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March 10, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:09:00
Edition 244 - Shadow People

This time Canadian researcher and film-maker Adam Tomlinson on Shadow People...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, we're well into March now.
The spring is just around the corner, although with the weather here in the UK, you wouldn't particularly be noticing that.
We've had a certain amount of rain, even a certain amount of snow in some places, but you cannot deny the march of time.
And I'm sure that the weather will turn warm soon.
In fact, I'm told it will turn warmer within days.
You know me and my attitude to the winter.
I can't wait.
But who knows?
There may be some surprises along the way.
So we're not going to predict anything here.
Thank you very much for your recent donations and your emails.
I'm going to do a lot of shout-outs on this edition and also bring you some very important news about this show.
Now look, you and I have been on a 10-year journey with The Unexplained, taking it from something that was a very embryonic podcast, almost exactly 10 years ago, to where we are now.
Couldn't have done any of it without Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who's helped me enormously to learn the potential of this medium.
But above all, I couldn't have done it without you supporting me because you've proved to me that you're there.
The numbers for this show are growing all the time.
And now we're going to take another little direction, I guess you can call it.
So we're heading off on another phase of the journey.
More on that very soon.
Ton of shout-outs to do.
I promised you I would do these, so let's get into them.
If you don't hear your name and you want to hear it, let me know.
First of all, Jay.
Jay, thank you for your email, pointing out that I didn't mention on the show the passing of Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who of course was a guest on this show more than five years ago.
Apollo astronaut, very interesting man of great erudition and somebody I will never forget having the privilege to speak to.
And I'm sorry that I, just with the run of things, I didn't get the chance to mention it.
I covered it on the radio.
But you're right.
We should have mentioned it here.
He will be much missed.
He was a man with the right stuff, well and truly.
Gareth, thank you for your personal experiences and your nice email.
Howard, says Baz, although we've never met, I've been introduced to your work which accompanies me over lonely mountaintops here in Ireland as I conduct my own research and you have become a welcome friend on journeys.
Nice to hear from you, Barry.
Michael Green, JFK, some information on that and him.
Thank you for that.
Hi, Howard.
I'm a regular listener to your show.
I enjoy listening and have heard some great stuff over the years.
Some shows better than others, I think.
But after 40 minutes of Merrill Fankhauser, I hope I've got the chap's name right.
Yes, you have.
I had to switch off, says Mark, in Kingston-upon-Thames, in London, on the London-Surrey border.
Okay, well, horses for courses.
A lot of good email about Merrill Fankhauser.
Yours was the first one I had not liking that show.
But look, you know, everybody is entitled to a view.
That's what it's all about.
Howard, says Jay in Atlanta.
Love the show.
I heard about it on Bell Gab and I've been hooked.
Have you ever considered creating an internet forum or a discussion group?
Work in progress, Jay.
More news on that coming soon.
Howard.
Now, here's proof of what I was saying.
The show about Meryl Frankhauser, the part of his conversation with John Lennon, where Lennon told him how his music came about, brought shivers to me.
I know from other sources that great artists have their art channeled to them from quotes above.
Same with automatic writing, says Ulysses in New York City.
Well, I've always believed that anybody who creates anything doesn't entirely do it themselves.
It comes from somewhere.
You know, sometimes I've done good work and I haven't quite understood how it's happened.
And, you know, sometimes the fluence hasn't been with me.
But I do believe that some of it comes from something external.
Can I prove that?
No.
But that's why we do a show like this.
Michael, who's building ejector seats for planes in Colorado and listening to the show.
Nice to hear from you, Michael.
Stephen Walker in Oak Harbor, Washington, suggesting Micah Hanks, who's been on this show before, but we can have him on again.
Camilo Conejo.
I hope I said that right.
Camillo Conejo says, I love the show.
Greetings from County Wexford in Ireland.
And a shout-out will be nice.
Consider that done, Camilo.
The unexplained, Mark Brooks in Cheshire says, please accept Scott's pocket money.
He's my eight-year-old son who's absolutely daft on the show.
He panics every time you say that I need money to keep the show going, which we do.
So he's asked me to donate his £8 pocket money so the show carries on.
Don't you dare stop.
Thank you very much, Mark.
And thank you, Scott, very, very much indeed.
If you ever want your pocket money back, I'll send it.
But thank you so much.
Mark in Chesterfield, Derbyshire.
Good to hear from you.
Brad in Modesto, California.
Great location.
I'd love to go back.
Graham from Scotland, who's living in Azerbaijan right now.
Nice to hear from you, Graham.
Jason in Seattle listens while making art for video games.
Brian in Massachusetts and also at the Holiday Home in Florida.
Good to hear from you.
Jim in Sydney sent me a really interesting email and I took all of it on board, Jim, a lot of it very personally, on the subject of abundance and how that can occur in your life.
Fascinating stuff, Jim.
Thank you.
Mark in Southampton wants me to cover Operation Gladio.
Something new to me.
Need to find out about that.
Lovely email from Dawn.
Greetings from Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway.
Dawson Creek in BC, British Columbia, Canada.
Dawn, thank you for your lovely email.
Noodles says, I'm curious if you've done a show about Tesla.
Yet, go back in the archives, Noodles.
We have done one, but there's always room for more on that subject.
I'm fascinated by that as you are.
Bob in Carey, North Carolina, thanks for your email.
Mitch and Gina in Florida, good to hear from husband and wife.
Ash in Brampton, Canada, originally from London, remembers me on Capitol Radio here.
Long memory, Ash, thank you for your email.
Melissa, big fan of the show.
Possible links between my tinnitus and the Epstein-Barr virus or Epstein-Barr virus.
Now, that is interesting because I've been a victim of that Many years ago, as a lot of people have, and to think that it might be linked with Tinnitus, I think a lot of people who get affected by that are never quite the same afterwards.
And that's certainly how I felt.
Melissa, thank you.
Joe White, good to hear from you.
Zoe.
Thank you for the translations from Russian.
Some creepy stories.
I need to check on copyright about that and see whether I'm able to read those out.
But Zoe, thank you.
That was kind of you to take time.
Mark Chappell, good thoughts.
