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June 17, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:00
Edition 257 - Peter Robbins

Ahead of his Presentation at the Scottish Paranormal Conference UFO researcher Peter Robbinsreturns...

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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.
Thank you very much for keeping the faith with the online version of this show.
10 years now we've been running this.
In fact, we're into our 11th year now and I couldn't have done any of it without your support.
Thank you for the continuing messages, for telling your friends about this.
And if you're a brand new listener to The Unexplained, thank you very much for finding me.
Please stay with us, as they say on radio.
If you want to make contact with me, by the way, make a guest suggestion or tell me what you think about the show, then go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
There you can see our archive of shows, 300 hours or so of material now.
You can also leave a donation for the show if you can.
And send me a message by email by following the link for messages.
All at theunexplained.tv, the website designed, honed and maintained by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot.
Before the guest this time, world-famous UFO researcher Peter Robbins, who's coming to Scotland in about 10 days from now for the Scottish Paranormal Conference.
He'll be there with Larry Warren.
More about that in just a moment.
Before all of that, your communications, some shout-outs.
If I can't get to you this time, then I promise you I have seen your email and I will try to reply in person to as many as I can.
But here goes with the shout-outs for this edition.
Chris Smee in Melbourne.
Chris, some great guest suggestions.
And overall, a great email.
Thank you very much.
Donna, I'm really sorry your question arrived too late for my recording with David Icke, but I promise I'll ask it next time if you remind me.
From Pete.
Pete says, I've been a follower of the podcast for about four years now, and I enjoy listening to it while I'm driving around.
Just want to say for all the people who think that David Icke is a nut, well, I think this man knows what he's talking about, and I'm a pretty logical 42-year-old, says Pete.
Thank you, Pete.
Sue in York, positive feedback on the radio show.
Says the show has a lovely magazine feel about it.
Thank you, Sue.
Ian says, loving the show on Sunday nights on the radio.
Can we get more calls from listeners?
We're working on it.
Brenda Harry, thank you for the couple of emails and the information you've sent, Brenda.
Thank you for that.
Stephen Brammer, I mentioned your email on the radio show last week, Stephen.
I also mentioned Derek in Hackney, Hackney, rather in London.
Nice to hear from you, Derek.
Adrian says, thank you so much for the show.
All the effort you put in does not go unappreciated.
I'm listening to you in London, mostly during my commute between Westbourne Park and Dalston Junction, but also while I crack on at work as well as in the bath before I go to sleep.
Your style and form have been an inspiration to me, so once again, thank you.
That's really kind, Adrian.
Thank you for that.
Saga, rather, Bergholtz in Sweden.
Saga, nice to hear from you.
Just wanted to thank you for an awesome show that always makes the walks with my dog that much more exciting.
Thank you, Saga, in, I think, is it Rotne in Sweden?
Thank you.
Jeff in Huntington, good to hear from you.
Neil in Nottingham, UK says, hi, Howard.
Absolutely loving the show.
Been listening for a couple of months to the online show and think it's the best thing out there right now.
Very insightful.
Thank you, Neil.
Usher Lewis in Australia says, I started listening to you last year and been hooked ever since.
Ghost stories are my favorite.
I myself am a medium.
I should like to hear from you about that.
Mark in Dundee, Scotland, I just started listening to the show.
Excellent quality.
Thoroughly enjoying the show.
I'm an amateur paranormal investigator.
Tell me more about that, Mark.
Erin in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, says, I have quite a mundane job working in a warehouse and stumbling across your podcast has saved me from many boring hours.
I'm particularly a fan of any episodes that have to do with the afterlife.
Thank you, Erin, and I wish you a good day.
Nikhil Pravin, the first listener that we've had in Fiji.
Nikhil, thank you for getting in touch.
Another new listener, Skylar in Seattle.
Skylar says, thanks for the amazing show.
I use it to get through my day in a very loud chocolate factory where I work.
Thank you, Skylar.
Got any samples?
Sorry, but that's really cheeky of me.
Only joking.
Stephen Thornett thanks me for asking his question to David Icke.
Well, that's what I'm here for, Stephen, and says, may your show go from strength to strength?
I hope so.
Finally, Chris Pagani writes about the investigator Stephen Merrill, says he was pretty excited about this show because I like the idea of scientific investigations of the paranormal, but his credulous acceptance of demonic possession was off-putting, says Chris.
Well, you know, different strokes for different folks, but that's the whole point of this show, for you to hear people's experiences and opinions and then form an opinion of your own based on that.
And as long as we're making that happen, I think maybe along the way we're winning.
But thank you very much.
If you want to get in touch with me, go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can send me an email from there.
Let's get to Peter Robbins.
Now, Peter is on a mobile internet connection.
It's a pretty good one.
It's in Ohio.
He's doing a conference there this week, just before he flies to Scotland.
So let's talk about ufology and Rendlesham Forest and a lot of other things with Peter Robbins.
What a delight to have you back on.
A pleasure, Howard.
And I return to you this time from the great state of Ohio rather than New York.
Okay.
I mean, I know you do a lot of conferences, a lot of traveling, and we'll talk about one of those events because it's right here in Her Majesty's United Kingdom.
But what takes you to Ohio this week?
A conference for Ohio MUFON.
As many of your listeners know, that is the abbreviation for the Mutual UFO Network, kind of the sister organization of Bufora, to whatever degree it's still around and kicking.
And they have chapters in all the states, and this is an Ohio conference.
I have been asked to speak on Rendlesham.
I have two wonderful colleagues who are the other headliners.
