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Oct. 11, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
45:46
Edition 316 - Guest Catchups

Top scientist Dr Martin Archer on Elon Musk's new space plans - and Carol Bowman on childrenwho've lived before...

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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.
Thank you very much if you've been in touch recently for your nice comments about the show and if you have made a donation to it recently, thank you very much indeed.
Comments and donations via the website theunexplained.tv designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot.
Thank you to him for his continued hard work.
We have plans for this show.
Very excited too about some of the guests that we've got coming up here too, but more about that in future editions.
On this edition of the show, two very different but two very compelling guests.
You might have seen in the mainstream media recently that Elon Musk at a conference in Adelaide, Australia, made a lot of announcements about space and his refined plans for using one type of rocket in future.
Plans to go to Mars with cargo, I think, by 2022 and people by 2024.
The dates given in media reports vary on this.
And the other plan being the idea of being able to shuttle people between cities on this planet using rockets within matters of minutes, something that certainly scientists and dreamers have been talking about since I was a kid.
Fascinating stuff.
I've run it all past Dr. Martin Archer from Queen Mary University, London, man who writes and broadcasts about science and space.
Very well known, so Martin will be on this edition from my radio show.
And then also on this edition, a very different guest, Carol Bowman, talking about the lives that some children, when they're very young, claimed that they have lived before this life.
It is compelling, fascinating, and in parts moving too, so well worth hearing.
Martin Archer and Carol Bowman on this edition.
TheUnexplained.tv is the address for the website.
If you want to get in touch, we'd love to hear from you.
Let's hear from the first of the guests on this edition then, Dr. Martin Archer from Queen Mary University on the new plans, refined plans, I guess you would call them, of Elon Musk.
We will start construction of the first ship around the second quarter of next year.
So in about six to nine months, we should start building the first ship.
I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years.
Five years seems like a long time to me.
But that's our goal, is to try to make the 2022 Mars rendezvous.
The Earth-Mars synchronization happens roughly every two years.
So every two years there's an opportunity for ships to fly to Mars.
So then in 2024, we want to try to fly four ships, two of which would be crewed, and two of which, two cargo and two crew.
The goal of these initial missions is to find the best source of water.
That's for the first mission.
And then the second mission, the goal is to build the propellant plant.
So we should, particularly with six ships there, have plenty of landed mass to construct the propellant depot, which will consist of a large array of solar panels, very large array, and then everything necessary to mine and refine water and then draw the CO2 out of the atmosphere and then create and store deep cryO, CH4, and O2.
Then build up the base, starting mostly with one ship, then multiple ships, then start building out the city, then making the city bigger, even bigger.
Thank you.
And yeah, over time, terraforming Mars and making it really a nice place to be.
There's been a lot of focus on that conference in Adelaide, Australia, and the stuff that he talked about there.
Two things.
One, progress in Mars missions and the focusing of one rocket, one vehicle to do that instead of a number of projects that he had on the go.
More focus there and the possibility of the first people being sent to the red planet, he says, in 2024.
And the thing that caught a lot of people's attention round about Friday was the idea that people will soon be able to fly from city to city within minutes.
According to Elon Musk, he's got a plan to allow us to do this by traveling through space and coming down again.
That's a very simplistic way of putting it.
But a man who might be able to decode it a little better than I can is Dr. Martin Archer from Queen Mary University London, award-winning physicist, science writer, and broadcaster.
Martin, thanks for giving us this time.
What do you make of what Elon Musk is up to?
Well, Elon Musk is known for being a bit of a visionary in this sort of field.
And it's great to hear the sort of aspirations that he has with SpaceX to do a lot of these plans.
And I do think that there is a lot of truth in what he says that will actually come to pass.
Not necessarily on the time scales, he says, and there are certain aspects of what he's got planned, which I don't think are realistic, particularly that one that a lot of people have latched onto, that idea of using rockets to travel long-horse flights in any point on the globe in under an hour is what Elon Musk says.
