All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 14, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:42
Edition 221 - Unheard Archive Edition

As Howard returns from a few days in beautiful West Wales, The Unexplained flashes back to2005...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the Return of the Unexplained.
And very literally, it is a return because for the first time in five years, I'm just back from a brief holiday.
I took five days away in West Wales, in one of the most unspoilt, beautiful, rural areas of this United Kingdom.
And I returned to the place of my Welsh ancestry.
And it was a marvelous, marvelous experience.
It's been a long time since I've been in that area.
And I discovered new places, places that I hadn't seen before.
So I stayed on a farm very close to Cardigan in the country, near a place called Newcastle Emlin.
If you live in Wales, you know exactly where this is.
And it was accessible only by single-track roads, miles of them.
But digital technology being so good, my satellite navigation in the car knew all of these tiny little roads.
It takes a lot of adjusting too when you get there.
If you've been in the big city and then you go there, then you have to adjust the way that you feel.
You've got to slow down.
And you've also got to adjust to the driving there and the tiny little roads.
So everything moves at a beautiful, reassuringly slower pace.
Thank you very much to Kath and Alistair, who run the place that I stayed, for being so kind.
And the kindest thing they did for me was to just leave me undisturbed for a week.
So I had a week of complete peace, just traveling around the little towns, spending time at Aberporth on the coast.
Look that up.
That's a beautiful, beautiful place.
And by the end of the week, I didn't want to return.
So my break in West Wales, I think I probably needed.
I was just getting to the stage where, after the last few years of being battered around by life, I just had to get off the merry-go-round for a while.
And I'm going to make some big changes in my life that I'll tell you more about quite soon.
But back to the records, as they say, as they used to say on American Top 40 Radio, back on the unexplained.
I didn't have a show booked for this time.
I've checked out a few guests and wasn't particularly satisfied with them.
So what I'm doing this time is I have rediscovered a digital tape that I didn't even know I had.
I found it underneath my bed, believe it or not, when I came back home the other day.
And it's a digital recording of the first anniversary edition of the radio version of The Unexplained.
You know, this show was first on national radio, and then it was replaced by a political show.
A man called George Galloway took over, and The Unexplained ended, and you, the people who listened to the show, emailed me in your hundreds and said, please keep this show going.
So I took the show that I devised, The Unexplained, to the internet.
And we've been here for nine years now.
Anyway, this first anniversary show includes an interview with a man who doesn't do a lot of radio, doesn't do a lot of interviews at all.
You very seldom see or hear anything about him.
His name is Matthew Manning, and he's best known in this country as a healer.
Born in 1955, started making headlines, getting himself on television when he was very young.
And the guy, whatever you think of him, is a remarkable person.
I know that some people don't believe in healing and that kind of thing.
And I have to remain impartial about all of these things, of course, but we'll hear that appearance on The Unexplained from Matthew Manning.
We'll also hear Matt Genge, who's an expert on asteroids, who we had on that same first edition, our first anniversary edition, coming very soon here.
No shout-outs this time round.
I did keep up with all of your emails while I was in rural West Wales, thanks to the broadband that they had there.
A little slower than London, but was still able to see your messages.
But I am going to mention two people, two emails that I got.
The first one was from Joe, who said, Howard, I introduced my friend Amelia Sims to your show at the start of last year, and she's completely addicted now.
That's nice to hear, Joe and Amelia.
She's been traveling for seven months and is now in Russia.
She's been listening to your show while she's been traveling to Dubai, India, China, Japan, and Mongolia.
And she's now in Russia.
So, would you please say a big hello to Amelia from Joe Catamo and also from me too.
Amelia, I hope you have a wonderful time.
Please look after yourself.
And, you know, we'd love to see some of the photographs when you get back from that trip.
So, Joe, consider that done.
And, Amelia, like I say, have a great time.
This is from Alex.
He says, absolutely love your show.
Been staying with my sister, Lauren, in Melbourne.
I'm staying there for a few months.
She's introduced me to the unexplained, and now I'm hooked.
This is nice.
Anyway, you must get loads of these requests.
I get some.
Lauren McNabb, 33rd birthday on the 15th of September, and would absolutely love a shout-out from you, I'm sure.
So, Lauren, I hope you have a wonderful 33rd.
It's a great age to be.
I mean, life is just really opening up and beginning.
And to be in Melbourne, wow.
So, I hope you have a lovely birthday, Lauren.
And Alex, consider that done, too.
I will do more shout-outs on the next edition.
I will collate all of the emails that I've had.
I'm just kind of getting back up to speed now.
Just starting to sound and feel like myself.
So, what we're going to do now is hear highlights.
I've taken out the commercials and the station idents and all the rest of it.
But this is as the show was broadcast in November 2005.
First of all, you will hear Matthew Manning, then you'll hear the scientist Matt Genge.
Before all of that, thank you very much indeed to Adam Cornwell, my hard-working webmaster, for his continuing efforts, maintaining the website, curating it, and getting the show out to you.
He's kept it all ticking over while I've been away.
So, Adam, at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, thank you for that.
If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me through the website theunexplained.tv.theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can email me from there.
And if you'd like to leave a donation for the show, you can do that too through the website theunexplained.tv.
So now we travel back in time to an era when The Unexplained was on AM and digital radio across the UK and around Europe.
This was the first anniversary edition and you're going to hear first from Matthew Manning.
The Unexplained's first anniversary, 52 weeks we've been here and doing this show.
Thank you for supporting it.
My name is Howard Hughes and the man on the line now is described as a psychic and healer.
His name is Matthew Manning.
And if you are of a certain vintage, you will certainly have heard of Matthew.
And Matthew, I think we might also introduce you to a whole new audience tonight, too.
Thank you for coming on tonight.
What do you mean of a certain vintage?
If you're over 25.
Oh, I see.
That was a long time ago.
Dearing me, you've been on two seconds and I put my foot in it already.
Matthew, I'm so pleased, I have to say, to get you on, because I know that these days, although you did a lot of television in the 70s and 80s, didn't you, you don't do a lot of media these days?
Not very much.
Rarely, rarely.
No, I like living a reclusive life.
Now, was there something about being in the spotlight as you were that made you want to do that, that made you not want to appear as much as you once did?
Ooh.
Well, I think you grow older, don't you?
And your goals change and what you want to do changes.
And I think you can keep doing media things and I think you end up becoming an entertainer and a bit like a performing monk as I've always said, which is not really my bag.
I'm more interested in trying to do something that's going to educate, help.
But I'm also aware that in doing that, the best way to get a message across is sometimes by entertaining as well.
