The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 216 - Morgellons Disease Update

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Aug. 8, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:05:35

Edition 216 - Morgellons Disease Update

Returning guest Tim Swartz has intensively researched this strange condition and itssufferers...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world.
	On the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Well, we're way past midsummer mark now and we're heading into August and looking at September and then the autumn and the end of this year, but the summer is not done.
	Had some nice weather in London and some very heavy rain in what has been a very unusual summer for us.
	Thank you very much for a massive bumper crop, as we say over here, of emails.
	I'm going to get to a lot of your emails probably in the next edition.
	The reason I'm not doing it now is I just haven't had time to collate the emails.
	I like to make notes on them all.
	I read them all as they come in.
	And this week has been such a busy week.
	I've done six days of work this week for two reasons.
	I need the money and because, obviously, at this time of year, people go on holiday and that's when fill-in work in broadcasting becomes more available.
	So that's what I've been doing.
	It all means that I haven't had the time to set up editions of the unexplained that I might have had, but I'm getting back on track.
	This edition, we have the return of a guest we've talked to before, but this time we talk to him about a completely different subject.
	The last time round, I think we talked about UFOs and time travel.
	We'll get to those things on this edition with him.
	But I want to talk about something that has become a mystery.
	A mystery wrapped in an enigma.
	It is the subject of Morgellen's disease.
	You probably heard it referred to in the news, probably more in America, to be fair, but it's definitely a phenomenon here in the UK as well.
	It is a condition that appears to have surfaced from nowhere and caused a lot of people, some of them high-profile, a great deal of grief.
	You might have read about Joni Mitchell, famous singer.
	Her hits, of course, included Big Yellow Taxi, Freeman in Paris, many, many others.
	We all love Jodi Mitchell.
	She apparently is a high-profile sufferer of this thing.
	But what is it?
	And more importantly, where did it come from?
	How do these things just emerge out of a clear blue sky?
	Perhaps literally.
	The man who might know about that is Tim Swartz.
	It is a return edition with Tim Swartz.
	We spoke to him, I think, about 140 shows ago or thereabouts.
	So we were in early days of the unexplained.
	And I was still learning my way around all of this.
	Let me tell you about Tim if you've never heard about him before.
	He's an Emmy Award-winning television producer, videographer, and the author of quite a few books.
	He's pretty prolific.
	As a photojournalist, he traveled extensively and investigated paranormal phenomena and other mysteries from diverse locations like the Great Pyramid in Egypt and the Great Wall of China.
	Most recently, Tim has become the associate publisher for Mysteries magazine, and also he's the writer and editor of the internet newsletter Conspiracy Journal, a free weekly email and newsletter considered essential reading by paranormal researchers just about everywhere.
	So this man's credentials are pretty good, and we should have had him back on the show before now, but we're going to rectify that.
	We'll cross to the United States and talk to Tim Swartz in just a moment.
	Thank you to hard-working Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his usual hard work, curating and maintaining the website, making sure that everything ticks over and getting the show out to you.
	Like I say, thank you for your emails.
	I will get back to you on this show very soon.
	Just to say, I've had a lot of email traffic about June Lundgren, the psychic medium who we had on the last edition.
	Now, I always get flack when I have such people on the show, and this time was no exception.
	A lot of you saying didn't like the show.
	One of you saying I turned the show off.
	Well, remember, if you don't like the content, that you must always do.
	If you don't like it, don't listen to it, turn it off.
	I've always said about the unexplained, we're going to have a spread of people on here, some of whom you will believe, some of whom I will believe, some of whom neither of us will believe.
	The idea being that these people get their stories out there.
	That's what it's all about.
	And it isn't for you or me to say, is it, that what June Lundgren had to say, and if you haven't heard the show, maybe you should listen to some of it at least, it isn't for either of us to say that she didn't experience those things because we're not her.
	We can pass an opinion.
	That's the best we can do.
	But is she entitled to tell her story?
	And we've had this debate here before, haven't we?
	I think so.
	And that's why we had her on.
	So I hope you understand that.
	And we'll always have a spread of guests on here.
	In a forthcoming show, we're going to talk to somebody about civilian space travel, for example.
	Now, a lot of people will be interested in that.
	For some people, that's a turnoff.
	We'll see.
	Please keep your donations coming, by the way, if you have donated recently.
	Thank you very, very much.
	The place to go is my website, theunexplained.tv, and there you'll find a link to a PayPal, a place where you can make a donation, and you can also follow a link to send me an email message there, a guest suggestion or whatever.
	I will get on top of all the guest suggestions very, very soon.
	I've got a lot of emails out.
	I'm waiting for a lot of replies, but I've got to do some serious work on the unexplained very soon.
	Okay, let's cross to the United States now and let's get to Tim Swartz and a second edition.
	Tim, thank you very much for coming on.
	Well, thank you very much, Howard.
	It's a real pleasure to be back with you again.
	Well, it's been a few years, you know, and this whole show that I'm doing now has evolved enormously since we spoke.
	I've learned a lot about the technology and about the guests as well.
	And I know there have been a couple of little junctures over the last two or three years where I think either you've contacted me or I might have contacted you and somehow it never happened.
	So I'm really pleased to be doing this because I think you've probably written in that space of time another five books.
	At least five books.
	Okay.
	It's hard for me to keep track sometimes.
	Let's do the 101 on you then.
	Tell me about yourself.
	Look, I've got your biogue here.
	I read it at the top of the show.
	Tim Swartz, Emmy Award-winning television producer, videographer, author of several books, photojournalist, traveled extensively, a man who's one for mysteries and conspiracies.
	That's the biogue.
	Talk to me about you.
	Okay.
	Well, you know, that's really close.
	You know, I mean, unlike a lot of people who are, you know, in the field investigating the weird and the strange, you know, I wasn't always interested in this kind of stuff.
	You know, because some people say that when they were a child, that they were always, you know, they saw ghosts or flying saucers or something.
	But it wasn't like that with me.
