Edition 300 - 300th Anniversary Edition
Featuring Midnight in the Desert's Heather Wade and Harvard Space Professor Avi Loeb...
Featuring Midnight in the Desert's Heather Wade and Harvard Space Professor Avi Loeb...
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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 Return of the Unexplained. | |
But not just any old unexplained, this is edition 300 of my show, and I can't believe that I'm saying those words. | |
It does seem to me like only yesterday, but is now. | |
11 years or so since I sat down first and recorded a podcast and wondered if anybody would hear it. | |
Sometimes I still wonder. | |
But since then, we've built an audience, and I've got Adam Cornwell, my webmaster, helping me out on this. | |
He's done such great work over the years. | |
And you, of course, in the four corners of this earth, if a globe can have corners, you know what I mean? | |
In every place on the planet, listening to this radio show, we're big in America. | |
We're big in Europe. | |
We have listeners pretty much everywhere. | |
And I'm constantly amazed and I'm constantly grateful for that fact. | |
We've had some remarkable people down the years on here. | |
All of the big names in the UFO field we've had here pretty much. | |
And science, we've had some big names in science here. | |
We've got one on this edition. | |
And people who are no longer with us. | |
People like, for example, Patrick Moore, the great British astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore. | |
I was lucky enough to do an interview with him. | |
You heard it on this show. | |
People like Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon, he was on this show. | |
Oh boy, there are so many. | |
The guy behind the Philadelphia experiment was on this show, Al Bielik. | |
So many people on this show over the years. | |
Thank you very much for supporting me, for being there for me through all of the good times and all of the bad times, of which there have been a few. | |
Radio, as I've made my living for all of these years, is not the easiest of games to be in. | |
And sometimes you have to take some hard knocks and some rough kicks down the track, and some of those things are just not fair, and you've got to suck them up and carry on. | |
So you've helped me to come through. | |
And this is an independent voice. | |
We are not controlled by any big media outlet. | |
So we can do what we want. | |
And we do it together, which is great. | |
Two guests on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
One of them is somebody you may know. | |
The other one, I think you may have heard on this show before. | |
The person you may know is Heather Wade. | |
Now, Heather is the person who took over the mantle of Art Bell. | |
When Art Bell retired, and we do hope that he comes back at some point, Heather Wade took over his show Midnight in the Desert. | |
Heather has found herself in the international news in newspapers just about everywhere recently. | |
Because of a story that is pretty damn remarkable, Heather has come into possession of a document that purports to be a secret document confirming, for example, that Roswell, including four aliens and a crashed craft, really did happen. | |
Amazing stuff. | |
Heather will be on this show talking about that, what else the document says, and a little bit about herself and Art Bell. | |
That's still to come on this edition. | |
First up, we're going to hear about the Sun. | |
NASA in the last few weeks has announced a mission to the Sun. | |
They've got to get as close as they can with a robotic craft and report back data and findings about the Sun and its peculiar behavior. | |
We'll have one of the world's leading space professors in just a moment here, Professor Arvi Loeb from Harvard University, a man who is known at the highest levels of science to do with space. | |
So we're very lucky to get him on here and very lucky that he likes this show. | |
Harvey Loeb coming soon. | |
Before that, just to say that I promise to do some shout-outs on the next edition of the show. | |
I have so many to catch up on, but I see all of your emails and they mean so much to me. | |
If you want to get in touch with the show, go to the website theunexplained.tv. | |
Follow the link and send me a message from there, as you have been doing since we started this show back in 2006, which seems like half my life ago. | |
It's just an amazing thing to think back on, really. | |
And I'm very, very grateful that it's got to where it's got. | |
We do this on a shoestring. | |
I have to go and do shifts that don't pay very much money in mainstream radio to keep myself going. | |
But I'm really proud of the fact for myself that the unexplained is still here. | |
Whatever else has happened in my life and yours, and I've lost both my wonderful parents across this period, and all kinds of things good and bad, have happened in that time. | |
But I'm still here. | |
And that is, I guess, in this day and age, an achievement. | |
So, let's get to the guests on this edition. | |
Heather Wade coming soon. | |
But first, Professor RV Loeb from Harvard University and a story that's been in much of the world's media to do with NASA's mission to the sun that it's planning. | |
NASA, according to the newspaper that I'm looking at now, which is the British Sun newspaper, strangely enough, NASA is gearing up to send a robot to the sun to help prepare for a huge solar event that could, according to the newspaper, wreak havoc on the Earth. | |
Well, let's talk to Professor Arvi Loeb about why we would want to go and explore the Sun and how we're going to do that. | |
Well, we would like to learn more about the immediate vicinity of the Sun. | |
There are still phenomena that we don't fully understand. | |
There are solar flares that have complicated physics. | |
And this would allow us to actually probe from a very close distance the whereabouts of the Sun. | |
It's very different probing it at a distance, remotely, from actually flying through the chromosphere of the Sun and learning about its properties. | |
Right. | |
But how close, even with a robot probe, can you get? | |
How close is close? | |
Well, the limit is set by how much shielding you put around the robot. | |
And in principle, the temperature at the surface of the Sun is about 5,600 degrees, about 20 times hotter than room temperature. | |
And so most metals melt at that point. | |
You really cannot go that far as you move away from the sun, the temperature drops. | |
And obviously, on Earth, we have only room temperature, so it's true also of planets. | |
As you put a planet closer to the star, it gets hotter and hotter. | |
And so, being at 10 times the radius of the sun is in principle tolerable. | |
And this robot is trying to probe that region. | |
Now, from what I understand reading news reports about this, one of the main reasons we're doing this, but I'm sure you can explain much better than the newspapers here could explain, is that we are interested in trying to get a handle on the flares and ejections that come from the sun, some of which could potentially down the track at some point cause us enormous problems here on Earth. | |
That's correct. | |
There are massive eruptions every now and then. | |
They are called the coronal mass ejections. | |
Basically, a big chunk of gas is being expelled from the sun by events that take place in the magnetosphere of the sun. | |
So magnetic fields that go in different directions come together and there is a so-called reconnection event that basically is like a localized explosion that kicks out a chunk of gas. | |
And this chunk, in principle, goes along with the solar wind and could impact the Earth if it goes in our direction. | |
And so it could affect, for example, communication quite severely. | |
And if we ever establish a station on the moon or elsewhere, we would have to worry about these eruptions disrupting communication and also affecting the electronics because here on Earth we are protected by the atmosphere. | |
There is a magnetosphere, a magnetic field of the Earth that basically deflects all the particles coming from the Sun and that helps us. | |
However, in a place like the Moon, there is no atmosphere, no magnetosphere, nothing to protect astronauts over there. | |
So these are concerns for future missions, but also nowadays, still, satellites are affected significantly by the particles, the energetic particles coming from the Sun. | |
What do you make of the speculation of some people, and they're not necessarily scientists, but they do have a presence on the internet, who say that we are headed at some point quite soon for what some of them call the kill shot, an enormous great ejection from the sun that is going to reduce us pretty much to the stone age? | |
Do you think that there's any credence in any of that? | |
No, we do have some statistics of eruptions over the past century, and there is no reason to be concerned in particular. | |
