The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 343 - Australian Skeptics

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 23, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:23:43

Edition 343 - Australian Skeptics

The Australian Skeptics have been investigating "pseudo science" and paranormality for morethan 3 decades...

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Well, we're still eagerly questing for spring here.
	It's been muggy and horrible for days, but they're telling us that the sunshine is about to come and we're going to have some very warm stuff coming soon.
	It's probably going to arrive before you hear this, but who knows?
	So all I can say is bring it on.
	Within reason, of course, as we say here in the UK.
	My website is theunexplained.tv, designed by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
	That is the place to go.
	If you want to send me an email, and when you do, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
	Or indeed, if you'd like to make a donation to the show, you can do that through the website, theunexplained.tv.
	And, you know, if you have made a donation recently, thank you very much.
	On this edition of the show, we're going to feature somebody who looks at things from a skeptical perspective.
	He's part of an organization, in fact, at the moment, he heads it up, who are offering $100,000 Aussie dollars for anybody in that fine country who can prove and repeat paranormal phenomena.
	You know, if you say that you can walk on air or you can make flames shoot from your finger ends, as long as you can demonstrate that to them and repeat it to them a few times, then the money's yours.
	So far, and they've been doing it for more than three decades, they have not given the money away.
	So we'll be speaking with Tim Mendem from the Australian Skeptics very soon here.
	Like I say, thank you for all of your emails.
	I do see them all as they come in.
	And, you know, those emails that need an urgent reply, get one.
	You won't get that from the mainstream media, but that's what we do here.
	So thank you very much.
	Keep the emails coming.
	And thank you very much for the nice things you've been saying.
	All right.
	Let's get to Sydney, Australia.
	The time here in the UK is morning time.
	And down there, it's evening time.
	So we are a world apart in so many ways.
	Wonderful city, though.
	I visited there twice and would love one of these days to be able to afford to go back and see Australia again.
	Let's get to Tim Mendem from the Australian Skeptics.
	Tim, thank you very much for coming on the show.
	That's my pleasure.
	And now you're an awful long way from where I am, which is kind of stating the obvious, I know, but Sydney is a long way from here and we're in completely opposite, supposedly we're in completely opposite seasons.
	So we're supposed to be going into spring and summer here, but we've got a grim rainy day and you're supposed to be going into autumn there and you've got a lovely day.
	We have a lovely day today, yes.
	What's that all about?
	You know, that's just so bloody unfair, you know.
	Anyway.
	I think it's perfectly fair, mate.
	It's wonderful.
	No, I've got to come back to Sydney soon.
	I love the place.
	Anyway, talk to me about your organization.
	I was doing some research on it today, and I don't know whether the article that I read was right, but apparently your organization has a 36-year, roughly 38-year history.
	38, yeah.
	We're probably the second oldest skeptical group in the world.
	Certainly the second oldest English language skeptical group in the world.
	There's an American group that started in the mid-70s with people like James Randy, whom I'm sure you've heard of, magician and sort of buster, if you like.
	Well, he started.
	He's the world's biggest debunker, isn't he?
	That's right, yeah, yeah.
	Well, he came to Australia in 1980, courtesy of an Australian millionaire named Dick Smith, a sort of wealthy businessman who wanted to bring him out.
	And they did some tests on water divining.
	And then at the end of these tests, they said, well, what we need is a group out here who will carry on this process and investigate various claims and things.
	And from then on, it started off in a very, very small way.
	Australian Skeptics, we put out our first magazine in 1981.
	And we're still going since.
	Actually, we're going from strength to strength, quite frankly.
	If you look at polls and you look at surveys, you see that more and more people believe in paranormality and general weirdness.
	So aren't you fighting a losing battle these days?
	You might say it's a losing battle, but it can be at times and it can be very frustrating.
	I mean, our aim is to try and apply, not to debunk, as you were talking about, James Randy, but to actually apply some sort of critical thinking to the whole process.
	If people apply critical thinking, that's as much as we can expect.
	And in many cases, sort of the role of the sceptics, we can at times put a lead on some of the more outrageous claims that are out there, some of the more obviously illogical and sort of out-of-left field claims.
	But people will believe in things, and it's an interesting phenomenon as to why people want to believe things which are not yet or not proven.
	But it's never a losing battle because all the paranormal beliefs go up and down seasonally almost.
	And at certain times, some particular beliefs are very strong, and then they fade away, and then they come back again.
	And that's just part of the cycle.
	And if we're there just to add a bit of what we regard as a bit of a rational approach or a critical thinking approach, then we're happy to do that.
	I had James Randy on my radio show quite a few years ago, about 12 years or so ago, when he was absolutely in his pomp and he was offering his, which I think he's still offering, his million dollars for anybody who can prove that phenomena exists.
	So you're following in his footsteps.
	Yeah, one of the first things we did when we launched the Australian Skeptics in 1980, 81 was to put up a challenge.
	And at that stage, it was $10,000, which was a reasonable amount.
	And since then, it's grown to $100,000.
	Not quite the million dollars, but James Randy doesn't offer that anymore, I should add actually.
	So our $100,000 is a pretty decent amount of money.
	Basically, just for anyone who can do what they say they can do.
	And it's been around for a long time.
	We've tested hundreds of people.
	I get approaches every week from people who are keen to make that challenge.
	Most of them drop out very quickly when they realize they actually have to do a test rather than just on their say-so.
	And we're not going to give them handover $100,000 just because they say they can do something.
	So we suggest, okay, what can you do?
	How can you test it?
	How can you prove it?
	And it's as simple as that.
	And it's a pretty simple process for them just to do what they say they can do.
	So we've tested probably a couple of hundred people.
	A lot of people have been water diviners.
	It's a big thing in Australia.
	But we've tested psychics and astrologers and all sorts of different sort of people.
	And so far, no one has managed to actually show that they can do what they say they can do.
	Have you ever been near?
	No.
	That's a bit sorry, isn't it?
	But look, if I can explain, what we have is that someone approaches, then we work out a mutually agreeable test.
	It has to be mutually agreeable, right?
	If both sides don't think it's a fair test, we won't proceed.
	Simple as that.
	If the person who's making the claim says this is an unfair test, you're a bunch of rat bags, you're not going to give me a chance, we'll say we'll stop, right?
	We're not even going to take it any further.
	And we're the same thing.
	If we think, well, you're trying to fix this or whatever, or you've got a special technique which we don't agree with, we'll stop.
	But once we have agreed on a protocol, and that does happen, that both sides agree is a fair test, we will then proceed.
	What we do is the first test shows that someone can actually do something.
	It's actually we understand what they're trying to say they do.
	And that's often a hard thing for a lot of the claimants to explain, especially when they first contact me and I'm the front line.
	They will say, I ask them, well, what do you do?
	And I think, oh, I sort of do this.
	You think, well, let's get precise so we can test it.
	And then say, okay, our first test is to actually see what they can do.
	And people don't get past that stage.
	The second test is say, we've now understand what you can do.
	And all you've got to do, and this may sound strange, you've got to do it to better than a million in one chance.
	And a million in one is actually not that hard.
	If you're rolling a dice with 20 sides or a die with 20 sides, right, you can get a million to one chance in five throws.
	I think it's five throws.
	It might be seven.
	But yeah, like within an hour.
	So a million to one chance is not that outlandish, but people sort of don't even get that far.
	Are you willing to accept, and I have seen this demonstrated, although I can't give you scientific evidence on it, that sometimes people who claim to be able to perform various feats of paranormality or whatever it might be, that they can't always deliver to order.
	And that's the big difficulty.
	Well, that's the interesting thing.
	And yes, we get faced with that all the time.
	But then again, you think you go and see your local palm reader or your local psychic or whatever, and you hand over your £20 to them.
	And if they say, sorry, I can't do you, do they hand the £20 back?
	No.
	They will take your money and they will say that they have given you the goods.
	If they can't perform as on demand as they offer up, which they do, then they shouldn't be in the game.
	Okay.
	I mean, I have known some who do give the money back if the fluence is not working for them, but I've known others who take the £20.
	So, yeah, I get what you're saying.
	Have a look back over the last year or so then and talk to me about the kinds of investigations that you've done.
	Okay, a lot of the activities, I mean, the activities of the skeptics here in Australia, and I'm sure in most of the world, have changed a lot over the last 38 years.
	When we first launched into it, it was a lot about psychics and predictions, spoon benders, people like that.
	There was very little about medicine.
	And now, over the most recent years, medical areas, alternative medical areas, has become the big issue.
	And it tends to be the big issue around the world.
	There's a lot of quackery out there, which is sort of taking advantage of people, people paying the ultimate price in some instances, sadly.
	When you say people paying the ultimate price, I think we just have to say, what do you mean by that?
	They die.
	Right.
	People die.
	Kids die.
	And you've personally experienced that happening.
	You've known of cases of that.
	I've known of cases, yes.
	I've known of cases where people have died because they've turned to alternative treatments when they could have taken traditional, not even traditional, sort of Western medicine hasn't been around that long, but I mean sort of evidence-based medicine, which could have dealt with their particular condition very quickly or certainly a lot better success rate than you might find with a lot of the alternative stuff.
	Isn't there a law, aren't there laws to deal with this, though, on the statute book?
	Not entirely.
	No, that's the whole trouble, is that a lot of this stuff is sort of regulated to a certain extent.
