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Feb. 24, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:09:05
Edition 242 - Merrell Fankhauser

One of the founders of pop's California surfsound and UFO/ancient civilisation researcherMerrell Fankhauser...

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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.
At the back end of February, staring down the barrel of March, and this is where I say a big whoopee, because we're moving from winter gradually into springtime.
And I do not do winter, as I've declared here many times.
Thank you very much for your emails.
We're going to get back to doing some shout-outs.
We had a bit of a big debate about shout-outs, and it seems that the consensus is that you want them to continue, so they will.
And thank you very much for all of the email.
If you'd said that you didn't want shout-outs, then we'd have stopped doing them.
And that's the way that I want to run this show democratically.
Thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work getting the show out to you and maintaining the website, all the other stuff that he does for us.
If you want to make a donation to the show, and if you have recently, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart for doing that.
Very important, if you possibly can, to make that donation.
You can do it at the website where you can also send me any kind of message.
If you want to send a guest suggestion, whatever.
One-stop shop is the website, theunexplained.tv.
WWW.theunexplained.tv.
That's the place to go to make donations or send me an email.
And if you send me an email, tell me about yourself.
Tell me where you are, who you are, and how you use the show.
I've got some great stories from people about how they use the show.
Now, much reaction before we get to the guest this time, who is a man called Meryl Frankhauser.
Got to follow your guts sometimes with guests, and I've done that with him.
I think he's going to be really interesting.
I'll tell you more in a moment.
A lot of reaction to the comments of Harry in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, many of which were nice, and also some criticisms of the show about, quotes, much useless banter, etc.
So I asked for your thoughts on that.
Harry wanted to get rid of the shout-outs, didn't want to do so much chatting with the guests, getting to know them, that kind of stuff.
Jim, also in Canada, says, don't change a thing about the show.
Great as it is, you always talk about Art Bell, but I have to confess I never did hear him.
You, sir, are my Art Bell.
Thank you, Jim, in Canada.
Alex says, quite simply, keep on doing what you're doing.
Pretty much the same sentiment from regular listener Ulysses in New York City.
Ulysses, you sound by the like of it to have a great job there designing buildings in New York, which must be a bit of a challenge.
Danny, the London cabbie, good to hear from you, Danny, says if only the mainstream media could recognize the value in a show such as yours.
He says that my show is up there with Coast to Coast AM.
Thank you.
Riga in Brighton, thank you for your message.
Thad Routh in Charlotte, North Carolina, many thanks for the email and the picture of the Coral Castle.
Amazing stuff.
I've just looked at it.
Nathan in Minneapolis says, I love the shout-outs.
Listeners know you actually do read their emails by this.
Asking the background of your guests is nice for people who may not know who the guest is.
Marcus in Stockholm, good to hear from you.
David Gee wanted a show on gravitational waves.
So did Donna in Myrtle Beach, California, and Stephen Essex, UK, and other emailers.
The last show I hope you got about gravitational waves and other things with one of the best in his field, and that's Nigel Henbest, the astronomer.
We'll have him back on.
Lee, thank you for the comments about the Peter Robbins show.
You weren't happy, I know, with the independent tests done on the soil from Rendlesham Forest.
I'm going to ask him about that the next time he appears.
Remind me, will you?
Chrissy in Brisbane, Australia.
Good to hear from you.
Denise Estes, nice email, wants to get Michio Kaku on.
I had Michio on my radio show, but I've been trying to get him on this show.
I've actually phoned his office and sent emails over the years, and I don't get a response.
But I'd like to get him on.
So if you would want to put some pressure on Michio Kaku to get him on here, please do, because I think he would find the experience a good one.
Kind words from Rico J. Delodovici.
Fantastic name, Rico.
Thank you for your email.
Jason Francis suggesting Gerard Artson.
We did have Gerard Artson on the show, but we could have him back on.
Kind comments and a fascinating email from Steve Zarpas.
He says there is intriguing evidence that what we consider aliens may in fact be dimensional beings that fit what for millennia have been called demons or fallen angels.
And that many people in the throes of an abduction experience have called the name of Jesus and that experience has stopped immediately.
Okay.
Are you sure about that?
Nikki in Nairobi, Kenya.
Good to hear from you again, Nikki.
Hello, Howard.
When will you cover the flat earth theory?
Tony in Adelaide, Australia says.
Tony, I did email one potential guest about the flat earth theory and I didn't get a response.
Quite often I do send out emails to people saying, will you come on the show?
And they don't get back to me.
But that's no excuse for not doing this topic.
I've got to put it on the list and thank you.
Love your show, Southern California Latinos for Howard.
Thank you very much indeed for that email.
Paul in Slough Berkshire, thank you for your email.
Daryl Taylor, nice comments, thank you.
And a lovely story from Kurt.
You know, I told you about people and the way that they use the show.
He says, hello, Mr. Hughes.
I just wanted to share this little bit of information with you.
My first child was born in December 2015.
Oh, two months old.
During those late-night feedings or during bouts of fussiness, I will play archived episodes of The Unexplained.
It seems your speaking voice has a calming effect on my daughter.
If she tries to speak with a British accent when she learns to talk, I'll know where it comes from.
Well, I know that I've influenced a few people.
That's something different.
Kurt, thank you very much.
What a lovely email.
If you'd like to email the show, go to the website theunexplained.tv and send me an email.
It would be nice to hear from you, whoever you are and wherever you are.
We are a bit of a family here.
Now, Meryl Frankhauser, the guest in California on this show, is just got his biography here.
Let me see.
Meryl Frankhauser led one of the most diverse and interesting careers in music.
This guy was at the very birth of the surf scene.
Knows the Beach Boys, met John Lennon.
Incredible track record this man has.
People that he knew and worked with.
Jan and Dean, Willie Nelson, Captain Beefheart.
And there's even a run-in, apparently, according to his biography, with the Manson family.
