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Aug. 20, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
58:19
Edition 265 - Brien Foerster

A return visit to Peru and ancient civilisation researcher Brien Foerster...

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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 show, for keeping your emails coming.
Going to be getting to as many of your communications in the next couple of minutes as I possibly can.
So shout-outs coming up.
Thank you very much for being in touch with me.
When you do get in touch, which you can do by going to the website, theunexplained.tv, following the link there, you can send me an email from that with guest suggestions or anything, really.
But when you get in touch, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
It's massively useful for me.
I'm not doing market research on you.
I'm just keen to know, really.
Well, it's the human being and the journalist within me, I think.
Still summertime up here, some weird weather, a lot of cloud at times, a lot of rain at times, and a fair amount of sunshine and warmth at times.
And the summertime will be leaving us all too soon, I think.
But that, as they say, is a whole other story.
Thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for maintaining the website and making it all happen.
Adam doing invaluable work and so many things on his plate at the moment.
So I'm really pleased that Adam can continue to do this for us than what we do with Adam.
The guest on this edition is a return visit to South America and Brian Forster, who's recently been in the news.
I tried to get him on my radio show, but we've got him on here online for the world to hear.
He appeared in some of the national newspapers here in the UK recently.
I'll tell you why when we get talking, okay?
So Brian Forster coming up here on this edition of The Unexplained.
Shout outs.
Let's get to those.
Andrew in Greater Manchester, good to hear from you.
Contacting you because I've just become aware of a movie, says Andrew, being shown on Sky Cinema.
That's a TV channel here.
It's called The Rendlesham UFO Incident, directed by Daniel Simpson.
Not aware of it, but I will look for it.
Thank you, Andrew.
James in Doddington, near Cambridge, nice to hear from you.
Thank you.
Mark in Isha, Surrey, great and detailed feedback.
Good thoughts as ever.
Thank you, Mark.
Hey, Howard, how are you doing?
I've been listening to your shows for a few months now, says Michelle in Glasgow.
And one night I was listening to podcast 170 about a haunted house.
And I'm sure, says Michelle, that softly in the background, I heard another voice, a ghostly one, saying something while the guy that I was interviewing was also speaking.
I think one other person, you know, Michelle, mentioned this as well.
I've got to go back through it very carefully and see if I can hear it.
I'm sure I didn't hear anything when I listened to it myself.
But who knows?
Pixie in Melbourne, Australia, formerly from East Anglia, UK.
Nice to hear from you and thank you very much for the good things that you say.
And you too are a sufferer from tinnitus, which so many of my emailers are too.
Seems to be such a common thing.
Maybe we're just the generation that grew up on electric music and cranking it up.
I don't know, but it does seem to be something that's affecting an awful lot of people now.
Caitlin, in Chicago, Illinois, I wanted to suggest Dr. Jim Tucker from the University of Virginia.
He does studies on children who remember past lives.
Great subject, Caitlin, and I'm going to try and do that on my radio show.
And if I do, I'll put it on the podcast here as well.
That's what I'm aiming to do.
I'm aiming to put the best bits from the radio show here online as well.
Kev in Liverpool, nice to hear from you, Kev.
Fantastic photos, including the Bold Street tunnels, which I've never seen before.
Thank you for that.
We were talking in a previous edition about the time slips that are said to affect so many people who've been to Bold Street in the centre of Liverpool.
Hello, Howe.
My name's Lisa.
Just found your show.
Like it very much.
Listen while I do my work.
VAT, that's a taxi reclaiming.
I especially like the episodes with Linda Moulton Howe.
Thank you.
Please ask her to do more.
I will.
Lisa, thank you.
Terry in Agnes Water, Queensland, Australia.
I'm a 20-year-old university student studying journalism via online correspondence and the unexplained never fails to chill me out after a long day of studying.
Nice to hear that, Terry.
Susan in Michigan.
Hello, Susan.
Love the Bill Konkoleski show.
Good to hear.
Andy McAnanny, one longtime listener to the podcast and also listened in the talk sport days.
And now trying to listen on talk radio, but wondering if those shows are archived online.
Not as extensively as they are here on this podcast.
So I think we're working on that, but I need to talk to them about what they plan to do.
But the best of the radio show, I will also put on here.
But the idea of this show, which was the one that was on first, of course, is that we have completely different material, and it's done in a somewhat different way.
So the two shows are complementary, I think.
So thanks for that, Andy.
David, Jane, and Anne in Stockton.
Good to hear from you.
Walt, living near Chicago.
Thank you, Walt, suggesting Amelia Earhart.
We're on that.
Thank you.
Zoe says, thank you for inviting Nick Pope.
Sounding reassuring these days, says Zoe.
Kate Seeth in Murray, Utah.
Good to hear from you.
Greetings from Tucson, Arizona.
Love your podcast and download it to listen when driving.
Possible guest suggestion, Gary Schwartz from the Faculty of Psychology, University of Arizona.
Interesting research he's done, says John, on mediums using triple-blind studies.
Love the show, Howard, says John Waters.
It shows through that you're a real journalist.
Thank you very much indeed, John, in Tucson, Arizona.
And finally, Charles in Finland, listening through those long early shifts.