	A lot of people are very careful about what they claim they can do in public.
	For instance, in Australia, you are not allowed to claim that you can cure cancer.
	And it's the same here.
	I mean, there is a very heavy piece of legislation that is quite rightly in place saying that you must not make that claim.
	Yes, but you don't have to dig very far within the alternative medicine fraternity with particular practitioners to find they will say exactly that.
	Okay, and there are a lot of grey areas as well, but we'll get into that in a second.
	Sorry, you were just about to say something else.
	That's okay.
	Go to the grey areas.
	All right, well, the grey areas include things like, from what I can discover, colloidal silver that you might have heard about and has come up in my inbox a number of times and people have been urging me to try.
	Those sorts of things.
	Now, those things, to me, it sounds like they verge on the remedies.
	You know, they're kind of old-fashioned apothecary cures, and you either believe in them or you don't.
	Some people would swear by them, and some people would say, not going anywhere near that.
	Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of colloidal sort of products out there.
	I'm not an expert, I should add, on this particular area, right?
	But I do know a lot of people who are sort of taking such things.
	The silver colloidal stuff is a very strange product.
	Most of these things, you've got to be very careful about the quality of the product you're taking and how it's produced.
	If there are things which, from our point of view, they don't do any harm except for the fact that they might take you away from getting proper treatment, then in their own right, they're not that great an issue.
	But there are certainly things that actually, in the alternative medicine area, which do do harm.
	And even though they're promoted as great products, I don't know if you've ever heard of a product called Black Salve.
	No.
	Okay, it's basically a salve-like an ointment that you put on your face or whatever over what appears to be a spot or a cancerous spot, that sort of thing.
	Like a mole, like something like that.
	And this will supposedly burn it out.
	The trouble is it burns straight through your flesh and can leave you with a hole in your face or whatever.
	And this is available a bit under the counter.
	It's definitely illegal to say so.
	The Black Solve is promoted as a cancer cure.
	And It is not.
	It is actually more than just a benign product.
	It is a dangerous product.
	And from that point of view, it's one of those areas where we can sort of look at this and say that it's something that should be avoided.
	It's not a product that we can say it doesn't do any harm.
	This one does.
	Well, it certainly sounds like it.
	I've never heard about it until now.
	And we certainly are not advocating that anybody go anywhere near anything like that.
	In the case where you investigated this, were you able to put the authorities on the trail of this?
	Or do they not want to know?
	No, no, the authorities are onto this as much as they can be, but it's pretty much a sort of word-of-mouth product that's being sold by a lot of naturopaths or promoted by a lot of naturopaths.
	It's being promoted by a lot of the anti-vaccination movement as well, or by individuals within the anti-vaccination movement.
	And they're promoting this, and I know a lot of people who were in the alternative medicine field who are promoting Black Salve as one particular thing, as a worthwhile product.
	And it's dangerous.
	It's outright dangerous.
	Well, that's very, very concerning if that is the case.
	What about such things as, and they've been widely debunked, psychic surgery?
	It was very popular in the 70s and 80s.
	And I think there are still people who put themselves up as being able to do that.
	And there are still people who are reviewing them and saying, oh, well, this worked for me.
	Yeah, I mean, yeah, okay.
	Stepping back a bit, cancer comes and goes within the individual, right?
	You have remission, and then it comes back again, and you have remission, et cetera.
	And with any cancer patient, they run the gamut of situations being that they are hoping that the remission will stay forever.
	With psychic surgery, yes, it was big in the 60s, 70s, sorry, 70s and 80s.
	And that was one of the topics that the skeptics dealt with very early on in their career.
	In fact, we had one of the first demonstrations of psychic surgery in Australia at our very first convention.
	It is a total shock.
	People say, yes, it has helped them, but cancer goes into remission of its own accord, etc.
	There are many, many, many cases, more cases of people who go to a psychic surgeon, often as a last resort.
	And you can understand their desperation if they're suffering from cancer and nothing else has worked.
	And so they go to anything that they think might help them.
	And that I can totally understand.
	And you may have seen that movie about Andy Kaufman, the great American comedian.
	And of course, one of the things that he went to was a psychic surgeon.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I mean, we actually featured him in a recent article in Now magazine.
	The psychic surgery has been around for a while, especially in the Philippines and Brazil are the two big areas for psychic surgery.
	I don't know.
	Would your listeners be aware of what it is, psychic surgery?
	Well, I think we would, you know, we're needing to explain that.
	There have been demonstrations of this on TV where the patient lies down or the area that they are experiencing issues with is exposed, and then a so-called psychic surgeon digs his or her hands supposedly into their flesh and pulls out the diseased part.
	That's right.
	I mean, it helps if the patient is a bit tubby, okay?
	I'd be a perfect candidate, I can tell you.
	Because they actually have some folds of flesh that when you push your hands in, it looks like your hands are disappearing into the flesh.
	Now, the thing is, the person sort of, there's a sort of a religious overtone to this, or sometimes not, but generally a religious overtone, someone pushes their fingers into your flesh and supposedly pulls through your skin, et cetera, down into where the cancer is.
	It tends to always be around the stomach area because there's a bit of sort of give and take there.
	And they pull out some tumour, which they are very loath to allow you to test and assess the tumour for very good reasons, because when it has been done, it tends to actually be chicken giblets.
	And they use various techniques of prestidigitation, someone like James Randy, who's a prestodigitator, a magician, will show you with false thumbs, a bit of covering over their thumb where they can secrete something.
	One of their assistants will pass them a cloth to tap down where the blood is, etc.
	The blood might be coming out of a false thumb, and inside the cloth is a bit of this chicken giblets and they will pretend to pull it out.
	And as I said, we've demonstrated this.
	And they are shunks, quite frankly.
	I mean, there are certain areas where you think there might be something here, there might be something there.
	With a psychic surgeon, no.
	I think they are total sort of cons.
	And there are people around the world who are still doing it.
	Andy Kalfin way back when believed it.
	There are a lot of people who have been to psychic surgeons and believe that they've been cured and then die within weeks.
	In Andy Kalfin's case, he died within four weeks, I think, after having said he was cured.
	Yeah, it was the enormous sadness of that, I think, that gripped me in the movie.
	I didn't realize that he'd gone to that extent.
	Have you ever had somebody put themselves up and try to be tested doing psychic surgery?
	Not for psychic surgery.
	Actually, no, no, I take that back.
	In the very early days of the skeptics, there was some people we approached and that we took to court.
	And this is a very interesting case.
	In the early 80s, we took this particular psychic surgeon in Melbourne to court, and the case was thrown out because the psychic surgeon admitted it was a fraud.
	And therefore, he couldn't.
	I know.
	It was the weirdest thing.
	And therefore, if we were accusing him of being a fraud and we knew he was a fraud, and he admitted he was a fraud, there was no case.
	It was very strange.
	How on earth can that be?
	I mean, I know we have a very similar legal system in Australia and Britain.
	Yours is based on ours and, you know, vice versa.
	They're similar.
	How can it be that just, I mean, if you say murderer, then, you know, if you knew somebody was a murderer, does that not make them a murderer?
	Because the thing is that we were accusing him of being a fraud and he said, yes, I'm a fraud, and you know I'm a fraud.
	So therefore, there was no case.
	Yeah, but was he telling his patients that he was a fraud?
	No, of course not.
	It was the strangest thing.
	It was sort of, everyone went, huh?
	And if he were rude, we would have said a rude word, right, about it.
	But I mean, it was just the strangest thing and it didn't go any further.
	And that was their defense.
	And it was a very clever defense.
	They said, you know he's a fraud.
	I know he's a fraud.
	Therefore, there's no case here.
	It was just a very strange thing.
	You go back and actually look at our magazines, which are all online for free.
	And if you do a bit of searching under psychic surgery and you'll find that particular case.
	And it was, and since then, you think, you just sort of shake your head and think, what the hell is going on here?
	And it can be very, very frustrating.
	And what did that, Once that person had been outed, and it's a long time ago now, once this case had been reported, which presumably the media was allowed to do, did that person continue to practice?
	Did they disappear to Vanuatu?
	What happened?
	I don't know about Vanuatu.
	I'd like to disappear to Vanuatu actually.
	Very nice place.
	Very nice place.
	I think he sort of faded away.
	And I think that's the thing with psychic surgery.
	It was a huge trend.
	It was very much in the news.
	It had a lot of media coverage, a lot of gullible media coverage as to how effective it was.
	And I think it's by and large, certainly from Australia, I think, I can't think of any cases of psychic surgery being happening in Australia for quite a while.
	And yes.
	And we have to bear in mind the laws, and I do this program to broadcast laws, so we are not recommending anybody tries this, and we are not recommending that anybody does not go to their regular doctor.
	That's your first port of call before I say what I'm about to say.
	I had a very bad heel for a very long time, and it was getting to be a problem.
	It really hurt.
	I think it was like a cycling injury that I got.
	And I thought it was never going to go away.
	It would wake me up with cramping in the night and all sorts.
	I had healing.
	Somebody passed their hands quite, you know, it wasn't invasive.
	So I just thought, oh, I'll go along with this then.
	And you can do it.
	Do whatever you like.
	That was probably my mind over my matter.
	But my heel has given me no problem since then.
	Can you accept that some people might have something that we don't understand?
	From a sceptical point of view, okay, we always have to say there might be something, okay?