	I mean, I was more interested in growing up in Indiana, you know, I mean, as a racing capital of the country, so Indy 500, yes.
	That's right, that's right.
	So I was interested in race cars and stuff like that.
	But one time I got a class assignment to do an oral report about UFOs.
	There had been a UFO flap going on in the country at that time.
	And I didn't know anything about UFOs.
	So, I mean, I did what little research was available to me at the time, which wasn't much, you know, gave my report.
	And then for some reason, I was tagged from that point on as being the flying saucer guy.
	You know, I was the guy that talked to Martians.
	And, you know, I mean, kids are always looking for something, you know, to hold against you.
	And that's what it was with me.
	But the thing, and of course I hated it.
	You know, naturally, you don't want to be teased or thought of as different in any way, even though everybody is.
	But the thing that I noticed was that people would make fun of you, you know, like in a group, but then later they would come to you by themselves when there's nobody else around and say, you know, I don't believe in any of this stuff, but, and then they would tell me their story.
	You know, they saw flying UFO.
	They saw, you know, there's a ghost in their house, something.
	And that's what got me really interested in this stuff.
	Not so much, you know, the what happened to them.
	I mean, that's interesting, sure.
	But what was interesting is that these people sincerely believed that they had an unusual experience and they did not know what to do about it.
	They didn't know who they could go and talk to, you know, because, and naturally enough, they were afraid to say anything for fear of being ridiculed.
	You know, even from your own family, I mean, you know, the teasing can be merciless.
	So, you know, when they thought that they could find like a sympathetic ear in me, they would come to me and tell me their stories.
	And that's what was fascinating to me with all these people having these experiences that they thought were real.
	You know, I mean, since I didn't have the experiences, you know, I can't go and say that they were definitively real, but they thought that it was real and they were looking for somebody to tell their story.
	And then, you know, a lot of people, after they would tell their story, that would be it.
	They were happy.
	I mean, you know, they may never have told anybody else again.
	But, you know, that's the thing about all of this strange and unusual stuff is that people, most people, with the exception of, you know, like us or your listeners of your show, they have no experience with this kind of stuff.
	They have no framework to place their experience.
	I mean, it is just so totally outside of their norm, you know, their norm, their normal day-to-day life.
	And just like the kids, you know, we're all conditioned from a very young age, they would prefer, and I'm sure they're still the same as adults, those kids you dealt with then, they would prefer not to believe it.
	And it's only when you have an experience yourself that you can't explain that you think there might be something in it.
	But the last thing you want to do, or most people want to do, is confirm that you've had that experience to somebody else in case they think you're a nut.
	Exactly, exactly.
	And, you know, because there's no place to pigeonhole for most of us this kind of experience, you know, naturally, you know, you're going to think, well, am I crazy?
	That's the one thing that I think everybody always says to me.
	Don't think I'm crazy, but, you know, and I have to reassure them.
	He's like, hey, look, you're not the only one who has had this kind of experience.
	I mean, this has happened to people all over the world.
	So don't worry that you're crazy.
	But the thing about it, though, isn't it, Tim, that the mind, the more I look into all of this and the more I'm involved in this show, I do understand that the mind is a staggeringly complex thing.
	The mind can create, it certainly does for me anyway.
	If I'm tired and I sleep deeply, I will have three-dimensional, multicolored, walk-around dreams, meeting and talking and reacting with people that I've never seen before.
	And the mind created that for me, I believe.
	Well, maybe it didn't.
	Maybe it comes from somewhere else.
	But in the absence of any other knowledge, it's the mind that does that.
	So this is the difficulty, isn't it?
	Whenever you investigate phenomena, like the last show I did, there was a medium, a psychic medium on here who had some very interesting things to say, I thought.
	I got a lot of email from listeners saying, you know, why did you put that crazy person on your show?
	Well, you know, that's just it.
	What is real?
	What is reality?
	You know, are we the man dreaming that we're a butterfly or are we a butterfly dreaming that we're a man?
	You know, so, you know, just because a person has an unusual experience, you know, we can't just go and say, oh, well, it was, you know, it was all in your mind or, you know, your brain misinterpreted, you know, normal situations.
	But then again, what is a normal situation?
	You know, from the research that I have done over the years, I think normal is not that normal.
	I'm inclined to agree.
	You know, I think we all have, if we open the door to it, we all have a certain amount of ability.
	A very quick story.
	Might have told it here before.
	If I haven't, here it is.
	I worked with a, in fact, I still from time to time do work with him, a guy on the radio called David Priv.
	David Priver likes to keep his feet on the ground, and, you know, I respect him for that.
	And he sometimes teases me about the stuff that I do shows about.
	But he is interested.
	And I remember telling him some years ago, okay, I know you don't believe in all of this stuff, but if I were you, I would check the spare tire on your nice BMW sports car.
	And he said, I'm not going to do that.
	Well, he came to need that tire because I think one of his tires blew out.
	And he said, You'll never guess, Howie.
	I checked the tire and it was defective.
	Like you said, I was like, Well, I told you so.
	I don't know how I know that.
	I don't claim to be.
	We have somebody in the newspapers here, or had somebody in the newspapers here called Mystic Meg, who used to write very amusing forecasts about stuff.
	I said, Well, I'm not Mystic Meg, and I don't know how I knew it, but I just thought I ought to pass it on to you.
	So what I'm saying in a roundabout way is that just like you said, what is normal and what is paranormal?
	That's right.
	Well, see, yeah, I don't think that there probably is very much of a difference.
	You know, I mean, what we call paranormal, supernatural, what have you is just science that we just haven't discovered yet.
	You know, I mean, it may be something that we won't discover, you know, for years and years or centuries even.
	But I mean, you know, you just, you look back through history and look at the scientific discoveries that have happened over time.
	I mean, you know, before those discoveries were made, like meteorites, I always like to use meteorites as a good example.
	I mean, it wasn't that long ago that scientists refused to believe that rocks could actually fall from the sky.
	And I mean, up until, oh my gosh, you know, like the 1700s, I know Thomas Jefferson was quoted as saying there had been a farmer who had seen a meteorite fall into his field and reported it.