But some of the best, you're not an entertainer, you don't want to be.
Some of the best entertainers in the world succeed and get their message across by rationing themselves.
And it seems that that's what you're doing.
You're rationing your appearances.
Well, I've got, frankly, no desire to do otherwise.
Last year I did a stretch on This Morning with Philip Schofield and Firm Britain.
And I was on, I don't know, every other week for about six weeks.
And, you know, you walk down the high street in your local town, and people start pointing at you.
He was on television like you're invisible.
And I don't like it.
It's not me.
And I suppose anybody who appears on the boob tube, as they call it, is seen to be a celebrity.
Even if you don't want to be, because you appear on there, that's how people perceive you.
Nah, but that's not true, is it?
You're not a celebrity just because you're on the radio, because you're on television.
I've never thought that, but there are people who see things as a matter of fact.
That, sadly, is society now.
If you've been on television a couple of times, you've suddenly become a celebrity.
That's never been my thing.
If I do something, it's because I've got a message that I want to get across or something that I want to show on a serious level.
And the one thing I suppose about doing teleprograms like that is that there is tremendous time pressure.
We have a little bit of time to expand here and to explain your story and what you do these days in 2005.
On the television, you get a couple of minutes, somebody asks you a question, and then they're into a commercial break, aren't they?
Absolutely.
You've got three minutes to explain yourself, and that's that.
And people make up their minds about you based on three minutes.
It's probably been hacked and edited and everything else.
It's not, as you say, it's not always the best way to put yourself across.
How would you describe yourself?
What phrase would you use to describe Matthew Manning?
Well, you used in your introduction the word psychic and healer.
I think the psychic probably goes back to the 70s when Uri and I hit the scene and we were known for doing psychic things.
I guess that's what Uri still does.
But I felt I wanted to do something which had some, hopefully benefit to other people or some value.
So I went off into healing and I felt that I'd like to be remembered ultimately for having helped a few people down the line rather than being a celebrity.
If that doesn't sound too precocious or arrogant.
Doesn't at all.
It's a fine line to walk, isn't it?
I understand you also turned down recently the chance to be on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
That was a joke.
Joke.
I mean, they phone me up because somebody's pulled out.
What do they want me on there for?
No one's ever heard of me.
I'm not a celebrity.
Hey, Matthew, did they tell you somebody's pulled out?
Yeah, somebody had pulled out.
I don't know who it was, but anyway, whoever took the place that I was offered, was it Kimberly from the Australian show?
I don't know, but I couldn't have done that.
No, I like living too comfortably.
I wouldn't want to be rained down and have snakes on me.
And eat witchity grubs.
No, don't fancy any of that.
I think what we need to do for the first, what, eight, ten minutes or so is just explain your life story.
Because I once saw a documentary on TV about you, which fascinated me.
It made an impact on me that I've never forgotten, which is why I've got you on the show now.
So, how did you discover the gifts that you have and what were those gifts?
Because for you it started very early, didn't it?
Well, it is a long story, but back in 1967, and I was then 12, 13, I became the center of what is known as a poltergeist attack or outbreak.
I was living with my younger brother and sister and my parents.
My father was an architect, and we lived in a modern house near Cambridge.
And odd things began to happen.
My father, this is how it actually started, came down one morning to open up an all-night burning fire, which in those days houses had.
And there, lying in the middle of the floor, was a Georgian silver tankard, which belonged to my father.
It was some distance from the shelf that it normally lived on.
And like any normal-minded person, you think, well, how has it got there?
And he's particularly logical.
So he thought, well, we must have had burglars in the night, but there were no signs of forced entry and nothing else had been moved or stolen or anything else.
His next idea was that somehow a cat had got into the house, but we had no pets.
And again, there was no way that a dog or a cat could have got into the house.
Being an architect and being very logical, he then thought, well, maybe somehow in the night the wooden shelf has twisted, and this has thrown this tankard across the room.
So he took everything off the shelf, took the shelf off its brackets, and looked down at its plane, and it was completely level.
Anyway, nothing more was thought about it on a logical basis.
I think obviously everybody was very puzzled as to what had happened.
Three mornings later, exactly the same thing happened again.
And I think then my father realized that something else was going on.
There were a lot of very strange synchronicities to this story, one of which was that my father, when he was a student, had read a book by a man who was then well known called Harry Price, who'd written a book called Poltergeist Over England.
My father had read this as a young man, as a student, and had then sold it on.
But when these first two events took place, he immediately thought poltergeist.
And of course, it's very difficult if you think you've got a poltergeist, and this is going back 40 years, who do you go to?
We were living near Cambridge, so he went to Cambridge University to departments of psychology, clinical psychology, child psychology, all of whom just thought he was some kind of nutter, I guess.
Anyway, these events continued and more objects began to move.
Pieces of furniture were overturned, a vase of flowers would move from one side of the room to the other and so on.
Anyhow, eventually, and I'm cutting the story very short, he went in desperation one night to the Cambridge police station.
You imagine what a strange report this must have been.
What on earth could you say?
What on earth could you say?
But there, and this was at the second synchronicity, was a police sergeant on duty that night in 1967 whose interest in life, whose passion in life, was psychical research and the paranormal.
And he was completely sympathetic to my father's story.
And he said, the man you need is Professor George Owen.
Of course, my father had never heard of him.
Professor George Owen was the world's leading expert on poltergist activity.
He actually was at Trinity College, Cambridge, and had written what was then and still is probably now the greatest academic book on the subject.
Anyhow, George Owen was obviously then called in, investigated the case, and decided that something odd, paranormal was happening.
And I think in retrospect, sort of 40 years later almost, I was very lucky in that because George Owen came in and he was a great diffuser.
He explained these things were perfectly natural, although rare, that they're not due to demonic intervention or madness or anything like that, that they do happen sometimes.
There's usually a teenager involved or an adolescent who's in some kind of situation of stress or anxiety.
And was that you?
Were you...
Did you feel yourself to be under...
I thought about it a lot.
I mean, I don't think I was probably any more angsty than any other teenagers.
I've now got a 14-year-old son, and I'm not sure that I was that much more angsty than he is.
He's a lot more laid-back than I am.
George Owen explained that these things are a bit like measles or mumps, which was a bit of an understatement.
He said they usually last for three weeks to three months.
They die out, and that's the end of it.
He was right in that regard, in that by Easter of 67, the events had stopped altogether.
They became rather a vague memory.
The following year, we moved to another house, which was probably about eight miles away, and that move had nothing to do with what had happened in the previous house.
My parents merely wanted to buy an old house.
And in early 1971, events started up again.
