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Oct. 26, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
59:24
Edition 274 - Professor Milton Wainwright

One show - two Professors - Milton Wainwright on "extra terrestrial microbial life" - andKevin Bennett on the "creepy clown craze"...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world.
On the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, my apologies, this show is a little bit later than I would have liked it to appear.
One of those months where I looked at the calendar and realised the month is almost gone and I haven't got nearly enough done.
I don't know whether you've had months like that.
Just one of those frustrating months that has been interesting in many ways, but not a great deal of progress made in it.
But I won't bore you with the details of my life.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting the show out to you and maintaining the website and doing the other cool stuff that he always does for us.
Thank you, Adam.
And thank you to you if you've been in touch recently by email.
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Now, two things to do on this edition.
And basically, it's a little bit of housekeeping, getting some material that I've been meaning to get out to you.
In a little while, we'll be hearing from British professor Milton Wainwright, who believes he may, that is may, have found extraterrestrial microbial life way above this planet.
Now, he made some headlines a few months ago, and you would have thought that the world's media and the world's research institutions would be beating a path to him to try and find out more about his work and also to try and fund some more work.
But those things are not happening for reasons that, frankly, baffle me.
Very interesting man, and you'll hear him and his story coming soon.
But before that, we're going to find out about something that's been in the news over the last month or two.
The creepy clown phenomenon.
You know, this idea of people in the US or the UK and various other countries dressing up as scary clowns and, frankly, terrorizing some people.
Now, you know, a lot of people have done this for a joke.
It's been perfectly innocuous.
And in some cases, it hasn't been.
But how has it spread?
Where did it start and what's it all about?
The man who's done some work on this is psychology professor Kevin Bennett at Penn State University in the U.S. And recently in a recording I made here, I caught up with him and asked him what he thinks it's all about.
I really think that there is no need to panic at this point.
I really don't think that there are mutant killer clowns that are breeding along the edge of the forest in your town or my town or anywhere else.
I don't think there's a network of killer clowns or psychotic clowns or criminal clowns that are popping up in different cities.
I really think that this all started with a hoax.
And then since then, there's some important psychological principles that can explain why it spread so far.
And it has to do with social panic or moral panic as well as social contagion.
But I do think that it started out as a hoax.
And since then, different people have joined in the clown movement, if you will, for various reasons.
I think each of these clown sightings needs to be taken individually or analyzed individually, I believe.
But of course, the difficulty is that they're all impacting on the public consciousness and getting into the news all at once and all together.
And as you say, they may all be very different.
It reminds me, and tell me if I'm wrong, years ago I studied politics and psychology.
And I studied a thing called the theory of crowd behavior.
Now, when you get a crowd, some people in the middle start to decide to do things like get a little bit out of control.
And that behavior spreads from the middle all the way to the outer edges, and the crowd gets a morality of its own.
It seems to me that this phenomenon is almost like that.
It started in one place and has spread outwards and outwards and outwards.
And people think that by seeing reports of this and then deciding to do it themselves for whatever reason, they are allowed to do whatever they like.
It takes on a, as I say, a morality of its own.
Yeah, I think it's really interesting because if you look at the psychology of crowds, you might have a crowd of, let's say, a thousand or one thousand, two thousand people, and almost every single person in that crowd has every intention of behaving well in a good way, in a productive way.
And it just takes one or two people, like you said, maybe near the center of the crowd, who start behaving in an aggressive way or violent way or in some criminal or illegal way.
And then that makes the behavior a little bit more legitimate for the people that are right around them.
And then they begin that behavior, and then it spreads out, and it validates it as it spreads out.
And so after you start off with one or two people that are behaving violently, it spreads exponentially to the rest of the crowd, even though the rest of the crowd really had no intention of doing that when they showed up at that event or protest or whatever it might be.
And I think a very similar thing is happening here, but it's not the case that you have 2,000 clowns that are all together in a crowd, but you do have people connected online and people using social media and looking at videos or reading reports of clown sightings.
And then they feel like, well, this is legitimate behavior.
Maybe I could somehow get involved with this strange phenomenon.
We've seen the power over the years of social media.
I am one of those many millions of people around the world who had a cold bucket of water chucked over my head for charity about a year or two ago.
So we know that social media can spread ideas very, very quickly.
But are we here seeing an example of how social media is being used for ill and how it might develop in the future to do that?
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that this is an example of social media that's not going in the best direction.
And there's lots of cases of good ideas being spread and good behaviors.
But we see lots of horrible behaviors that are getting spread, and this is one example of that.
And I think people are jumping in to the clown craze for different reasons.
I mean, some people might just be interested in the attention, and so they might dress up as a clown and then have someone videotape it, and then they post that.
Other people might just have mental illnesses to begin with, and then they decide, well, I can dress up as a clown, and that brings a sense of anonymity to me.
And we know that people are more likely to behave aggressively whenever they are anonymous, when their face is covered up or they're hiding behind the wall of a computer or social media.
And the difficulty is, isn't it, Kevin, that although a lot of the people who've wanted to do this and have decided to join up with it, whether they're in the US or the UK or wherever they are, you know, they've wanted to do it just for fun and they haven't wanted to frighten people.
But as you say, a Rolling Stone gathers a certain amount of moss here and it has agglomerated, it has taken on board some people who are not well motivated, people running along with baseball bats and all these things that we've seen.
So this is a difficult phenomenon for the authorities in all of our different countries to control, isn't it?
Because of the number and type of people that it's gathered.
Yeah, exactly.
And from what I understand and what I've read about the different reports, and I try to keep up with all these reports, but there are so many actually that it's difficult to keep up with.
But a lot of them result in a police report being filed.
