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July 9, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:21
Edition 467 - Philip Mantle

UFO publisher Philip Mantle on his research - with Jason Gleaves - on some astonishing photos from Poland - And Nigel Watson - author of a new book on Alien Abduction

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is the Return of the Unexplained.
Well, seven or ten days ago we were having a heat wave in the UK.
Now it's cooler and wetter and we're looking for the sun to shine again, which I think it might next week.
We will see.
Sorry about the delay in getting a couple of shows out to you recently.
It was just caused by an issue at my webmaster's end.
But I think that is all corrected now and we should be completely up to date with the podcast.
So apologies for that.
But we are an independent outfit and sometimes things don't entirely go to plan.
But it was nice of you to notice and to get in touch.
Thank you very much for all of your emails recently.
If you want to get in touch with me, then you can go to my website, follow the link from there.
The website is theunexplained.tv and you can send me a message of any kind from there.
It's nice to hear from you.
And if you've donated to the online show recently, thank you very, very much.
It is very kind.
I'm going to do a couple of mentions and then we'll get to a couple of guests.
First of all, we'll hear a little bit from my radio show, but everything recorded here now through lockdown, with Philip Mantle, famous UFO book publisher, famous investigator.
He and Jason Gleaves have been researching a photograph or series of photographs that were taken in Poland in recent years.
Not exactly taken last week, but taken very recently.
And the photographs have got into the papers recently.
They've been rediscovered and analyzed.
And it appears that they are very credible looking.
If you go to the Daily Star and you search UFO Poland, you will probably see the photograph of the craft.
Classic kind of bell-shaped UFO, wedding cake style.
But you'll see the picture.
So I'll talk with Philip Mantle about that that made the papers in the last week or so.
And then somebody you may not have heard, he's been doing some radio in the United States recently, British author Nigel Watson, UFO investigator, with a different take on alien abduction.
He's written a new book, done some new research about this.
He is pretty skeptical about it, but you'll hear why in the conversation that's the second item on this podcast.
Nigel Watson in Plymouth, United Kingdom.
So two guests on this show.
Your thoughts and feedback, of course, always welcome, and it's nice that you're keeping in touch with me.
I'm recording this edition with some slightly different equipment just this once, just to check something out.
So your thoughts about the way everything sounds are always welcome.
And thank you for them.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot for his hard work on the show.
Thanks for Haley booking the guests, which is something that she does incredibly well.
So thank you very much to both of them.
A couple of mentions then before we get to Philip Mantle first.
Greg in the US emailed two days ago and says that he notices a lack of cultural diversity in my guests.
I thought that I did have a very diverse, smorgasbord of guests, Greg, but I hear what you say.
I promise it's not a policy.
And if you can suggest any guests from any cultural background, as long as they're interesting, I'm always happy to look at anybody and put anybody on this show.
If they've got something good to say, they get on here.
You know, in my life, I visited so many countries and I've been privileged to experience and meet people from many, many cultures.
I grew up in Liverpool, one of the most diverse places on earth.
And I have to say, the wisest person that I've met in my life is somebody that I met in Australia from the native culture there.
I spoke with him in Perth.
And this man, I think I've referenced him before on this show.
He didn't say a lot of words, but he didn't have to.
He just radiated wisdom.
And for that reason, that man I will never forget.
So Greg, thank you very much for your email.
Tim in Birmingham, thank you for your email.
Kind of about Ray Boyer, the pilot who I've spoken with a couple of times of an Oranyi Airlines flight to the Channel Islands in 2007 that encountered a huge UFO.
And the debate about that goes on, and you have an interesting synchronicity about that, Tim.
Thank you for that.
Rob Dixon, thank you for your kind comments.
And Peter, thank you very much for sending me a link to a Tinnitus video.
It's always interesting to see those things.
Okay, that's all the business done, I think.
Remember, the way to contact me is through the website theunexplained.tv.
Please also check out my Facebook page, the official Facebook page, The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
That is always valuable when you connect with that.
Okay, let's get to the first guest then, Philip Mankel, talking about the image of a UFO about 180 miles or so from Warsaw in Poland.
It's not just one photograph, Howard, it's a series of photographs.
And we almost, you know, must err on the side of caution because we know in this day and age that, you know, photographs can be easily replicated on your desktop computer, you know.
But we also had an investigator on site take scenic photographs of the area.
And of course, Jason, formerly in the RAF, now specializes in computer enhancement.
And I rely mainly on what he has to tell me.
And he couldn't find any evidence that these photographs had been manipulated.
Unfortunately, the newspaper article didn't run any of his computer-enhanced images.
So we couldn't find any wires or fishing line or anything like that.
And Jason also has the ability to overlay the pictures one on top of another.
There's five in total taken, Howard.
And he can show where this thing has moved in sequence as well, you know, from one frame to the next.
So we always, like I say, we err on the side of caution.
You know what the newspapers are like?
We always say we can never prove 100%, you know, that these photographs are the genuine article.