Charles, in my day job, the one that I use to try and keep me eating just about, I have to do those very early shows too, and those early get-ups.
And even though I've been doing that, my alarm has been going off around 4 a.m. for practically as long as I can remember.
Doesn't get any easier, does it, Charles?
Thank you very much.
If you want to get in touch, go to the website theunexplained.tv and follow the link from there.
And if you can make a donation to the show, that would be great.
Let's get to the guest now in South America, in Peru, Brian Forster.
A return visit to him.
Brian, thanks very much for coming back on.
Oh, my pleasure.
Thank you, Howard.
Now, describe for my listeners, would you, Brian, your location at this moment, because there are a lot of new people joining this show all the time.
And the ones who heard you first time, Rod, I'm sure they haven't, but might have forgotten.
Okay, well, I'm actually located four hours drive south of Lima, the capital of Peru.
I'm in a small town called Paracas on the coast.
And this is the location where the ancient Paracas culture with elongated heads lived.
Okay, I want to talk about the latest developments in your research into them very soon because it's all fascinating stuff.
But again, for our new listeners, and just so we can get this done and then we can move forward, how would you describe yourself?
I had a go during my intro to this show, but I wasn't very good.
I'm sure you could do way better.
Well, the funny thing is that I am a professional adventurer.
People actually pay me to take them to ancient locations and guide them around.
And I'm also an author, just finishing my 20th book.
And I have 850 YouTube videos on my channel.
Some of which, not all 850, some of which I have seen.
I mean, you are a remarkable man.
You do a lot of stuff.
One point, just to clear up here, and this came out of a show that I did recently about ghost investigations and tours that are arranged for people to see so-called haunted locations.
And I think the same may go to some elements of the field that you're involved in here.
Is there pressure on you and people who do what you do, to find things for people, to give them a bang for a buck, to make sure that they have an experience and to make sure that they discover something when they come on a tour?
Well, so far we've had basically zero people who were not completely fascinated by either our explorations around Cusco and Machu Picchu, Tiwanaku and Pumapunku in Bolivia, or here on the coast of Peru.
I'm actually four hours' drive north of the Nazca lines, so that's also reasonably close.
So everyone's been honestly quite blown away by their adventures with us.
Great.
And you don't feel that as somebody who provides a tour that you have to discover something new for them every time.
It's not that kind of thing.
Well, honestly, we only do the tours about 25% of the time because I don't want to overwork the sites or over-visit them.
So I'm usually happily pleased to find something that I've never seen before in any of these locations.
And is it getting more difficult to take tours to places like the Nazca lines because governments are getting more protective about their ancient and sacred sites?
Actually, it's quite the opposite.
The present Peruvian government is expanding tourism, and so they're actually working on rebuilding some of the ancient sites and providing better services to visitors.
And there is a sense, isn't there, that in South America and in Egypt, which I know that you've had involvement with too, we find clues to who we might have been and who might have been here before we were here.
Very much so.
We're getting more and more scientific evidence of a much greater antiquity than what we've been taught in school.
Now, my plan had been to get you back on this show a little later this year.
That was until I started reading the British tabloid newspapers a few weeks ago.
And you know what I'm going to say?
You made a certain amount of headline news over here and around the world because of a discovery that you were sort of part of.
It was something that was discovered in a jar that looked like some kind of fairy or ancient alien creature or hybrid something, but really, really weird.
Can you talk to me about that?
I can.
If I had simply seen a photograph of it, this winged creature that looks sort of humanoid with wings, I wouldn't have believed it.
I would have thought that, of course, it was a mock-up from Hollywood or something like that.
Well, look, the picture looked like something when I was a kid, some of the very old fairgrounds were still around.
They were just about still here.
And they would have exhibits in jars and various things.
And it would have come from an era of weirdness.
And there was a lot of fakery around.
So my first thought was, I wonder if this has been faked up for a fair?
Well, actually, I visited Jaime Massan's office, which is where the thing in the jar, actually, there are two of them.
There's one in a jar and another one that's basically desiccated.
And I'm a trained biologist, so I looked very hard at what this was, and it appeared to me to be real.
And an American, not radiologist, but an American veterinarian was given the x-rays, and he concluded that it was some kind of life form, but what, I don't know.
And where was the exact location of this bizarre find?
It was actually found on the side of a highway in rural Mexico by a young boy, and somehow it got into the hands of Jaime Mausan, who now has it in a jar on his desk.
Right.
And the only way that I can describe this thing, and I would certainly recommend that you put Brian's details into a search engine, and very soon you will see recent media coverage of this thing, because you're there with the jar and this thing in the jar.
It almost looks like something at the start of a Walt Disney feature.
It does, or a horror movie.
It seems to be part humanoid, part bat, part something else.
It's a very strange thing.
And clearly somebody had decided that it was important enough to want to preserve it.
Well, the unfortunate thing is that they put it in formaldehyde, which destroys the DNA.
So they will not be able to do DNA testing of it.
But again, actually, in a country like Mexico, odd things are reasonably common as compared to some other nations.
Yeah, I can well believe that.
So as far as you are aware, because you were in at the beginning of this thing and helped it to get the media coverage that it got, where does the research into it and on it stand at this moment?