Thank you.
Michael in Stourbridge in the Midlands in the UK, place I know well.
A couple of paranormal stories from him.
Thank you, Michael.
Derek in Hackney, listening in the darkness at 4 a.m.
Thanks, Michael.
Leon, thanks for your good thoughts and wishes.
Nicole in Salt Lake City, commenting about Richard Estep.
Our last guest says, thank you, Howard, for this amazing episode.
A lot of good feedback about Richard Estep.
We'll have him back.
Rick sent an alien abduction cartoon.
Rick, it's just gone into my inbox.
I need to check that out.
But thank you very much.
Craig in Wigan, good to hear from you.
Baz in Ireland, thank you for your email.
Steve in Florida says, thank you for being you.
That's the nicest thing you could say.
Thank you, Steve.
That's very kind.
And finally, my name is William Collins.
I'm 27 from Coventry in the UK.
I wanted to say that many moons ago, my dad used to listen to you on the radio on car journeys, family trips, and while he traveled in his HGV lorry, his truck, while he was working.
All these years later, he's no longer with us, but you're excellent.
I hear it.
It feels like it brings me a little bit closer to him.
I also wanted to say thank you for the podcast.
It's outstanding.
I know that if he was here, he would love it just as much as I do.
William, that means a great deal to me.
And look, I know what it's like to lose your dad, and I've lost my mum, too.
You know, it's something that you never entirely get over, but you learn to live with.
I think that's all I can say about it.
But my thoughts are with you.
Now, important news about this show.
It's taken 10 years to get here, and we're kind of splitting into two directions in the future.
The big news is, and some of you have emailed me about this already because it's been in the trade press over here, a version of The Unexplained presented by me is going to be on a new radio station in the UK called Talk Radio, related to the show where I started this, Talk Sport.
I started this in 2004 on TalkSpot.
It ran for nearly two years.
Then it ended, the station went all sports, and now they're starting a talk station, and this show on Sunday nights at 10pm in the UK will be there.
The podcast will continue.
It will also be called The Unexplained and run by me, but it will be different.
For a start off, the podcast will have the shout-outs on it.
We'll have longer form interviews on it, different guests treated in a different way, and that show, more of an international show, The Unexplained, from and to the UK on Talk Radio, will be a domestic show for this country, but I would be very grateful if wherever you are, you were able to join us on the internet stream.
Talk Radio, launching at the end of March.
My show, Sundays at 10 p.m.
And can you guess?
I'm really excited.
You know, with all of these things, it's always a leap in the dark.
We never know how it's going to go.
But let me promise you that the podcast, where it all started, this website, theunexplained.tv, and this podcast show will continue just as it's always continued and will expand and develop.
We haven't stopped the news on this show yet.
There's more to come, and I will tell you more about that, but not for a couple of months now.
So those are the big things.
This show continues, and there'll be a new radio version on Talk Radio from the end of March.
I'm absolutely thrilled.
Now, the guest on this edition is going to be talking about a subject you've wanted me to talk about for years, shadow people.
I know it's a big, big topic with people like George Nuri on Coast to Coast AM in the US.
So we're going to do it now with somebody I don't think you've heard before.
His name is Adam Tomlinson, who spent a long time researching this phenomenon and has also made a movie about it.
He got in touch with me, and I think he's somebody it'll be worth hearing from.
He's in Canada.
We're going to connect with him very shortly.
Just to say thank you very much for 10 years of support for the online version of The Unexplained.
Now, my situation will continue much the same.
You know, even though I'm going to be doing a radio version of this, it is not, of course, going to make me rich and I will still need to be able to earn money in other ways.
So it is vital for the podcast to continue that you continue to donate.
And we'll see how it all goes in the future.
But, you know, you've got to move forward in life.
People have been telling me that for years.
You cannot stay static.
And so, we've got to move forward into 2016 and see what transpires.
You know, life is a very interesting and varied thing.
And I've had my ups and my downs.
I've had my share of kicks in the teeth, let me tell you, one way and another.
And I've also had some wonderful warmth shown to me by a lot of people.
And a lot of you emailing me and the wonderful things that you say.
And the special people in your life remain special forever.
And the others just fade away.
I guess that's how it all works.
Let's get to Adam Tomlinson now.
In Canada, let's talk shadow people.
Adam, thanks for coming on The Unexplained.
Well, thanks for having me.
This is great.
All I know about you is some information that you sent me.
You sent me a great trailer for the movie that you've made about shadow people.
And I know that you're in Canada, but beyond that, I know Zilch.
So fill me in.
Well, I live in Grimsby, Ontario, which is just across Lake Ontario from Toronto, which is where the film was made.
And I made it with some people I met on the set of Scare Tactics, Brigitte Kingsley and her partner, Andrew Symek.
And that's a hidden camera prank show where people get tricked into thinking that there's vampires, Bigfoot, all these kind of things.
So it's a lot of fun.
So you work in this professionally then?
Yeah, I mean, like a lot of actors, writers, it's, you know, you're sort of in and out.
I'm not sure if anyone is really in the film business.
It's, you know, because every job is new, every new opportunity you have to fight for.
But yeah, I made the movie because I wanted that to be my entrance into a more permanent level of employment with this kind of thing.
Okay, well, your field is like my field, then radio sounds much the same.
There will be people who will be a little sniffy at you having just said, I worked on a hidden camera prank show about paranormal topics.
Some of those people would say that automatically rules this guy out.
What words would you have for them?
Well, I'm not really sure why that would be the case.
I suppose, you know, the show is a comedy, so I find comedy in general seems to get, you know, less respect, the idea that it's not serious, which I think is rather absurd.
What I love about comedy is that there's truth in it.
And, you know, with the reality show, the truth is people actually believe these, you know, in the paranormal and in monsters and that kind of thing.
And it's kind of cathartic.
There's a release afterwards where they go, oh, it's just a prank.
It's just a joke.
And it's really a lot of fun.
I wonder if that's made, you being involved in a comedy show loosely tied to these subjects.
I wonder if that's made some people think about whether actually this stuff is all real.
I'm not sure.
You know, it's hard to group everything into one thing.