But, you know, liaising with our colleagues in Poland and with Jason's analysis, you know, we find that they are a series of photographs that have certainly attracted our interest.
When and in what circumstances, Philip, were these pictures taken?
Well, the gentleman in question, he doesn't want his name used, but he was just basically out rambling, you know, out for a walk.
And, you know, this object came into view and he snapped away.
I mean, we know his name.
I can't pronounce it anyway, I would, even if I had his permission to use it.
You know, it's a Polish name.
But he gave his full cooperation.
It is a digital camera, like, you know, just about every camera is today, you know, not the old 35 millimeter.
And, you know, he just wanted an answer for it himself.
He was as baffled as anyone.
So he was just literally out, you know, for a walk on his own.
You know, it's the kind of place that he knows fairly well.
And what is surprising, I mean, these are not brand new.
These photographs are from a couple of years back.
And we published them in one of our little magazines here in the UK.
And for some reason, you know, the press decided to show an interest in them as we speak.
And why that is, you probably know better than me, Howard.
I don't know how the minds of the media work.
Well, it's sometimes a little imponderable and impenetrable, but I'm glad it got out there now, even if it is a couple of years ago.
I mean, they are very convincing-looking pictures.
Just for my listeners' benefit, though, Philip, can you just describe this object?
Does it fit into the standard pattern of the various UFO shapes that we both know?
Yeah, I mean, UFOs come in all shapes and sizes.
You know, this is kind of a, you know, a triangular top-shaped thing.
This does look like the old children's spinning tops, roughly in shape, and it's layered, it's coloured.
You know, these pictures are full colour.
And of course, one of the benefits of releasing the photographs, Howard, is that then others can scrutinize them.
And, you know, maybe they will come up with some more answers and saying, did you notice this or have you seen that?
So, you know, that's one of the benefits of the internet and social media, of course.
You can share these things and, you know, all work together on it.
And that's why I'm glad that the Daily Miller have gone with them so other people can now, you know, see them, ask questions.
I'm literally, as we're speaking, uploading the photographs themselves to a UFO group in Italy because they want to study them.
So here they are.
These are the originals that I was sent, you know, the high-resolution images.
And no problem in cooperating with them at all.
They may come back and say, well, Philip, we've had them tested and we think it's this, that, or the other.
And that, of course, that begs the question, doesn't it, Philip?
Why would a UFO or the occupants of a UFO be interested in a small village, I understand this is, 180 miles away from the capital, Warsaw?
Well, that's a good question.
I mean, when I set up flying this press, Howard, the first book I ever published was UFOs over Poland.
And, you know, Poland has a history of extremely bizarre UFO sightings and encounters.
And, you know, this one is no different.
If we knew what UFOs were and what their intentions were, that would be amazing.
But, you know, maybe the gentleman in question was in the right place at the right time or alternatively in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Who knows?
But that's just, you know, we can only recount his story as he's related it to us and share it with our colleagues and members of the public as well, of course.
And as far as you know from the accounts of the person who took the picture, was it making any noise and how did it behave?
No, no noise at all.
It was slow moving and then, as usual, at the end of everything, it was gone in a flash, you know, which is not uncommon.
You know, we hear that time and time again from UFO sightings from around the world.
And it's one of the aspects that people say this, you know, states that it's not of earthly origin or it's certainly not man-made is the acceleration.
One minute it's there, the next minute it's gone.
You know, it's disappeared.
And this was the same.
The newspaper quotes you as saying that it's the best UFO picture that you've seen in 40 years.
Isn't that so?
I think I said originally it's the clearest I've seen in 40 years, but it doesn't necessarily make it the best.
No, like I said, you know, I've been reading my original notes on it.
And what I did go on to say is that if Jason's analysis is correct, then it could well be just that.
Because like I said, he was extremely careful in his computer analysis and we couldn't find anything wrong with it whatsoever.
Doesn't mean there isn't anything wrong, Howard.
It just means that on this occasion, we've not been able to spot it.
So like I said, by sharing it in public and with our colleagues around the world, maybe we'll find out some more details.
We'll have to wait and see.
Gee, I hope so, Philip.
Times are very, very interesting at the moment.
All sorts of things are coming to the fore right now.
You are massively busy, too.
If you want to, do you want to just plug what you're up to at the moment?
Well, as well as publishing other people's books at Flying This Press, I've written two new ones.
They'll be out later in the year.
The first one is called Introducing UFOs, a Young Person's Guide.
And this is looked upon as an introductory book for maybe a teenage audience.
You know, perhaps at high school wanting to find out more, but don't want to read too much.
You don't want to use great tome in front of you.
And then for some years now, I've been collating UFO landing accounts from the UK.
And that book on that is now finished.
It's simply called UFO Landings UK.
It's finished, it's completed.
And I've just undecided what would be the right publishing date.
And then to top it all, this year, don't mention it, but this year is the 25th anniversary of the infamous Alien Autopsy film.
So there'll be a lot to say.
I have my revised edition, Roswell Alien Autopsy out to coincide.