I mean, life on Earth existed for billions of years, and definitely, you know, there is no risk at the level of eradicating life or changing our current lifestyle in a way that would be so dramatic. | |
I mean, there could be big effects on communication satellites or other things, technological, but these are not necessarily affecting our existence in any way. | |
Isn't it true that was it the Canadian power grid some years ago was badly affected by one of these, though? | |
Yeah, you could have effects on electric grids and other electronics, but these are not as severe as shutting down a whole nation. | |
Right. | |
So when, Avi, we have so many other priorities, and you and I have talked about them before in space. | |
We're very interested to get ourselves to Mars as quickly as possible. | |
We're interested in revisiting the moon. | |
We want to try and explore our nearest and furthest neighbors even more to see if life might be out there. | |
Why is it necessary to spend money doing this, do you think? | |
Why is that of value? | |
Well, the sun is the closest star and the dearest star to us in the sense that it keeps us warm. | |
It's our furnace. | |
And so the fact that it's so close to us allows us to study it in great detail and perhaps learn more about stars farther away. | |
And then, of course, we would like, in principle, to visit stars elsewhere. | |
It will take much more effort to do that. | |
Just to visit the nearest star, which is four light years away, would take at least a few decades for a spacecraft that moves at a fifth of the speed of light. | |
It would take 20 years. | |
And so it will take quite some time before we visit another star and are able to study it in the same detail as we can study the Sun. | |
And so for now, let's probe our immediate neighborhood as much as we can. | |
In the more distant future, we should think about visiting other places because eventually the Sun would die. | |
The Sun is roughly at the middle of its life right now. | |
It has about 7 billion years left before it will consume its nuclear fuel. | |
And after that, it will cool down to become a white dwarf, a remnant that is the size of the Earth, that will cool with time and will not support life anymore. | |
So thinking long term, we should, aside from catastrophes like asteroid impacts on Earth or climate change and so forth, we should contemplate in the long term other alternatives. | |
And of course, visiting other stars would be the natural thing for us to do. | |
There has been some talk, and some of this is scientific, that our sun has been behaving abnormally to some extent in the last few years. | |
Can you comment on that? | |
What do you think of those reports? | |
No, I don't think there is anything unusual. | |
The sun has a cycle that it goes through of magnetic activity. | |
There is no indication that it goes through anything abnormal. | |
It's just that it does vary with time. | |
In the long term, it also will change its global properties, will change its surface temperature, will change its radius. | |
Once it will consume most of its nuclear fuel, it will actually expand to a size that is roughly the Earth-Sun separation right now. | |
So, it's quite possible that it may engulf the Earth when it ends its life. | |
That's when the envelope expands, but the core of the Sun will become a white dwarf, as I said before. | |
And that is a process that presumably will take a lot of time. | |
It will take seven billion years from now to start. | |
And then, yeah, we don't have to worry about it in the near future. | |
But like everything, we tend to think about the sun that is a permanent source of light in the sky. | |
It will die. | |
Like anything in life, it's transient. | |
You and I have talked in the last year a couple of times about gravitational waves. | |
They were the biggest news of the last 12 months in space research. | |
According to the papers in the last two weeks or so, scientists have been reporting another burst of gravitational waves. | |
How exciting is this? | |
It is very exciting in my view because it's one thing to meet, let's say, one person from China. | |
If you find a Chinese person on the street, it gives you information that Chinese people may exist. | |
But when you find another one, it changes your perspective. | |
There is a population. | |
You realize that it's not just a fluke. | |
And the special thing about this last event is that it involves massive black holes, black holes that weigh tens of times the mass of the Sun. | |
So in total, the two black holes that come together weigh 50 times the mass of the Sun. | |
And this system is very similar to the first discovery by LIGO. | |
And so it means that a substantial fraction of all the events that the LIGO Observatory is discovering, maybe a half of them, are associated with very massive black holes that come together. | |
And these black holes are quite rare. | |
They were not anticipated to be a significant population before LIGO. | |
And the question is, why are we seeing half of the events associated with such massive black holes? | |
One possibility is that there are nurseries that promote the mergers of massive black holes. | |
You can imagine a star cluster where the massive black holes sink to the center, just like dust particles that segregate in air. | |
Because they are massive, they sink to the center of the gravitational potential well and they find each other there. | |
And therefore, you make primarily pairs of massive black holes that eventually coalesce and produce the LIGO sources. | |
And this is all connected with some very exciting, but has been up to now science fiction material about the idea of warps in space-time. | |
Well, when two black holes come together, black holes are the most extreme structures of space-time predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity. | |
They have a singularity in the middle, and they are basically distortions of space and time such that if you get into a black hole, you cannot escape. | |
It's the ultimate prison. | |
And when you put two black holes smashing into each other, you end up with a storm of space-time. | |
You generate very powerful disturbances in space-time that propagate out just like waves on a pond and eventually reach us. | |
And so it's, first of all, it provides a terrific test of Einstein's theory of gravity in the extreme regime where you distort space and time in an extreme way. | |
And we have good confirmation that the theory works by comparing computer simulations to the observed signals. | |
But more importantly, this messenger of gravitational waves allows you to study the nature of black holes in a way that we could never do before. | |
We are getting very close to this horizon inside of which you cannot escape. | |
So it's really remarkable that this idea of a black hole that was invented 101 years ago, about a century ago, by Carl Schwarzschild, shortly, a few months after Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity, this idea is now verified by direct observations. | |
And I think Carl Schwarzschild and Albert Einstein would have been thrilled to learn about the latest developments. | |
You used a wonderful phrase, Arvi. | |
You're very good at using these phrases that are so descriptive and so apposite. | |
You said the horizon beyond which you cannot escape. | |
I suppose the intriguing thing is what, and we can only speculate, might lie behind and beyond that horizon. | |
That's right. | |
Well, there is one way to find out, and that's to fall into a black hole. | |
So in my last moments of life, I would be willing and happy to do that. | |
I'm currently actually the founding director of the Black Hole Initiative here at Harvard University that was inaugurated just last year. | |
It's the only center in the world that focuses on the study of black holes. | |
And it brings together mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, and philosophers. | |
And it's quite exciting to have these discussions about these objects that we've never seen before. | |
In the news, just finally, and I know that you have to travel off to Europe, so I'm very grateful for you giving me this time just before catching the flight, Avi. | |
The Daily Mail newspaper here that does a lot of space news has done this in the last 24, 48 hours. | |
Some comments from an astronomer called Chris Impey, who I think you might know. | |
He's quite well known in the States. | |
I believe he works out of Arizona. | |
Yes, I know him. | |
Okay, well, Chris Impey is saying that alien life could be discovered within the next 20 years, but those life forms will be far from intelligent beings. | |
Does that take us any further? | |
What do you think of those comments? | |
Well, there is no evidence or substance behind them. | |
It's just a speculation. | |
And so I think a lot of people have a prejudice About whether there is intelligent life or primitive life out there. | |
I think we should treat it as exploration. | |
Just like explorers went to find what lies beyond the horizon on Earth, Christopher Columbus and others. | |
We should just explore the universe without a prejudice. | |