I mean, for instance, you know, if someone was singing Bigfoot's Real, I mean, that's just a different kind of primate.
You know, with aliens, that's its own thing.
And it's just like with shadow people, it could be its own thing.
It could be related to other things too.
I'm not really sure.
But I kind of like the fact that I was on a show like that because I don't want anyone to misunderstand or to think that I'm advocating that shadow people are a certain thing or not a certain thing.
I'm just very open-minded towards it, as I am towards any other thing.
But from what I've read about you, you've given a lot of time, like years of your life, researching this phenomenon.
So something about it must have grabbed you.
Well, what really grabbed me about it is that there's just no possible explanation that I can think of that won't fundamentally change how we think about the world and our relationship to it.
There's no answers.
There's a lot of possibilities, but all of the possibilities are impossible, according to what we know right now.
So I got into it after a personal shadow person experience.
I don't know if you want to talk about that.
You can't just tease me with that.
Yes, of course.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Well, my experience was I was living in Toronto at the time.
I was having a nightmare, a horrible nightmare, lucid, about a man in a hat who was following me.
So I'm in the nightmare and I remember thinking, I know how to deal with this problem.
I'll just wake up.
So I did.
I woke up.
I opened my eyes and there was the man in the hat standing over my bed.
And it's really hard to describe how I felt at the moment.
The level of fear is just indescribable.
I mean, I've been in car accidents and that type of thing, and it just doesn't even touch it.
And the reason is, I think, because there's, number one, hey, there's a man in my house looking over my bed.
And then there's that second level of realization that, wait a minute, this guy came out of my dreams.
That's not possible.
Well, how is it possible for something to step out?
Look, you know, I've had, especially this year for some bizarre reason, I've had some really whacked out, very strange dreams involving people that I've never seen before.
But I've never had a creature or a thing or a character step out of one of those dreams into what we perceive to be reality.
How can that be?
Well, that's a great question.
That's what I've spent the last over a half decade, probably eight years now, trying to figure out.
So I'm lying there in bed.
I either can't move or am not moving.
And then at some moment, a fight or flight instinct kicks in.
I jumped out of bed, kicked the shadow person, and he just sort of disappeared isn't really the right word, but faded away.
Almost like in the original Star Trek when someone gets beamed up, you know, there's that residual whatever.
Okay, so there you've got Orson Welles or somebody who looks like him in a black hat standing over you.
You have the fortitude, the balls, I nearly said, but you have the guts to get out of bed and kick him one.
What did that feel like?
Were you kicking into thin air?
Yes, that's exactly what it felt like.
And the funny thing is, when he disappeared, I looked and saw a hook with a fedora and a robe on it.
And I remember thinking, okay, nice try life.
You're just going to try to convince me that that's what I was seeing.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Did you have in your room a fedora hat and a hook?
Yes.
We did.
Okay, well, there's the explanation, isn't it?
No, no, because it certainly wasn't.
I just remember thinking, okay, that's exactly, if I tell people this, they're going to say that's the explanation.
And it might have been if it ended there.
Like, if it ended there, I would have been, yes, that's the explanation.
Great, lovely.
I can go be a lawyer.
What a great storyteller you are.
So there was more.
Yes, there's more.
And the next morning, I frankly kind of forgot about it.
And it wasn't until a couple months later, and not forgot about it, I dismissed it.
But a couple months later, I'm having a conversation with a friend, very good friend, you know, having a couple beers, talking about this and that.
And he says, you know, I've never told anybody this, but there was one time when I was at my grandma's and this man in a hat.
And all of a sudden, all the fear came back.
And I'm like, I couldn't even let him finish the story.
I was like, I know exactly what you're talking about.
What's going on?
I felt like I was in a horror movie.
And so then I went home, Googled Hat plus Man plus Nightmares and 77 million hits.
The Hat Man has a Wikipedia page.
Here I was thinking I found this completely unknown thing.
And it was just another curve in this whole journey.
It's like, okay, So people know about this.
And you knew about it then, too.
Did you feel that whatever this was, you certainly felt galvanized to get out of bed and kick it one.
Did you feel it was malevolent?
Yes.
And from the now hundreds of stories I've read about people's similar encounters, it's almost always benevolent.
Or there's almost a sense of...
Yes, yes, malevolent.
Sorry, yes.
Very important concept.
So you felt that whatever this was did not intend you good?
No, and I mean, that could possibly be the fact of, you know, it's a dark man in a black hat.
Who stepped out of your dream?
Yeah, but I think there's more to it.
And it just seems like the descriptions of it are so uniform, which is what's fascinating about it.
And why, you know, I went to law school.
I'm pretty good at evaluating evidence.
And when hundreds of people tell the exact same story, it's almost always menvolent.
There's shocking numbers of dogs who seem to be able to sense this.
Everyone's story involves their dog.
So, yeah, I'll come across the occasional story where someone thinks, oh, they're just neutral, but I've never encountered someone who thought they're good.
Okay, well, I certainly would be fairly scared right from the get-go if something like that appeared.
Thankfully, it hasn't in my bedroom.
Now, a couple of things we have to get clear here.
Presumably you were living in this place alone, were you?
There weren't people there who might prank you?
Oh, no, no, no.
It was definitely not a prank.
I was living alone.
And then people will say, like, oh, what were you smoking or what were you drinking?
But that was the other couple of things I was going to get on to.
So if we rule out other people and pranks, that was factor number one.
Factor number two is alcoholic beverages and factor number three, narcotic substances.
Well, the answer to both was no.
And even so, I mean, I've tried alcohol and narcotic substances, not the most of them, but you know what I mean.
And none of them have any effect kind of like that.
I mean, I don't know.
So what have been going, all right, if none of those things were a factor and it wasn't your friends putting you on, as they say in North America, having you on, as we say over here, then what else was going on in your life at that time?
Was it a troubled time for you?
It was somewhat.
And there is a definite connection with shadow people and schizophrenia, depression, drug use, that type of thing.
It's not always, but there are a lot.
It just seems to be a very strong correlation with that type of thing.
It's not for me, and I wouldn't ever do it to pry into your life.
But were you having any issues of that kind?