And I've even made a four-part documentary series, Howard, called Alien Autopsy: The Search for Answers.
And that's available on Amazon and Apple iTunes.
I thought Peter Davenport was the busiest man in ufology.
I think he's got a close competitor with you.
As we speak, I'm chatting away to you.
I'm sending photographs to Italy.
And I also have a film producer wanting information from it.
So I'll give you just a bit of what I'm doing.
And who says men can't do multitask, Howard?
How's that?
Well, I think you are moving proof they can.
Hey, listen, thank you.
Have a good Sunday, Philip.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Howard.
You take care.
Philip Mantle, and don't forget, of course, to look out for new publications from Flying Disc Press.
Very, very impressive they are.
Another new publication, Nigel Watson, has published a book about the whole phenomenon of alien abduction.
It's always very controversial.
Everybody has their take on it.
Nigel has his.
So let's get to him.
He's in Plymouth in the United Kingdom, and he has a completely different take, I think you'll find, somewhat skeptical about the phenomenon of alien abduction.
Nigel Watson, thank you for coming on my show.
Yeah, it's a pleasure.
So Nigel, tell me a little bit about yourself.
I know that you've done a few interviews in the United States recently, and you've had a little bit of publicity about the book that you've written to do with abductions.
But talk to me a little bit about your history up to now, because I think you've got a bit of a background in ufology.
Yeah, I started back in the early 70s.
I got interested in the moon landings and watched the landing in 1969.
And from there, I just collected anything I could about space exploration and astronomy.
And that veered into collecting information about UFOs.
In my local library, I found books about people who said they'd seen UFOs.
And it seemed quite logical that if we were sending space probes out to Mars and landing men on the moon, it seemed logical that any advanced alien civilization would be capable of coming to Earth and landing and meeting us.
But so my interest was aroused by that.
And then I helped set up a UFO group where I lived in Scumthorpe.
And from there, we had quite a lively group for quite a few years throughout the 70s.
And some of us used to go and interview UFO witnesses and came across quite a few interesting cases.
But it was quite frustrating that most sightings were of lights in the sky or orange globes or hard to track down really.
Some of the sightings, even if you run up local airports and tried to track down what it was, it was very difficult to pin down what some people had seen.
And in the end, it's just a light in the sky, so it could be, you know, anything really.
And that is the frustrating thing, isn't it, about UFO sightings?
And we see them in the papers all the time.
In fact, somebody sent me one a day or two ago from the Birmingham Mail that was about lights in the sky.
People seem to be reporting these all the time, and sometimes they can't be explained.
Sometimes they're easy to explain because they're Elon Musk satellites, but they're always a mystery.
Yeah, well, a few years ago, it was quite a fashion for people launching these orange lanterns, Chinese lanterns, and they triggered quite a lot of UFO sightings.
I saw some, I now live in Plymouth, and one night I did see a sort of group of orange lanterns flying past.
And we kind of keep in, these kept in formation and we don't make a sound.
So we do look quite otherworldly and spooky.
And it has been found that people have seen the moon and thought it was a sort of spaceship landing in their garden.
And I suppose when the moon is low on the horizon, it can look quite strange compared to when you normally see it higher in the sky.
But sometimes a lot of these things are because people see things when it's foggy conditions or just glimpse things.
So, you know, so it's not always easy to explain them unless you kind of look up astronomy charts or whatever.
And yeah, it particularly happens with people driving along and thinking a UFO's following them because if you see the moon alongside you, because roads are straight, you know, if you turn a few bends and things, the moon will look in a slightly different position, but it'll still be over to your left or something.
The light will be refracted a bit.
You know, of all of those cases that you investigated, that you looked into when you were starting to get into all of this, which were the ones, maybe you can give me one or maybe two if you like, that you couldn't explain as being somebody misidentifying lights or seeing something that was actually a plane?
Well, there was one particular case I investigated sort of in the late 70s.
It involved an 11-year-old schoolboy called Paul Bennett.
And he and his mates saw quite a few UFOs and things.
But on one occasion, we actually saw like a 12-foot tall robot scooping up soil.
And then it kind of disappeared from view.
And, you know, that was quite an intriguing case because Paul was quite a credible witness.
But and he kind of led his group of friends in the sort of like mini UFO group of his mates.
And I'm not sure how credible it was, but it's just quite fascinating that he kind of, you know, noted it in quite a lot of detail.
And he had some other UFO sightings in that area as well.
And he collected a few other people's sightings.
So that's quite a good one because it was a bit more different from lights in the sky.
And Nigel, you know, in the UK, in the US, wherever, more and more people seem to be, you know, because they've got cameras and they're alerted to these phenomena by the papers, they seem to be having sightings.
But do you think the amount of contacts in that way, if we can use the word contact, do you think they really are increasing?
Or is it just that we're more aware of them now and there are more outlets to get them out?
Yeah, there seems to be more footage from mobile camera, you know, cell phones and mobile cameras and things like that.
But they're usually pretty poor quality, you know, of people, you know, the camera's shaking, it's zooming in and out.
