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Aug. 25, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:17:12
Edition 478 - Philip Mantle
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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 of this is still the unexplained.
Still hot as I record this, not quite as hot.
Still waiting for that great big thunderstorm that's going to clear the air.
We certainly need that.
But the whole UK affected more or less by the hot weather.
And let's hope that temperatures that hot, that's the last time we'll see them this year.
Okay, enough about the weather.
On this edition, an extended version of a radio conversation that I had with Philip Mantle, the UK's leading publisher of UFO books, UFO researcher of great acclaim himself.
This is a brand new version of his 1990s book we're going to talk about, Without Consent.
It's about close encounters of the very closest kind.
Those who were abducted or were nearly abducted or chased or had personal up-close encounters with something from somewhere.
Some very credible accounts, and Philip has put them in the book, increased the detail, gone back to a lot of the cases, included some new material.
There's a lot of documentation, photographs.
This has taken a lot of work.
So well worth hearing about.
Without consent, the book, Philip Mantle, coming very soon.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his continued hard work on the show.
Thank you to Haley for her continued hard work, booking the guests for me.
And thank you to you for being part of this.
If you want to email me, go to that website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the messaging link and you can send me an email from there.
Okay, let's get to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
This is an extended version of the radio conversation.
There's a lot more material on this one.
Philip Mantle returns to The Unexplained.
Philip, thank you very much for giving me your time again.
My pleasure, Howard, and looking forward to what we have coming up.
Now, in this last year or two, Philip, you have established yourself, really, and we've known each other for many years, but you've established yourself as maybe the world's leading, certainly one of the world's leading publishers of UFO books in this world.
Was that part of a plan?
No, no, not at all, Howard.
I mean, you know, whenever I try and plan something, it seems to go disastrously wrong.
So welcome to my life.
Yeah.
I mean, what happened was in 2015, I had previously down the years been an editor of two or three magazines.
So I had contacts through that and my research around the world.
And a Polish colleague of mine, and I apologize for trying to pronounce his name, but it's Peter Chielebius.
And he sent me a manuscript that he had written, not to be published.
I mean, Peter's spoken English is pretty good, you know, but he was trying to brush up on his written English.
So he wrote this manuscript, which was a UFO book about all things Polish, UFO-wise.
So I read it and, you know, I thought, well, that's good.
And I left it in my, you know, in my inbox for some time.
I got back to Peter and gave him some feedback, of course.
Then I have a colleague, ex-CID police detective, John Hansen.
John has published his own books under his banner of Haunted Skies for a number of years.
And John said, why don't you publish it?
I'll show you the ropes.
And it was always my intention to wait until I had officially retired.
So anyway, I took the plunge in 2015, open flying this press, and UFOs over Poland was the first book that I published.
And it's now available in a couple of languages elsewhere.
And it was a steep learning curve, Howard.
So there was no plan involved.
I literally jumped in with both feet, you know.
And then a couple of years further down the line, I'd done a few more books.
And I took the opportunity then.
I had the chance to take early retirement.
So I did.
And that gave me the chance to concentrate on my work, my research, and publishing at Flying Dispress.
And what did you just remind my listener what you retired from?
Well, I used to work for the Halifax Bank that was then owned, of course, by Lloyds.
Lloyds had taken over.
I worked most of my life in industry, Howard, and then in 1999, I had a near-fatal heart attack.
So it took me a few years to get over that.
But, you know, my days of working in heavy industry were over.
So I had to look for an alternative.
And it had to be some kind of desk job.
And I'm very grateful.
I went to a jobs fair and applied for a couple of places.
And the Halifax set me on.
I served them in a variety of capacities and worked for them for 16 years.
But we have to say that there is nothing, I think, further from banking than the study and investigation of UFOs and alien encounters.
No, I mean, you know, I did all kinds of stuff for the Halifax.
I answered the telephones.
I worked for a short while in their fraud department.
Yeah, I did some admin.
I worked in their training department.
I was one of the people that used to show new people around the building, for example.
My pitch to them was, look, you know, I came from industry and if I can adapt to this environment, then you certainly can.