	The sceptics are not about...
	The whole concept of a skeptic is to say that, prove it to me.
	The skeptical, and this is sort of just stepping to one side for a moment.
	The skeptical manifesto as I portray it is nine words.
	You say you can fly, I say show me.
	And it's as simple as that, right?
	And there might be various ways that you can show me, and there are various ways that we can test you to see if you really can fly.
	And I mean, flapping your arms, fly, right?
	And therefore, with something like what you're talking about, which is, yeah, it is anecdotal evidence, which is sort of, you have to, it is limited as far as it's true for you, but it's not necessarily, you've got to look at a lot of cases to try and find out the reality of something.
	Someone passing their hands over someone else, there is no scientific mechanism where that could work.
	Okay, that's pretty definitive.
	But if there is a mechanism that we don't know about, we'd love to find out about it because it would obviously be an amazing discovery.
	It would have huge implications.
	But the fact that it hasn't been one, are you talking about Reiki or something like that?
	Well, this was just somebody who said, at least a few years ago now, it was down in South Africa, who said that they could wave a hand over me.
	And I did feel.
	But there again, you see, a lot of these things can be suggestion.
	You'll feel a heat.
	I did feel a heat.
	And there was no source of heat.
	And I did feel a bit woozy and drowsy afterwards.
	And then the next day, I didn't have any more trouble with my heel.
	But like I say, the way that I rationalize that away is that I just simply convinced myself it was time for this thing to go.
	And maybe that was it.
	You know, I am the first one not to believe that I was miraculously healed, but something happened, whether I did it myself or not.
	Howard, that's one of the things which comes up against skeptics all the time.
	I mean, sort of, obviously, you went through a process, you went through an effect, et cetera, and you had an outcome.
	And that's fine.
	I'm very happy for you and your heal.
	But obviously, I wasn't there, so you really can't sort of talk about it much.
	But based around the general experience about things like healing from a distance and healing sort of healing touch, that sort of stuff, in the same way as faith healing and a whole lot of other areas, there is no evidence to say that it actually works in the way that it is portrayed to work.
	That's a key issue.
	Someone makes a claim as to how it works, then you assess it according to what they say.
	And if it doesn't work according to what they say, well, you say, well, your claim is not very good.
	And then they will turn to an alternative.
	And that's good.
	That's fine.
	You find an alternative.
	You narrow the options down.
	You keep going until you find if it is yay or nay, whether there is anything there at all.
	And that's the way scientific method works.
	Someone puts up an idea, you knock it down, you challenge it.
	It's a school of hard knocks in science where you keep going, you keep going, and refining and refining until you find if there is anything there or nothing there.
	And so far, some of the things that we've looked at in the areas like you're talking about haven't led to anything convincing yet.
	But of course, if there was some kind of interaction between human beings that we didn't understand, it would be very hard to prove it, although that shouldn't stop us looking in a scientific way.
	I don't think it should be hard to prove.
	I mean, because people do it all the time.
	People make these claims all the time.
	I mean, your local psychic says that they can talk to the dead people, your relatives, et cetera, who were dead.
	Very simple to test it.
	You just sort of try and find out.
	The amazing thing is these people who do this sort of things state the most inane results.
	Oh, yeah, Billy, you've got a bad back.
	Yeah, yeah, big deal.
	Show me where the money is buried under the floorboards and I'll start to believe you, right?
	I mean, yeah, let's get into some serious areas here and let's just not sort of mess around around the outside.
	People make these claims all the time and all we're asking them to do is put your money where no, actually put our money where their mouth is.
	And it's a very simple process.
	We're just saying, you say you can fly, show me.
	And it's as simple as that.
	And people, all the ones we've tested, all the ones we've tested so far, and not to say that the next one's not going to be the one, but all the ones we've tested so far have not been able to do what they say they can do.
	And as we said at the beginning, a lot of this is about repeatability, being able to do this again and being able to do it a reasonable number of times to demonstrate it to your satisfaction.
	How do you explain things like years and years ago, and I had a phase of being able to do this.
	I can remember being in London with my sister and we went to a place called Wood Green Shopping City, always packed out on a Saturday.
	They had a multi-story car park.
	You could never get a parking space there.
	My sister had a little white mini car, and we were going floor after floor after floor.
	And I said to her, and I don't know where it came from, two floors up from here, There will be one single parking space.
	This is a true story.
	Next to the most disgustingly colored purple car.
	We went two floors up.
	There was only one parking space in the whole building.
	It was next to a disgustingly colored purple VW.
	Sorry if you own a purple VW, by the way.
	You know, and I kind of started to convince myself that something had happened there.
	And I had a little phase of being able to do that.
	Now, if we rule out any human potential like that, doesn't the world become a very dull place?
	No.
	By the way, I used to own a purple VW.
	I used to park in that car park.
	So I'm very upset.
	I'm very upset with you, actually, about this.
	Now, how can we prove that?
	Have you got pictures of this purple VW?
	Do you not have pictures of it?
	Douche.
	Obviously, yeah, that's one of the cases.
	Fascinating, yes.
	It'd be wonderful to have been there at the time and to have seen what had happened.
	This is when you ask people that when they go to see a psychic, et cetera, record what they say.
	You know, you take your smartphone in and you put it on voice recorder or you take a cassette recorder or whatever sort of system you want to use and you make sure you record what the psychic is saying and then play it back to you.
	And then to actually look back at it years later in many cases and see what the actual story was.
	Because as you know, as I know, as a lot of lawyers know and police know is that memories are very fluid things.
	Okay, I'm not saying this is the case in your case, right?
	Because I'm not there, I don't know.
	But people who are eyewitness to events understand that as the years go by, their ability to remember something changes.
	And in some cases, what they thought was true then never actually happened.
	I mean, it's things like lie detectors, which are totally useless, by the way.
	Real lawyers, real police do not use lie detectors because they do not work.
	And they are not admissible, certainly not in Australian courts.
	I presume in the UK courts as well.
	They are not admissible as evidence because they do not work.
	They're not admissible, but until the technology for them is advancing and better forms of lie detectors are being evolved.
	The whole trouble is with sort of lie detectors, that sort of thing, they work on sweat and electricity transmission and the surface of the skin.
	Anyone who's nervous creates a little charge across their skin.
	They could be nervous because they're being accused of something.
	They could be nervous because they're lying.
	There is no indication as to which particular aspect it is.
	It could be because it's hot.
	But I mean, I don't know if the technology in that particular machines is improving or not.
	But I mean, it's certainly not admissible in court because despite films, despite TV shows, despite everything you hear about so-and-so going through a lie detector test, they're useless.
	But back to your story about the purple VW that I used to drive in London.
	Yeah, it very well might have happened.
	Who knows?
	I mean, I'm not there.
	I can't say.
	I'm not going to sort of say it didn't happen to you, Howard, because it probably did.
	And I think it's fantastic.
	If you can find a parking spot in a particular, I've known those parking stations.
	I can never find a spot.
	This wood green shopping city, I'm sure it's still the same now, but this was early 80s.
	And the place was absolutely jam-packed.
	And it was the only parking space.
	And my sister looked at me as much as to say, oh my God, what are you?
	Has my brother, my troublesome brother, turned into a guru?
	What's going on?
	And we just, we laughed about it, and we would still laugh about it now if we talked about it.
	And I had this little phase that if I said something with assuredness and confidence, then the chances were that thing may happen, which might be some kind of aspect of human psychology that we do not as yet understand.
	And that brings me back to the point of when you say everything is bunkum, then you disallow our discovering things that may amaze us in future.
	Well, nothing is, I wouldn't say everything is bunkum.
	I mean, there's very few areas.
	I mean, there are some aspects of what the skeptics investigate, which they say are bunkum, and psychic surgery is one of them.
	There are many areas which we say it's interesting, and let's look at it further.
	And that's exactly what the skeptical approach is, should be.
	And I'm not saying it is for everybody who classes themselves as skeptics, but certainly what it should be is show me your claim and let's look at it seriously, but from a scientific perspective, not just because I would love it to be true.
	Now, after a while of the same claim popping up every week for the next sort of 30 years, you think, and it's being disp or debunked on that particular aspect, on that particular claim.
	And after a while, you think, I'm really not going to find someone who can actually do this.
	But bashing my head against the wall and as you say, sort of, are we sort of fighting a losing battle?
	We will continue to do it, which is very noble of us and very sort of a bit crazy of us.
	But yeah, it's the way to do it.
	It's the way to do it.
	Okay.
	After a while, some things, you have a continuum, right, from one end to the other.
	Some things are possible and other things are improbable.
	It's hard to say impossible because that would be very unscientific because you're saying it could never happen.
	And we cannot say that.
	Unlike psychics and things who can say they're 100% correct, we would not say anything that's 100% proving.
	You don't know the sun is going to rise tomorrow for sure, right?
	You know it pretty well, 99.99999%, but you don't know that it's actually going to happen for sure.
	And that's a scientific approach.
	The more we clear towards war, sometimes I question whether it will rise again tomorrow.
	I know, I know.
	That's a worry, and that's something we should all investigate and investigate from a rational point of view of critical thinking.
	But I mean, yeah, the skeptics will not say everything is spunk, or they shouldn't say, right?
	There may be some who do, and frankly, they are pushing it from a skeptical perspective.