And to start with, I was very embarrassed by it because the George Owner said, you know, these things only happen once, and I didn't really tell my parents a great deal about it.
But the second outbreak was much more powerful, much more violent, and in a way, much more aggressive as well.
And on this second occasion, we had rooms in the house that were just totally overturned.
It had looked like a group of vandals had been in there.
Anything that wasn't held down had been turned over or moved.
And how did you feel at that time, being very young and being the apparent...
Very frightened.
Although people often ask me that question.
It's funny because kids accept things or odd things or unusual things much more readily than adults do.
Adults have got much more logic in place and they think down much more straight lines.
Children, and again, you have to bear in mind that things have changed now, but with the sort of films there are around now and Harry Potter and everything else, people are more accepting of things like levitation and things flying around.
But in 1971, it seemed very out of date.
In those days, it was completely unheard of.
But of course, the biggest problem facing my father was that I was then a boarder at a public school, and he was very concerned that if I went back to school, these things were going to continue at school.
And if they did, I might get pushed out or that another boy might get the blame for it.
So he had to go and he felt he had to go and have a meeting with a headmaster at the beginning of term to explain what had happened.
And this is actually where it was quite amusing, because the headmaster was a retired army officer, very stiff upper lip.
And he was convinced that these things didn't happen.
And even if they did happen, they certainly wouldn't happen in an English public school.
And there he was wrong, because within a matter of hours, the activity started erupting at school as well.
And there, over the next weeks, it was witnessed by large numbers of people, by classrooms, of pupils, by teachers.
Absolutely alarming for all concerned.
Matthew Manning, I want to pause the story just at that point.
I want to come back to it in just a moment.
Before we do that, what would you be doing on Christmas Eve?
Have you got plans for it?
Well, you could be choosing how you're going to spend £100,000.
Yep, £100,000.
Go ahead, Ollie Unexplained.
We're going to talk about asteroids, UFOs from underneath the Caribbean.
Got to hear that story.
Plus, JFK, 43 years on after the man was assassinated, some new theories.
And some old ones, too.
We're going to go across, and you'll hear some unique archive recordings that I've discovered that I don't think you'll have heard before.
That's all coming later on this show.
For right now, we have Matthew Manning in Norfolk tonight.
Suffolk, Suffolk, Suffolk.
That is the biggest mistake you can make, isn't it?
It is out here.
If you say, what do they do to you?
If you say that you're from Norfolk and you're from Suffolk, you get lynched.
Basically, yes.
Well, I won't make that mistake again, Matthew Manning.
Now, we were at the stage where we were talking about your early life, how these alarming things happened at home, which perhaps your parents were more concerned about than you were because you were young.
And as a young person, you just accepted that was the way of things.
But things get more complicated when you've got to go to school, don't they?
Well, as I say, things then broke out at school, and it's a long story, but I was about to do A-levels in 1973, and I'd actually got a place to do psychology because I wanted to try and understand what was happening.
I've got a place at Sussex University.
And my father said, well, you know, the best thing to do, have a year off.
And in those days, people didn't have gap years.
He said, decide what you want to do.
And at the same time, I'd been approached by a publisher who wanted me to write a book about the experiences that I had.
Anyway, the book came out in 1974, a book called The Link, which went on to sell a million copies, which in those days was a huge number of words to live.
In these days, a huge number of copies to sell.
And of course, what happened was that for the next year or so, I became just someone that traveled around selling this book, going all over the world.
And the one thing that became very apparent was that all anybody wanted was the big pizzazz, the big bang.
Well, they wanted results.
Did it make you rich, Matthew?
So wherever I went to the world, I had to produce results.
And for me, one of the turning points, I was in Germany promoting the book there where it had taken off.
And I was in front of a press conference.
And bear in mind, I was 19 years old.
And dealing with the press when you're 19 and an aggressive press in those days was not the easiest thing at all.
So how did you deal with that?
Did you fight them back?
It's not a matter of fighting.
All you can do is be honest and be yourself, which is all I ever did and all I ever do now.
But out of this press conference, arrived a man called Professor Shibala from Ravensburg University.
He was an electronics engineer, and he'd got this very strange contraption, which was essentially a box with a loop of wire coming out from either side of the box.
And on the loop of wire were ten lights.
And he had this idea that if I concentrated on it, I would be somehow able to illuminate the lights.
So anyway, there I am with a room full of people with television cameras and everything else whirring and sceptical, hostile journalists, and I have to sit there and make this thing light up.
So I sat there for about 10 minutes, which I can tell you in that situation seems an eternity.
And eventually, with one sort of big whoosh, something happened and one light went on.
You'll never guess what the headline was in the German press the following day.
Tell me.
Psychic can only light one light.
Because one light went on was amazing enough, but because all ten didn't go on, I got criticized for it.
And that was what I was up against the whole time, and I became very, very disillusioned with it.
And by that time, I got involved in doing a lot of research with scientists in Europe and in Canada.
And out of that time, I think only one interesting piece of research really surfaced.
I'd been in Toronto, and again, this was 1974, working with a large number of scientists, one of whom was a recent or then a recent Nobel Prize winner, Brian Josephson from Cambridge, Professor Brian Josephson.
The scientists there had attached me to a machine called an electroencepraph, which measures brainwave patterns because they wanted to find out what, if anything, was happening in my brain when I was engaged in what they call paranormal activity, the kind of thing I've just described with the lights.
They found that, first of all, there was a very unusual brainwave emanating from me, which they dubbed a ramp function, R-A-M-P.
Furthermore, the computer which was analyzing the energy level, for want of a better description, from this brainwave pattern, was showing that I was in deep sleep, in stage four sleep, which I wasn't, I was awake and talking to the researchers.
They then used the computer to try and trace which part of the brain this brainwave pattern was coming from.
And they found it was a part of the brain which everybody has, but which is believed to be dormant in most people.
It was the central, most primitive part of the brain.
And I always thought that was one of the most interesting experiments that I took part in, because I now believe that whatever I do, and many other people like me, possibly has little to do with little green men from outer space.
And I know you've got something coming up on that later.
I think rather it's a throwback to a time when we all lived in caves and we didn't have modern technology and we were forced much more to rely on our intuition.
So we had to live in those days on instinct and that's exactly what you were doing.
We had to find food, water, shelter, direction or whatever.
Anyhow, I continued doing that work for about another three years and it just seemed to me that the scientists really weren't that interested in doing anything that was particularly constructive.
All they wanted to do was to see whether I could change the voltage in a piece of electrical equipment across the room, whether I could wipe out a computer program from one side of the building to the other.