I don't think that is going to happen, but his plans for Mars and precursors to the moon, I think they'll happen maybe a bit later than he says.
So the time scales are maybe a little optimistic.
This idea, though, of being able to somehow transport yourself from some terminal in London and arrive in Australia within minutes or not very long, how would that work in the way that he foresees it?
Well, I mean, this has been an idea for a while.
It's not brand new.
Obviously, it's a lot quicker to get to somebody.
If you've got a rocket, you can get up into orbit and then back down again A lot quicker than you ever could fly an airplane to somewhere.
So that's literally all that's proposed.
And it's with his new proposed rocket, the BFR, that he reckons you could do things like London to Melbourne in under an hour.
It's all that, and it's basically building on a lot of the technology that they've been developing at SpaceX for the last few years.
In particular, you might have heard about these relandable rockets.
So rather than rockets being discarded, actually these ones are able to land, and they've had 16 successful landings in a row, which is fantastic.
And it is going to drive the cost of space down.
So he's kind of taking that, well, a number of steps further with this proposal.
Well, if you think about Richard Branson's plan to take paying tourists up into space for a little jolly up there and then come down again, the people who will do that are having to pay a lot of money to do it and they're having to do training to do it.
But here we're talking about something that could actually allow paying trippers at some point to travel great distances rather than book a plane and be locked away in that for 24 hours.
Yeah, I mean there is quite a lot in parallel with Virgin Galactic on this particular thing that Elon has talked about.
I'm not entirely sure that you wouldn't have to do some training.
I mean you're going in a rocket.
Now compared to Virgin Galactic, you're not going in a rocket for that.
So Richard Branson's plans don't have anything like the sorts of Gs that you're going to be pulling.
There's acceleration that you'll feel by being in a rocket launch.
So I think even if Elon Musk's plans of these long-haul rocket flights were to go ahead, I think you would have to do some training because you're going to be subjecting your body through stuff just like astronauts do.
So I don't see how you could just rock up and do that.
I can't imagine.
I mean, there was a promotional video.
I don't know if you've seen it put out, but it talked about London, New York taking 29 minutes.
Now, what does it take now?
Seven hours, I think, or thereabouts on a conventional plane, as long as there are no delays and nothing's cancelled on the way.
So we're talking about roughly seven hours at the moment.
So you're cutting that by a factor of 14 or more.
In fact, that can't happen just in the snap of a finger.
I guess you have to have some preparation for that.
Because as you say, the kind of forces that you are going to be subjected to will be nothing like the 600 miles an hour or so that a normal jet flies at.
No, exactly.
I mean, it's a huge thing.
And there are other problems, you know, potentially with this, not only what, you know, you're going to be putting passengers through.
I mean, how much fuel is this thing going to get through?
I mean, it's a huge amount.
Is that energy efficient?
Is that something that we should be doing in this era and age when we want to cut down on fossil fuels and things like that?
And also, does it economically make sense?
We've seen what happened with Concorde, and the reason why that ended up not being successful was actually the business model of there being too few aircraft and what happens if one of them can't fly.
That was the real thing that was the clincher on Concorde, not the price.
And obviously the price of taking a rocket is going to be way more than it ever was to take a Concorde.
So those who say that all of these things are going to happen within our lifetime and we will see big colonies on Mars and we'll be flying to New York in 29 minutes and we'll be getting to Australia maybe in 45 or 50, it may well happen, but it won't happen perhaps on the time scale and maybe not sadly within our lifetimes.
I think it's fair to say that we will see people on Mars in a lot of people's lifetimes that are around now.
NASA has plans to get there and they're more realistically saying the 2030s.
So I think we are going to see some future in space exploration and development in space, particularly people going back to the moon.
That's going to be happening within the next 10 years and people going to Mars sometime in the 2030s, probably.
I'm not sure about this rocket stuff for travel.
I don't think that's going to be how everyone goes on their holiday.
But certainly there are very exciting things coming up which a lot of people will be able to see in their lifetimes.
I'm pretty sure of that.