I mean, you're a law school grad, bright guy, but that does not make one immune from the ups and downs of life, does it?
No, I mean, I'm completely comfortable admitting I've had depression very badly before, and that might be a connection.
But again, still, I really can't see it being more of a correlation than a causal type of factor.
And of course, there are many people, and we have to say, that, you know, creativity and depression go hand in hand.
I mean, look at Robin Williams being quite a recent example, a sad example, a man who was depressed but had enormous talent.
Those two things quite often walk down the road together, don't they?
They do.
And it's kind of funny because I've, I mean, Sarah Silverman wrote this in her book, and it was a great point.
And she's like, I've been depressed, but I've never accomplished anything creatively while depressed.
I think if anything, it just emboldens people to make stronger choice, not stronger choices, but riskier choices or like be a stand-up comic or a filmmaker or something like that.
Yeah, maybe to overcome it.
I think you're right.
I think in a lot of cases you're right.
Okay, so here you are with this Orson Welles type dark character.
I just kind of see Orson Welles here wearing a cape and a dark hat.
It sort of fits.
Could you see a face, by the way?
No.
And in none of the encounters that I've read about is there a face.
Sometimes there'll be red eyes or yellow eyes.
And one thing actually on that point, I've come across while researching hallucinations, because I thought, okay, maybe it's a hallucination, that there is a specific part of the brain that identifies faces and just deals with faces.
So it is possible to have a hallucination of a person without a face because the hallucination triggers a different part of the brain.
I think it's called the fusiform face region that deals with faces.
So that could be, if it is a hallucination, one explanation why almost no one sees a face.
At the same time, there are other types of shadow people I've come across like old hags, which you might have encountered.
An old woman who sits on someone's chest, strangles them.
And I would imagine that whatever the cause of the Hatman is, the old hags would be based on a similar, whatever the phenomenon is.
All right.
One of the explanations that I know people are probably screaming at their MP3 player right now, as they're driving along listening to this, which a lot of people do, is maybe you are suffering from, and we all get this, I've had this only in the last week or two, a sleep paralysis, where you have something that scares the bejabis out of you as you sleep, and you feel you can't do anything about it.
You're paralyzed.
But the only thing is, in your case, you tell me that you got out of bed and kicked this thing.
Well, sleep paralysis is an extremely intriguing explanation at first.
At first, I thought that was the explanation because it fit the parameters of what happened to me very well.
I did wake up from a dream, And sleep paralysis basically, the argument is that during the REM sleep cycle, people wake up before their brain is finished dreaming, basically, and have a hypnopic dream.
A hypnagogic dream is when it happens as you're falling asleep.
And there's a number of problems with that.
Number one is people see it during the day.
Multiple people have seen them at the same time.
But my main problem with the sleep paralysis explanation, it's what some statisticians have amazingly called the underwear gnomes fallacy.
I don't know if you're a fan of South Park.
I am, yes, yes.
But the underwear gnomes would steal underwear, and their mantra was first step underwear, third step profit.
And someone would say, what's step two?
And they're like, step two.
And I find the same thing with sleep paralysis.
How does a very base physical thing manifest itself in this larger hallucination?
I mean, sleep paralysis happens in the medulla emblogata, the base of the brain.
And it doesn't actually paralyze you.
What it does is it just raises the threshold for the amount of energy that needs to travel into the muscles to activate them.
So that actually kind of fits my experience too, because I was lying there unmoving until I just reached this crescendo of fear where I was able to jump up.
But it's amazing that you were able to, because I've had these experiences, certainly with dreams, many, many times.
And like I say, only very recently.
But the thing that's always happened to me with them, all of my life, anyway, and I think it goes for a lot of people, is that you just simply feel that you're not able to do anything.
And as much as you try and try and try and galvanize the, you know, the fluence into your limbs, you cannot move.
Well, I mean, I'd like to think there's something special about me, but I think it was just, like I said, it's a fight or flight instinct and I had nowhere to go.
So that's what my brain chose, I guess.
I am not even sure if it was a conscious decision.
But on sleep paralysis, the number one problem with the explanation, and it's the same problem with every explanation as we get into them, is that why does the man in the hat look the same to everybody?
Okay, like even if you grant that it's a dream carrying over, well, why isn't it a dream where I get a new cell phone and I see a cell phone?
Well, that's true.
But then why do a lot of people, they certainly do in the UK, and I've had this one myself, the dream that you're naked at the bus stop and everybody's looking at you or your teeth are falling out is another one.
Well, those are things that could, I mean, potentially happen.
Everyone can, you know, everyone knows this, you know, everyone feels shame about their bodies.
But the idea of being naked is out there.
Everyone can imagine it.
I'd never heard of a man in a hat.
Most of the people who've experienced it have never heard of it.
It's very specific.
Before that experience that you had, Adam, had you researched this, heard about it, or was it completely new to you?
It was completely new.
I had no idea what was going on.
That's why my first step of my research process was Wikipedia.
I mean, that's how little I knew about it.
And in fact, I wasn't until that point really interested in anything concerning the paranormal just because there's no evidence.
Again, I come from a legal background.
And let's be honest about it, quite often, and I have to face these brickbats all the time because of the subjects that I talk about.
Sometimes people think you're a little wacko if you research these things.
I've had employers who've raised their eyebrows.
Some of them still do because I do this.
Well, that's actually one of the reasons why I've wanted to research it and not just research different people's stories so I can go being almost like evangelical preacher about it, saying there's these shadow people.
They exist.
They're real.
It's really not that difficult to get to that point.
You can read five stories about shadow people and begin to see enough similarities that, okay, this is something that happens.
Now let's try to figure out what it is.
And I think by taking a more scientific approach, I think it's a way of sort of counteracting that argument and saying like, you know, maybe I'm crazy for having that one experience, but really what I'm doing is just researching an actual phenomenon.
And the fact that people are having these experiences, even if it isn't an evil entity, if it is something that appears from the innermost, deepest, most recesses of the brain, it is still worth talking about.
Well, absolutely.
Because then the question becomes, how did it get into the innermost most recesses of the brain?
And why the hat?
And why the hat?
