Edition 432 - John Hanson
A welcome return to prolific UFO author John Hanson - based in the English Midlands and the man behind more than a dozen fascinating"Haunted Skies" books and some exciting new research...
A welcome return to prolific UFO author John Hanson - based in the English Midlands and the man behind more than a dozen fascinating"Haunted Skies" books and some exciting new research...
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained. | |
Good to have you there. | |
Thank you very much for all of your nice emails and comments. | |
If you have been expecting a reply to an email from me and you haven't had it, please remind me I'm a little bit behind myself as I'm just still recovering from this bug that I had, a little bit like flu or something like that. | |
Whatever it was, it kept me out of action for the big part of a week. | |
I don't think I've had anything like that in years. | |
But you were very kind with all of your suggestions and the nice things that you said and your messages of encouragement as I lay there. | |
But I'm still sounding a little bit chesty. | |
You know, that might kind of improve the voice, who knows. | |
Thank you very much to Adam, as ever, at Creative Hotspot for getting the show out to you and for his work on the website. | |
Thank you to Haley as well for her efforts in booking the guests that we find here. | |
I want to do a couple of shout-outs before the guest on this edition who is an old friend of this show, the man behind, and he is prolific. | |
The, I think there are more than a dozen now, Haunted Skies books. | |
John Hansen, he is a meticulous researcher, which comes from his working background in the police in the UK. | |
It just means that you collate things, you collect documents, and you'll see all of those. | |
If you've never seen any of these books, then I recommend that you do see them. | |
Haunted Skies, they're called. | |
He's involved in some other research right now. | |
So we're basically going to catch up with him, talk about a few things, including some new research that he's doing and some books that he's in the process of putting out there now. | |
So we'll do that, but it will just be a general catch-up with John because we haven't spoken to him for a while and he is a great guest. | |
The shout-outs I wanted to do before we get to John, though, are just a few V's. | |
Harry in Egbeth in Liverpool, thank you very much for getting in touch, Harry. | |
Nice to hear from you. | |
Sam, great name, Sam. | |
Sam Galliers. | |
Thank you for the story that you sent me. | |
Hope you hear this. | |
Trevor in Oregon. | |
Thank you very much. | |
You wanted a shout-out? | |
So Trevor in Oregon, there you have it. | |
And Trevor, thank you for what you said about the show. | |
Glad you enjoy it. | |
And this comes in from Amy. | |
It sounds like Casey Kasim, does it? | |
This comes in from Amy. | |
This comes in from Amy, who is at Stevens Point in Wisconsin, where apparently it's been really bad. | |
It's been really cold there with wind chill advisories. | |
We've had some rain that has never stopped and wind and flooding here, but we haven't had wind chill advisories yet. | |
So look after yourself, Amy. | |
Amy wanted to tell us a story, and I've got it here, and I'm going to try and read it just as it comes. | |
So, Amy says, I wanted to share my story with you of an old co-worker who passed away, and I'll keep it brief, but please feel the emotion behind the words. | |
This happened at a job years ago, where I worked for a department store that had been built around seven years before that. | |
I had a mother-daughter relationship with my co-manager, who over a Memorial Day weekend had died unexpectedly. | |
She'd started working for the store from day one, as well as a handful of other employees who were like pillars that held each department together. | |
I idolized her so much, I must have externalized her in my mind, which made reality hit all the harder. | |
She was the first great loss that I'd experienced in life, so seeing everything go on and function as per usual when her loss made it feel like nothing would be the same, really made me feel small, and everyday life became futile and mundane. | |
About a week after she passed, I had this dream that I was looking at her silhouette blown out from this bright light behind her, and I heard her say, everything will be all right. | |
I woke up feeling amazing and felt like I could smile at work again. | |
That morning, I saw my other co-worker who'd also been working at the store from day one and felt this pressing need to tell her about the dream. | |
An expression came across her face that I've never seen before or since on anybody, and she said that she'd also been visited in her dream that night. | |
As our eyes began to fill with tears of disbelief and euphoria, our other co-worker, who was also a pillar of the store, said he'd thought that he'd seen her at work just the other day. | |
After that, our spirits were raised so high, it felt like we alone lifted the dark fog out of the store and every day seemed happier. | |
Great story, Amy. | |
I don't doubt those experiences at all. | |
You know, that when my mother died, I had a dream of her, and she came to me and she said, are you okay? | |
And once she'd made sure that I was okay, she disappeared. | |
All of these things are very, very common, so I find that interesting, and it was very good of you to share it with me. | |
Monique. | |
Quick story from Monique, and then we'll get to John Hansen, our guest here. | |
Shortly after receiving, says Monique, a medical procedure, I saw images of Mara, the Hindu equivalent of the devil, on my work computer. | |
I don't practice Hinduism or Buddhism. | |
Everything escalated from there, from seeing demons and spirits of people in inanimate objects, as well as nature spirits reflecting in windows and more. | |
Feeling under spiritual attack, I decided to fast and to pray, something I'd never done or not done in many years. | |
I sat on my deck on the ninth hour of the first day of my fast. | |
The veil in the sky opened and I could see several entities making an appearance and then floating away. | |
The sky activity continues to this day. | |
The dark attacks, though, stopped after I faced my inner demons. | |
I don't know what to make of that, Monique. | |
That's quite a story. | |
Thank you for it. | |
Okay, you can always email me if you'd like to. | |
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv. | |
You can send me messages, guest suggestions, whatever from there. | |
And if you'd like to leave a donation, then you can do that too through the website, theunexplained.tv. | |
And of course, your donations, vital for this work to continue. | |
All right, let's get to, I think, about 100 miles away from where I'm sitting right now in the UK. | |
John Hansen, the man behind the Haunted Skies books, and a catch-up with John. | |
John, thank you very much for coming back on the show. | |
And it's lovely to be speaking again. | |
It's been a while, John, but like I've always said whenever we've spoken, you are definitely prolific. | |
You deserve that term. | |
How many Haunted Skies books were there, and have there been? | |
Well, I think it's probably about 16 and I'm working on three. | |
And I'm working on three. | |
And we've discussed this before. | |
We, as I say, came on air as such. | |
And something that fascinated me for many years was the amount of incidents involving members of the public who had all sorts of not only psychological, but medical physical problems after. | |
And I thought that when I started looking through my files, I thought, would I have enough to do a book? | |
And I've got enough for three books. | |
It's an amazing amount of stuff. | |
And I think to myself, some people say about UFO researchers, enthusiasts, investigators, but I'd like to think that I'm a historian because that's what I do. | |
And it's important to preserve so much stuff here because like you, I haven't got a clue about the source of all of these incidents that have taken place. | |
But undoubtedly, the majority, well, so the majority, that's not fair. | |
Nearly all of the people I've spoken to have had these experiences. | |
And often, some of them can't come to terms with what has happened. | |
I mean, right in front of me, just to remind people they don't know, a gentleman called Mr. Tilt, Dennis Tilt, and he and his wife, Jean, and obviously they've both passed away by now. | |
They were on the 30th of April, they were on the way home, and they saw three luminous beams of light forming a triangle a few feet off the ground in a nearby field in the Warminster area. | |
And we have to say to listeners outside the UK, because I think listeners to this in the UK will probably know that Warminster is like UFO Central. | |
Well, it certainly was in the 60s and 70s. | |
And people talk about UFO waves. | |
Well, I tend to think of a wave of UFO activity being just that, a wave as if it's coming off the ocean. | |
And of course, it'll pass over an area, a locality. | |
And maybe two or three weeks later, maybe a day later, it'll go on, it'll move on to somewhere else. | |
And with Mr. Tilt, he saw these three lights. | |
They merged into one ball of lights. | |
And he said it looked like a frying pan without a handle. | |
The couple felt very nervous and decided to leave. | |
And then I spoke to his wife, and his wife told me that the day after he reported the incident, he found a burnt patch on the ground. | |
They went back to the scene, about 50 feet in diameter. | |
And she says, to the best of my memory, we weren't physically or mentally scarred. | |
Although, very oddly, my husband brought my attention to a red mark on his chest, about the size of a 10 pence apiece. | |