Okay.
But he's also meshed in his life with a certain degree of strangeness, as you will hear.
So, a guest that you haven't heard on this show before, and I'm following my gut to do this one.
Let's hope he's good.
Let me know what you think.
And, Meryl, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Great to be here this morning, Howard.
Well, it's morning here in the California coast.
Well, as a man once sang, morning has broken in California.
We've got beautiful, beautiful clear sky here in London.
It's a little cool.
There's not a cloud in the sky, but it's evening time here.
The sun's going down, so we've donated it to you, Merrill.
Thank you.
Take good care of it.
Make good use of it, will you?
Merrill, I'm doing this really without my usual preparation, really, because I get the feeling looking online about you that you're just a great guy to have a conversation and shoot the breeze with.
One of the phrases I used about you in the intro to this show was that you have been involved, of course, at the top level in music.
And I think some of your music is still played on air over here, which is great.
But also, your life has, and this was the quote that I came up with, tell me if it works, your life has meshed with strangeness at times.
Does that work for you?
That works, Howard.
I think that's a good way to put it.
I've gone through a lot of different phases and adventures.
And, you know, it's been an interesting trip so far.
Well, it certainly sounds it, and it's a trip that goes all the way back to, I think there's a photograph of you beginning your career in music.
And I think that was at the very turn of the 60s, the 60s, you know, just leaving the 50s and going into the 60s, wasn't it?
Yeah, well, I started actually in 1958 playing solo.
And then a group of high school students, when I was going to high school, we formed a surf band, instrumental surf band called the Impacts.
And in 1962, we were playing at the then biggest auditorium between Los Angeles and San Francisco in Pismo Beach called the Rose Garden Ballroom.
And there, Delphi Records discovered us and put out our 1962 wipeout album that eventually sold over a million copies.
And that's how it all got me started.
And 400 songs later and over 40 albums, I'm thankful to still be going.
Because, look, we forget.
I think a lot of the current generation forget.
When they think of surf sound, they think of the Beach Boys.
And it's nice to know that Brian Wilson is still around.
I interviewed Mike Love about 18 months ago.
Incredible man.
Nice to know they're still doing their stuff.
But we haven't got to forget that there was a whole surf scene in California, you know, Jan and Dean, the safaris, and all of these bands, yeah?
Yes, and the instrumental surf music, you know, was a few years before the vocal surf music.
I interviewed Mike Love also for my TV show that I do, and that interview is on YouTube.
And Dean Torrance of Jan and Dean and I have been friends for all of these years, and I just did a concert with him about two years ago.
And it's nice to see that some of the younger people actually like this music and have embraced it.
And there's even new instrumental surf bands that have popped up with the younger generation.
And also nice to see that Brian Wilson is being supported by a whole new band for those tours that he does.
And they've managed to recreate that sound quite remarkably.
They've even got the harmonies off Pat.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
He's got some young guys in there that still have what we call the teenage twang.
Yes.
I don't think I've got that anymore.
Your voice goes down a bit when you get a bit older.
But, you know, wonderful time.
I was born and brought up in Liverpool.
And of course, Liverpool is still steeped in the fab for the Beatles.
But I have to say that as much as I love the Beatles, and I do, and I think George Harrison probably my favourite, my heart has always been with that California music.
I've always lent towards all of that.
I don't know why, because I didn't hear Pet Sounds, you know, until 1999.
I hadn't actually heard the totality of Pet Sounds until 1999.
And I bought it on that remastered CD, the one that they remastered into stereo, and I played it all day.
And it is now my absolute favorite album.
And how I missed in growing up and, you know, developing in radio and stuff like that, how I missed Pet Sounds, I will never know.
But look, you were there at the birth of all of this.
You met some remarkable people in your time.
How come you're not kind of still in the sort of mainstream stuff?
How come you're not sort of producing current hits?
Why did you, you took a different path.
Why did you do that?
Well, around 1973, I was living in Woodland Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles, and my friend Jeff Cotton, guitar player, who was with me in the Exiles when he was a youngster, and then he joined Captain Beefheart's magic band.
And we were all, at that time, before we moved to Los Angeles, we were living in the high desert area of Lancaster.
That's where Beefheart and Zappa came from.
Well, anyhow, he quit Beefheart, and we formed a band, and we were playing in Los Angeles, and we didn't really have a name for the band.
And one day I was cleaning up the fireplace, the log bin, in this house we were renting, and I found this ancient book, I think it was a 1932 edition by Colonel James Churchward called The Lost Continent of Moo.
And we went, aha, that's the name for our band.
So we called our band Moo, and eventually we found out that the mountain peaks of the Lost Continent of Moo were supposedly the Hawaiian Islands.
And in 1973, we moved to Maui.
And that took us on a totally different turn.
We got more into an esoteric kind of spiritual, if you will, music.
And we quit playing mainstream rock and roll.
And that seems to have carried me on, Howard, through all of these years.
And I have legions of fans all over the world.
And I'm on, you know, labels in Greece, Spain, and I'm currently on Gonzo Multimedia from London.
And, you know, I've come full circle now.
My latest recording, Signals from Malibu, is a throwback to the instrumental surf days of the 60s.
Only I have a kind of sci-fi symphonic twist.
And it came in an odd sort of way, Howard.
I wasn't expecting this, and I hadn't recorded a set of tunes for an album in probably over a year and a half.
And all of a sudden, I get mailed these strange radio signals that this retired radio expert that was in World War II had recorded off the coast of Malibu.
He lives up in the mountains there.
And one night he still messes around with ham radio.
And in the Second World War, his job was to pinpoint where the Japanese were broadcasting from on these different islands and atolls.
So he was talking to somebody in Australia, and he dialed off the frequency, and all of a sudden he started picking up these very strange radio signals like nothing he'd ever heard.
And he knew every military code and frequency, and he couldn't figure out what this was.