Well, it's in a video called Watchers 10 made by L.A. Marzulli.
He filmed it two and a half years ago, and it took that long for Jaime Massan to give him permission to publish the video.
But Hopefully the x-rays will be shown to a number of physicians and anatomists in order to be able to see if they can detect fakery or not.
And if we see that this thing has a skeleton and perhaps remnants of a brain and things that indicate that it was living and sentient at one point, what do we do about that?
Well, hopefully find others.
The veterinarian who looked at the x-rays also noticed that there was buckshot inside.
So it's believed that someone, possibly a farmer, shot this thing as it was flying.
That makes it even more intriguing.
So we can assume that maybe a farmer thought this was some kind of rogue bird eating his crops.
We can only assume here.
Let fly with the buckshot and brought this thing down.
Yeah, I don't tend to look at cryptozoology too much, but since I personally was able to examine it, that's why I published photographs and articles, because I'm very perplexed as to what this thing is and was.
But of all people, you are not surprised by anomalous creatures or the remains thereof.
No, because of course, as a biologist, I've seen photographs of some very strange animals that have been found deep in the ocean, etc.
And I'm sure there are species that have not been properly detected and examined so far and will show up in the future.
And I wonder if this ties in, Brian, with the latest thinking about how life may have got onto this planet and possibly others, in that it might have been spread around the universe by perhaps asteroids or comets, bits of space rock carrying bits of whatever soup is out there in the deepest recesses of the universe and actually depositing those things in our atmosphere and seeding life or the elements for it.
I think so.
I was forced to study Darwinian evolution for four years, which I agree with on some level, but I think life is far more complicated than the simple Darwinian evolutionary model.
Hopefully through time, we'll be able to learn more about not only what life is, but who we are and where we come from as well.
Last time we talked, we talked about the elongated skulls that have been found in your neck of the woods, and you said that research into them was ongoing, and I think you got some new material.
Yes, we finally have new DNA results from four of the elongated skulls from this area.
And what do they say?
What does that material tell you?
Well, the analysis was done through Lakehead University, which is in Canada.
It's one of the best ancient DNA research labs in the world.
And only one haplogroup, which tells you your ethnicity, showed up in each of the four.
There was a baby skull that was 22 months old when it died 2,000 years ago.
And the only haplogroup that showed up was what's called U2E1, which is proto-Germanic or proto-Baltic Slavic, which should not be on the coast of Peru.
Which would mean that that person was an awful long way from home, obviously.
Very much so.
Which, again, further fuels the notion that ancient peoples were able to travel in ways that we have not given them credit for up to now.
Exactly.
I'm trying to work on the possible migration route.
It could have been through the ancestors of these people, because the second one actually turned out to be T2B, which is European, as in the British Isles or the Baltic states.
Number three is H1, which is Western Europe or Basque.
And the fourth one is H2A, which is Eastern European or from the Caucasus.
So I'm trying to figure out the migration pattern, which was likely through the Indian Ocean and then the Pacific to get to the coast of Peru.
We also talked when we discussed these elongated skulls last time around about why they may be like that, whether they were a form of creature, a form of being, human being, or early human being that just looked like that, or whether they had been subjected to some form of ritual process that involved, and it sounds and it is horrendous, elongating the skull through the use of pressure.
Yes, well, that's true.
And elongated skulls or cranial deformation has been found on six of the seven continents.
Most of them are the result of cranial deformation.
But I was fortunate to have a radiologist with me about three weeks to a month ago around Lake Titicaca.
And we found a skeleton in a very small museum.
He dated at about 12 years old, and he said the head was so large that it could not be human.
He said, this is not cranial deformation.
And next to it was found the fetus of a baby about eight months in gestation.
And he also, the head of that was about the size of its torso.
And he said that also cannot be human, as in not Homo sapiens sapiens.
A head the size of the torso.
Yes, I'm not exaggerating.
That's astonishing.
Now, although we can't know much at this stage, and I guess there's an awful lot more research and looking to be done, what it is telling us is that potentially our view of how we evolved to be what we are may not be in any way correct.
Well, or at least there most likely were subspecies of humans that existed in the past that were probably absorbed into or wiped out by us as in Homo sapiens sapiens.
We had the example, of course, of Neanderthal, Denisovan, and also the little hobbit-like people from Indonesia that were exterminated by human beings.
And we get a confluence of peoples, of animals, beings, whatever you want to call them, early humans, predecessors of humans, relatives Of whatever they might have been, all coming from different places, indicating that somehow they'd learned to, well, I presume they couldn't fly, maybe they could, they'd learned to sail.
Yes.
I think that's something that especially researchers such as Thur Heyerdahl spent decades working on, of course, with his Contiki and Ra expeditions, etc.
I think that most archaeologists and anthropologists are not properly informed as to the intelligence of ancient people and their ability to build something like a sailing craft.
Well, certainly there is a good body of knowledge that suggests that there was a group of people well south of where I'm speaking from at the moment in London who were able to spread their influence way north.
And from what you're saying, there are indications that perhaps even before that, there were people who were able to do that and go perhaps east-west.
Yes, and I think that's what the paracas are starting to show us through the DNA results.
We're planning on much more extensive ones, but if we keep coming up with either European or Middle Eastern DNA showing up on the coast of Peru 2,000 plus years ago, we're clearly seeing that human migration is far more complicated in the Americas than what we've been taught.
And if they were evolved and sophisticated enough to use boats and travel long distances, then they will have had other artifacts.
We would call them artifacts, but they would have had other tools of their lives.
And I presume you're going to be looking for those too.
Yes, we found that the Paracas, for example, had the most advanced form of textile known likely in the Americas 2,000 plus years ago.
And they may also have known of the concept of the potter's wheel, which no other Mesoamerican culture is supposed to have known about.
Now, I've used some very clumsy terms, and they're not the best terms that I've used.
Would humanoid be the term that works here?
At this point, yeah, I would say humanoid or a subspecies of human.
Until we get more results, we can't really theorize too much.
But the radiologist was emphatic that there's no way that the skulls that he saw, which were extremely elongated, could have been the result of any form of cranial deformation.
He said these people had to have been born like that.
Astonishing.
And if we see and look at examples from nature today, big head doesn't automatically mean big brain, does it?
We can't automatically assume that these people had an intellect as high as ours or close to it.
Well, some of the parakaskulls that we've examined are about 30% larger than normal.
And by looking inside the cranial cavity, you can see that the brain filled up the entire thing.
So it is very likely that their brains were larger than ours.
So if they had larger brains than us, it's reasonable to assume that they could do things and they could certainly travel, but they must have been able to do other things and perhaps be aware of their surroundings, be aware of the sky above them and able to map it as the ancient Egyptians did.
So the hunt for evidence is well and truly on.
I don't even know how you would begin that.
Oh, it's a process that I'm working on practically every day.
I'm very fortunate in that I'm about a 30-minute drive from a massive ancient cemetery, which unfortunately is being looted, but often artifacts are left behind by the thieves, which give us clues into who these ancient people were.
Now, that's difficult, isn't it, when you've got people stealing stuff and they must have been doing that for generations.
An awful lot of potential evidence has probably been taken away by people who wouldn't understand it.
Well, that's true.
And up until the 1960s, a lot of artifacts were shipped out of Peru to private collections and major museums.
The government has put a stop to that now.
But again, I'm fortunate in that I'm able to often find artifacts that lead or give us clues as to the nature of these people.
So what will you be doing next?
Actually, at the moment, I'm working on a book about the Paracas.
They've never really been documented that well, and especially not for the general public.
There are numerous archaeological notes that have been written, but those are only shared amongst different colleagues.
So this is for general publication.
But I can't finish the book until our next set of DNA testing is done.
Now, when I was a kid, most people knew about the ancient Egyptians because of the Tutankhamun exhibition and various other things.
We learned about it at school.
And later we came to learn about the Mayans.
Do you think that these people, these humanoids, would be comparable with the Mayans and the ancient Egyptians?
Would they be on a par with them potentially?
Not in terms of their constructions, but again, no one is really studying these people, so that's why I've kind of taken it on.
And my wife and I live in Paracas, so it's the ideal location to research this.
These people also had red hair, which genetically should not be there.
That's another indication of Middle Eastern or European ancestry.
So I'm tracking westward into different island groups to see if the red hair also existed in those locations.
Well, if it's possible that they were traveling in that way, and it seems feasible that they were and knew how to do that, then somewhere there's going to be, perhaps you'd have to dig quite a way down for it, the remnants of a boat or possibly a navigation instrument.
Presumably they might have been able to depend on ocean currents and tides and that sort of thing to an extent.
But you need at some point to develop something along the lines of a sextant to really know where you're going, don't you?
Yes, I suppose you do.
But actually, the Polynesians are famous for having Been able to travel thousands of miles without any proper, what we would call a navigational instrument.
They used the sun, the stars, the moon, winds, currents, and migration patterns of birds.
And they were very efficient at moving throughout the Pacific.
So at the moment, these people, these humanoids, are a great mystery.
We don't know anything of what they may have written or noted down about themselves, the stories they passed on, the sort of education they might have had, the things they believed.
We literally are completely in the dark about those things as of right now.
To some extent, yes.
But what we're starting to find out now is that the so-called Nazca culture, which many of your listeners will have heard of the Nazca Lines, the Nazca culture actually moved into the territory of the Paracas and exterminated the royal bloodline.
And it was the Paracas who began the whole line and geoglyph system that we call Nazca.
Okay.
So what's that saying to us?
Well, it's indicating, for example, there is a geoglyph which is almost 500 feet tall.
It's located on the side of a mountain, and it can only be seen from the ocean.
So we think that that was a navigational instrument or a homing beacon for them, because the landscape of the Peruvian coast is not mountainous.
So there's no real great markers for you to be able to figure out where you are.
But since this points straight north, it would be very effective for someone trying to come home from a northern location.
So just as these days we have markers and buoys, buoys, as you say, at the entrance to harbors like Liverpool or New York or San Francisco, whatever, they had their own ancient way of doing this, we think.
Yes, and you can see this marker from several miles away.
Again, it's 500 feet tall.
It's in the shape of a trident, and no one's been able to decode what that symbol means yet.
But of course, I'm actively working on it.
Are you concerned that you're not getting support from academic institutions?
The kind of research that is done in Egypt and on other civilizations is not being done on these people.
And you're having to carry the standard yourself.
Well, not quite alone, but you know what I'm saying.
Are you concerned that more interest is not being taken?
From academics, not really, because I can access most of their information.
I'm actually working with one of the top archaeologists of Peru in terms of the DNA testing, and he is one of the world experts on the Paracas and other cultures of this area.
So I have him and also Senior Juan Navarro, who was my mentor who recently died.
I spent six years with him studying this whole area.
So I'm looking more at the general public's interest than academics, to be frank.
Now, ancient people who lived in Scotland, what we know about them in the islands way north, lived a very rough and ready existence because of the weather and the privations that they had up there.
And, you know, their homes were built into hillsides.
They were great chunks of rough-hewn rock.
Some of those things survive.
What do we know of the way that the Paracas lived, of the houses that they had or the homes that they had?
Did they live in huts?
Did they build stone homes to live in?
Do we know anything about that?
Yes, there's actually a Paracas royal village that is underground.
So it seems that the royalty enjoyed living underground for some reason.
The common folk lived in probably thatch huts of a sort or made of cane.
But there is about 20 kilometers from here, there is this major Parakas center where the houses are all underground.
Almost as interesting as the way that people live and how they thrive is how they're wiped out, or not necessarily wiped out, but how they die, the sort of diseases that they succumb to, the things that they're afraid of, the predators that get them.
Any evidence of those things?
Not really, because Paracas is quite a desert area, and the Paracas people were very adept at agriculture because the water systems are actually underground.
They come in underground streams from the Andes and empty into the ocean.
So they were very prolific at growing food, and they were also master mariners in terms of fishing and catching sea lions and possibly whales.
So that's why I'm tending to look at a great navigational capability that preceded them, because the archaeologists will admit they do not know where this culture came from.
They suddenly appear 3,000 years ago and then disappear 2,000 years ago.
So we know little of them.
We know a certain amount about them, but we don't know what their influences may have been, you know, who they got along with, who they didn't get along with, who they fought with.
Well, this area was quite...
And again, we're getting more information that it probably was the Nazca who were forced to move south because of drying conditions in their area that they took over the more fertile Paracas territory and exterminated the royal family because we do not find the red hair or elongated skulls in the Nazca record.
And Brian, in the research that's being done now, is there anything that will help us to understand or detect whether elements of them are within us somehow?
Unfortunately, again, they seem to have been exterminated or were weeded out over the course of a few hundred years, probably starting about 100 BC.
The Nazca themselves wound up destroying their entire Environment by cutting all the trees down, thereby destroying the soil.
So they were forced to leave the coast of Peru for the highlands about 600 AD.
And that restricts our ability to find out those things.
I'm thinking really about potential DNA clues and that sort of thing.
Well, there is a possibility that some of the Paracas were able to escape the onslaught of the Nazca, and they moved on an ancient road system into the highlands of Peru and could very well be part of the bloodline of the famous Inca civilization because the Inca did deform their children's skulls and had red hair, supposedly.
Right, so there may be some kind of confluence there between those peoples that we need to discover.
But it's just unfortunate that they succumb to the onslaught of another bunch of people.
Yeah, and also I do know people who are of Inca blood, and so we would like to have their DNA tested if possible in the future and see if there are some interesting haplogroups that show up, which are neither typical European, as in Spanish, or Native American.
How would you sum up what use this research is to science?
I'm honestly not concerned about that.
I find the culture fascinating.
And when I started to study them, I was amazed to see that very few academics were studying them at all.
And if for nothing else, this strange thing about the elongated heads.
It must be a marvelous thing, though, to be in a field of research that you are pioneering yourself.
Yeah, actually, I very much love it.
Now, your website is a great portal.
It's full of material, videos, details of stuff that you're doing.
One of the, as I came back from work today, turned on the computer, checked with your website as it looks today.
One of the presentations there is High Technology Machu Picchu.
Just that title alone intrigued me.
I didn't get a chance to look into it.
Well, we're finding, I do a lot of work up in the Cusco area as well, which was the capital city of the Inca.
And we're finding more and more evidence that there was a civilization that existed before the Inca that had some form of high technology because the megalithic works of that area were not done by the Inca.
Right.
So what do we know about that?
And when you talk about high technology, well, we think about the Egyptians and the things that they could do, the way that the pyramids were built, the technological sophistication, the geometry, and all the rest of it.
Are we talking about technology of that sort of order?
Of that sort, or possibly even more advanced.
I recently wrote a book called Aftershock, which is about the global cataclysm that happened 12,000 years ago.
And it's very much my opinion that the megalithic work in the Cusco area, as well as some of the famous and not so famous structures in Egypt, such as the Great Pyramids, were not built by the Egyptians.
The Egyptians found them 5,000 years ago and adopted them because they were a Bronze Age culture up until about 800 BC.
Some of this sounds like, I may be wrong, that it ties in with the work of Graham Hancock.
Very much so.
Graham was a very early influence.
His Fingerprints of the Gods is a masterwork.
So he had a very difficult time battling academics, whereas I honestly don't bother with that.