And eventually I said, look, I'm interested in doing this work.
I'm interested in knowing what makes me tick, how I do it.
But if I'm going to continue with you, I want to do something that hopefully has some positive benefit or which might be helpful to people somewhere further down the line.
And it was then in 1977 that I began what turned out to be five years of testing with scientists in America and in Britain where it was my job to try and influence biological targets rather than inanimate targets.
So I did experiments where I had to influence enzymes, blood cells, somebody else's brainwave patterns from a distance and indeed cancer cells.
And what was your success rate?
Well there lay the irony because in a laboratory my success rate was really quite high and those reports have all been published many years ago in various scientific journals.
And for example one of the experiments involved me in influencing cancer cells in a plastic container where I was successful 27 times out of 30.
Of course it wasn't long before people heard that the kind of work I was doing and I started getting letters saying, you know, I have a mother who suffers from terrible migraine headaches and you've done this work working with this enzyme in blood samples that has implications for migraines.
And that's really how I became involved in the work that I still do to this day, almost 30 years on.
But at that time you were so young.
How is it possible for you to take that on board when you're what, 20, 21, 22?
22, 23.
I think it's like a vocation, Howard.
It's like a calling.
I think it's something that you have to do.
And I've met over the years a lot of other people who practice healing.
And often they've railed against it, they've pushed against it, they've rejected it for years and years and years.
But eventually it comes out.
And I think if it's a gift you've got, it's something which you have to use.
Now, I have to ask you this, Matthew.
You were so young then, and you were exhibiting paranormal abilities that people could not explain, but you were definitely doing these things.
And you said you influenced cancer cells 27 times out of 30, and you're 23 years of age.
Inevitably, for somebody so young, you have to be a very Special person, if you're not this way, don't you start to think of yourself as special?
No, I never did, Howard, because I think that what I'm doing, and it sounds a bit clichéd and I always say this, but I think that what I do is something which we have all probably got as an innate ability or talent.
And I go back to what I just said about the experiments in Toronto.
I think probably anybody can do this.
It's rather like learning to play a piano.
Theoretically, anybody can learn to play a piano, even if they only ever play it in their own front room.
Not everybody is necessarily going to become a concert pianist.
Some people have it to a great degree, and you have it to a great degree.
I was thrust into it from an early age, and that's all I've ever done since, and I can't imagine doing anything else.
But the interesting thing was that when I started working with people as opposed to samples in test tubes, my success rate dived.
I wasn't nearly as successful with people as I was with test tubes.
Why was that, do you think?
Well, that was the question I asked myself, because you'd think it would have been more difficult working in a laboratory with rather skeptical or hostile scientists than with people who wanted to get better.
And I've realized that when I was working in a lab and I was influencing a target in a plastic container or a flask or in a test tube, it was basically me against that target.
When I work with people now, as I now know, there are all sorts of other influences that come into play.
For example, stress, mental attitudes, emotional factors, diet, all sorts of lifestyle factors are going to influence that outcome, which is why I now feel in the work I do, I'm just one component in helping somebody to improve their quality of life, or hopefully, better still, to get better.
One of the things, Matthew, that came out of a documentary that we talked about that I saw about you, I think, 10 years or so ago, and I know you're in the process of doing another one now, is that you have more people who want your services inevitably than you are able to help.
Yeah, but I'm now, I suppose, I don't know what the word is to use.
We get letters from people, and I think, well, there's someone else out there that could actually help you.
They've got talents and they can deal with that problem.
There are some people, and they write in and they've got problems.
For example, Alzheimer's is one problem which I know I can't do anything with.
There are a number of problems that I know that I can't help.
I don't treat psychiatric problems, for example.
I've never had any success.
We get letters from people who are ill, and I know in my heart there's nothing that I can do because they've gone too far down the line.
Well, here's an example.
I had a good friend, still have a good friend, who used to drive me into work when I worked at a London radio station some years ago, and she was suffering with breast cancer.
And I desperately wanted to be able to do something for her at the time, and I just didn't know what.
But we used to talk on the way to work.
Could you, if that person had come to you, could you have helped her?
I would always do my best to help.
I could never make any guarantees.
And obviously, a lot of the people I work with are women, and sadly, a lot of them are young women with breast cancer.
And, you know, what I'm doing, I think, I believe, is something that runs alongside orthodox medicine.
So I regard myself as complementary and not alternative.
I'm very pro-medical, and I know there are times when the medical profession can do things I can't possibly do.
Sometimes I like to think that perhaps I can do something they can't do.
And I think it's a matter of not opting for one or the other.
It's using everything at your disposal together.
You know, the medical approach, whatever I can do, whatever you can do for yourself.
And that, as I see it, is the way ahead.
So Matthew, somebody writes to you and your secretary picks up the letter, reads the letter.
It's a person who's tried many different alternative methods before and heard your name, has read about you and now thinks that you can help.
What do you do then?
It depends on what the situation is, Howard.
I mean, one thing that distresses me is a number of letters that we get in the office from women.
Again, it tends to be women that have been diagnosed with breast cancer, and they have turned down all medical treatment, which is absolutely foolish and stupid.
And their argument usually is, well, the medical treatment, chemotherapy, radiotherapy is dangerous and invasive.
My reply is, so is the cancer, and you've just got to fire absolutely everything at it.
So actually, medical people might be surprised at this, but I spend a lot of my time actually trying to talk people into medical treatment.
And I think that's also one reason why over the years I've had a lot of and still got a lot of support from the medical profession.
I don't think the medical people are anti-healing.
I think they're anti-alternatives when people turn down medical treatment, which may work, in favor of other treatments which may not have such a great success rate.
Does it not make it more difficult to gauge your own success rate?
Because if somebody is also taking alternative therapies, maybe taking some new drugs in a trial and also seeing you, you don't know which, if that person gets cured or goes into remission, you don't know which of them has done the trick.
We may not.
And to be honest, I don't think that person is particularly concerned.
All people are interested in is A, quality of life and B, hopefully recovering or getting better.
It's the most basic thing.
Is it the power of mind?
Is it spirit?
Is it you activating that person's internal resources?
I think it's both, actually, Howard.
It's an interesting point you brought up, me activating someone's inner resources.
I think, yes, that probably does have something to do with it in ways that we don't know at the moment.
But then I think to myself, and I'm a fairly sceptical guy even about what I do and about what other people do.
I think, well, you know, there could be any number of explanations.
But on the other hand, I go back to the work I did in America in plastic containers and flasks.
And I think, well, it worked then, so maybe that's what worked on this occasion.
Does it really matter?