Jennifer Stein, who is the executive producer of a project that's taken a lot of my passion and energy the past couple of years, the feature documentary, Travis, the True Story of Travis Walton.
And we will be screening that wonderful documentary there.
And another speaker who, Bill Konkaletsky, is the director of nearby Michigan MUFON.
And Bill is what we would call a very out abductee.
He has had these experiences since his childhood, and he has written about them, lectured on them.
He is a university administrator.
He is happily married.
People in his life know that he has had these experiences.
It doesn't come.
It's a pleasure to hear somebody like that speak without any reservation.
So that's the basic reason I'm here.
Is the fact that he's able to speak in this way and more people are, do you think that's a sign of our times?
Well, let me put it this way.
For me, the informal demographic that I observe here and abroad at UFO conferences, gatherings and lectures, which is very healthy, is every year more and more people seem to care less and less what other people think about what they think about the subject.
I'm seeing it very interestingly in people coming into retirement age who really just don't care that much anymore about what their neighbors might feel about their interest in the subject.
And Bill is part of a new generation of people that I would have been working with 25 years ago.
This was the core of their secret life and the thought.
And for many of them, it still is and who can blame them.
That if, you know, their family or friends or work associates knew that they believed, let's put it that way, that they had been taken and returned and that it happened to them on and off throughout their life.
They would be ostracized, ridiculed, avoided because they're kind of uncomfortable to be around.
And people like my friend Bill, I think they're real pioneers.
And I what I observe with him is he's got a base in a very happy marriage.
He's a wonderful dad.
The administrators at the educational institution he works at, this is not an issue for them.
He is absolutely, you know, first rate as his job.
He is very well liked by his coworkers.
He is, for me, again, somebody we can point to and say you can take this route in life, but only under certain circumstances.
There are people who would be very reckless to do it.
And unfortunately, that UFO ridicule factor still rules, whether it's in politics or the world of science or the professions.
It is still something that is used to poke fun at people.
And it is.
But you know what?
I think, Peter, we're a much more accepting society than we used to be.
We're less accepting of what politicians tell us and try to feed us one way or another and more accepting of what might be alternative to the mainstream.
The story of Bill, I didn't think we'd get into the meat of the conversation so quickly.
Glad we did.
Just tell me two things quickly.
And I don't want you to spoil any presentations that you might be giving over there or over here.
But having said that, how did he get in touch with you?
And what's his story?
I had first been in contact with Bill Konkoletsky probably four or five years ago when he was still he has been the director of Michigan MUFON for quite a number of years.
And he had contacted me.
They have a very active chapter there.
And for me, one of the most moving parts of doing what I do is every once in a while, somebody reaches out and says, we really appreciate your work.
We follow it.
And we'd like you to come here and, you know, speak for us.
And so they brought me in for a weekend and I gave several talks for, I could guess, about 50 people.
One on Rendlesham as kind of a best case from a scientific analysis point of view, as well as all of the other extraordinary evidence that we have on it.
And the other, an informal workshop for UFO investigators.
Now, MUFON and I believe before I used to have UFO investigator training.
And it's quite serious and you have to qualify.
And, you know, you've got a big manual to work from and there are ethics clauses and all that stuff.
I've never done that, but I've simply investigated the phenomena for 40 years now and learned quite a bit just in the course of, you know, common sense and doing my work.
But that's how we met and became friends.
We've stayed in touch.
And the last conference that we spoke at together was in March.
Before that was last summer.
So he is now fairly well regarded within the UFO community here as a valued speaker.
And again, for me, growing up in a family where one of my sisters had gone through this as a kid, the healthiest thing any of us can do if we have the support system in place with something that has upset us or changed our lives or, you know, inspired us or whatever, is to be able to be honest with it, at least with the people closest to us.
And it's easier said than done.
This whole ridicule factor, Howard, got me so intrigued on a certain level that for years I've been coming and going from a very simple question, which is how is it that a very simple observation from one person reported to another person can make them into an
outsider, a joke, ostracized.
Let me give you the best example.
You and I run into each other on the street in your neighborhood in London.
and neighbors and i say howard the damnedest thing happened to me yesterday i looked up in the sky i was Playing with the kids or walking the dog, and I saw this thing or things.
They were not airplanes or helicopters or any kind of conventional things.
They seemed to be under intelligent control.
One was as big as a star and it zigzagged and then took off.
One was as big as three aircraft carriers.
A big black triangle was there.
A circular one came down, landed in the neighborhood's yard, burned a hole in the grass and took off.
I wonder what that was.
Now, in a sane, rational world, you would say or think, gee, that is interesting.
I wonder what it was, too.
How did it happen that we in the Western world got a simple reality like I've just described wired up with ridicule, condescension, sarcasm, ostracism, and in some cases, a compromising of your professional position?
I can suggest, Peter, and sorry to interrupt, I can suggest two potential reasons for that.
And, you know, look, my guess is as good as anybody else's, I guess.
One reason might be that there is so much fakery around in this whole UFO thing.
So many fake videos appear these days, especially, because it's so easy to do.
The other one is that it makes people...
And if that makes them feel uneasy, the best way to deal with it is just to deny it.
Yes.
Now, that would make perfect sense to me in contemporary life.
However, what I was starting to focus in on, and this began for me actually in the late 80s.
I've come and gone from the subject, but in the last two years, I've really dived into it and developed several papers, given several talks on it.
I'm still doing the research.
But what I'm talking about is in the summer of 1947, arguably the birth of the modern age of UFOs, so to say, there were not a lot of hoaxes.