My job is to inform the general public of my findings.
Okay.
I mean, high technology, just that headline intrigued me greatly.
The sorts of things that have been found, what would they include?
Just give me a few details.
Well, it's the incredible intricacy of the stonework.
Graham Hancock was very famous at once saying that some of the work in Cusco, you can't fit either a credit card or a piece of paper in the joint.
And in fact, you can't fit a human hair.
They're so good.
And the Inca civilization was also a Bronze Age culture.
So they didn't have the tools to be able to shape hard stone like granite and basalt.
The same, again, with the Egyptians.
The Egyptians did not have the capability, at least the dynastic Egyptians, to be able to cut and shape all the stone for the Great Pyramid, which is 2.3 million blocks.
I think the idea that the Egyptians were capable of that work is completely nonsensical at this point.
We have a lot of scientific evidence to back that up.
And do we think that they maybe had a system of geometry that was as sophisticated, as developed as the ancient Egyptians appear to have had?
Well, the strange thing is that a lot of the work in Egypt is very linear, whereas the work in Peru is more organic.
So there is one massive wall called Sacsay Waman, which is several hundred feet long, and it contains stones weighing as much as 120 tons.
And these stones fit together with almost perfect accuracy.
Again, not something that a Bronze Age culture could have done.
I mean, to me, the first thing I think about, being a Brit and living not too far away from this place, the first thing I think about when you talk about those things is Stonehenge.
Well, true enough.
In Stonehenge, it would have been very difficult to move those, you know, the bluestones from Wales across that terrain because it rains so much where you live.
So they are quite profound, but in terms of technical accuracy, they are almost child's play compared to what we see in Peru and to some degree, Bolivia.
Now, I said at the head of this that I wanted to get up to speed with you.
So in 2016, what else are you excited about?
Well, we have a major tour happening in November with Hugh Newman of Megalithomania.
Normally, quite a few British people come along with that.
And then I'm planning on spending the next six weeks here in Paracas just because My wife and I have been traveling almost too much.
And early in January, we're hoping that we're going to be on tour in India looking at lost ancient high technology.
Then March, we have our fifth annual tour of Egypt.
Boy, and what are you hoping to achieve in Egypt?
Well, we're going to be visiting all of the famous sites, of course, like Giza, Dendara, Thebes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But we're also going to have a site right close to the Mediterranean whose name now escapes me.
But it's an ancient site that has not been excavated much, and it seems to have been destroyed by some kind of cataclysmic event.
Actually, the name comes to me.
It's called Tannis, and almost no one goes there.
But we've seen sites or signs of possible vitrification of stone, which means that it could have been hit by plasma from the sun 12,000 years ago.
Right.
That's interesting because you're not the first person to mention that.
That is a sign of that, isn't it?
If you have things that are turned into glass by extreme heat, that's telling you that something pretty intense happened.
Yes, that's right.
And Dr. Robert Schock is probably the world authority on that.
He's a geologist.
He's an expert on weathering of stone, and he's the one that was able to establish that the Sphinx, for example, has to be at least 8,000 years old because of the weathering patterns.
And going out to the Middle East in these troubled times, and they are troubled times, and we don't know what's going to happen next, is that a difficulty?
Is that a concern for you?
I would imagine if you're taking ordinary people out there or people who are experts in their field who want to come along with you, you've still got to do things like make sure you're safe, organize insurance and that kind of thing.
That's true.
But we have absolute experts who organize the tour called the Kemet School who are based in Cairo.
And there are no problems in Egypt now, except around the Sinai, which is hundreds of miles away.
So I would actually fly to Egypt tomorrow if somebody gave me a ticket.
I'm not afraid of the country at all.
No, I think you have to take your chances if you want to experience life.
You're right.
Just a quick thing.
Your audio slightly is breaking up.
I'm just trying to make sure.
Are you doing anything else with your computer while we're talking?
Because I think it might be making us break up slightly.
No, I'm not.
I only have you on.
Okay.
I need to be sure.
You've cleared up now nicely.
Do you know anything about giants?
Giants, a topic that really fascinates me.
And I've done one show about giants, and we parked it there.
But what do we know about giants in ancient times?
Well, there are legends from around the world of giants.
Of course, most of them have been exaggerated.
I think it's very, it's a common belief now that there were very tall people who lived in, especially North America, either with or prior to the time of the Native Americans, because there are many legends of them battling people seven, eight feet tall who had red hair.
And also, of course, the Nephilim is a biblical account of very tall quasi-humanoids.
So I think there probably is or was abundant scientific evidence.
However, most of it has been hidden away from the public by devious minds.
Meaning?
Meaning, because people of that stature and possibly not being exactly Homo sapiens and sapiens doesn't fit the Darwinian paradigm, which is heavy duty in academia.
So I know for certain that certain institutions in the United States have found possibly hundreds of skeletons of very tall people that are likely hidden away now in the recesses of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Makes you wonder, if that is so, what it is they would not want us to know.
Well, again, it doesn't fit into the standard Darwinian paradigm.
Right.
So, you know, it upsets the apple cart from that point of view.
But the march of science and understanding should be forward progression, shouldn't it?