And I think we should use the best telescopes we have to search for signs of both primitive and intelligent life and see what we find. | |
My personal belief is that we are not special. | |
And this is just out of modesty. | |
I adopt the principle of cosmic modesty. | |
We are not special in any way. | |
We are not located at the center of the universe, in difference from what some people thought in the past. | |
And we are not at the center of the biological universe. | |
So I think if we find primitive and intelligent life here on Earth, it must exist elsewhere. | |
It's just that it's a challenge to detect those signals. | |
And we should do our best to do so by developing the technologies and having the instruments that will allow us to detect faint signals. | |
So when RV says to me, I believe that we are not special, that means that's your way of saying you believe we are not alone. | |
Yes. | |
And moreover, it has practical implications. | |
It means that we need to search because if we find life, if we answer the question of are we alone, that will have major implications for our view on our place in the universe and will also open up new avenues of research. | |
I mean, there will be a new branch of astrolinguistics, how to communicate with aliens, astrosociology, how to interpret their collective behavior and so forth. | |
You know, it will change a lot of things. | |
And so finding evidence for life elsewhere is really one of the most important questions and challenges in science. | |
And of course, it's not just scientific challenges we'll face, there will be theological challenges that we'll face and political challenges too. | |
That's true. | |
And I very much look forward to these challenges. | |
So much of my attention these days is dedicated to the search for life, be it in primitive or intelligent forms. | |
And I try to think about signatures, signals that we could look for, other than just communication signals in the radio. | |
For example, looking for artifacts on the surfaces of planets, such as solar cells, or looking for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of planets outside the solar system. | |
And there has been some suggestion, hasn't there, that we may have been seeing what appears to be the hallmark of something way, way out there within this last few months. | |
Yeah, so there is one star in our galaxy that shows changes in brightness that cannot be easily explained and are quite unusual. | |
So people speculated that these dimmings of the star that are quite significant might be due to megastructures that are standing along the line of sight and blocking our view of that star. | |
This is still a speculation. | |
There is the possibility that fast radio bursts, these are flashes of radio waves that last only a thousand of a second and come from the edge of the universe, they might be artificial in origin. | |
We don't know their sources as of yet. | |
So there are still many interesting phenomena that we don't have explanation to, but by no means we have good evidence that any of them is related to another civilization. | |
You're about to get on a plane for Europe. | |
I think you're coming to Greece. | |
Is that to do with work? | |
Yeah, there is a conference on the physics of fine-tuning, which is basically the question, is life as we know it, did it require fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe that led to our existence? | |
It's not the same question as asking whether there was some design that led to our universe, whether there was an architect behind it. | |
Right, so what you're saying that if all the elements are there for life, something or someone, some other factor will have had to finesse those elements into making life? | |
Well, that's one way of thinking of it. | |
In my view, another way to think of it is that, you know, life is an accidental byproduct. | |
It's the most appreciated phenomena we find on Earth. | |
It's the treasure that we really appreciate here on Earth. | |
But it may be just a byproduct of unusual conditions that took place in our volume of the universe. | |
And that's it. | |
And so many things happen in life by accident. | |
When I was born, nobody would have forecasted that I would become a professor at Harvard University and so forth. | |
And so we should be grateful for that, but it doesn't carry any special significance. | |
And my particular view is that we are not special, that many things like us exist out there. | |
Harvard professor Arvi Loeb, a man who is always welcome on this show, and a man who believes very much that it's important to educate the coming generations about science and space so that they can be as infused as we are about this and can continue the pioneering research that's been going on for decades now. | |
Somebody else who's been in the news over the last few days here is Heather Wade, the person who stepped into Art Bell's sizable shoes on his show, Midnight in the Desert. | |
Heather has been doing a great job and has found herself in the middle of a media frenzy in the last few days, all connected with a document that has come into her possession that purports to be a secret U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document or report that actually confirms that Roswell, as we know it, happened, and a whole lot of other cool stuff that, if it's true, will be pretty damn earth-shaking and may even shake a few other planets, who knows. | |
Here is my conversation with Heather Wade. | |
So Heather Wade, thank you very much for coming on. | |
Oh, I'm happy to be here. | |
It's an honor to be on your program, Howard. | |
Well, it's an honor to be talking to you, Heather. | |
Look, you've made international news, whether you know it or not. | |
The Daily Express newspaper, and I think possibly others over here too, ran this a few days ago, and I'll quote, it says a flying saucer did crash in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, and four dead aliens were found before the world's biggest ever cover-up began nearly 70 years ago, according to an allegedly leaked U.S. top secret document. | |
Heather Wade, U.S. radio host, claims to have obtained an extensive U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency DIA report into a number of alleged alien and UFO incidents, including Roswell. | |
This, I think, is where you come into it all, Heather. | |
You know, you are at the center of a certain amount of interest in your own country and around the world. | |
How does that feel? | |
Well, it feels like I have a big responsibility here. | |
It feels like I have a big responsibility to handle this information in the correct way and to get those who are qualified to look at this information and see where it leads us, see where it's going to take us, see if we can't verify some of this information or maybe not. | |
Okay, now, you know that I come from a mainstream news background here in the UK, which doesn't stop me doing all the stuff that I do do. | |
In fact, it was partly rebelling against that that caused me to do the work that I now do on The Unexplained. | |
But I have to ask you this. | |
What is the document and what source did it come from? | |
You cannot, I doubt you can divulge exactly who, but what kind of area did this come to you from? | |
Did it come to you from the security services, somebody perhaps who worked for them and retired? | |
Where is it from? | |
Well, I can give you a little backstory on that without revealing who exactly the source is. | |
There's a little more backstory to it than people are entirely aware of. | |
There was a gentleman who apparently was where the original source came from. | |
Now, he was some sort of government intelligence official who got his hands on this information and sat on it for quite some time. | |
And he passed away seven years ago, passing this document on to an ex-military man that he knew. | |
And that ex-military man sat on this information for years and years and years, finally talking to a friend of his saying, do you know anyone who'd be interested in looking at this? | |
Do you think this is something that ought to go out into the public? | |
We've got a lot of information here. | |
Shouldn't we find someone that would handle this correctly or at least someone who could get it out into the public without while protecting our identities? | |
And the guy said, well, sure, I think I do know someone. | |
And he contacted me in the middle of the night and said, I have some documents. | |
Would you be interested in looking at them? | |
And I said, well, sure, not knowing at all what I was walking into. | |
And I was just thinking, well, sure, if it's interesting, I'll take a look at it. | |
And when I did, this whole thing started. | |
Right. | |
Now, those of us who are familiar with the works of Art Bell, the man whose shoes you are now filling and whose show you are now doing, will be aware of various gambits that have occurred over the years, including the alien autopsy movie, including the guy who told Art that he was flying in a small plane over Area 51 and was about to be shot down. | |