I'm sure that puts them at ease.
But what was nice is I actually lectured about UFOs a couple of times internally at the Halifax.
I worked for them in Leeds at a huge contact center that did all kinds of things.
They used to have their own internal sort of newsletter.
I wrote a couple of articles for that.
And then we used to have at one point this huge projector that would project things onto big screens around the center.
And I even saw one of my new books appearing on there one day, you know, so everybody knew what I was involved in.
And, you know, that's just the way it is.
But it is interesting that you were in a completely different field.
But actually, having said that, if you worked in the fraud department, then that's a very good field to be in if you're subsequently going to be going out and interviewing people who are telling you that they've had alien encounters because you'll be able to tell whether they're telling the truth or not.
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but it was, you know, working in the bank can be extremely boring at times, I have to be honest.
But it depends on how you make the job yourself.
You know, if you want to sit there and be bored all day, then you can be.
But I certainly didn't.
And I worked with some wonderful people, and that's what makes the job.
But the one thing that sets you apart from other people who publish the odd book is that you've been able to make connections with some of the most famous and notable people in this field.
I'm thinking about people like Calvin Parker.
But if you look at the updated edition of the book we're going to discuss, which is called Without Consent, which is about British UFO and alien encounters, abduction encounters.
You know, you've got people on board like Calvin Parker.
You worked with him on his recollections, persuaded him to publish them and even update them.
And then Nick Pope has written the foreword to this new book.
Yeah, well, of course, my connections with Nick goes back to his days when he was working at the Ministry of Defense.
You know, I have letters in my filing cabinets from Nick telling me that, you know, UFOs are of no defense significance, just like his predecessors and those that worked after him.
So I knew Nick from the days at the MOD and, of course, when he left and became an author and a researcher himself.
So I've been involved in this subject for over 40 years, Howard.
So I've just got to know lots of people around the world by one way or another.
Like I said, I've edited three magazines, so that put me in touch with people.
And of course, through Flying Disc Press, yet more.
And that continues to grow.
And that's the beauty of modern technology as well, of course.
Oh, of course, if you remember, you mentioned magazines.
And in the 80s, I remember when I was starting to get interested in all these things, there were only magazines.
There were newsletters that people would produce of varying quality.
There was the odd magazine, but there was no internet.
People were not connected in the same way.
No, absolutely.
I mean, you know, if you wanted to find out information about this subject or any subject for that matter, you know, you had limited options.
One was your local library, you know, your local high street bookshop or W.H. Smith's, you know, and that was it, basically.
There were a few magazines, like you said, that you could subscribe to that were sort of homemade.
I mean, one of the biggest sellers on the UFO market was UFO magazine, which was published and edited by the late Graham Birdsell.
Now, I began my time in ufology with Graham Birdsell when he started the Yorkshire UFO Society back in 1980.
And we produced our own little newsletter called the UFOS Journal.
I still have copies of it now, Howard.
We used to print about 30 copies on a hand gestetner, so you crank this thing by hand.
We then upgraded to something really superior, which was an offset printing machine, about the size of a large washing machine.
And that was housed in Graham's brothers flat, Mark Burtzell, on the seventh floor.
And I remember when it arrived, I was hoping that the lips were working, you know.
So we then printed our own little magazine called Quest for Knowledge.
And that went on, of course, and ended up as a print publication on the high street called UFO Magazine.
And I think at its height, Graham was selling something like, you know, 40 or 50,000 copies a time.
And so from very, very small beginnings, you know, the magazine grew.
And it was a credit to Graham and the staff that worked with him.
And at the beginning, when you were taking in reports from the Yorkshire area, how would they come in?
Would people phone you up?
Would they find you?
Would they send you a letter and say, I think you need to know, I live near Filey and I've seen something strange?
Well, what we did, we were very proactive in those days, Howard.
We made ourselves visible.
And by that, I mean we would register our address and telephone number.
The phone number was Mark's flat because he lived on his own, you know.
And so we'd register it with, you know, your local police stations, local newspapers, radio stations, you name it.
There was even areas just in the 80s, for example, with a lot of sightings coming from in and around the market town of Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales.
