I say, Howard, is you want people with charisma.
So I will interrupt Heather, because I would say Heather is somebody who has charisma, and people like to hear her.
They're mesmerized by her voice, but also by what she says.
And charisma, I think, is more important than eccentricity.
And I think what people buy into, and this goes for both of you, Nigel and Heather, is passion in any field.
If you're passionate about something and it comes across, you've won.
Absolutely.
I mean, we're not just passionate about science.
We're passionate about classical music.
We're passionate about the countryside.
We just have passion in our lives, apart from passion.
Apart from in our relationship, because we're two incredibly good friends.
And we're not in any way.
I didn't want to.
How do I say this?
But you live together, don't you?
But you don't live together.
We share a house.
That's right.
Thank you.
That's a much better way of putting it.
Yeah, we share an absolutely beautiful farmhouse, 615 feet up in the Chiltern Hills with, oh dear, dare I say it, the indoor heated swimming pool.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, it's so cool.
Oh, so it's a lucrative business then, this astronomy thing.
It has to be lucrative because Nigel is he can afford to go into space.
Yeah, well, exactly.
We're going to talk about the astronomy, but just one quick question about you two before we get into Nigel and his astronautics, if that's the word.
Do you ever, you get on so well every time I've talked to you both.
Do you ever disagree, Rao?
It's already funny.
So many people say, for example, when it comes to the beginning of the universe, does one of you say it's the Big Bang and one say it's a steady state?
And I can imagine you're over the breakfast table arguing about it.
But no, we don't.
I mean, to be honest, there aren't big disputes in astronomy, and we're more likely to argue about is it going to be an Australian wine or is it going to be a Chilean wine tonight?
I mean, this is just the nature of the dispute.
One thing that unites you is you both love the good things in life.
Oh, we do.
And we don't, Raoul.
We've actually, because we met so early on, when we were literally sort of 19 and 20, we've just grown together and become sort of brother and sister.
And I mean, I couldn't imagine life without Nigel.
He's just so inspiring.
That's lovely.
All right, let's talk about astronautics and you, Nigel.
You were getting very, very excited with the Virgin Galactic project.
Of course, it's had a massive setback now, but you were going to be and still are, I think, going to be part of that, yeah?
Oh, absolutely.
I'm signed up.
In fact, I've been signed up with Virgin Galactic since 2009 when I bought my ticket into space.
And they've been progressing.
And of course, we had that disaster last October when the spaceship crashed.
But that's been a setback.
But to be honest, we know what happened.
It was, well, the pilot made a mistake.
We don't know why he did it.
He pulled a lever that shouldn't have been pulled.
And so the spaceship broke up.
But the basic design of the spaceship is fine.
The fuel is fine.
As far as we can tell, everything is fine.
And the whole plan was to have five spaceships, a fleet of five spaceships.
And the second one was already two-thirds complete when that first one broke up.
So yes, there's been a delay of at least a year.
And obviously, there's a big inquiry going on to what happened.
But the project is on track.
It's been delayed by a year or two.
Are you in training?
Not in formal training.
Yeah, there's less training.
I've been reading about Sarah Brightman is going up to the space station in September and she's in Russia training for six months in Russia.
Nothing as to half of that, but I have done what they call the Vomit Comet.
Oh, you've done that.
Isn't that where they take an old plane up and then they storm it and you become weightless?
That's absolutely right.
I mean, it's not actually a comet.
They call it that because it sounds gross.
It's a Boeing 727, actually.
And they do it in a series of loops.
So it's like going to a roller coaster, but actually at 35,000 feet up in the air.
And did you revisit your breakfast?
I didn't, actually.
There were some people looking, sitting at the back of the plane, looking a bit green.
What's it like to be weightless?
But you cut your head.
Hang a second, I'll come to that.
So what you do, how you go through a series of loops, so you actually do 15 loops.
It's not just one.