The police come out and investigate, and usually they find nothing.
I mean, there are some cases where they've made a few arrests and there have been some violent episodes as well.
But the vast majority of these cases are really nothing happens and the clowns just kind of disappear off into the darkness and nobody ever really discovers anything.
And I think that contributes to the social panic or the moral panic that some people are feeling right now.
And I think it's similar to some of the social panics that we've experienced in previous decades, like the satanic ritual panic of the 1990s.
There was something called stranger danger in the 1980s where parents were terrified that somebody would pull up in a van and throw their child on the van and take off.
And that exploits every parent's worst fear because unfortunately there's a kernel of truth to that.
I mean, that does happen every once in a while.
But I think it's been greatly, it was greatly exaggerated in the media and elsewhere.
Same thing with the satanic rituals.
You can go back to witch hunts from the 1500, 1600s in Europe and in the United States, and you see a similar pattern here.
And most of these patterns tend to go in clusters as well.
So you'll have one report, one sighting, and then a few days later, five, six, seven, eight pop up all at once, and then it might die down.
And then a week later, you have another cluster.
So they seem to grow in clusters like that.
What advice would you give, if indeed you would give any advice, to parents of young children?
There are lots of reports in this country.
We have a charity here called Childline, which has been getting reports about this.
A lot of kids are scared by this phenomenon, and it is gathering momentum here.
What advice would you give parents?
Well, I think the serious advice I would give to parents, and I'm a parent myself, so I know there's legitimate concern about a stranger, especially a stranger who's dressed in some kind of makeup or mask that obscures your face.
There's a fear that that person might mean harm.
And if you're walking down the street with your child and you see a clown with a weapon, a knife or something like that, my advice is to go in the other direction, of course, as quickly as possible.
But I think in some ways we're playing up the clown angle of this a little bit too much, because I would say if you see anyone on the street who's carrying a knife, you should go in another direction.
So I think the best thing you can do is to just use your gut instinct and try to avoid people that look really menacing.
I'm going to ask you about the whole clown thing in a moment, but we've asked what you think parents should do.
What about the authorities?
What about the police?
What about society here?
Because they're in a bit of a bind.
There are people who think that this is fun, and there's no great law against pranking.
But there is a law against terrifying people.
Right.
Yeah, there is no law against just wearing a clown suit and walking around.
And there's no law against innocent pranks.
But you reach a point where there's a line that you cross.
I think there's some gray area as well where you go, well, is this dangerous?
Is this just all fun?
Or is this something that's really meant to terrorize someone?
And I'm not sure what the authorities can do because you can't go around arresting everyone who's dressed as a clown, especially with Halloween coming up.
I mean, that's the other thing that's an issue here is you have Halloween.
I think this thing will increase in intensity until we reach Halloween, and then I have a feeling it'll die down after that.
But boy, it's frustrating because there are so many kids, teenagers, young adults that are jumping in here doing things because they might think it's funny and they might not realize that it's really terrifying to an eight-year-old or 10-year-old or anyone, really.
Well, we have offenses over here like threatening behavior, I'm guessing, but I don't know.
I have no specialist knowledge that police might to start using that a little bit more until this thing dies down.
But the question is, isn't it?
When will it die down?
We've got Halloween coming up, as you say.
Do we think that it will naturally roll off after that?
Well, I do think if it really is a social panic or social trend, like I think it is, it will die down after Halloween.
After we pass the high of Halloween and we get into November and also it starts to get a little colder, I think people will just hopefully grow tired of these episodes.
If you check out the internet, there's lots of what I think are false videos, fake videos, where people have decided to dress up as clowns and then they have a friend.
Clearly, it's a friend that goes and videotapes them and they make it seem like it's a legitimate clown sighting.
And that's all fun, at least for those People, but it just contributes to this whole epidemic.
I may be completely wrong, but my first thought is: you know, what is missing in the lives of people that they feel they have to join in with something like this?
There are lots of things to do in life that might bring you pleasure and fun.
Dressing up as a clown and going out there and being part of some silly worldwide craze doesn't seem to be one of them.
Yeah, well, I don't really want to get into the waters of psychoanalysis too much because that's not really my area.
But I do think that Halloween is the perfect Carl Jungian holiday in the sense that we have the opportunity to wear our shadow on the outside.
We can wear a mask and we can behave in ways that we normally would not behave.
And there's actually a lot of very good research from social psychology just looking at the role of anonymity.
And whenever you conceal yourself, you're deindividuated, which means that you can behave in ways that you normally wouldn't.
There was a study that was done a few years ago that looked at, it was a Halloween study actually, that looked at how children who are given the opportunity to take a piece of candy from a house, they can either take one or they can take a bunch of candy and the sign that was, there was a note left on the door that said, we're not home, please take one piece of candy.
And as kids came up to the door, some kids just took one and some kids took a handful.
And the kids who took more candy were the ones who were in masks and were in groups of people.
So whenever we're placed in a group of people and we're anonymous, we're most likely to transgress and behave in illegal ways.
Here's a question that would either fit at the front or the back of this, and I've decided to put it at the back of this for no particular reason.
What is this thing about clowns?
Because there are people who have a fear of clowns, and I know you don't do psychoanalysis, but it's an interesting thing, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
And that's a legitimate phobia.
There's something called chulrophobia, C-O-U-L-R-O phobia, chulrophobia, and it's a fear of clowns.
And some estimates say one out of every 12 people has some kind of anxiety issue with clowns.
Maybe they don't have full-blown chulrophobia, but they have some anxiety with clowns.
And usually that comes from some incident in childhood.
So that would be a classical conditioning approach where a clown maybe traumatized you somehow, maybe just got in your face and made a weird noise.