	And Thomas Jefferson said, I would sooner believe that this farmer is crazy than that rocks could fall from the sky.
	So, you know, the same thing I think has to do with a lot of this other, you know, paranormal, what we would call paranormal phenomena.
	It's just something that we have not developed the science or the understanding yet.
	Okay, researcher you are, but are you a direct experiencer of anything?
	You know, I have had some ghostly experiences in the times when I was doing, you know, like haunted house investigations.
	Now, I was doing this kind of stuff years ago, long before, you know, the reality television shows have come about.
	And, you know, like every town now has a ghost hunting organization.
	But I had an experience where back in the middle 1980s where I went to a house that was supposedly haunted by a poltergeist.
	I was working at a local television station at the time.
	So I had access to television equipment, you know, some very nice professional equipment.
	So I took this stuff with me, hoping that maybe I could, you know, be the first guy to actually capture this kind of activity on three-quarter inch videotape.
	And as soon as I got into the house, every battery that I had with me was dead.
	Now, you have to remember, I mean, these were very big NICAD batteries.
	I mean, it took hours to charge them.
	Everything had been charged.
	Everything was dead.
	So I had no way then to record the experience that happened to me later.
	As I was sitting in the living room talking to the couple, the kind of elderly couple who lived in this house, we heard what sounded almost like a bang somewhere in the house, like somebody had hit the wall or the ceiling really, really hard.
	And then from the ceiling, you know, just right, almost right directly right above us, small rocks started to fall.
	Just one by one.
	From my perspective, it looked like that they would just appear maybe about an inch or so below the ceiling and then drop to the floor.
	Very hard to stage or fake, isn't it?
	Very much so.
	So, I mean, so the next thing that I did was that I scooped up these rocks, maybe about five or six of them, and I marked them with a big X using like a magic marker, you know, a big pen.
	And I went to the back door of the house, and almost directly behind them was a cornfield almost fully grown.
	So I chucked each and every one of those rocks into that cornfield as hard as I could.
	And I sat back down.
	Almost immediately, those very same rocks reappeared from the ceiling and dropped down on the floor in front of us.
	Each one of those rocks had the X that I had marked on them.
	I don't know how you could replicate that.
	You got me.
	I don't, you know, I mean, I went as far, I mean, I went up into the attic, and it wasn't much of an attic.
	It basically was just like almost a crawl space filled with insulation.
	So it would have been really, really hard for anybody to hide themselves and do that.
	And what do you believe did that then?
	Well, you know, they said that their house had been haunted for a little while, that there had been knocks, you know, on the wall and whispering voices and furniture moving around.
	They were convinced that they had a ghost.
	So something you clearly believe and they must have believed put on a show for you.
	Yes, definitely.
	But a show that you couldn't record because your batteries were dead.
	Yes, yes.
	I mean, even I even had with me, you know, like a small camera.
	And when I would try to take pictures, I mean, nothing would work.
	It was like it was frozen.
	Were you scared?
	Were you scared out of your wits?
	You know, I wasn't scared.
	I was, to me, it was more just like this fascination.
	I mean, it was just, I was in awe.
	It's the only way that I could, I, you know, that I could put it.
	I mean, it was, here was something going on that I could not explain.
	And it was just, it was so fascinating.
	Now, you know, I suppose, say, if a full-bodied apparition suddenly appeared in the doorway and ran toward us, that may have, you know, that may have scared me a little bit.
	But, you know, rocks falling from the ceiling at that time, you know, it wasn't scary.
	I mean, you know, it was in the daytime.
	So, you know, I take your point completely.
	We've got to move on quite soon, but I just have to clear this up.
	The family who lived there, did they get their dilemma sorted out?
	You know, shortly thereafter, it was almost like that incident kind of drained the energy from whatever it was that was going on, because I talked to them a couple times afterwards, and they said that, you know, really after that day, the activity diminished greatly and then disappeared completely.
	Very glad for them.
	If we get time at the end of this, please remind me, I know you did a lot of research about Tesla and his writings, and I know you've revisited that in the last few years, haven't you?
	So we'll go back there if we get time.
	Let's just take a look at the clock and see where we are now.
	Okay, Morgellin's disease.
	Now, I'm going to say as a journalist, it periodically comes up in news scripts here.
	And on one of the bits of material that was supplied about your book to do with Morgellin's disease and its origins, came up something that chimed with me because I've run news stories about this, and that is the case of Joni Mitchell.
	Everybody knows Joni Mitchell, and Joni Mitchell, we believe, has Morgellens and has been as debilitated as many people are with this thing.
	Yes, Joni Mitchell actually had claimed that she had Morgellans a few years ago, but she had been basically ignored, just like anybody else who complains that they have this disease.
	And it wasn't until recently when she collapsed in her home and had to be taken to the hospital that the newspapers and other news sources started to revisit her original complaints, speculating that possibly her collapse had to do with Morgellens.
	I think actually she had a brain aneurysm, which caused her collapse.
	But the fortunate or the unfortunate thing for Joni is that her dilemma actually brought Morgellens back into the spotlight again because it has languished for several years ever since the Centers for Disease Control here in the United States put out a report saying that Morgellens was nothing more than delusions of parasites,
	which is a fairly uncommon complaint where people say that they have bugs on their skin or inside of them.
	Yeah.
	Well, look, let's read the description here because I went to a UK organization for people who say they have this.
	Symptoms.
	Morgan's disease is systemic, affecting all body systems.
	Once an infection is fully established, initial symptoms often present as skin-related, as if afflicted with mites or lice, fleas, and dandruff and dry skin.
	I mean, literally, the photographs that go along with this are of things that are appearing from people's skin.
	They have these great marks or wheels or whatever they are and stuff oozing from them.
	It is horrendous.
	There was one photograph of somebody who has her back has these white blemishes that are oozing.
	I mean, it's quite horrendous and certainly life-changing.