	And certainly from our point of view, there are certain things we say are highly, highly, highly unlikely on that continuum down there near 0% chance.
	And there are certain things which are down there, and there are things which up towards the 100% chance.
	But there's a lot of stuff down in the middle and a lot of stuff that we deal with, which is down in the bottom 20%.
	What about psychics and mediums?
	You must have investigated.
	I'm sure you have an awful lot of those.
	A lot.
	And have you found them all, in your view, to be misguided?
	Misguided is an interesting word.
	Actually, I think most of them we've met have been genuine, genuine believers, right?
	They genuinely believe that what they're doing is correct.
	There are definitely a lot of shonks out there.
	In fact, if you talk to a lot of psychics, they will tell you, oh, there's a lot of people out there who are crooks or who are insincere or who are just taking your money.
	And amazingly enough, you keep talking to a lot of psychics, and they keep saying there's a lot of people out there who are cheats.
	Then you wonder how many of them are cheats.
	I actually spoke to one psychic who said that everybody else, apart from himself, was a cheat.
	All right, I can't.
	In fact, I've spoken to a few like that.
	I had a phase of psychic shopping for a while, going to people who said that they were psychic mediums.
	And I have to say, I heard an awful lot of sewage from a lot of them.
	However, I did hear, over the years, a number of nuggets that these people couldn't possibly have known by data mining me or asking me cold questions or doing any of those things that I'm pretty impervious to.
	So my personal view, and I've got no scientific evidence for it, is that there may well be a very small coterie of people who have some kind of ability, and there are a lot of people who believe that they do, but actually don't.
	Yeah, I mean, I would say, as I say, sort of with our tests of water diviners, for instance, we believe everybody that we have tested really believed they could do what they said they could do.
	They were genuine people.
	weren't crooks, et cetera, out to make $100,000 per se by cheating.
	I think there's a lot of psychics out there who are cheats.
	There are a lot of people out there, there's a lot of people in all sorts of areas who are cheats.
	I mean, we're going through a banking inquiry at the moment in Australia.
	There's a lot of bankers out there who are cheats and knowing full well that what they're doing is not correct.
	I promise to say nothing about cricket.
	Please don't.
	Thank you very much.
	I know.
	You see, look how polite I am.
	You mentioned cricket.
	Even not mentioning it.
	Thanks.
	Now disappear into the woodwork.
	I know.
	We still love you.
	Very much.
	It is our constant shame.
	That's okay.
	We still beat the palms and the ashes, so never mind.
	To our constant shame.
	I know.
	But the thing is that that's why we always say that if you go to see a psychic or something, get a recording of what they say so you can play it back to see how much you did tell them.
	And it's often surprising how much people, and I've seen this, and I've done it, and it's often surprising how much people tell a psychic just by their reactions without realising it.
	One thing I would suggest that if you wear a wedding ring, for a day beforehand, take it off.
	And it leaves a little mark on your finger, which by after a day will sort of not be as obvious.
	But a psychic will tell you you've had a recent emotional problem.
	Right?
	Because they see a mark on your finger which looks like you've had a divorce or something.
	If you're saying something to a psychic, and if the psychic says something which is accurate or seems close, lean backwards.
	If they're saying something which is inaccurate, lean forwards like you're interested.
	And they will take that as a false clue.
	And you can actually guide a psychic into telling you the things that you want them to tell you.
	Listen, I don't disagree with you.
	I think a lot of this stuff goes on, but I have still been told in my life one or two things that I cannot explain.
	But I will tell you one little story about somebody that I spoke to about a year ago.
	And she was going on and on about this now.
	She said, your mother is a very tall, you was a very tall and dark woman, wasn't she?
	And I said, no, my mother was very short and fair.
	I mean, there's no going back from that, is there?
	I know, I know.
	That's the thing.
	I mean, it's a bit hit and miss with a lot of this stuff.
	I can't comment on the times.
	Obviously, I can't comment on the times in which you had a good experience with a psychic.
	And I'm sure people do otherwise.
	I mean, you know, the agile question is, who's the best con man in the world?
	Howard, who's the best con man in the world?
	I don't know.
	I've met a few in the industry in which I work.
	I'll tell you that.
	Let's not name any names here.
	Howard, the best con men in the world, no one knows because they're the best con men in the world.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So the best ones survive.
	It's like a market forces, right?
	And the really good ones survive and they keep going.
	But, you know, I think the problem is that this whole sector, I don't know whether it is a problem, the issue, let's put it that way.
	The issue is in this whole sector, there is a space for doubt.
	There are people who appear to have something.
	And I think all the ones who are fakes or deluded, misguided, whatever, trade off that fact.
	Yes.
	Oh, yes, I would totally agree with that.
	And I think that there is this sort of like, you know, there's the one good apple and all the rest of all the bad apples say, well, you know, I could be the good apple.
	Who knows?
	You know, but I mean, and I would agree that there are areas out there which are worth investigating and which sort of show interest and show, oh, that's an interesting area.
	And that's why the skeptics exist.
	If everybody who was a claimed psychic, et cetera, was known to be a fake, there would be no skeptics.
	You would not need any skeptics.
	There would not be an audience for these people at all.
	But the skeptics exist because there are those areas which are, oh, that's interesting.
	Let's have a closer look at that, right?
	And it could be, you know, you might reach a stage where I can't go any further.
	It's interesting, but I can't prove or disprove it.
	And we've just got to leave it at that.
	There are others you say, I look at and say, well, that's an obvious chunk, and I can point out where you are cheating or where you are misguided or whatever, right?
	And as I said, as you say, there are certain ones that are really impressive and you hope that they will then agree with you to go and do some sort of test and sort of put them through a fair and a mutually agreed test, as I said.
	And it's all friendly and that sort of thing.
	And we'll just sort of test to see if they say they can do under pretty controlled conditions rather than conditions that they control.
	I'm still waiting for somebody who professes to do this, who I interview on air, to give me some facts that they couldn't have known on the phone, on Skype, live.
	And so far, nobody's really been able to do that.
	Yeah, it's because, I mean, in these days of social media and everything, and I've seen this so many times and so many people have been distraught about it, that a psychic in quotes, right, or can so easily go online to find out about people.
	I mean, you're talking about Facebook scandals at the moment, right?
	Of so much privacy, so much private data, information being spread so readily that if you go on, I knew someone who was very upset about someone who lost their husband, And they said they saw a psychic, and the psychic told them all this information about a psychic, about their husband, et cetera, that they could never have known.
	And I found out all this information in about five minutes of searching on the net, right?
	It was so easy to do.
	But that assumes that the person you go to see will take the trouble to do that.
	If it takes five minutes and if you know who's coming along to you to actually see, yeah, for an appointment, et cetera.
	Yes.
	I mean, if it's your, if you're a crook, you would do it, right?
	But there are skeptics out there who are actually setting up false Facebook pages.
	So be warned, psychics out there, you could be getting false information.
	Oh.
	A tangled web we weave.
	But look, I have to say again, when I had my psychic shopping expeditions, you know, I was probably in my 20s, maybe early 30s, and I went to see an awful lot of people because I wanted career guidance.
	I wanted to see if I was going to be a happy person.
	Nobody ever asked me my name.
	Nobody ever asked me how old I was or anything beforehand.
	Whatever I was told, I was told cold.
	And I have to say, and we're going back a few years here, most of it was completely useless rubbish.
	But some of it was of quite some use, I have to say.
	But none of what I'm saying to you is scientific.
	Well, that's the thing.
	I mean, and I agree with you.
	Some of what people say to you is quite incisive.
	And you think, well, gee, that's pretty cool.
	They said something to me that they should not have known or actually means a lot to me personally.
	It depends on how in-depth and how sort of precise what they're saying is.
	Is it a generic statement or is it something precise to you?
	I'm assuming it was something pretty precise and therefore it was impressive to you.
	Or it turned out to be impressive once you sort of went down the track a bit and found out, oh, that had some relevance.
	It didn't at the time, but it does now.
	And that's why it's worthwhile doing all this stuff.
	That's why it's worthwhile investigating all this stuff.
	But from the skeptical point of view, you've got to go into it, not with necessarily a doubting perspective, but let's say it's to be proven, right?
	Rather than saying, I'm going to go in there and I believe it totally and whatever someone says, I'm going to sort of take.
	And most customers of psychics and psychic surgeons and whatever you think go there with a positive point of view.
	And that's where the danger comes in.
	That the same as the shonky medicine cures and things, if someone goes in there with an effect that I believe you are correct, they will tend to find them correct, even when they die.
	Well, look, age 23 I was, I went to meet quite a famous psychic.
	And, you know, I was age 23, I was terribly lacking in confidence in myself.
	But I had this great gift that I still have to some extent, where I could feign total confidence.
	In fact, in some jobs that I had when I was a kid, people wrongly suspected me of being arrogant and over-assertive and all sorts of things because I was putting on a front.
	Inside, I was like, I mean, these days, I don't give a damn, and that's made a great impact on me.
	It's improved my life enormously.
	But back then, I worried about everything, and I was a shaken little jelly inside.
	So I went to see this man, and I was pretending to be the big, confident I'm it.
	Okay, and I was only 23, and I probably needed a bit of slapping down.
	He gave me the greatest character analysis of my life.
	He was completely spot-on-right.
	I have no idea where he could have got that from, because to this day, I know that I gave him no clues and no cues.