It doesn't have to be some kind of serious physical abuse.
But people develop phobias through a couple other ways as well.
And one is through vicarious acquisition.
And that means that you see somebody who's being traumatized by whatever it is, a clown in this case.
And then the third way that people develop phobias is through informational acquisition.
And that means that you read about reports or you watch videos even or you hear about, you hear stories about people having run-ins with whatever it is.
In this case, it's clowns.
And I think that the vicarious way and the informational way are really being promoted through the internet because that's what you do on the internet.
You watch other people that are experiencing clown attacks or they're reporting clown attacks.
And you read enough of that stuff and you develop, you could develop some kind of anxiety disorder.
When I listen to American Radio, I hear a lot of people talking at me on various talk stations, claiming that people have less and less power.
The world is becoming globalized.
Individuals are being preached to by the same kind of television programs that look the same everywhere, the same sort of commercial messages.
And they are increasingly, if you believe this narrative, feeling disempowered.
They feel that there's nothing much they can do for themselves.
Do you think that in some weird way, what we have just seen with this phenomenon is a part of people starting to kick, finding a way to kick against the stuff that they are prescribed?
Yeah, I think that that would be closer to a psychoanalysis approach.
And I think in some ways that's it's I like those explanations, but I think in some ways they reach a little bit too far.
Like if we say that the creepy clown craze reflects our underlying fears and uncertainties about what's going on in the world today, I think that sounds real nice as a sociological explanation.
But if you really analyze each individual teenager and young adult that's doing this, I don't know that that really plays a role in their decision to go out and dress as a clown and prank people or terrify people.
I think that that's when we step back and sort of look at everything, we go, well, we live in a world where there are strange people and there's fear and anxiety.
And, you know, 42 million Americans have some kind of anxiety issue, not with clowns, but just anxiety in general.
And so that, you know, it all seems to roll together, come together in some big picture about fear and anxiety and being able to fight back against something.
But a big enough phenomenon that if the New York Post article that I read about you, that's how I discovered you, is correct.
A big enough phenomenon for you to have given a presentation about this this week.
Yeah, I talk, you know, I'm at Penn State University, and we had an episode on one of our campuses just a week or so ago where there was a clown sighting on the edge of campus, I guess a couple clowns.
And through social media, word spread almost instantly.
And so something like 1,500 students gathered together in a mob and basically chased this.
They were chasing after these clowns.
Of course, they never caught them.
The clowns were never really documented or seen.
The police didn't see anything.
So it's a big issue that our students were talking about.
And I think it might have been the case that there was a clown in the woods.
Who knows?
But somebody reported it, put it on social media, and then it just took off from there.
And most of the students that were involved in the mob going after the clown, they were just out there because it was fun and they were tired of studying for three hours and they said, let's run around.
The weather's nice.
You know, I think that's, at least for that particular case, that's an explanation for it.
Most of the people who taught me gave their presentations and then took questions at the end of it.
What sort of questions did you get asked at the end of your presentation about this?
Well, you know, I get questions about the psychology Of clowns themselves and what makes them either scary or funny or whatever their role is.
And I actually like talking about that.
I could talk about that for a second because I talked about something called the uncanny valley.
And that's a term that refers to an animal or a non-human form that becomes increasingly human-like.
And it turns out that the closer something is to looking like a human face, the more comfortable we become with it.
So there's a positive relationship there up until the point where something is almost exactly like a human face, that it's uncanny.
It looks almost like a human.
Then there's this drop-off, and it's called the uncanny valley.
So there's a drop-off in how comfortable we feel about that face or that entity.
And I think clowns might fall into that valley because they look creepy.
They're clearly humans underneath, we think, but they look just off enough, just a shade off, that we go, that's really unsettling.
I feel really uncomfortable about that.
And we don't like that because whenever we look at a human face, we need to see what the intention is behind that face.
What's the emotional state?
What's the mental state?
What is this person really feeling and thinking?
And that's confusing when we look at a clown.
And that's the fundamental problem with looking at a face that has makeup on or it's obscured with a mask.
We can't do any sort of mind reading like we normally do.
And I do think, I hope it will die down.
And I think it's funny in the sense that, well, there's some hoaxes and that's okay because the internet's full of hoaxes.
But once it turns into a dangerous situation, like you have a handful of people around the world that are actually violent while they're wearing clown gear, you know, that's not funny at all.
And I know the legitimate clown community is not happy about what's going on because they feel like their livelihood is being threatened because people are scared of clowns now that just do balloons at kids' parties.
And they don't feel like they should be lumped into this group of menacing killer or psycho clowns.
Professor Kevin Bennett from Penn State University in the U.S. on the creepy clown phenomenon that he thinks may burn itself out after Halloween.
Well, if you're hearing this show in November, we may soon get the answer to that question, eh?
Now, Professor Milton Wainwright is a British guy who made some headlines a few months ago and continues to make some headlines, but not nearly enough, with some research that he's done that suggests that he may have discovered possible potential alien microbial life above this planet.
Now, I think that's remarkable stuff, and I'm amazed that the media hasn't paid more attention to him, but I did, and this is our conversation.
Since about 2013, we've been sending weather balloons to the stratosphere to a height of about 30 kilometers.
And when we're up there, we have a special sampler which opens up, and any material that's falling from space lands on the sampler, and we bring it back by parachute.
And it's all very sterile, it's the old and clean rooms, and we see what we find.
Right.
30 kilometers.
Give us an idea of exactly.
I mean, I know 30 kilometers is 30 kilometers.
But in terms of with reference to the land and the oceans and the border with space, where is that?
That's very high.
We also sampled about 41 kilometers, which is 25 miles straight up.