This happened a few hours after the sighting. | |
It was the source of occasional irritation and was right up there to his death. | |
Now, interestingly, there was an analysis of soil control samples taken from outside the burnt area and also the area inside. | |
And I won't detail all the various bits and pieces about the sample, but the bottom line was that it was hot enough to fuse the fuse flint and hot enough to actually vaporize a person. | |
Now, that is frightening. | |
Well, if you say that it was hot enough to melt the flint, now flint is a rock that's, as far as I remember from school, that's volcanic. | |
It takes a lot of heat to melt that. | |
It does indeed. | |
And as I say, I looked up the heat required, you know, when, you know, that is required to cremate people. | |
And the heat that was, as I say, that was brought to the attention of the researcher was double that. | |
Now, to me, just that one incident alone is pretty serious stuff. | |
And I think UFOs are serious stuff. | |
And, you know, I have, as I say, I have so many reports from people that have experienced some horrific things as well. | |
Okay, so listen, I want to take your guidance then now, because what I was going to do, but we don't have to do it that way, we've kind of leapt straight into it. | |
But that's just because you're a gift that keeps on giving. | |
Once we start talking, we do not stop. | |
I was going to talk with you a little bit about a couple of other things before we talk about your latest work, which is, and that's just been a little hint of it, which is to do with the physical effects of actually being in contact with something, which don't get talked about a lot. | |
The effects on people's bodies, the effects on the environment, those sorts of things. | |
So we can either do that first, or we can talk about some specific cases and some other stuff I wanted to chew around with you. | |
So you decide. | |
That would be fine. | |
I think my problem, and you've more or less endorsed through what you've just said, my problem is I actually have too much stuff. | |
Well, you do. | |
I mean, look, these books, and if people who haven't seen them, and I was, when I did the introduction to this, I was recommending they do, because epic is the word to describe them for two reasons. | |
Number one, they are physically big. | |
There are many pages in them. | |
But unlike some authors who fill a lot of pages by spacing out the print, you know, and having not very many words on the page and making the diagrams nice and big, yours are packed with detail. | |
And also the fact that because you have an ex-police background, you know, like my dad had, you are people who are, you're trained to be meticulous about getting evidence. | |
So your books are full of newspaper articles, are full of documentation, Certificates and anything that you can get your hands on, photographs from people's records. | |
They are the most comprehensively put together books that I've ever seen, and I've seen lots. | |
You're right, but the problem is, of course, and with these, well, we'll talk further about the other books, but the other books will be much, they'll be the same size volumes, but there will be two to three hundred pages only. | |
And that will contain some hell of information. | |
But you see, unfortunately, people don't want or don't appear to want to buy books with colour images. | |
And as I explained so many times to people, if you publish a book and you've got 75% black and white pages and you've got 25% colour, you have to pay for 100 pages or 100% in colour. | |
You can't pay less for one page, black and white, and then it just doesn't work. | |
Right, so it's like watching a, I don't know, this is probably a bad analogy, but watching a black and white film, a movie on a colour television set. | |
The set is equipped for colour, but you're only using it in black and white. | |
That's right. | |
That's very good. | |
Yeah, and this is the problem. | |
And a lot of people, I mean, I'm honest enough to admit that, first of all, it's thanks to somebody like yourself that hopefully people will buy the books because I don't make hardly any money out of the books. | |
And well, I just don't. | |
But to me, there's a passion about it. | |
I've met so many wonderful people out there and quite a few of them have passed on now. | |
And it's important to preserve their sightings, their experiences, because at the end of the day, it's our history. | |
I mean, if you wouldn't mind me asking you a question, you've told me about your dad and he's had one or two sightings. | |
Was that instrumental in any way towards you getting involved in, let's face it, a subject that a lot of people, well, a lot of people aren't interested in? | |
I mean, there's a lot of answers to this, and I'll give them really quickly. | |
My dad was, like most people who are in the police, they're meticulous about report writing and record keeping. | |
So my desire, I think, to be a journalist came from my dad who taught me to use a typewriter because he had to type up reports when he was a sergeant. | |
You know, a lot of his work was typing up reports. | |
So he taught me to use a typewriter very young. | |
Also, his dad was psychic, okay? | |
His dad was like that, and people would go to him. | |
And it's the Welsh background. | |
We were from Liverpool, but it's the Welsh background. | |
So his dad was a bit like that. | |
And my father had a few ghost experiences and stuff like that. | |
And this was in my family. | |
My grandmother, and I won't bore my listener with this again because I have told it on the show before. | |
But in the 60s, my grandmother told the story to the family and she used to draw the picture, saw a UFO at 6 o'clock in the morning hovering over a railway track that runs from Liverpool to Southport. | |
And my grandmother lived in a place called Waterloo, right by the railway track, and that's halfway between Liverpool and Southport. | |
One morning, she wakes up, and this is an old house. | |
I mean, this was a really old house in a cobbled street in those days. | |
They had an outside toilet, I remember, which used to amaze me when I was a kid that anybody had anything like that. | |
But the railway ran out the back, and she, and I remember her bed was back to the window. | |
It was one of those old sash windows. | |
And she described lying in bed, looking out of that window behind her, and there was a classic, she didn't know anything about UFOs. | |
She wasn't interested. | |
And, you know, it was an astonishing story. | |
She drew the picture of this grey metallic layer cake thing that she saw. | |
And she even, she used to put the little, the little windows around the middle of it. | |
Classic UFO. | |
That was my grandmother. | |
So the short answer to your question is that all of this stuff is in my family. | |
That's why I'm doing this. | |
That's well, that's very commendable. | |
And as I say to so many people, you are a believer like me. | |
Certainly the amount of evidence that I've obtained over, what, 25 years? | |
And I mean, we could talk, but it would be impossible. | |
We would bore the listener by going through hour after hour, probably two or three days of talking about. | |
How many cases have you investigated? | |
I'm talking UFO cases now. | |
I really can't. | |
I can't put my finger. | |
What I can say is that I've interviewed most of the classic cases like Jesse Rostenberg, Margaret Fry, the Air Force pilots. | |
I mean, I sent you that information about Mr. Swinney. | |
We're going to go through those. | |
I thought the way we'd do it is put those cases once we've done the stuff about the new work about energy. | |
Okay, well, you will have to do it. | |
Then we'll put it off the back of it. | |
I can't bloody remember it all. | |
No, it's okay. | |
I'm going to do my audiobook bit. | |
I'll probably be rubbish, but I'm going to do my audiobook bit and I'll introduce each one when we get to it. | |
But look, you are an encyclopedia, so there's so much stuff. | |
I kind of see, you know, those dams that they make hydroelectric power from in North Wales? | |
I think there's one called Trows Valid, I think. | |
Anyway, somebody will tell me. | |
You know, with you, once you turn that sluice, the stuff comes pouring out. | |
And it's great. | |
It's absolutely great. | |
You wrote a book about Rendlesham and the man who was the deputy base commander there, Charles Holt. | |
In fact, I think it was you who put me in touch with him. | |
And I did a show with him. | |
You spent two weeks with Charles Holt. | |
And I'm just wondering now, because we've been through the anniversary of everything that happened at Rendlesham Forest in 1980, which my listeners will know about. | |
So, you know, I won't recap that. | |
I'm just assuming that they know. | |
You know, the twin air bases, US, UK, and weird happenings just before Christmas and around Christmas 1980. | |
Now, Charles Holt was the deputy base commander. | |
He was the guy who was aware of all of this. | |
He's written and spoken himself, but you spent time with him. | |
Looking at it now, and the book has been out for a few years. | |
Has he had any other thoughts on this that he's expressed to you? | |
Not really, other than the fact that I started the volume two, the whole perspective, probably about 12 months ago. | |
And I have so much information, but it's not so much putting the information together, but it's a bit like, I suppose, I don't know, maybe it's a classic sweet or it's a very special drink. | |
I spend so much time doing it because it has to be right, especially if it's the whole perspective too. | |
And I have most of the information. | |