So he got talking around to people, and he said, yes, it seems to be coming about three miles off the coast directly in front of my house.
Out at sea.
Literally out at sea.
Out at sea.
And somebody said, well, you know, there's an odd anomaly that looks like a dome-shaped building with pillars out there in the area that you're talking about.
And the thing is huge.
It's over 1,000 feet wide and 650 feet tall off the bottom of the ocean.
And he went, wow.
So anyhow, he ended up talking to a UFO group, the Extraterrestrial Research Center in New York.
Hold on a minute.
As far as he told you, and I suppose I should be talking to him really, how did he make that connection?
How did he start to connect this to UFOs?
Well, he didn't at first.
In fact, he didn't even know, you know, that this anomaly was under the water.
And somehow somebody told him to get in touch.
Somebody in Malibu that was in with the UFO thing said to get in touch with these people in New York.
Well, when he got in touch with Michael Luckman, who wrote a book called E.T., the Extraterrestrial Connection, and it was a book about rock stars that he had felt were influenced by E.T.s.
And of course, the Moody Blues was in there.
John Lennon was in there.
Michael Jackson and me.
Well, I want to talk about John Lennon in a bit because I know that you met him, and I also know that he claimed to have had a UFO sighting.
So remind me to talk about Lennon.
Sorry, carry on talking about Malibu, though.
And that was in the book that I just mentioned by Michael Luckman.
So anyhow, Michael sends me these signals and said, Merle, because he knew I was interested in UFOs, and he said, what do you make of this?
Well, I started playing them, and I immediately heard like a 60s low James Bond style guitar in a surf feel.
And so I recorded that, and the band came over, and I said, guys, what do you think of this?
We sat down in an hour and a half, we had the whole tune finished, and I put these strange radio signals in the music.
And the other thing I found out, Howard, I played at a casino that's an Indian casino just south of me here.
And a big Indian guy was a security officer.
And he came up to me at the break and said, oh, I know a lot of your music.
In fact, I have a few of your albums.
What are you working on now?
And I told him about the signals from Malibu and the underwater anomaly.
And he says, oh, our tribe, the Schumash Indians, who were the indigenous people for thousands of years up and down the coast, he said, we knew about that building a long time ago.
As a matter of fact, there's even pictures, drawings of when the ocean level was down, they were fishing off the top of this building.
And he called it a building.
And I just about fell through the floor.
And then he looks at me and he says, you know, that's part of the lost continent of Mu, which I had been studying since 1969.
And it just floored me, Howard, how as all of this stuff is connected and it keeps coming back.
If there was an anomaly like that, I call it an anomaly, but a building like that, and it's three miles off the coast, how come this thing hasn't been extensively explored over many, many years?
It should be on the front of every newspaper, shouldn't it?
Well, now that's something that they're trying to figure out Right now, a few miles up the coast, maybe eight miles, there's a naval airbase.
And we think that they've known about this for a long time.
Some people say it could be natural, but if you Google it and look at it, it's got these definite pillars and this smooth, rounded rooftop that doesn't look like the shoreline.
So it's hard to imagine that it's natural.
Whether it's a UFO base or not, I don't know.
But, you know, the other strange thing that happened, I wrote another song called Messages from the Dome because I had extra amount of these radio signals that I didn't use.
And I played this piano part to it, and it came out more like a classical piece.
But near the end of that, Howard, if you listen, it sounds like a lady's voice almost high-pitched yodeling.
When that comes out in the mix, I've shut down four radio station boards.
Lord.
One was there in England.
You don't shut me down, okay?
No.
One was there in England.
And what I found out, though, I've done in the last year and a half, probably over 50 radio interviews about this.
It only does it to newer digital mixing boards.
Analog boards or old digital boards, it doesn't affect at all.
What do you think that means?
I don't know, but I'm having my friend who is an engineer at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch analyze these signals now to try to tell me what he thinks is doing this.
And he did come back after he listened to it one time and ran it through an audio analyzer.
And he said, well, there's some high harmonics that the human ear can't pick up that's there.
I wonder if it's something to do with the, because you know all digital is sampling.
You know, a digital signal is not the full analog.
It's not a direct representation.
It's little bits picked off, lots of them.
I wonder if there's something there that interferes with, I think it's, what is it, 24-bit 96 kilohertz or upward sampling.
Maybe that's what this is.
It could be.
And the interesting thing is one radio station said that the board was shut down completely and they had to have some technicians come in and it had erased all of the presets in the mixing board and they had to reprogram the mixing board.
One other interesting thing, I was on a radio show in Baltimore on the Bob Hieronymus show, and he's been on this ancient alien TV program quite a bit.
We did this interview and he said, Merle, I want you to listen to something.
He started playing these signals that were from a famous UFO case from 1970, the Billy Meyer case, where his dog was barking outside at something up in the air and he went out and there was this disc.
So he turned on his reel-to-reel tape recorder and held up a microphone and recorded the sound that was coming out of it.
Well, when he played that sound, I said, oh my God, it's almost identical to the sounds I have in this music that were just recorded a year ago.
How can that be?
I said, if this guy in 1970 was faking this, he had a piece of equipment that wasn't invented yet.
So what does your gut tell you that this might be?
Although you're having somebody analyze this, you don't know exactly what it is.
What do you feel that it might be?
Well, at first I thought, okay, this is something the military's doing.
There's some kind of submarine experiments or something going on.
And then when I was on Dr. Bob Hieronymus' show and he played me that, I went, wow, this is wild.
Maybe this isn't the military.
And one other little bit of history about this Malibu area, for years and years, they've been seeing lights coming in and out of the water in that particular area since the 1940s.
When you say they, people.
Just people.
General members of the public have been seeing this.
Yes, I was on a radio station in San Luis Obispo, and a lady called in, and I was talking about this, and she said, oh, yes, my mother and my aunt lived in Malibu in the 40s, and it was a common thing for them to go down to the beach at sunset and wait till it got dark and watch these lights go in and out of the water.