So that's extremely high.
So I guess you could fly in a Boeing 707, take off and take off again, maybe take off again, I'm not quite sure.
But it's extremely high.
So we're well above the Earth, but of course we're not in deep space.
We're not where the space station is.
Right.
I mean, we've all seen these silly but rather fun videos of people sending teddy bears way up to the edge of the stratosphere and the borders of space.
So it is something that is not as difficult to do these days as it used to be.
Tell me a little bit about the technology, though, Milton.
It's remarkably straightforward, remarkably simple.
The only complex thing is the sampler has to be well designed because the sampler has to open up on GPS, it has to close, it has to be maintained sterile, it has to be completely closed, and then it has to fall from the stratosphere on a parachute and make sure it doesn't obviously impact the Earth and smash.
And then all this has to be done sterile.
When we get the sampler, we have to take it into a sterile room, and then we have to use very complicated, sophisticated equipment to see what we found.
So the actual launch is probably the easiest part of the whole setup.
But I have to say, some of my friends listening to this tonight, some of the people who are into this show and very much into space technology, will be very upset if I don't ask you about the sort of rocket that you use and the way that you would launch that.
Oh, no, it's a balloon, remember.
It's a weather balloon.
Right.
So, yeah, it's a weather balloon, isn't it?
It's not rocket-propelled.
The problem with rockets is that they go too fast and anything impacting them will be smashed to smithereens.
The great thing about a balloon is it goes up nice and lazily and it samples the stratosphere I'm sorry, I got that completely wrong.
I assumed you had like a rocket that would take you so far and then this balloon would deploy.
Oh, the balloon starts off on the ground.
Oh, no, no, it's just a straightforward weather balloon.
We did most of our launches from Derbyshire across the...
Okay, and you have something built into the balloon that, as you say, is able to deploy itself by a trigger that you will send from the ground.
The whole thing is GPS coordinated, so you know exactly where you're going to deploy it.
Exactly, we know the altitude, the temperature.
We have cameras on there to see that the sampler opens and closes sufficiently okay, that there's no kind of hitch, and obviously it lands in one piece.
We make sure.
I mean, obviously, if there's a crack in the box, in cracking the sampler.
We don't use that launch.
It is, I mean, you make it sound easy.
I'm sure the engineering of the thing you send up there is not that easy.
It must be very precise.
No, the actual, as I say, the sampler is quite complicated.
When I say complicated, it actually is based on a CD drawer, would you believe?
The C D drawer opens and closes, and the samples fall onto what we call stubs, which are little round disks which fit directly into an electron microscope.
So we don't have to mess about taking the samples, making complex transfers.
The material falls onto a little stub, and the stub goes straight into the electron microscope.
I understand.
So you have something that literally comes back to Earth, and as long as, as you said at the top of this, it is absolutely sterile and you haven't taken up something from down here or managed to catch something in the atmosphere somewhere.
As long as it's completely sterile, you have something that you can remove from the device when it lands and plug straight into your microscope.
Look at it.
So there's no problem with contamination.
Right.
Why are you doing this?
Well, why indeed?
We're trying to kind of provide evidence for the theory of panspermia.
Now, the theory of panspermia says that life came from space, that life originated on Earth from space.
So instead of the normal chemical theory that suggests that chemicals got together and formed life, we suggest that life came from space.
So as soon as the Earth cooled sufficiently, the life was there ready to take off and then evolve in the normal accepted way.
Now, what we're also working on, what we call neopanspermia, neo meaning new.
So the new bit is that they're coming in all the time.
This is what we're very interested in.
So we're saying that not only did life originate from space, but it's been coming in ever since.
So that the whole of the biology of Earth has been influenced by material from space.
Now this is being reported on and talked about in the media an awful lot.
How come we haven't been, because the technology is really simple to do this, how come we haven't been doing this for decades?
Well, the reason we haven't been doing it, I guess, is that nobody's thought about it.
And, you know, this theory of panspermia or neopanspermia was very unfashionable 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Now it's becoming more fashionable.
People are beginning to accept the idea that maybe life comes in from space.
So people are beginning to think about it, obviously.
And we've been thinking about it for 20 years.
And we're now kind of trying to demonstrate the reality of this theory.
Okay.
And are we talking about organisms?
And I want to talk in our next segment about precisely what it is you have found.
Are we talking about things that might have been brought here, I don't know, in the normal drift of the tides of space, if there is such a thing, or something that might have been brought here off a comet or something like that?
We don't really know where they originate from, but we tend to think they're from comets.
We think that comets that spew out this material into space as large chunks of ice, and the chunks of ice get smaller and smaller, and then very minute parts of pieces of cometary ice hit the surface of the Earth.
And it's these we think we're sampling as we send a balloon into the stratosphere.
And the current thinking, and there's been some reporting about this not only this year but last year as well, I've read a fair amount about this, is now the great excitement is, as we spend billions of dollars and billions of pounds and Euros going out into space.
Actually, it's possible that we ourselves were seeded by something that came here from somewhere else.
Well, when you say we, the origin of life came from elsewhere, we believe.
But obviously, we've evolved.
We didn't come ready-formed as humans, obviously.
But yeah, the proto-life, the original life form, we believe, came from space.
Now, there might have been other life forms developing on Earth as well, but the majority, we think, came from space.
Now, with people spending billions, as we said, going out into space to check for life out there, this is a very nuts and bolts and very British way of doing things, isn't it?
It is incredibly cheap.
I was just reading in the newspaper today that we're spending five million in the UK next year looking for dark matter, which may or may not exist.
We know these things exist, and for a few thousand pounds, anyone can repeat this work.
It is, I mean, it's not rocket science, it's balloon science, and it's extremely cheap.