So we would make ourselves very visible.
We would do lectures and contact the newspaper, but we'd also go into the local pubs.
And we used to have a little A4 thing that would ask if they were put on their notice boards and things like that.
And one of the things we used to do when people either phoned us or wrote to us is ask them how they'd found us, you know, how they'd managed to get in contact with us.
Then we knew what was actually working and what wasn't working.
And it was amazing where our phone number and our address used to get to at times, Howard, it really was.
And of course, there was a time back in the 90s, if you rang the Ministry of Defense, they would give you my telephone number.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Quite literally, yeah.
They would give you my telephone number.
They would take the details as well if you were insistent.
But also in the literature that they sent out, you would see a couple of UFO organizations recommended at the bottom of them.
And one of them was us.
So even if they didn't want to collect UFO reports themselves, they were certainly not averse to putting people in touch with you and you could do it.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's one of the things we used to say to people like the police.
We used to say, surely you've got better things to do.
You know, please, you know, we're more than happy to, you know, to take this off your hands, so to speak.
And we do that with, you know, Air Force bases.
There was more of them around then than there are today, or even your local airports and things of that nature.
We try and build up a good rapport with establishments like that.
So if anything did come their way, it ended up with us.
And it worked pretty well by and large.
Yeah, no, if anybody knows what's going on and the kinds of strange things that occur, then a police officer will know.
You've only got to think of people like Alan Godfrey, but there are so many other people involved in this.
In fact, you mentioned John Hanson.
Wasn't John Hanson a police officer himself?
Yeah, John was a CID detective in the West Midlands, yes.
So there, you know, that police collection is very useful.
I want to talk about the book then, and this is an updated version of Without Consent.
It is a whole range of and documentation of purely UK cases of close encounters of the fourth kind.
Just explain to me what those are before we get into the cases.
Well, you know, for want of a better phrase, it's people who have had an alien encounter, an alien abduction, or missing time.
You know, they've had an experience where there's a portion of the incident they cannot remember for one reason or another, you know.
And so we put the missing time part in as well.
And it all, I mean, it came about quite by accident.
Again, no planning here.
My co-author is Carl Negatis.
Carl was a Fleet Street journalist, worked for some of the biggest newspapers, you know, that are still going today.
He was a feature writer for them.
And Carl and I did a couple of features together.
And he then backed in working for the Fleet Street, but he set up his own PR company.
One of these clients was a TV production company in London.
And they were looking to make a documentary about UFOs and encounters.
And they asked Carl, do you know anybody?
He said, I just happened to.
I've worked with this chap, you know, Philip Mantle.
So they put us in touch.
We did all the research for this documentary.
And for whatever reason, it never came off.
And I just said to Carl, it's such a shame.
And I said, you know what?
This would make a damn good book.
And Carl just said, it just so happens, you know, one of my other clients in the north, Carl originates in the Cheshire area, is a book publisher.
I'll ask him.
So I said to Carl, well, you ask him.
And if he agrees, we'll actually do it together.
So he did it.
He asked, it was a company called Ringpool Press.
They agreed.
And we set about, you know, writing the book.
Carl interviewed some people.
I literally jumped in the car and went from one end of the country to the other, interviewing as many people as I could.
Because again, we're talking, this was the days before the internet, Howard, no email or anything like that.
So there was only two ways of doing it, really.
One was on the telephone or the other was in person.
And we dug out some old files as well, and, you know, from our colleagues and that kind of thing.
And without consent, in its original format, was published in 1994.
And, you know, I still think it's one of the best and certainly the only book, as far as I'm aware, that deals with these encounters from a UK point of view.
Yeah, because most people think that these things happen in Arkansas or somewhere down in Florida.
They don't think that they happen in Philey or, you know, the M5 motorway in the UK.
But they do.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And from a debunker's point of view, they would have you believe that these incidents only happened to some redneck who's been on the local wine, you know, in the middle of nowhere.
But that's not the case.
Well, no, I mean, some of these cases, I mean, you have one that goes all the way back.
We'll talk about it when we get there, but one that goes back all the way to 1942.