	And from what I'm reading, and I'm ashamed to say I didn't know much about it until I started reading about it today, I read a piece from one of Britain's daily newspapers from 2012 about one woman's fight to get someone to listen and take notice of her with this thing.
	It really has been some kind of Cinderella condition, hasn't it?
	Very much so.
	One of the most bizarre things about Morgellans, it's also called the fiber disease, is that people complain that hairs are fibers are growing out of their skin, oftentimes out of the lesions and ulcers that develop on their skin, but oftentimes just out of unblemished skin or out of their lips, their eyes, ears.
	And these fibers are different from hair.
	I mean, they're more like collagen or keratin in their composition.
	And they're reported to move.
	People say that they can feel it moving under their skin.
	It's just an absolutely, it's almost a science fiction type of scenario.
	Well, I mean, it sounds a little, when I started reading about it, a neighbor of mine, who's certainly no longer with us, not connected with what I'm about to tell you, but a few years ago, he used to travel an awful lot on business, and he got himself scabies from sheets in hotel rooms.
	It's quite common, isn't it, that people pick this thing up.
	Terrible skin condition.
	And this, to me, looked like, you know, scabies on steroids.
	It is.
	It's very similar to scabies, with the exception, again, of the harsh hairs, as it's been reported.
	The one thing about Morgellens is that as the disease progresses, the fibers or the hairs start to grow internally as well.
	There have been people who have had to have surgery for other reasons.
	One woman had to have a knee operation.
	When the doctor opened her up, he found that her knee bones and cartilage were absolutely infested with these unknown types of fibers.
	People who have had MRIs on their brains, there is indication that these fibers have actually crossed the blood-brain barrier and have established themselves at certain areas of the brain.
	So, I mean, yeah, it is.
	Very much, it's like scabies on steroids, but with other really unknown conditions going on.
	Now, you're not a medical man, are you, Tim?
	So this must be very difficult or must have been very difficult for you to research because this is a medical thing and you only got to go on the internet.
	And, you know, I've had various problems medically over the years recently, and I've gone on the internet and I've found papers written for medics About what I think I've got.
	And they're baffling.
	They're impenetrable.
	How did you begin to research this then?
	Well, you know, I first started the research by actually talking to people who were suffering from Morgellans.
	You know, I mean, I saw with my own eyes, you know, just the horrible lesions and sores on their body.
	I mean, I saw the fibers that were growing out of their skin.
	I then talked to a lot of doctors and researchers.
	I talked to doctors who did not believe that these people were suffering from anything other than a form of delusion.
	And then I talked to a lot of doctors and researchers who believed that there was something going on.
	Is that still now?
	Because the articles that I read where people were desperately fighting to have their condition recognized were appearing in papers maybe 2012 or thereabouts in this country.
	And they were saying the medical profession won't listen to us.
	They're saying we're creating this syndrome.
	And it reminded me an awful lot of repetitive strain injury.
	Do you know what that is?
	Yes.
	You know, you get that when you work on computers.
	Now, I worked at Independent Radio Newsy, a big news agency, 20 years ago.
	I'd only just come to London.
	I was a young guy, very much like ABC or CBS News, producing national news bulletins and reading them.
	During the Gulf War, we all had to work tremendously long shifts.
	And we were using very early computer systems, and our seating and ergonomics were not great.
	And I ended up, and six of us ended up, in terrible, desperate pain with repetitive strain injury.
	So much so that I couldn't lift anything, do anything.
	I remember going on holiday with my girlfriend at the time, and I couldn't even pick up the suitcases at the airport.
	She had to carry them, which I felt terrible about.
	It was a terribly debilitating thing that I suffered with for years.
	But the doctors initially told me it's all in the mind.
	And it chimed with me enormously when I read the accounts of people who said they had Morgellans.
	And the medics were saying, this is a syndrome that's in your head.
	It's worse now, in fact, than it was back when Morgellans first surfaced in 2001 up until around 2011.
	After the CDC study came out, you just might as well forget about going to a doctor or dermatologist and saying that I have Morgellans because then you are just instantly told to go see a psychologist or go to your doctor and get antidepressants.
	You referenced the CDC, by the way, for our UK listeners, European listeners, and that's the Centers for Disease Controlling.
	Yes, that's correct.
	They put in a little money and did some research in California using 12 subjects that they never did reveal where they found these subjects.
	And they said that the samples that was taken from these subjects of the fibers were nothing more than common textile fibers, cotton, things like that.
	They never approached any of the scientists or doctors who had been researching Morgellens for years and years with their findings.
	So it was almost like they had approached it with a skeptical frame of mind from the very beginning.
	Now they do acknowledge that the pain and itching that these people are feeling is real.
	And I'll put quotation marks around that.
	But they say that it's a condition that comes basically from their mind.
	It's a type of mental illness.
	Well, the mind is an amazing thing.
	You can make yourself unwell if you really want to, and I'm sure that that comes into it.
	But equally, there are many more things that have a real and serious, genuine cause.
	And for the medical profession, which they so often do to dismiss and poo-poo a thing, is really not good practice, I would have thought.
	I'm sure not all doctors do this, but we need to be, I guess, making some progress in this.
	Where do you think we're at in 2015 with the understanding?
	Yeah, well, right now, there has been some really good research that has just been recently published that has shown that there is a connection with Morgellins and Lyme's disease, which is a tick-borne illness that's especially prominent here in the United States, but it has also appeared, you know, elsewhere around the world.
	I'm very close to one of Her Majesty's royal parks in the UK.
	There are a number of these around London.
	They have deer in them, and they are very much in a natural state, as they would have been many hundreds of years ago in the time of Henry VIII.
	You know, officially, they're not allowed to be touched.
	You know, by law, you're not allowed to mess with them.
	So they're in a natural state.
	And, you know, we have Lyme's disease here because of the ticks.
	Right.
	At least 43% of the people who have complained of Morgellin's symptoms when they are tested, they are found to have the same spirochete bacterium in their blood as is found in Lyme's disease.
	And a lot of Morgellin sufferers respond extremely well to intravenous antibiotics, the same type of treatments that's used on Lyme's disease.