And this is one of the most frustrating things about the whole program.
We've obviously been criticized in the media and on the internet and so on.
And what we really find annoying is that other scientists are not trying to repeat it.
Now, we're not saying we're right or wrong.
We've provided this evidence and we want somebody to repeat it.
Now, NASA could do it in an afternoon.
It really is very straightforward.
Now, we've done about 10 launches now.
We've even launched over the Bonneville Salt Flats in the US, over Death Valley, as well as mainly over the UK.
And every time we go up there, we find these amazing organisms.
Now, why isn't someone proving us right or wrong?
It's a mystery.
And that's exactly why I wanted to get you on this show.
And the only reason, as I read about this before inviting you to come on here, and you very politely and kindly said yes, the only reason I can imagine why the rest of the scientific establishment and the people who do space research aren't that keen on doing this is that it is so nuts and bolts.
It is a bit Wallace and Grobit.
It's very simple.
And they would probably rather do things that require very clever and complex technical solutions.
I mean, obviously, as I keep saying, the sampler is quite sophisticated.
But the actual idea is very straightforward.
I don't know.
Okay, they could make it more complicated.
If they wanted to spend a million pounds, they could perhaps, I don't know, make it really complicated.
But they don't need to make it complicated.
It's straightforward as that is.
And what do your colleagues in this?
We're restricted, obviously, by the limited amount of money we've got to 10, 15 launches.
So the United Kingdom is at the cutting edge of this research.
Trouble is, I won't say no one, but not many people who should be listening are listening.
That's right.
In fact, we've actually been blocked in our efforts to do this.
So there's a tremendous negativity about looking for life in space for some reason.
Maybe religious.
One of the things I think may be behind it is that, of course, this interferes with the concept of Darwinism, natural selection, because if you're getting information from space all the time, then the standard view of evolution is messed about, okay?
You know, if this turns out to be so, surely it could be built into our theories.
That's right.
There's no problem with it.
You've just got to change your mind.
But of course, mindsets are very set, and people just don't want to change their mindsets.
Okay, and what sorts of response do you get from people in the scientific community, your peers around the world, in places like the US, China getting more involved in space research?
We get a negative response.
Very few people react to our work.
Now, there is very excitingly, there's a Japanese laboratory has released a, sorry, has obtained samples from aerogel from the space station.
And they're hoping to show that living organisms are captured at the space station.
Now, that would be fantastic because, of course, the space station is much higher than we can go.
So if they find life on the outside of the space station, then that's going to be amazing.
I can't let this point pass.
You said about a minute ago that you've been blocked.
Who blocked you?
Well.
You'd have to name names, but just give me an idea of the source that this might be.
We've had some negative responses from the European Space Agency.
One of my postgraduates was told that if he didn't stop this work, he'd never work in science again.
So that's the kind of thing that you come across.
Okay, well, we don't have ESA to comment on that themselves, and I hear what you say.
But, you know, that is interesting, isn't it, that there are vested, we've heard this before on this show, there are vested interests in science wherever they come from.
I want to talk next, Milton, about what you discovered, because it was the Salt Flats launch that I read about and was the one that got me interested to call you.
So let's do that next.
This is really cool stuff.
This is something that we are doing in the UK.
Now, all right, China's been in the news today with their massive 1,643-foot-wide, I think it is.
It might be wider than that, telescope, and they are starting to test that.
They're looking into space.
But here is something that you can do with a weather balloon.
I thought that they were launching from rockets and then deploy, but no, you just put it on the ground and you launch it up there.
Then some complex technology puts a little scuba CD tray out there and it collects in sterile conditions whatever it might collect and brings it back here.
And that's the interesting part.
So Milton, thank you for waiting during the break there.
What have you found?
Now, you've got to imagine that when I first did this, I wasn't too excited, I wasn't too certain we'd find anything of interest.
So when the photographs of the electron microscope work came to my computer and I scanned through them, I was absolutely gobsmacked, literally, for what we saw.
What we found were what we call biological entities.
Now, we use that expression because we don't know what kind of organisms they are.
They're organisms, but we don't know if they're plants, animals, insects, or whatever.
But of course, they're microorganisms, so they're very, very small.
The maximum size is about 30 microns.
So that's extremely small.
Just about seeable with the naked eye.
Okay, and what are they?
Do they look like anything that we know?
No, that's a very important thing.
Well, first of all, why do we know they're organisms?
Well, for a number of reasons.
First of all, they have form, they have structure.
They have what we call bilateral symmetry.
That is, if you put a line through them, you've got equal shape on either side, if you see what I mean.
I mean, if you put a line through or lines through a piece of fluff, then it's all over the place, yeah?
But imagine if I put a line through you, you'd be symmetrical, yeah?
So they've got bilateral symmetry, that's okay, but what's more amazing is that when we put what we call EDX on them, which is a special machine that we can zoom in on them, and when we do this, we find they're made of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen.
Now, cosmic dust, which we also find on the samplers, is made up of all kinds of things like iron, silicon, etc.
All inorganic materials.
But carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen is the signature for life.
It's the signature for biology.
And these biological entities are the signature for biology.
Okay, is it possible that these things may have been somehow spewed up into the very highest reaches above us by impacts in the past?
This is the crux of the argument.
Our critics say that these organisms are sent up into space from Earth, sent to the stratosphere from Earth.
And they cite volcanoes and various winds.
People even say they float up there.
Well, things don't float up to this height from the Earth.
There's a thing called gravity, which some people don't seem to know much about.
And what about all the hardware that we've got up there, like the space station, etc.?
Well, most of that material is, of course, sterilized before it goes up there.
And if you have material on there, you would expect it to be common Earth material, right?