This thing kind of hit the ground running with the so-called Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24th, 1947 in Washington state, and then a week and a half later, some thing or things coming down in the plains outside of a town called Roswell, New Mexico.
How is it that the American media immediately started reporting this in the national papers and on radio as a joke, as a war jitters, as mass hallucinations,
as, and I'm not kidding you here, dust on the eyeball, pressure within the eyeball, lights refracting off of low clouds, anything but the possibility that we were not alone and that this was high technology from parts unknown.
Now, this is interesting, though, isn't it?
If you look at the Roswell case in particular, the Roswell case was taken by the people on the ground at the beginning very seriously.
It was only subsequently that it was dismissed.
And I've looked into a few cases from those very, very early days of ufology, if you may call it that.
And that seems to be a common thread, don't you think?
I do.
And with Roswell, we have something very special in place.
I, like a lot of people in the work, obviously I'm familiar with it.
I've studied it.
I've read some of the books.
I know some of the specialty researchers.
But some years back, I had the honor of working as a consultant for the city of Roswell for several years.
And I'm very proud to say that at the time, I was the city of Roswell's liaison with then New Mexico Governor Richardson on any UFO-related matter, which was fascinating work.
I'll tell you that.
But what happened very quickly in Roswell, for your listeners who are not familiar, is a ranch foreman named Mac Brazel reports to the local base, which is the Roswell Army Airfield.
And it's important to remember here that at the time, it was the only nuclear strike force in the world.
The 509th Bomber Wing was stationed in Roswell.
And that was the wing that essentially was the unit that had bombed Hiroshima and Nakasaki.
In fact, many Americans, many people don't know that the mission to bomb Hiroshima began in Roswell, New Mexico.
The Enola Gay, the B-29 that actually did the bombing, left from Roswell, New Mexico.
So it has kind of a dual, interesting history there.
But very quickly, Brazzle reports that there's a huge debris field on the farm on the ranch that he is managing.
And out go two American Army Air Corps officers.
The Air Force was still about six weeks from starting its creation.
And one of them, Jesse Marcel Sr., the base intelligence officer, he collected part of this debris.
He brought it back to the base.
The commanding officer, a very tough, I think terrific American general named Butch Blanchard, basically just said, we've got it.
This is not from this world.
Make the announcement.
And Marcel makes the announcement.
Now, looking back historically, you know, you'd almost gasp because General Blanchard didn't clear this with the Pentagon first.
He just let it out.
And of course, he paid, well, they all paid something of a price for it in the end, didn't they?
Well, Blanchard, very interestingly, his career went on almost unblemished.
I mean, he was a great officer, and they just left him alone for some reason.
Marcel, on the other hand, who had posed that day with fragments of, you know, these pieces from this crashed craft, was forced the next day under orders to pose with part of a mogul weather balloon.
Possibly the most humiliating moment of this decent man's life.
He became a chronic depressive.
He did not have a happy life.
I'm very proud to have numbered Jesse Marcel Jr., who we lost about two years ago as a dear friend of mine, and now Jesse III and one of his daughters I'm just walking for a moment.
It's fine.
We have to say that you're at the venue of a conference at the moment.
We're talking on a wireless connection.
And for me, you know, it's still a bit of a miracle that we can do this, much better than a telephone.
Well, that's true.
To cut to the chase, though, it's only because a brilliant, now senior, internationally respected researcher named Stanton T. Friedman heard that there was this officer in his late 80s alive and in retirement in the state of Alabama, and this would have been about 1979 or so, that he found him, got his statement, and that's when we began to learn about Roswell.
But in the American media, first there was this flurry of reports on, I guess, about the 3rd of July that Flying Saucer has crashed, Army has pieces.
And then 24 hours later, oh, it was just a weather balloon, and why are we all so hyped up about this?
Ultimately, this has become a subject for me that, you know, for a lot of people, oh, it's so in the past.
Why are you even concerned with it?
And I just remember George Santiana's amazing quote of those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it.
We need to understand the early history of this UFO phenomena and how it got wired up with this ridicule.
Well, one of the problems, though, and again, I'm sorry I'm interrupting from 3,000 miles away.
One of the problems is that we keep seeing videos online and people say, what on earth is this?
And then we get the usual piling in of people, other people from the other side saying, well, it's all perfectly explainable or this video has been faked.
Now, the latest one that I saw, you may have seen this, was a diamond-shaped object over Melbourne, Australia.
There was a big flurry about this about a week, maybe two ago.
It was in a lot of the newspapers who carried the video on their websites.
The Daily Mirror here certainly did.
Diamond-shaped thing.
I had no idea.
It looked like a large potato chip packet floating in the air.
And of course, the sceptics came out and said, all perfectly explicable, but there it is hanging in the air.
Problem is, isn't it?
We seem to be stuck in this dialogue of people posting videos or making claims and nothing much happening.
That is why incidents like Rendlesham Forest, R.A.F.
Bentwaters, which we've talked about on this show and on my radio show so many times, that is why they are so key to all of this.
If it is to move forward, as you rightly said, Peter, we have to understand what happened in the past.
Yes.
And you bring up, I think, a seminal problem right now, which is in what we'll laughingly call the old days, where we had analog film print cameras as opposed to digital technology, which is wonderful and we all love it.
However, if you were going to fabricate an image on, say, Super 8 movie film or a 35 millimeter or the other kinds of camera film we used to use, even with a 10 power jeweler's loop, any sane person can usually pick up the edge of cut paper glued down.
It was not a big deal.
Or to look at a polarized photograph, a still from a Super 8 movie, and you could see the string attaching the toy UFO to a stick or whatever, moving it around.