	So, you know, unfortunately, it's difficult to find a doctor who will do that, first of all, because Lyme's disease is controversial here in the United States as whether or not it's actually real or not, still, you know, this time.
	But if it's responding to antibiotics in some cases, then that can't be, unless, of course, it's a placebo effect.
	Very hard to say that that's something that somebody's created for themselves, isn't it?
	Well, and the problem is, is that once treatment is stopped with a lot of people, the symptoms re-emerge after a while.
	So there's speculation that, much like HIV, that the spirochete bacterium finds a good place to hide itself for a while, you know, until the antibiotics have left the system and then they're able to reestablish themselves.
	Or because it is pretty clear that Morgellens is somewhat contagious, though you have to have a suppressed immune system to begin with in order to get it.
	That seems to be the case.
	But there could be situations where it has established itself in the household, you know, somehow, you know, in bedding or, you know, in carpet, you know, what have you.
	I was going to ask if there were commonalities between what people report, where they'd been and what they'd done.
	Look, we have, you have a name there.
	I think you call it mono there.
	We call it glandular fever here.
	And it's something that young people often get.
	And I got it when I was in my late 20s.
	I think possibly I was 30 when I got it.
	And it made me really, really ill.
	And I know how I got it.
	These people, do they have a do they have, well, I think I know how I got it.
	These people, do they have some kind of sense of the moment, how they might have acquired this?
	Was there something that they all did?
	One of the things that seems to be common is that a lot of them were gardening before they got it, or they were outside, say, like camping in an area where they were exposed to dirt and mud and plant life.
	But a large part of Borgellen's sufferers say that they had been outside gardening.
	And then, you know, like within a couple of days, they suddenly developed symptoms.
	Some people reported that they were outside and suddenly they felt like on their arm or their leg, you know, like what felt like pinpricks all of a sudden.
	And then in a couple of days, those pinpricks would turn into sores that would then spread across the body.
	So it seems that, you know, exposure to dirt, plant life, things like that seems to be a common factor.
	I've got a list here of skin symptoms, and that list is about 25 items or more.
	And then you go down to the other symptoms that include bladder weakness, urinary tract infections, ears, eyes, nose, and throat, that's declining sight, gritty feeling, white particles in tear ducts, eye inflammation, declining hearing, loss of balance, heavy staining on the teeth, gum disease, furrows in the tongue, increased saliva, psychological symptoms, depression, irritability, and decreasing patience.
	Not surprisingly, bipolarism and ADD are all linked with this, according to this document that I'm reading.
	Right, right.
	Have you heard that before?
	Oh, yes, yes.
	As the disease progresses, people will exhibit just a multitude of different systems.
	I mean, and it all seems to be related to the suppression of the immune system.
	Like I said, the people who originally contracted, I mean, they already may have had a compromised immune system to begin with.
	And then once this, whatever this is, gets established within them, then it just slowly works its way through you, making you sicker and sicker.
	You have a very persistent cat there.
	Oh, I'm sorry that you hear her.
	Over all these thousands of miles, she sounds very, no, I'm sure she's absolutely lovely, but over all of these thousands of miles, I can hear her either wanting to get in or get out or be fed.
	That's usually where it is with cats, isn't it?
	She's wanting to get in.
	Oh, if she can hang five for 25 minutes or so, that would be fantastic.
	But anyway, look, this is where the mystery begins, because these are the accounts, and we hear people talking about how they're not being listened to.
	But if you read around the internet, and there's a lot of garbage on the internet, we both know that, a lot of stuff you've really got to just dismiss because it's stupid.
	But there are suggestions that this thing does not come from this planet.
	Yeah, you know, that's one of these things naturally because of the unusual symptoms that this disease exhibits, especially when it has to do with the fibers.
	I mean, there's actually a bovine disease that has the same kind of symptoms, except that it seems to keep itself around the foot and hooves of cows, where fibers made of collagen and keratin will grow to the skin, which has led a lot of researchers to speculate that somehow this disease has jumped that human-animal barrier and has established itself into people.
	But because of just the bizarre aspects of this disease, naturally there are going to be people who speculate that this disease may be like a man-made disease that was created in a laboratory, possibly for the form of bio warfare, and that somehow it escaped.
	Lyme's disease was thought to be the same thing because when it first appeared here in the United States, it appeared not too far away from Plum Island, Long Island, which is where they have done numerous experiments and research on biowarfare using ticks.
	Hey, Tim, I don't want to be accused of animal cruelty here.
	Your cat is very persistent.
	If it's easy to let her in, why don't you let me just talk and why don't you let her in if you want to?
	All right, go ahead.
	Okay.
	So we're talking with Tim Swartzy.
	We're talking about Morgellen's disease.
	Tim is now, I mean, it's very exciting.
	We're doing this.
	I try and do these shows.
	I think I've often said this, as if they were exactly live, because I think that's much fairer.
	And I think you get a much better conversation if you do that.
	So that's what's happening now.
	All these thousands of miles away in Indiana.
	Tim is letting the cat in because, as you heard, she was pretty persistent.
	What's her name?
	Diva.
	Diva, that's a good name.
	She is a diva.
	And what is she?
	Well, is she Siamese or something?
	No, nope.
	She's just a black, long-haired domestic feline.
	In much need of attention by the scientists.
	That's right.
	All right.
	Okay.
	So you were saying suggestions that this thing might have been created in a lab and somehow escaped.
	Yeah, that has been one of the more persistent rumors, simply because Morgellens, for as much as we know about it, has seemed to have just popped out of nowhere.
	Now, there has been some research conducted that has shown that there may have been cases recorded back as far back as the 50s and 1960s, but again, because of the unusual nature of Morgellens, it was dismissed again as being delusional parasitosis.
	And let's not allow the fact to escape that sometimes doctors are baffled by stuff that happens.
	I came back from Africa back in, what was it, 2009 or so, and I had a bug that made me terribly ill for four nights and days.
	I could not move for the pain.
	I was constantly being sick.