Exactly.
That's, again, it's just so specific.
And not all shadow people necessarily, from the reports I've read, have hats.
Some of them wear cloaks.
I listened to a recent podcast of yours where someone was talking about seeing a man in a dark cloak.
So it's very likely that it's based on the same reasons.
Now, what are those reasons?
That's really what I'm interested in and trying to figure it out.
The most simplest explanation, I mean, just going back to my experience, is that it's a hallucination.
Now, people who've encountered shadow people will kick and scream and say, it's not a hallucination.
I saw it.
It's real.
But that's the tricky thing about hallucinations.
They hijack the exact same mental processes that are used in actual perception.
So you can tell what's a hallucination.
This conversation we're having right now could just be a hallucination that involves all five senses and is extremely accurate.
And everything is electromagnetic.
What goes on in your brain, the signals that make your limbs move, that make you think and remember, it's all electromagnetism up in your brain.
So, you know, the difference between something being stimulated in there that isn't real, but nevertheless you perceive as those electromagnetic impulses, and something that is real stimulating those same impulses, I guess the difference between those two things, if the result is the same in the brain, is pretty small.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, and the idea of the electromagnetic impulses, that's also interesting.
And that leads to a completely different line of inquiry.
And it's that in the last hundred years, we're exposed to, it's an astronomical, well, not astronomical, but something like 50 million times more electromagnetic energy than we were 100 years ago.
So our computers, our monitors, our lights, our radios, you know, the whole electromagnetic spectrum.
And it's bombarding our brains with this stimulus that we have no idea what it's doing.
True enough.
I have a Wi-Fi radio right by my head.
When I go to bed, you know, I listen to American-Canadian talk radio.
I just got to get my fix of all of that.
And that thing is on in standby mode all night.
I've got chargers for electric lights operating in the hallways in the place that I live.
And that generates radio interference up and down the AM dial and spills over onto FM.
What's that doing to me is a question I often ask.
Well, this is actually something that's been researched in Canada, actually, in Sudbury, there's a scientist named Michael Persinger.
And you might have heard of these in passing, but it's known as the God-Helmet experiments.
And the God-Helmet experiments were conceptually very simple.
Subjects had electromagnetic frequencies, not strong, no more powerful than your clock radio, directed towards their right temporal lobe.
And there were very specific frequencies that I'd imagine he just calculated over time.
And he was able to induce hallucinations.
His goal, there's a book called Neuropsychological Basis for God Beliefs.
His goal was to come up with an explanation for how people have near-death experiences and claim to see Jesus or God or that kind of thing.
And he was trying to explain them away by just saying, no, it's just a product of the mind.
And that the reason, say, a Christian would see Jesus is because they have a notion of what Jesus looks like.
Their mind recreates it.
And I guess it's just a nice thing our brain does to make death seem easier, which I have a problem with because it goes counter to everything about evolution we ever would have learned.
And even in cases where a hallucination wasn't induced, it's still people would have a sense of connection to the universe.
They can feel sad.
They can feel happy.
So these electromagnetic signals can be used to manipulate our brains.
And these were very specific electromagnetic frequencies, but that doesn't mean that a non-specific frequency can't have some kind of impact.
And maybe for some people, that is creating the hallucination of shadow people.
I mean, it still doesn't explain why they all look the same.
But I mean, even if that isn't the answer, I think it might lead us closer to the answer.
So I think if I ever make any contribution to this whole debate, I think it will be by getting a quarter of the way towards the answer in some capacity.
But whatever the word real means, by dint of the number of references to it that you found and the number of people who report this phenomenon, it is something that is real.
Now, whether it's real within your brain or real from somewhere outside, that is the moot point.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it's similar to alien abductions.
It seems like the stories are just so similar.
But at the same time, that's another thing that's out there.
We all know from entertainment what that could be like.
But yeah, with the shadow people, it's definitely a thing that happens.
So the question is, what is it?
And that gets us to another really important kind of line of questioning, which is, okay, so say it is a hallucination.
Now, how can we all have the same hallucination?
Because collective hallucinations are impossible.
Hallucinations use a certain part of our brain, and it's an individual thing.
I've done research on collective hallucinations, and any instance of it, it's usually some, you know, a thousand people having the same religious experience, which it really could just be a bunch of people pretending to have the same religious experience.
And that is something that you would have been primed for.
You know, if a thousand people go to see a movie, 500 people in a movie theater, and they see a scary movie, and 20 of them after that, or 50 of them after that, have a pretty similar nightmare, then we know what's caused that.
But so many people disconnected, presumably, having Hatman hallucinations, appearances, apparitions, whatever, or old hag apparitions, appearances, hallucinations, whatever.
That's pretty interesting.
Right.
And that's what got me thinking.
Okay, collective hallucinations are impossible in terms of the way I've described, but what if it's part of a larger collective consciousness?
So, okay, a larger collective consciousness.
How can that happen?
Well, that brings us back to electromagnetism and the electromagnetic field, which this is astounding, something I've come across.
And again, it's Michael Persinger.
This guy's great.
We are all connected through the Earth's electromagnetic field.
All our thoughts, all our feelings, it's there in what I guess in the past might have been called the ether.
And we can, there's a possibility, there's a YouTube video called The End of Secrets that if this connection was maximized somehow, we would have full access to everyone else's mind, sort of like a hive mind, like bees have, where the intelligence of each individual bee is combined and magnified so that they act almost like the neurons in the brain.
And I don't know if you've ever heard someone, I've heard lots of these stories where someone's, say, spouse will be in a horrible accident, they'll pass away, and the person will just feel an awful sense of sickness or sorrow, and they just know the person died.
The only explanation I can think of for that is through that connection, through the electromagnetic field, and in terms of those, just that common connection we have.
Well, certainly in my own case, when I was driving up to the hospital, a couple of hundred miles north of London to be with my mother in a very serious situation, something told me that she'd turned the corner.
And that was what I heard and felt.
I've turned the corner.
And I felt calmness and saw sunshine and realized that my mother at that point had died, which indeed she had.
Now, I don't know how I could have known that on a motorway here in the UK, but that is a fact.