You have 15, and it's 30 seconds at a time when you float around the cabin, and it's padded on the inside, and you wear a flight suit with plastic zips and things, so everything ought to be quite safe.
I remember as a boy seeing a great BBC broadcaster who they should bring him back.
I know he's quite old now, but they should bring him back, James Burke, doing this.
Oh, no, I can't stand it.
Heather is not his number one fan.
Heather, you don't wrap it up.
But anyway, look, he had a massive audience at the time, and I think it was for Tomorrow's World he did the volume.
The unexplained.
Oh, yes, truly the unexplained.
Yes.
So what does it feel like?
We're getting back to this question.
What does it feel like, Nigel, to be weightless, to be floating?
First of all, it's totally amazing.
What they do, I say the 15 loops that you do.
In the first one, they say, we're going to be on Mars.
We're going to do Mars gravity, which is one-third of the Earth.
So you can jump quite high and you come down again.
And then the moon, actually, to be honest, it felt like being weightless.
I could push up, I go right up to the ceiling of the plane.
And we all thought, surely this is real weightlessness.
But then you lie down in between the weightless sessions.
And then when we were weightless, we floated off the floor.
And it was telling you, it was exactly like Harry Potter that somebody waved a magic wand and you just literally levitated.
And with the problems with the Virgin Galactic, I know you say that they've probably solved it now and it's probably going to be okay.
But somewhere deep down, are you not scared?
I'm excited at the moment.
I'm 95% excited, maybe 5%, I think, about what might happen.
But I know when I'm actually on board and they like the rocket engine, then I think I'm going to have those adrenaline feelings kicking in.
But we do three days of preparation.
Before we fly, we meet our fellow passengers.
There are six of us actually inside the spaceplane and a pilot and co-pilot, and we all train together for three solid days before we go up there.
So it's going to be part of it.
It's actually a whole experience.
It's not just being in space for five minutes.
Three days doesn't sound like a lot.
Well, to be honest, it goes with the experience.
We have five minutes in space, and three days is enough training for that.
So I've done the weightlessness, and as Heather was saying, my big mistake was not the vomit part of the comet, but they said, fly like Superman.
So I pushed off, went down the cabin at high speed.
I had to be competitive.
I had to be faster than anybody else, and then hit my head and had blood coming out of my head and blood drops floating around in weightlessness.
And when you come back down to Earth, are there any after effects?
Probably not for the time that we'll be up there.
I mean, what I would love to do is to do what Sarah Brightman is doing, going up to space station, because that's a whole week in space, and then you have to do your exercises, because if you come down, you lose mass from your bones, so your bones get a bit more brittle.
But I should be all right.
Both of you, really, what do you think of these people who are currently considering volunteering to go to Mars?
Because that's a one-way trip.
Well, I mean, I think that's fallen through completely.
I mean, there was going to be a TV reality show to judge the contestants and things like that.
And that seems to have actually gone.
The funding seems to have gone through.
But somebody's going to do it and propose it.
We're getting closer and closer to it.
Interest in Mars is increasing all the time.
So somebody's going to want to do that.
Yeah, somebody's going to want to do that.
But there seems to have been an awful lot of rumours about this whole enterprise.
Well, I think it's interesting looking at the people who did volunteer, the ones who've been interviewed, they're all quite young, in their 20s and 30s.
And I would have thought it would be people who are in their 60s, who'd lived life, who had retired, had their grandchildren, say, I've only got 20 years left, let's toddle off to Mars.
But I couldn't imagine being in my 20s, the whole of life before me, and actually living on Mars with 20 other people and never came back to Mars.
Because there's a lot, and you both know this, there's a lot of psychology involved in this.
I mean, Nigel, you had to psych yourself up for going for five minutes into space.
Equally, these young people will have to really seriously consider, if you can, I will never see, other than on Skype or Facebook or whatever, the people who've been closest to me in my life again.
Seriously, I mean, I think the whole thing is.
I was interviewing an astronaut who was also a psychologist, and he was saying, imagine going to Mars, even on a return trip.