	I was on my own in my apartment, and I thought I was going to die.
	And in the end, in the UK, the health service is not quite as good at the weekends because you have people who are filling in for other people on shift.
	So I saw a doctor who came here.
	He said, you've got travelers' diarrhea.
	I didn't have diarrhea.
	I was terribly, terribly ill.
	He just said, there's nothing I can do for you.
	You'll be all right in 24 hours.
	I wasn't.
	I ended up in hospital briefly, but they never knew.
	The point of the story is they never discovered what I had.
	And it came back every year for about three years after that in a milder form.
	And they thought it might have been associated with ticks in Africa, but they didn't really know.
	Well, see, and that's just it.
	There are new diseases that emerge every year that a lot of them end up being controversial because they've never been seen before.
	Look at Legionnaire's disease.
	I mean, nobody had really ever seen that before until it popped up in the 1970s with a bunch of extremely strange deaths.
	I mean, you know, the people would have flu-like symptoms that would just, then they would just rapidly deteriorate.
	Their lungs would fill with fluid and they would be dead.
	And wasn't, didn't that start with some gathering of vets, I think, in Salt Lake City or somewhere?
	And it was linked to the aircon, wasn't it?
	I dimly recall this.
	Right, right.
	Well, I mean, and there's been a new case of Legionnaires here in the United States in Brooklyn over the last couple of weeks.
	And it was found that the Legionnaires bacterium grows in the cooling towers of air conditioning systems in big buildings.
	Nobody had ever seen that before.
	So at first, when the people were coming in with these symptoms, they were like, oh, well, you just have the flu.
	And, you know, and because it's a virus, you know, there's nothing we can do about it.
	So just take some aspirin and go home.
	Well, then all of a sudden, these people were dropping and dying, and they were mystified.
	Go for the Gophor syndrome.
	I mean, for years, doctors were just telling these soldiers that, you know, it's all in your head.
	You have, you know, like a battle fatigue or what have you.
	But there was definite physiological reactions going on within these soldiers.
	You know, their brains were deteriorating.
	The cartilage in their joints was falling apart.
	And it wasn't until years later that finally the medical profession acknowledged that, yes, these people were exposed to something.
	And they're still just not quite sure just exactly what caused it.
	But now at least they're acknowledging that, yes, it's not in their heads that they are actually, you know, they were actually exposed to something.
	So I'm hoping that Morgillens, that the same thing will happen.
	Unfortunately, because it's not like a pandemic.
	It's not where you have entire cities catching this.
	It's just seems to be just a few individuals here or there.
	And the other unfortunate things is that women seem to be at least, you know, over 50% of Morgellin sufferers are women.
	And I don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but in the United States, women tend to be ignored a lot more often when they go to doctors to complain about being sick or feeling pain or things like that.
	Well, I think the way things are over here at the moment with our health service, and this is only personal experience, I think women and men tend to be ignored a lot of the time or misdiagnosed.
	That's not all the time.
	There are some wonderful people in the health service, but boy, it's under strain now.
	And this is just something else that we've got to deal with, something that's appeared apparently from nowhere.
	We don't quite understand where it's from or what it is.
	But somehow the medics have got to deal with it.
	Well, and considering, you know, I mean, whether or not you believe in climate change or global warming, I mean, we do know that there have been shifts in wind patterns all across the world and that diseases that never existed,
	say, in the northern hemisphere, but did exist, say, in more tropical areas, have been carried up out of their original locations and are now appearing in places that they have never seen before.
	West Nile virus is another good example of a disease that had never been seen in the United States.
	And now it's everywhere here.
	I mean, here in Indiana during the summertime, mosquitoes are found all the time that are carrying West Nile virus.
	You know, 20 years ago, who had heard of West Nile virus?
	It was never seen, you know, around here.
	Well, same with Ebola.
	Ebola, with its origins in Africa and people now saying that there were cases of Ebola or something like it decades and decades ago, but we think of it as something that appeared in the news 20 years ago and reappeared in the news big time about a year ago.
	And that's another one of these medical mysteries, isn't it?
	Right, yes, exactly.
	And, you know, there has been some researchers who say that there could be a connection between Morgellens and Ebola because there have been sufferers of Ebola who have been found to have fibers again growing out of their skin, much like Morgellens.
	The difference is that Morgellens does not appear to be life-threatening in an immediate amount of time.
	It seems to be more of a lingering type of disease and not nearly as contagious as Ebola, thank God.
	What do you know about the geographical spread of Morgellens?
	I tend to think of it, because it's an American-sounding word.
	I tend to think of it as something that probably is mostly in America, but we also have cases here in Europe.
	When you've researched this, where is it?
	Well, I should point out also that Morgellens actually was a French word when the first cases or what appear to have been the first cases appeared like in the early 1600s in France.
	And it was the doctor who was researching it called the Morgellens.
	But in the United States, it first appeared in Texas, Florida, and California.
	There was also some cases that were found along the east coast, especially again around New Hampshire and Long Island, around the areas where the Plum Island military research organization is.
	From there, it has spread through practically the entire United States and up into Canada.
	But it seems like warm, humid conditions seem to be a favorite, at least originally, for the original outbreak of Morgellans.
	And as far as you understand, is its growth exponential?
	Is it linear?
	Are cases multiplying?
	And if they are, how are they multiplying?
	You know, unfortunately, we just do not have any good research right now on how it is spreading.
	Once again, we've been hamstrung because patients who report having symptoms are dismissed and given antidepressants now rather than being treated for morgellens.
	So if you go to a doctor or dermatologist and say that you have morgellens, then the doctor will not write it down as morgellins.
	He will write it down as OCD or something along those lines.
	So unfortunately, we just do not have any good, with the exception of these patients who then get mad at their doctors and then go to a doctor who is known for their research in the Morgellens and say, hey, look, I have these symptoms.
	Then it gets to be recorded.
	But the majority of the sufferers have no idea who to turn to after that.
	And sometimes with things like this, and if we think about Gulf War syndrome and that kind of stuff, these things only get resolved when, unfortunately, it all ends up in the courts.