And how excited are you by the talk this last week of there being instead of an international space station in future some kind of base on the moon?
I mean it's great.
I think we've needed to go back to the moon for a while.
We haven't been there in something like 45, 50 years.
And there's a big drive for that at the moment.
And actually because it helps us develop the technologies for going to Mars.
So there is this desire to go there again.
And I think they're sort of working up the science cases.
What is it that we want to do there?
What is it that we can find out?
So I think that's incredibly exciting, actually.
Dr. Martin Archer from Queen Mary University London, thank you for staying up to do this on The Unexplained and I'm sure we'll talk again.
Thanks Martin very much.
Cheers.
Dr. Martin Archer, search him on the web.
You will find out all about him.
Very, very interesting guy, science writer, broadcaster, author.
He's from Queen Mary University in London, UK.
Now something very different and very much the core of The Unexplained.
Meet and drink to us.
Life and death.
What happens when you die?
What happens after you die?
And sometimes what happens before you die.
On this edition, we're interested in the after part of that equation.
Carol Bowman has been researching the past life memories of young children.
I found this a very compelling and very moving at times conversation.
I hope you do too.
Her books, Children's Past Lives and Return from Heaven, are now classics in the field of reincarnation, according to her biography, and have been published and read around the world in 22 foreign editions.
She's done a lot of this.
Let's get her on.
Carol, thank you for coming on this show.
Oh, you're very welcome, James.
So I don't know whether you heard any of the person that we were talking with before you.
We were talking with Carol, Carla Wills Brandon about my producer's laughing here because I've mixed up your two names because I've got one Carol and one Carla.
It's perfectly done.
When you're my age, when you're my age, you mix names up all the time.
You're at the same age, fans.
Well, exactly.
You know, it's the age when life gets a little unclear.
But we ask the big questions that matter.
We talked with her about the idea that some people who die, not everybody, but people who die, see just before they go, relatives, perhaps, or visions of people.
They have conversations with spirit beings or whatever.
But quite often relatives.
I don't know whether you're aware of that.
Well, I worked as a bereavement counselor in a hospice for a few years, so I'm very aware of that.
It happens, I think, a lot more than is recorded, a lot more than people are willing to talk about, I suspect.
Absolutely.
Yes.
But yeah, that's not really my field of expertise, but I was exposed to it quite a bit.
And I know right the moment before my mother left her body, and this happens quite often, people do see others in the room.
So maybe we won't know until we get there, but apparently there is some connection with the spirit world at that point, at that moment when we are about to leave the body, which I think is comforting, actually.
It is, and if people derive comfort from it, then that's fine, whether it is something that really exists or whether it's an artifact of the brain or whatever it happens to be.
What we're here to talk about.
Yeah, whatever it is.
Now, what we're here to talk about, and there is a little bit of delay on the phone line, so we just have to both kind of be aware of that, but we'll work around it, is past life regression.
Define for me, would you, what past life regression is?
Yeah, actually, I'm going to be talking about spontaneous past lives, and the difference is in past life regression, there are techniques you can use, deep focus, hypnosis, meditation, to access past life memories, and that's usually with adults.
But my field of research is in children's spontaneous memories.
These are two, three, and four, and even five-year-olds who remember their previous lives.
So of course you don't use hypnotic regression.
No, nothing.
But these are children who come into this world saying that they've had experience of something else somewhere else.
I even had this, I've told my listeners here, and some people in the studio laughed a little, but I was telling my parents and anybody who would listen when I was four that I vividly remembered California.
And I described the Pacific Coast Highway.
I described the beautiful blue sky and the deep blue ocean and the Cadillac cars that were driving up and down there.
And lo and behold, I went to California in much later life, probably 15, 16 years ago, and I actually saw what as a child I believed I'd remembered.
So it's an experience that happens.
And maybe I just watched a little bit too much television at three years of age, but it's something that was a part of my life.
Right.
And I had the same experience when I was a child.
I had dreams that I later found out were related to past lives.
But the research I've done is a result of my own children having memories when they were young.