I don't think anybody's actually very concerned so long as they get a benefit.
Now, for the rest of my working week, Monday to Friday, I ask tabloid journalists questions because that's what I'm paid to do.
On a Saturday night, I try not to do that, but I have to ask this one.
Do you make money from this?
Yeah, of course I do.
It's what I do for my living.
It's what I do professionally.
I don't know how many professional healers there are in the country.
But yeah, so that's how I earn my living.
And it's also a very difficult situation because there are many people I know who can't afford it.
And I've been there myself.
There are people who, when they're ill, suddenly aren't earning anymore.
So I always have a sliding scale of charges.
So hopefully those people that can afford it support those who can't.
And if if somebody gets cured, do they tend to give you a little bit more money as a thing?
No, no, no, no.
I've just got a I've got my standard charges and if they want to make a donation to charity or whatever, that's fine.
East Anglian Air Ambulance is my favorite.
Well, they do a lot of good work and with the bad weather closing in, I think they'll be doing some more too.
All right, Matthew.
Well, we've been through one case study, the woman with bladder cancer.
What is the one that has surprised, amazed, possibly shocked you more than any other over the years?
A very, very strange story from just over 10 years ago with a young girl who was then about three or four years old who was brought to me by her parents.
She was suffering from a viral infection of the brain.
She was under Ormond Street Hospital and she was losing motor movement, speech, her ability to swallow and so on.
And the scans showed that a large part of her brain had been damaged by a virus which the doctors believed had been picked up by cattle on her father's farm.
When she was brought to me, she was like a rag doll.
She couldn't sit up, she couldn't move her arms or legs.
And I worked with her three or four times and bit by bit, power or movement started coming back into her body.
She was able to swallow again, she started speaking, she was able to use her hands, and she made what appeared to be a complete recovery.
Her parents obviously were delighted, but the doctors at Almond Street were completely baffled and decided to do another brain scan to see exactly what had happened since she had not been on any treatment.
The follow-up brain scan was very strange because it showed that all the damage that had been in her brain at the first scan was still there.
It had not gone away.
So what had happened?
And yet she had made this recovery.
The only explanation they had, and I think they were probably right, was that something somehow had rerouted signals through other parts of her brain that had not been damaged by the virus.
And it was quite interesting because several years later, it was five, six years later, I wanted to put that story into a book edit called One Foot in the Stars.
And I thought, well, I mustn't write a story like that without checking on the parents because I didn't want to write the book and then find that she'd relapsed.
So I wrote to her mother and asked for an update.
And she said the healing or the progress was maintained.
That the little girl was now riding a bicycle, horse riding, and showed no signs of any of the damage that she'd experienced as a young child.
What a wonderful story.
So you'd helped her to turn the corner.
But looking at it from a medical point of view, what happened?
Because the brain damage was still there.
But I don't think that little girl or her parents or her family would be particularly concerned.
I wouldn't be with my child.
How does it work exactly?
I'll tell you a story from my own life, which is quite a trivial example.
But working as a journalist, one of the occupational hazards is repetitive strain injury.
Working on keyboards, computers make you so productive these days.
Sadly, the downside of it is, as you know, Matthew, you can injure yourself.
And I was during the First Gulf War, one of those people who worked 12-hour shifts, and I injured my arms and my neck and my back very badly.
I could barely lift a cup or a bag or anything.
I was in terrible pain, and I was desperate.
I thought I was going to lose my livelihood.
And I went to see a healer, a lady called Evelyn, who I knew through a friend of a friend.
And Evelyn laid hands on the affected areas.
I felt a heat.
And I don't think Evelyn did the trick entirely, but I still believe to this day that she helped me to turn a corner somehow.
And I don't know what the mechanism is.
Is this what Matthew Manning does?
Essentially, I suppose, yes.
And I don't think we know what the mechanism is.
And, you know, hard science likes to say, well, we only accept things which we can measure and quantify in a laboratory.
But the fact is, Howard, that life is full of things that we can't measure and quantify repetitively.
And I know I always say, but a very good example is love, because no one has yet come up with any kind of device that will measure love.
You can't come up to somebody with a probe and say, well, they're completely in love or they've just fallen out of love or they're falling into love.
There isn't a mechanism like that.
And yet we know that love exists.
Yet we don't say that love doesn't exist.
So might this boil down to, and we all, as human beings, it's part of the human condition.
We like to feel that somebody cares about us.
Now, you go to the medical profession these days and quite often you are treated as a commodity.
You're treated as a disease, as a symptom.
You're not treated as a person.
So perhaps when somebody turns up to you, here's somebody who cares about me.
That I'll have to have a role to play.
And if you go to a GP, the figures show that the average time that a GP spends with a patient is seven minutes, which is not very long.
And I think there are many problems, especially stress-related problems.
And even if they're not stress-related, being ill causes stress.
And I think those problems are not properly addressed and can't be with the way the NHS works.
And it's not a matter of knocking doctors, it's a matter of feeling sorry for them for the way in which they have to work and the conditions they work.
But you know, if you look at a lot of the studies that have been carried out into healing and complementary therapies, invariably the critics come back, the medical critics and say, well, it's all right for them to do that because they've got half an hour and an hour to listen to somebody.
We've only got seven minutes.
But they may well have a point.
And I think a lot of problems are emotionally based or have emotional implications.
And that is where mainstream orthodox medicine fails because they don't have time to deal with it.
Now, Matthew, I've wanted you tonight to tell your story.
I'm very, very grateful to you for doing it.
I hope you'll come back on this show again.
I haven't asked for calls.
I haven't asked for texts.
I haven't asked for anything tonight.
But I have got one email to put to you.
And I know you'll have heard this one before, but here it goes.
This is from Paul.
And Paul says, if God has inflicted physical suffering on human beings for karmic purposes, who is Matthew Manning to step in and interfere in that process?
And with Paul, I would agree.
And I think that this gets into a very odd space with which I'm very familiar.
And I think that we all have a life, and I personally believe in reincarnation.
I think we're all here for a reason, for a purpose.
And I think there are times when perhaps for whatever reason, and it may sound arrogant, people may not understand it, it may sound hard, but I think sometimes we go through experiences in life because it's something from which we're going to grow or evolve on a spiritual basis.
And I think that is the point of life.
That is why we're here.
We're here to be tested.
We're here to be tested.
We're here to grow and to evolve.
And equally, you have abilities.
God, if there is a God, would expect you to use your abilities.
That's what you're here for.
Yeah, and I think sometimes that there are reasons why healing does not work.
And it may be that it's not the right time for it to work, which may sound like a cop-out, but after having done this work for nearly 30 years, that is what I believe.