It would be like taking a camper van around Britain locked up with five other people for a period of three years.
And even if you're Mother Teresa, both of you, even if you are as saintly as anything, you're going to have a day when you both, you know, maybe one of you feels a bit miserable, out of step with all the others, and you've got to get on with people, and you can't all the time.
There's another mission actually called Mars Direct, no, not Mars Director, Mars, oh, Mars Direct, it's been cancelled now, which was to send a pair of people around Mars and straight back to Earth again.
And the guy who planned it said, let's send a married couple.
We talked to psychologists, and they said, actually, a married couple will be the worst people to say exactly.
Absolutely.
That should have been a six-second motorburn.
No, it shouldn't.
It should have been 7.5 seconds.
You turn left here, darling.
It's never, ever going to work.
No, but I mean, the other thing about going to Mars, it's incredibly...
You've got real dangers out there in space.
It's not like going to the moon, which takes about three days.
That's fine.
When you go to Mars, you've got the dangers of solar flares, cosmic rays.
It's a very, very dangerous environment.
Again, I interviewed a space technologist from NASA, and he said, well, we're going to send people to Mars, but I reckon that when they come back, we're going to have some wet noodles coming back.
And I checked on the, in one of the latest books we've written, and I used that phrase.
And the copy editor, who was absolutely brilliant, by the way, said, I don't understand the phrase wet noodles.
And so we tried to explain to him, we meant sort of people who'd been...
Her brains are being fried by radiation, basically.
They're basically all sort of dead.
Yeah, but we discovered it had an alternative meaning.
Which we won't say on Earth.
No, well, thank you, which I'll say.
Thank you for sparing me that.
I'm the listening public of delicate sensibilities.
Is it something that either of you, I mean, look, I think we're all a similar sort of age.
If you were the right kind of age for that early 20s, whatever, would you even remotely consider it?
I'd love to go to Mars.
I mean, if it was a return ticket, that's the key thing.
And have checked with my Virgin Galactic ticket.
It does say return on it.
But no, going to Mars, I mean, to actually to go to a whole new world, to actually stand on Mars, to fly over it, to look at those canyons.
There are volcanoes on Mars, which is a small world, but the volcanoes are bigger than the volcanoes on the Earth.
And of course, maybe there's some kind of primitive life there.
It would be a fantastic journey to Mars.
Well, I'm glad you said that, because I interviewed a man last week from the United States.
Surprise, surprise.
And he's used a technique that the U.S. military used to use, whether it's fact or fiction, people are split about this, but called remote viewing.
And his remote viewing, where he's used this mental technique to try and see what is on the surface of Mars, suggests to him, and other people have said this as well, that there may have been an ancient civilization before us, but perhaps linked to us there.
What do you make of all that?
I think that's a load of rubbish.
I'm sure there isn't.
I mean, I think that life did actually arrive on Mars.
I'm sure that, I mean, it's fairly obvious.
It was bombarded by comets and asteroids, and they contain the sort of materials that could create life.
And when the Viking space probes arrived there in 1976, there was one experiment on one of the Vikings that definitely proved there were primitive microbes on Mars.
So I think life did get started on Mars.
And I'm fairly sure that there is water on Mars today.
Well, I'm sure there's water on Mars today.
And where there is water, not inevitably, but there's very often life.
Exactly.
And that's the whole point.
I mean, there are various locations in the solar system where there are wet environments.
For example, you've got Saturn's moon Titan, you've got Enceladus, you've got Mars.
I'm fairly sure life is fairly commonplace in the solar system, but we're not talking about little green men, we're talking about little green slime.
And to say they're saying that these planets in the early days got bombarded, and we know that rocks from Mars came to the Earth because people have picked up meteorites which have come from Mars.
And so rocks from the Earth should have travelled to Mars.
So we're saying that life is not something that's static in one place.
I think we probably are coming to that view these days.
I mean, talking about the public, not people like yourself.
That life can be catapulted from one place to another.