So, you know, there's a group of people that firmly believe it's UFO activity, and it's like one of those unexplained mysteries.
And I keep learning more as I go along, and I get feedback from people when I'm doing radio interviews like yours today.
Merrill, do you think that the lights, and I haven't seen them, I've heard accounts of them, and you've just given me some more.
Do they equate with what paranormalists sometimes call orbs?
Yeah, I don't know.
I've seen some pictures, and people have sent me pictures from the area, whether they're real or not, I don't know.
But they look like disc-shaped, you know, the common flying saucer, the few pictures that have been sent to me.
And we did a video for signals from Malibu and messages from the dome that are both on YouTube.
And it's still, I'm just, you know, mystified By it, and if it is UFOs and they can prove it, that would be great.
But at this point, I still don't know.
And like I said, with Point Magoo Naval Air Station being very close to this, it's hard to believe that they don't know about this.
Well, if you drive, for those of my listeners on this side of the Atlantic, if you drive down the coast in that area, you will see vast bits of territory right on the coast that are literally barbed wire fence off, and they are military establishments.
You can't go near them, so who knows what they might be up to?
Yes.
And you can Google Malibu Underwater Anomaly, and it comes up.
There's, you know, full pictures of it.
And I put a picture of it on the cover of the Merle Fankhauser Signals from Malibu CD.
So luckily my label in England there, Gonzo Multimedia, they're very keen on UFOs.
And when I told them about it, they said, if you do a whole album of this material, we'll put it out.
And that's what I did.
I just, I was inspired.
And we popped the album out in less than two months, which was pretty fast, and got it off to them.
And it's selling okay.
It's not a runaway seller, but it's getting a lot of airplay.
And I've been doing a lot of radio shows about it.
Okay, I think that you should tie up with a couple of my friends.
I've done the voiceover sections on their albums quite recently.
The Pocket Gods in the UK.
They're an indie band.
And I think that you should at least have a talk with them because Mark and the guys are very well known in the UK.
They were discovered by a British broadcaster called John Peel, who was very much on the Peel.
Well, John Peel, I mean, I think his reputation has indeed stretched the United States.
Great.
He was one of the first people to play my band Moo back in the early 70s on his pirate radio station.
Well, there you go.
You see, that is the whole connection there.
So I think the pocket gods and you would get on, like, as we say here, house on fire.
So why do you feel that it's necessary to represent this anomaly off the coast and the things around it in music?
Well, I didn't even think about it, Howard.
It's odd where songs come from.
When that was sent to me, it just inspired me.
And because my dad was a pilot, he taught me to fly.
I was always interested in UFOs when I was a kid, and this just sparked my interest.
And, you know, it just popped out.
I was telling you, I met John Lennon at Harry Nilson's house back in the 70s, and he and I were talking about songwriting.
And he said, yes, isn't it interesting what inspires a song?
He said, I didn't write any of those songs in the Beatles, and I'm still not writing them.
And I went, what?
He said, yeah, they were all channeled to me.
He said, I don't know.
John Lennon said that to you.
Yes, he says, I don't know where they come from.
And he said this, Howard.
He said it's automatic writing.
And when he said that, it just gave me shivers because sometimes I'll get an idea for a song and I don't know where it's coming from.
I've either got to sing it into a tape recorder or start writing it down and writing the music that's in my head down or I'll lose it.
It'll go away.
And then if I capture enough of it to remember it, I've got to pick up the guitar and figure out how to play it.
It's like somebody else wrote it.
I sometimes hear a whole song completed in my head.
And John said the same thing.
Now, John is another one of my heroes, of course, because he's from Liverpool and all the best people are.
John was at the height of his fame in those days, certainly in the American phase of his career.
He was a big joker, though.
Are you sure that he wasn't joking with you?
No, he wasn't joking.
But him and Harry, you know, it's been written up in a couple of magazines.
They were doing lots of substances and drinking.
They got in a bit of trouble on the Sunset Strip.
This was a party that Harry was having, and I was living on Maui, and I had known him since the beginning days when he was struggling to get his first records out.
And he just told me, come on over, I'm having a party.
And there was John Lennon sitting there.
Then he put me on the spot and made me sing a song acoustically to John and about 30 people.
And it's the first time I ever kind of got a little stage fright in my entire life.
I'm not surprised.
How did it feel to, you know, I'm sure John was very gracious about it, but as you say, stage fright, it must have felt absolutely terrifying to have to do it in front of the great man.
Well, it wasn't terrifying, but my lips started twitching, and that had never happened to me.
And I played him a song off of my 1976 Maui album called On Our Way to Hana.
And it's a beautiful stretch of road out in the jungle with waterfalls on one side and a panoramic view of the ocean.
I know about it because I did a radio show for a week from Maui, and I know Hana, and I know that beautiful place pretty well now.
Very, very spiritual place.
Lovely spiritual.
I mean, look, I think.
I lived there for 15 years.
I know, I read it in your biography.
15 years there must have seemed like a beautiful eternity.
Yes, and the song was about seeing two UFOs on this winding road to Hana.
But John and I that night, we probably talked maybe for a total of 15 minutes Because there were so many people there, and they were all trying to have a word with him.
But when he talked to me across the room, he said, that's very interesting, what inspired that?
And so I told him, and then we got alone off in the dining room, and that's when we had the conversation about songwriting.
And that was a great moment for me, and I treasured that moment.
And I did get to meet George Harrison.
Who, of course, went to live in Maui for a while, didn't he?
And I gave him pictures of my jungle house before he moved there.
And he listened to my song On Our Way to Hana because the guy that was running Dark Horse Records for him, Dino Raleigh, recorded my Maui album in Hollywood.
And he wanted to get it out on Dark Horse Records.
And George listened to it and liked the music.
And the next thing I know, he bought a piece of land about 30 miles out there past me.