	Yes, yes.
	And I don't know if that's going to happen like that with Morgan's.
	I think the only way that it's going to go to the courts or get even more public attention is if somebody extremely famous gets it or a political leader or somebody along those lines.
	Only then will any real attention and money start going into it.
	Say the president of the United States or a very famous congressman would get it.
	And then naturally, I mean, they would have the money to look into it.
	And they wouldn't be called delusional or you just need antidepressants.
	No, no, the money would then start being put into this.
	But only until that situation arises, I think, will any attention really be properly paid to it.
	That is a reflection of the crucible that we live in these days, that showbiz celebrity and notoriety, unfortunately, are what counts.
	And, you know, this is no reflection on Michael Douglas, who I greatly respect and think is a fine actor, but he got cancer, and suddenly the world becomes interested in the kind of cancer that he had.
	That's just how this works, isn't it?
	Yes, it is very much.
	And, you know, I mean, people will talk about, you know, Joni Michael.
	Well, you know, Joni Michael is, you know, not that big of a celebrity, unfortunately.
	I mean, you know, I love her music and a lot of other people do too, but I mean, she just did not have the, you know, the clout other than, you know, her condition being reported just kind of almost along the lines of, you know, entertainment news.
	You know, not medical news, but, you know, oh, here's Joni, Joni Michael.
	I mean, Joni Mitchell, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	You know, Joni Mitchell, you know, years ago she was famous, but nobody's heard from her now.
	And, you know, she's got this crazy disease, and we all know that, you know, she's not quite right.
	Well, that's a whole other issue, isn't it?
	And that is to do with the way that we treat serious news stories and things that happen.
	And, you know, I'm very concerned as somebody who does news and has for all of my life that a lot of stuff is just becoming trivialized now.
	You know, the number of times I go on, and we're not talking about this, so I mustn't deviate too far, but let's just get it out there.
	The number of times you see some reference to an interesting news story or something that you think is, and then you click on a website, a news website, and you get some garbage video report voiced up by somebody dressed up to the nines, as we say here, in an office somewhere in, you know, Idaho or the north of England or somewhere, talking about this stuff that adds nothing to the story and actually trivializes the whole thing.
	Sometimes I despair about the dissemination of information in this world, but I feel better after that.
	It's been a very, very long week.
	All right, so where are we at then?
	What are the conclusions?
	Without giving away the whole nine yards of your book, what are the conclusions that you come to, Tim?
	Well, the conclusions that I have with this, with Morgellens is that, you know, it's an actual physical disease, that, you know, that it's not, for the majority of these people, it's not just something In their heads, and that there has been research that has been continued to be conducted,
	and that it looks like that the disease is treatable, and that people shouldn't despair, and that they should do the research and find a doctor who acknowledges the reality of this disease and start getting the proper treatment.
	And as well, start, you know, I mean, it wouldn't hurt to get the proper mental treatment as well because depression falls right in line with this disease.
	So, I mean, just because you have this disease and you're depressed doesn't mean that it's not real.
	So, I mean, you know, get yourself treated both physically and mentally.
	And sometimes, you know, if you've got something that the medical profession doesn't entirely understand or want to understand, then you can end up depressed.
	Right.
	I've told my listeners here, they know this over the years.
	I've got tinnitus ringing in the ears, which I got after a virus a few years ago, and I thought for a while that my career was finished.
	I've still got ringing in the ears.
	I've got it right now.
	But there's nothing that they can do for you.
	And if that's not a recipe for getting you depressed, I don't know what is.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	So, you know, these people with Morgellens who say that they have the symptoms of Morgellens, and if they go to a medic who says there's nothing much we can do for you, we can just treat you for depression.
	Well, if you weren't depressed in the beginning, you will be after that little confrontation.
	Right.
	But don't give up.
	That's the main thing that I want your listeners.
	If you know somebody or if you're suffering yourself from it, don't give up.
	There are doctors out there who will listen to you and they will help you.
	Just don't despair.
	I think you told me at the beginning of this that you spoke firsthand to some people who'd had this.
	Tell me the worst case scenario, the worst case that you came across.
	Well, the worst case that I came across was this, and this actually was a man who had developed morgellens after he had plowed his garden.
	And then the next day he started showing the symptoms.
	And it got to the point with him where his body was entirely covered with these horrible, horrible lesions.
	And they itched.
	He felt like that there was things constantly crawling under his skin.
	They got into his eyes.
	And when I say into his eyes, they were actually in the fluid in his eyes.
	And he started exhibiting neurological disorders.
	He had an MRI.
	There were lesions on his brain in several different locations that appeared to be conglomerations of these fibers.
	Eventually, he passed away from a heart condition.
	When an autopsy was performed, it was found that the main artery that leads into his heart was absolutely clogged with these fibers.
	The doctors said that it was a, how do they put it?
	It was like a calcium buildup that had taken the form of fibers.
	There's a technical term I can't remember exactly what it was.
	But basically, these fibers had clogged up his arteries to the point where he could no longer get the blood to his heart and he passed away.
	So that's the worst case scenario that I've run across.
	And there may be others that I don't know about, but I mean, that one was pretty horrific.
	And these cases are terrible for the people involved, especially that poor man, but the people left behind who don't have adequate answers for what happened.
	Yes, yes.
	And the unfortunate thing about this is that his wife also developed symptoms to Morgellens not too long afterwards.
	Fortunately, her symptoms never got to the point that his did.
	And eventually, hers actually just kind of waned and went away.
	And she, under times of stress, they'll come back, but she seems to have had a better immune system.
	Yeah, so that indicates that there are people who are resistant to these things, just as they've discovered people who appear to have immunity to HIV-AIDS.
	Then the same can happen with this.
	That's interesting.
	So the body, the human body, our physiology is a remarkable thing.
	Right.
	I think the majority of the population, in fact, is probably resistant to Morgellins.
	That's why you don't see people just dropping in the streets from it.
	I think that there has to be certain physical conditions that a person is undergoing in order to get this in the first place.