And I wouldn't have an argument with Paul over that.
I think he's right.
By the same token, I think sometimes healing is the act which can turn someone's life around and turn them from being someone who maybe is completely materialistic to a different viewpoint and maybe seeing the world and seeing themselves and seeing everybody around them from a spiritual point of view rather than a material one.
And George, my producer tonight, has made a very good point.
You could say the same thing about doctors, about conventional doctors and their position in the scheme of things, I guess.
Yeah, and you know, doctors do the very best they can.
And it's, you know, I don't like hearing doctors being knocked.
They're a brilliant group and I've got nothing but admiration for them.
But, you know, they work in harder conditions, I think, than I do.
What do you want to do with the next 20 years of your life, Matthew Manning?
Not that I'm sure you've got more than 20 years to go, but what do you want to do with the next 10 years?
I shall carry on doing what I'm doing for the next 10 years, I think.
I'm 50 now, and there are things I'd like to do.
I'd like to travel, and I'd like to go to some of these far-flung places and see for myself some of the people that I've heard about who do remarkable things with healing, with psychic abilities.
And I think by the time I'm 60, I'll have given it nearly 40 years, and someone else can take over the menu.
I'd like to take a break.
Now, I don't often, in fact, I can't remember when I last did, quote the Bible at people, but we've got about a minute.
Now, I'll throw this at you.
Those who say, physician, heal thyself, can you help Matthew Manning?
I never get ill, is the answer to that, Howard.
Really?
Truly.
And it's quite interesting, you know, because I sit next to people, and this is the truth, all day long whose immunity is shot to pieces for one reason or another, through treatment or through disease, and they come in with hacking coughs and viruses and everything else.
And I really never catch anything.
But then maybe in the work I do, and maybe I'm a bit naive, I like to think sometimes I'm a bit protected.
Have you never had, well maybe, have you never had a cold or a flu or something?
Rarely, rarely.
I've done this work since 1978, and in that time I have had off one day and a half through ill health.
Seems there's a lot of colds and flu going around now, but there are some people.
Not out in Suffolk.
And not Norfolk.
There are some people, it always seemed to me, that seem to be more susceptible.
Whether it's an attitude of mind on their part, I've spent my whole life trying to work it out.
But there are some people who seem to be more susceptible to colds and flu and bugs.
I would agree with you totally.
And I think it probably has to do with mental and emotional states.
And if you look at a subject that I'm fascinated by, which is called psychoneuroimmunology, you can now see what scientists are unraveling.
That emotions and mental states really do have an impact on our health and on our well-being.
And there's one fascinating study which I'll wind up with, which was carried out in America with a group of actors who were playing two different, involved in two different plays.
One was a very, very heavy negative play tragedy, which centered around somebody who was about to be executed the following morning.
The other one was a very frothy-up comedy.
The actors involved had blood samples taken from before they even read the scripts right through to performances which lasted two weeks.
Those actors who were in the very dark, cold play about the assassin about to be executed, their immune functions all dived.
Those who were in the comedy, their immune functions were all strengthened.
My point is, if you can do that to yourself in three, four weeks and it's just a play, what happens in real life when you've got those emotions going on year after year after year?
Matthew Manning, a pleasure to have you on tonight, and I do want to have you on again.
Please have a good night and thank you for making time for us on The Unexplained.
A UFO story that will stagger and stun.
But first up, we're going to talk about something we've had on this show before, asteroids.
The reason we're doing this tonight is there was a major conference in London at the beginning of this week about the threat to this planet of ours from asteroids.
Bits of space junk flying around the planet.
The one of these days might well hit us.
Experts from across the globe came to London, and one of them is Dr. Matt Genge, who works in the field of meteorics, and he's from Imperial College London.
Matt, thank you for doing this on a Saturday night.
That's right.
First of all, why have a conference?
What was the point of that?
Well, you know, the scientists all around the world working on asteroids and how many asteroids cross the Earth's orbit.
And it's been realized maybe since the 1960s when we first started recognizing the impact craters on Earth that occasionally asteroids run into us.
And so over time, we've become more concerned that if that happened today, that it might cause serious problems.
Now, my description was a piece of space junk flying past the planet.
Is that a good enough explanation of what they are?
I wouldn't call them junk.
You see, because it's my job, I study the rocks that come from asteroids and from comets.
And they're wonderful things because they date back to the early solar system.
So they're about 4.5 billion years old, which means they're older than our planet.
And they can tell us about the formation of our solar system and exactly how we get here.
So I think of them as very valuable rather than junk.
All right.
And are there any real and present threats to the planet at the moment that perhaps you and I don't know about?
Well, there's two at the moment.
I wouldn't describe them as present threats.
There's one that's called asteroid 2004MN, which is obviously a wonderful name.
It rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
It just does, doesn't it?
Well, it's got two names.
One is 2004MN.
The other one is even better, is 999942 Apophis.
Who gives them these names?
Well, the first name I said comes from simply the year it was discovered, 2004.
And then they count the number of asteroids they discover and they they give them numbers give them letters instead of numbers on the end of the year.
So 2004MN was, you know, was discovered in 2004, and it was something like the 100th asteroid that was discovered.
And the other one?
The other asteroid is 1950DA, which is a lot bigger than asteroid 2004.
But we've got a lot less to worry about with that asteroid because it's much further away.
So the predictions are that asteroid 2004MN has a very small chance, and by small I mean one in 14,000, of hitting the Earth in 2036.
A little while back we had a guy called Dan Durder from America on this show.
He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
He's an expert on asteroids.
You might well know his name, Matt.
But Dan Durder was using an analogy that I thought was particularly good about these things.
He said that we are in a cosmic shooting gallery, and just as you would go to a shooting gallery at the fair, mostly, the way things work, people miss the target.
But one of these fine days, the target will be hit.
Oh, absolutely.
We know that the Earth has been hit by asteroids throughout its history.
But we are in a cosmic shooting gallery, but we're a very, very small duck and in an awful lot of space.
So most of them miss us.
The chances of an asteroid hitting within our lifetime are enormously low.
But if it did happen, it would be quite significant.
It would be a very significant event.
Well, it would.
There was, was there not an asteroid impact, I think in around 1912 or so in Siberia, somewhere like that?
Absolutely right.
Yeah, 1908, above the Tunguska River in Siberia.
Asteroid was quite small.
It was about 60 meters in size.
And it broke up before it hit the ground and effectively exploded in the atmosphere.
So it just dumped all its heat in the atmosphere and caused an explosion in the air, a bit like a nuclear airburst, but without the radiation, that flattened about 2,000 square kilometers worth of trees.