We now are in very different territory.
To digress for one moment, I don't know about you, but when I first saw, and this has got to be over 20 years ago, I guess, the movie Jurassic Park, I saw it at the Ziegfield Theater in New York City, our premier movie theater, widest screen in New York, greatest sound system.
And there comes that moment when the great Australian actor Sam Neal and the American actress Laura Dern are nursing this dinosaur, and the John Williams music score swells up and the camera goes up and you see the Brontosaurus.
Now, that's an amazing filmatic moment.
And I swear to you, for maybe a little less than a second, I was actually in the place where I thought to myself, oh my God, the secret of this film is not that CGI has developed to such a point that they can put these images out for us.
They found the island with the dinosaurs on it.
Now, it only lasted a moment, and I say it very seriously.
It was followed by a very wistful feeling of I can never trust another visual image or another filmatic image in my life.
We have got the state of the art now, and anybody with, you know, an intention to deceive, who is fairly facile with Photoshop or any of the other technologies now that you can muck about with moving or still images, can put these things out.
And there seems to be this part of human nature that loves to have the rest of us off on something, haha, I fooled somebody.
Which leaves us all, the rest of us, in a terrible position, doesn't it?
Because, you know, a lot of us would rather like to believe and rather have a sense that there is something out there.
But the manifold fakes out there are not helping the whole situation.
Now, Roswell, and Roswell, rather, Rendlesham Forest is something that we need to understand, and more information now seems to be coming out.
Again, though, the problem with Rendlesham Forest is, and I know that you're going to be speaking with my old Liverpool friend, Larry Warren, at a conference in Scotland coming up at the end of this month, which we will be talking about, the Scottish Paranormal Conference.
The problem is that some people in the field tend to go, as we say over here, using a football, a soccer analogy.
They tend to go for the man, not the ball.
So what's happening at the moment is, you know, I've talked to a couple of people recently on my show who've said that they have doubts about the credibility of what Larry Warren says.
Now, I've met him, I've looked into his eyes, and, you know, I think there's a strong probability that he was telling me the truth on the basis of his body language, and that's all I've got.
But there are many people who say we even doubt that he was even there.
Now, I need to be speaking with Larry, and if you can ask him to get in touch with me, I'd love to talk with him.
I really enjoyed it last time.
That's the problem that we've got.
Well, the thing is, for anybody that takes the time to study the information in Left at Eastgate or my newer book called Halt in Woodbridge, it goes into great detail on the scientific and supporting witness testimony backing up Larry's allegations that go back now to 1980.
And the fact is that anybody that knows Larry knows he is a warm, effusive, great guy who does not suffer fools at all.
And he has been so attacked for so many years that he has very little patience with people who have little or no knowledge of what he's actually been through, what has been published to back it up.
He is not keen to, he's not in this to make friends.
And his manner can be brusque at times and rightly so.
But once again, we live in a time where if you can't give it to me in a 90-second soundbite, or I can't read it in a paragraph compression, I'm a busy person.
I don't have the time to read your book or to study these documents for myself.
Well, if you don't, my feeling is everybody is entitled to an opinion.
However, I'm one of those people who feel if I don't have enough information to have an informed opinion, I will not, I will simply reserve having an opinion.
And that is precisely where I come to the folks who, you know, they don't care whether they know what's going on.
They will tell you what they think, believe, and feel, and damn you if you don't accept their point of view.
And that's precisely where I came to the conversation with Larry when I spoke with him in a radio studio in Liverpool, where, as you know, he lives these days.
He is entitled to his view of events.
They sounded very compelling to me.
Are they absolutely the truth of what happened?
I don't know.
I hear what the man says.
He sounded very credible to me, and his tales of being seriously warned off talking about this sounded very chilling to me.
Another aspect of it, especially for folks who are beginning to entry-level in terms of studying the Rendlesham Forest incident, is people say to me, well, you know, I saw this documentary and this other guy said he saw this, and it's nothing like what Larry said he saw.
The problem there is that we are dealing, the Rendlesham Forest incident is a series of separate events that occurred within approximity of several miles of each other maximum over three separate nights involving different personnel.
So for starters, you've got to do your homework and get the timeline, understand who the individuals were on each night, which would cut back on a lot of nonsensical criticism based on a lack of knowledge.
Okay, let's just say for people who are picking up on this show for the first time, and we are picking up listeners all the time, most of my listeners, 99.9% recurring, will probably know of Rendlesham Forest.
This is 1980.
It's near Christmas.
It's wintertime here in the UK.
This is an American Air Force base where it is now claimed there were stored nuclear missiles, although that's never been confirmed by anybody.
And over those three nights, as you say, there was terrifying alleged alien contact of a nature that we've never seen in this country before or since.
Yes.
First, at the time of these events, it was a very tense moment in the Cold War.
The Soviets had great concerns over the pro-democracy movement going on in the Gdansk shipyards headed by a then unknown electrician named Lek Volencea.
And they had massed troops on the Polish border.
It could have gotten very ugly very quick.
Also, the other backstory that has been verified by a number of people, including the late Lord Peter Hill Norton, Admiral of the Fleet, Chief of the equivalent of our Joint Chiefs of Staff of the MOD, Chief of Staff, and then a parliamentarian.
But I've spoken to several guys who, not Larry, who also was trained to work around nuclear ordinance, who also worked around the ordinance on Rendlesham.
By virtue of our treaty with the UK, and I mean America's treaty with the UK, which may still be the same as it was then, I don't know, the Americans were not allowed, understandably, to have nuclear weapons in the UK.
And yet we had them on Bentwaters.
All of this is a backdrop to the UFO events which transpired.
And again, a number of events happened over those three nights involving landings, if you will, observations, measurements of where these anomalous craft interacted with organic material.
In fact, for me, some of the greatest and most dramatic scientific evidence to back up the reality of the general story and certainly my co-author Larry Warren's account is site specific to the spot in the farmer's field called Capel Green in the Rendlesham Forest where he and the men he was with were ordered to surround a phenomenon which ultimately manifested as a structured
craft.
And the findings from a completely independent and highly respected laboratory that does such things in the States here was the results were almost science fiction in terms of what had happened to the soil and the plant material in that area.
And these were tests that were conducted over 10 years after the fact.
And I know because I collected those samples, also the laboratory analyst, very respected Guy in the business who did the original work still stands absolutely by his findings.
And I published an update from him last year in the new book, Halt in Woodbridge.
So we really do have not just the best known UFO incident in the history of the United Kingdom, but also the best documented one.
And what drove me all the years of working with Larry to complete our book and then to move beyond it was not so much my fascination with visitations from beings from elsewhere or being enamored with this technology that they seemed to possess.
It was absolute anger at the way that the men who were eyewitnesses were treated immediately after the fact and ongoing from there.
The fear of God was put into these guys.
They were put through some terrible things to shut them up.
And it still makes me angry to think about what they went through.
Okay, now you're going to be talking at the Scottish Paranormal Conference with Larry at the end of June.
What is it, 25th, 26th of June?
Yeah, actually a week from this Saturday.
We will be in Glasgow and very much looking forward to this very special conference and being back together on the same stage for the first time in quite some time.
I don't want to spoil your presentation about Rendlesham with Larry.
And as I say, please give Larry my regards.
I'd love to talk to him again soon.
I will.
Give me a taster of what new you will be telling us because we've heard a lot about this.
A lot of people, and there's a buzz around Rendlesham Forest at the moment.
There are a lot of people independently doing research.
I think it's Gary Heseltine, who I recently talked with, was very, very excited.
You'll know Gary.
I've known Gary for years.
Gary was saying that there is now testimony from the, I think, one or two air traffic controllers, radar operators there.
So there's a lot of stuff, it seems, coming out.
There's a confluence of material now.
So give me an idea what is new.
Yeah.
Well, one of the things that we're going to be doing is a comprehensive review of what we consider, I consider certainly the best scientific and, how can I say, human evidence put together, the testimony of witnesses superimposed on the findings of the analysis.
The fact that Gary has taken a special interest in one very important aspect of this case, which is the letter that Larry Warren wrote to his mother only a week after the events, which is certainly the very first, how can I say, the very first account that we have from a man involved to anyone in the civilian world.
This is absolutely historic.
And of course, that letter can be dated, paper, ink, you know, postal stamp, that kind of thing.
It will also give Larry Warren and I a chance to review on stage with this audience some of the extraordinary things that have happened over the years for us, to us, based on our involvement with this long, long study.
And it runs the gamut from unnerving to truly funny to absolutely fascinating.
A lot of it has never really been presented before on a stage, but we've got such a point of reflection here.
After all, even though the book was republished in an expanded version on the 25th anniversary of the events in 2005, next year marks 20 years since Left at Eastgate was first published in the United Kingdom.
And for me, more surreal than aliens or flying saucers or paranormal stuff was for a good part of the summer of 97, Left at Eastgate remained about two points ahead on the top 10 national book list of John LeCarré's new novel, The Tailor of Panama.
And that for me is still one of the most surreal and proud moments of my life.
I'm a huge Jean-Le Carré fan and thought that our book was selling better than his for several weeks in the UK.
Nobody can ever take away from me.
Good, right, and that is a great accolade.
It's a great thing to bask in.
But I think we do need to know.
A lot of people listening to this will be saying, okay, there's a letter.
And that's, if it can be dated and verified, that adds to the mix.
But I wonder if there are, and maybe you know, maybe you've been told, if there are official documents that have yet to come out, or maybe they have come out and bits of them have been redacted, that might actually take us much further down this road.
There are a whole classification of documents now that we have within the research community.
I'm embarrassed to say that not one of them has come from my government.
They have all been released by the Ministry of Defense over the years.
I would say I would have to classify them as mid to lower level documents having to do with Rendlesham.
No smoking gun, but some interesting smoke.
We do understand, though, that over the next months, there will be another release from the Ministry of Rendlesham-related documents.
And what they will tell us, we can only guess right now.
I'm aware of at least two witnesses who were involved with Larry on the third night who to come forward, you know, I think the world thinks in some senses that there's glory attached to this or it's very romantic or terribly exciting when really, more often than not, you're setting yourself up for ridicule.
And if they need an example of why they should not or why they should continue to not come forward, all they need to do is look at the heat that Larry has taken over the years and the attacks on him that simply Have not stopped.
It's just, for me, sometimes it is extremely frustrating because nothing that you say, nothing that you can put out there will convince somebody who doesn't want to look at the full sweep of the document.
Well, that's true.
You just have to be willing to accept that people have a point of view.
You may not, once you've heard it, but you've got to hear it first, agree with it.
But everybody is entitled to their viewpoint and their spin, which we all have on events.
Can I ask you one quick thing, Peter?
Can you talk a little more closely into your device?
I think you're drifting off slightly.
Okay, is this any better?
Much better.
Okay.
We've got to keep you close and personal with that device that you're using.
But it's amazing that we can have this conversation between me here in London and you in Ohio.
Now, I don't want to lose, before we get back on track here, I don't want to lose the story of the man called Bill, because you told me about how you came into contact with him.
Just give me a taste of what Bill says happened to him.
Well, first thing I'll do is I'll tell you that most people that become public with their UFO-related experiences end up taking a side.
My experiences with these other intelligences, aliens, for lack of a better word, was extremely positive.
I've grown from it.
I see the world in a more positive way.
I'm a better person.
Or it was very frightening.
I was anxious.
I don't trust them.
I'm not sure if they're good or mean humanity well.
The thing that makes Bill's, and again, that's Bill Konkalewski, my dear friend in Michigan, who I'll be speaking with this weekend here in Ohio, that separates his accounts, and they also happened to his brother, and I'm not speaking out of school here.
Some of them, going back to early, were unnerving, anxiety-provoking, and frightening.
Others of them were very moving, very friendly, and, you know, the subject of lessons of a more positive nature.
Classically, you know, he as well as other people that have been through these experiences are literally taken, often from their beds at night and floated through a wall, a window, whatever.
And I know how this sounds, and frankly, I could care less how it sounds.
In the years that I was the assistant of a man named Bud Hopkins, who many of your listeners know was essentially the pioneer of scientific study of UFO abduction phenomena, we worked with hundreds of individuals and some of the evidence that they brought with them in terms of overnight changes to their physical body,
to other people who had witnessed it, to a physician who had worked with them and documented truly anomalous health aspects, to a family history of this, that they are taken.
You are brought either on board some advanced craft or taken to some area.
You are told certain things, and some of them are very similar from case to case, and then returned to your bed.
And is that Bill's story?
That is certainly one of the things that's happened to him, no question about it.
And I think he has a book out.
I think it's called Growing Up in Two Worlds.
But what I'm going to do, Howard, is in the next day or two, I'll follow up, and I will not only get you information on his books and him, because he's a fascinating guy, and again, very, very comfortable in being public about these experiences.
I will also send you some of the research that I've been doing on what I call the origins of the ridicule factor and what it goes back to and what seems to have set it in motion in the summer of 1947.
Well, I think that would be very useful and that would take us forward.
When you're on the circuit, giving presentations to people, and you've been doing this for years, Peter, as we both know, has the nature of questioning that you get, has it changed?
Are people more informed?
Are they more skeptical?
How are they these days?
Boy, that is a great question.
Overall, they are better informed, and they come to these conferences or a talk that you might give at a library or a national conference, what have you, armed with knowledge.
And I am now more and more impressed with the quality and the specificity of the questions that people ask me about the subject in general, my take on it, changes that I've observed or in specific work that I've published, Rendlesham and otherwise.
Again, I'm seeing it more and more from two distinct groups, 20 and 30-somethings, who grow up with an absolute attitude of, of course, this is real.
Of course, the government covers it up.
And I'm busy doing other things trying to get my life together, but I accept this as a matter of fact.
And then that group that are coming in toward or are retired now, who have worked hard, who have thought about this in many cases, who may have had earlier, more dismissive attitudes.
But one of the people in that couple will get interested and the other one will often follow.
And I've seen it repeatedly now as I travel around the country.
I've also seen it to a degree outside of the States.
Maybe part of it is just, you know, you're living your life.
You're closer to the end than the beginning, as my 96-year-old father likes to say, which I think is cutting himself a fair amount of slack, plus his heart.
And what the hell?
You know, what is going on with this thing?
Is there something to it?
And if there is, why aren't we being told about it?
Now, interesting also, and bringing it back to Rendlesham, this factor of people getting older, I wonder if a lot of people now are going to be Reaching retirement age and getting to late stage life.
If you are hearing from people, perhaps in connection with Rendlesham or other phenomena, who have sat on stories for years and now they get to 65, 70, 75, 80, and they think, what the hell?
You know, I'm not going to be here for a whole lot longer.
Time to get it out there.
Yeah.
Well, I think that you're not only very observant on that, Howard, but it is human nature.
And where we have seen it most in UFO studies in America has been with two generations in New Mexico going back 15 or 20 years, men who were coming into their 80s and even older,
who were involved, if peripherally, or had an awareness of what had actually transpired in the Roswell incident, started to come forward in the form of deathbed testimonies, codicils on wills, sharing things with their family that they never had.
Why?
Because they were old-fashioned patriots.
They had pledged themselves to the national security of the United States, very much akin to the Official Secrets Act.
They had sworn on that.
And yet, in one case, I remember meeting a gentleman some years ago in Roswell, who I think was 88 at the time, who was involved in flying debris that had been picked up at the field from Roswell to 8th Army headquarters in the neighboring state of Texas.
And the reason he came forward was he was watching television one day, the history channel, and there was a documentary on this Roswell incident.
And he saw one of his old friends on there and thought, my gosh, you know, I'd like my son to know that this happened and I was involved in it.
With Rendlesham, you know, again, we're not seeing deathbed testimonies, I hope, quite yet, but we are seeing a number of individuals who have lived their business lives and are now, you know, playing with their grandkids or working at, you know, an avocation that they always wanted to do.
One very important example is a man named Adrian Vostinza.
Adrian's name comes up quite a lot in the study of this case.
He was involved in two separate incidents on the third night.
One that people may be familiar with because it's been featured on so many documentaries over the years, that being the deputy base commander's own UFO incident out in the woods with a team of men, and a UFO passes overhead and shines a beam of light right to within a few feet of them.
And then sometime later that evening, involved with Larry Warren in the event in Capel Green, the farmer's field.