Well, it's supposed to be, but unfortunately, in many cases, it's a boys and girls club, and only those that are within the academic circle are allowed access to certain information.
And they all confirm with each other what they think history is.
And that's the great battle that Graham Hancock started when he wrote Fingerprints of the Gods.
And thankfully, he continues to this day researching.
But now there are thousands of us doing this around the world.
And you're confident and comfortable that all of us have finite lives here.
In the time scales that you look at when you look back through history, our lives are just a snap of a finger.
They're a blip.
You're confident that going forward, there will be people who will want to carry this research and this quest forward?
Yes, it seems to be expanding rapidly thanks to the internet.
People are questioning a lot of different things now.
They're questioning belief systems.
They're questioning banking.
They're questioning governments.
And they're also questioning history.
And so that's basically my job, I guess, is as I learn new things, I get to share it with whoever wants to know about it.
And hopefully they will take the baton and carry it on with them.
Okay, we have some audio breakup, but you're still intelligible.
But just to explain to my listeners, you are an awful long way away in South America.
And the fact that we can talk like this is pretty damn remarkable, I think, in 2016.
One thing that I haven't asked you about, and some of my listeners would expect me to, and I get why they would.
You haven't mentioned any possible influence or any anomalous influence that may have been brought to bear on any of these people, and the ones in particular that you study, by possible extraterrestrials, Is the only way I can put it.
Well, my mind is open to that possibility.
The problem, of course, with the DNA testing is that what the computer does is it compares DNA that you provide it with what is in the registered GenBank, which is a depository of all known human DNA.
Unless there's alien DNA in there, the machine or the computer program simply can't detect anything like that.
But I am open to the idea that seeding from other systems did occur on this planet.
That's a concern, isn't it, if we're using automated systems and computers, which have tremendous capacity to go through samples that are delivered to them at great speed.
But if it's something that's not in the database, then possibly something fairly mind-blowing, earth-shattering, whatever, might get overlooked.
At this point, but DNA processing is becoming much more sophisticated.
The cost has dropped by 90% in the last five years.
So if we're able to, if it keeps growing at that rate, I think they will be able to detect certain strands or elements of DNA which is not human, and therefore it either has to be a subclass of humanity or something literally out of this world.
You tell me at the top of this you've written 20 books.
Can you tell me anything about 21, 22?
Yes, actually number 20, I'm finishing over the next month.
It's about Akhenaten, the great pharaoh of Egypt.
And 21 is the book about the Paracas.
And 22, maybe Lost Ancient High Technology of India, if our tour happens in January.
India, right.
Is that a first, is that a new zone for you?
Very much.
I've never really been interested in going, mainly because I don't like populations of a billion people.
But I've seen some very convincing photographs that there are stone structures there that are much older than any known culture and were inherited by the present occupants.
And of course, the legends of India talk about vimanas and flying ships and bolts of lightning and all sorts of things.
So I think it'll be intriguing.
They do very much.
But isn't it interesting, and you're so right, their research tends to stay, and it may be just a language thing, the language that things are written in, tends to stay within the Indian subcontinent.
So we over here, I say over here, I'm talking about North America and Europe, we kind of talk about the things that we get and we can see on the television and read about Egypt really easily.
A lot of people are doing South America, Central America now because it's easily accessible from the U.S. But they don't talk about India.
It's not uncharted because the people who live there know, but to us, it's not as known as it maybe ought to be.
I completely agree.
And it's because an engineer and a geologist that I know were in India less than a year ago, and they saw megalithic structures that can't be explained easily in terms of the known Indian cultures that we hear of.
So again, we could be looking at civilizations existing 12,000 plus years ago in India whose work has been inherited by later people.
Now, India itself, and you can include Pakistan beyond, that whole area is utterly vast.
It is huge.
And there is huge variations of people and climate and territory from the cool north, which the Brits were very fond of, to the fiery south.
Different people everywhere.
Where on earth would you begin?
Well, the good thing is that, again, these friends of mine have already been there and they've located, I think, 10 different major sites.
And so I think our tour is supposed to be 10 or 12 days.
So we'll start with that and see if it gets more intriguing to make duplicate trips in the future.
And when you go, how do you record what you find?
Are you allowed to do any digging or do you just have to take pictures?
Basically pictures, video, and we have a megalithic expert that lives in India who will be our major guide.
So he will be able to inform us through interviews, etc.
And our geologists may be able to take samples, not by breaking stone, but finding bits of stone on the ground, etc.
The Indian culture is very visual.
The stories are told in pictures and symbols.
Wouldn't it be interesting if you could get real life on the ground tie-ins with the stories that people tell of ancient times in India and the tie-ins to religion and that sort of thing?
Well, exactly.
And the point is that a lot of oral traditions or even written traditions are not made up.
They're not fairy tales.
Usually these things are based on fact as a base.
So, for example, again, the giants of North America, most archaeologists, of course, say that Native people made the stories up, but the Native people are saying, no, this is our history.
So you have to look for that seed in the complex story to begin with.
And that's a skill in itself, isn't it?
Very much.
Okay.
Well, you've got a lot on your plate and a lot that you've got to do.
Now, look, we meant this show to be a catch-up, really, and a coming up to speed in 2016.