If that thing happened in Manchester tonight, God forbid, but if it did, what would it do?
Well, well, it would flatten Manchester and kill everybody in it.
And that's why we need to be concerned, and I guess that's why you were having the conference this week.
Yeah, but the odd thing is, we're not actually particularly concerned about those ones.
Because 2,000 square kilometers sounds like a lot.
And you're right, if it happened over Manchester or London or Moscow or any big city, enormous fatalities.
But it's not likely to happen over those cities.
It's likely to happen over the ocean or in some part of the world where there's very few people living.
And so we're worried about the bigger ones, the ones that are bigger than a kilometer in size, that could change the global climate and do that on very short time scales and could threaten the existence of the human race.
Now when you say very short time scales, how short is short?
Within a few days.
The effects of an impact, if you're close to the impact, it's almost instant.
You've probably seen pictures of these huge impact craters on the moon that are 30, 40 kilometers across.
They form in seconds.
Impact cratering is the most rapid process in geology.
It happens in a blink of an eye.
But then all the debris from that that's thrown up into the Earth's atmosphere are all ejected back up into space.
And it takes a number of days to work its way around the atmosphere and start affecting the amount of sunlight that gets through.
So this is something that has an impact on the planet.
From a whole variety of perspectives, it doesn't only make a tremendous mess of whatever it hits or comes close to, but it also messes up what we can see, stops the sunlight from getting to us, which is a very serious thing because that would cause an instant cooling of the Earth, I guess.
Gases, is that a problem too?
It depends where it hits, but one of the reasons why the impact, which we believe killed off the dinosaurs, or certainly added to the environmental stress at that time, occurred because it hit in the Gulf of Mexico, where there were lots of carbonates and sulfate rocks, and those rocks turned into gases, which were very harmful for the atmosphere.
You breathe something like that for any period of time, and you'll die.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
These big events are very rare.
So things like asteroid 2004MN, which is this small one, it's only about 50 meters in size.
So that would be kind of like a Tunguska event.
They're not particularly hazardous.
We know about this one, so we're going to keep an eye on it.
But what we're really looking for is to try and track all the really big asteroids to make sure that there's no chance that any of those can hit the Earth.
All right.
Let's hold just at that point there, I think, Matt, because we've now established what we're talking about.
What I want to move on to next is what you must have talked about in the conference this week.
In fact, I know you did, is what we could do about that situation were it to, as scientists say, eventuate.
I think it's information that is quite essential for all of us.
There are people like the MP Lenbert Opic who've been talking about this for a very long time, and I know that he's been frustrated over the years because it seems that a lot of MPs like himself are not listening to the fact of the matter because they have other things to be concerned about.
So there are going to be reasons why we all need to be concerned and perhaps need to do something, and we'll tell you more about that coming next year on Talkspot.
A lot of people listening on Freeview now, and however you're listening, wherever you are, it's nice to have you along.
Dr. Matt Genge is an expert on lumps of rock flying through space asteroids.
There's been a conference in London this week about asteroids with a lot of international experts gathered to talk about what the latest threats might be out there and what we could do about them.
And Matt, you were saying just before we had to take some time out that the one that we know about is this thing called 2004MN, but there are other more significant threats than that out there potentially.
And it's the potentially that we have to think about, isn't it?
It certainly is.
It certainly is.
And having some sort of plan is a good idea.
So what can you do?
All right, we've all seen the Bruce Willis movie where Bruce thrusts himself out into space, lands on one of these things as it heads toward Earth, plants a nuclear device into it, blows it and himself to pieces, and thereby saves the planet just at the end of the movie, which is all very nice.
But in a real situation, well, first off, let's ask the question: when would we detect something like this?
Could it really blindside us and appear with six months' notice?
It could do, but the chances of that happening are very, very low indeed.
But it could do?
It could do, but the chances are very low.
For example, 2004 MM, because it's quite a small asteroid, so it's not one of these very hazardous ones.
But that one was on an orbit that's quite difficult for it to be seen most of the time.
That one was discovered as it passed us.
And as I said, it's very small.
It's about the size of a football pitch.
It sounds huge, but it wouldn't create too much damage.
But we think with the majority of asteroids, we're going to have at least 20 years warning.
A good example is the asteroid 1950DA.
That one's been observed by radar, where it came close to the Earth, so we know its orbit very, very well.
And that's got a 1 in 300 chance of hitting the Earth in 850 years' time.
So we can have enormously long warnings on dangerous objects.
But say you had 20 years' warning.
You think, okay, we've got two whole decades now.
Technology is going to advance.
We're going to learn a lot more about these things.
We'll probably have some more space missions.
In fact, we will have some more space missions in that time.
So our knowledge of things extraterrestrial will increase.
Nevertheless, the idea of dealing with something that might be a kilometer or more across as it heads towards Earth is something that must be daunting for scientists, even if you factor in what we might know in the future.
It sounds daunting, doesn't it?
A kilometer-sized ball of rock does sound very daunting.
And moving at what kind of speed?
Moving at, well, relative to our planet, probably at several kilometers per second.
So quite fast.
Lots of momentum there.
And these things, if it's a kilometer in size, it'll weigh about a billion tons.
But it's difficult for us to think about these things because we're used to moving around on a planet with very strong gravity.
And it's actually very easy to move a billion tons of rock in space because there's no friction.
Once you push it and start it moving, it keeps moving.
And if you actually do the calculation on how much force, how much power you need to try and divert an asteroid, for a one-kilometer-sized asteroid, you could divert it with the force equivalent to a Robin-Reliant engine in 70 days.
Really?
But the question, I suppose, is how you get that force to it, how you apply the force.
Exactly.
Because Robin Reliants are not too reliable in space.
Not too reliable on Earth, either.
Well, I'd imagine that's probably the case.
So, what would you do?
How would you get the necessary in Invertigomas motive force to the place where it's needed to be delivered in time to do something that's going to help us?
There's been lots of suggestions.
Everything from doing standoff nuclear blasts.
We know our nuclear weapons very well.
But one thing that we do very well are rockets or engines.
And that's probably going to be the most reliable way of moving an asteroid.
But one of the problems is many asteroids, we think, are piles of rubble.
They're not single solid objects.
If you hit them too hard, they might break up into bits.
So you then have a number of objects coming towards you instead of just the one.
Exactly, and you get pepper-shotted by smaller asteroids which do less damage, but the entire planet gets hit.
But one of the latest suggestions for how we might handle that is that we can actually drag an asteroid just through gravity.