And I just say that the thing with the Rendlesham incident is that back in 1940, I interviewed a chap that was on RAF Woodbridge in 1940 when he saw a similar object going over the pond. | |
So you're saying that something happened there. | |
And let's just remind the listener that this stuff happened in 1980. | |
You're saying that there was somebody who experienced something on that site 40 years before that. | |
Oh, and indeed afterwards. | |
I have a lot of it isn't just about December 1980. | |
Let's say that we take, I don't know, November 1980 when people even photographed a UFO at Leyston where Brenda Butler lives. | |
They photographed it and I interviewed the two people. | |
It's a very interesting photograph. | |
It's obviously genuine in my opinion. | |
And that was just down the coast from the Rendlesham bases. | |
But there has been a lot of paranormal activity in Rendlesham Forest. | |
Now, I can't say to the listeners that there's a connection, but it's possible there is, because one of the most fascinating things that has happened to me during my many visits to the forest, and I'm off there again soon, is the ports, the stones that fell next to me and my colleagues. | |
And it's quite a common thing that happens down there. | |
These stones, they're round, smooth, polished pebbles, and they're very warm. | |
In fact, they're near enough that you have to wait a few seconds to pick them up because they're that hot. | |
But you're saying these things fall from the sky when you're there? | |
Well, I don't know if it's the sky. | |
Personally, I think they're levitated by something or someone because they don't, because I've witnessed them and so many other people have witnessed them. | |
And of course, all manner of things can fall from the sky, including coins, including God knows what can fall from the sky. | |
And I've covered enough, if you like, sightings involving things like that. | |
But the forest, I've been there and witnessed it myself. | |
Now, if you were a sceptic, you would, and of course, there's no wrong with being skeptical, but a sceptic would suggest, as they've suggested before to me, that it was a bird flying through the night sky with a pebble in its mouth, which was rather in its beak, which was hot and dropped it. | |
Really? | |
That's a new one on me. | |
But there are some strange things about, particularly to some of the servicemen down there as well. | |
So Rendlesham isn't just about what John Burroughs, Jim Penniston, Bostinza and others saw, including Colonel Holt and so many others, but it is about some very strange phenomena, whether it's, but of course, looking back at what happened in the 40s, most of the, if you like, a lot of stuff came over the East Coast. | |
And something that certainly interests me is the fact that during the people will have heard of what happened in Belgium during the 1980s when the Belgium Air Force tried to prevent these triangular UFOs from passing over the country. | |
And there was lots of reports. | |
There was a wave of those. | |
But of course, the Essex area, which is Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, Colchester, there was a heck of a lot of activity over there. | |
And I've got all the files here. | |
And of course, we're looking at the classic triangular object, which was seen hovering by so many people over houses. | |
And I think there's obviously a connection with the same sort of phenomena in Belgium. | |
The problem here is there's too much. | |
I remember Dr. Alan Hynek once said that our problem, he said, was that we are too rich in UFO imagery. | |
And the more you get involved in researching into this, the harder it is to understand why this subject isn't taught on a curriculum and why isn't it brought out in the open. | |
Well, I suppose one of the reasons it's not taught in schools is it's not something that you can boil down to a formula. | |
Because you're interested in this. | |
You're deeply into it. | |
I'm interested in this. | |
But neither of us can be sure what this phenomenon is. | |
Interdimensional, interplanetary? | |
Is it all from here? | |
Who knows? | |
We know there's something, though. | |
That's all we do know. | |
And I suppose that's why they don't teach it. | |
Did you ever get involved in talking of that area around the English Channel and around Belgium? | |
And we might have talked about this before, but a case that intrigues me and always has, because I reported it on the news, you know, I was doing radio news in London, was the case of a British Midland, I think it was, plane. | |
You probably know where I'm going with this, that is supposed to have encountered in that sort Of area crossing the channel and going towards Belgium, a UFO the size of a battleship. | |
I don't know if you remember that one. | |
I remember it. | |
I have quite a number of incidents recorded like that. | |
So for me, it's, yeah, so many like that. | |
But like we said before, neither of us can explain what these things are and where they come from. | |
We can't. | |
But if they, I don't upset anybody here, but if they can freely discuss religion and I'm not particularly religious, but I believe in good and evil. | |
And I suppose, yeah. | |
But why is it that there's so much more evidence about UFOs, not only physical, but there's so much there and yet it's ignored. | |
And I mean, I've spent years going through newspaper accounts from particularly from the 60s onwards, where anybody that had the courage to contact a newspaper and report what they'd seen, | |
to a great degree, their testimonial was correct, but the conclusion, of course, would be anything to denigrate that report or ridicule that report. | |
I think it's less so now, but I think if any school teacher stood up, I'm sorry, if any school teacher stood up and started teaching kids about this, I can still see that there are newspapers in the UK and probably in America too that would front page that news. | |
Teacher instructs kids in little green men. | |
And that is why you're not going to get this in schools. | |
Not yet. | |
I agree, but it's I suppose if I knew very little about the subject, I could understand why it's not taught in schools. | |
Why my own personal feeling here, Howard, is that one of the reasons why it's not brought out into the open, and forget, people talk about disclosure. | |
I think that's quite, it's never going to happen. | |
Hold on, we've got to just hold on for a second there. | |
You know that I know people like Steve Bassett and many others who do think that disclosure is going to happen. | |
You don't. | |
No, I certainly don't. | |
Because of the military implications of all of this. | |
And if one believes it behind our backs, there's certainly a lot of money. | |
And people a lot more intelligent than me and scientists have conducted research and investigated all these matters going back to the 40s. | |
Well, then this stuff is going to be, you know, it's going to be endorsed top secret. | |
And it's a bit like year after year, particularly not so much now, but back in the late 90s, and then the turn of this century, the public records office or the MOD would declassify files and there would be excitement by the media. | |
And I've often gone through all these files. | |
I can only say that 95% of them are, I'm sorry, but 95% is absolute rubbish. | |
What about the recent release of what we are now told is the last batch of MOD Ministry of Defence in the UK UFO files, which is very recent and these were put online, so you might have seen them. | |
Do they shed any more light than we've already got on this phenomenon? | |
Well, I can only say this. | |
Over the years, I've spoken to people that have had sightings and had experiences going back to the 70s and the 60s. | |
Some of those cases I've brought to the attention of the MOD, not the witness details, but I've asked them, is this a matter that you know about? | |
And they've said yes, but we can't declassify till the 30 years has expired. | |
Well, here I am, 15 years after that, and none of that has been declassified at all. | |
And the other thing is, how do you explain the fact that all of this information excites people? | |
Hardly any of it contains, hardly any of the sightings, experiences, reports that I have here. | |
And a lot of people have reported it to the MOD. | |
How come there's none of that in there at all? | |
So you're saying that they are withholding some of this material? | |
Well, absolutely, because none of it is ever brought to the public's attention. | |
And let's be honest, I think we'll both agree that if it's that important, it ain't going to be declassified, is it? | |
Well, I wouldn't have thought so, but I'm willing to be persuaded the other way. | |
But what you've just said is very important. | |
You are saying that you have documented hundreds of cases that of the, and you'll tell me how many, but of the hundreds of cases that you've documented, some of these were reported to the MOD, but those cases are not in these documents that have been released to the public. | |
Not at all. | |
And have you raised that with anybody? | |
Well, who can I raise it with? | |
Nobody I can raise it with. | |
The only thing I can do is publish the books. | |
And that's what I, as I say, that's what I intend to do. | |
And the books speak for themselves, really. | |
Well, it does. | |
The information, the evidence, as your dad would probably say, does speak for itself. | |
And it speaks a bloody different language than the one that's been directed at us, you know, about last batch of files being released. | |
And that's just, just the only way I was once criticized because some researcher criticized me strongly because he said, I spend too much time with the witnesses. | |