Before we park this, is there anything that I should have asked you about and haven't?
No, I think we covered quite a lot of ground.
And I'm very, very thankful that you decided to have this conversation with me.
I don't know how you keep all the balls in the air, to be perfectly frank.
And I can understand why you do the tours and that sort of stuff, because you have to make money from somewhere to finance everything else.
And everything cross-fertilizes back, doesn't it?
So when you do the tours and you do the research, then the benefits of your research go Into the tours.
Everything connects.
Same with the books.
But keeping all the balls in the air, Brian, is not an easy thing.
Have you got a backroom staff of 30, 40 people?
No, but I have a very low threshold of boredom.
So I have to keep active.
And if one topic is not advancing, then I move to one of the other ones.
So here on the coast, I'm back to studying the Paracas.
And then in October, I'll be back in Cusco studying the Inca and older cultures.
And then on and on it goes.
And you're steeped in all of this.
Presumably, you get back up to the U.S. from time to time.
I mean, how do you adjust?
When you go to not just the U.S., but, you know, over here, U.K. and Europe, very different from where you are right now.
How on earth do you adjust?
Well, we tend to spend most of our time in Peru.
I like to visit the U.S. maybe for a week or two per year, but that's about it.
And we are actually going to Britain and Ireland and Brittany in September of next year, thanks to James Swagger.
And that'll be great.
I love to visit Britain once every two or three years because I do have ancestry there and very much love the English culture and pubs, et cetera.
So that'll be good.
Well, you'll be interested in the whole Celtic thing.
And I speak as one with connections, as maybe you have too.
But you know, the links between the people of Scotland and the Welsh and the Irish and then all the way down into France, it's all fascinating here.
Oh, it is.
It's very interesting.
And actually, through part of my study for this book, for some strange reason, I'm looking for the origins of such things as the potter's wheel, etc.
And Europe has an amazing history in terms of conflict and people moving in and taking over.
Like the Bronze Age appears to have been actually quite brutal on older cultures in parts of Europe.
And there's a lot to discover.
And, you know, we have the resources here.
We have the pressure of population.
So lots of people around who might be studying these things.
So I think you're going to find a lot.
And James Swagger has been on this show.
He is a man who you can sit back and just listen to.
He's a tremendous storyteller.
Oh, he's excellent.
Now, if people want to find out about you and discover that great website and discover the work that you've done, find out about the 22 books and the tours and all the rest of it, where do they go?
How do they do that?
It's called Hidden Inca Tours.
www.hiddenincatours.com and it's a resource for those who want to use it.
I also have another website coming online called hiddenhumanhistory.com and it will be a mega depository of information.
Now, we are talking across, I think there's a six-hour time difference between us.
I mean, at this end of the day, I get very confused and rely very much on black coffee.
You're at the beginning of your day.
We know that.
It's breakfast time, just at the back end of breakfast time where you are.
On a typical day like this one, where we're talking, what will you do?
I'm going to be working on my Paracas book basically all day.
And do you like to get questions from people who go to your website, maybe hear this show, and feel that they want to ask you something?
Do you welcome questions from people?
Yes, I do.
All right.
Well, Brian Forster, it's nice to have had this catch up and we'll do this again.
If there's something new to talk about, let me know.
And if you hear anything about that strange winged creature and the research upon it, that creature found in a jar, apparently, did you say tossed from a car by the looks of it or by the side of a highway?
We need to know more about that.
I will definitely post anything I learn about it if I hear more from it.
My friend Elie Marzuli is the one who's researching it more than I am.
But yeah, it's a very strange thing.
And how did you, you got yourself into a lot of papers here.
That's why we're having this conversation.
How do the journalists who report these things contact you?
Do they just sort of phone you up out of the blue one day and say, we've heard you've done this?
Or do you make the approach, you and Eli Mazzouli?
I don't at all, actually.
I guess it's because I'm prolific on the internet that people pick things up.
And again, I was simply surprised.
I went to see Jaime Massan, who's basically a paranormal investigator.
And I was sitting next to him at his desk, and he simply pulled this jar out and said, what do you think that is?
And I went, what?
You know, that's what started my interest.
Again, if I had simply seen a photograph, I would have said, well, somebody, you know, obviously made that.
But it appears to have been a life form that died about five years ago, shot by a shotgun in rural Mexico.
And therein must lie a story.
Brian Foster, thank you very much indeed for doing that.
And if you can put me in touch with Jaime, by the way, I'd be very interested in having him on this show because I think Art Bell used to talk to him back in the day.
But very much enjoyed this and linking up with South America.
Don't often get the chance to do this.
And I wish you well in all of your works.
Thank you so much, Howard.
Always a pleasure.
The remarkable Brian Foster.
And I'll put a link to his work, of course, on my website, theunexplained.tv.
That website designed and created and honed and maintained by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thank you very much for being part of all this.
More great guests coming soon and plans for the future on this show.
Yes, it's a slow process, but it'll be here soon enough.
Thank you for all of the support and the nice things you say.
And for those times when I don't feel that I can carry on, you've helped me.
You've lifted me up.
Believe me that you've done that at times.
Thank you again.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London.
And until next we meet, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
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