If we have something, a spacecraft that weighs a bit more than your average car, and it just simply flies along in front of the asteroid, it can slowly divert the path of the asteroid just through the gravitational force.
So almost like a ship or a boat's wake, it could do the same thing.
Yeah, almost, almost.
Right.
One of the ideas, maybe it was a wacko idea, but I do remember reading this on the internet about two or three months ago, was the idea of using sails.
Sails would work.
There is a very strong wind that comes from the sun, called the solar wind.
And it's made up of tiny little electrons and atoms that are blasted off the surface of the sun.
And if you had sails, it would catch that wind.
But you need very big sails in order to divert an asteroid.
And also, I would guess, and I don't know, you tell me, but the solar wind, is it predictable?
The sun itself is becoming, it seems, more and more unpredictable with these X-class flares being shot out by it at irregular intervals.
This is a solar minimum, apparently, at the moment, yet we've got flares appearing.
So could you use something as unpredictable potentially as a solar wind to do this?
We can use the background solar wind because the flares are associated with something called solar energetic particles, which is kind of like a stronger version of the solar wind.
So we base our calculations on how quickly the thing's going to move on the background solar wind that's given off all the time.
But the problem is you really do need massive sails in order to move an asteroid, and it takes a long time to do.
And it's a bit of a gamble because we've never done it before.
Okay, so we'd have to take a spaceship up there, we'd have to land Bruce Willis on there, or somebody like Bruce Willis, and they'd have to erect sails on it?
We probably wouldn't send Bruce Willis or even somebody even slightly like him.
Please.
We might send an astronaut or two, but that imposes all sorts of other difficulties too.
It's much easier to send a robotic spacecraft to land on the thing.
We've already landed at least one spacecraft on an asteroid, which was the NASA near spacecraft.
So we know we can do it.
We know we can get there.
And we certainly, as far as rocket engines go, we know we've got the technology to do it.
You're making it sound easy, Matt.
I know I'm making it sound easy.
It's obviously there are many difficulties in it.
And to plan a mission like this probably would take you several years.
And I suppose what this group of people, what, how many people were at your conference this week?
It was a couple of hundred.
Okay, I guess these people are now thinking about this.
They've gone away to whichever countries they've come from.
But the next stage is to get governments, to get your Tony Blair's, George Bush's, and all the other politicians around the world, to try and sit up and take an interest.
And they would say to you, well, we've got problems in Iraq.
We've got conflicts that we don't know anything about.
We've got terrorism at home.
We've got pension situations in the UK.
We've got to feed our people.
Our resources are beginning to run out.
This is way down the list.
You're absolutely right.
Scientists have been talking about ways of diverting asteroids now for about 15 years.
And there are many more pressing problems on this planet to deal with that are much more urgent than asteroids.
The time to throw money at an asteroid diversion technology is when we identify that hazardous asteroid that's going to hit us in 20 years.
And is that the message you're trying to get out from the conference then?
Just simply that we don't have to do it right now, but you're going to have to at some point?
I think probably the message from the vast majority of scientists who, because everybody's got a different opinion, obviously, the vast majority of scientists is the same one as Douglas Adams.
Don't panic.
Scientists have been investigating this problem now for many years.
We know that theoretically it's possible.
There are missions that are on the drawing board now to go up and test some of this technology.
So money is being put into asteroid diversion.
The US government spends a large amount of money, some of the $4 million a year, on actually looking for these asteroids to find...
Just to spend on exploration for looking for them.
But I guess in the cosmic global scheme of things, $4 million is not that much, is it?
Well, we could spend an awful lot of money on it.
But then you have to ask yourself, does it really need that amount of money spent on it now?
It's, you know, when there are such pressing problems around the world, how do we rate asteroid impact hazards?
These things are very, very rare events and extremely unlikely to happen within a lifetime.
I had Lembert Opik MP, who is a campaigner for a monitoring station to be set up to just check that these things are out there because he thinks that the way that we monitor these things out in space could be better.
The threat could be better monitored and scanned for and checked.
Isn't the temptation just to let this go away, to not think about it, for governments to say, well, we have got more pressing things to think about, and this is something that there is a one in whatever it is chance of happening.
So bearing that in mind, the sky could fall in tomorrow.
Other things are going to happen first.
The chances are, let's just forget it.
Well, that would be difficult because at the moment, U.S. Congress has charged NASA to find all asteroids bigger than one kilometer by 2008.
So far, astronomers around the world, because it is an international effort, which even includes amateur astronomers as well, have catalogued around 80% of those asteroids.
And the rate at which we are discovering the things is accelerating.
So we're expecting to have all of those, maybe there'll be one or two, we don't know where they are, but virtually all of those one kilometer sized or bigger asteroids located and know where they're going in the future by 2008.
And then the plan is to extend to the smaller ones, ones down to say about 300 meters in size.
So the problem's being addressed.
It's just up to governments to decide how quickly they want it addressed.
How quickly do you think they should address it?
I think that it's going about the right rate at the moment.
Since there's no absolutely clear hazards, it would be very difficult, I think, to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars on protecting against a hazard which really hasn't come to anything so far.
Well, I think that sounds kind of reassuring, and I sincerely hope that it stays that way, and one day we don't wake up and we're told that something awful and nasty is about a year away from our planet, Matt.
Thank you very much for that.
Dr. Matt Genge was part of a conference that happened in London this week looking at the threat from asteroids, something that we've talked about on this show before with Dan Dirder in America and also Lembit Opik MP who wants better monitoring and checking of these things.
So at least we know that if we do what we're supposed to do here, there will be time to make a plan.
And making the plan is perhaps as important as considering the situation.
Having a way to deal with this situation is something that we need to at least contemplate and have in mind.
And I think that's where we are.
Well, I certainly sounded excitable back then, didn't I?
That was me as I sounded 10 years ago when The Unexplained was on national radio in the UK.
Talking there to Matt Genge, an expert on asteroids, very interesting man.
And before him, a man who doesn't do a lot of media these days, Matthew Manning, the British healer.
Your response to those guests?
Your thoughts on future guests?
Any thoughts on the show, I would love to hear from you.
Just go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can send me an email or a donation for the show from there.
We're back to our regular format in the next edition.
More great guests to come.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for his hard work.
And thank you very much above all to you for all of the support that you've given me over these nine years on Line of the Unexplained.
And before that, if you did, for the radio show.
We have exciting developments.
And as I say, I am planning to make some pretty sizable changes in my life.
And I will share those with you as I've shared everything else with you very soon.
Thank you for your support.
Please keep in contact.
And until next we meet here on the Unexplained, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
Please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection