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June 23, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:00:21
Edition 258 - Jason Offutt

This time... a great guest - author and paranormal researcher Jason Offutt in Missouri...

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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 being there.
Keep the emails coming.
Lovely to hear from you.
No shout-outs on this edition.
For a few reasons, I'm sort of catching up with myself at the moment after a crazy, busy, silly week.
Some of that I will explain in just a moment.
But if you want to get in touch with me, I will be doing shout-outs on the next edition.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can send me a message or a guest suggestion or anything you like there.
If you'd like to make a donation to the show, you can also do that.
There's a PayPal link there.
And it's really easy to do.
And to keep this online show going, which is where it all started, your donations are utterly, completely, totally vital.
The website, by the way, if you're looking at it now, was designed, created, maintained by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Special guest on this edition, a man who is steeped in paranormality.
He's an author called Jason Offut.
And among other things, and I'll get the pronunciation of his name right when we talk to him.
I'll check it with him.
But among the things we'll be talking about are shadow people, which is a massively popular topic with you.
I was always very skeptical about shadow people, but I've had a lot of email about shadow people, and a lot of rational, professional people seem to have experienced this phenomenon.
So we'll talk with him about this and various other things, hauntings and the other stuff that he writes about.
Prolific author, Jason Offert, on this edition of The Unexplained.
If I sound a little tired, it's probably because I am.
I was up very, very early this morning to cover the news, read the news for part of the United Kingdom about the exit of the UK from the European Union.
It happened literally hours ago.
Now, the pollsters told us yesterday, before I went to bed, that it was looking like the Vote Remain group, that's the people who want to stay in the European Union, had won.
When I got up, the shock news was Vote Leave had won.
The margin, 52% to leave, 48% to remain.
So quite convincing, really.
But the pollsters once again massively got it wrong.
And I'm not really allowed to express a view, and I don't want to, on a radio show or a podcast politically.
I don't think that gets us anywhere, really.
I have to be impartial about these things.
But one thing I can say is that, and I know that you as an unexplained listener will be interested in this, I think we're seeing a phenomenon at work here.
I think there is a sizable measure in the vote that we've seen, the result that we've actually had delivered to us, which has caused the Prime Minister to quit.
David Cameron is only going to be with us for another three months, and he thinks somebody new should be at the helm, quotes.
The phenomenon that we've seen here is one where people, ordinary people, are having, it seems to me, less trust in politicians, whichever party they're from, and are wanting to poke the politicians in the eye and give them a shock.
And I think that's part of what's happened here.
Now, that's not to belittle the Leave campaign, because there were great arguments on their side and great arguments on the other side.
But a lot of people get very disgruntled with politics and politicians.
And I think in their frustration, they've wanted to make a point in the only way that they can.
That's just a ballpark analysis of this.
And of course, I'm always happy to accept that I may be wrong.
But there does seem to have been a certain element of that in this.
So the United Kingdom, as I speak, is facing the process of getting out of the European Union.
Up in Scotland, which is part of our United Kingdom, they voted to remain.
But of course, it's an overall decision for the whole UK, so they can't.
They've got to come along with us and leave the EU.
Now they're talking about wanting another referendum there to take them away from the United Kingdom.
So as we speak, it's depending on which side of the tree you're on, it's either massively exciting or very, very scary, or any combination of the two.
But I don't think in my lifetime I've ever lived through political times like this.
So if I'm sounding a little tired as I record this edition, which is going to be a bit of a respite for me from all the politics that I've had to deal with at work in the last days, if I sound a little tired, that's the reason for it.
But thank you very much for continuing to support The Unexplained.
We are living in very, very interesting times.
And I think a lot of us are just trying to make sense of it all and the new reality and the new world that we're all stepping into now.
Okay, let's get to the United States to Jason Offut, author.
And we're going to talk about all kinds of paranormality with him.
And thank you very much, by the way, Roger Saunders in California for recommending him.
Jason, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Howard, it's my pleasure.
Thank you so much for asking me.
Now, first thing, very important.
How do I pronounce your name?
Is it Offutt, Offut?
How do we say this?
It's Offut.
Offut.
Okay, I'll remember that.
I'll keep in my mind.
Get Offit.
And then I can, that'll, you know, it'll be in my mind forever then.
You heard that more than once.
You try seeing what it's like being Howard Hughes.
Wowie.
I've had a life and a half with my name.
That's a whole other story.
Now, look, I was doing some research about you, as I do before somebody comes on this show.
You were very highly recommended to me, and I see that you're a fellow journalist.
What's this all about?
Well, yeah, I was a print journalist for 17 years, covering politics, covering school-to-school systems.
And at one point, I just kind of hit a wall and started left the journalism business.
Not entirely.
I still do some writing for newspapers, but I'm a teacher now.
I teach journalism at a university.
Okay, now that is a bit of a calling.
I had some great instructors in Cardiff, South Wales, where I was trained to be a journalist.
I finished my degree, and then the radio station that I was being employed by, they foolishly gave me a job straight out of university.
They said, we want to send you away to train.
So they sent me on a course in Cardiff that was staffed by people from Fleet Street, Fleet Street being the term for the best national journalism in the UK.
So I was taught by people like that.
And I used to think what a tremendous responsibility they have in shaping the next generation.
Well, I do my best.
One of the things I push is for people to be impartial because unfortunately that runs rampant over here, being partial in news coverage.