I could go on. | |
Not all of these things are genuine. | |
How convinced are you that the documentation that you've been handed, and there are three links in the chain from what you told me, that it's all actually genuine? | |
Because the source says they have nothing to gain. | |
They just want the information out into the public, and I released it to everyone for free. | |
I have no reason to do anything other than that. | |
Also, I don't know how much this counts, but reading through this document a few times that I have done now, my gut tells me if I follow this, that I may just come upon a detail that will let me know it is entirely true. | |
Also, having some other experts look at it, Linda Moulton Howe being one, I look up to her a great deal and she's been in this field for a very long time, as everybody knows. | |
And she was able to look at what this document says, look at some of those facts, dates, locations, names, stories that are told within it. | |
And with her investigative work and interviews that she's done with people that I would have no way of knowing about, interviews she's done with people, private conversations that none of us really have the details on. | |
Based on that work she's already done, she was able to corroborate some of the information in this document, information that has never been released to the public before. | |
So I'm leaning toward it being true, but I also at the same time, I do want to handle it right based on the things you just said, right? | |
The Roswell slides also being a stain on ufology, in my opinion. | |
So I think the handling of it has to be done correctly. | |
And the only option we are left with, Howard, is to chase the mystery. | |
And how do you do that, Heather? | |
Where do you start? | |
You start by looking at the content. | |
Then you can look at names. | |
Standard Friedman told me just tonight, on my broadcast tonight, that there were some names in this document that are not listed in other alleged Majestic 12 documents. | |
And so that's some place to start. | |
Also, the Defense Intelligence Agency, I believe, is a place to start. | |
Now, whether they will fess up to anything is another matter. | |
But if you look at the first page of the document, it does say Defense Intelligence Agency as the organization that this document comes from. | |
So I think that's a place to start. | |
Looking at people who have been involved in this field for a long time that have an extensive background in That is yet to be discovered. | |
Okay, so you've got a lot of detective work to do, and of course, you've got a radio show to do in the middle of all of that, so the task that you face is pretty monumental. | |
There are a couple of thoughts that I have right off the bat here about this. | |
One of them is, of course, the skeptics thought that simply somebody who's done a lot of reading could put together something like this. | |
We've only got to remember the famous so-called biography of the memoirs of Howard Hughes, my namesake, produced by a guy. | |
And a lot of experts said, my God, this is the real thing. | |
The Hitler diaries were said to be the real deal. | |
So it is possible for people to be fooled. | |
And I suppose the worry on your part is that there are ill-intentioned people out there. | |
There are people with a bad agenda. | |
There are people who want to spread disinformation. | |
We both know that. | |
Such people could use you as a conduit for disinformation, because if this is disproved, then people are not going to believe much else, are they? | |
This is the difficulty with this. | |
However, if it turns out to be the real deal, then you are Heather Wade sitting on the biggest story of all time. | |
Congratulations. | |
No pressure, right? | |
You're dead right. | |
No pressure at all. | |
Yes. | |
And so this is why I think it's very important to be cautious. | |
I think you can't, in this short of a time, come out and say it's definitively real or definitively fake. | |
We've got to follow where the content leads us. | |
We've got to follow where the facts contained within lead us and see, do we end up at a brick wall? | |
Do we end up with another clue? | |
We've got to follow the clues. | |
And I think another honest way to approach it is to involve every single guest I have and every single audience member that I have out there. | |
They can go to the website. | |
They can download it, look at exactly what I'm looking at and do a little detective work right along with me and we'll see where it goes. | |
The only way, excuse me, to approach it, I think is that way. | |
Did you ever have the sense that perhaps here I am being used as the innocent victim of somebody's publicity stunt? | |
No, in fact, I didn't and never have felt that way. | |
A lot of people are actually writing to me with that theory. | |
And I can understand why it would look that way on the outside, but I know my source. | |
And my source is not a disinformation agent. | |
My source didn't know what they had. | |
My source wasn't sure if anybody would even be interested in it. | |
He just said, this is interesting. | |
Do you want to take a look at it? | |
In fact, he's gotten quite spooked by the reaction. | |
Okay, now, well, this all adds to the credibility of the thing. | |
If the source of this thing was not entirely sure what he was sitting on, that does add something to the story. | |
I suppose, you know, look, all the skeptics are going to have their five cents worth, and you're going to be hearing from all of them, I can assure you, if you haven't heard from them already. | |
There will be those who would say, well, why hand this to Heather Wade and a radio host where you could have given it to Woodward and Bernstein? | |
Sure. | |
Or any number of paranormal shows out there. | |
Or what about a mainstream news outlet? | |
A person could have gone that route. | |
Yeah, it could have been New York Times, Washington Post, CBS NBC. | |
You name the bureaus that this could have gone to. | |
Sure. | |
This person knows me. | |
I've known this person. | |
This was a question I was asked by Stephen Bassis, so I'll go ahead and answer it on the air. | |
When I was asked, how long did I know this person? | |
I've known this person for two years. | |
And look, all he is, is interested in listening to people talk about this kind of stuff. | |
And this was the show that he listened to the most often. | |
And my listeners happen to know, you don't need a big fan club. | |
You don't have to pay $19.95. | |
I'm available and happy to talk to anyone. | |
I'm not too good to talk to any of my listeners that have a ghost story, a UFO story, or anything else. | |
Long may you stay that way, Heatherway, because, you know, big media changes people. | |
Yes, it absolutely does. | |
And I never want that change to happen to me. | |
So he felt comfortable coming to me. | |
I mean, this is a person that often, I don't know, every few days is going, hey, how you doing? | |
Who's on tonight? | |
What's going on with you? | |
You know, are you all right? | |
How did you like the show tonight? | |
These kind of things. | |
He's never sending me articles or information. | |
He's very low-key. | |
So when this particular person shows up and says, I have something that I think you might be interested in looking at, well, that gets my attention because this is not a person who's always trying to get my attention. | |
Well, that's another tick in the credibility box then, as far as I'm concerned. | |
I'm sure the skeptics are going to have a lot more to say, but let's park that there. | |
We've tiptoed around the story. | |
Let's unpick the story now, and in particular, Roswell, the crash, the four bodies, and all the rest of it. | |
What is inside these papers that adds weight to that being true? | |
Well, in plain English, I happen to flip to this page just because I was wondering if you would bring it up. | |
In plain English, it spells it out right here. | |
On 7th July, 1947, a secret operation was begun to assure recovery of the wreckage of an unidentified flying object which had crashed in a rural site in New Mexico. | |
And if you just look down just a few lines from there, right there it is. | |
All of the four alien crew members were dead and badly decomposed to action of pressure. | |
Some of those words are very difficult to make out. | |
The quality isn't the best here, but it does spell out that alien bodies were recovered and so was a craft, a craft that was broken up into, I think it's in here, I just need to find it, into about 370 some odd pieces. | |
That's very specific. | |
Yes, when they talk about the pieces left of Roswell. | |
Who do We think made those observations? | |
At what level and at what stage of the investigation was that report written? | |
By someone known as MJ1. | |
Okay. | |
Well, knowing the MJ12 references that are famous in ufology and all the rest of it, MJ1 makes me a little suspicious. | |
Would you call yourself MJ1? | |
Maybe you would. | |
Maybe you would. | |