Now, Adrian, over the decades, has made a few very kind of controlled statements.
He has never fully come forward.
And yet last August, he finally did and did what I consider an historic radio interview on what had happened with him and why he had been quiet all these years.
And to cut to the chase, the reason he had not come forward was early on, his life and the lives of his family were threatened.
And he decided not to push it.
And I guess you get to a stage in your life where you think, well, you know, I'm coming to the back end of it.
The threats don't mean quite as much.
Well, with Adrian, he had worked, I guess, generally speaking, in border patrol work in Texas.
Can I just ask you to be a little closer with that microphone again?
Okay, Peter.
Just come as close as you can to it.
Thank you.
I'm actually kissing it right now.
That's perfect.
Okay.
That's what we call intimacy in radio.
Intimacy with the microphone.
Okay.
So you were telling me about Adrian Bastinza.
Yeah.
Essentially, that he had retired from his career.
He was working with youngsters now.
And I don't know whether his parents are still with us, but whatever that mechanism is inside of any given person where they say, enough is enough.
I want to go on record with this, at least to some degree.
And I'm sure there was some holding back of specifics, but the fact that he did this show and John Burroughs hosted the show, a first night witness.
Larry Warren was also a guest on the show.
The well-known writer, paranormal journalist, Linda Moulton Howe was also on the show.
And a lot of us listened almost transfixed because we had all wanted to hear his account.
I had tried to reach out to him many years ago, and he made it clear in so many words.
He wished me well, but was not interested in speaking with me.
And that should be enough for anybody as an investigative writer to back off and, you know, get going on more productive lines of investigation.
Right.
You mentioned my good friend Linda Moulton how she was on my radio show about a week ago with some amazing stuff about the Antarctic.
I'm sure you've seen this material about the hole in the Antarctic claimed and the craft that have been said to appear from it, and then a bunch of scientists out there who disappeared for a couple of weeks and came back terrified.
I mean, that area, that whole area of things that may be here, not out there, is also fascinating, isn't it?
I know it sounds kind of, well, just loopy to some people.
You know, a hole at the pole.
Please give me a break.
When I became involved in studying esoteric stuff 40 odd years ago, one of the first things that I stumbled on was there's a lot of nomenclature and a small group of people who believe that the earth is hollow and there's an entire civilization inside there.
And one of the great secrets of the world is to not make that public because it's just too weird.
But what stuck in my mind was in about 1948, Admiral Byrd, the famous Admiral Byrd, who had been, I think, the first man to, was it the South Pole, he led a military expedition of something like 800 American soldiers.
We're talking about 1948 here.
There was no war on, obvious concern with the Soviets.
If one believes some of the mythology, lore, and legend that the Nazis established a base in Antarctica.
But what we do know, and I'm talking about the coverage from the New York Times at the time, was that the mission was shrouded in secrecy, that there were a certain number of lives were lost, that Byrd nor anybody on his team ever spoke about it again and took whatever knowledge they had about it with them to their graves.
So it's interesting to me that Linda is focusing in on this right now.
It is a great unanswered question.
And if true, we would have to kind of reevaluate our whole way that we see the world that we live in and on.
Okay, now this brings me to a point that I wanted to get to towards the back end of our conversation, which means that I'm bang on track.
A lot of this depends on the testimony of people who went through things in the past.
Now, those people are getting up in years, or maybe they've left us documentation because they've now died and sadly left us.
What is going to happen in the future?
Where are the people with credible testimony about things today?
Now, it doesn't seem to me that there are those kind of people in all of these fields.
I mean, look, I interviewed, and this is a different subject, but time travel.
I interviewed the late Al Bielik.
And, you know, there's nobody with first-hand experience of that, I don't think, around anymore.
Where are the future generation of people who've experienced, you know, are those people out there, are there younger people who've had experiences to this degree?
Or are those people dying out?
And is it all going to become third-party accounts in the future?
I think there will always be individuals in that group of people who have these anomalous experiences or are privy to highly classified material that seems so exotic in its nature.
There'll always be a percentage of them with that whistleblower mentality who are willing to buck the system, take the chances, tell the truth, and live with themselves even in a state of ignomy from the forces that be.
I think it's just human nature that that is in the spirit of some people.
I know in thinking back on what I know about Larry Warren's experience, which is fairly substantial, having worked with him for 28 years now, and not intending it to run that long, I thought we were going to write a book, be done, and move on to other things.
But a deep friendship came out of that and an ongoing fight, if you will, for the truth wherever it may take us.
I think part of the problem here is that in this growing age of wholesale internet conspiracies, and you can post the wildest, craziest thing online, and there are always going to be people that gravitate toward it.
And the fact is also that some of true conspiracies have that same feeling to them.
But it's more about belief now.
And give me the quickest way that I can to size up the data that you're doing.
Again, that reality of I'm a busy person and I don't have time to read your book.
Well, again, if you don't have time to educate yourself to the specifics of a very complex story, question, or claim, then, you know, you're the one who is holding yourself back from it.
And there's nobody that can put that information in your head.
Your comment before about time travel, I thought, was somewhat kind.
I love the idea of time travel in terms of science fiction.
It's a wonderful thing to play with in our minds, and there's been so much written on it theoretically, but absolutely nothing on it actually having happened.
And one of the shiny objects for me that is taking attention away from the serious scientific data that we have put together around the Rendlesham Forest incident is the claim of one of the very legitimate witnesses, I might add, and that is Jim Pennyson, who was involved on the first night, an Air Force security police officer sergeant who was involved with John Burroughs.
They did see a craft together.