And just say you were filming the moon, if you move the camera about or put it out of focus, it can look like it's zipping around in the sky when it's really stationary.
So although nearly everyone's got a camera on them now, the actual quality of the images are really worse.
And it's quite interesting that in this century, things like abductions and close encounters where people say they've met an alien coming out of a landed UFO seem to have gone down really.
I think the golden era was sort of like the 80s and 90s.
I think one particular reason was Spielberg's close encounters of a third kind, which kind of introduced to a worldwide audience the idea of these spindly grey aliens.
And that for myself, it meant that I got quite a few reports from people who remembered seeing sort of really strange UFOs.
And like Paul Bennett's case came up because of the publicity surrounding the film.
And so I suppose the thing with the film, it meant that it gave publicity to the subject and it meant that people looked for UFO investigators to send their information to.
Whereas now I think people just post things on the internet and it can get kind of lost because there are so many outlets now.
Okay, I want to talk about the abduction research.
You led me nicely into it.
Why did you want to write a book and do research about this when there have been many books written already?
I think it's because I kind of looked on the internet and looked at the books and I always felt they were a bit either one-sided or confusing.
So I kind of wanted to get a focus on the subject and see how it evolved and its consequences today.
I think the problem with some of the investigators in the 1980s didn't seem to know much about the history of a subject.
So they kind of thought they were looking at a sort of unique subject.
Whereas if you actually look at them and do a bit of research, there were actually contact cases in 1896 and 1897 in the United States.
There was a massive, what we called phantom airship scare.
People throughout the country started reporting seeing lights in the sky and they thought it was a secret inventor trying out his new aircraft.
And it sort of started in California in late 1896.
Most were of lights in the sky again, but some people said they saw behind the light a large cigar shape or some people saw the flapping of wings or rudders or propellers.
And some witnesses even said they saw like men inside a carriage below the craft.
And then it was one or two people that said we actually met the occupants of his craft.
There's one particular case where a man said he was walking alone in the countryside when a sort of airship landed in front of him and out come figures like Adam and Eve figures who were sort of naked and beautiful and showed him round their craft and it had like spinning discs and things that, you know, don't seem credible in terms of anything that would fly.
But so that case and quite a lot of other cases sound very much like the cases we get today.
But it seems like a lot of these were like newspaper hoaxes or perhaps pranksters writing into the papers.
But it's quite fascinating that long before the UFO craze was in America of all places were sightings of things in the sky, people meeting occupants of these craft.
And also there was speculation at the time that there might be extraterrestrials and some thought there were like Japanese people in them for some reason.
And also there was one particular case where a farmer said he saw one of his heifer lassoed by an anchor from a flying craft and that it was taken up into the airship and then a few days later he found the dead mutilated body of a heifer.
So it was a link there to cattle mutilation long before it became a thing in the USA in the 1970s.
So there's quite a lot of early Sightings like that that come long before the UFO subject.
Okay, so these days we have a name for them, we know what to call them, but you think that maybe the phenomenon has been around for a lot longer than we think.
Yeah, because during the Second World War, people called them foo fighters and Allied pilots often saw these balls of light following them, but they were never a danger to the aircraft.
At the time, they thought there might have been German weapons, but although they flitted about and were puzzling, they never posed any danger.
So in the end, they realised there weren't any type of weapon.
And of course, after the war, there weren't such weapons employed by the Germans.
And then shortly after the war in sort of Sweden, there were sort of hundreds of sightings of ghost rockets where again, most of these couldn't be explained.
Possibly some were Russian craft being tested after the war, you know, like OV-1s being tested.
But there were so many sightings of this, you know, that I couldn't explain them.
But it's with Kenneth Arnold in 1947 and the term flying saucers came up.
We had a kind of umbrella term for anything seen in the sky, you know, could be regarded as a flying saucer.
And these days, of course, we talk a lot about UAPs, which is a term that is borrowed from the military.
In your book, you quote David Jacobs, famous researcher on these matters, saying that statistically there could be anything up to 200 million people worldwide who may have been abducted.
That's an astonishing statistic.
Yeah.
Some people have disputed these figures because they did a survey of people, but I think there are so many things that you could tick the box to that nearly anyone in the population would be included as being an abductee.
For instance, they asked questions like, have you ever seen a ghost or a poterge or had strange dreams?
And I think most of us, even sceptics, have perhaps had a glimpse of something weird happening, seen something strange in the sky.
And I think they kind of made it too open a question, really.
I think they did a stricter survey a few years later, but even that meant that, say, a million people might have been abducted.
But I think that figure must be far lower.
I think another factor that comes along, which David Jacobs and people like Bud Hopkins, is that they hypnotically regressed people.
And hypnotic regression isn't a perfect science for recalling information.
And given the context of looking for information about UFOs, I think people did come up with information that the researchers were looking for.
And I think people who have actually not reported or seen a UFO or had no interest in the subject have been hypnotically regressed and had a recollection of being taken on board a UFO and examined and given stories very similar to so-called real abductees.