You would get common contaminants, bacteria, insects, moles, everything.
You wouldn't expect to get something unusual, right?
Now, the main argument we put forward is this.
This is the crux of our defense.
We see no pollen or grass on our samplers.
Now, if this material were coming up from Earth, it would be full of pollen, full of fungal spores, because of course the Earth is covered in grass and so on.
Are you with me?
But we don't see any of that.
We only see these organisms.
Now, unless there's a sieve that cuts out all the pollen and the grass, this material cannot have come from Earth.
It must be incoming from space.
I mean, this is absolutely fascinating stuff.
And I can imagine that there are an awful lot of people, perhaps with vested interests, who think perhaps they're cleverer than you are, who will say you've got it wrong in some way.
But let's just spell it out for people listening tonight because it's important, and that's why you're on here.
You have found organisms that are symmetrical, that contain the building blocks of life that shouldn't be where they are.
Exactly.
And they're coming in.
We know they're coming in because some of them associated with impact events.
That is, the sampler is damaged by the material coming in.
Now, it's not the organism, that's far too light.
The mass of that would be far too small to cause an impact event.
We think this is the ice.
They're entombed in ice, and the ice makes the impact event, then evaporates and leaves the organism on the sampler.
So they must have been traveling at speed when they arrived on the sampler.
They couldn't have been lazily drifting up from Earth.
Where do you have these things?
Where are they kept?
Well, fortunately, they're covered in gold.
When we look at them under the electron microscope, we have to cover them in a fine layer of gold to visualize them.
Otherwise, the electron microscope doesn't work, right?
So they're entombed in gold, so they're not going anywhere.
They're not going to cause any problems.
They're there forever under this mummified situation.
It's rather nice they're covered in gold, isn't it?
Well, yes, I mean, my producer, Emma, who has an interest in these things, says 20-carat aliens.
I guess in a way they are.
Now, look, there are going to be all sorts of concerns about this.
The reason I asked you where they are and how you keep them.
You know, if we don't understand quite what they are, then we don't quite understand what impact they might have.
Yeah, sure.
A lot of people say to me, you know, oh my God, we're going to be killed.
The end of the earth, this is aliens coming from...
They've been coming from the year dot all the time.
They're arriving as we speak.
They are as much biology as we are biology.
Now, of course, that doesn't mean there aren't some pathogens in there.
There could be pathogens in there, very small numbers, but if they were going to cause any damage, they would have caused it millions, billions of years ago, right?
Well, if I was a crazy, weird alarmist, I would say there could be some kind of bug that we have no defense for.
Well, there is a theory that modern diseases like SARS and so on originate from space.
Now, that's very much towards the edge of things.
But the possibility is there that, yeah, they could be pathogens, but the majority of them are not going to cause any problems because they're as much biology, as I say, as everything else on the Earth.
They're just coming in, and they've been coming in forever.
I can't understand why, unless I'm very stupid and have missed something, the rest of the world is not beating a path to your door right now.
Well, I don't want them to beat necessarily to my door.
What I want them to do is get off their proverbial and just send some balloons up and repeat what we're doing.
Now, you see, I mean, obviously, we could be wrong.
I mean, I've had about a thousand baths.
This is a thousand bath problem, right?
Laying there thinking of where we're going wrong.
As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with what we've done.
Everything seems to be okay.
Now, if somebody can find something wrong, I'd be more than delighted.
I just want the answer to this.
If they can point out where we're going wrong, please do it.
But no one seems to be caring or bothering.
I mean, it may well be they're doing it and they've not reported on it.
I don't know.
The $64 question, this is probably the $64 million question tonight then, is if these are the building blocks of life, if they're organisms that we haven't seen.
Now, be careful there.
The building blocks of life, this is what NASA uses for chemicals.
These are organisms, right?
They are not the building blocks of life.
They are life.
So they're organisms that have lived possibly in a comet, and they're spewing, they're raining down on this Earth as we speak.
Right.
Thank you for correcting me about that, because that's pretty fundamental.
Very important point, because NASA has a kind of fixation on the building blocks of life.
They're now talking about the building blocks of life coming in and then life chemically starting on Earth.
They don't seem to want to make the next step and say that life arrived from space, and I just don't understand it.
And you're keen for more research to be done, Milton.
You're not sure whether you're absolutely correct or whether your research means something else.
But, you know, here is NASA and the European Space Agency and the Japanese and the Chinese and the Indians all going out looking for life.
And you're saying, here I am in England, you know, in the United Kingdom, we found something.
Well, yeah.
I mean, we've certainly found it, and we can certainly find it every time we go, or nearly every time we go.
So this is not, I mean, it's a fishing trip, obviously.
What you get is what you get on the day, obviously.
I mean, so this is not something that we've just seen once.
We've seen it about 10 times, as I say.
We've seen it over Death Valley.
We've collected it, as you said, over the Bonneville Salt Flats.
So it seems to be coming in everywhere.
It's not just over Yorkshire.
And where do you think they come from?
As I say, they probably come from comets.
I don't know.
I mean, one theory I've suggested is maybe they originate from Earth way back and some impact event sent them up and they're on the way down now.
So that's one kind of alternative theory.
But we think they come from comets, basically.
Now, when the first people stood up in this country and other countries and said, excuse me, we believe the Earth is not flat, they were derided.
I mean, there are still people who say that the Earth is flat, and I want to be talking to some of them because they have very serious theories that claim the Earth is flat.
But the people who made the original claim that the Earth is not indeed flat were, just as you've been derided, they were not supported.
So this is a very lonely road that you're walking.
This is so normal.
It's normal.
It seems like, you know, we talk about paradigms.