And the person involved was a sentry.
It was during World War II.
And this person was in the military.
And that in itself is a fascinating case.
But you have all kinds of people at every level of society, from, you know, bus drivers to everybody who've experienced these things.
And that's what makes it such an interesting read, I think.
Well, that was our aim of the book.
It wasn't to really prove anything substantial, apart from the fact that the people who have these encounters are just like you and I, Howard.
They're just everyday members of the public.
You know, they're going about their daily tasks, their daily life when these things happen.
You know, like you mentioned, one was a bus driver, a police officer, you know, somebody who worked at a teacher's center, a painter and decorator, you know, and the list goes on.
They're just, you know, if you put all these people in a room, they wouldn't stand out.
They were just like you and I. And so I'm glad you noticed that because that was, you know, what we intended to do.
Well, that's the thing that shouts at you from the book.
Nick Pope in the forward, just to conclude this segment.
The last words he says in his forward, which is really excellent, refreshingly, he says, without consent is a book about the abductees themselves, not the researchers who've investigated their claims.
Rather than telling their stories for them, Philip Mantle and Carl Negatis place the abductees at center stage, drawing heavily on direct quotations from interviews and hypnotic regression sessions.
That's true, but there's also a ton of documentation that you've got.
I don't know, apart from John Hansen, nobody documents their material like you did.
Well, I'm just, I think I'm from the old school, you know, Howard, I have this documentation there.
And it's great to quote from it or summarize it, but we now have the technology whereby we can reproduce it.
And yes, I can summarize it, but here it is in full, and you can view it for yourself and draw your own conclusions, you know.
And Nick is right, you know, some UFO researchers tend to already have an idea in their head of what, you know, what the nature and origin of the phenomena is, and they cherry-pick the information to support their theories.
Well, there's none of that in this book, you know, none of it at all, because I was clueless then, and I'm clueless now.
So I wouldn't be able to cherry-pick if I tried, Howard.
I don't think it comes across as clueless at all.
We're talking with Philip Mantle, leading UFO investigator and publisher, About the updated version of Without Consent, a book about the experiences of real people in the United Kingdom who say or believe that they had encounters with aliens or craft or missing time and all that goes with that.
There are some great stories here, and there is not a single story from the United States or any other country, which is what makes it such a great read, I think.
Why update this book then?
Why return to it, Philip?
Well, I've just got, you know, down the years, I just, you know, my research continued, Howard, you know, even though the book was, you know, long since out of print.
And I think over the last couple of years, there's been renewed interest in the subject, largely as a result of things that happened that have been published in the New York Times and things of that nature.
But we also must realize that new people come into the subject on a regular basis.
So they perhaps don't know everything, you know, and they're looking for information.
So I decided that rather than having this material languishing in my files, that I'd update without consent.
It seemed just an appropriate time.
Plus, I had the time on my hands to do it.
We've all been in lockdown in one form or another.
So, you know, I put that on a list.
I tried to plan it, Howard, you know, and it came off.
So it's there for anyone who's just entering into the subject.
For example, I had a gentleman come see me.
It kind of makes me feel old, but his father, I used to work with his father, and his father bought him a copy of the original book when he was eight years old.
And it was that book that got him interested in the subject.
And he's now, you know, 30 plus years old with his own family.
And he was amazed to find me on social media.
And we live just a few miles away.
So he come and paid me a visit.
And he said, I've got to have a copy of the new version.
It was the original version that got me interested in the first place.
No, I think you get a lot of interest in this, Philip.
I really do.
Well, I hope so.
You know, I keep my fingers crossed anyway.
Okay, in the book, you give a very useful, and I'm going to keep it.
This is a definition I'm going to keep for other interviews on this field, in this field that I do.
Quotes, alien abduction is the temporary taking of a person or persons by beings from beyond this world.
Victims, and there are many, often tell of being mysteriously transported to strange and unfamiliar places, perhaps spacecraft, where they undergo some form of examination presumed to be medical in nature.
That's a great ballpark definition, isn't it?
But that's not all of it as it relates to the stories that we're going to talk about.