So I think that's a problem with that subject.
You'd think that if somebody reported being abducted by aliens on board a UFO and being medically examined, you'd think, you know, they're either telling the truth or not, you know, but it's, I think it's the same with anything with the paranormal and UFOs.
As over the grey area, really, it's down to, you know, are they seeing extraterrestrials?
Are they hoaxes?
Or is it, you know, just something psychological?
And that's always going to be the problem that we have when we investigate these things.
You know, a lot of people think they've had experiences, but maybe when you look at it closely, they haven't.
You talk, first of all, in the book, because it is a very good place to start.
It is the most famous case of modern times, the case of Betty and Barney Hill.
Is there anything that you can add to this case?
Because you say that it's been discussed an awful lot, which it has.
We all know they were shown a star map, they said, that apparently showed stars that we hadn't yet discovered.
Various other things happened to them.
They were experimented upon.
And we're all aware of the story, however it's presented.
What's your take on that case?
I use it as a launching point, really, for looking back at the history of a subject and also how it has had repercussions on later abductions.
I think that possibly when we saw a UFO first when we were driving home at night, I think it was probably stars, planets that were probably saw, because we were rushing home because of what was going to be a hurricane.
And it was fairly stressful the weekend they had.
And then to see a light sort of seemingly following their car, you know, made them even more stressed.
And then Barney Hill looked through binoculars at the craft and he saw like little alien beings in the craft itself and he saw a sort of Nazi German leader type look down on him and that really scared him and he drove off.
And then when they came home a few hours later, they realized they'd missed two hours of time.
But it wasn't until very quite a few years later that they actually were hypnotically redressed to actually try to find out what had happened in those two hours.
And in the meantime, Betty had had nightmares about being Abducted by aliens and probed.
So one explanation is perhaps her dreams helped foster the idea of that's what happened in those missing two hours.
You know, some people said, you know, perhaps it just got lost and also stopped several times.
So in a way, they could account for those two hours and it wasn't too exceptional.
So you've got people, you know, explaining a case like that and other people saying it seems like they were genuinely abducted.
Well, look, the interesting thing about it is that two of them had the same recollection.
It's one thing if one person has a recollection, but if two do, then something must be happening, mustn't it?
I think the problem with her case, and like I've had quite a few abduction cases involving two people, is that when they get on board the UFO, they're separated by the aliens, so then they have separate experiences of what happened on board.
And also, it's possible that Betty's dreams and ideas about UFOs kind of contaminated Barney Hill's recollection under hypnosis.
But I think the thing is, though, I think we were genuinely had some sort of strange experience and under hypnosis, we were very stressed.
So I think we believed something had happened, but it's really hard to pin down any solid evidence.
Betty tried taking a book away from the aliens, but they took it back.
And then there's Betty's recollection of a star map on the wall of a spaceship.
But there again, it was recorded under hypnotic regression.
And it's just a series of stars and lines.
And, you know, there's so many stars in the heavens, it's very hard to, well, it's very easy to match up random collection of dots and lines with something out there because there are so many stars you could potentially use to prove that they align with what she saw.
So I don't think that's particularly good, solid evidence.
So are you, you know, a lot of people have been very impressed by this story over the years.
They think it is the granddaddy of all stories.
A new TV series in America is being made about it.
I don't know whether you read about that.
So you're doubtful about the story.
Yeah, I'm doubtful of it because of all these different reasons, really, hypnotic regression.
Even Dr. Simons, who hypnotically regressed them, was very skeptical about the case.
But even he was impressed by the fact that they kept to their story.
So I think they did genuinely believe that they were abducted.
The problem with us is having evidence for that.
And, you know, that is one of the best cases.
And we have to say that you quote this, and it's worth remembering, you quote that even Jacques Vallet was skeptical about the claims of the star map.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, his take on it was that any self-respecting spaceship would wouldn't need that.
It's like now we don't need roadmaps in our cars.
We've got GPS.
So it would be a bit weird for a spaceship to have a map on the wall, really.
Unless they keep that there for visitors.
You also talk about the claims of telepathy, because that was the first time, I think, that we heard such clear reports of telepathy being used between beings and us.
Yeah, yeah, they communicated like that.
I think there have been quite a few other cases prior to the hills where people have seen lights in the sky and then had messages in their minds from alien beings.
But this was the first one where people actually were taken on board and had telepathic communication, which were again might turn it more into like it was more of a dream-like sequence because it was going on inside their head rather than being verbalized.
But it's quite strange because some abductions there is telepathy and in others there isn't.
And it's also interesting with a bet in Barney Hill case is that apparently they stopped the car because a UFO was blocking the road and we were kind of dragged on board.
Whereas in later cases people were beamed through windows or walls on board a space.
Tractor beams.
Yeah, tractor beam type things.
Whereas it was more old school with Betty and Barney Hill.
What about you talk about Bud Hopkins' research into the notational symbols, in other words, the calligraphy, the letters that were used.
What about those?