One of the things that I did along those lines, this has been a couple of years ago, but I offered a class called Paranormal Journalism to teach at least one classroom full of young journalists how to cover the strange and bizarre with a straight face because generally that's not done in the press.
Now, listen, that's a real service, and I don't know of any other course that maybe there is anywhere else that offers that, because this has been my thing for all of these years that I've been interested in these things.
And I've had to work on news desks all over the UK and look at my colleagues and their reaction to some of the stuff that I'm interested in or some of the stories that appear.
Quite often, it's getting less now, but quite often this stuff is laughed at, sneered at, scoffed at, or not properly investigated.
Right.
And that was one of my biggest gripes.
Even if the journalists were covering it with a straight face in their stories, they always started off with, if it was TV or radio, they'd always start off with the X-Files theme music, or they would mention for Bigfoot Encounters, the movie Harry and the Hendersons, or the movie Ghostbusters for Ghost Encounters, which immediately discounts everything else in the story.
Yep.
And my view of it is, and I do say this whenever I broadcast about these things, is that, look, we know that a fair proportion of this stuff is a little wacko and a little out there, but it can't all be garbage.
It can't all be wrong.
So why don't we give these people a hearing and then we can decide rationally and logically for ourselves what is correct and what is nonsense?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, just like any other story, you know, just put it out there in front of the public and let them decide.
I mean, it's one of the things that I found with my students is I had a number of skeptics in that class.
And the first day of class, I explained to them how many stories on paranormal activity I wanted them to write.
And they said, I can't do this.
There's not enough out there.
And I told them they were wrong just to talk to everybody they knew.
Everybody's got a story of something paranormal that's happened to them.
And nobody ever let me down.
They all found stories the entire semester.
Yeah, number one.
This I can believe.
Even when I punt for people to tell me their stories about different subjects, one of them being shadow people that I want to talk with you about first, even the ones where I think I'm not going to get much response here and I'm not even sure whether this is a phenomenon worth talking about.
Certainly in the case of shadow people, I was overwhelmed, I was deluged both on the radio show that I do and definitely on this online show with people getting in touch saying, look, I'm a rational, professional person.
But when I was younger in the house where we lived, we had this.
And the story is the same over and over again.
The descriptions vary slightly.
It's quite often a dark figure wearing a hat.
But it's a dark figure.
And I just didn't have any time for this phenomenon a year ago.
And now, because of the volume of people who've been telling me about it, I do.
Well, I kind of ran into that.
I didn't know of anybody who'd encountered shadow people.
I encountered shadow people in my home when I was a child.
And that's what led me to research them and write my book on them.
But I hadn't heard of other people talking about it until sometime in the 1990s.
And then I wrote for, I had a blog for a while called From the Shadows where I wrote about paranormal encounters.
And I wrote one on shadow people.
And I was deluged by posts from people who had experienced the very same thing that I'd experienced.
And that kind of prompted me to work on my book because I realized so many people had encountered shadow people across the world.
And in many ways, you're doing them a service by investigating it some more on their behalf.
What did you experience?
Well, I lived, let me set this up to where we lived.
I grew up on a farm in rural Missouri, and we were six miles away from the nearest town.
And in cities, people keep their drapes closed because anybody walking by can look in.
In the country, we had our drapes open all the time because the only thing outside were moths and coyotes.
So at night, I could see the sky.
And when the moon was out, I could see everything in my room.
It was just a nice uniform shade of gray.
And one night I had just laid down and shut the light off.
I was, I don't know, maybe about eight or nine years old.
And something moved in the corner of my room.
And a dark figure stepped out of the corner.
It was, I don't know how tall it was because I was laying in bed, but it seemed gigantic to me at the time as an eight or nine year old.
It was a man, and he was completely black.
I couldn't make out any facial features, no eyes, nose, ears.
And you say this thing stepped out of the corner.
Stepped out of the corner, stepped out of the corner of my room.
And its movement, the best I could describe it is a badly drawn cartoon, one of the cheap early computer cartoons from the 70s.
And it walked past my bed and into the hallway.
And this scared me to death.
And I screamed for my father.
And he uttered a cursed word, got out of bed and walked in to see what was going on, turned off the light, and everything was normal.
And then I started seeing more of these the very same way.
Not night after night, but just occasionally for about the next six months.
And sometimes it was one, sometimes it was eight or ten in a line, but they seemed to be going from place to place, and my room was in the middle.
Were you scared?
I was terrified.
Absolutely terrified, of course.
But the thing is, they didn't seem to take notice of me.
It was like I wasn't there.
They just walked right by me.
Nothing looked at me.
I'm glad they didn't, or I may have wet the bed.
But I didn't know what they were.
I called them shadow people in my head, even though I didn't talk about them to anybody, because that's exactly what they looked like.
It was a person, but they had no definition.
It was like a shadow.
Do you know how common this is, Jason?
I've heard this same story from my listeners a number of times.
The fact that they had this experience when they were young, they haven't really talked about it, but decades and decades and decades later, because it's a better climate now for divulging these things.
And I guess people get a bit more confident when they get older.
Decades later, they feel empowered to speak.
Right.
And the mere volume of people who've experienced this is, it floors me.
In the research I did for my book, Darkness Walks on Shadow People, hundreds upon hundreds of people I talked with about this phenomenon, and it was from everywhere, all across North America.
I interviewed a guy from Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Australia, England.
There was a really scary one from Portugal.
It is a worldwide phenomenon.
It's scary, although it's not dangerous, I don't think, in most cases.
You tell me that it's a worldwide thing, and you say there are cases in Portugal and England and the U.S. and just about everywhere.
Do the experiences see and experience and know the same thing, or does it vary country by country?
It does not vary country by country.
It varies experience by experience.
I put together a few different types of shadow people, some on their description, but mostly on their behavior.
The ones I saw, the ones I experienced, I think the most common, I referred to as benign shadow people because they don't pay any attention to people at all.
They just are going from place to place and people just happen to see them.
The one you mentioned earlier with the hat, there's a type of shadow person who looks like he's wearing, you know, dressed like a businessman from the 1940s or 50s or a gangster from the 40s.
He's wearing a suit and a fedora.
Again, it's the same as the benign shadow people.
You can't make out the definition, just the outline.
These are a little bit more intimidating because they seem to notice the person who notices them.
They're malicious shadow people who not just notice the people who notice them, but seem to be lurking around their house, peering at them from around doorways, peering at them over their bed as they sleep.
Now, this explanation of some of them being aware of the situations that they're in and able to react with them, does it rule out the idea that I've heard some people express that the shadow people are an imprint of a parallel universe in some way?
Because if there's a person or a being or something getting on with life in another universe and it just happens to impinge momentarily upon ours, that's one explanation.
But if this thing actually knows what's going on in your bedroom when you were a kid or in Portugal or wherever, that's a whole other thing, isn't it?
Right.
Yes, it is.
And I've explored those two explanations.
I think that the conclusion that I came up to in my research was that shadow people aren't just one thing.
There's not just one explanation for them.
They are different entities that look the same.
There's something called divergent evolution to where animals on different sides of the planet that aren't the same species, aren't related.
One might be a feline, one might be a canine, but they evolved in the same sort of environment and they're nearly identical animals.
It's that sort of thing, I think, that these shadow people are different types of entities.
They just happen to look the same.
I think the interdimensional traveler, I mean, how do we prove that?
But I think that makes a lot of sense to the ones that I saw.
They were going somewhere.
Maybe an area, my bedroom, for example, was just a thin spot at that time between the universes.
And I saw them.
They couldn't see me.
Maybe they were people.
Maybe they looked just like me, but that's all I can see of them.
Maybe that's to do with our ability to receive.
I mean, who's to know?
Our ability to perceive and receive.
I didn't ask you should have some journalist I am.
Hey, how did your experiences with them end?
They just stopped coming.
Right.
Yeah, they just stopped coming.
And I relaxed after a while, and I haven't seen them since.
And that's been decades ago.
Wow.
And so I suppose you spent, until you started talking about it, years trying to rationalize it.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
It was one of those things that made such an impression.
Well, a man with no features walking through my bedroom at night that leaves an impression on a person.
It was always in my mind at some point, trying to figure out what it was.
And as a journalist, I never really got the opportunity to write about anything, to explore or research anything of a paranormal nature.
But once I started teaching, I had the time to do it, and I can write about whatever I want.
So I dug into this phenomenon.
One of the impressive things about you and shows your journalistic background is in the blurb in the write-up about this book to do with shadow people, you say that you interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses along with experts from religions, psychologists, physicists, and metaphysicists.
What conclusions did those conversations bring you?
Well, from the physicist, all they could tell me was what you're describing these beings doing, they can't do.
Okay, Thank you.
That's a lot of help, isn't it?
But from the religious aspect, this type of entity is fairly, you know, it's described in all of them.
In Christianity, I interviewed a Catholic priest who performs exorcisms.
And before I even described to him what I was talking about, he described it for me perfectly.
I was going to describe to him an encounter of a pregnant woman who was on the second floor of her house.
That's where her and her husband's bedroom were.
She was eight months pregnant.
If women are eight months pregnant, they pee a lot.
So she got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and the bathroom was down the hall.
Well, as she was sitting in the bathroom, she left the door open.
She could see two lights that looked like taillights of a car down the hallway, except that she was on the second floor, and there's no way she could have seen lights like that.
And then they started moving toward her.
And she said that, you know, as they got closer, she could see the black form of a dog, a big, big dog.
And those were its eyes.
And she screamed and her husband came out and turned the lights on and it was gone.
But the priest I interviewed described that sort of a being, that shadow people to him were demons, demonic entities that can take the form of something terrestrial, human, a dog.
But something will be wrong.
Something will be a little bit off because they can't perfectly form, you know, except that form.
So, you know, maybe their arms will be too long, the dog will be too big, their gait will be off.
And I mean, all different things that I've gotten in Shadow People reports.
That suggests, doesn't it, if those reports are to be even remotely believed, that something evil out there on occasions is able to project itself into a shape or a form.
Right, right, exactly.
And that's what I got.
I interviewed an expert in Islam who said that, I mean, this sounds like a jinn to me, which is a dark entity from Islam.
There's also light jinns, but there's dark jinns who can do this same thing.
I interviewed a Cherokee shaman who described to me that this type of entity is a Native American healer who's started using his knowledge for greed or for bad purposes, and he turns into something less than human, this black human lurking shape.
So, I mean, it's different religions worldwide are explaining the same thing, and they're all bad.
So I think there could be some connection.
And apart from scaring the you-know-what out of us when we see these things, are they able to physically do anything, anything malevolent, anything harmful?
Well, yes, to some extent.
Which is another, you know, leads me to another type of shadow person that can do this.
There are people who have reported shadow people in their rooms or, you know, they're laying on the couch or they're walking, you know, down a lonely street and they encounter one of these.
It's not always at night.
Sometimes it's in broad daylight.
And they feel weakened.
They feel what they've, how they, many, many people have explained it to me was that they feel that this entity is terrifying them on purpose.
The fear they fear is more than just seeing something strange.
It's deeper than that.
And what their impression is, is that this shadow being is feeding off of the fear it's generating in them.
Now, isn't that strange?
You know, I was about to say to you, it sounds to me like either it is feeding off them or in some way that they don't know psychologically on a level they don't appreciate, they are feeding off it.
Didn't think about that.
Didn't consider that end.
But yeah, yes.
I mean, that's just, again, one of the different types.
And about the interaction, that is the main.
If this is the type of shadow person that will interact with air quotes with my fingers here, victims, that's the main type.
There have been just a couple of encounters that I've covered where something physical had happened.
One woman I talked with, she never took a picture of it because it was when she was about 11 years old and she was in her 40s now.
But she woke up with a bruise after an encounter with a shadow person.
The bruise, she said, was in the shape of a hand.
There was a case out of Australia I talked with a woman who was physically assaulted by one.
And that's the only case that I've covered that someone has been physically assaulted by a shadow person.
The kind of people that you've spoken with, and I'm very impressed that you've done first-hand direct communication with these people, and you haven't just read it in the book, that's very impressive.
But do they share any common features?
Are they similar kinds of people?
Different countries, different ages, different backgrounds, different professions, different areas of interest.
This thing covers, I'm sure there's some similarities with some people, but across the board, it's just anybody, not a specific type of person.
This can happen to anybody.
One of the problems in this whole unexplained world, since I've been investigating it for these shows, has always seemed to me that it is possible to put together what is, and yours is, very impressive research where you do the legwork and you talk to the people, but at the end of it, what you've got is a collection of impressions and stories and views from experts.
But how do you take it forward from there?
What sort of research and further investigation do you think, Jason, needs to be done?
Well, and this is where things kind of fall down for paranormal research.
And I've gotten some pats on the back, but I've also gotten some flack on my opinion on paranormal research.
And it's mainly that if you're out in the field looking for the paranormal, even if you find something that's legitimate, and I know that there's legitimate paranormal encounters out there, I mean, I've had one.
But if you're doing that kind of research, nobody's going to believe you, even if you have evidence.
How many EVPs have guests played for you?
I can hear that and it's terrifying and it answered your question.
But I mean, science isn't going to take that.
Any sort of scientific research, which is one of the cool things about teaching at a university, is I can go out and have a beer with physicists and talk about stuff like this.
But it's got to be repeatable.
And you're not going to have a ghost or a shadow person or a UFO or a Bigfoot encounter.
You're not going to have that be repeatable.
You're not going to be able to replicate it in a lab.
And that is what science needs.
When it comes to research like this, it's going to be really hard for shadow people or ghosts, which I think some shadow people are.
It's going to be hard to ever prove them.
When it comes to other phenomena, I mean, if they have a dead body of a Bigfoot or a thylacine or some water monster, that's different.
That's something science can wrap their arms around.
So what needs to change then?
Because it sounds like something does.
Does it need to be the scientific establishment that needs to broaden its definitions and think a little out of the box?
Or does it need to be some of the happy amateur researchers who check these things out?
Well, I don't know what the amateur researchers can do.
And they're doing, I'm not trying to belittle what they're doing because a lot of them, I've got some friends who do this sort of thing.
They enjoy what they're doing and they do uncover some evidence that I think is really, really solid.
It's just, it's the scientific community that's the issue.
It's going to take people like Dr. Jeff Meldrum, I believe he's an anthropology professor at Utah State, maybe, who's a Bigfoot hunter.
It's going to take people like that to seriously dig into paranormal phenomena before it's going to be taken seriously worldwide.
I don't want to spoil your book for people, and I'm sure they'll buy it anyway.
You told me that there was one amazing story from Portugal.
Now, I know Portugal pretty well.
What's that story?
Well, this couple was walking home from a late supper, and they saw there was a wall and a garden on the other side of the wall.
But the wall next to the street, there was a tree that kind of overhung a little bit.
And it was shaking.
The tree was shaking.
So the couple was a little unnerved.
And they looked up and there was this dark figure in the tree with blazing red eyes.
And they gave it a wide berth.
When it went across the street, and the thing dropped out of the tree, and it was a black, human-shaped shadow.
And it started chasing them.
Eventually, it stopped following them.
But that was terrifying.
That was a case of a shadow person looming and waiting in a tree to pounce on someone, it seemed like.
But they were able to evade it.
They went back.
The boyfriend went back the next day in that spot, and there was a burn mark.
He didn't know if it was there before, but where the thing had dropped onto the sidewalk.
Oh, my God.
Now, look, those sorts of things do happen in the UK, and quite often they're student pranks.
I presume that these people were fairly convinced that what they were dealing with was not somebody winding them up, as we say here, you know, having them on, putting them on.
You know, it was something serious.
I suppose the burn mark really would give the light of that.
Right.
And I'm not quite sure what to make of the burn mark because that's the only one that I'd ever heard of when it comes to shadow people.
Now, one in London that I'd spoken with a guy who had just moved into a new flat.
And the way the cable was, he had to put the TV in a certain part of the room and put his sofa in front of the TV.
And he could tell that another sofa had been there from the imprints on the carpet.
And he was watching TV late at night, and he turned the TV off, and there was enough light coming in through the window that he could see his reflection in the TV glass, but there was somebody else in it.
Oh, my God.
And he looked at next to him where this person should be, and nothing was there.
And he got up and knelt in front of the TV to stare at it a little bit.
And the thing finally got up and went away.
But he did this night after night.
And he had noticed when he moved in that the carpet in front of where he was going to put the TV was a little worn.
One night he was sitting there like he usually did to see what was going to happen.
And the thing started leaning into him and he was starting to feel a bit cold.
And then he got up and knelt in front of the TV again and then realized that the TV had been there before.
The couch had been where his couch was.
The worn marks on the floor were probably where the previous tenant of the flat was doing exactly what he had done.
Oh, Lord.
I mean, I suppose, look, I don't know how you would do this kind of research, but the next stage in that research in London, I'd love to know who this person is and where it was, but would be to try and contact previous Occupants of that apartment.
Right.
And that's a little bit too hard for me to do over here.
You notice that you and I are translating for each other.
You use the word flat, and I use the word apartment.
That's funny.
That is funny.
That's very good.
See, we're so polite, aren't we?
Okay, shadow people.
So are you going to write any more about shadow people or is that it for you?
You're going to move on?
This is the book.
As for books, probably that's going to be it.
If there are any really good encounters, I might pin an article or two on it.
But right now, that's probably what I've got.
I think I've covered the topic as deeply as I possibly could.
If something new comes up, I'll definitely look at that.
That's a proper journalist.
Some people who write books about these things, they'll get one book out.
It might be quite successful.
There really isn't anything else to say about it, but they'll put out volume two just to try and write on the coattails of volume one.
I'm very pleased to hear that, you know, when a thing is done, we know, don't we, as journalists, when a story is done, when we've written the piece, when we've recorded whatever it might be, and we believe it's done for now, then it really is done.
It's time to close the book and do something else.
Exactly.
And I'm well aware of the type of people that you're talking about because when I first started this, I told my wife, I said, don't let me become one of those guys.
Well, you know, I think some people in this field, and it's only a few, and we won't name any names here, but I think need to realize when a thing is done and when enough miles has clocked up on the clock and it is time to change the car maybe and do something else.
But that's just one of my little musings on this whole unexplained world, which I still find fascinating.
One of your books is What Lurks Beyond the Paranormal in Your Backyard.
I love the description.
I'd love to see the book.
But apparently within 100 miles of your house, you found cases of demon possession, alien abduction, time travel, hauntings, and a mind-reading dog all within 100 miles.
So what you're saying here is that the unexplained and the bizarre is actually more commonplace than we might think.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
And even in the book, I challenge the reader that if I found all of these paranormal encounters within 100 miles of my house, there are just as many or maybe more within 100 miles of your house.
Have you told James Randy about any of this?
No, no, I did not.
I did not contact James Randy.
I should have.
You know, there's a million dollars still saving.
Exactly.
And it could be yours.
You could be in the Bahamas right now with a pina colada.
A mind-reading dog.
Right.
This was back in the 1930s in a town.
Now it's about 13,000 people called.
It's Marshall, Missouri.
Back in the 1930s, a hotel owner, Sam Van Arnsdale, was an avid hunter.
And a friend of his gave him a hunting dog.
It was the runt of the litter.
It was an English Llewellyn setter.
And he gave it to him as a joke because it was the runt of the litter.
It had to be English, didn't it?
Absolutely, because it turned out to be a mind-reading dog.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
You see, all of us have hidden talents.
The dog always showed intelligence.
But when it got old enough to hunt, it was phenomenal.
It was like it knew where the birds were.
And there were articles written in various magazines across the country about this great hunting dog.
And one day, Sam Van Arsdale said something.
And people used to meet in his hotel on a Saturday morning.
They'd come to town, they'd hang out in the lobby and play cards or checkers or just chat.
And Sam just said, I wonder who in this room is from Kansas City.
And the dog went over to a person and stood by him.
Oh, my God.
Van Arsdale went over there and talked to the man, and he was from Kansas City.
So he started experimenting with the dog.
There was a group of girls.
I actually interviewed the one who was still alive.
It's been about eight years ago.
I don't know if she's alive anymore.
She was quite elderly, but she was standing with a group of girls, and there were three girls with red dresses in this group.
And Van Arsdale said, go to the girl with the red dress.
And the dog walked over to the group of kids, turned around, looked at his owner, and just sat because there were three of them.
I wonder, was he looking at the girl with the red dress?
There were three girls with red dresses.
That's what the dog sat there and looked back at his owner.
And then he goes, then the girl with the red dress and the bow in her hair.
And he went right to her.
And it was the girl that I had interviewed who saw this firsthand.
The dog was able to pick the winners of presidential races, the sex of a baby.
Husband and wife would go, what sex is our baby going to be?
And it's going to be a boy.
Kentucky Derby winners, the dog was able to pick.
And he got such worldwide fame, people would come from all over.
There were people who would come and give the dog instructions in German or French or Spanish.
And the dog would do exactly what they said.
Do you know, I've never heard a story like it.
Gee, if that dog was around now, they needed to be putting a photograph of Trump and Hillary in front of it.