And I ran into his wife and his very young son at that time once in a restaurant.
But I never saw him after he moved there.
And that was that.
Well, it's a great place to disappear.
My impression of Maui was that there were people who'd given up on the rent race permanently or temporarily and they left Los Angeles, had enough of it, and wanted to live somewhere better.
And gee, I could really relate to that.
And then there are the people who are the native people.
They're the Pacific people.
And they are the ones with the real, it seems to me, with the real spirituality.
And the guys who come from outside do their best to pick up on that.
And it rubs, you've got to be a real hard heart.
You've got to be a hard heart and a hard head for the spirituality and that whole ethos, that feeling of Maui not to rub off on you, it made a really deep impact on me, I have to say.
Yes, I was luckily very accepted by the Hawaiians.
And, you know, they called me Brata Merle.
And I went on my search for ruins of the lost continent of Mu and down in this jungle, overgrown valley, I found three pillars on a platform that looked like Mayan Indian stonework.
And it had a sidewalk that went under the jungle.
I had to crawl on my hands and knees down to the ocean, and you could see the sidewalk going under the water, and then a lava flow went over the sidewalk.
So that last lava flow in that area was about 1800 years ago.
So I knew those pillars and that stone sidewalk.
That's all.
And then I found a pyramid in the middle of Haleakala crater out in the middle of that lava flow.
And I almost killed myself trying to get to this thing, jumping these chasms.
And that lava is so sharp.
It just cuts your shoes and your trousers up.
But I managed to get to it, and it was about 40 feet tall.
And I got to a position where I could take a picture of it.
And that's at my website, MerleFankhauser.com.
And it's also in my book, Calling from a Star, the Merle Fankhauser Story.
Well, I got in trouble with the Parks Department for leaving the trail.
So the Parks Department obviously knew about this stuff, but didn't want tourists to find it.
Exactly.
And you're not supposed to leave the trail because you could fall in one of these lava tubes and never be found again.
It's very dangerous.
And you have to sign up at the Rangers Station when you're going in there.
And there are cabins you can rent for the night.
And then let them know you can only stay in so long and then you've got to come out.
Well, I heard years later that they let the National Geographic Society go up there with a powered auger and drilled a hole in the side of it.
And they concluded it was a larger structure.
And that was just the capstone that was sticking out of the lava flow.
So do you believe, Merrill, then, that there is some kind of connection between this thing off Malibu and we know that California looks out to the Pacific and even though it's five hours flying time, whatever it might be away, Maui and Hawaii, you know, the call of those places is very strong there.
There's a bond, isn't there?
Do you think that there's some kind of connection?
Maybe there's been a kingdom or some ancient civilization or something like that that links places like Maui and California?
I definitely do.
And the Hawaiians all said that when they came from Tahiti to Hawaii on the south side of Maui in a desolate lava flow that's there where there's still ruins, they said they found a white race living there.
And in that same area, there's an axe head that's in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
And it says that it was believed to be of Viking origin.
Well, out in that lava flow, I explored that, and some Hawaiians that would fish out there, they wouldn't stay out there at night because it was too spooky, and they call it the King's Burial Ground.
There's all of these buildings that are half submerged in the lava, and in one place, there's a building that's sticking out, and it's about seven miles after you leave any paved road.
You have to just hike out on this roadway with these stone rock walls next to it, but then a hill of lava will come over it, and you've got to climb over that and keep going.
Well, there's this big building out there.
It's a Hawaiian building because the Hawaiian buildings are, you know, lava rocks stacked up, and then They would build thatched roofs.
Well, this Hawaiian guy told me, over in the corner, there's a hole in the floor.
And I went there, and yes, there was.
And I found this old rickety wooden ladder that somebody had made.
And there were things you could see where they had made torches to go down there.
I went down in this thing, Howard, with a friend, and I could not believe it.
It looked like I was in an ancient tomb in Egypt or something.
But again, it had this stone, cut stone floor, like Mayan Indian is the only, or Inca is the only way I can describe it.
The walls, the ceiling, the whole thing was like that.
And it was this under chamber that I think the Hawaiians felt was some sort of a sacred temple from the race that was there before.
And they decided to build this big building on top of it.
And the building that's on top of it is as big as a large department store, and it's got four foot thick walls.
It's huge.
So something was going on there.
Why do you think then, Merrill, why you must be frustrated because you're not a scientist.
There you are trying to drink all of this stuff in.
It must frustrate you that this stuff is not being, maybe it is and we're not being told about it, isn't being researched more by academics.
Yeah, you know, there was a British guy that went out into the King's Highway, the place I'm just talking about, and he was a great photographer, and he could not believe that nobody had ever even taken any pictures out there or had, you know, publicized this in any way.
And he sort of took credit for finding it, even though I was there 30-some years ago, and all the Hawaiians knew about it.
And he took these great pictures of this roadway in these ruins.
And a couple of years ago, I was on coast to coast, you know, the big radio show over here.
And after I was on, I got 848 emails.
And I opened one, and it was a couple, a married couple living or on vacation on Maui on holiday.
He heard about that, and he was real interested in archaeological stuff, and he wanted to hike out there.
And I said, well, it's not your tropical paradise.
It's a lava field that gets very, very hot.
Make sure you bring hats, good hiking gear, and lots of water and food.
So he hiked out into it.
He couldn't get to this one big building, but he shot pictures on his cell phone of all of these other-like houses.
You'll see like a walkway or a stoop to a house or a rock wall, and it'll be covered up with lava, and parts of it will be sticking out.
And he couldn't believe it.
He emailed me back, and he said, it's all there.
It's just like you said it was.
And he couldn't believe that nobody knew about this.
I even had Hawaiian young people that live on Maui that emailed me and said, what is this?
Our parents have never even told us all of this exists.
Well, it's kind of like a taboo.
Like they really don't want anybody to know.