And you hear that all the time.
So that speaks to what you just said.
And the reason you would have felt that with your mother and not the hundreds of thousands of people who die every week is just the closeness of the connection.
But that's just it's not a it's just a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.
So we all have that kind of connection in a small way, which might be the root of empathy in a way.
I read an article about 9-11 when random number generators all over the world just started going haywire because we collectively felt the sorrow of 9-11.
And that was, and it was more than just hearing about it and being sad.
It was a connection we all had.
Now, there's no way to prove whether or not that's actually true, but I think it's just something interesting to talk about.
Let's get back to you and your research then.
You had this experience.
You kicked the butt of the shadow man who disappeared.
You were kicking into thin air, it seems, but whatever it was disappeared.
Tell me how you went about doing research on that.
Who did you speak to first?
What did you do?
Well, researching it, it was extremely difficult because the first step of research was actually exceptionally easy.
Like I said, he had a Wikipedia page and there's a lot of stories.
And I was like, okay, I'm really getting somewhere.
So now I'm going to go to Google Books.
Now I'm going to go to the academic databases.
Now, you know, just doing all the research that I've learned to do taking university for way too long.
And the information was almost conspicuous by its absence.
There was just nothing out there.
And I thought, well, that's really strange for the most interesting thing that I've ever come across that nobody's talking about it.
And I found the only way to really learn anything about this was to learn about it indirectly.
So I would either research the more complicated sciences.
I mean, if we have time, we can get into dark matter, multiple universes, higher dimensions.
And then going in the complete opposite way, there's books that aren't available online, published by people who any decent psychologist would label as insane, but that actually, they're at least talking about it.
So that would be guys like David Icke.
It would be, I'm not actually sure how to pronounce her name, Laura Knight Jasnik.
She wrote a book called High Strangeness, which included, I mean, a hundred-page transcript of conversations she had with higher dimensional beings.
But once I just got over the fact that, okay, this is, I just stopped caring about the credibility of the source and just started paying more attention to what they're actually saying and, you know, looking towards literature and art.
But what about getting out there and talking to people who had the same experience as you?
You know what?
I've talked to enough people that it just got so repetitive.
The stories are just so similar, and that's what's fascinating about them.
But that's also why there's enough people going out there talking to people about their stories.
And I'd just be as happy to, you know, I can read a book about 50 experiences that someone spent years and years researching.
But you have spoken to people who've had that experience, have you?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And it's unbelievable.
When I speak to them, they're just like, you mean I'm not crazy?
Are they all similar kinds of people?
Are they all, you know, you and I, we're creatives, aren't we?
We have our artistic way of expressing ourselves through different media.
Some people are bookkeepers.
Some people build aircraft engine.
Are they a whole variety and spectrum of people?
Oh, absolutely.
I've found, especially from going to film festivals with the film, the question and answer periods afterwards have just been fascinating because it's exactly like you said, people from all walks of life.
There is no pattern.
You know, like I said, though, if someone has schizophrenia, chances are they are going to experience something like this.
And I suppose the question about them in that circumstance is whether the schizophrenia has opened up a portal to something beyond them or whether it's an aspect Of what is inside them, I guess that's the research point.
Oh, exactly, exactly.
And that also leads to the idea of: okay, well, if there are shadow people, just say they are in there something, what do they want?
And one thing I've come across is the idea that they feed off negative human energy, which would, again, there's so many questions that need to be answered before you get to that point, but let's just talk about that point.
And that's where the correlation of drugs, alcohol, depression, schizophrenia, almost like that weakness opens the door.
And they're like, okay, this person's vulnerable.
I'm going to take their energy, whatever that means.
I don't know.
So you really do have to protect yourself if you can.
Yeah, and that gets into a whole other thing in terms of what people do to protect themselves.
And the most common, I found there's basically two types of experiences.
There's ones like mine where it's really simple to get them to go away.
Like some people just scream, go away.
Some people will say a prayer.
Some people will kick.
Before we go there, let's just be clear about this.
There are people that you've had contact with who, unlike you, they've had this experience multiply.
They've had it a number of times.
Yes.
And the most interesting and, well, for me, in terms of the influence it was to have on my life, I was in a coffee shop with a friend.
We were having a conversation.
And this is before I knew too much about them.
I was in the early stages of my research, just having a conversation.
And I could tell some guy was sort of listening.
And he comes up to the table and he's like, they'll ruin your life.
They'll take your money.
They'll do this and that.
And I started thinking, wow.
And this is, it sort of gave me an idea of which direction to go to in the movie.
And it's like, this can really take over someone's life.
And then I put myself in that guy's shoes.
And I'm like, imagine just being that terrified all the time, because it never gets better from what I've heard.
Like, I've emailed people.
I've reached out to some of the people who told stories online, provided their email.
And it never gets better.
It's just this constant living in just the worst kind of the worst kind of fear.
And when I say worst fear, I mean there's people who live in war-torn zones who have fear that is more accurately described as bad.
But just in terms of the actual emotion, it's just indescribable.
And to have to deal with that all the time is just, I couldn't imagine what it would be like.
And how is it possible for them to carry on normal lives if they're being tormented in that way?
Well, they don't.
I mean, that's the thing.
It's just things like going, showing up to work or interpersonal relationships.
You know, the main character in the film, the shadow man, it affects her life with her husband.
She doesn't have friends.
She just has to seek out answers.
She becomes obsessed with this because it's dominating her life.
Is that based on a real person?
Her journey is actually based a lot on mine, my process of discovery, but it's more of just an amalgamation of all the stories.
Just sort of learning as much as I can and then just writing a story about the totality of the experience.
Are there people who see these things consciously in daylight?
You know, if I was to look around right now, and there's thankfully nothing there apart from the laundry I've just done hanging up.
I think that's what it is anyway.
Are there people who have those experiences in daylight?
Yes, yes.
They're fewer, but there is enough that, again, I think there's enough people who have said it that it's hard to disagree with a bunch of unrelated people describing the same sort of thing.
And again, that's one of the reasons why I'm almost positive it can't possibly be sleep paralysis.
That is when a lot of these experiences happening.