	All he knew about me was that I was a young professional broadcaster coming to do an interview about an interesting subject who appeared to be very confident.
	And he knew that I was not what I appeared to be.
	Howard, I've got news for you.
	He was not reading you.
	He was reading me.
	I was exactly the same at age 23.
	And I think a lot of age 23 people are very, very, very similar to this thing.
	They got a lot of front, or they want to have front, and you can actually break down that front pretty quickly.
	That I was exactly the same.
	I was sort of, you know, everyone at age 23 thinks they should be more confident than they are.
	It's a Dunning-Kruger effect, et cetera, of people who doubt their own abilities, et cetera.
	And you can look at that one up.
	But it is a common thing.
	I mean, if what he says to you, you go back to the old tests of people who give character assessments of a group of people.
	What's his name?
	B.F. Skinner, who was a psychologist, the one who sort of figured out about mice pressing buttons or birds pressing buttons, pigeons, I think it was, pressing buttons to get a particular result, a Pavlovian response.
	B.F. Skinner gave all his students a particular character reading based on the birth date or whatever, I don't know.
	And he asked them how accurate it was, and they all said it was very accurate.
	They all got the same one.
	But they all thought it was extremely accurate.
	Now, it depends on how specific this reading that you got was, how much specific detail or how much generic detail there was.
	No, there was a lot of very, very specific detail.
	But look, let's add in the caveat here, that the fact of the matter is that I've only ever had one assessment like that in my life.
	All of the others that I've had were well short of the mark in various degrees.
	So this was special in that it was very, very specific.
	Well, that's very cool, and I'm impressed.
	I would like to know the name personally.
	Okay, but I mean, sort of all the ones that I've had, they've been so generic as to be a waste of time.
	You know, and not even vague.
	They're just sort of so much generalisms that I could give to anybody.
	You could give to anybody on the street.
	The person across the fence can give it to you.
	And that's when it becomes disappointing.
	You think, actually, I paid money for this.
	And, you know, really, that's all you can say that I will have, I will, you know, I believe I have greater potential than I'm achieving and I have a bit of a pain in the back, etc.
	And people don't really understand me, but I lack confidence in this area, but I know I can do better in this.
	And all sort of statements like that, which are the sort of stuff you generally get from a lot of fairground psychics.
	And it is so depressing and so annoying that they just rattle this stuff off.
	And you can see them.
	And I've seen great recordings of actually some people who've done that in the UK, who've gone to see, and I've seen it here, but you can see it everywhere.
	You pay your money to a psychic and you say, do you want the £50 reading or the £10 reading?
	I say, well, I want the £10 reading.
	And wham, they're into it and they're rattling it off.
	And then five minutes later, you're out the door.
	And they've given you absolute, I don't know what the expression is in the UK, BS.
	Yeah, well, I think that works around the world, you know.
	But look.
	I think it does.
	you know, I have a lot of it.
	The reason I'm doing this show is because I have a great interest in all of this.
	And in my younger days, I used to be one of those people who paid the money and went to see all sorts of people.
	Another person I saw who has completely disappeared from the face of the earth, and I won't name her, but she was in London, in a very posh part of London, and you know, her reading cost a lot of money.
	I think my sister paid for that back then.
	And I was having career issues.
	It wasn't going well.
	I was very young and very concerned.
	And so I went to this woman and she did a tarot reading for me, a card reading.
	And she looked at the cards and she wouldn't go any further.
	And all she said was, so many disappointments.
	Well, that's what transpired.
	Not only had that started, but that is what continued.
	She wouldn't go on with the reading, didn't allow it to continue.
	And indeed, I did have a period of the most intense disappointments.
	Now, I don't believe that she was faking it.
	I don't know what she had, and I can't find her these days, so I can't ask her.
	But it was pretty remarkable.
	That's why I think you can't write everything off.
	No, as I said, the skeptics don't write everything off, right?
	The skeptics have to base it on percentages, if you like.
	And we've looked at a lot of different people in a lot of areas and a lot of different studies, not just by us, but a whole lot of other areas.
	And there is never this 100%, except in some areas, but there's rarely this 100% saying it's all BS, right?
	It's all bunkum.
	You have to say, well, there might be the one out there who can actually do it.
	But all the ones we've tested so far, right?
	And there are a lot of people who don't want to be tested for whatever reason.
	And all the ones that we've tested so far have not come up with the goods.
	And after a while, do you become jaundiced?
	Do you become skeptical?
	Do you become cynical?
	Hopefully not.
	I've been doing this, and the skeptics have been doing this in Australia for 38 years.
	You don't keep doing it if you think the whole thing is, frankly, bullshit, right?
	You give up.
	I get entirely where you're coming from.
	What qualifications do you have to do this work?
	It's amazing, actually.
	Anything and everything.
	I mean, it's amazing how many...
	Probably like yours.
	I've been a journalist for most of my life and basically, I don't know, character reading, if you like.
	But for proper testing, we have, depending on the subject, I mean, we have people who promote perpetual motion machines or free energy machines, as they're often called.
	We have people who are psychics.
	We have water diviners.
	We have all sorts of different types of people who come forward to be tested.
	And depending on the test, you have different expertise.
	But we have physicists, we have magicians, we have sort of medical people, we have sort of legal people, obviously, as well.
	We have mathematicians to work out statistical probability and that sort of stuff.
	We have a whole range of different people.
	So depending on the test, you apply these different people to.
	And these people are all volunteers.
	They don't get paid for it.
	And therefore, depending on the test, that's the skills.
	No one person, I think, has all the skills necessary.
	And that's one of the things.
	You become, I mean, the position I'm in, I have to be a bit of a jack of all trades, you know, and because I deal with a lot of different areas.
	But if there's a particular area that I can't deal with, I pass it on to someone else within the skeptical movement who can answer it, who does have the experience in a particular area.
	And so therefore, it's a bit of a horses for courses thing.
	Do you find the fact that you are this group of individuals with different skills, but under the banner of skeptics, don't you think that that hampers your work somewhat in that you're going into it from the point of view of skeptics?
	If we could change that word, we would.
	The skeptics have been analysing themselves.
	The skeptics are more navel-gazing than you would, than is good for them.
	Quite frankly, they always go on about, are we doing the right thing?
	Is it the right approach?
	Are we being too sort of dogmatic?
	Are we being, as someone described it, too dickish?
	And if we could change that word skeptic, we would readily do it.
	And we have, over the last 40 years, sceptics have tried to find an alternative word.
	And there's nothing which really conjures up, it's an old word, it's an old Greek word.
	Ancient Greeks were skeptics.
	And the premise is basically that I withhold my judgment until I know something is true.
	And I apply critical thinking processes to assess something.
	I don't just, I try, it's not always successful, I try to remove emotion from it if I can, and I'll just look at the evidence.
	It doesn't always work, but I mean, that's the approach you're supposed to use.
	If we could call it something else than skeptic, if we can convince the people, as we do with our challenges, by always saying, we do not proceed if you're not happy with a challenge, right?
	So we're not going to go in there and hopefully not be rude to you, right?
	Hopefully not.
	It happens, but hopefully not.
	We're not going to sort of sit there and say, you turn up in the phone and I say you're an idiot.
	I get phone calls every day from a lot of people who are obviously quite upset or disturbed or whatever, and I deal with them.
	I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't, or a psychologist, so I can't deal with them in detail.
	But I treat them with as much respect as I can, apart from those who are obviously extremely rude, which I have those as well.
	But I mean, we do not go in there and attack people per se.
	What we do do is attack their claims.
	Attack might not be the best word.
	We actually say, prove your claim.
	And even stating that people find offensive.
	What about ghosts and ghostly phenomena?
	I have seen one ghost in my life.
	And it was an absolute open and shut case.
	You know, I was in a place where I was working.
	And to cut a very long story, because I've told it many times on the radio and on this show.
	But to cut a long story short, I was doing a radio phone-in show late at night in Liverpool.
	I went to the loo, you know, call of nature during a commercial break.
	My producer was running the show for me, so I had a couple of minutes.
	Came back down, and it's dark in the corridor in this very famous building in Liverpool.
	And standing outside the studio door is a short man in a long overcoat, a pair of workmen's boots, a flat cap, who looked at me and disappeared within two seconds.
	And I wasn't frightened.
	I was just surprised.
	And he'd looked at me, not quite into my eyes, but he'd looked towards me and disappeared.
	I saw this.
	I had not been drinking.
	I had not been imbibing anything.
	I was doing a radio show, was totally focused.
	And I walked back into the control room and I said, Jonathan, you'll never believe I've just seen him.
	He said, you've seen him, haven't you?
	And a lot of people working in that building late at night have seen the same person.
	None of us had communicated with each other.
	I didn't know about this until I told Jonathan.
	So what happened there?
	Was that an artifact of my brain?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I'd love to be there.
	Okay, can you take me there?
	I'd love, I want to.
	Yeah, but you know, the chances are that I'd worked in that building many times.
	And that hadn't happened.
	It happened once to me, but it was something that other people, the same person had been described.
	Now, they'd never talked to me.
	I hadn't been told about it and forgotten about it because I didn't work there all the time.
	I would just appear, you know, drive up the motorway to Liverpool, do some shows and go away.
	So nobody talked to me about that.
	I couldn't have known about it in any way.