If you were at that kind of level, then that's perfectly plausible. | |
Who knows? | |
Right. | |
In the beginning, first page of the document, it does say controlling office name and address, Operation Majestic forward slash MJ1, address classified. | |
Now, don't get me wrong, I do have a healthy dose of skepticism here, but that's what calls for extensive investigation. | |
We may have nothing. | |
We may have someone trying to pull an elaborate trick on all of us. | |
Then again, we may have the real thing. | |
How are we going to know unless we pursue it? | |
Yeah, and I think the only thing that you can do is to do what you've done, and it's what I would do, is you put it out to your audience and you say, if you know anything, if your dad told you anything, if your granddad told you anything, maybe you know a guy down the street who's getting on a bit, seems a little troubled and one day opened his heart to me and told me, I know something and I don't want to go to my grave with that secret untold. | |
That's the kind of material you're looking for, isn't it? | |
That's the kind of corroboration that you need. | |
Oh, yes, exactly right. | |
Exactly right. | |
And when it comes to the direct language I was talking about, if you'd indulge me for just a second, I'd like to share something directly from the document that is in the most plain English it could possibly be in when it comes to this subject. | |
I've never heard such language in any government document before. | |
Advanced beings of non-human nature are continuously being detected along with their flying disc craft in the controlled space of the United States since the 7th of July, 1947. | |
The remains of seven flying craft and the bodies of 27 deceased non-human beings have been recovered as of this briefing date and are at present being studied by Magic 12 scientists. | |
27. | |
27. | |
So I suppose the question is, you know, these people have deep freeze technology, cryogenic preservation and all the rest of it. | |
Where are they? | |
Exactly right. | |
Exactly right. | |
I mean, that's why I feel like I'm almost investigating just a sliver of evidence that may indicate a crime. | |
And I almost feel like handling it like a crime investigation, following the information that I do have, and see if that might lead us somewhere. | |
Because whether these are human or non-human, we do have dead bodies involved. | |
Now, look, there is a story that I tell my listeners in the UK. | |
It's a very small story compared with yours. | |
But I had a radio show based on my unexplained show 12 years ago on a national radio station. | |
And one night, my producer, Dave and I came out of the building. | |
It was two weeks after I'd interviewed Paul Hellier, the former Canadian Defense Minister who claims that UFOs are the real deal because he's been told so, or words to that effect. | |
We came out of the building, and we do the show in a very quiet part of London. | |
Nobody's around weekends. | |
Weekdays, it's a hive of activity. | |
Weekends, nighttime specially, no one should be as quiet as the grave. | |
Directly opposite, Dave said, can you see that? | |
And directly opposite us, on the other side of the road, was a black Jaguar car, two guys in black suits, white shirts, black ties, with a camera anchored on the dashboard of that car that was following us as we walked down the street. | |
To this day, I have no idea who they were and what they were doing. | |
Were they having a joke? | |
Was it the Blues Brothers on an international day out? | |
What was going on? | |
So I suppose the point of the story is if we assume there are such people, there are such agencies around who take an interest in these things, let's put it that way. | |
Has anybody taken an interest in you? | |
That may be forthcoming, actually. | |
I found by one of the articles that was published in the UK, there was, I was smiling and reading this write-up, and then I get to the very end that said the Express has placed a call to the DIA and are waiting for a response. | |
Well, they may wait a long time. | |
Who knows? | |
Maybe they'll get some kind of standard response. | |
I wish them luck with that. | |
Well, I'm glad you brought up Paul Hellier, actually, because he says I had the pleasure of interviewing him as well, the honor of interviewing him. | |
And he says that there are four, right? | |
Four extraterrestrial species on Earth. | |
And in this document, it describes four different kinds of extraterrestrial. | |
That was one of the details that hit me. | |
Not that it proves the authenticity, but it's still an intriguing aspect. | |
How long is this document? | |
How many pages? | |
It is printed 24 pages, but there are two sheets per page, so it ends up coming out to 48 pages. | |
And as far as you can tell by looking at it, for whose benefit was this report prepared? | |
Who was it for? | |
The office of the president in January 8th, 1989. | |
That would have been George Bush. | |
Right. | |
That's George Bush one. | |
Yes, that would have been right before his inauguration, right after the winning of the election and just before his inauguration. | |
Is there anything in there that we haven't heard about? | |
The 27 bodies certainly I'm not aware of, but is there any other stuff in there that we don't know about? | |
Any cases? | |
Roswell, of course, we know about because it's been in the headlines for 70 years. | |
But are there any cases in there specifically that haven't been talked about? | |
Oh, yes. | |
Well, there's a case in here that has been talked about, but I don't think it's been talked about enough, and maybe it just hasn't been talked about for quite a while. | |
And that is the alleged crash in Aztec, New Mexico, March 25th, 1948. | |
This document covers that event quite extensively. | |
And there are some details that vary from the account that we know. | |
Number one, that Aztec, New Mexico was a crash. | |
In this document, it lists quite clearly that it was not a crash, it was a controlled landing assisted by our own Air Force, also detected in coming into Earth's atmosphere by our Air Force, by three different missile tracking radar stations. | |
And then that craft was brought down at that time. | |
The military and the Air Force shows up at the site in short order and begins to try and literally break into the craft. | |
And then it goes further than that. | |
They end up finding 14 cryogenic chambers within the craft, 12 of which are occupied, and one of which they successfully reanimated. | |
And that is probably the most controversial aspect of this document because that being that was reanimated turns out to be a humanoid EBE, which they then held in custody for 11 months and conducted extensive interviews with, which there is a portion of in the document. | |
A portion of the interviews? | |
Yes, there are transcripts of an interview with an extraterrestrial biological entity. | |
And what sorts of things does he, she, or it say? | |
Well, many different things. | |
I don't even know where to begin. | |
Just give me a flavor. | |
Okay, well, most of the time, the extraterrestrial is talking about how there are such differences in the way they think versus the way we think, that they are frightened by humans and how we deal with each other, and that it's going to take us quite a long time to be really prepared for extraterrestrial visitation as a reality. | |
Hmm. | |
Well, that squares with the facts, doesn't it? | |
Oh, it certainly does. | |
It absolutely, certainly does. | |
Now, there's so much in here. | |
But basically, another thing about the Aztec case that isn't talked about, that your listeners may not be aware of in this document, something that we've never heard of in relation to the Aztec New Mexico 1948 event, is that this extraterrestrial entity says, and the people that write this document say, that there were three humanoid babies on this craft. | |
And the extraterrestrial says that it was its mission to bring these babies here and tells the Air Force men that are interrogating it to raise those babies because we are going to learn from those babies. | |
And that's going to assist us in some way. | |
Oh, my God. | |
And if we assume this was not an isolated incident, then the words that we can hear in our heads on the basis of that is they are here. | |
Exactly right. | |
And so part of my investigations is to try and find, and I know how impossible it sounds, try and find some trace. | |
Are these then babies still alive and on this world today? | |
We don't find that out from the document. | |
And so I don't know how I'm ever going to answer that question, but it is a question that deserves an answer, Howard. | |
Well, there's a very famous case. | |
I think Art Bell did the interview. | |
I did the interview too some years ago. | |
It's more than a decade ago. | |
The story of two women who brought up a girl child. | |
I think it was the story. | |
I haven't got the details here with me here, but the girl was unusual. | |
And her friends at school thought she was unusual. | |