No, I mean, we had to start and try and explain it in some respect.
And, you know, you could write a whole book trying to just explain what these experiences are.
So trying to condense it is never easy, but we tried our best.
Okay.
Well, I think you did brilliantly.
Let's start with the Elsie Okanson case from 1978, which is now an astonishing 42 years ago.
This happened in Northamptonshire.
This is a classic case of somebody driving a car.
And I quote from the book, suddenly, a brilliant circle of pure white light appeared and illuminated the road by the passenger side of the car.
Then, as suddenly as it came on, it went off and I was in darkness once again, recalled Elsie.
Now, there was much more to this story, and I believe that Elsie also had hypnotic regression after this.
I might be wrong about this, but talk to me about this case.
Yeah, I mean, Elsie worked at a teacher's center.
You know, she was a very educated lady.
She lived just outside of Northampton at a place, I believe it's called Churchstow.
She was married to a police officer, you know, and, you know, Elsie had no interest in this subject at all at the time.
So, you know, driving home that particular evening, she'd had a headache during the day.
She said it was like a tight band going around her head.
So she was heading home when the incident that you've described, she saw this dumbbell-shaped object towered.
And of course, this light just, it was almost like, you know, the scene of like Roy Neary in close encounters where the light engulfs his truck.
But this was shot onto the surrounding area and was off again.
And, you know, Elsie told her husband the story.
He was quite a senior police officer.
And one of the things, she didn't have regressive hypnosis.
One of the things that was suggested, perhaps, to Elsie was to do, to just sit and relax.
And, you know, whatever it is that relaxes you, just sit down, relax, and close your eyes and think about what had happened.
So Elsie described seeing this light with this, she could almost see the bands of light, you know, emanating from it.
So it wasn't just a constant light.
And then she saw these two figures, for one of a better phrase, but they were, you know, not two arms, two legs or anything like that.
There were strange shapes, almost, you know, sort of your cartoon ghost type shapes moving around.
And it baffled Elsie.
We found another sighting nearby on the same night from another lady.
And this puzzled Elsie, you know, but Elsie had.
One of the things I've talked about a little bit is what I call side effects, Howard.
When some people have these encounters, they have other things happen to them afterwards.
Elsie was the same.
First and foremost, she felt compelled, as if it was an instruction almost, to seek out others and tell them what had happened to her.
So Elsie was not bothered about going public.
For example, the story first appeared in her local newspaper, and there was a knock on the door afterwards, and there was a man stood there, and he just laughed at Elsie.
He didn't say anything, just turned around and walked away.
So she knew what she was letting herself in for.
But she also became a spiritual healer sometime afterwards.
And Elsie put this all down to the encounters she had that night.
Right, because we know that there are multiple cases, most of them in the U.S., where people claim to have acquired either to have been cured, and there's another case that we'll talk about of somebody who was cured or thought they were cured of something.
But some people say that they acquire abilities or skills or something different happens to them.
And Elsie was one of those people.
Absolutely.
I call them side effects for want of a better phrase.
And Elsie went on to appear on television, went in the national newspapers.
Now, believe it or not, some years later, Howard, a colleague and I, actually ran a college course here in West Yorkshire at the Adult Education Centre in Wakefield.
So it was one evening a week and for 10 weeks, we went through a system all about UFOs.
And it was well attended.
Elsie even appeared at that.
And so the idea being, rather than you sit here and listen to me and my colleague, you can hear it straight from the horse's mouth.
And there's a photograph in the book of Elsie speaking at that college course, you know.
And she was asked, you know, how had this encounter affected her life?
And she said, for her, it was very positive.
It had given her a new lease of life.
You know, she was met all these amazing people.
She'd now become a spiritual healer, which she had no doubt was a direct result of her experience.
So for Elsie, it was a very positive thing.
Sadly, you know, Elsie's no longer with us.
She did go on to write her own book about it.
I do have it somewhere.
I can't remember the title of it, but because I've got so many books.
But, you know, and she was a lovely, lovely lady.
And she handled the experience really well, which not every, we have to say, not everybody does.