	So you researched this.
	Why do we need to be concerned?
	Well, there's a number of reasons.
	First of all, we're going to see newly emerging diseases like this all the time.
	I mean, we've seen it throughout history.
	We can't ignore the fact that this is going to happen again.
	And the fact that this has been so ignored by the medical profession for so many years that I think that is disturbing, though unfortunately, it's not.
	I mean, we've seen it time and time again.
	And people are dying and suffering for no reason at all.
	If the medical profession had just got onto this more quickly, I think that there could have been cures or at least things to treat, to improve the quality of these people's lives until an actual cure is found.
	So what we need to learn then by the sounds of it, and your book points this up, is how we process people's stories, how we treat them through the medical system, and what we do with the information that they give to us.
	Yes.
	There are a lot of doctors who feel like that they are more knowledgeable than their patients, that these patients come in complaining of symptoms, that the doctors are like, well, that's impossible.
	And I know better because I'm a doctor.
	I went to school to be a doctor and all that.
	I think that there's a conceit going on and egotism, so to speak, with a lot of these people in the medical profession.
	What do they call it the God complex, the God syndrome?
	Yeah, yeah, very much so.
	Yeah.
	And that, you know, these people come in and they complain of these symptoms and they're like, well, I've never heard about this before, so obviously it's not real.
	And I think that doctors need to get past this and to actually start listening more to what their patients are saying.
	Now, before my many friends and listeners who work in the medical profession start saying, you're tarring us all with a terribly bad brush here, we have to say that there are a huge number of people, the vast majority of people in the medical profession who care and will pursue something when it's reported to them and will do their best.
	I've had personal experience of that.
	So let's not run away with the idea that the whole system is flawed and everybody in it.
	That's not so.
	I think what you're saying, and I don't want to put words into your mouth, is, Tim, that it's the systems that need to be looked at, perhaps a little less than the people.
	Well, you know, doctors are people too, you know.
	So, I mean, you know, and they're not perfect.
	So, I mean, you know, I don't want people to think that, you know, every doctor that they're going to go to is just going to, you know, dismiss them and, you know, and think they're crazy.
	I mean, it's like you said, I mean, there are many, many excellent doctors out there.
	And, I mean, we wouldn't know as much as we do now about the whole Morgellen's disease if it wasn't for these doctors who did listen to their patients and want to do something about it.
	Exactly.
	And what you've got to always know when you go and see a medic is that the next one you see, if the one that you've just seen doesn't give you a satisfactory answer or doesn't seem to be interested, the next one probably will.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	All right.
	What's the book called about this?
	Well, the book is called The Final Nail in Your Coffin.
	That's the short title.
	It's called Epox to All Mankind, Morgellens and Red Mercury Plagues Created in the New World Order Labs of Mad Scientists.
	And did you come to a conclusion about whether this thing was created in the labs?
	Sounds like it isn't.
	You know, I haven't come to a conclusion yet.
	I mean, naturally, I mean, I have my own personal theories and speculations, but I can't really go and say that.
	I mean, that would just be conjecture.
	And, you know, I'm not in a position where I'm just going to go and put that out.
	So, I mean, I'll leave that up to the readers to decide for themselves.
	I wouldn't want you risking your Emmy Awards on my account, Tim.
	Okay, finally, we've only got a couple of minutes, but just give me a, we can do another show on this.
	But I think we touched on Nikolai Tesla the last time we talked.
	And I saw somewhere written that you'd written something about newly discovered writings of his, the man, An Enigma, of course, who knew stuff that were it to be fully publicized now, perhaps could help us in our various dilemmas in this world.
	I'm not putting this very well, but, you know, he knew things, and perhaps those things were kept very, very quiet.
	You know, since the last time that I talked to you, Howard, about Tesla, his notoriety has absolutely exploded across this planet.
	I mean, more and more people now know who Tesla is, and they are acknowledging the great things that he done, that he did to benefit mankind.
	And some of the newly found notes of his had been held by the United States government and had been parceled out to places, say, like Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and other research organizations across the country in an attempt to try to find if the things that he was writing about could be weaponized, which is unfortunate.
	But I mean, we now know that Tesla was actually doing research in what we would call now field propulsion, or in science fiction terms, anti-gravity.
	And I think that we are going to see some absolutely fascinating discoveries coming very soon based on Tesla's research.
	Well, one of the things is the EM drive that has been in the news recently, the impossible propulsion system that NASA has acknowledged actually seems to work.
	A lot of this is based originally on research that Tesla did in the early 1900s.
	Sounds like you're going to have to revisit this.
	I revisit it all the time.
	Oh, lovely to talk with you, Tim.
	I enjoyed it last time.
	And I'm sorry, it's been about four years, I think, since we last spoke.
	Let's try and reduce that gap next time.
	But thank you very much indeed.
	If people want to know about you and your research, you have a great name for your website, don't you?
	Yes, it's a conspiracyjournal.com.
	Just one word, conspiracyjournal.com.
	And it's not just a website about conspiracies and things like that.
	I mean, we've got everything in there.
	We've got ghost UFOs and just everything weird and strange that I'm interested in.
	And I'm interested in everything.
	I mean, there's stories about the Loch Ness Monster, too.
	So Bigfoot, you name it.
	We find a place for it on our website.
	So you're still that little boy who talked about UFOs.
	Very much so.
	It all fascinates me, and I hope it will continue to fascinate me till the day I leave this great earth.
	Well, Tim Swartz, thank you very much indeed for putting up with me.
	I'm a man who was up at half past three this morning, and we're doing this at the other opposite end of the day in a temperature where I'm recording this of about 31 degrees Celsius or thereabouts.
	So I hope I made sense.
	You certainly did, and many, many thanks.
	Thank you very much, Howard.
	I enjoyed it.
	And I hope your listeners enjoyed it as well.
	A very interesting Tim Swartz.
	I'll put a link to his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
	The website designed, curated, maintained, and kept ticking over like a Swiss watch, Like a real chronograph by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
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	Take care.
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