That's the current knowledge.
And we talk about paradigm shifts.
Now, paradigm shifts are very difficult to achieve because science is conservative.
It has to be conservative, otherwise all kinds of loonies would kind of come in into it.
It has to be conservative.
But there comes a point when the conservative element takes over and they become gatekeepers.
They stop new ideas.
This is one of the big problems of peer review, of course.
If you send papers to journals with people who've got fixed minds, then they're not going to allow that to be published.
So peer review can actually stop these paradigm shifts, as we call them.
But you're a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
You know, they don't hand those out in sweet packets.
You have to make a lot of effort to get that.
So, you know, you are a man who presumably is listened to.
What are your colleagues in the Royal Astronomical Society telling you?
They probably don't know about it.
I don't know.
You see, I mean, I've given talks in various parts of the world, and I just gave one last week at the Hoyle Institute.
Now, of course, these ideas originated, the modern version, with Fred Hoyle and Chandra Vikramasinghe.
And Chandra Vikramasinghe works with our team.
Now, if you talk about attacks on people, Chandra over the last 30 years has been mercilessly attacked by the establishment.
This is one of the greatest thinkers, I'm not including myself in that region, one of the greatest thinkers of modern science.
And he has been absolutely damagingly attacked, particularly on the modern, what do you call it, internet and trolling and so on and so forth.
course a lot of us get that kind of thing you have a very thick skin don't you And I just say, look, I don't care.
I mean, the fact is that these trolls know very little, and they demonstrate it every time they write anything.
Well, I think it's the old theatrical thing, isn't it?
You know, a lot of old actors have told me, oh, darling, never read anything written about yourself.
You won't like it.
So I've given talks about this throughout the world, and people listen and they ask questions.
They ask the same questions, of course, which I have the same answers to.
And basically, no one stands up and says, you know, you're wrong because of this.
Now, I would love that if somebody could do that.
I mean, I'm close to retirement now.
I could come back to Wales here where I'm speaking from, and I could just, you know, grow cabbages.
I'd just like somebody to tell us what generally happens with these situations is, like, 30 years later, somebody comes along and then, like, Wainwright or whatever, found this 30 years ago, and it's kind of a historical thing.
This sounds terribly sad, Milton.
It sounds like when you decide to retire and put your feet up in Wales and count the sheep, are you saying that there's not going to be anybody else to carry this on?
Well, I just don't know.
I mean, perhaps from this interview, someone might do it.
It really is so easy.
In fact, I've suggested that maybe, you know, amateur boffins could do this.
Certainly, they could get the samples.
Whether they'd have access to the electron microscopes or not is another matter.
But certainly, I mean, student groups in universities could do it.
And if everyone around the world was doing it, then we might get some answers, you know.
Sounds to me like what you need, and you got some nice media coverage a little while ago, but what you need is somebody like Stephen Hawking or somebody like that to pitch in and say he's at least interested in what you're doing.
Yeah, we've had occasional comments like that, but nothing happens.
You see, as they say, nothing materializes.
And it's very frustrating.
I mean, let me give you an example of where your efforts can be thwarted.
Thwarted.
Beautiful word.
We were hoping one of the major universities in this country would do what we call isotope fractionation on our samples.
Basically, if it comes from space, it's likely got a different carbon-oxygen, different isotope ratios to organisms found on Earth.
Now, we had this set up.
We were two weeks away from it being done.
And this might have been the QED experiment.
And then two weeks into it, we got this comment that the head of the institute, head of the department, had stopped the work because it was embarrassing.
That it was too embarrassing.
The idea that life came from space was too embarrassing for his institute to get involved in.
and he cancelled the work.
Embarrassing on the...
Well, you're obviously not a scientist.
I mean, I've been in the business now, what, I'm 67, so if you take A levels, I've probably been in 50 years, let's say.
And I've never known such a critical moment in science because, as you know, like everything else, money came into it about 20 years ago.
And basically, money has destroyed modern science, is destroying modern science.
And all this business about grants and so on, it's different from when I started.
Okay, well, I mean, without naming any names, Milton, this is a fascinating stream of conversation.
Money is destroying science.
Now, I would have thought money coming into science must be good.
Of course, yeah, obviously, at one level, if you've got plenty of money, you can do it.
But obviously, if you're competing for money, then what does competing for money always involve?
It involves jealousies.
It involves groups of people grabbing the money from other people.
You know, money is corrosive in any organization.
So does this mean then that money in your field in space research gravitates to a few prestige projects and people like you are just blackballed?
Well, I mean, obviously, I mean, most of the money goes to things like looking for dark matter and Higgs bosons and all that kind of cosmology.
I mean, obviously, a lot of money is spent by NASA going to other planets and comets and things.
But we think they're kind of taking a bus ride past the main event.
Good Lord.
If I had a bottomless pit of money and was not living in the poverty that I do live, if I had millions, how much money would make a quantum difference to the work that you're doing?
Well, I wouldn't.
I'm always fond of money, who isn't, but money isn't the main point here.
The main point is somebody repeating it.
So, I mean, £20,000 could repeat it.
Good Lord.
10,000 if...
No, £20,000.
I mean, obviously, that would be only a few launches, but if you had...
I mean, you can spend money, obviously.
You can spend money on anything.
But 20,000 quid would do it.
I think you I really are when I made this suggestion about Stephen Hawking, I just think you need a high-profile individual.
I mean, look, there's a flashing sign in front of me for one of our sister radio stations here, Virgin Radio.
You need a Sir Richard Branson.
Yeah, that would be a good idea.
Or you need somebody like the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, who is a man who's not afraid to take a chance.
You need somebody like that.
Ask him to talk to me.