It might arrive on a comet.
Yeah, yes.
And all these interplanetary taxes.
One intriguing thought when we were researching our book on Mars is that in the early days, it was actually easier for things to travel from Mars because it was lower gravity than the Earth.
So the odds are, actually, that life on the Earth arrived in a rock from Mars rather than the other way around.
In which case, actually, after all these billions of years of evolution, we are actually originally Martians ourselves.
Okay, Nigel and Heather, now we're going to talk about the good stuff, the astronomy.
Let's talk about the eclipse, because, you know, most of us down here in the south of England didn't see it.
No, exactly.
it was absolutely spectacular here in the Chilterns it was completely the whole Spectacularly a non-event.
The entire, it was, there was high pressure.
I know you've had the weather forecast, so you know all about this.
The whole area was covered with what I called East Coast yug.
And at 10.41, which was the instant the eclipse was due to finish, suddenly the sky cleared.
And we had a cloudless sky with the sun and everything like that.
But one of our friends actually got to see it from Aylesbury and one of our friends got to see it from Dundee.
And I was on the Jeremy Vine show.
And John Coolshaw was on with me as well.
The famous Impressionist.
The Famous Impressionist.
He does a good Patrick Moore impression, by the way.
He also does me.
He does me.
He does.
He does me.
He is impossible, surely.
Howard Hughes.
Well, that's exactly.
And I always say to him, John, it doesn't sound like that.
Yes, it does.
Sorry, I interrupted you.
He's very good.
But he actually got to see it from a ship off the coast of the Faroe Islands.
Apparently, the captain actually saw a clear patch headed for it, and they actually got to see the total eclipse.
You know, for us, it wasn't a great thing because, you know, for us, it would have been just partial.
And what you see is the moon making a kind of nicked out crescent of the sun.
A total eclipse is a totally...
Oh, we're just, So go to the internet and see that, and you've got the fantastic view of the sun blotted out in the sky, and then this strange thing with the black hole in the centre, which is the moon's silhouette, and then the weird fronds of the atmosphere.
Andrew, Nigel, what do you think of the way the media built this up?
Because from what I saw, and I only know what I read on the news wires and see in the papers and hear on the radio, we were built up for something like the one that was in 1999, I think, where I stood on the top of a building in central London and watched London go dark in the morning.
This did not occur.
When I say, Howard, that's the media for you.
I mean, there were reports on the internet and probably in the press as well saying that from 8.30 to 10.40, Britain is going to go black.
And clearly it wasn't.
Even in the maximum eclipse, still 10% of the sun was shining, so 90% was obscured.
And of course, if you go out in a heavy thunderstorm, the thunderstorm will block out more sunlight than we had on that eclipse.
Well, all I had where I live, which is sort of near Heathrow Airport way, the sky went a little bit like if you've been to Los Angeles and you've seen that smog they have there.
That's what it went like.
The sky went a kind of muddy brown.
That's absolutely right.
And so in Scotland it was more spectacular.
They lost 95% of the sun, but nowhere in Britain was it going to be as spectacular as the media were making it.
I mean, it's good to have people going out and looking for something astronomical.
I mean, oddly enough, back in the 1990s, Heather and I were up in Bista shopping centre of all places, and there was an eclipse of the sun, not quite as big as the one we've just had, but you can see it through the cloud.
Nobody knew it.
It's had many people walking around going into the clothes shops.
And there's an eclipse up there in the sky, and nobody was interested.
But I mean, the whole point is that from Britain, mainland Britain, it was always going to be partial.
You would never get that spectacle of what Nigel described as being the black hole in front of the sun.
And in fact, it is the most incredible spectacle to observe.
We've seen six total eclipses ranging from Indonesia to Hawaii to Egypt.
And next year, by the way, if you're interested, there's going to be a total eclipse in Indonesia.
And the following year, there's going to be one in America.
So you have to be in exactly the right place.
But when you actually get to see it, it looks like a Chinese dragon mask.