And in my son's case, when he was five, he developed a phobia of loud booming sounds, which we first noticed at a 4th of July Independence Day celebration here in the States where they have fireworks.
And once the fireworks began, he absolutely became hysterical.
And a friend of mine who was a hypnotherapist was visiting, and I told him about my son's phobia, not thinking that it could be related to anything in his short life.
It was mysterious why he wouldn't expose to those sounds.
Although hysterical.
To be fair, Carol, to be fair, as a child, we have November the 5th here, and of course we let off a lot of fireworks like you do on July 4th.
Right.
For a different reason.
I was scared of fireworks when I was five, I have to say.
Well, in my son's case, when we asked him what he was afraid of, he started talking of himself in the first person as a soldier, an adult soldier, which was totally out of character with my son who didn't even have a toy gun.
And he remembered crouching behind a rock.
He described the rifle he used.
He said, I don't want to be here.
I don't know who I'm shooting at.
And he described being shot in his wrist.
And they said they took him out of battle.
And he described how they put him on a bench.
He said it wasn't a bed.
It was a bench, a hard bench.
And it was some kind of hospital, but it wasn't a hospital.
It was just some poles on the ground covered by material.
And he said he didn't want to be there.
He didn't want to fight.
And he missed his wife and family.
Which is a classic soldier's experience.
And there he is in a field, what we would describe, I guess, as a field hospital being treated on the field of battle.
Right.
And that moment when he said, I miss my wife and family, was the turning point for me.
I was trying to figure out what was going on.
And he proceeded to say how he didn't want to be there.
He felt guilty about being a soldier.
He didn't want to shoot anyone.
And he went on to say after they bandaged his wrist where he was wounded, he had to go back into battle.
He didn't want to go.
He's made to go behind a cannon.
And then all of a sudden, the recollection stopped.
But the upshot of all that was after he talked about it, his phobia of loud sounds went away.
In fact, he asked for his first drum kit after that and made booming sounds all the time.
But even more interesting, on that spot where he said he was shot on his wrist in battle and they had bandaged it, he had a chronic severe eczema on that spot on his wrist since he had been about nine months old, which had not responded to any medical treatment.
And after this very quick recollection, the eczema cleared up.
So that was the point where I decided this is really something I want to explore.
And I started asking around if any parents in my community in North Carolina had experiences with their young children.
And I started collecting stories just from parents.
Oh, yeah, my daughter remembered talking about her family had died in the flood.
You know, this is a three-year-old or a four-year-old.
And a lot of children remember dying traumatically.
And when I started doing my research, I found that there was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, which is a very prestigious school in the States.
He was the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, and his name is Ian Stevenson.
And he had documented about 2,500 cases from around the world of young children who had spontaneous past life memories.
And he was able to collect enough data where the children remembered their names from the past, they remembered where they lived, they remembered specific details of their former lives that he could actually verify these memories by having the child direct them through the details to another family in another town, and he would find that there was someone who died that matched the description the child gave.
And even more interestingly, the present child would have personality traits similar to the person who died.
And in some cases, the child would have birthmarks or birth defects related to the traumatic injury in their bodies when they died.
And he would investigate to the point of getting autopsy reports of the deceased and matching it up with the birthmarks or birth defects on the present child.
So that experience that your son had, where he had the eczema in that area where he had an injury, supposedly, in a previous life, many other people have experienced that in many different ways, you say.
That's right.
And the main thing that I got from Dr. Stevenson's amazing research, he wrote volumes about this, but it's in academic books, is that children all around the world have these memories regardless of their parents' religious beliefs, regardless of their cultures.
And these memories manifest most around the age of three, between two and five.
And usually these memories tend to fade by the age of seven.
So these are universal patterns.
Well, I was going to say that about your son.
You said that your son's fear of loud bangs ebbed away once he talked with you about his supposed experience in a past life.
But it may just have been that he was getting older, having other experiences, and you erase what is there.
Not really, because it was very immediate.