She didn't like the naked sunlights, always kept her eyes covered. | |
There was something odd and strange about her. | |
And she died, I think, or disappeared after that. | |
And it was believed that this was an alien or a hybrid. | |
I'm telling the story badly, but it gives some degree of credence to what you've just told me anyway. | |
I'm familiar with that story. | |
Sophie's Eyes. | |
Sophie's Eyes, and it was Helen Billidoe, wasn't it? | |
And somebody else. | |
I can't remember the other person, but yeah, we're talking about the same thing. | |
Yes, absolutely right. | |
You know, and when it comes to these, don't get me wrong, I do have a healthy dose of skepticism here. | |
I do kind of go, all right, give me enough information to try and convince me. | |
These are very far-out, wild things that we're talking about that most people aren't ready to accept. | |
I'm not ready to accept. | |
Well, this is the problem with the whole thing, though, isn't it? | |
On one hand, you've got people like Captain Randy Kramer, who says that he was deputed as part of a special squad to live on Mars for 17 years, and then he came back to Earth younger than he was on Mars and has continued to live, but is part of this special force. | |
They don't issue him paychecks because that would give the game away. | |
So they don't pay him, but he's here in the service of this special force. | |
So you go from tales that make you raise your eyebrows and think that can't be true to information like you have within these documents. | |
And it's all out there. | |
It's all out there simultaneously. | |
And it's hard to know what to believe. | |
That's the difficulty, isn't it? | |
Well, it is. | |
It's the difficulty of our time. | |
We live in a time where the blur between what is fake and what is real is significant. | |
And for investigators of the unexplained, right, it becomes even more difficult. | |
We're trying to investigate things nobody has the answers to. | |
And we're also trying to wade through fraudulent information, intentionally faked information. | |
And there's got to be some also real information out there. | |
So I've always had this suspicion in my gut that we will get something real presented to us. | |
And we've seen so much fakery that we'll point at it and go, that's fake too. | |
And we'll miss it. | |
But let's be honest. | |
We will. | |
As broadcasters, you must have thought it was Christmas, your birthday, and Thanksgiving all rolled into one when this document arrived. | |
Even if this is proved to be a total fake, it can't do you any harm, can it? | |
I wouldn't imagine. | |
As long as you're following the mystery and you're not making any declarations, I think you'd be okay. | |
And even if it is a fake, and I'm not saying that it is because I don't know, it could be completely genuine. | |
I'm equally not qualified to say that. | |
The trail that got it to you and the reasons for it getting to you are an interesting story in themselves. | |
Well, right. | |
It sure is. | |
And like I said, I said this tonight on the air, actually. | |
I'm almost wondering if I shouldn't regret getting these papers now, because now that I have them, it's a great responsibility because I feel when it comes to answering the question, are we alone? | |
We have to follow every lead. | |
And here I've got about 99 different leads, Howard. | |
Which makes me think that you need, number one, as you say, you need to enlist the support of your audience for that. | |
And they will certainly give you that. | |
The task will come down to you, though, to sort the wheat from the chaff. | |
In other words, to see which are the good leads and which are the bad leads. | |
That's going to be difficult for you. | |
But you almost need to engage a private investigator, I think. | |
You need Colombo. | |
Yes. | |
Oh, absolutely. | |
And I think involving forensics is not a bad idea. | |
We're talking about a government document. | |
There's got to be experts out there on that. | |
There's got to be a lot of clues for a forensic scientist, maybe a forensic linguist, somebody at the Defense Intelligence Agency who knows what they're looking at when they look at it. | |
Or somebody retired who could take a look at not only the document itself, but look at the phraseology of it, the way that it's written. | |
Would a document written in that era for that purpose, assuming such things happened, would it be written in that way? | |
Would it be written as candidly as that? | |
Would the phraseology be the way that it is? | |
Those are interesting things to know, too. | |
Oh, yes, absolutely right. | |
Yes. | |
And there are, well, clearly typewritten text on here. | |
There are several government stamps that say things like top secret, do not duplicate, classified, those kind of things. | |
I'd imagine there must be a way to investigate that. | |
There's also a document number stamped on every single page. | |
That has to lead somewhere, one would think. | |
So there's some examination yet to be done. | |
And I know Stanton Friedman told me tonight as well that he needs to sort of track down some of the information that's in here. | |
He can't make a determination. | |
I can't make a determination. | |
And I know everybody sort of wants that. | |
But I think it's going to unfold over time. | |
And we're going to have to, well, go out there and do the work to get the answers that all of us want right now. | |
But I think, yes, involving a private investigator, involving some forensic scientists is the way to go. | |
And here's a thought. | |
You have your sunshine laws, your Freedom of Information Act over there in the U.S., where people can, it may be that the authorities, for national security reasons, redact certain parts of it, but you can request official documents after a certain point in time. | |
I wonder if you can request any of the component parts or this complete document itself. | |
And if you made a request like that, what exactly would happen? | |
Well, that's a very good question. | |
I wonder if that would turn good or turn bad for me if I submitted a request. | |
Well, should we say that there would be a trail that led right back to you? | |
That's the problem. | |
Right. | |
Well, you'd get one of those phone calls that go kind of like, how'd you get this number? | |
How did you get this document number? | |
And we need to see you in court on this date. | |
But the problem is that the racehorse is out of the trap now. | |
Everybody knows. | |
You've done some interviews. | |
You've been quoted in newspapers. | |
How is it playing in the US, by the way? | |
It's made the news here in the UK. | |
How is this story playing there? | |
I mean, look, in the media, you have rivals. | |
So they're not going to give you a massive amount of publicity. | |
I would not have thought. | |
I could be wrong. | |
How's it playing? | |
No, you think right. | |
And I think what's going on, or at least what I see, a lot of people are curious and there's a lot of polarization. | |
There are people that want to investigate it further. | |
There are people that are having a knee-jerk reaction that it must be fake because some other MJ-12 documents have proven to be fake. | |
Well, some MJ-12 documents have proven to be authentic also. | |
But the reaction is very polarized, a lot like our social climate is right now anyway. | |
I see it curiosity for the most part also from the listening audience and from my guests. | |
Like I said, Linda Moulton Howe is still going through it. | |
Stanton Friedman left me tonight saying he's going to continue to examine it, talk to people, make phone calls. | |
And that seems to be the general mood. | |
Either people have a knee-jerk reaction, it's real, it's fake, or they're right in the middle and they're incredibly curious. | |
Well, if you've got Linda, who I've known for years, and Stan, who I've known for years working on this, you're in good hands, I would have thought. | |
One of the things that worries me slightly is actually the fact that you haven't had a call from an alphabet agency saying, do you realize you're sitting on something that's dynamite here? | |
If you value your life and your safety and your future, drop this like a hot sack of potatoes. | |
You haven't had that call, so maybe the credibility stack goes down very slightly. | |
Well, that's the phone call I'm itching to have. | |
I mean, that is the phone call I'm itching to get. | |
Oh, man, somebody said, well, you better watch out for the men in black or something like that. | |
I would love for that to happen. | |
I would love to get that phone call. | |
Somebody telling me, do you realize what you've got your hands on? | |
I perk right up. | |
You've got all my time and my attention. | |
Tell me. | |
You tell me. | |
What do I have? | |
And if that call did take place, well, we've got a bigger story than we think. | |
Well, my personal thought is it's not going to do you any harm at all either way. | |
I mean, you're getting a certain amount of publicity. | |
It's piqued your interest. | |
It's testing your skills. | |