I get involved with witnesses. | |
I spend time with them. | |
I write down what they say and then publish it and get to know them. | |
And surely that's what it's about. | |
I would have thought so again. | |
Now, of all of the witnesses that you've spoken with over the years, and I'm going to put you on the spot here, you might not, you know, if people tell me, I don't know. | |
I love microphones. | |
I collect them. | |
If somebody says to me, Howard, what's your favorite microphone? | |
I can't tell you because they're all different. | |
They're like my little babies. | |
They're all different. | |
So if I asked you, from all the research that you've done, and speaking to me right now, you might think differently tomorrow about this question, but the most compelling witness that you've ever personally spoken to in all before we get to the new research on exposure, we'll talk about that. | |
But the most compelling person and the most compelling account of anything that you've personally experienced? | |
Well, first of all, I emailed you previously and the guy that stands head and shoulders above everybody else with regard to the way in which the MOD do keep UFO files was, of course, Mr. Swenney. | |
And you can no doubt read that in a few minutes. | |
Okay, we'll get to that. | |
But I'm just thinking about if there's, I don't know, an old lady in a post office or something like that, just as a human experience. | |
But there's so many, but Margaret Fry, her sighting, and not only her, but a number of other people down in Bexley, Heath, Kent. | |
That was 56. | |
I interviewed other people. | |
I traced other people. | |
Some of them had got marks on their bodies. | |
Some of them had got burns. | |
Other witnesses, school children. | |
That was a very interesting case. | |
And there's Jessie Rostenberg who's no longer with us. | |
Jessie had a fascinating encounter with a craft and its apparent occupants. | |
And she had all sorts of medical problems afterwards. | |
And I've got to know so many people. | |
I mean, Jean Hingley, you know, from Rowley Regis, she had something land in a back garden. | |
And I have photographs of the marks in the snow. | |
I have statements of people that knew her. | |
Unfortunately, when this went into the media, it was reported as a Mince Pie Martians case. | |
Oh, damn. | |
And it's stuck to that all these years. | |
Of course, it's not the kind of thing you expect in Rowley Regis, is it? | |
That's the thing. | |
But what about her? | |
When was this, first off? | |
79. | |
79. | |
Okay, so it's 40 years. | |
Give it. | |
40 years, yeah. | |
And how was it at the time? | |
What was the conclusion about it? | |
What was the expert opinion? | |
Well, let me say one of the experts was the police superintendent that I spoke to. | |
Unfortunately, he's passed away a couple of years ago. | |
But he said to me, he went to the scene and he said there was a very genuine lady and he can't explain what it was that she saw, but she was very badly affected medically. | |
And for all I know, that might have been one of the reasons why she passed away at an early age. | |
But she wasn't on her own. | |
I traced people that had seen the thing move, you know, move over the house about an hour later. | |
How big was it? | |
Sorry? | |
What size was it? | |
That is about the size of a bubble car. | |
Right. | |
So the size of, I don't know, halfway between a motorbike and a car. | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
And it landed in the snow. | |
And the next thing she was aware of, and people, you know, I was there myself many years ago, skeptical, but she saw, as she says, three entities that came into the house and the conversation took place. | |
And what I'd like to know is why, out of all the hundreds, if not thousands of cases I've looked at, why prominently does three come into it? | |
We talk about triangular UFOs, which are three lights set at an angle to each other and a triangle. | |
We talk about the Bexley Heath case, where Margaret and other witnesses saw the base of the UFO, which was three globes set at equilateral distance from each other, forming a triangle. | |
And I could go on for hours about this sighting, always three. | |
I can guarantee if somebody talks about something coming into the house or seeing something in the sky, nearly it's always three. | |
I have no idea why. | |
This particular experiencer in Rowley Regis, as far as you know, and from your experience, had she been interested in all of this before this? | |
No, not at all. | |
Not at all. | |
That's so common, isn't it? | |
The number of people are saying I wasn't involved in this at all. | |
It is. | |
It is. | |
Most people are certainly sceptical until it happens to them. | |
And of course, we also mentioned that the lady from Herefordshire, Doris, that I'm going up to see in a couple of weeks' time, she spoke to me in 1999. | |
And in the conversation I had with her last week, I was saying, do you remember it? | |
And she said, it was awful, she said, that was with my daughter at the time, 31st of December 1999, and this ball of light followed the vehicle. | |
And of course, out in the Worcestershire, Warwickshire areas, I have a lot of reports involving motorists that are followed by these things. | |
Well, isn't that funny? | |
Because very recently on my radio show, and there's no reason why you should have heard this, but I did listen to stories. | |
And one of my listeners told me a story that she hadn't told more generally. | |
She was telling me on the radio about something that she couldn't explain. | |
She wasn't into any of this, and she was in the car with her daughter, and a ball of light paced the car, literally was parallel with the car, and then it went for a while with them along the road. | |
This was in Kent, and then it just shot away into the sky. | |
So this happens by the sounds of it. | |
I wonder what it is. | |
I mean, if you were to say me, if you were to say to me, Howard, I'll give you a pint of beer for every case you've got that or report. | |
I'd be expecting gallons. | |
I have so many sides. | |
I found those particularly interesting along the Worcestershire, Herefordshire area. | |
So many. | |
And I spoke to a lady recently who was on her way home with a daughter. | |
And she thought, she saw what looked like huge flowers huddled together at the sides of a field, luminous. | |
And as she went past, they were waving and moving about, and she was terrified. | |
And nothing like that happened before. | |
And I spoke to her last week, and this is going back years, and it put her on a completely different course through life. | |
It changed her life completely. | |
And so many others, you know, this is common to. | |
Well, I find that experiences like the one with the orb or the glowing ball, whatever it is, they seem to be the kind of things that change people who never even thought about this. | |
They weren't even skeptics. | |
They just didn't have any of this on their radar. | |
But these experiences tend to change people into, I won't say starry-eyed believers, but they're more inclined to believe now. | |
It's just like I had a ghost experience, and I was always skeptical about ghost stories. | |
I always thought there was probably another explanation. | |
That was until I saw one myself. | |
And that changed my mind about ghosts. | |
I now believe that they do exist, and I believe it because I saw a man who disappeared in front of me. | |
And there's nothing like having the experience yourself. | |
Well, I remember the, I think her name was Leris D. She's passed away, but she and a friend were on the way up Silbury Hill, pouring rain and going past, sorry, past Silbury Hill, was pouring with rain. | |
And she said, oh my God, look at that. | |
It looks like a Bronze Age figure crossing the road. | |
And they applied the brakes because it had been raining, skidded and hit it. | |
Now, this doesn't make sense. | |
How can you actually hit an apparition or how can you hit something? | |
And for years I pondered on, if you like, look at it on the other side of the coin. | |
Was that figure in some way from perhaps from another part of history, from the past? | |
And what would he have seen? | |
So many people have even come across where the vehicles have been damaged by hitting apparitions or ghosts or figures. | |
And it just doesn't make sense to me. | |
Isn't that astonishing because we tend to think of them as wispy, willowy things? | |
But all I know is that what I saw for the two seconds, three seconds, four seconds that I saw him and he looked at me, he was as real as you are. | |
Where did that happen? | |
My listener's going to kill me for going through this story again. | |
I'll just apologize. | |
But it was actually in the... | |
And I did his late-night show for over a couple of years, spells of two or three weeks at a time. | |
And I was there, and the show runs from 10 until 2, 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. | |
Is it 12 until 1, I think, is music. | |
Then you're back doing talk at 1 o'clock, till 2. | |
And I took a break during a record, during the music segment, went up to the loo, and it's a spiral staircase around the tower. | |
Came down, and there are only two people in the building, my producer and me, and my producer's in the studio. | |
So outside, now the tower, a lot of people will know this famous Liverpool landmark. | |
It's got glass all the way around it, and if you walk around the tower, you can either look out to the Pennines, and you could see as far as Yorkshire, or you can look right across North Wales and you can see as far as Anglesey. | |
You can see for miles and miles there. | |
So it's always fine. | |