And I could see that with other children, too, because since then I started putting together what I had learned from my children's experiences and about my daughter had a memory too, which I don't have time to talk about.
But she had the same experience.
She had a phobia, which immediately went away after she talked about the past life story.
Well, you can give me an idea.
What was that phobia?
She was, we didn't know this at the time, but she was terrified of our house burning down.
And she had a little bag packed under her bed with her favorite Barbie doll and some clothes.
So she was ready to evacuate to get her.
She was ready to flee.
Exactly.
And we didn't know this until she was about eight and was spending the night at her friend's house overnight.
And for some reason, they were watching a movie with a dramatic explosion and fire scene with it.
And she became hysterical to the point where the mother had to bring her home at about 11 o'clock at night.
And she had spent the night there many other times.
So it wasn't separation, anxiety.
It was clearly she got triggered by that scene of the fire.
So she started talking about what she remembered before about being a child who died in a house fire.
And she got very emotional in describing it.
She was crying.
After she talked about it, her phobia went away.
So this is, I had two kids who had these memories, and I don't think it was a coincidence.
I think it led me up this particular path.
Right.
Well, I've never been a parent, but for those who are, or are perhaps about to be, if you are in a situation, which you say is pretty common, where a child comes to you and does what I did when I was a kid.
I lived in California.
I'm an American, which is absolutely true.
I mean, my parents, they were very sweet.
They just listened to me prattle on about this.
But, you know, how should you handle that situation if you're a parent?
Well, actually, what they did was fine with you.
You just don't want to dismiss that, what a child is trying to tell you or dismiss it as fantasy.
Maybe it is fantasy, but just let them talk about it.
I mean, to their credit, we only had a black and white TV back then, so I'd never seen color television, but I was describing clear colors and everything.
They just listened to me.
You know, they spent a lot of my formative years just listening to me.
Yeah, which is fine.
But in some cases, you didn't remember your death, but a lot of children, like about 60%, according to Dr. Stevenson's research, of the children remember traumatic deaths, as my children did.
So in that case, you really want to listen to them.
Don't shut them down.
You know, even encourage them to talk about it by asking open-ended questions.
Well, what happened?
And then what happened?
And how did you feel?
Because a lot of times the children are carrying very powerful emotions from these traumas into the present life.
So we talk as adults about post-traumatic stress disorder.
You're actually saying that some children exhibit, because of the way we think they die, they exhibit a sort of post-life stress disorder.
Exactly.
Thank you for saying that, because it operates in very much the same way.
So it's best to discern what they're trying to tell you, and maybe they need assurances that this was something that happened in the past, And they're now safe, or whatever assurances they need from the information they're giving to you.
And the worst thing you can do is shut it down.
And if the child shows any propensity to want to know more about maybe the manner of their departure or about the life that they claim that they've led, do you assist that as a parent?
You can.
I have a very well-known case of a little boy in Louisiana who at age two started having nightmares five nights a week of his plane crashing.
Good lord.
And this child was totally obsessed with airplanes.
Anytime they went anywhere, if there was a model airplane or anything that had to do with aviation or airplanes, he would point to it and they had a whole collection of toy airplanes in his room because that's all he was interested in.
So he started having these nightmares at which point the child's grandmother gave his mother, the little boy's name is James, gave James's mother my book to educate her about children's past lives.
And she started asking him about his plane crashing.
And after she did that, he started talking about the plane caught on fire and he couldn't get out.
And after that, he started recalling more details of that life to the point where the father didn't want to believe it.
His Christian beliefs precluded a belief in any kind of reincarnation.
So the mother was really on her own, but he started talking about his airplane, how he flew a Corsair.
The parents didn't know what a Corsair was, but it's kind of 1950s, isn't it?
Is that 1950s or 1992?
Right.
Yeah, World War II.
And it was on aircraft carriers.
And so the mother asked him, well, where did your plane take off of?
And he said, a boat.
And he said, and they asked the name of the boat.
Do you remember the name?
And he said, yeah, Natoma.
And the mother said, is that a Japanese name?
He said, no, it's American.