But that's a remarkable story.
I've never heard anything like that.
Well, and I was quite impressed by the owner of the dog because this dog got so much press that Hollywood came calling and we're going to buy the dog and he wouldn't sell.
I mean, I can understand what the value of that would be for a dog actor.
You just give him a script.
Yeah, I mean, but put Lassie out of work.
But look, this speaks, doesn't it, to the fact that we don't entirely understand the relationship between ourselves and canines for one, but all animals.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
We humans Think we're so damn smart and we don't understand how these things work.
We don't understand the amount of things we don't understand far, far outweighs the amount we do.
True enough.
Among the things you found within a hundred mile radius of where you live, you found an example of time travel.
I have been trying to get a credible and good time travel story on here.
And the only one that I ever got on was Al Bierlich from the Philadelphia experiment, who sadly died a few years ago.
And, you know, I've been offered other time travelers and time travel stories.
None of them have really stood up.
So what did you find?
Well, and there are very few.
I'm fascinated, always have been fascinated by time travel.
Well, this was back in the mid-90s.
I listened to Art Bell, Art Bell's radio program.
My hero.
And he had a guest on named Mike Markham.
Art had seen an article in a newspaper.
It hit the Associated Press wire, so the story was all over the country.
But it was about a guy named Michael Markham who had he dropped out of school.
He was studying to be an electrician in Ohio.
And he dropped out of school to follow a girl, always the wrong thing to do, but follow a girl here to Missouri.
And he was living in a small town, and he was just, he was playing.
He was bored, so he built a Jacob's ladder on his kitchen table.
And for the listeners who aren't sure what a Jacob's ladder is, it's two diagonal metal posts that if you feed an electric current, you can watch the current zigzag up until the posts are too far away that it fizzles out.
Something that you would have seen in Dr. Frankenstein's lab.
I was going to say it's normally the kind of thing you see in a movie, and the mad scientist has got it going.
That's it, exactly.
And so he built it, and he noticed something that shouldn't be there.
He described it as a strange heat signature that was floating over the Jacob's ladder.
So, you know, being a guy, he did what, you know, a guy would do.
He threw something at it.
It was a finishing screw on his table, and it hit the heat signature and disappeared.
And about 10 seconds later, it reappeared and dropped straight onto the table.
And he came to the immediate conclusion that I just built a time machine.
And he decided I need to build a man-sized time machine.
The reason he did this, I think, is absolutely brilliant.
He didn't want to build a time machine for the betterment of mankind or to increase the body of knowledge.
He wanted to go a few days in the future and bring back lottery numbers.
Fair play to him.
Hats off to him because that's exactly what I would do.
Well, and so he needed power.
He needed power for this thing that his house just couldn't provide.
So he and a few guys that he knew stole six power line transformers and took them in his house and he rewired a couple of them so he didn't have enough juice to send himself into the future.
And when he flipped the switch, all the lights in town went off.
It was a very small town.
So they were able to find him and he was arrested.
The saga goes on for a number of years, but let me condense it.
In 1997, after he'd gotten out of jail and because of the exposure from Art Show, he got tens of thousands of dollars of donations of money and equipment, and he was able to build his time machine.
And then he disappeared.
I talked with friends of his.
I talked with a person, his landlord.
He just vanished.
And do we think that he disappeared in time?
Well, that was a big question.
And I did something that nobody had done up to this point.
I was able to track him down.
And I talked with him.
And he jumped in his time machine.
He said he tested it out because he tested it out by throwing grapefruit in it that disappeared.
And he even went as far as to throw guinea pigs into it.
And they disappeared.
And he found them outside his rental.
He rented a shed for his experiments.
And he found him in the parking lot outside the shed.
You know, there are many skeptics out there, and I can understand their point of view.
And they'll be saying, yeah, right, bring on Michael J. Fox.
Right, right.
Well, that's just what we were talking about before.
People don't take things like this seriously.
Well, he eventually jumped into the machine and woke up in a field in the winter.
And he couldn't remember who he was.
He couldn't remember anything.
Apparently, when he jumped in, he was teleported in time and space to a field just outside of Cincinnati.
And it took him a couple of years to get his bearings back and remember exactly who he was.
He lives in a homeless shelter for a while.
But when I talked to him, he said, I'm done.
I'm finished with it.
That's a shame because I was going to ask you for his details.
Okay.
Well, I mean, look, who are we and who are you to say this is not so?
Right, exactly.
And this is one of the things when people are talking to me about what I do.
I've been called a ghost hunter, a paranormal investigator.
I'm none of those things.
I'm a journalist.
This is how I approach all of these topics.
I tell people stories.
And with this case, I told this man's story.
And with all the stories I tell, I have to make sure in my heart that these people at least believe what they're saying is true.
And in his case, you spoke to him.
I love to do this with guests, especially if I see them face to face.
You can always tell whether the people believe what they're saying.
When I spoke with Al Bierlik, I had no doubt at all that Al Bierlik believed everything that he was telling me.
And I'd heard him on other radio shows and I'd seen him in other recordings.
And his story was consistent.
Now, people are not telling you the truth as far as they understand it or believe it.
Their story wavers and shifts.
His story never did.
So, you know, you got a Sense that you were being told what this person believed was the truth.
Exactly.
Yes.
Wow.
Wow.
You really have done the work.
This is the problem, though, isn't it, Jason?