And my attention was always drawn by the lights of the horizon and all the rest of it. | |
But on this particular night, I'm coming down from the loo, from the toilet, and I'm just about to walk into the studio, and I look, and standing about four feet away from me is a guy dressed as an old watchman or workman, wearing a long coat, shiny boots, and a cap. | |
He looks at me. | |
He's not very tall. | |
He looks at me and then he just disappears. | |
And I didn't have time to be scared. | |
I was just, oh, there's somebody else in the building. | |
And I went into the studio and I said to Jonathan, the producer, who will verify this, I've just seen, he said, before I could get any words out, he said, you've seen him, haven't you? | |
So everybody in the building, a lot of people in the building have been seeing that. | |
So that was my experience. | |
Sorry. | |
I'm sorry for my listener. | |
Promise not to tell that story again. | |
No, no, I hadn't heard that one. | |
That certainly is interesting because I tend to think not so much of what we see, but what does that see or they see? | |
And what are the parts? | |
Somebody once said to me that our every movements are recorded. | |
You know, you get off a chair, but the energy that was you is still there for some considerable time. | |
You move about and sometimes time never actually disappears at all. | |
I think that's probably true. | |
And I think if an occurrence is impactful, if it's a murder or something joyous or something deeply traumatic, then it's going to make a bigger impact on the scale. | |
If it's just you, you know, I don't know, eating a sandwich, then it's probably not going to make any impact. | |
But if it's something big, and I think in the case of this particular man in the tower, I think the story that most people have worked out is that he was probably a watchman in that tall building. | |
Maybe at the time it was constructed. | |
And a few people died, I think, in the construction of the St. John's Tower in Liverpool. | |
So we suspect that he probably went back to the 60s or 70s, and he'd been a watchman there, and he was keeping an eye on the building very benignly. | |
Now, listen, we must get to the latest research. | |
Yes, that's the problem, you see. | |
Once we start talking, we do not, we said this. | |
I've got so much stuff in front of me. | |
I talk about a prime minister's question. | |
This is not good. | |
Let me tell you why this is good. | |
This is good because, you know, some people don't have enough material. | |
that's not your problem. | |
We're going to talk here about something that most people, I don't think, who look into ufology and UFOs and all the rest of it have probably never considered. | |
And that is the impact that the encounter or the experience has upon them, the physical impact. | |
You talk about marks on them, maybe marks on the environs or surroundings of where this thing happened. | |
And I think this is a great vein that you are going to mine here with the, it's not one, it's three books, isn't it? | |
To do with exposure. | |
What happens to people when they are exposed to UFOs or phenomena like that? | |
So I'll let you talk now. | |
Right. | |
Yeah. | |
Well, yeah, the problem is, well, not so much the problem, but I suppose getting close to people, I'm not talking about, well, I'm talking about people that allegedly have been abducted. | |
I've often said, and I've probably said to you before, I can't prove that abductions take place. | |
And I don't even know if I can believe that it's aliens that are doing it. | |
I don't know. | |
But what I do know is that over the years, I've spoken to so many people about experiences and so many people, I mean, you might say that it's all in the mind, but if it's all in the mind, well, why do people have injuries and people have medical problems that when they're brought to the attention of doctors and surgeons, the response is to ask them if they've had surgery? | |
Well, a lot of them haven't had surgery at all. | |
And as I say, over the years, I've come across so many people that have had problems, have had marks, they've had scars. | |
The front cover of the three books that I'm doing, and I hope that they sell well, because I'm not about making money. | |
I'm about putting, and it's not about me. | |
The books aren't about me. | |
I have had some experience, but they're about people. | |
And you've said yourself about what your dad saw, what you've seen. | |
And it's about recording that. | |
So people should know that these bloody things can be dangerous. | |
Okay. | |
You know, I have so many reports of UFOs doing what people refer to as gymnastics across the sky or aerial maneuvers. | |
But why? | |
What's all that about? | |
And sometimes people can see structured craft and, you know, people can be injured and some frightening things can happen to them. | |
And I thought, let's get these books done. | |
And it's taken me, what, it's taken me about four weeks to nearly finish the first one. | |
And I've got all the information, the other two. | |
Four weeks is quick. | |
Well, yeah, but 25 years of collecting the stuff. | |
You must have it meticulously catalogued. | |
I don't think I'm too scatty to do that. | |
That's your police background. | |
My listener is going to want a couple of examples, though. | |
With regard to the purpose of exposure. | |
So many. | |
Well, we just explained about Mr. Tilt. | |
I think just so many. | |
This is a problem. | |
at the end of the day, you, you've got a cover, you, you've got a, You've got that, saw that, yeah? | |
You've got that, yeah. | |
And that addresses the issue on the front. | |
The object that the alien, and I didn't like the cover of this book. | |
I've got to admit, I didn't like it at first because it shows an alien being. | |
And there are a thousand books like that, but I understand why you did it. | |
Well, yes, but the object that he's showing is unique, or she's showing is unique, because that is something that was recovered from a lady called Elaine, who's a personal friend of mine. | |
I've known her since the late 1990s. | |
She used to live in Southall, London. | |
She's had a history of strange things happening to her. | |
And one, I can't remember the actual date, but she felt some pain in her nose. | |
And this apparent small piece of metal came out of her nose. | |
And she put it in a tissue, sent it to me. | |
And this is where it's going to get really spooky. | |
I hung on to that for 24 years till last year. | |
And it was examined by Professor Lorimer at Manchester University. | |
He said it was hydrocarbon in origin and the strangest thing he'd ever seen, like a knitting needle curved at one end and pointed at the other. | |
Now, that's fascinating. | |
Now, that was kept in a small, like a sample bottle of liquid. | |
And this is, I can't believe I'm even telling you this, but it was kept at the other house in Bromsgrove, where I lived before I moved here. | |
And it was on a shelf in front of me. | |
I went to move it off the shelf and it disappeared. | |
It disappeared. | |
I stripped the bedroom. | |
The bottle disappeared. | |
The small file, yeah, disappeared completely. | |
And I have never seen that before in my life. | |
Well, sometimes you can't come to terms with these things, but no idea. | |
But it happened. | |
So do you believe that that might have been an alien implant? | |
Well, how can I? | |
I don't know, but it was something so unusual. | |
And the lady that ejected it, she has a history. | |
And it's a history, a background history involving not only UFOs, but seeing strange figures that matches more or less so many other files, reports, cases, experiences that I have on record here. | |
And so something's happening, something... | |
You agree? | |
I do. | |
Yeah, obviously. | |
You know, if you want to go back as far as the pyramids, then they might have gone back that far. | |
But what is, but we often wonder what their agenda is. | |
I personally think that their agenda is us. | |
We are here. | |
Some sort of interaction takes place. | |
Well, we know interaction takes place between UFOs and people, generally speaking, because even somebody just seen a UFO, a triangular object or a cigar-shaped object with somebody inside, you know, that can change their lives. | |
But sometimes people can have some horrible things happen to them. | |
An ex-copper I spoke to, he was living in the Leicestershire area and he was out fishing. | |
I might have mentioned this one before, out fishing maggots on the floor. | |
And this thing appeared over the nearby Stanwick Lakes, appeared over Stanwick Lakes. | |
And the maggots pupated, which they shouldn't have done for 24 hours. | |
He wondered what the hell this saucer-shaped object was. | |
And then suddenly it was gone. | |
And he went back home. | |
He told his wife. | |
His wife didn't believe in. | |
He contacted the MOD. | |
He was pestered beyond doubt by the police. | |
Now, how can that be? | |
He was a police officer, but he was pulled up by the police many times and his vehicle was searched. | |
They wouldn't tell him why. | |
Anyway, he returned. | |
So you think somebody somewhere started taking an interest in him because what he went through? | |
That's right. | |
Now, he had an MRI. | |
He had things with him. | |
He had all sorts of problems and they couldn't understand because he'd never had surgery before. | |
But in a way, it gets worse because he then, as I say, retired from the police, but he wanted sight of his records from the hospital. | |
And they told him they'd lost them. | |
He went to his doctor and he asked the doctor if he could have his records. | |
And they said, we can't let you have the records. | |
I'm sorry. | |