So the father started doing research online and found out that there was an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, an American aircraft carrier called the Natoma Bay.
And they were corsairs, and they asked him, do you remember your name?
And he would always say, James, but his name is James in this life.
So the father kind of wrote that off, you know, this couldn't be real because he said his name was James.
But then the mother asked him, do you remember anyone on any of your friends?
And he said, yes, Jack Larson.
Jack Larson.
And they were able to trace Jack Larson in the logs of the ship.
There was a surviving veteran on the Natoma Bay by the name of Jack Larson.
So the father went to a couple one-to-one reunion of the Natoma Bay veterans, the surviving veterans, and he started doing research secretively.
He didn't want to tell them what was up because they thought he assumed they think he was crazy.
But he found out, the father found out there was one pilot who died in the way James described, and his name was James Houston Jr.
So he was a James.
And young James went on to remember details of his family life.
And the family found out that there was a surviving sister in California of his pilot.
And they contacted her and told her what was going on.
And she was very open to it.
And she was able to corroborate a lot of the details of her brother's life.
Now, I would be remembered.
As I say, I'm not a parent, and I probably will never be a parent, but I think I would have some reservations about introducing the child, no matter how vivid the recollections are, to that stage of it, to going to meet a sister or whatever.
How much of that was the child involved in?
Well, that's an interesting point because in some cases you don't want to contact the other family.
It's just not appropriate.
But in this case, we were working on a television show for a major network, and they were taping James, and they were taping me and telling the story.
And at that point, I said, look, if they're going to air this, you have to contact the sister.
And they found that she had a daughter.
She was an elderly woman.
She's since died.
But her daughter was with her when the mother called and told her what was going on.
And she wanted to meet him, too.
So in this case, there was an openness and a receptivity to this, but in some cases there wouldn't be.
And, you know, it's not necessarily advisable.
I'm thinking of it from the point of view of the child.
I would just be worried that a child might be destabilized by going into this too much.
He was delighted.
He was delighted.
I have photos of him meeting Jack Larson, his friend, and the sister.
And you should see the smile on his face.
He needed closure.
The reason why these memories come up is because the kids need closure quite often.
And presumably, did James get closure from this?
He did.
And there's more to the story.
I mean, he was delighted to meet these people.
And I think it helped settle something in his soul.
After the piece aired on ABC-TV, which is one of the networks here, a Japanese film crew connected to one of the networks there saw the piece and arranged for the family to go to Japan.
James Houston's plane was shot down over Iwo Jima.
They hired a boat and they took the family out to the area where James Houston's plane went down and they did a memorial service.
And James was about seven at the time.
And he cried.
He threw the bouquet into the water.
And from that point on, he was at peace.
And what of James, you know, James on this side of life?
What of him now?
What is, you know, obviously we don't want to identify him too closely, but what is he doing?
What did he turn out to be?
What's he doing?
He was very accomplished.
He reached the highest level of Boy Scouts.
Last thing I heard was he was joining the military.
Oh, well, that's a circle of life.
Yeah, well, unfinished business, I guess.
Hopefully he won't have to see combat, but the way things are going in this country, who knows?
Anyway, it is interesting because it just, the way that case unfolded, James' story unfolded, and other children's too, sometimes they need closure.
Sometimes they need to talk about it and just kind of express the emotions.
But in James' case, he really, he needed a little more and he got it.
You know, it was kind of orchestrated for him.
That doesn't happen very often.
Parents have to handle that one really carefully.
We are continuing to talk about the children who have recollections of lives that they say or they believe that they have lived before.
It's something that is fleeting within their lives.
In my case, I stopped talking about being an American from California by the time I got to about seven, I think.
That's late, probably six, maybe.
But I had vivid, what I thought were memories that I hadn't got from our black and white TV of being in California.
And, you know, I still have a big soft spot, as you might know listening to this show, for all things American.
You know, in many ways, there is a part of me that wishes I was an American.
So it's in my DNA somewhere.
Carol Bowman is on.
We're talking about this.