I'm not saying it isn't, but the fact that people see them during the day, I mean, number one, that's got to be awful.
But number two, it also suggests that, yeah, we really don't know what's going on.
Do they ever speak?
Rarely, but sometimes.
I've heard people talking about how, you know, a man in the hat will be speaking a language they don't understand.
Or, you know, occasionally, one I read a story where a guy said that he was warned by a shadow person that something terrible would happen to his father.
And the next day, a guy pulled a knife on his father.
Now, again, that's just one story.
But yeah, there's been examples, but very few of female shadow people.
But they're almost always men.
They're almost always black.
They're almost always wearing hats.
And they're almost always viewed as exceptionally terrifying and benevolent.
Well, we've described the phenomenon, and we've talked about research about other sorts of things.
And we've talked about some people who you said would be written off, perhaps, by mainstream academia who've written books about this.
How do you go about serious research on something like this?
Well, that's where the science comes in.
I mean, there's just so I've come across maybe, say, eight to 10 different avenues of inquiry.
Some of them are scientific, some of them aren't.
But again, just, you know, starting with the electromagnetic field, that seems to just be this incredible thing we don't understand.
And, you know, in terms of very, very serious scientific inquiry, it's very difficult because the scientists think this is all just ridiculous.
And the people who are promoting the idea that this is a real thing, they either don't understand the science or just think they're a bunch of chirks who think they know everything.
And there's really no one.
I'm trying to really occupy the space in the middle and just seeing, okay, maybe it's this, maybe it's not.
I'm not really, I don't have a dog in this fight.
I'm not really going to bat for one perspective or another.
And the more hard scientific the explanation gets, the further, the more questions there are underlying it.
So for instance, dark matter.
There's the idea that they could be beings living in a dark matter world.
They're comprised of dark matter.
But it doesn't take very long to have that conversation because we don't even know what dark matter is.
So I find it's just something that people say to sound smart, which is one of the reasons why sleep paralysis is an intriguing explanation because you can say it and it sounds sciencey.
And okay, I'm not crazy.
I just said sleep paralysis.
I use the word hypnagogic.
I'm good.
And what about the idea that perhaps, as I've often thought, that there are maybe multiple dimensions, there is stuff going on that we cannot see in another dimension from the one that we are currently in.
But occasionally, perhaps those other dimensions collide with ours.
Maybe that could explain this.
Yes, and that's something I've heard too.
But again, it's something people more say in passing.
So I've looked into this.
And one of the more intriguing ways of describing that is The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.
And the way he became invisible in that story is by moving to the fourth dimension, which you can just imagine it like a page on a book that's on top of another book, another page in the book.
And that by occupying that fourth dimension, light was able to pass through him, but he was able to look down on the other people.
So in that sense, that's very possible.
Then again, higher dimensions could be very small.
They're almost impossible to visualize.
But that actually, the H.G. Wells explanation is very intriguing because it suggests that they're just sort of right on top of us.
And if you think of how they might appear and disappear, the multi-dimensional argument is actually pretty useful there.
There's a point in the movie, and you might have come across this, where you can visualize higher dimensions by imagining being a two-dimensional person.
So if you draw a circle on a piece of paper and put a dot in the middle of that circle, to the dot, it looks like he lives inside the circle.
There's nothing inside the circle.
But if you lift the pen off the paper and move it to a different part of the paper, it would appear to that two-dimensional person that you just disappeared and reappeared.
So in a sense, the idea that shadow people are fourth-dimensional beings who can appear and disappear at will, it's easier to wrap your head around that if you think about it as it's just another degree of, you know, another dimension of space.
Instead of forwards, backwards, left and right, up and down, there's another one of those that we can't even conceive of because, you know, for the entire history of our evolution, there hasn't been a need to.
So here you are, a guy with a law degree who's done some research into this.
Presumably you want to take it further.
I know you've made a movie about it.
What can you do next?
Well, make another movie.
A lot of what I know, I've come across in researching a sequel.
So that's already written.
And it's just really, it's a question of whether or not the first film does well.
I've also written an 11-episode series, and I'm working on a series of novels.
I've thought of writing a more academic style type of book, but I feel like it would just require, I'd need like six different co-writers.
And it doesn't sound to me like the kind of thing that you can entirely analyze and scrutinize in a cold and scientific way.
This is something that is so deeply buried, and these stories are almost like folklore, but folklore in people's real lives.
How can you do that purely, coldly, scientifically?
I have no idea.
Maybe you do.
Well, I mean, that's what I've really come to the conclusion that you can't, which is why I'm not too upset that I haven't found the answer.
But I mean, if you go back, I think the answer, it could be related somewhat to, let's go back to sleep paralysis.
Let's go back to having a dream.
And it just gets to the idea of what are dreams?
And, well, that, we don't know what they're for.
But I mean, have you ever had a dream where there's a song playing that you don't know the lyrics to, or there's a car that doesn't exist?
Your mind has just invented this car or the dreams that I have all the time that feature three-dimensional full-color people that I've never met before.
Exactly.
And so that got me thinking that dreams could be a way of having a closer connection to the electromagnetic field.
And this would be through the pineal gland, which sort of connects us to the universe.
And maybe during dreams, the pineal gland is more active.
So Through skipping through the electromagnetic field and tapping into other people's collective memories, their thoughts, feelings, it could be maybe you're getting those images from someone else.
Maybe there is kind of like a blend of ideas up there that we can only access or can predominantly access through dreams.
There's a point I don't want to let escape.
And we've talked a lot about electromagnetic stuff and the fact that there's more of that out there.
And, you know, I have personal experience of that and everybody does these days.
Broadband Wi-Fi going on, all sorts of stuff, interference from lights, everything everywhere that we didn't have in the old days.
I suppose if this was purely something generated by that kind of thing, cases of shadow people and people being tormented by shadow people or whatever would be increasing.
Is that so?
Well, it's tough to measure, but it really is.
Well, in other words, how far back in history did they go?
I'm sorry for interrupting.
Well, it's the actual shadow people, it's tough to say, but I mean, if you think of like old hags or demons, which might be influenced by the same thing, I mean, they really go back for all of human history, that kind of thing.