Yeah, that's quite a wide area, really, because from the 1950s, there was somebody called Georgia Domsky, a famous contactee, and he saw a UFO land in a Californian desert and met an alien called Orphon and went off on sort of a nutian.
And when he flew away, he left sort of boot prints, left hieroglyphics and a kind of wheel of life swastika image in the sand.
And so there has been quite a lot of association between UFO contacts and hieroglyphics or squiggly lines.
But they do tend to always look a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
And where again, it might be that that's the sort of thing we don't expect from alien texts, really.
But I think Bud Hopkins, in particular, made an issue of collecting such things, and so he used them as a marker for seeing if somebody was a sort of genuine abductee or not by how they adverse alien squiggles compared to other alien squiggles.
But what I don't like about Bud Hopkins' work in particular is that he did use hypnosis, and I think that's where you're kind of messing with people's minds, really.
And I think it should be more used less often, really, and not used for anyone who might have just seen a light in the sky.
With Betty and Barney Hill, it was used because Barney had been going through a stressful period, so they wanted to get to the bottom of his stress.
And it was used, you know, for genuine medical purposes.
Whereas I think if you're just hypnotically regressing anyone who sees a UFO, I think that's a bit of a liberty, really.
And I don't think it helps if you're messing with people's minds, really.
I mean, but of course, those things are always done with consent.
But you're saying that the results they bring out may not be valid.
Yeah.
Or I think we can actually make it worse for people because, you know, it just makes things more stressful.
And we might just bring up nightmares and things from the past and that's shaped in an alien format, you know, and that in a way I think, you know, people should be protected more and have people who are sort of more expert on psychology, really, rather than just, you know, trying to dig out information about UFOs.
So I think that, you know, that's a danger of that area, really.
There is one aspect of this case that I don't remember hearing about, but it's probably been well documented.
I just didn't hear about it.
Betty's missing earrings.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, her earrings went missing.
I think they were returned later.
And I think there's another incident of leaves being heaped on a kitchen table.
And it's almost like after their encounter, it seemed like things were coming in and out of her house, almost like the aliens were leaving little messages like that.
So effectively, just let's clarify that the earrings were returned, it was said.
Yeah, I think they were returned, yeah.
But they went missing for a period.
And I think one of the neighbours said that they saw what they thought were men in black hanging around her house as well.
So there was a lot of little things like that that seem to happen to people who are abducted.
They don't just have one major experience.
They tend to tend to get poltergeist experiences and seeing ghosts and different things.
It might be just that they're more sensitized to seeing anything odd in their environment that we'd normally ignore.
So, you know, that could be another factor in it.
And certainly Betty did go on to see literally hundreds of UFOs in a neighborhood, which most were probably satellites and things.
But I think she kind of got a bit over-enthusiastic about, you know, seeing UFOs and what you call sort of space friends, really.
So, yeah, I suppose in a way you have to look at each case separately rather than how Bud Hopkins or David Jacobs tend to lump them all together to kind of prove their own expectations.
David Jacobs in particular believes that the aliens are conducting some sort of hybrid breeding program.
So most of his cases seem to focus on that area.
And certainly with the Betty and Barney Hill case, Betty felt she was being had a sort of probe put in a navel that they said was a pregnancy test.
And so the aliens seem to have an over-interest in our biology.
Well, that's been borne out by other encounters.
Something you talk about in the book is something that I haven't heard much about, something called missing fetus syndrome.
Oh, yeah.
Mary Rodwell in Australia in particular has kind of studied this subject the most.
But there again, it came up in the 70s.
I think John Keeler wrote Operation Trojan Horse and the Mothman Prophecies.
He sort of came across a few people who had women who had pregnancies and then they were suddenly unpregnant.
And then with Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs' research, they found that this seemed to crop up a lot.
And some of the abductees were later taken on board and then shown a baby, implying that their missing fetus had been taken away by the alien and then born in outer space.
You know, there are quite a few medical conditions that can explain missing fetuses and you can even have phantom pregnancies.
And I even came across a man who said he had a phantom pregnancy as a result of meeting A couple of space women in a UFO.
Well, I mean, that's an extraordinary story if that is so.
You know, I presume he would have had himself medically checked out after that.
And if he didn't, then that is what you say, an extraordinary story.
Yeah, I think that's the thing.
A lot of these are anecdotes, and you can't really pin down evidence.
I think with the Betting Barney Hill case, ufologists at that time were kind of a bit dubious about it because they'd been tracking down sort of flying saucers and lights in the sky.
And so they just wanted to scientifically prove that strange objects were visiting us.
But they didn't really want to accept that there were any occupants inside these craft because that smacked of 1950s cheap science fiction films.
So we tried to keep the subject respectable.
But with a betting Barney Hill case, because they seemed so credible and the information about them was given in quite a lot of detail, in the end, even the civilian UFO investigators couldn't turn a blind eye to it.
But it's interesting, it was John Fuller, a journalist, that wrote a book about their experiences that put it onto the worldwide stage.