Fascinating case of the Airman James Houston and the Natoma Bay aircraft carrier and the conclusion of that, which was all good by the looks of it.
And any ghosts, if that's what they were, were successfully laid to rest.
And James, in this life, in this era, is living a very happy and successful life.
Carol, do you think that there could be a physical explanation for some of this?
Could it be some kind of genetic memory?
You know, we hear stories of people who get heart transplants, liver transplants, and then they take on the characteristics of the person who's departed, who's died, who's donated the organ to them.
Could it be that?
And how could it be that if there was a little boy in Louisiana, using this case as an example of many others, there was no relationship between the families, you know, no blood relationship.
And in most of these cases, there isn't.
So there really isn't a genetic component.
Is there an energetic component?
Yes, because we are energy.
But the imprints are so specific, matching to a person who lived and died before the child is born that even if it is some kind of energetic transfer, what's the difference between that and reincarnation?
It's not possession because all these characteristics are integrated into the child's personality and even their physicality.
So it's really reincarnation is the best explanation and understanding that there's some essence that passes after death into a new body.
That's what's happening here.
And I have hundreds of cases.
You know, I was just talking about one that had a lot of detail.
And if I can veer off in a slightly different direction, if you don't mind.
Please do.
You are very astute in saying, well, you know, maybe it's not a good idea that James had contact with the other family.
And I agree with you.
In some cases, it's not a good idea.
And I've had a forum on reincarnation set up since 1997 when my first book came out.
And there are hundreds of cases posted on the forum.
You can get to it from my website, CarolBowman.com.
And about 10 years ago, I think it's about 10, a mother, again in California, oh, by the way, my son lives on the Pacific Coast Highway.
Anyway, that's an aside.
So anyway, back to the story.
The little boy in California was born in 2003 or 4.
I don't remember at the moment.
And he was obsessed with everything about firefighting.
And, you know, sometimes these little toddlers have these obsessions like James did with airplanes.
His was firefighting.
And when he was about two and a half or three, his mother was reading a Curious George book to him.
And on the cover of the book was a drawing of the New York City skyline showing the Twin Towers.
Okay, for those of us in the UK, what is Curious George?
Oh, I thought that was a worldwide phenomenon.
It's a children's book about a monkey.
A little monkey in his keeper.
I've lived such a sheltered life.
I don't know these things.
Okay.
Yeah, I think probably they're popular in the UK, too, I'm guessing.
Anyway, they're popular here.
Oh, it's something else that's passed me by.
So anyway, there was a drawing of the New York City skyline, and this little boy pointed to one of the towers and said the bad men knocked them down with the airplane.
And he said, I couldn't get the people out.
They were yelling for help, and I couldn't get them out.
And, you know, the mother was stunned.
As you would be.
As a parent would be.
Yeah, and after that image triggered more of his more conscious memory.
I think he had the unconscious memories or hadn't been able to express them.
He started talking about when he was a fireman.
And the mother would say, you mean you want to be a fireman?
He said, no, I am a fireman.
And he would talk about people calling for help.
And he was very distraught about not being able to get the people out of the building.
He remembered the number on his fire truck.
He described his firehouse as being downtown, which would be correct.
If you were in Manhattan, you would describe Lower Manhattan as downtown.
And he remembered details of firefighting.
The full case is on my forum.
It's incredible what he remembered, how to operate a fire truck, that they had T V screens in them, they had boats on top, which is true because Manhattan is surrounded by water, so they do water rescue too.
And had he had any exposure to coverage, which is everywhere, of 9-11?
Absolutely none.
None.
This was shortly after he was born, shortly after 9-11, 2001.
The mother would never expose him.
She's a pediatric nurse, so she was very aware of what he was doing.
So she would be aware of what you should do and what you shouldn't, right?
Right, exactly.
But he was obsessed with firefighting from day one.
He would do these little drills at home where he'd take his toy ex and pretend he was chopping down one of the walls in their house.
So there were some unusual behaviors there, too, which all made sense once he started talking about 9-11.