I mean, there are stories of people who have nervous breakdowns, people who are haunted by nightmares and dreams for years afterwards.
So actually, Elsie is one of the stories from 1978, this was, of somebody actually getting a positive out of it and being able to cope with the experience.
And that, as we say, is not the case in every instance.
You tell the story from 1983 of Albert Bertu.
This man, now, Aldershot, we know it's a military base.
It's on the Surrey-Hampshire border.
It's not very far from where I live.
I don't associate Aldershot necessarily with weirdness and paranormality.
But here is a guy, early hours of the morning, he's fishing, and he encounters, quotes, beings.
And in the book, it says, you quote, I think it's some kind of debriefing of this man, Alfred Bertu.
He says, I got a bit of a shock when they came up to me with those green overalls on.
I couldn't see any buttons or zips or anything.
It was just as though it was molded onto them.
The dog sat there quietly after I told it to shut up.
They had pea green helmets on their heads, but the visor on the front seemed to be blacked out like smoked glass.
I mean, that is straight out of science fiction.
It is, you know, and like we say, Alfred was just, it was a, you know, he was getting on in life at the time, but one of his passions was fishing, you know, on the canal, which he'd done, you know, many times before when he encountered these strange beings and this craft that he went on board.
And, you know, Alfred describes this thing in quite some detail, probably more detail than we've got room for in the book.
But it's a British Calvin Parker, isn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
You know, and he was astonished by it.
And, you know, Alfred, you know, never changed his story.
Again, accidentally, he ended up in the newspapers.
He didn't want to go public.
Many researchers have interviewed Alfred.
Timothy Good was one and was highly impressed with him.
And again, like we tried to emphasize at the beginning, he was just Joe average, you know, going about his daily routines.
He happened to go fishing.
You know, he liked to go fishing on the canal when, you know, and he knew nothing about the subject prior to this.
Howard, you know, it wasn't anything that he was interested in or, you know, and he saw these strange creatures with these this bizarre clothing, if you want to call it that, and was totally perplexed by it completely.
And the connection, of course, you mentioned Calvin Parker.
Calvin was fishing on the river in Pascagoula.
So there's the fishing connection.
But Calvin, of course, wasn't approached down on this level by beings.
Alfred was.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there are some similarities with other cases with Alfred and the sort of, what can I say, the description of the craft rather than anything else.
And how did he describe the craft?
Well, it's your dome-shaped flying saucer, but it had these protrusions underneath because he actually saw it lift off as well.
So he could see it from the underside.
And we have in the book, you know, two of his original sketches of what he saw rather than just artist impressions.
So we feature them in the book as well.
And they were done by Alfred himself.
And so there are some similarities with other cases in that respect.
But again, it was just, you know, your normal average, everyday Joe going about his everyday tasks.
And did the beings tell him when he was taken on board the craft?
Did they give him any clue as to what they were doing with him?
No, not at all.
You know, and, you know, none of these encounters are the same.
They have some similarities sometimes, Howard.
You know, there may be little bits that seem, well, yeah, but they're all completely different.
They're all unique in their own respect.
And it's the same with Alfred.
I mean, it's one of the reasons we mentioned Calvin Parker because him and Charles Hickson had their encounter in 1973.
Theirs is so unique, not just in what they experienced and what they saw, but how they went about dealing with it afterwards.
and of course, they struggled, didn't they, when they got on the craft?
I think Calvin struggled with one of them.
Yeah, I mean, you know, Calvin had a physical encounter, and he also struggled afterwards from you know, in a psychological capacity.
His colleague who was with him was a lot older than him.
Calvin was only 18 at the time.
His pal, Charles Hickson, was 42.
Now, Charlie Hickson had actually served in the army and had fought in the Korean War and was involved in some quite heavy fighting at one point.
So when you read what Charlie had to say, he actually used some of his wartime experiences to deal with it because he thought at one point while they were on board the UFO that he was going to be killed.
And he's saying, well, I hope they get on with it and do it quickly.
I don't want to suffer.
And then he went back in time to when he was pinned down under enemy fire in Korea.
And his captain was saying, don't panic.