Like I have a painting on my wall that's a duplicate of an Australian cave painting that shows alien or shadow people like creatures.
It was used in the movie, but the scene was cut out.
So that's my, it's what I get from it.
But in terms of the actual Hatman, that seems very, very recent.
Now that could be because it's happening more, or it could be because people have more opportunity to speak of it or write about it online without getting burned at the stake.
You know, like if this happened to me 150 years ago, there's no way I would have breathed a word about it to anybody because they'd think I'm crazy.
But the anonymity of the internet for all the negative things that flow from that really helps people express themselves and be honest and talk about the things that have happened.
And even if it is a purely mental phenomenon, the tricks that the brain can play on us, we don't fully understand and maybe we will never fully understand.
But look, you know, a lot of people have dreams.
I have dreams about members of my family who have passed.
I had one only a week or so ago where I'm in my grandmother's house and I couldn't recall to you consciously what that house looked like.
But I could tell you now after that dream because I went back there and all that information was stored.
I walked around that house and my mother, who's passed on, my dad who's passed on and my grandmother who's passed on were all there in that house.
But I didn't see them.
I knew they were there, but I walked through the place and they were not to be seen.
Now that was something that my brain was doing to me.
Something was playing out there.
So our minds have remarkable capabilities.
Yeah, and but then I started thinking about nightmares.
What is the evolutionary utility of nightmares?
So things like you're saying, being naked at the bus stop, that would inspire you to get dressed in the morning.
But that's more of an adult type of dream.
But if you think back to being a kid, I find so many kids, myself included, will have dreams about wolves.
Now, why do we have nightmares about wolves?
Well, it didn't make sense 500 years ago because running away from wolves is something that we would have had to do.
Now, I don't know.
This is just an idea of mine.
But if that's true, then if shadow people are on the same shelf as wolves, yeah, it's possible.
Maybe it's something from our past that we had to deal with that's buried deep in our consciousness.
DNA memory.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Which is, that's a, that's a, could do a whole podcast on that.
I mean, I couldn't, but someone could.
And that's, yeah, that's fascinating too.
And, and, but that, that at least it points to a reason.
You know, it's, is that the answer?
I don't know, but maybe someone's listening who knows more about this than I do that can take a baton and, you know, kind of like that.
Run with it.
Get in touch with me.
I think send me an email about that.
This movie that you produced then about this, which is why you got in touch with me.
You say that you get audiences when you show it at festivals and stuff, and some of those people have had these experiences.
Is that why they go and see your movie?
Presumably it is when they read that somebody's made a movie about this thing that I've been suffering.
Do you find that they turn up at your screenings?
Well, I think the people who come to screenings, I think it's really the story.
I'm not sure all of them know that it's a real thing, but just describing a newlywed photographer who's haunted by a man in a hat who follows her from her dreams and into reality, I think that's a good story, regardless of whether or not it's true.
And we don't want to give away the plot.
Does she actually come through this?
In terms of the end, well, you're going to have to watch the movie.
William, it's worth the try anyway.
But it is.
She doesn't die anyway.
That's the most important thing.
Well, I don't want to give anything away.
Okay, oh, well, all right.
Yes, mystery.
We got to maintain the mystery.
All right.
Talk to me about the movie, what it's called, where we can see it, that kind of stuff, and what you're going to do with it now.
Well, the movie's called The Shadow Man.
It was originally called The Man in the Shadows, but our distributor decided The Shadow Man was preferable.
So it should be coming out in Canada on iTunes and the rest of the platforms.
And everywhere else in the world, we're looking at a June release.
And we're going to try for limited theatrical in the States and TV all over the world.
But I feel like most people who are interested in seeing it will probably do so through iTunes or some other online site like that.
How much have you spent on this?
In terms of financially, the film itself, our budget was $124,000, although a lot of that was deferred.
So we ended up spending a lot less.
I was extremely lucky to find a team who just works incredibly well together and quickly and effectively and efficiently.
So we shot the movie in 12 and a half days, but it looks fantastic.
I love the trailer.
Is the trailer on your website?
Yes, it's themanintheshadows.ca.
You can view the trailer there.
There's a synopsis.
There's biographies of the cast and crew.
So yeah, again, themanintheshadows.ca.
Well, I wish you luck with it.
And I'm really pleased, Adam, that we spoke about this.
There will be people, of course, who will say, this guy wants to go out there and get a life.
What's he doing researching this stuff?
It's a load of nonsense.
I'm sure you've heard that.
That won't have been the first time you've heard that.
How do you respond to that sort of stuff?
Well, I mean, frankly, I found the law to be a lot of nonsense.
What did some great British man say once?
I can't even, you see, I'm so uneducated who said the law is an ass.
That's a fact.
Well, it really is.
It's almost just like a game and there's little pieces and it's got its own little language.
So in other words, what you're doing, you would say to them, and I don't want to, I'm stealing your words now, aren't I?
But what you would say is that this is just as valid as all the other stuff that you've done in your life.
Or equally as invalid.
But yes, I would say so.
I just, and part of the reason I'm so interested is that there just seems to be such a lack of people who are going through the same research process as I am.
I'm going to get emails from people, and I'm sorry to hurry because we're coming to the end of this now, but I will definitely get emails from people who've had this experience and would like to connect with you.
If I get those emails, maybe they should be emailing you as well.
How do they contact you?
Well, they can send me an email directly to my email account.
It's at A-D-A-M W-L-U at hotmail.com.
You happy for that to be given out?
Sure, I don't care.
All right.
Just actually, well, it's done now.
All right.
And if anybody emails me, I will pass those emails on to you.
And I wish you luck with your research.
And, you know, hopefully I'm going to get a torrent of people saying I've had this experience and then we can do a bit more research.
What about that?
That sounds wonderful.
Thank you for having me on.
Thanks very much, Adam.
Thanks for getting in touch and good luck with the release of the movie.
Okay.
Thanks, Alec.
Well, tell me what you thought of Adam Tomlinson.
You can get in touch with me by going to the website, which will continue theunexplained.tv, the website designed, created, owned and maintained, as it will continue to be by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot.
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