That it's very hard to devote the time and the resources that are necessary to do research on that level.
You're lucky that you've got a journalistic background, journalistic training, so that gives you a great head start.
But for most ordinary Joes wanting to get involved in this, it's hard, isn't it?
It's extremely hard.
And since I teach at a university, I also have the added benefit of having summers off, which is where I do a lot of my research and writing.
Right.
Okay.
No, it's the ideal job to have.
Sadly, I have to keep cranking up my mainstream news work.
Otherwise, I would give more time to all of this.
Now, look, you've done a lot of stuff.
You've investigated your state for the most spirited, the most haunted places in it.
And you're a great storyteller.
What have you unearthed?
Well, quite a few really, really fun, fun ghost stories.
There are a couple that really, you know, I've really, really found fun.
This one I'm going to give very, very briefly.
And I found this tidbit out after my book on Missouri hauntings came out.
There is an old hotel in a town called Excelsior Springs, Missouri.
Springs, because there are mineral springs.
People would come from all over.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to the Elms hotel and spa because people thought mineral water, natural spring, mineral water had healing properties.
So at one point, this was a pretty famous place.
And of course, it's not really anymore.
It's still beautiful.
But it was also still popular in the 1970s.
And there was an Elvis impersonator in the 1970s who had a heart attack and died at the hotel.
Oh, boy.
He went the same way as the man himself.
But he wasn't on the toilet like the man himself.
Well, no, exactly.
I was going to just skirt over that point, but I'm glad you mentioned it.
Well, yeah, sorry I went there.
But people will see, if I'm going to see a ghost, this is what I want to see.
I want to see an Elvis impersonator walking through a wall.
Well, I mean, that must be, you know, if that's not the zenith, it's pretty close to it.
It's got to be.
Now, the most interesting, I think, the most fun, the most creepy, Mark Twain even wrote about in his autobiographical work, Life on the Mississippi.
He wrote about this, and I went there.
The cave in Hannibal, Missouri.
If you're familiar at all with Tom Sawyer, there's a dramatic scene at the end where he and Becky Thatcher are in this cave being chased by the bad guy.
Well, that was based on a real cave.
And people would, kids especially, would go explore from Hannibal.
It was about three miles outside of town, would walk and go explore the cave.
Well, at one point, a surgeon out of St. Louis, Missouri, which is fairly close by, about an hour and a half drive today.
Then it would have been longer, of course.
But it's about an hour and a half away.
This surgeon was experimenting.
He wanted to know how to perfectly preserve a human body.
And he needed some place to store bodies that was the same temperature, humidity, everything the same all year round.
So he bought the cave.
And what he needed to further his experiments was a body.
He didn't have a body.
And there was a bad flu outbreak and his 14-year-old daughter died.
So he preserved her.
He had a copper cylinder with a glass tube in it.
And he put his daughter in there and filled it up with a substance that was partly alcohol.
I'm not sure what else was in there.
And had it taken to this cave, and it was mounted on a chain from the ceiling.
And which all that's horrific enough.
But the children from Hannibal, Mark Twain included, would take torches, walk around this cave, and the highlight would be the older children.
They'd tell ghost stories all along the way.
And the older children would take the younger children who'd never been there into this room in the cave, unscrew the top of the cylinder, and pull the girl's head out by the hair, which would send all those children running and screaming.
Unsurprisingly.
Eventually, the parents of Hannibal got the doctor to take his daughter out and give her a proper burial.
Oh, my Lord.
But since then, and I interviewed a number of tour guides who'd been tour guides at the cave over, you know, over the years, and they've all reported to me either people in the tour or themselves seeing this little girl falling in with the tours and then disappearing at the end.
Now, being a great journalist, I see that you've backed up what you've written with a promise.
You've told the public reading your book that the places that you've talked about are open to the public to go and see, and you even give them directions.
So you're basically saying to them, I'm telling you the truth here.
Go and see it for yourself.
Exactly.
And I wanted this book, because I've read a number of books on hauntings, and they're all fun.
I really enjoy reading them, but they're usually all the same.
It's in a private residence.
And I wanted to write a book that's sort of a haunted tour guide.
I wanted to make sure that people reading, if they wanted to go to a spot that I wrote about, they could.
So yes, I gave directions.
If there's a cost, I gave how much it costs to get in.
I even had someone contact me.
They were getting married.
They wanted to get married in one of the spots and thanked me for the directions.
Did they actually do it?
Yes, yes, they did.
Oh, boy.
Well, different strokes for different folks, I say, Jason.
Amazing stuff.
Do you think that Missouri is any more blessed, or depending on how you look at it, cursed with these phenomena?
No, I don't.
Again, just like with what lurks beyond, I think this is happening all over the place.
We just hear about the big encounters.
When people think about Sasquatch, they think about the Pacific Northwest.
But this thing has been seen everywhere.
There are reports from all over North America.
Central and South America have their own Sasquatch.
Europe does.
Russia has the Alma.
We've got the Yeti.
And Australia, of all places, have the Yaoi.
And these all have the basic same descriptions of a Bigfoot.
I'd be very disappointed if Bigfoot hadn't shown up in Missouri.
Right, right.
Well, we have our own name for it.
Back in the early 1970s, there was a rash of sightings just south of Hannibal in Louisiana, Missouri, of a Bigfoot that had been killing dogs and terrorizing picnickers.