He didn't call it 9-11, of course, but when he couldn't get the people out of the building.
And he gave enough information that the mother was able to figure out who he was based on the number of his fire truck and other details he remembered which he didn't want to reveal to the public.
Now, that throws up all sorts of difficult issues, doesn't it, though?
When you're in that situation.
I mean, listen, this is mind-blowing because I'd no idea there was such a current, powerful contemporary example here.
But if I was the parent in that situation, I'd want to research it.
But in terms of good taste and in terms of raking it over for perhaps the family of somebody still coming to terms, of course they will be with a terrible loss in awful circumstances.
I would not know what to do.
Okay, so here's what we decided, the mother and I, and I was, you know, in the best interest of the child and the other family.
Once she got the name, I researched it.
I read the obituaries.
I read the tributes.
I read their posts about their beloved deceased son, brother, fiancé.
And we determined they were Irish Catholic on Long Island, which is a very conservative Catholic community.
A lot of firefighters in New York are Irish Catholic.
And we decided it would be too jarring, too disruptive for the family to have this information.
They believe their loved one is in heaven with Jesus.
So we didn't want to make it.
Is there any point at which you might try to make that connection?
Perhaps in 10 years, 15 years, whatever?
Or is it just being left at that now?
We're just leaving it.
We don't think it's in the family's best interest or in this boy's best interest to contact the other family at this point.
Well, I totally understand that.
Right.
But by some, you know how things work sometimes?
It's like they're out of our hands.
If somebody read the post on my forum for whatever reason and happened to know the family and contacted them, then we could start a dialogue, but we're not going to approach the family.
But at least the impetus must come from them, mustn't it?
They've got to make that decision.
If they get to hear about this, if they get in touch with you, if they want to complete that circle, it's a matter for them.
Right.
And in the meantime, you know, the mother has talked this child through it.
And what's interesting to me is that, you know, his last thought in that life was altruistic.
He was thinking of others.
And she said his, you know, even as a little boy, he was always thinking of others.
You know, this altruism seemed to carry over, too, which is really interesting.
Not only his obsession with firefighting and knowing details that only firefighters would know and the terminology.
So a lot carries over.
But in this case, another traumatic death.
And he's also, he has a phobia in this life.
And phobias are very common in children who remember previous lives.
If they had a traumatic death, the phobia kind of matches up to the memory.
And I think in a lot of cases, they can be resolved by talking the child through it, if the child is willing to express it.
So in this case, in this life, this child is terrified of heights, which is really interesting because he died on top of that very tall building.
And look, it was very much a part of my life because for two different radio stations in London, I went to Ground Zero twice to cover the first and second anniversaries of 9-11.
I met many of the people involved in that.
And years before that, on my first trip to New York, I was taken by my Uncle Billy, who's sadly no longer with us.
He worked on Wall Street.
Uncle Billy took me to the base of the Twin Towers.
And I remember, if you ever got the chance to see them, you stand at the base of the Twin Towers as they were.
And it almost makes you feel sick looking up at that great height towering above you.
There is so much more, Carol, that we could talk about.
Sadly, we don't have the time tonight, but I would love to talk with you again.
It's very moving, all of this.
And of course, there are people who are going to say, this is all hooey, but there is so much evidence, albeit in some cases circumstantial variable.
It has to be circumstantial.
That's what it is, that it is worth further investigation.
I think if people want to read about you and your work, there's a lot online.
Where do they go?
Right.
CarolBowman.com.
And I think my books are available in the UK.
I mean, they were when they came out.
I guess they're still in print.
I don't know.
Through Amazon.
Carol Bowman.
And I'll put a link to her work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
And before that, Dr. Martin Archer, on the latest announcements of Elon Musk to do with Mars and really express travel on this planet.
Amazing stuff.
You know, I'm sure we all hope we can live to see all of that happen.
More great guests in the pipeline, More great plans for the show, too.
Thank you very much for your support.
Please keep that support coming at theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much.
Until next, we meet here at The Unexplained.
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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