Don't panic.
The opportunity will come for us to get out of here.
Just be patient.
And of course, it did.
And they did get out of it.
And the same happened with the UFO encounter.
But see, Calvin had none of that to fall back on.
He was an 18-year-old, you know, very little life experience like all of us at that time and had nothing to fall back on in that respect.
Right.
And what about Alfred then?
How did Alfred come through this?
Was he just experimented on and then gently returned to Earth?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, no harm came to him.
You know, he seemed to handle it, you know, psychologically very well.
He was puzzled, you know, quite literally, you know, scratching his head as to what had happened.
And he would just shrug his shoulders and said, all I can tell you is this is what I saw.
This is what happened.
And make of it what you will, you know, and it's that unassuming aspect of some of these encounters that make it all that more believable because they're not looking for publicity.
They weren't interested in the subject beforehand.
They don't know what happened to them.
You know, sometimes they come forward to seek out a UFO researcher in the hope that they'll be able to tell them what's happened to them.
And of course, that's not something we're able to do.
So some look for answers.
And Albert was no different.
He would have liked to have had the answers to what would lay behind the encounter.
But you have to draw your own conclusions, I'm afraid.
But not the kind of thing you expect to happen by the riverbank in Aldershot.
There is another case, just to round out this segment.
A man called Graham Allen, not very far from Aldershot, across in Berkshire.
But Graham Allen didn't come through it quite so easily.
He's one of the cases of somebody who was left with flashbacks.
That's right.
I mean, Graham was on his way.
Graham was a painter and decorator.
And he was a young man.
And he was driving at the time.
And he was on his way to see his fiancé, his wife to be when, you know, the radio went funny.
You know, you've seen that on various sci-fi movies.
Electromagnetic effects.
When was this, by the way?
Sorry, I should have asked.
I can't remember the date.
I think it was early 80s.
I think it was late 70s, early 80s.
Yeah.
And, you know, he had a very bizarre encounter to Graham.
And like you said, it was almost like post-traumatic stress disorder, where, you know, certainly military veterans will have flashbacks to incidents that happened in the past.
Well, Graham was the same.
You know, we'd have flashbacks about what happened to him.
I mean, I'm still in communication with Graham.
You know, I exchanged a couple of emails just recently.
And, you know, I interviewed Graham in person at his home.
His fiancé had become his wife and he was a family man.
And he was still, I'm trying to not put words in his mouth, but nervous when he talked about it.
What does he, I mean, how does he sum it up?
You know, today, what words would he use to sum it up?
Well, I think Graham would say that he believed this was an alien encounter.
Graham went on to become involved in UFO research.
He went to live in Staffordshire, and there used to be a UFO group called the Staffordshire UFO group, and he was part of that for some time.
And Graham still has a number of files in his attic and things like that from that era.
And, you know, was still, again, like most of them, Howard, you know, as puzzled as the rest of us as to what happened to him.
But he has no doubt he happened.
Was he taken on board a craft?
He thinks so, yes.
Yes, he's pretty sure he did, yes.
And I'll give you an example.
He was told by the beings on board this craft, he was given information of how to build this machine.
Now, I don't know what the machine's purpose was, neither does he.
Bearing in mind, Graham was he wasn't an engineer, he was a painter and decorator.
Graham was so convinced that this was authentic that he even went to the bank to try and get a loan to build this thing.
I don't think he got his loan, so he didn't build it, but he'd been given instructions, for want of a better phrase, of how to build this machine.
And does that blueprint still exist?
Well, it's in his head.
You know, it's in Graham's head.
I don't think he'll ever forget it.
And he's no idea what the machine was.
Well, at that time when I interviewed him anyway, he'd no idea whether he's come to some conclusion since then.
Who knows?
But he'd no idea what it was.
But he was convinced it was real.
That's the main thing.
And he was so convinced, he was quite prepared to go and borrow a lump of money from the bank manager.
What a pity he didn't get to do it.
But to summarize it, it's real people.
People who didn't have a stake in any of this beforehand, did have a stake in it afterwards, of course, because their lives were inevitably and inexorably changed, but he is just one of many cases.