And the guy that told me where these pillars were in the dense jungle, he said he used to play down there as a kid, but his parents forbid him to go down there.
It was a taboo and said the evil moo will get you.
The evil moo.
Yes.
And when he showed me this trail that went down, he went, oh, no, I'm not going down there.
He said, but you're welcome to go down there.
And I managed to get enough light to take a picture of one of the pillars on a side angle.
But he was still afraid of it.
And I don't know why they accepted me and trusted me with things that they still don't want to let people, you know, tromp around over there.
But I did hear seven years after I photographed those pillars in the jungle, German television somehow went down there and filmed those pillars.
And I don't know if they broadcast it in Germany or what.
But it's interesting.
Also, back to the Malibu anomaly, up in the mountains there, there are faces that are carved into the rock wall.
And there's two monolithic pillars there with petroglyphs, and they point right out to where this anomaly is under the water.
And the Schumash Indians all say that was made by the people before us.
And the Schumash were here for at least 3,000 years, they know of, up and down the coast.
So how are you researching this, Merrill?
Are you seeing that there's some, and we referred to this before, didn't we, is some kind of Pacific accent of some ancient civilization, perhaps linked to extraterrestrials that leap, but you know, it's been talked about before in relation to Egypt and other places.
Is it some kind of Pacific civilization that has a link to Maui, that has links across the Pacific, that is right there in California, too?
Yes, because the maps that I have, and you can look these maps up, Colonel Churchward had a map of what he thought Mu was, and it showed part of the coast of California, and there was a bit of ocean in between, when the plates were still up further out of the water, and ocean was Inland here, quite a ways.
And they proved that because they found, you know, fossilized sea creatures and starfish in the mountains here along the coast.
And I think it was all connected somehow to some civilization for sure.
And, you know, a lot of geologists don't want to believe that could be possible.
But, you know, the Earth has changed quite a bit, and it's still changing.
And, of course.
And our conceptions of it, what we believe about it, and what we know about it also changing all the time.
They don't want to change the history books as to what they've written down is one of the problems.
But, you know, it's an ongoing, interesting adventure for me.
Like I said, I keep learning more about this as these things come up.
And it seems like the signals from Malibu has launched me back into it more.
And one interesting thing in the Hawaiian legends, they were seeing lights going in and out of the water back there in the 1800s and coming out of the craters and going into the ocean and back into the craters.
So yes, at first I didn't think of it when I started in 69 studying the lost continent of Mu.
But now I do believe there is some extraterrestrial connection to it because there's something going on.
What about you?
You wrote a song.
This is a loose end we need to tie up here, I think.
You wrote a song about lights, UFOs over Hana.
Talk to me about that.
You mean the On Our Way to Hana song?
Yeah, On Our Way to Hana.
You saw something in the sky, yeah?
Yeah, and that was in broad daylight.
We were driving to Hana, and I lived off of that Hana highway about 20 miles out from the town of Kahalui.
And I built a two-story cabin down in the jungle on land that I leased.
And we were taking a trip to Hana, myself and the whole band one day.
And we came around this turn near a place called Wailua Bay.
And there we saw these two silver objects.
At first I thought they were dirigibles because they were sitting there mid-air.
And the sun was shining on them, so you couldn't really make out the form.
It almost looked, to quote a phrase, cigar-shaped, like two silver.
But then as they moved more, they looked more like discs, and they just shot off into the, you know, the air so quick it was gone.
But I also wrote a song called Calling from a Star, which there's a video on YouTube.
Peter Noon of Herman's Hermit sang backup on it with me.
And that was a sighting that myself and a whole group of tourists saw.
A blue glowing orb came into the crater at night.
We went up for the sunset, and when it got dark, this thing appeared, and we watched it for a good three or four minutes.
And two smaller orbs came out of it, and they formed a tetrahedron, an inverted pyramid, and shined lights from one to the next.
And then they went back into the main orb, and it shot straight up and disappeared.
And I went back down to my house and immediately wrote Calling from a Star.
Did you hear the story that a lot of people tell in Maui?
It was told to me by, oh, I've forgotten her name, but she was a big radio, I think she still is, a big radio star on a radio station in Maui called Ka'oi, K-A-O-I.
I've been on that station many times.
Oh, well, this lady, she plays Hawaiian folk music, and she was a great guide for me when I was there.
But she told me the story about a golf course.
Apparently, they built a golf course, and it was on some ancient burial site.
There were some Japanese tourists playing golf there, minding their own business one day, and these warriors, as the story goes, I'm not telling this as well as she told it, but these warriors rose from the ground of the golf course and scared the living daylights out of these Japanese tourists.
That kind of stuff, though, happens all the time there, doesn't it?
Yeah.
And then over on Oahu, they tried to build a hotel on an ancient burial ground, and they had so many problems with that hotel, it was ridiculous.
And people were seeing things like that in the rooms in the hotel, and then the foundation of the hotel kept slipping.
So, you know, there's a lot of interesting stories like that in Hawaii.
Well, I spent five broadcasting days there, Meryl.
And we were doing a show for London Morning Drive.
We were very lucky to go out there.
We broadcast live from the West in Maui.
I'll never forget that hotel.
You probably know that pretty well.
I stayed at the Weston, and I heard the famous Martin Denny play there one night, which was really a treat.
You know, they did Quiet Village.
And I loved his exotic kind of music, and that was neat getting to hear him play live.
That was back in the 70s.
It's the most spiritual place that I've ever come across in my life.
And I still feel very, I mean, it would cost me, as we say, an arm and a leg to go back there.
But I want to go back there one day because I've got a lot of unfinished business out there.
It seems that I met the people who run the local newspaper there, one of the local newspapers.
A lot of those people have come from places like California.
They've got out of the rack race.
They were fascinating people.
You know, there are people there who are working with hemp.
They're making clothes and things out of hemp.
And all sorts of people with stories.