It is truly and utterly frightening.
Yeah, well, it is because it's so beyond what we've come to expect.
I mean, the one thing I thought about when they were talking about the eclipse is that those people who lived at Stonehenge back in the day and ancient civilizations who didn't understand stuff as we do, or well, at least that's what we think, what on earth and what in heaven's name must they have made of this?
Well, most nations around the world thought that the sun was being swallowed by something.
So in China, you have a dragon.
In Scandinavia, it was a pair of dogs or wolves who were eating the sun.
In Vietnam, for some reason, it was a giant frog that at the sun.
But what people did generally, they shouted and screamed and they banged gongs and so on to get rid of it.
And I tell you, that worked because you bang your gong for two minutes and the sun reappears, which just goes to show that all the rituals really work.
So they thought that the magic modo, the flu mojo, the fluence was working and actually was just the way of things.
Now, somebody said to me, another one of these people who I interview from time to time, how is it that in heaven and earth, the geometry is so perfect that one disc exactly covers another?
And if you think about it, and if you're a bear of very little brain like myself, that does seem to be almost too much of a coincidence, doesn't it?
It does, in fact.
I did a little demonstration for BBC Radio Oxford.
They asked me into the radio studio to film me, which struck me as being odd, but of course it went on that Facebook site.
And so I did a little model.
I had a blueberry.
I said, that's not a blueberry, that's the Earth.
And here is a peppercorn.
The peppercorn is the moon.
And the sun is an exercise ball three feet across.
I've got a bright yellow exercise ball, which I don't exercise on.
That's just the sun.
So imagine a peppercorn versus a three-foot exercise ball.
That's the difference in size of the sun and the moon.
But as you say, one's 400 times bigger than the other.
It's 400 times further.
It's got to be cosmic coincidence.
I can't think of any other way.
Well, the only other assumption to make is one that people of science would find very hard to make.
And, you know, the jury is out as far as my mind is concerned.
I can see God coming.
No, no, no, no, we don't leave God out of this.
But some kind of force that made it all is one of the conclusions that people could come to.
Oh, I know, but that's rubbish as well.
But going back to Nigel and his filming, he's got his own YouTube channel.
This is where I had a bowl of fruit.
I don't mind having a bowl of fruit anyway, but I thought, well, if the Earth is a blueberry, how big would Jupiter be?
And it's the size of a grapefruit and so on.
And I've done that actually live for camera, also recorded on camera, obviously.
So you're now doing this on YouTube?
Yep, there was a YouTube channel series called Nigel Goes to Space.
Excellent.
And is that free to see?
Oh, it is, absolutely.
It's free to see.
It's part of Naked Science.
There's a strand called Naked Science, which has been up for a few years now.
He's not going to be naked, you'll be pleased to hear.
Well, I think, you know, it's always wise to preserve your modity, the modesty, especially if you're a person of science wanting to be taken seriously.
Or if you're me, for example.
Now, okay.
For the pair of you, I want to get you to this.
You've written this most amazing book.
I'm going to count the pages now.
I thought it was about 400.
It feels like 400.
It looks like one of those fantastic old-style American compendium books.
And I know, Heather, that you wrestled a great deal to be able to write the requisite number of words for this.
It was not an easy thing to put together.
But what we have now is your book, Both of you, the astronomy Bible, where literally, and I've flipped through it, any topic that you want to know about in astronomy, it's there.
How difficult was this to put together?
I loved writing it.
I really did.
The only problem was when the editor managed to, well, mess up what we wrote.
That was a real problem.
But we managed to salvage the book back.
The design is gorgeous.
We tried to cover everything about astronomy from constellations to the moon, the sun, stars, to things that you can do practically.
It's a very practical book.
It is.
And page 230, you said that you tried to cover everything from the real nuts and bowls stuff to the more esoteric stuff, like extrasolar planets on page 230.
What are they?
These are planets going around other stars.
So we now know, of course, eight planets going around the Sun.