	And yet I revealed something that other people had experienced.
	Now, that must be paranormality, even if I can't demonstrate that for you three nights out of five.
	Yeah, I know.
	I mean, as frustrating as it is, what can I say?
	I mean, there's nothing.
	I'm not there.
	The thing about ghosts, there's obviously a lot of issues that everyone accepts.
	What form does a ghost take?
	When is a ghost made?
	Is a ghost...
	Is there any humans that you get ghosts?
	Apparently not.
	There was a story recently about horses, ghost horses and things.
	How many ghosts are there in any particular place?
	Ghost spirits that haven't sort of gone on to their final rest.
	All the sort of areas.
	Why is someone who is killed in a car crash horribly mutilated, comes back not mutilated?
	All sorts of questions about ghosts.
	Why are poltergeists so spiteful and so trivial as to do they knock things over?
	You know, do something proper for a chance.
	You know, do something big.
	Well, what about the Enfield poltergeist case?
	I've interviewed the man who spent a good portion of his life researching that and writing about it.
	A very sincere researcher called Guy Lyon Playfair.
	And I am convinced, and the world was convinced, that something very bizarre happened in that perfectly ordinary house.
	Way back in the 1970s that got reported around the world.
	It may have been phenomena that was linked to one particular person in the house there.
	So, you know, maybe it's not ghosts, but it's something that zeroes in on a person or radiates from them.
	But again, that's paranormality.
	And seasoned journalists who camped out there saw it, saw things being thrown around.
	This person ascended off the floor, I believe, or ascended off the bed.
	I mean, those things happened.
	Howard, I don't know that case.
	Okay, I'll be honest with you.
	It was the most famous poltergeist case in the UK.
	One of the most famous in the world.
	Okay, well, sorry.
	I don't know it.
	And I should know it.
	I would agree with you.
	They made a movie out of it.
	What's the movie?
	Well, I think it's called The Enfield.
	It may be called The Haunting, or it's called—I need to find this out.
	I'll tell you after this.
	But it's about the Enfield poltergeist.
	Okay, sorry.
	But I don't know, so I can't comment on it.
	Anyway, but it's the same as, like, the Amityville case, which is a fabricated case, totally, right?
	There is no evidence that anything happened in the Amityville building in America that indicates that there was any haunting at all.
	It was a totally sort of made-up thing.
	But if you go to Guy Lyon Playfair's house in Earls Court, where a lot of Aussies still live, by the way, if you go to Guy's house, he has got bookcases full of tapes and documents that were made at that time.
	And there were phenomena, whether they were explainable phenomena or whether they were paranormal phenomena, occurring at that address.
	Yeah, okay.
	I mean, I'm sure.
	But I can't comment on it because I just—it might have gone around the world, but it must have missed me by.
	But maybe I was trying to find a parking spot in that car park.
	All right, well, listen, take a look at it, and then later tell me what you think about that case.
	But, you know, I believe something happened there.
	Yeah.
	I'm looking at it right now.
	All right, okay, okay.
	Just call it up for Wikipedia.
	And obviously, I will have a look through it, and I will get back to you about it, what I can see about it, and I'll do some research on it.
	Just as a point of sort of interest for people, if you want to get an alternative skeptical view about a particular thing, if you just—I'll try it right now.
	Enfield—sorry, typing it in.
	You'll probably hear me typing.
	No, that's fine.
	Enfield goes skeptic.
	You put skeptic after something, and you see a skeptic speaks about the Enfield poltergeist.
	And you have a look, and some of the things—it's a new TV series called The Enfield Haunting, by the way.
	And you might find that there is something interesting there, some alternative explanation.
	As I say, I do not know.
	But the fact of the matter is, you see, again, we come back to the gray area.
	There is always going to be an alternative investigation.
	You know, I know a very well-respected psychical researcher in Scotland, Tricia Robertson.
	One of the cases in Tricia's book—and she is connected with Professor Archie Roy, sadly now deceased, who was the most famous Scottish paranormal investigator— among the cases in her book—and I hope, Tricia, that I'm telling this right—was the case, and quite a recent one, of a pilot who turned up at the airport, I think in Glasgow or very near there in Scotland, maybe Prestwick, and actually spoke to a colleague of his, and they had a brief conversation.
	Sadly, the CCTV couldn't be recovered.
	They couldn't find it.
	But they had a conversation.
	But that conversation happened after the man had died.
	How would you explain that?
	What would a skeptic say about that?
	I don't want an explanation, but what would a skeptic say about that?
	A skeptic would have to say, well, yeah, I need more details of the circumstances, et cetera, that it was all about.
	Just, by the way, I'm just looking up the Enfield case.
	thing right now you look up skeptic there's an interesting article on the Center for Inquiry website which is the first group they were sent up to be a skeptical group psycop as it was then called which talks about you know that particular case and looks at all the possible sort of explanations for it including sort of sort of playfair sort of saying that it was Janet was one of the sisters, right?
	Yes.
	It was Janet and Peggy, I think, and whether they were a bit overenthusiastic, and that some of the suggestions were that they were creating these things.
	Now, I don't know the circumstances, right?
	I really don't know the circumstances, so I can't say.
	And that's the trouble with anecdotal evidence.
	I'm not there.
	I can't go through all the parameters of how something manifested itself.
	And then these things are often one-offs.
	And you think, well, you just got to leave it there that you don't know.
	If you weren't there at the time, I can't do a proper investigation.
	I can't sit back and look at it.
	I can just take witness evidence.
	And as we know, witness evidence is you can take it or leave it.
	If something keeps appearing, yes, then you can go and sort of assess it.
	I mean, Baley Rectory, you know, it was sort of now long gone Baley Rectory.
	went looking for it and it disappeared.
	The Baldy Rectory was investigated.
	The site is still there, yeah.
	I actually was looking for it.
	I couldn't find it.
	And then I realized it had burnt down.
	But back in my days of when I was sort of trying to find a parking spot in the car park.
	In Enfield.
	Yes, in Enfield, yes.
	Strangely enough, yes, well, Enfield, not far from Woodgreen Shopping City.
	But look, a lot of this, what we come back to is a lot of this exists in a grey area.
	So for you, there must be so much frustration.
	There's so much challenge.
	I mean, for the skeptic, people often say, surely the world is so boring for being a sceptic, but it's not the case at all.
	The world is actually constantly exposing things to you.
	New things are being discovered all the time.
	And certainly from a personal point of view, who you can never know everything, there is so much fascination out there in the real, quote, world, right, that sort of just keeps your interest going all the time.
	And in this sort of world of sort of unknown, the gray areas, if you like, it's fascinating stuff.
	It's as much fascinating to know, to deal with the people as it is with the actual claims.
	And, you know, the people, some of them are sort of out there, you know, loonies, and some of them are very genuine people who are very soundly based and well-grounded, who have experienced, like yourself, who have experienced certain things.
	And that's what makes it constantly interesting and constantly fascinating is that it's a never-ending thing.
	And people will continue to see stuff and we will continue to investigate.
	And that's what makes life so much fun.
	But some of it we have to take on face value or dismiss it depending on how we feel.
	I mean, in my last edition of this show, I interviewed a man called Howard Storm.
	Howard Storm was a professor, took a group of art students to Paris, had a health emergency, ended up in a hospital.
	They couldn't get the right surgeon to treat him at that time, so he was dying.
	He went through what he believes was a near-death experience, was on his way to hell, he says, and was confronted by Jesus, who put him back on the straight and narrow, sent him back into his body, and changed his life around.
	Now, look, that exists in a gray area.
	I hear what he says.
	I can't prove it didn't happen.
	I can't prove it did.
	Where do you go with that?
	You don't go anywhere with that, basically.
	I mean, that's what you have to accept.
	You have to accept some things you've got to just say, can't say.
	And, you know, the whole thing, the interesting thing that happens with a lot of people who have strong beliefs is that they think, if I can't say something, it must be this.
	And so, no, you just, you don't have to, unfortunately, you just got to stick with, I can't say something, I don't know.
	And you've got to stick with that because you don't know.
	You don't know one way or the other.
	And that's really frustrating, really, you know, makes you very annoyed because you can't give an answer.
	And that's what upsets people who come to me and say, you know, as you're getting me with anecdotes and things, and I can't give an answer, I wasn't there.
	And then they might go away and say, well, see, the skeptics don't know.
	And of course they don't know if they weren't there at the time.
	And sort of, you know, no one knows if they weren't there at the time.
	But saying you don't know does not mean that this paranormal event happened.
	It just means you don't know.
	And I think in the interest of fairness, Tim, I've got to say here that it's very clear from talking to you, you don't go into this from the premise that it's all crap.
	You actually go into this from the premise that you want to learn something.
	And I think you would, I don't want to put words into your mouth, but I think you would be very pleased if one of these days you were able to prove something in a scientific way to satisfy yourself and pay out the money.
	I would love it.
	I would absolutely love it.
	I think it'd be fantastic.
	Life is so, you know, people talk about the glass half empty, half full.
	My glass is overflowing because there's so much stuff out there which is sort of just fascinating and so much stuff we don't know.
	And for one of these things to occur to be true, do I have suspicions it will never occur?
	Yes, I do.
	Okay.
	But I mean, if one of these things turns out to be true, wouldn't it be absolutely fantastic?
	Wouldn't it be brilliant?