All of these things are good and useful. | |
And, you know, I think we need to talk a little down the track and see where you are with this. | |
But you certainly got some coverage. | |
Now, for my audience, they are, of course, many of them, fans of the great Art Bell. | |
And you have carried on the mantle of Art Bell by taking over his show at short notice. | |
I think it must be a year now or more that you've been doing this, Heather. | |
How's it feeling? | |
It's getting more and more comfortable. | |
Of course, at first, I lacked experience, but I guess that comes with time. | |
It is getting more comfortable. | |
I'm, how do I say, a little less nervous when it comes airtime? | |
And I have the benefit of his advice. | |
Anytime something comes up, I can always go to him and ask how to proceed. | |
But it's getting a lot easier. | |
And I've also got a very, very loyal audience that joins me every single night, you know, five nights a week. | |
And isn't that good that they've followed you through with this? | |
And one of the things that Art may have told you, and it's something that I had to learn the hard way here by doing a lot of radio in the UK, don't read anything about yourself if you can possibly help it. | |
Oh, yeah, I had to learn that. | |
Oh, my gosh. | |
Yes, you're so right about that. | |
If you do, and you try to figure out how to proceed based on the opinions, because I don't know about you, but for me, it's also incredibly polarized. | |
Either they really, really like me or they really, really don't like me. | |
And both sides love to tell me how they feel. | |
So it will leave you so confused if you look at that and try to base your decisions on that. | |
And so artists said, yes, you're going to get all kinds of opinions, thoughts, everything coming at you. | |
What you have to do is learn to cut through the noise and concentrate on what you're doing and try to get to a truth, try to get to some understanding. | |
Well, I also work for the BBC and have off and on over the years. | |
Mostly my work has been in commercial radio, but I've also worked for the BBC. | |
And the BBC's view of such things is that if all the political parties attack you for bias or for being no good at what you're doing, you're probably getting it right. | |
So I read my email and always take it on board. | |
And I get some email from people saying, Howard, your shows are going off the boil here. | |
You've had some lame guests recently. | |
And I have people saying, Howard, you're on a row. | |
These are the best guests that you've ever had. | |
And the way that you interview these people, wow. | |
And that's lovely to read those things. | |
And I guess at the end of the day, all you have to do and all I have to do, we have to do as people who do this is just continue to do the best that you can because there is no more than any of us can be expected reasonably to offer, I would say. | |
Does that sound, it probably sounds a bit pompous. | |
It's not meant to. | |
Well, no, I think you're right on point there. | |
And by the way, your email sounds very familiar to me, which is an odd comfort. | |
But no, that's exactly what we have to do. | |
I think that we shouldn't be held responsible for finding the answers, but I think we should be held responsible for pursuing the answers, pursuing some sort of truth when it comes to the paranormal and the explained. | |
Because Howard, really what all of this paranormal investigative comes down to is two questions. | |
There are two questions. | |
Are we alone in the universe? | |
And what happens after we die? | |
Those are the two big, big questions. | |
Everything else sort of revolves around those, right? | |
So if we continue pursuing these and we continue collecting people's experiences and other people who know and study this information, then we're headed in the right direction and that's all we could ever be expected to do. | |
And I've been doing this stuff on the radio for 13 years now this year. | |
And what I always used to say and what I still say from time to time, both on the podcast and the radio show, what I say is I don't expect you to believe or buy any or all of this. | |
But if 5% or 8% of this happens to be true, even that amount will shake the nature of our perception of this world. | |
And that's why we do what we do. | |
That is exactly right. | |
You know, all we need is one UFO case to be the real thing to answer that question, right? | |
That's all we're going to need. | |
And so I feel, you know, there's a lot of false trails to go down. | |
But until we go down all of those false trails and mark them false to get to the one that's real, you see, that's what we have to keep doing because you get to that one that's real and there you go. | |
You have your answers. | |
And then where do we go from there? | |
So I feel in relation to the documents, this is a clue. | |
This is a lead. | |
Where is it going to go? | |
Where's it going to take us? | |
We do ourselves a disservice if we don't follow where it's going to take us. | |
The job that you do, I mean, look, I do my podcast and my radio show, but I also do so I can eat other radio work, news work and music and talk shows, that kind of stuff. | |
When you're doing that all the time, you know, art, I think, had a remarkable constitution and was able to take an awful lot of effluent on board and still come up smiling every time. | |
It's not easy. | |
It's hard work. | |
It's testing work and it can emotionally and physically drain you. | |
How are you doing? | |
Oh, it absolutely does. | |
Well, Art has an expression, at least that he uses with me, which is you'll harden to it. | |
And I didn't believe him at first, right? | |
I thought, you know, he's got a way of really distilling things down to the simple bottom line. | |
And that's what he did there. | |
And I was very skeptical of that, just as skeptical of that as I am of these documents. | |
But it did end up happening. | |
Over time, I would give just 200% on the air, and I'd be through and absolutely finished by the time Saturday came around. | |
And now I notice over time, it takes a little less out of you every time you do it. | |
So that's starting to happen. | |
But it's your life. | |
It's not a job. | |
This is not a clock in, clock out situation. | |
This is something that you're doing all the time. | |
It never shuts off. | |
You're always in pursuit of the next thing. | |
You're always in pursuit of something that somebody may have discovered and something that you need to interview them for. | |
You're never, ever, all the way done in this job. | |
There's another thing waiting for you constantly. | |
So you have to get used to that and accept that as a way of life. | |
Did you ever see the remote viewing movie that Ed Dames was a consultant on called Suspect Zero With Bob Kingsley. | |
Bob Kingsley. | |
Bob Kingsley is a broadcaster, Ben Kingsley. | |
Bob, if you're listening, you've just got a name check. | |
Ben Kingsley. | |
Great, great movie and very, very true to life. | |
And there's just a little tiny one-second cameo, major ed dames in there, as well as the remote viewing instructor. | |
But the phrase you've just used about it never shuts off was Ben Kingsley, Sir Ben Kingsley, there in the desert in the middle of all of this with his hands clutched to his head saying, please turn it off. | |
It is something that never leaves you, isn't it? | |
Well, right. | |
And I've found in the course of this work that if you go looking for the unexplained and the paranormal, it will find you too. | |
It will know. | |
It will somehow land in your lap and it will find you. | |
And then now you can't give it up. | |
It ends up sort of sinking its claws into you and it almost becomes an obsession, almost becomes a compulsion, which the show has kind of become for me. | |
When the weekend does come, there's this odd feeling of utter and total exhaustion and yet a compulsion to go, but I have things to say. | |
Am I going to be able to get, am I going on tonight? | |
What am I going to do when I go on tonight? | |
Oh, it's Saturday. | |
Okay, well, Monday. | |
We're getting ready for Monday. | |
And there you go again. | |
As long as you still feel that way, you're winning. | |
Is that what that means? | |
Take it from me over here. | |
I'm just some guy over in England, but I think that's what it means. | |
It means that you're on top of it and you're doing all right. | |
A big question that everybody will be asking you. | |
You know, Art Bell is as big an enigma as my namesake Howard Hughes was in his day. | |
Everybody had a theory about him. | |
Everybody had news of when he was going to make a public appearance, whatever. | |
As far as you are aware, is Art Bell returning to the radio? | |
Well, he is a mystery. | |
No one can figure out what he's going to do or really what he's all about, right? | |
And I think he likes it that way. | |
I think he likes to leave an open question, and he's done that with when he may or may not come back to broadcast. | |
Even I don't know. | |