And then you've got the Hawaiian people themselves who all of this knowledge about stuff that isn't stuff that we can see or feel or touch.
It's beyond us.
They accept it almost as a given, I find.
I don't know what you think.
Totally.
There's a book written by a Hawaiian called Children of the Rainbow, and they talk about the people of Mu that were there when they came to the islands from Tahiti.
And I was blessed to play at Hawaiian luaus.
I played for their weddings.
I played for their funerals.
You know, they make a big thing on the first birthday of a baby.
And I got to play a lot of baby luaus.
And I was so, so glad that they accepted me so well.
And I love the people, and I still love it.
But in 1987, I was flying back and forth six to eight times a year over here recording and playing music.
And then I decided in 1987 that I had to move back.
And I bought a house here on the coast.
I'm right in between L.A. and San Francisco on the central coast in a little town called Arroyo Grande.
And it's very beautiful.
And it's similar to Hawaii.
And we usually have a very mild climate.
But this year it's been very strange.
And I miss Maui, but I was there last in March of 2014.
And I was a little saddened, Howard, about how overpopulated and crowded in the traffic now, the places I used to go and think nothing about it and drive there.
It takes hours to get from one side to the next now.
Well, isn't that sad?
Because I can remember one journey from the West In out to that big surfing.
There's one big surfing beach.
A lot of the surfers come from all over the world and they stay there for the season and they just do surfing.
I'll never forget that word.
You're probably thinking.
Yes.
Oh, I think.
You know, where I learned a wind surf.
You know, I haven't heard that name and that word for, oh, God.
When were we there?
We were there in 1996.
I haven't heard that word, that name, since 1996.
20 years now, Meryl.
20 years of my life.
I know.
Wow.
Got to go back there.
Time is flying.
Tempest fugitives, they say.
I've got to go back there.
But, you know, there is such spirituality, and you must feel with this research that you're doing, there's an awful lot of unfinished business back there.
Exactly.
And all of my friends that are still there, and I get reports about things, and I'm on television there because I do a show called Tiki Lounge, and I've been doing it for 15 years.
And I did a show from there when I was there in 2014.
And so I get people telling me things that have happened and what's going on.
And then the show airs up and down the coast here.
So, you know, there's always something pulling me back there, and I miss it.
But I just, you know, like I said, the overpopulation and the traffic really blew my mind.
That's going to be a big problem, though, isn't it, Merrill?
Because if overpopulation traffic building happens to that extent, it means that a lot of these ancient sites that need to be explored, that people have known about for years but haven't done a whole lot about, they're going to get covered over and forgotten.
Yeah, hopefully not, you know, but the things that I was telling you about that I found are so remote and so far out in the jungle in such rugged terrain, especially the ones in the lava flow, there's no way they could build out there.
It's just impossible.
Okay, well, you're a man of music and your credentials, we've only scratched the surface.
I mean, here's a man who knew Harry Nielsen and met John Lennon, for goodness sake.
And, you know, I guess, well, you knew Mike Love and all the rest of it.
No, Mike Love, all the rest of it.
You must want to do something about that which you have learned.
What do you want to do next with this body of work that you spent more than three decades, four decades coming up with?
What do you want to do now?
Well, I'm just continuing on.
I'm still playing a concert or so every month, and I'm doing the TV show, and it's interesting.
I've had Mike Love on the TV show, Dean Torrance of Jan and Dean, Willie Nelson, tons of 60s people, all the people I knew in the 60s and 70s.
Now that I'm doing the show, they want to come on the show.
And I've been enjoying doing that.
And you can see some of them on YouTube.
You just type in Merle Frankhauser's Tiki Lounge.
Number 92 is the one where I went back to Maui, and I hadn't been there in nine years.
And I'm still, you know, exploring what this signals from Malibu is really about.
And my next project that I'm going to do is go down to Malibu and take a crew, my crew with night vision video cameras and sit there, Howard, overnight and film the night sky and see if I can catch any of these lights that have been reported coming in and out.
And you think the events are so regular that if you stake it out for 24 hours, you're going to see?
Well, that's what people are telling me.
And people that are down there, surfers say, oh, yeah, we sit on the beach at night after surfing.
And just about every other night, you'll see something that you can't explain.
And it's not an airplane because it's going into the water.
So, yeah, we'll see what we can find.
I'm going to make a little documentary about it and how, you know, these odd radio signals Were sent to me and make a show about that.
Well, the radio signals, didn't you say to me 20 minutes or so ago in this conversation that you have somebody at the moment working on those radio signals?
Or is that work complete?
Yes, I have an engineer that's analyzing them completely.
He did a first real quick analyzation, and he said, you know, there's nothing wrong with what you did in the recording.
The signal isn't so loud that it's going, you know, over.
It's something that's in there.
There's some harmonic that he saw on a scope that you can't hear in the upper register.
So you can listen to it.
It's near the end of messages from the dome.
And like I said, it sounds like a lady's voice sort of yodeling.
And it comes out loud about three-quarters of the way through the song.
And that's where I've had problems with digital mixing boards in radio stations.
Oh, and one other thing.
After I recorded the song and I mixed it down to digital DAT tape, I tried to burn a CD off of it.
And every time it got to that spot, it shut the burner down.
It wouldn't let me make a CD.
And I'm thinking, what the heck?
I must have got a batch of bad CDs.
Look, we don't know what this is.
I went through four CDs, and then I got the bright idea, hmm, I'll hook it up analog.
And when I hooked it up analog, no problem.
So, and obviously neither of us is a technician.
We're onto something fascinating here because if there's a code within this signal that can get inside digital equipment and stop it, then there might be all kinds of uses for that.
Yeah, yeah.
It's interesting.
Like I said, I'm still learning more about this as I go along.
And if I find something out, I'll update you and give you an email and let you know.
Please do, because we've darted around so many topics, and I think you and I could probably do four or five shows, Meryl, if you ever had the time to do that.