	And wouldn't it be great if you could repeat it, that it wasn't just a one-off and that you could actually do it over and over and over again?
	Life would be amazing.
	It would be, but the fact that we haven't had this experience with someone doing it over and over and over again and an impact that it should have on our lives, a little thing like changing the laws of physics or whatever or changing this sort of thing should have a major impact on everything we do.
	The fact it doesn't makes you think, maybe it's not there.
	But I would absolutely love it.
	And most, and that's why we offer up $100,000, right?
	It's serious money.
	It is our money.
	It is genuine money.
	We have the money.
	And if someone can do it, they can do it.
	And they can get the $100,000.
	And we are genuine about that.
	I have to say that I'm not a religious person, although I was brought up, you know, in the Christian faith as a child.
	So, of course, we had to read the Bible and stuff.
	And we had the American evangelists round and listen to what they said, but it hasn't been the path that I followed.
	But in the Bible, Jesus turned water into wine, and the story's there.
	Now, would you have said to him, you need to be able to repeat that over and over again?
	Because he would have told you, why do I have to repeat it over and over again?
	The point is made.
	Okay.
	Now, he doesn't have to repeat it over and over again.
	I was like you, I was brought up Church of England, as it was then called, which means basically you don't have a religion.
	It was very light on.
	I hear what you say.
	A very gentle touch.
	But I mean, you go back to the Bible first.
	Yeah, okay.
	I can't ask him, how did you do it?
	But I say, did you do it?
	Is the first question you ask.
	Not how did you do it.
	I mean, before you explain how Santa's Reindeer fly, you have to ask yourself, do they?
	And that's where you're coming in from that.
	You take one step back.
	I mean, someone says they can do something, you say, fascinating.
	I will look at how you might have done that in a second.
	I've got to find out first if you did it.
	And that is a big step to take to actually pull back that far.
	Because it sounds cynical.
	It sounds very cynical that I'm not going to accept that you actually did that, what you said you do.
	I mean, with your experiences of finding parking spots or whatever, I have to accept that you did it.
	I wasn't there.
	I'm not going to say you're a liar.
	It happened.
	I've got no idea.
	I did do it, and that's exactly as it happened.
	And, you know, I recall it today as clearly as it happened in 1984, whenever it was.
	And Howard, you were known throughout the world as a very honest person.
	I hope so.
	But I mean, I can't say otherwise.
	But with Jesus, finding a parking spot is slightly different to turning water into wine.
	Well, of course it is.
	My example is very trivial.
	And we don't want to upset people who listen to this who have their faith.
	I totally respect you.
	But I just use it as an example.
	Let me give you an example, maybe something from your own life here.
	Most of us cannot go through life without things that we might consider to be a miracle.
	You stand there and you think, geez, I should have gone under that bus.
	How did that happen?
	Now, come on, Tim, this must have happened to you.
	But you can't repeat it, can you?
	Going under a bus, I almost did, actually, once.
	Well, there you are.
	You say you're here to tell the tale.
	What a miracle that was.
	Well, yes, if the bus had hit me, it wouldn't have been a miracle.
	It's a bit of a bit of a logic issue in that one.
	I tell you what, driving on, I was over there in the UK a bit two years ago driving on some of the A-roads.
	I'm surprised I survived some of those.
	That was a nightmare.
	But I mean, as far as a miracle, an inexplicable result.
	The trouble with inexplicable results is they're inexplicable.
	If I can't explain it, it doesn't mean it's a miracle.
	It just means I can't explain it.
	I can't, quite honestly.
	I know cases where, God, if I had, not God, that's the right word, is it?
	If, gosh golly, if I had walked under that bridge at that particular time, I would have been clobbered.
	But then for the person who did walk under that bridge at that particular time and got clobbered, is that a miracle or not?
	This is what always annoyed me about people, you know, you're dragging out someone out of an earthquake zone, where in Haiti, especially, there was a particular case, but I noticed that you drag a child out from under a building after three days and say it's a miracle.
	You think, well, that's a bit tough for the 30,000 other people who just got killed in the earthquake.
	They didn't experience a miracle, right?
	And that wasn't an act of God, but pulling this kid out of a ruin was an act of God.
	And I find the logic there quite unpleasant.
	But in that instance, for that person, it was remarkable.
	And for you not being hit by the bus when you should have been hit by the bus, for you individually, it was remarkable.
	And the fact that it's happened to one person doesn't invalidate it, does it?
	I didn't get hit by the bus because I actually ended up hearing the bus honking me and I leapt back.
	And is that a miracle that the guy honked me?
	No, it's because he did something sort of very human.
	If he hadn't honked me, I would have been hit by the bus and therefore there would be no miracle.
	But with the person who, yeah, for the person who's pulled out of a ruin, it's fantastic.
	But it's not a miracle.
	It is fantastic that that person, because the other 30,000 people who were killed in that particular earthquake, or whoever many there were, where's their miracle?
	Why is this person being pulled out a miracle, but everyone else who dies not a miracle?
	To me, it's a fairly hateful description because of every person who gets cured of a particular disease by miracle, a lot don't.
	So what's wrong with them?
	Why are they sort of picked out to die when this one person is not?
	What's special about that one person?
	Nothing in particular.
	It's often the interaction of the bus driver blowing his horn or the person pulling a kid out from underneath a ruin.
	It's no miracle.
	It's often a human intervention.
	And I find the whole concept of miracles, especially in that context, very, very depressing.
	And yet professionally, in the work that you do, you are questing for a miracle.
	You're looking for the one person who can deliver the unusual, aren't you?
	No, I'm looking for an explanation of an unusual.
	A miracle is quite the opposite of finding an explanation.
	A miracle is saying, I don't want an explanation.
	I have a miracle that will do it.
	In fact, a miracle is the opposite of logic or critical thinking or everything that actually makes us human.
	It actually takes away from our ability to choose.
	It's saying it's an inexplicable result, i.e.
	a miracle, an act of God or whatever.
	My point of view is I would love to know how things happen, especially in the paranormal world or whatever, but I'm not going to expect an unanswerable solution.
	And that's what a miracle is.
	What are you going to do if one day you find something that is repeatable and is a miracle?
	Is something that you can't put a rational explanation to, but there is somebody repeating it for you.
	That's what we're after.
	At this stage, we're not after how something happens.
	We just want to know that it happens, right?
	And that is repeatable.
	If someone can repeat a particular claim, whatever the mechanism that they think they're using, if someone can repeat an actual claim, that's as far as we're going with our $100,000 challenge.
	Then we'll look into how the hell do you do that, right?
	But all we want to know is, can you do it?
	It's as simple as that.
	And this has come back to the thing, you say you can fly, I say show me.
	It's bloody simple to say, you say you can do this, whether you're a psychic or whatever, and show me.
	But show me under conditions in which we know you're not cheating, I'm not cheating, in which sort of everything's above board.
	And that's all we're asking.
	We're not asking for explanations of how it happens.
	A miracle, we're not asking for miracles, we're asking proof that something happens.
	That's it.
	What about UFOs?
	There are people in this world, I have spoken to them, who claim, although they haven't done it for me, that they can summon them.
	Yeah, I've sort of Met and spoken with a lot of people like that too.
	Most UFO people, of course, just see something in the sky which they can't explain.
	They are unidentified, after all, which is what they use stand for.
	And I prefer, I know the term UFO, and I always like to use the term flying saucer because it upsets people.
	But I mean, you know, the unidentified aerial phenomenon is actually probably a more correct explanation that it's unidentified, it's up there, and it's something.
	Rather than flying, flying implies something that's controlled, and an object implies it's a real thing.
	But I mean, yeah, people who say they can summon UFOs, I have challenged them, say, let's go out there in the daylight or the night sky or wherever you say.
	And this happens to a lot of different people, you know, people who can summon psychic powers.
	It's the same thing.
	We go out there and say, okay, let's go out there and you will summon a UFO.
	And then the response is, oh, I can't do it all the time.
	Well, they say, we just said you did.
	And you'll find excuses, and that's what we find.
	Unfortunately, I don't want excuses.
	I want to do it.
	I really want to do it.
	And I said, you know, show me, please.
	But I mean, and the people when they come to the crunch, they tend to pull out.
	And so someone who says they can summon UFOs, fantastic.
	I'll be there with bells on.
	All right.
	Well, we'll get your contact details at the end of this, definitely.
	What's in your intro now then, Tim?
	My intro at the moment is I've got a number of different things, people who sort of, I've got a lot.
	Okay, I'm the executive officer of Australian Skeptics, so I'm the chief cook and bottle washer.
	More bottle washing than chief cook, I should add.
	But basically, I get responses from people all over the place.
	The most recent thing, what have I had most recently?
	I've had people who are the son of God.
	I've had, which is strange that came from a woman.
	the daughter of God should be surely.
	I've had people who I mean, she might have been a previous existence.
	They say that we can be every sex in previous future existences.
	I think God as a lady would be a lot nicer person.
	But I'm getting people who are claiming auras, who can photograph auras.
	I'm getting the usual UFO photos.
	I get that quite a lot.
	Orbs crop up a lot lately.
	You know, orbs, the little sort of blob you see.
	It's the new version of ghosts.
	And you've got people willing to demonstrate orbs to you.
	Yeah.
	Well, demonstrate photos of orbs, yeah.
	Yeah, I've got people who demonstrate photos of fairies to me.