And they called it Momo, short for Missouri Monster.
Oh, fantastic.
You need to write a book about that.
Well, there's already been one done, but as a kid, this is showing my age.
I remember those encounters, and I remember them being in the newspaper.
And I would go outside, you know, walking through cornfields.
Again, I grew up on a farm wanting to encounter this thing.
I was a bit of a weird kid, I guess.
You see, that's part of the media that's missing, isn't it?
Because a lot of these things would have been documented in the little tiny local newspaper, the guy with the eye shield, you know, and with his arms rolled up and his fingers covered in printer's ink.
You know, those would be the places where those stories would be collated.
But we don't do journalism like that anymore.
Not anymore.
They used to.
I mean, back in the turn of the century when spiritualism was big, there'd be stories on, you know, serious news stories on seances.
There'd be, you know, in the 1940s and 50s, serious news stories on the front page newspapers about UFO encounters.
And, you know, after the Patterson Gimlin film in 1967, there were serious stories all over the country in local newspapers about Bigfoot.
And the seriousness, they're still there, sort of, but the seriousness is gone.
And all the stories are campy now.
You mentioned seances.
I really sorely think that good research needs to be done on seances because most of the people that I've spoken with who've done them, I haven't been entirely sure about their stories.
You know, I need to see more proof kind of thing.
And you do read the most egregious fraud being perpetrated upon people at seances.
But, you know, I don't, somewhere in my heart, I believe there must be somebody who's doing the real deal and can actually demonstrate that reasonably repeatedly.
And I'm on the same page with you there.
I think most of the people who do seances, I mean, especially the professional type people who do it for money, are all charlatans.
I thought the same about psychics.
For the longest time, I was convinced that psychics were, you know, all of them were complete frauds until I met somebody who told me things that they shouldn't have known.
My wife and I had just bought our first house and we just had our first child.
And I was interviewing this woman over the telephone for my first book.
And she'd never met me.
It was a cold call.
I looked her number up and I called her.
So she had no idea, anything at all about me.
And after we got finished talking about what I was interviewing her for, she said, you have a ghost in your house, just flat.
And I'm like, well, I don't know about that.
And then I described something my wife had been telling me that she'd get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
And she'd walk, to get to get there, she had to walk through the nursery.
And there would be a light, like Tinkerbell from the old Disney Peter Pan movie cartoon that was hovering over the baby's bed.
And she'd stare at it and it would fade to nothingness.
And this had happened another time.
And I thought, you know, she's still dreaming when she got up to go to the bathroom.
That's really not there.
And then one night I saw it.
And I explained that to this psychic.
And she goes, that's just your grandfather, Sam.
He really loves his namesake and wants to make sure he's okay.
Okay, that is what set me back.
But that put me back on my heels because I never referred to my baby by its sex.
I just called it the baby.
She had no way of knowing the baby was a boy or that his name's Sam or that his dead grandfather's name was Sam.
Now, those are the stories that I like because they really are unexplained.
Right, right.
But at that point, I realized, wow, maybe there are some real psychics out there.
And I still think there are a lot of charlatans, but some of these psychics are the real deal.
I totally agree.
I'm sure there are genuine people.
I've come across one or two who've impressed me enormously.
In my life of looking into these things, and I first got interested in all this stuff, like you, when I was very young, I've met some people who I've really had some serious questions about.
I really haven't bought into it at all.
Listen, you are welcome on this show anytime you like, Jason Offitt.
I've really, really enjoyed this.
What are you working on right now?
You must be working on something because what is it's summertime now.
Don't you have your big long holiday from work?
Yes, yes, I do.
And yeah, I'm working on something right now.
It has nothing to do with the, well, actually, I guess it does have to do with the paranormal a little bit.
I'm writing a young adult novel.
Okay.
Well, listen, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you.
You are a fund of stories, and I can tell that you do proper research, and that is such a rare thing.
So please, will you talk with me again?
Howard, just you say, Wynne.
This has been an absolute pleasure.
I would love to be on the show again.
Thank you.
And look, it's not often that I do these conversations, and you chime with the.
It's a strange thing that when you were mentioning topics, they were the topics that I was thinking of, which means that we're on the same page one way or the other.
Or maybe telepathy really does exist.
Who knows?
If people want to see your website, find out about you, the books, the research, all the rest of it, where do they go?
All of it's at one place.
Jason Offit, J-A-S-O-N-O-F-F-U-T-T dot com.
Enjoy your Missouri day.
Thank you very much.
Enjoy your London day.
Interesting stuff, eh?
And I'll put a link to Jason's website on my website, theunexplained.tv.
My website designed and maintained and honed like the old Swiss watch it is by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Please keep those coming.
I'm going to do some shout-outs, a mega selection of shout-outs, probably in the next edition.
Please make any guest suggestions you want to, or tell me what you think of the show, how it can be improved, all that kind of stuff.
Just go to the website theunexplained.tv, and if you can make a donation to what we're doing here, then it will be gratefully, gratefully received, because we are making plans as 2016 proceeds.
But then we're always making plans because in a world where plans are not made, where are we going?
Which maybe takes us back to the EU referendum and what happens now.
The political decision has been made.
There are going to be some really fascinating times, I think.
And of course, in America, you've got your presidential election coming, and that's going to be a ding-dong battle, too, isn't it?
Gee whiz.
What times we're living in.
More great guests coming soon on The Unexplained.
Until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained, and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
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