I'm just wondering if, you know, if you have people working with you at the University of Buckingham, I think they should start writing letters tonight.
Well, I mean, obviously, I've done all this, and believe me, it's extremely frustrated.
As I said, I've given talks all over the world, and just nothing happens.
I mean, there's been, you see, one of the things that scientists say to me, my colleagues, they say to me, well, you shouldn't do this, this kind of talking to the radio and everything and the newspapers and telling them, it kind of demeans science.
And I say, well, the problem is, if you don't try and put it out there, nobody knows about it.
Exactly.
I mean, look, this is a particular kind of show, right?
There are many other shows that I don't think would be able to get to grips with this because it would probably be a little too complicated for them to understand.
It's not strictly come dancing, so, you know, it may not quite make the cut for them.
It's not the bake-off.
But, you know, this is something that I believe should be aired.
I have remember done videos for Through the Wormhole and various National Geographic programs like that.
So there is plenty of information out there about it.
Okay, well, look, here's one thing I do promise.
I have a podcast that runs parallel with this radio show.
The podcast was there ten years before the radio show.
I will put you on my podcast.
I have listeners around the world, and I promise many of those people are scientific, and I hope that they take the interest that they should be taking in the work that you're doing.
I'd appreciate that.
Remember, I'm not saying I'm right.
I just want someone to prove me wrong.
Well, thank God for the University of Buckingham, then, I guess.
Well, when you say, now is a complication.
When you say University of Buckingham, I also work for the University of Sheffield, so I have two universities.
Well, thank goodness for them.
Yeah, well, maybe not.
Oh, okay.
Well, is your funding going to run out?
Can you tell me?
Pardon?
Is your funding going to run out?
My funding ran out as of yesterday.
Well, last week.
Oh, Milton.
Yeah.
But you see, as I say, I mean, I can keep on doing this.
Well, I could keep on doing this if I had the money, and I could keep on doing it for the next hundred years, but that wouldn't matter.
What I need is somebody else to do it and find that I am right or find that we are wrong.
Okay, well, look.
There's this whole story here that I did not know existed before we had this.
I thought we were going to have a straightforward scientific conversation and wrap it up there.
Here is somebody that I believe needs support.
I'm talking here to my listeners.
So if you're driving a taxi tonight, maybe you have scientists or important people in the back of your cab.
Maybe you could run this past them.
If you are listening on the news desk, which, you know, I know that I've worked on news desks in London and I know that they're working late at night preparing the next day's news.
And sometimes they have music radio stations on or talk radio stations on.
I have a feeling there is going to be somebody at some news desk, somebody somewhere tonight listening to this, Milton.
And let's hope that they give you the coverage you deserve.
Often the response are not surprising.
Well, this is crap.
This is bogus.
The guy's a nutter.
So you've got to get over that as well.
There have been songs about this.
There have been books written about this.
A lot of people who've been at the very cutting edge and have turned out to be genii in their, if that's the plural of genius, they've been derided at the beginning.
So my thoughts are definitely with you, Milton.
I know you're 67, and I know that it's very tempting to retire.
I'm very young 67, but you certainly sound and you sound very feisty 67.
You know, it's easy for me to talk, isn't it?
But I'm very much, and I've been in my life and career, a no-surrender kind of guy.
So the only words I can say to you for what they are worth, please don't give this up.
Well, I mean, the system does wear one down, and there's been some dark moments.
But as I said, I'm not a genius.
We found this.
Remember, this is the teamwork.
It's not just me.
We found this, and I just want somebody to tell us what's happening.
We can't see any problem.
Maybe there is a problem.
I don't know.
All right, Daily Mail, Daily Express, you love these science stories.
Both the Mail and The Express have been doing many more of these, and The Mirror, and The Sun.
If you are listening to this tonight, here is a man you need to give more coverage to.
And let's see if we can get somebody else somewhere in this world to do parallel work to prove whether this is right or it isn't.
Because if it is correct, then life, not just the building blocks thereof, as you so correctly pointed out to me before, life has been coming here possibly for generation upon generation.
And it's right on our back doorstep, and we've been missing it.
Anything else you'd like to say?
I should ask your listeners to wear an umbrella when they go out tonight, or use an umbrella, to protect themselves from the incoming log.
But they don't need to do that.
As I said, they can engage with them.
They can glory in them.
They're coming in all the time.
They're part of biology.
If people want to read more about you and the work that you do at Sheffield and Buckingham, where do they go?
Well, I have a website, but if you just put on Milton Wainwright, there's a little bit of a Milton Wainwright at Sheffield, you will get it.
I have a website with all the details on it.
You should be able to find that.
And there's also a little bit of a Wikipedia comment.
Okay, well, I know you have a website.
All you've got to do is put it into a search engine.
Milton Wainwright is the name of the man we are talking with.
Think of the poet and the guy who walks on the hills in the Lake District.
Or Wales, as the case may be.
Milton, thank you very much for joining us tonight.
And please take care.
I want to catch up with you again in a little while if we can.
Would that be okay?
No problem.
Thank you so much.
You're welcome.
Professor Milton Wainwright, and you can find out more about him and his work and the stuff that's been written online about him by searching his name in Google, and you'll come up with a certain number of listings.
And if you are from a research organization and you'd like to get in touch with him, I know he would be interested to hear from you.
Milton Wainwright in the UK.
And before that, we heard from Professor Kevin Bennett in the US about the crazy creepy clown phenomenon and where that has come from and where it might be going to.
More great guests in the pipeline coming soon here on The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for keeping the faith with me.
And for your lovely, supportive emails, please keep them coming.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv, designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot, and you can send me an email from there.
More guests, as I say, coming up in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
Till next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
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