And then the kind of alien abduction genie was sort of let out of a bottle then.
Then in following years, there were far more abductions.
In recent, well, I say recent, more recent years than Betty and Barney Hill, we had the case of Calvin Parker and Pascagoula, which you reference in the book now.
I've interviewed Calvin.
I have to say that he sounds incredibly credible.
He was a man who for decades would not, did not talk about this.
And now, you know, as he's reaching a stage in his life, he is talking about this.
A lot of people are glad that he did.
New witnesses have been coming forward.
This case seems to be developing even in 2020.
What do you make of the Calvin Parker case?
Well, I think with Calvin Parker, it was an experience that seemed to shock him to the bone.
I think he seemed to have a nervous breakdown shortly afterwards.
And I think just within hours of the case, when we were interviewed by the police, he just climbed up really.
And I think it was almost like some sort of shock.
And like you say, he didn't really speak about it until recent years.
Whereas Hickson, who was with him, he was more outspoken about what we saw.
And he related how we'd seen these UFO come towards him and these mummies float towards them and then grab them and take them on board a flying saucer where they're examined.
Calvin has since said that I think he was medically examined on board this craft.
And it's also interesting that the day after his encounter, he felt like he'd been subjected to radiation or felt dirty and had to shower a lot.
And that's exactly how Betty Hill felt, that she felt that we'd been subjected to radiation.
And that's one reason why she reported her case, a fear that we'd been exposed to a sort of deadly dose of radiation.
Surely those common recollections then make those two cases more credible.
Yeah, they do sound more credible like that.
And also the fact that I think in both cases the witnesses were highly stressed and that you get the feeling, you know, something strange did happen to them.
It's also interesting the responses whereas Charles Hickson had spoke freely about it and he'd go on TV interviews and I think he wrote a book about it and I think he later said he'd had further communications with aliens and he felt that there was going to be a big revelation but that never came about.
But he was the eloquent one, a bit like Betty Hill, whereas Parker was more circumspect and more like Barney Hill.
But he seems to have kind of come out of that now and wants to talk about it.
But there again, it's another case that it's really hard to pin down, but even the police were quite convinced by them because they secretly tape recorded them when they put them in a room on their own.
And later they were taken to a local Air Force base where they were checked for radiation, but there were no signs of anything like that.
But it does show, I think, something quite shocking happened to them, but where again it's really hard to pin down.
So would the idea then behind your research be that there are many cases that are just misrecollections, maybe brought out by hypnosis or whatever.
And there are some cases where something has happened, but it may not be abduction by aliens.
And then there's a grey area, if you'll pardon the expression, which is maybe not very big, where perhaps it was abduction by aliens.
Yeah, I think this shows was a kind of contrast between sort of European ufology and ufology in the United States.
In the United States, it's like either they're extraterrestrials or we're not, you know, there's some people who solidly debunk every case going.
Whereas I think in Europe, we tend to have the attitude it might be more of a social and psychological phenomenon, and we kind of look at it from that point of view.
And I think, you know, particularly my research in a way, I've looked more at the impact of these experiences rather than trying to prove it.
Because I think if you try to prove spaceships and things, it's very difficult because there's no solid evidence.
Whereas at least if you look at it from a cultural and social or psychological aspect, you can see that whether it's literally true or not, it's had an impact on our society.
We all know about these cases and like the Hill case has a TV movie in 1975.
It was featured in the Blue Book TV series and it's going to have a forthcoming TV series about it.
So I think it shows, it sort of captured our imagination.
So I think that's something about these cases, you know.
I guess so, but it does always make me wonder when I hear reports of people being abducted, and it's gone on for years and years and years, you know, if the aliens are doing this and they're doing this clandestinely, what is the point of doing it for so long?
If they wanted to divine information about the human race and how it works, then I would have thought that they could pretty quickly get the information they needed.
So why are they still doing it, I think would be a question that I would ask.
Why are they playing a cat and mouse game with us?
Yeah, they always seem to act like B-movie science fiction movies as well, because several people have said we could get a lot of this data just by raiding medical laboratories, we could get samples of air.
We could hack into the internet and get a lot of information about us more than just sort of just sticking wires into us.
So a lot of our activities seem to be the stuff of science fiction rather than scientific inquiry.
And also, it's like they block people's memories about things, but then they're easily unblocked by hypnotic regression.
So you'd think if we were that good, they'd be able to totally blot out such things from human memories.
And also it's things like Rosswell.
If they're so great, how come their craft seem to keep crashing?
We've got certain we're quite inadequate for quite advanced spacefarers, I suppose.
Well, I suppose it suggests that they're not infallible.
But yeah, quite a lot of these things are quite quirky.
What struck me when I was reading the abduction books by Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs and John Mack, the aliens seem more like robots.
You don't really see them eating or breathing or having much interest.
Spacecraft seem like almost like military vehicles.
There's never much entertainment or things like that.
Well, then of course there's always been the suggestion that the ones who do the abducting, the ones who do the legwork, the dirty work, are maybe drones or they are some kind of hybrid creature and the actual brains behind the operation, perhaps that intelligence is somewhere else.