I can tell you that he tells me directly how this does not come from my ego, Howard. | |
I don't have much of one to speak of anyway. | |
But he does say that he is satisfied with the job I'm doing and that if he came back, it might get in my way. | |
And I come back at him and I say, well, are you kidding me? | |
I'm not going to be the person that stands in the way of you getting on the air. | |
And he goes, no, no, no. | |
That's not it at all. | |
I'm giving you enough time to establish yourself. | |
That's what he's doing. | |
And that's a great position to be in. | |
And that's a great thing for him to do. | |
Yeah, but he always leaves that question open. | |
There is no answer whether art is going to come back or not. | |
I always think to myself, you know, someday when that music starts, it's going to be him that starts talking. | |
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you good evening. | |
I'm listening over internet connections for 20 years. | |
I've been listening to that. | |
Oh, yeah. | |
You were as captivated with it as I was. | |
Oh, sure. | |
I mean, I can't remember a time. | |
I mean, I would have to think back pretty far when I wasn't listening to his show. | |
I mean, I am just a listener like anybody else out there. | |
I used to get in my car, and because we couldn't get the station in very clear that he was on at the time, I would get in my car and go driving out on the highway to find stations that got his show in clearer and just drive through the night listening to whatever he was talking about. | |
I never cared. | |
One of the great moments of my life, Heather, it's the same kind of thing, was that with a girlfriend years ago, we went to California. | |
She was American and she did the driving there. | |
I was terrified to drive in California, but she did the driving. | |
And I lived one of my dreams. | |
We are driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. | |
It is dark. | |
It is warm. | |
We turn on the radio, and I think it was Cogo K-O-G-O, maybe KFI at that time. | |
And I actually heard Art Bell on a big, clear-channel AM station booming out from the high desert and across the great American Southwest. | |
I bid you good evening. | |
I heard it on a car radio in America. | |
I can die happy. | |
Oh, oh, yeah, there's nothing like it. | |
There was nothing like it. | |
Even at the time, until this day, it would give you chills when you heard that intro music, come on, the chase. | |
And I can't tell you how many nights I've had under a full moon driving down Highway 101 in Northern California in the middle of the night, not a car to be seen on the highway, and Arts of Voice and listening to Bob Lazar, Whitley Streeber, the Ghost Investigator Society. | |
CIS. | |
Yeah, exactly. | |
Lynn Holton Howe, you know, all these fantastic people, or even Rodney with the captured spirit, or Mel with the whole, you know, there's so many fantastic moments. | |
And there's just, I struggle to find words to describe what that was like. | |
Is Mel still out there, by the way? | |
For my UK listeners and my listeners around the world, Art Bel had this regular guest who had some property on which there was a seemingly bottomless pit, at the bottom of which may have been all sorts of biblical mayhem and chaos and terrible noises and screaming. | |
Is he still around that guy? | |
Well, a couple of things, actually. | |
Yes, he is still around. | |
I came in contact with a gentleman who just by pure chance ended up living a couple doors down from Mel Waters himself. | |
And then Mel Waters took off. | |
It turns out Mel is a bit of a, I don't know, travel bug. | |
He gets this wild idea every now and then, and he just heads out on the road and he'll travel and hitchhike with truck drivers and make his way across the country, make his way back and then relax for a while and get up, do the same thing. | |
So I've been trying to put the word out to American truck drivers. | |
Hey, if you run into Mel Waters, you got to let me know. | |
Please let me know. | |
I know there are a lot of trucker listeners. | |
Now, another interesting thing that has just happened in the last, I don't know, seven or eight days was I had a caller on an Open Lions show right at the end, which is always strange. | |
Oftentimes, the most interesting call is going to be in the last five minutes of an Open Lions show. | |
A gentleman calls in to say, Look, I need to talk to you. | |
We were talking about abductions that night, but he goes, Look, this is not about an abduction, but I do need to talk to you. | |
I know somebody in Maine that has a hole, a bottomless hole, and around this hole is what seems to be petrified wood. | |
And this hole is nine foot in diameter, and it's been there for as long as anybody can remember. | |
I mean, it really reminds me of what Art used to talk about with Mel. | |
Do you remember? | |
And I said, well, of course I remember Mel's hole. | |
So I told the gentleman, please go talk to your friend. | |
Apparently, this hole is on his friend's property. | |
I said, well, please talk to your friend and find out if he would like to come on the program to talk about it. | |
I would absolutely love to do an interview with him. | |
So as we speak, you and I, right now, Howard, my caller who called up to tell me this is now on that property pursuing his friend to find out for us. | |
I am waiting right now for the response from this guy to find out. | |
Jeez, I hope you get one. | |
Would like to come on the program and talk about it, but we may have a third hole on our hands because Mel, as you, if you remember, had the one up at Monastash Ridge up in Washington, and then he found another one down in the southwest, I believe, in Nevada. | |
Well, this one is now in Maine. | |
In the wilds of Maine, and Maine, wintertime in Maine, you may have experienced it, is pretty bleak, pretty remote. | |
It is pure naked beauty out there in the countryside, but it is remote stuff. | |
Remote place. | |
It's Stephen King country. | |
I can hear the wolves howling now. | |
Yeah. | |
One of Art's friends, Tess Gerritson, very famous and excellent, excellent author, I recommend anybody. | |
If you see Tess Gerritson on the spine of a book, it's guaranteed to be good. | |
She made an interesting comment here recently that said, Maine is positively rich ground for the paranormal. | |
The place is just haunted. | |
Boy. | |
Well, listen, I think we ought to park this conversation now. | |
I was up very early in the morning to do a morning drive show. | |
You were up through the night doing your show. | |
You got the weekend off. | |
I've got to proceed with my various activities. | |
But let's resume this conversation at another time, Heather Wade. | |
Nice to talk with you, and I'm sure I will read about what's happened connected with this document soon enough, but I'd be very keen to find out. | |
Thank you very much. | |
You're absolutely welcome. | |
When I have an update, you will be one of the first to know. | |
The woman who took over from the great Art Bell, Heather Wade, who's doing a great job on Midnight in the Desert, thank you to her, and I know that we will talk again. | |
Nice to know that there is a transatlantic communion of thought going on to do with these subjects. | |
Thank you, Heather, very much indeed. | |
Give my regards to Art Bell, the man who inspired all of us. | |
300 shows we've now done. | |
Thank you also to Professor R. V. Loeb at Harvard for giving me his time. | |
We'll be talking to him as well again. | |
Thank you very much for supporting me over these 11 years, for the nice things you've said, and just for letting me know that you're there. | |
If you want to get in touch with me, I love to hear from you. | |
There were no shout-outs on this edition, but I'm going to do one quick mention here because I've been asked to, and I always do these things when asked. | |
Roger says, love the show. | |
It says, could you give a shout-out to my wife, Jeanette? | |
The 6th of July is her birthday. | |
She loves the show, and it would mean a lot to her if she was mentioned. | |
Can you tell her that she does something unexplained to me? | |
She's a great mum to our son, Henry. | |
And we hope she has a fabulous birthday on the 6th of July. | |
Could you also ask her, where are my trousers? | |
Roger, only you can know what that's all about. | |
But I'm happy to do it. | |
Jeanette, have a lovely birthday and thank you very much for listening to this show. | |
You see, we react to our listeners, unlike a lot of mainstream media. | |
300 editions of The Unexplained, 300 shows across a lot of years. | |
And we've learned a lot over the way. | |
I've been through a lot in my life. | |
You've been through a lot in yours. | |
And we're still standing. | |
Looking forward to edition 301. | |
So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained. | |
This has been Edition 300, 301 coming soon. | |
Wherever you are, please stay safe. | |
Please stay calm. | |
And above all, please stay in touch. | |
Thank you very much. | |
Take care. |