It had hieroglyphics writing symbols on it.
Jim copied them out into his field notebook, and he has always, well, he has claimed since 2010, December 2010, that when he touched those symbols, a binary code of ones and zeros downloaded into his head that the next night,
24 hours later, he copied out into that notebook, and that purports to be a message from Time Travelers from the Future, who selected Jim, among all people from humanity, to give this message to humanity at a future date.
How does Jim know it was Time Travelers from the Future?
Because they told him.
And the message was?
Well, it's published in the book that he and John wrote with Nick Polk that came out in 2014 called Encounter in the Rendlesham Forest.
But the message is, speaking off the top of my head, the latitudes and longitudes of six, we'll call them sacred locations around the world: a temple in China, another one in Greece, a mythical sunken island off the coast of Ireland called High Brazil, the location of Sedona, Arizona, and two other locations.
And then a series of very cryptic-clipped comments that, with respect to the time travelers, sound to me like script excerpts from a B-science movie.
There, for me, is nothing credible to back up that aspect of Jim's account.
And yet, in the great spirit of the exact wording of that wonderful poster from The X-Files, I want to believe.
There are a lot of people that want to believe that time travelers from the future came back, obviously, with positive intents, because why would they come back with nefarious ones, to give a contemporary human being a message that,
What I just told you is the message decoded, but there are those like Nick Pope who theorize that perhaps there's a message within the message.
And if and when that is decoded, it will give humanity important information, you know, who knows, to help us right the wrong way.
As far as you know, this is probably not a fair question, Peter, so no need to answer it if you can't.
Is work being done to further decode that message?
Oh, I have no idea.
And you should try to invite Jim on as a guest, although I wonder if he will accept.
He is very prickly about anything approaching criticism of his idea and theory.
Okay, well, listen, you know, I'm a great listener and a nice guy.
If you can smooth the way for me, Peter.
But he won't talk to me.
He won't talk to me.
I am not the smoothing person that you need.
Now, what do you make to a report that I read, and I'm paraphrasing this, but it was on one of the news wires here yesterday, or maybe the day before now, that said, in terms of making contact with another civilization out there, at current estimates, given the time that it would take to communicate and various other factors scientifically, it's going to take 1,500 years.
Do you find that a little depressing, if that's so?
No, I find it very silly.
This is an argument that's been being made since the 1940s.
Based on our deepest understanding of the forest reaches of what we understand about physics or about the speed that anything or force can travel, they make these arbitrary statements, which I find entertaining in a way.
In 1948, the first major American classified project on UFOs was released.
It was called Project Sign.
Many years later, it became declassified, and it's now part of the archive of fascinating information that we have about what officials thought about this at the time.
And when we come toward the end of that report, one of the things that they write is based on something that happened three years ago, and they're talking about the first explosion of a nuclear bomb.
Beings out in the universe could measure something that had happened on Earth, and in light, you know, it would probably have taken them two years to get here.
Again, that's thinking, military thinking in 1948 based on, you know, thinking in terms of engineering and, you know, hyperspeed from that point of view.
Right.
But in a very poignant moment, and it's something out of the best kind of the day the earth stood still or something, and this is an American Air Force report from 1948.
I'm paraphrasing ever so slightly.
It says, so above all else, we should be expecting to see them here now based on the fact that our behavior as human beings on Earth should give them cause to be concerned.
Talking about our history of violence and the fact that 100 years or so from then, we're going to be out in space with our rockets and very powerful weapons and our very aggressive human behavior.
Which tangentially brings us back to Rendlesham Forest.
Yeah.
Peter.
We've come full circle.
Peter, listen, it's been a great hour.
Thank you very much.
And just to explain again to listeners that this has been on a digital connection, Peter's at a conference in Ohio.
When do you leave for the UK then?
When do you leave for Scotland?
Well, I fly back to New York State on Sunday.
I've got two days to turn things around, do my wash.
I fly to Scotland on Wednesday, and I will be speaking there a week from Saturday at the Scottish UFO and Paranormal Conference in beautiful Glasgow.
And I am so looking forward to returning to that great historic city, seeing old friends, making some new ones, and revisiting the great nation of Scotland.
Will you be signing autographs?
Oh, I guess.
But only if people ask.
Peter, lovely to talk with you.
We'll catch up again.
And, you know, I always enjoy conversing with you, and please take care and enjoy Scotland.
I love Glasgow.
You know, I was telling you before we recorded this, I used to be in Glasgow quite a bit because I used to do training for radio stations up there.
Oh, too much.
And, you know, the people are so warm and friendly, so you're going to love it.
I will give your regards, and I will be in touch soon.
And thanks so much for having me back, Howard.
And oh, Peter, if people want to know about you and your work, it's only fair.
Plug your website.
Ah, that would be peterrobbinsny.com, NY for New York.
And I'm sorry, yeah, peterrobbinsny.com or visit me on my Facebook page.
Peter Robbins, please take care.
Thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
You bet, Howard.
Have a great day.
Have a great day.
The voice of Peter Robbins, always good to have him on the show.
And I will try and get Larry Warren and other people suggested by Peter on this show.
Your guest suggestions, gratefully accepted, always appreciated here.
Please get in touch via the website, theunexplained.tv.
You can send me a guest suggestion, some thoughts about the show and how I'm doing it, whatever you want to say.
And when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and the way that you use this show, as a few people have done on this edition.
Thank you very much.
And thank you to Adam, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot, for making the wheels turn, as he always does.
More great guests in the pipeline here on the online show.
So until next, we meet around the world.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
And please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And please stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
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