There used to be nine until poor old Pluto got demoted.
There were eight planets going around the Sun.
But we now know about 2,000 planets going around other stars.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
They've been discovered since 1995.
And they're a weird bunch.
There's some we call hot Jupiters.
So those are huge planets as big as our Jupiter, but so close to the star that they're their own sun that they're totally scorched.
There are water worlds, worlds bigger than the Earth, but totally covered in miles and miles of depth of ocean.
So there's no solid surface at all.
But somewhere out there, there's got to be another planet like our Earth.
You know, one of the things that's always a problem when you do anything for the internet or for radio, whatever you do, there are always time restrictions.
So I'm going to try and keep this to two final topics.
Number one, you will have heard recently of the death of Leonard Nimoy.
The whole world seemed to mourn him because he was a great supporter of organizations like SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and he was interested in all of these things.
What kind of contribution do you believe that he made?
Because it seems to me that through Star Trek and what he did later in his private life, the man was a great exponent of all of the things that you do.
I think he was very, very inspirational.
And I think that the people who promote SETI are also very inspirational.
They're actually reaching out to see, is there any other life out there and how can we communicate with it?
And both of you, should we be trying to communicate with it?
Because there are people who say we really shouldn't.
Oh, yes.
I take issue with that because, first of all, then if they're that much more advanced than us and they've actually survived through all the wars that could wipe out an entire civilization, I think they're going to be more pacifist than we are.
But secondly, they know we're here.
Our radio signals and television signals and radar, I mean, military radar is incredibly powerful.
People out to almost 100 light years now will know the Earth is here and there are people on it.
So there's really no argument if they want to find us.
They are going to find us.
And both of you, I could talk to you both all day, and we've known each other for years, so it's difficult to break off any conversation.
And we have to repeat this, Nigel and Heather.
What about this technology that I've been hearing and reading a lot about, of an elevator that they're trying to develop?
That is literally a cable, almost like a cable car, but one that goes straight up beyond the stratosphere and into space.
Do you think that that is a runner?
Yes, I do.
I mean, this is actually the brainchild of my dear, dear, departed friend, Arthur C. Clarke.
And I'll hand over to Nigel, who's better on space than me.
Well, Arthur was one of the people who thought about it, and you're absolutely right.
When you think about it, if you think about TV satellites, they're in what we call geosynchronous orbits, which means they always stay above the same part of the Earth because they go around the Earth in 24 hours, which is the same period the Earth goes around.
So if you just imagine that satellite's up there in the sky at the same point, you've got your satellite TV dish pointing at it.
Suppose you just connected a long, as you see, like a tower or a very, very strong rope from their satellite to the Earth, and then you have cable cars running vertically up and down it.
And the great thing about it, it doesn't take any energy because you have a car going up, a car going down, and they balance each other.
So you don't need rockets.
You just use, well, like a cable car, you don't have to.
Well, let's hope when they demonstrate it for the first time, if they do, they don't get Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, to demonstrate it, because when he demonstrated the cable car across the Thames, which was his idea, he got stuck.
Good point.
Lovely to talk to you both again.
Thank you.
We'll talk again.
The remarkable Heather Cooper and the equally remarkable Nigel Henbest talking about space.
Thank you very much for both of them agreeing to come on this 200th edition of The Unexplained, where we've also looked back at some of my favorite interviews.
I hope you enjoyed the little clips from interviews that we played here.
And that is 200 shows.
Thank you for your support through them.
If you've made a donation, thank you very much.
But just for being there, I'm very, very grateful for making this happen and reach so many people every single week.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for getting the show out to you.
And thank you to Martin, who devised and updated the theme tune, Martin.
I would love to hear from you when you can.
But above all, thank you to you for connecting with me, for having faith in me over these years.
That was Edition 200.
Let's look forward to Edition 201 and then another 199 editions on top of that.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been edition 200 of The Unexplained.
And until next we meet here, please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
Take care.
Thank you.
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