John Lennon, I've got to get back to that because he had a UFO experience.
I don't know when you met him, had he had it or not.
Yeah, he had had it, and it was in the apartment building there, the Dakota that he saw it.
But that night, like I said, there was probably 30 people at this party at Harry's house, and we didn't get into UFOs or anything, although, you know, he heard my On Our Way to Hana song.
But he just, you know, we just started talking about songwriting.
And actually, I was so honored, I don't know if it was a year or so later, he did an interview with, I think it was called British Weekly, and he mentioned meeting me.
So you made an impact.
I thought that was really great.
You made an impact on John Lennon.
Yeah, and then just here about three or four years ago, a guy that's a fan of mine that plays guitar, but he also does some kind of home improvement work, was in New York and he was working on something for Yoko.
And he mentioned me, and he said her eyes lit up, and she said, oh, John had mentioned him.
Please tell him hi.
And I thought, wow, what an honor.
Now I'm getting a hello from Yoko Ono.
What a life.
I know you've got a book about your life out, haven't you?
There's the autobiography there.
Yeah, the whole autobiography is in there and a story about meeting John Lennon and all of the things I've gone through.
And, you know, it's just, I call it Merle's world, Howard.
It's like I never know what's going to happen next or who I'm going to meet, you know.
But you sound so relaxed about it all.
All this stuff has happened to you and you're so laid-back?
Well, you know, I was brought up actually until I was about 12 in Louisville, Kentucky, and I would explore the woods and creeks there.
And I had kind of that laid-back existence from the beginning.
And then my father got tired of the snow and the cold.
And he moved us out here to California around 1955.
And we always lived in, you know, relaxed atmospheres.
My dad was an Indianapolis race car driver, but his occupation was a flight instructor.
And my mom had been a big band singer.
And my dad played guitar and taught me my first chords.
So we always had this musical kind of relaxed feeling.
And then I eventually moved to Hawaii, which as you can attest to, is very laid-back.
What a remarkable life, Meryl.
And we've only scratched the surface.
Can I ask you a favor?
Yeah.
You know Mike Love.
I interviewed Mike Love, and I seemed to get on with him when we spoke.
He was playing a concert in Newbury in Berkshire, and I was doing a show for Radio Berkshire.
And we talked about the concert.
He was very laid-back.
I caught up with him on a tour bus, believe it or not.
We spoke by phone.
He was on a tour bus.
And we talked about TM, Transcendental Meditation, which he uses and has used for many, many years.
And he promised me that he would do a show with me about TM.
If you see him, can you remind him?
Sure, I will.
I haven't talked to him in years.
You can see my interview with him.
It's on YouTube.
But if it does come up and he plays in the area, I'll talk to him about it.
I'll just do because I liked him a lot, as I've liked you a lot, and thank you very much.
Tell me one thing, just before we have to park this: one of the greatest experiences of my life that I will take with me to my ultimate end was having dinner at the end of this week in Maui at a restaurant that I think you might know.
It's an open-air restaurant.
The top is open-air.
It's called Kimos in Lahaina.
Do you know Kimos in Lahaina?
And they have flaming torches there.
You know, there's no electric light.
They put flaming torches there.
You eat steak and you look at the ocean and see the whales out there.
For me, that was a life-changing experience.
I hope it's still there.
Yeah, it's still there.
And, you know, just down the street and across the street a bit is Mick Fleetwood's restaurant.
Oh, wow.
Yes, of course.
I interviewed him on the BBC some years ago, and he sounds very laid-back because he was talking to me from his home in Maui.
Yeah, yeah, he moved there a number of years ago.
I saw him in 1979 at the American Music Awards, and he kind of knew who I was.
And there's another one a few years later.
He moved over there.
And I used to play in Lahaina quite a bit at a place called the Blue Max, and they had all of this old airplane memorabilia on the walls.
And everybody you can think of from Stephen Stills to Rick James to Jane Fonda came in there at one time.
You never knew who was going to be in the audience that night.
God, Meryl, you know what?
I'm humbled by the life that you've had and led.
All I have now to remind me of Maui and chemo's at Lahaina is a fridge magnet, which I look at every day.
I've loved it.
Well, if you ever make it over here, make it to California, or you're on your way to Maui, please stop by and say hi or let me know when you're going to Hawaii, and you never know.
We might be able to rendezvous over there.
Willie Nelson has a house there now, and I visit him, and I've played on the island there.
In fact, there's a video of Willie and I doing wipeout on Maui at the Mac Outdoor Amphitheater there on YouTube.
What a life.
I could talk with you for five hours, six hours, seven hours.
Please don't let this be the last conversation, Meryl.
Thank you very much indeed.
And I hope I haven't interrupted you too much.
I've been trying to get all of that amazing stuff from you, and there's so much more to go.
Meryl, thank you.
Let me have a link when you have, if you post this somewhere, and I'll send it to all of my friends all over Europe.
Well, that's so kind, and thank you.
And if people want to know about you, what is your website?
It's MerleFankhauser.com, M-E-R-R-E-L-L, F-A-N-K-H-A-U-S-E-R.com.
And my book, Calling from a Star, The Merle Frankhauser Story, is available at Amazon.com.
Merle, a real pleasure to talk with you.
And I'm looking out of the window here, and the sun has now dropped like a big golden ball behind the trees.
And you have the rest of your California day to go.
That's how the cookie crumbles.
Thank you, Merrill, very much.
Thank you so much, Howard.
Meryl Frankhauser in California.
If you want to know more about him, his work, his music, his thoughts, I'll put a link to him on my website, theunexplained.tv.
And that website, designed, created, maintained, honed, and made perfect by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thank you very much for all of your support.
Please keep your donations and emails coming to theunexplained.tv.
That's the website, and you'll find links to do those things there.
When you send me an email, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show, because I'd love to get your stories.
Until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
And please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
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