Yeah, there has been a theory that a lot of these aliens are like worker ants, like a hive mentality and something higher controlling them.
So I think it's quite fascinating all the sort of ideas you can have about what the aliens are about.
Because if you look on the internet, some people have listed 62 different types of alien species and things like that.
Because people have seen everything from hairy dwarfs to giant robots.
In Britain, when people have been abducted, the aliens tend to be more blonde, Nordic types.
Whereas in the United States, the grey areas, aliens have become the main thing.
Interestingly, Betty Hill described her aliens as more human-looking than any alien that people had seen afterwards.
So when she went to UFO conferences, often people would come up to her and say, oh, I saw grey aliens exactly like yours.
And then she'd either tick them off or think to herself, well, actually, my aliens look different from your aliens.
So, you know, perhaps a lot of this is due to social conditioning.
People have certain expectations about what an alien might look like.
And so, yeah, like now, we all know if we were to imagine an alien abducting us, we tend to think of a spindly grey alien of a sort, like in Spielberg's Close Encounters film.
But in other cultures, it might be interpreted more like a devil-like figure or something.
And perhaps people said perhaps through things like sleep paralysis, where you're in the state between being awake and going to sleep or Being asleep and waking, there's a period when the brain doesn't wake you up sufficiently.
So you're in a twilight zone between reality and dream.
So people see figures at the bottom of the bed.
And often, you know, nowadays, people have seen aliens at the bottom of the bed and perhaps had some sort of dream about being abducted.
And that, of course, you know, plays into the idea that some people say that they're put into a kind of trance-like state when they're abducted.
Well, maybe they're in that semi-sleep state.
So you are skeptical, it seems to me, about the whole phenomena and reports of alien abductions only because of the variation in the reports.
And I think we all note the lack of evidence.
Everybody says, well, if people have been abducted, and I appreciate the fact that Betty Hill tried to take something from the craft, you know, nobody's ever taken a photograph.
Nobody's ever brought anything back.
But of course, people have had marks on their bodies.
That's a different thing.
Yeah, I remember going to a lecture with Bud Hopkins, I think it was in Sheffield many years ago.
And he showed, it seems like hundreds of slides of people showing scoop marks and scratches on their body that they said were a result of being abducted.
There again, that's another area where sometimes you do find odd marks on your body.
Often you don't sort of inspect your body that often.
And you can easily find the odd scratch or bruise.
Scoop marks are quite interesting.
But there again, unless you could have a sort of video camera on somebody going through an alien abduction, if you could actually get pictures of somebody actually being floated through a wall or something, that would be a bit more solid.
But even when we are supplied with anything like that, it always seems to be vague and shadowy.
I think there have been a few claims of people taking pictures of inside a UFO when we've been abducted.
But the pictures are so rubbish, you know, that you can't really...
But they're not, I have seen some pictures, but they're not distinct at all.
And mostly we don't get pictures and we don't get artifacts.
So how would you sum up then the way from the book that you've written, the research that you've done, the way that you think about this phenomenon?
Is it a phenomenon that you dismiss, you're not going to look into again?
Or is it something that you think needs a bit more research?
I think it's something that fascinates me because there are so many angles to it.
And I think it's easy for people to dismiss it.
But I think, you know, like sleep paralysis has been used as one explanation, but I think that's a kind of people come up with an explanation and then kind of want to explain everything as that and dismiss the subject.
Whereas I think there's, you know, far more deeper avenues of exploration in terms of psychology and sociology even.
You know, the factors that cause people to have abductions can be quite complex.
You know, sometimes it's due to their own psychological turmoil or it's due to social factors where a lot of other people are reporting UFOs and things.
So the OUFO thing plays on people's minds.
But on the other hand, if you look at people like Betty Hill or Calvin Parker or something, but when you do speak to them, they are very convincing about what they experience.
So it's very hard to say, you know, it's rubbish, it's just in your imagination when these things have played on their minds for like, you know, decades.
And, you know, I think just dismissing the subject out of hand is avoiding the issue, really.
And, you know, it just fascinates me with different variations and things that might help us understand more about our own condition.
So it is a complex phenomenon, as you say, that ties into psychology and ties into paranormality and many, many other things.
If people want to read your book, who's it published by?
It's by McFarlands and it's available on their website and through normal online dealers and bookshops, Amazon and places like that.
And just give me the title again?
Captured by Aliens.
Captured by Aliens Question Mark.
We have to say that.
And have you got a website, Nigel?
No, but I've got a Facebook page and I've got one called UFO Investigations Manual on Facebook because that's the title of my previous book.
UFO Investigation.
We'll have to talk about that again.
So if people want to communicate with you about this conversation, they can do that through your Facebook page.
Yeah.
Okay.
Nigel Watson in Plymouth.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Nigel Watson in Plymouth and before him, Philip Mantle.
More great guests here on The Unexplained coming soon.
So until next, we meet.
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.
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