We can't let you have them. | |
We can't let you have. | |
Now, the next thing he knew was that again, three or four years later, the lady receptionist at the surgery was retiring. | |
And he happened to speak to her in the street. | |
He said, oh, you know, what the bloody happened to my files? | |
And she said, well, I'm not supposed to tell you, but they were removed by two guys that came into the surgery. | |
And that's all I can tell you. | |
So something's going on, you know. | |
That happened here. | |
I'm sorry, I don't mean to keep interrupting and sorry to my listener. | |
But that happened here in the UK. | |
This person, a police officer, had an experience like that and his medical records were disappeared. | |
Yes. | |
And what became of him? | |
Well, he moved to the coast. | |
I haven't spoken to him for a couple of years, but like so many people, he's, you know, the guy is so genuine. | |
And why would you make this up? | |
And the other thing is he was pestered by police officers and other people. | |
And as he said, he phoned up the MOD and said, look, I did not ask for publicity. | |
The only people I reported of it was to you. | |
So would you please cut it out? | |
And then it all stopped. | |
But again, it's a familiar story to me. | |
I probably have 40 or 50 cases like that. | |
So touch wood. | |
So far, I've not had any problems. | |
So you have other cases of people who have had experiences like that. | |
Yeah. | |
And they have then found themselves the subject of the attention of the authorities. | |
They have, yeah, yeah. | |
In this country, in the UK. | |
Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
That's going to shock some people. | |
Well, it shocked me. | |
How do you think? | |
I mean, I'm an ex-police officer, but there are other things that I can't tell you on air, which not only mystify me, but shock me in respect of other matters involving similar sightings like that. | |
And certainly there are some things I couldn't mention on air. | |
So yeah, these things happen. | |
Do we have men in black like they do in the States? | |
Well, we have enough sightings of the men in black. | |
I mean, again, I appreciate times of premium, but I just happened to look at one of the books and an ex-RF serviceman who was a retired police officer, Ken Saunders. | |
I interviewed him some years ago. | |
I'd forgotten that he talked about a UFO. | |
He was living in Bristol, off-duty. | |
Son came in, quick, dad, come outside, UFO. | |
He ran out and saw this great big orange ball over the golf course. | |
And it was pulsating orange light. | |
And anyway, he went to work. | |
He didn't say anything to the other officers of what he'd seen. | |
And the next day, he was driving home from port, he said, close to the outskirts of Long Ashton near a university research establishment. | |
And he was shocked to see outside the entrance to this building a figure in a spacesuit. | |
Well, I suppose you think, yeah, maybe it's a joke, but he was motionless and stood watching me, seven to eight feet tall and had a black visor with a helmet. | |
He looked like a robot. | |
I didn't stop to investigate further, but went home. | |
And then he talks about he found out that the previous day on he was watching TV, point west nationwide, I heard of a sighting by a couple who were driving near Bath when they saw what looked like a spaceman walking towards them. | |
And he says the description is identical to what he saw. | |
What is eight feet tall? | |
You know, most human beings, most of us, you know, I'm six foot two. | |
I don't know how tall you are, but you know, the Very tall people, some very tall people reach seven feet, but not eight foot hard. | |
No, no, no. | |
So that's the fascinating thing about this subject is that there are so many, well, there's so many incredible sites in this brain. | |
And all I can say is that once I believed that UFOs exist, I certainly couldn't entertain even the remotest possibility that there were occupants inside these things. | |
I'm still not sure if they are, but people see them. | |
Bridge North, another case where the lady saw something landed and some figures near them, always three figures. | |
So much stuff, and it should be recorded because it is part of our history. | |
Yeah. | |
But in terms of the three new books, all to do with exposure and the effects of people having had these experiences, you talked about the police officer who then and other people who then find themselves to be the subject of police interest and other cases where people have been physically affected. | |
Maybe Elaine, as you talked about her in Southall, who might have had something that some people might say is an alien implant in her. | |
Any cases of people being sort of affected by what we might think of as radiation or magnetic interference, something like that? | |
Well, the just trying, I do have, sorry, there's so many, but the not, well, Gene Hingler had a problem, 79 Raleigh Regis. | |
Jessie Rostenberg had a problem. | |
She went to see the doctor. | |
And the doctor thought she'd been exposed to radiation because her blood count. | |
There was a problem with the white blood vessels or whatever. | |
So there's something very wrong there. | |
It took her months to get her. | |
But that seems part and parcel of getting close to these things. | |
But having said that, I was talking to a gentleman the other day. | |
I think, I don't know if you know him, Colin Saunders, Fossway, Leicestershire, 1999, Triangular UFO. | |
He was out with his family in the car, Fossway, Roman Row. | |
There's an association there, but he saw something and he built a model of what he saw. | |
And he's certainly been very interested in the subject for many years. | |
But he said to me, well, look, not every member of the family was affected. | |
And that is quite right. | |
Not everybody that sees a UFO at close range will have strange things happen to them. | |
But I tell you what, most people do. | |
So I don't know. | |
I remember that case, though, and I thought it was astonishing that. | |
And sometimes you get these reports where people experience phenomena, but maybe somebody standing next to them or somebody who's in the same car does not experience that. | |
I always find that deeply weird. | |
Okay, those are the three new books that are coming out, and we'll remind people about those at the end of this. | |
We'll move on to some. | |
Sorry. | |
Sorry, June. | |
I was just going to say, if anybody has any matters they wish to bring to my attention, please. | |
You know, I'll be happy to talk to them. | |
I'm not an expert, but somebody that's passionately interested in putting the truth out there. | |
And, you know, it's about time, I suppose, we made a stand. | |
I can't give any answers, but it's important to record it. | |
And, you know, so many times I've spoken to people and they've said, arguments say, ex-police officer from Preston, she had a fantastic sighting outside the police headquarters years ago. | |
She was only too pleased to find out she was not on her own. | |
And when you say fantastic sighting. | |
Yeah, some reptilian, like a reptilian walking past the main gates of the police headquarters. | |
She was a police officer with them for 30 years and very reluctant to talk about it, but did talk about it as long as her name wasn't used. | |
And a very genuine lady. | |
And she was so pleased that she was not on her own because a lot of people think that singular things like this, they don't happen to us. | |
But of course, you know yourself, a lot of people have these sightings and not only UFO sightings, but manifestations, apparitions. | |
You've told us about one there, which is really interesting. | |
Because we can't find an answer, can we? | |
Well, this is the thing. | |
And these things, I think what we're learning are more commonplace, if you can use that word. | |
And they don't all happen in Tucson, Arizona or exotic locations. | |
As we've said, they happen in places like Preston or Rowley Regis, you know, ordinary places in countries like the UK. | |
So there is something here that is worthy of documentation, which you are doing, and further investigation. | |
Now, we're going to end this. | |
You've sent me a whole list, and we're going to try and get through them as quickly as we can of some of your favorite stories. | |
So I'll start with this. | |
And you want me to do my audiobook bit, don't you? | |
Yeah, we go. | |
Okay, here we go. | |
Case one then. | |
9th of September, 1952. | |
RAF pilots sight UFO over RAF Top Cliff in Yorkshire. | |
This is 19th of September. | |
Two RAF officers, three members of the ground crew, were standing near Coastal Command Shackleton Squadron at Topcliff, watching a meteor jet, which was one of our finest planes in the 50s, descending to land at the nearby Dishforth Air Base at about 10.30. | |
Have I done enough there? | |
Can you take that up from there or shall I go on? | |
Yeah, no, please go on. | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
In an interview later held with a reporter from the Sunday Dispatch, 21st of September 1952, two days later, Flight Lieutenant John W. Kilburn from Egremont in Cumbria had this to say. | |
It was something different from anything I've ever seen in 3,700 hours of flying in a variety of conditions. | |
As the meteor crossed from east to west, I noticed a white object in the sky. | |
It was silver, Circular in shape, 10,000 feet up, five miles astern of the aircraft. | |
It appeared to be traveling at a lower speed than the meteor, but was on the same course. | |
I said, What the hell is that? | |
And the chaps looked to where I was pointing. | |
Somebody shouted that it might be the engine cowling of a meteor falling out of the sky. | |