	But you don't want that, do you?
	You don't want a photograph because you will say that's a fake.
	You want to see it for yourself.
	Well, you can't always see it for yourself, can you?
	I mean, I can't, if someone across the other side of the country says that they've taken photographs of fairies, I can't whiz.
	I'd love to whiz over there.
	And we have people in various places who we say, can you go have a look at this?
	But in many cases, you have to take photographic evidence, which is not very good.
	As we know, photographs can be faked very easily.
	But it's surprisingly often that the photographs you get are not very sophisticated.
	And if you can sort of look at them and say, you know how often it is that someone takes a photograph of a flying saucer outside their window and it's a reflection of a light inside the building?
	Not always, though.
	Oh, not always, no, but it happens so often.
	It's a bit embarrassing.
	And you can actually go there and find, you know, you can go there and find the window.
	With modern photographs, with the metadata and things, you can find out exactly when and where it was taken.
	Are you telling me then, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but are you telling me that the $100,000 would be there for somebody who provided you with a good image, a good photograph of something that you really couldn't explain?
	No, no, that's one of the problems with the $100,000 is that basically it's for someone who has a skill.
	But what happens if that skill is summoning UFOs?
	If they can summon UFOs, we'd have to sort of discuss that one and find out.
	The problem with summoning UFOs is you have to be sure of what you're seeing as a UFO, right?
	And that's hard to pin down.
	But I mean, if they say at this particular point, I mean, I've had people who say they can dissolve clouds and that sort of stuff.
	And yeah, sure.
	And I've seen this all the time.
	But I mean, if someone says, in that particular spot, we're going to get a UFO which is a certain size, which is a certain color, a certain shape, et cetera.
	And it is going to go from there to there and then up to there and then down to there.
	That'd be interesting.
	If someone says, let's go out in the sky and see what we can see, and they say, whoop, that's something.
	What was that?
	I caused that.
	You can't use that for a challenge because it's sort of, you don't even know what happens for a start.
	But I mean, if someone can actually do something which is repeatable, that should qualify for $100,000.
	Okay, well, those people who I've spoken to, and maybe those who I haven't, who say that they can by using various techniques, summon UFOs, there's money on offer for you, but you've got to be able to demonstrate it and repeat it.
	There is one caveat to that.
	They have to be in Australia.
	They have to be a restaurant.
	Yes, sorry.
	we're not going to travel the world I mean, but could they travel to it if they thought it was worth it?
	Could they?
	Because look, $100,000, the airfare is, what, $8,000, $6,000.
	Yeah, that's whether if you're flying a business class or economy, man.
	I don't know.
	What's the exchange?
	I have no idea what the exchange rate for Aussie dollars is these days.
	55p to the dollar.
	Oh, is it real?
	It's not 6,000.
	$2,000 then, is it?
	It's about $1,015 then, whatever.
	No, no, it's about $1,000.
	Yeah, it's about $2,000, yeah.
	Depends on which way you're flying.
	But I mean, let's not go there.
	Let's not worry about that.
	I'm not in the travel agent business.
	I'm not going to sell flights.
	But I mean, if someone wants to, strictly speaking, I mean, we had a lot of this stuff from people coming from overseas who said, I've observed a certain thing or have a certain skill.
	A lot from Poland for some reason.
	I don't know why.
	But I mean, the issue is that really we have said it's about residents of Australia.
	You don't have to be citizens, but you have to be a resident just to sort of keep it under control a bit.
	So I'm sorry if someone wants to travel from Rickmansworth down to, you know, Niu, is it?
	Well, used to be near you, from down to Sydney and say, I can do this particular thing, it's probably, no, we're trying to limit it to Australian residents.
	So I know that might be a bit nasty and people don't like it, but that's the way the game is.
	See, you might be turning your back on something amazing.
	What happens if there's somebody listening to this right now who can demonstrably time and time again walk on water and they're willing to travel, but you won't accept them?
	Well, they can walk across.
	Once again, souche, Tim.
	Honestly, I know.
	It's a bit rough, I know.
	But I mean, and after this, after this, after this interview goes to where I'm going to get people for sure who can walk on water work and who do all sorts of things.
	Unfortunately, we've just got to set up some rules that that's the way it is.
	It has to be a demonstratable, repeatable skill, and it has to be from someone who's a resident of Australia.
	Sorry about that.
	I had an interview of yours on, I think, 2UE radio there in Sydney, where you were talking about the Bermuda Triangle on a late-night show.
	You don't even believe in that, do you?
	Do you know what?
	Most skeptics at some stage in their life used to believe in something, right?
	It's amazing how many people believed in von Deniken.
	You scratch a skeptic, especially of a certain age, right?
	You scratch a skeptic and you'll find a von Deniken believer in there somewhere.
	And then for one particular reason or another, they did some research and found out, hang on, no.
	My thing was Bermuda Triangle.
	I used to quite believe in the Bermuda Triangle until suddenly, and because I used to read Bermuda Triangle promotional stuff, there was stuff that was very pro-Bermuda Triangle.
	As soon as you start looking at other things and people who are asking questions who are being skeptical of it, you think, well, hang on, okay, it's not quite as much as it appears to be.
	So Bermuda Triangle, after you look at it from more and more and more, I mean, the whole concept has disappeared.
	When was the last boat or plane that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle that made big news?
	Well, I think there are still things that happen, and now they're saying that there might be a new one, I think, not very far from you.
	I think it's in the South China Sea.
	You didn't know about that.
	A new Bermuda Triangle, I think, not far from China.
	I didn't know that one.
	Okay, there we are.
	Thank you.
	It's a Bermuda Triangle, but not in Bermuda.
	But that's a whole other story.
	Actually, the Bermuda Triangle is not in Bermuda either, but never mind.
	That could be even more inexplicable.
	And can we just say for the devotees of Eric von Daniken, who I have interviewed twice, once on the radio, once on the podcast, I know that there are many people, and I've been fascinated by his works too.
	But, you know, what you're hearing is the opinion of Tim.
	It is not a definitive statement.
	Thank you very much.
	Okay.
	Well, I had to let you out of that one.
	All right.
	Sorry, you were saying?
	No, no, no, by all means, sort of throw me in the deep end.
	The interesting thing about Von Daniken was that when the book, the first book, The Chariots of the Gods, question mark, first came out, it was part of it was serialized in a Sunday newspaper in Australia, in Sydney.
	And people read it and think, fantastic, this is the first they've heard of it.
	And they thought, that's really fascinating.
	And the next day, the next weekend, they serialised the second half of what they were printing.
	But there were a lot of letters from people who were saying things like, I'm an archaeologist.
	What Von Deniken says about archaeology is total rubbish, but his astronomy is fascinating.
	And someone else would write in, this is literally, I remember this happening, and this is part of my turning.
	An astronomer would write in saying his astronomy is absolute rubbish, but his archaeology is fascinating.
	Well, that's just the human condition, isn't it?
	You only get two people in a room.
	They won't agree.
	Well, it shows is that you can't trust scientists outside of their area of expertise, right?
	They are as willing to believe as anybody if it's areas they don't know anything about.
	But if it's an area they do know something about, and they should know something about it, they've been doing it long enough, as you've been doing things long enough, I've been doing things long enough, and after a while you pick up a lot of information and a lot of, you hopefully apply some wisdom born of years, that if they say what I do know about is rubbish, you then start, and you build up this sort of collection of different people in different areas saying what Von Denikin said is rubbish, you start to raise some doubts, as it did in my young brain at the time.
	There's one thing that we can prove or not.
	Have you got the $100,000?
	If somebody was able to demonstrate this afternoon something fantastic, have you got the money?
	Yes.
	You have?
	Okay.
	Well, let's put the challenge.
	It's not in the check, right?
	Because we don't use checks anymore, right?
	But yes, no, the money, absolutely 100%, I can say that.
	The money exists.
	It's real.
	Okay.
	All right.
	I hear what you say, and I'm sure it is.
	And I look forward to the day when you find that person.
	So if there's anybody primarily in Australia, but a resident of Australia listening to this, who feels that they are up for this challenge, where do they go?
	They can write to me.
	The website is skeptics.com.au.
	That's skeptics with an SK.
	And we won't go into that, but it's a long story.
	Skeptics.com.au.
	And my address is NSW.
	Or you can actually write to challenge.
	Challenge at skeptics.com.au and you will get to me.
	Good luck in your work.
	And it is a miracle to me, at least.
	And it is repeatable that we can speak to each other at opposite ends of the world, at opposite ends of the day.
	That's a miracle.
	And what makes it even better is that your weather is lousy and mine's really good.
	Well, I don't think we can debate that one, I think.
	But very concerned about our weather here.
	You need to be sending that sunshine this way, please, because you're hanging on to it far too long.
	Tim, thank you very much.
	My pleasure entirely.
	Thank you, Howard.
	And my thanks to Tim Mendon from the Australian Skeptics for taking time to go through their work.
	And that money is there to be claimed.
	If you feel that you can demonstrate phenomena whatever to him and the team, then the money's yours.
	Simple, eh?
	Let me know how it goes.
	I'll put a link to him and his organization on my website, theunexplained.tv.
	More great shows in the pipeline.
	Thank you very much for your response.
	Please keep the email coming.
	So until next we meet.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	This is Be Me Unexplained.
	And please stay safe, stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

▲