Then we thought it might have been a parachute. | |
But as we watched the disk, it maintained a slow forward speed for a few seconds before it began to descend. | |
While descending, it was swinging in a pendulum fashion from left to right. | |
As the meteor turned to start its landing run, the object appeared to be following, but after a few seconds, it stopped its descent and hung in the air, rotating as if on its own axis. | |
That's a heck of a story from 1952. | |
It is. | |
Now, I am convinced that what they saw followed those pilots back because they'd been on Operation. | |
If somebody wants, if people want to look up Operation Main Brace, NATO exercise, they'll see that there was an awful lot of UFO sightings over those ships. | |
And I'm pretty sure that those aircraft have been involved in Main Brace and were returning home. | |
And as we said before, it's not only cars that get followed, is it? | |
It's aircraft. | |
So that came back with them. | |
And I think I mentioned there, I tracked down a lady that wasn't too far away from Dishworth. | |
And she was having a very, very well-to-do lady. | |
She was having a picnic there. | |
And she saw this thing like a lemon squeezer in the sky and made a note of it and contacted the officer in charge at Dishworth. | |
And she said, oh, I told him what she'd seen. | |
And he said, oh, that's very interesting. | |
I'm actually writing a book on all of this sort of stuff. | |
Well, of course, that book was never published. | |
But perhaps if you'd mentioned to the listeners about Mr. Swinney, because Mr. Swinney, I met him personally and what a smashing bloke he was because he's passed. | |
Okay, well, I'm just going to flip forward a couple of pages. | |
I know people hate it when people on the radio turn pages of documents. | |
Listeners hate it. | |
Sorry about this. | |
My business. | |
So I'm trying to do this really quietly, which is not easy where I record these things. | |
Okay, so this is a great case. | |
This is 21st of October 52. | |
Pilots saw three UFOs over Gloucestershire, and this man, and we'll hear a lot of him, Air Commodore Michael Swinney, OBE, so he's been awarded by the Queen, spoke to us during a visit to his home address in 1998 about what he witnessed 50 years ago, 21st of October 52, while he was an RAF flight lieutenant stationed at the Central Flying School, Little Rissington in Gloucestershire. | |
And I'm just going to read a little bit of a quote from him that you got. | |
He says, as we broke cloud cover, I saw what at first I thought to be three parachutes in front of the path of the aircraft. | |
Instinctively, I grabbed hold of the control stick and pushed it to one side in an evasive movement, at the same time looking over my left shoulder and directing David Croft's attention to what I'd seen. | |
At this point, I realized the three objects, three objects, were not parachute flares, but two perfect circular objects with a third object being on edge, showing a fuzzy white. | |
I contacted Little Rissington Control Tower by radio, told the controller after some deliberation, he had three UFOs in front of the aircraft, asking him what action I should take, he replied they would contact the senior officer at the airbase for guidance. | |
A check made with Box radar station in Wiltshire confirmed the objects had been plotted on radar as three blips that then merged into a single echo. | |
What a story. | |
But then, of course, can you just the next bit is of interest because he ended up working, he tried to get access to his file, didn't he? | |
And the MOD told him that it was no longer accessible. | |
But when he actually was recruited, he went to work at the MOD, then he got his file. | |
Did he? | |
And what did the file say? | |
Sorry? | |
What did the file say? | |
Was it a straight report like we've just heard? | |
Yeah, that's right. | |
But they told him that they didn't know where it was. | |
They've got no record, blah, blah, blah, whatever. | |
But when he was working with the MOD, he managed to get his file back. | |
And this was 18 years after that event. | |
I'm just looking at it now. | |
It was 1974 when he saw it. | |
Saw the file. | |
Yeah. | |
Has you got time just to read that bit out? | |
Yeah, I will. | |
In 1974, during a posting to the MOD itself, Mr. Swinney, now an Air Commodore, asked for sight of his original UFO report from 52, was handed the document which contained his and David Croft's account without any fuss, after being told it had been previously filed in the Air Intelligence Branch's blue book. | |
After examining them, he placed the files into the out tray and thought no more about it until retirement in 2002, when he expressed an interest in having sight of the reports again. | |
He wrote to the RAF's Air Historical Branch, now based at Bentley Priory, he was advised that UFO reports submitted to Air Ministry, and I'm just turning the page, intelligence, could have been preserved for transfer to the PRO, the Public Records Office, or alternatively marked for destruction, which was suggested to have been the likely fate of the instance. | |
In other words, those important documents may have been thrown away. | |
Yeah. | |
But he wouldn't let it go, would he? | |
Because I'm reading here. | |
Mr. Swidney wrote to the Director General of GCHQ, that's our intelligence centre in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, to inquire if their department had retained a copy of the incident and was later told that while a search of the archives had failed to find the document, his request had been passed to the MOD. | |
They wrote to him explaining, quotes, it was generally the case that before 1967, all UFO files were destroyed after five years, but after 67, following an increase in public interest, UFO files are now routinely preserved. | |
Any files from the 50s and the early 60s are available for examination at the Public Records Office. | |
Michael Swinney, if it was generally the case that before 67, all UFO reports were destroyed after five years, how was it that I actually saw and read in 1974, 17 years later, the same file? | |
I can't answer that, and they seem to have tied themselves in knots, don't they? | |
That's right. | |
Well, you've just identified one particular case, if you like. | |
So, you know, it's common sense dictates that that scenario has been reenacted many times over. | |
And you met Air Commodore Michael Swinney lived to a ripe old age. | |
He was 90 when he died. | |
You met him, didn't you? | |
I did. | |
Before I left the house, he said, would you, can I offer you the hospitality of the house? | |
He was living in this mansion, and I foolishly thought he was going to offer me a room and coke or a glass of sherry, but he said no. | |
He said, I just wondered whether you wanted to use the toilet. | |
But listen, the account that you've given, and I'm holding the paper, I'm sorry for rustling the papers. | |
The account that you've given is a man who just wouldn't let this go. | |
And we have to say that he was debriefed by two people from the air ministry, as it was then. | |
And he told them that the objects, and remember these objects were tracked by radar, were moving at a speed of around 6,000 miles an hour. | |
Yeah. | |
That's a hell of a story. | |
He's not the only one, is he? | |
An old colleague, Flight Lieutenant Jimmy Salinin, he's no need to read from it. | |
I'll send you a copy. | |
He's passed away. | |
He was living in Yorkshire. | |
What a lovely guy. | |
And he, I think, 54 over Southend on Sea. | |
He saw these things. | |
He was flying a meteor jet fighter. | |
He thought they were contrails from three aircraft. | |
But then these three things came up to him and filled the cock into the aircraft outside. | |
And he said they were bun-shaped, they were golden, they were saucer-shaped objects. | |
And then they shot off away. | |
And then when he landed, he told the intelligence officer about what had happened. | |
And as a result of which the information was passed on to Prince Philip's secretary, and he was interviewed, not by the prince, but the, I think it was, I can't remember the guy's name offhand, but I think it was Henry Chinnery, I think. | |
But he interviewed him about what he'd seen. | |
And so we have a wealth of evidence and information, but of course, to a great degree, it is curtailed. | |
Well, yes, yes, because there are pieces missing from the story, sometimes documents that go missing. | |
You mentioned Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. | |
I mean, we know from what we read, and I've read a lot, you know, before there was an internet, I remember reading that the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, is interested in these things. | |
And that's astonishing, but he's always taken a keen interest in ufology, from what I've understood. | |
Well, he has, but of course, he's not the only one. | |
There are so many people that privately, they certainly believe in these things, because why not? | |
They've been privy to so much information over the years. | |
But publicly, of course, you can't, it certainly isn't career enhancing or helping you by saying historically, yeah, no, I agree. | |
That's right. | |
But I mean, yeah, I mean, he's always been interested. | |
And my ex-father-in-law, Petty Officer West, served on board HMS Kelly and told me some entertaining stories about Lord Louis Mountbatten, about when the ship went down. | |
And yeah, I mean, fascinating people. | |
I was once told, you know, John, when I was doing The Unexplained originally on Talk Sport Radio in 2004, it ran there from 2004 to 2006, and then I turned it into a podcast, and now it's a radio show again and the podcast. | |
But I remember being told one night, and I think it was when I had Timothy Goode, and you know Timothy Good, wonderful man, I had Timothy Goode on talking about his UFO research, and he said to me, Howard, I can't give you any names, he said, but somebody important will be listening to you tonight. | |
And I always wondered whether it was Prince Philip. | |
I'd love to know. | |
Yeah, it's funny you should say about that, about Tim Goode, because did you know that Tim Goode's mum had a sighting? | |
I remember we've talked about that. | |
I can't remember the details. | |
Well, she had a sighting on the 8th of July, 73. | |
I won't go through it all, but because a long story short, it was reported to the MOD cigar-shaped object, and they wrote it off. | |
The senior major logos officer was unable to comment on the flight path comments or the alleged disappearance into the distance at a phenomenal speed. | |
Basically, they're saying she'd witnessed the appearance of mock suns one or two hours previous to the sighting, which was absolute rubbish because there's so much corroborative evidence backing up what people have said. | |
But yeah, I've not heard from Tim Goode for a bit, but we did have a conversation about Prince Philip and you've reiterized his interest, and that's as much as I can control. | |
Timothy Goode is what I would describe as an English gentleman. | |
He's got a beautiful crystal clear accent. | |
And I think he doesn't he doesn't he repair violins or something like that? | |
He's a music man. | |
He's a great orchestras, isn't he? | |
Yes, he's a musician, and I think he, you know, he's heavily involved in classical music. | |
I know that. | |
But a wonderful man. | |
I think he's getting up in years now, though. | |
As we all are. | |
As we all are. | |
But Timothy Goode is on one of my podcasts. | |
I'm just saying to my listener, if my listener searches my podcast back catalogue, I think probably about 350 shows ago, you'll find the show with Timothy Goode, Lovely Man. | |
Just finally, you said to me, John, that sometimes these reports and cases come to a screeching halt Or a dead end when it's not possible to find out anymore. | |
And we talked about 1952 when a lot of things happened. | |
You mentioned in one of the documents that you sent to me the record of Parliament, Hansard, from 1959, seven years after events in 1952. | |
And the Secretary of State for Air, Mr. George Ward, was asked for a result, results of the inquiry into UFOs sighted by airmen during NATO's Operation Mainbrace, which you mentioned in September 52. | |
And the reply from Mr. Ward, the government man, was, no object was ever identified. | |
And that was the end of it. | |
Well, that's right. | |
I could say to a Prime Minister's question time on the 27th of May 66, Mr. Edwin Brooks asked the Secretary of State for Defence Merlin Rees, how many reports of unidentified flying objects were received by his department throughout Great Britain during 64 and 65. | |
How many have not been satisfactorily explained? | |
And Mr. Rees said 74 in 64, of which five cannot be explained. | |
And in 1965, 56, of which 14 cannot be explained, adding that in the cases have not been satisfactorily explained, the information given has generally been too imprecise or inadequate to support any further investigation. | |
Shades of Project Blue Book, all that stuff. | |
You know, at the end of the day, you cannot ignore the evidence. | |
But by the same token, I understand where these people are coming from because it's a double-edged sword, isn't it? | |
We've discussed enough information tonight, which would certainly perhaps be the cause of interest. | |
The one thing I would say to you at the very end of this, and we're once again about to break, we did it last time. | |
We're about to break my record for the longest podcast here. | |
And my web guy is going to kill me for this. | |
But anyway, just at the end of this, I would say that the sort of cases that I think would still make the newspapers, and I'm talking about Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Sun, those sorts of papers in the United Kingdom, the case of the police officer who found himself the subject of official attention after he had an experience and his medical records disappeared. | |
If there's more documentation on that, I think you should be getting that to a newspaper. | |
It doesn't matter when it happened. | |
Well, can I just say that so far, during, what, 2012, during the last eight years of all these books have been published, I've never had, the only thing I've ever had in the Nationals is the Betty Turpin, Betty Driver, Frida Driver. | |
Yes, I remember that. | |
Yeah, that's the only thing in the Daily Mirror. | |
Now, this person you're talking about, Betty Driver, Betty Turpin, character in a great British soap opera called Coronation Street. | |
And they had some sightings which they brought to my notice, and I got to know them. | |
And so, yeah, it's frustrating for me that it was the same with the Wiltshire book, the same with the Colonel Holt book. | |
There's so much new information in the Holt perspective. | |
And I contacted all the newspapers. | |
And I've got one or two friends on the Nationals. | |
And they've all turned around and said, sorry, John, it's too serious. | |
We'll have to be seeing what we can do about that then. | |
John Hanson, we're out of time. | |
The new books, the three of them, when are they going to be out as far as you know? | |
Well, these will certainly be out in the next couple of months. | |
Okay, and if people want to look at the body of your work and get to know the kind of stuff that you do and you've done, where can they go and check that out online? | |
Well, first of all, as I say, I live in Worcestershire, which is not far from Birmingham. | |
And as you've pointed out, not far from Evesham. | |
But anybody who lives locally, wants to come in and have a cup of tea and look through. | |
I've got thousands of files here, wants to look through, they're more than welcome. | |
Now, John, you need to be careful about making invitations like that because people are going to take you up on them. | |
If you're happy with that, that's all right then. | |
No, more than welcome because if one can only spread the word, you know, if people want to come and look through, they can, because what's the point of having all these files if nobody's going to look at them? | |
And you need to make a plan for, I mean, you know, none of us is going to live forever, but you need to make a plan. | |
Not ready for my demise just yet. | |
No, me neither. | |
That's the two of us. | |
I've left them all to you. | |
But you know, Stanton Friedman, his archives, I've spoken to the archivist in Canada who's cataloguing Stanton Friedman's archives, and they had van loads of the stuff. | |
So you've got to make a plan. | |
It's going to be a very long time from now, but one day, and it'll be a long way away from now for both of us. | |
That day will come. | |
Hey, listen, what's your website, John? | |
What's your website? | |
www.haunted H-A-U-N-T-E-D skies or www.hauntedskies.co.uk. | |
Hauntedskies.co.uk, John Hanson. | |
We've broken my record for the longest podcast, again, which is. | |
Please, if anybody has information and they need confirmation that they're not on their own, you know, let's do it. | |
And they can always contact me and I will forward whatever they send me to you. | |
But, you know, in the first instance, they can find you online and contact you that way. | |
John Hansen, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, not just because it's fascinating, but also because you're in Worcestershire, where I had some of the happiest years of my career, not only working on Radio Wyvern in Worcester and living in Malvern, but also being on BRMB radio for a short time and living in Bromsgrove. | |
Well, that's where we lived before in Oakland Grove. | |
We lived there for 12 months. | |
I wasn't there. | |
I was only there for three months and I loved Bromsgrove. | |
It was like when I'd have to be on the early morning shift, the morning drive, breakfast show shift on BRMB. | |
And it was 15 miles, I think, outside Birmingham city centre. | |
And I'd get up in the morning and I'd think, another lovely Worcestershire morning and I'd drive to BRMB. | |
And then in the afternoon, I'd have my afternoons in Bromsgrove or go down to Droitwich or somewhere like that. | |
Long story. | |
I'm not going to mention slug and lettuce. | |
Oh, yes. | |
That was, I think the slug and lettuce, you know, I think I lived, it's a long time ago, but it was one of those MB. | |
Yeah, it was an MB pub come eatery. | |
And I think that the house that I rented was opposite it. | |
But that's a long story for another time. | |
John Hansen, thank you. | |
Thank you very much for your time. | |
Thank you. | |
John Hansen, a man who really grafts and works at his craft, and you can see that it's the hallmark of every book that he puts out. | |
What a remarkable man who is one of life's hard workers, I think. | |
And also Dawn, of course, who assists John. | |
So John and Dawn, if you're listening to this, thank you very much for being part of my world here on The Unexplained. | |
We have more great guests coming up here in the pipeline on The Unexplained. | |
So until next we meet, thank you very much for your good thoughts and wishes lately. | |
It's very kind of you. | |
Please keep in touch. | |
And when you do, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show. | |
So, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
This has been The Unexplained Online. | |
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch. | |
Thank you very much. | |
Take care. |