We're going to talk about some slightly different cases next with Philip Mantle.
We're talking about the updated version of his book, Without Consent, all United Kingdom cases of people who had the closest of closed encounters.
You talk in one segment of the book about chases.
Christine Smith, 1982 is the year.
And here is somebody, and we've heard cases like this from America.
In fact, the Betty and Barney Hill case sort of started in this way, of somebody observing something in the rear view mirror of the car.
Well, again, I think I mentioned early on that there was areas in and around the market town of Skipton in North Yorkshire, in the Yorkshire Dales, that had a lot of very peculiar sightings come our way and a lot of sightings as well, Howard.
There were times when we just couldn't keep up.
And this lady was one of them.
And there's a particular rogue called Coniston Cousins.
She was familiar with it.
She'd driven there many times when she was driving at night.
And she saw these lights in the rearview mirror.
Obviously, they got closer and closer, and they actually paced her, you know, either side of the car.
And Christine had a period of a missing time.
And I'm cutting a long story very short here.
Now, we talked about police officers.
One of our members at the time was police sergeant Tony Dodd.
Tony lived just on the edge of Grassington and he was part of the Yorkshire UFO Society.
Again, sadly, Tony's no longer with us.
Tony had had his own sightings.
However, that's how he got interested.
What they used to do in the police patrol car, they would sit on the tops of the moors sometimes because they got better reception on the radios.
And that's what Tony and his colleague were doing one night when this object literally flew over them and Tony put on the blue flashing light and it turned around and came back.
And that's what got Tony interested in the subject.
And so this is one of the cases that was handled by Tony.
Cutting a long story short, Christine went under hypnosis.
She was hypnotized by a professional.
So this wasn't some kind of wacky stage, you know, magician or hypnotist or anything like that.
And tells an amazing, you know, long-running story.
And we put it all in the book.
I mean, as I said, all these cases are unique.
And when Christine's under hypnosis, it's almost if she could communicate with them, as if it was still happening.
And Antonia asked them, well, you know, where do you come from?
And they said, Akabar.
And what's your name?
And they said, Zeus.
Well, you know, Zeus is one of the ancient Greek gods, of course.
So isn't Akabar in the Middle East?
Yes, Akabar is actually in the Middle East, and you could even find it in the Bible.
So, you know, this was something, you know, very out of the ordinary in every sense of the word.
And of Christine wasn't a hugely religious lady or anything like that.
She'd nothing to prove in that respect.
And then, of course, those that, you know, are not keen on the use of regressive hypnosis.
And I understand the reasons for that.
But it was still nonetheless fascinating to listen to this.
Tony made audio recordings that we listened to.
And again, make of it what you will.
She was just, again, another ordinary lady on her way home when this happened.
And with regards to the hypnotic testimony, some people think it is a useful tool.
Others are not so sure.
You know, I kind of stay on the fence.
The reason I stay on the fence, I'll give you an example.
Go back to Calvin Parker again.
When Calvin and his friend Charles Hickson were driving to the river that night to go fishing, on their way in, they passed another car that was parked up.
I think there was a courting couple in it, Howard.
Now, Calvin could tell you what make, what model this car, what color it was.
But he couldn't remember the registration.
It was only when he went under hypnosis that he could read the registration plate of this car.
And what Calvin did, he hired a private investigator to track down the owners of this car and he found them.
This is some years later, of course.
And sadly, one of them had passed away, but he found the lady who was in the car that night.
And it's only because he remembered the registration plate under hypnosis.
So it can be a useful tool, and we have to remember that.
But as to Christine in 1982, was it merely that she was chased by weird lights, or was there more to it?
Well, it was the lights that were the main thing.
Because, again, in and around these areas in the Dales, Calton Moor was an area.
Calton is a small village just on the outskirts of Skipton.
And above the village is Calton Moor.
It's mainly Heather.
So they used to do a lot of grouse shooting in that area.
Not many buildings of any note up there.
But we seem to get a lot of sightings of these strange lights in and around these areas, Howard.
And the paranormal as well.
And I've told this story before.
I remember we got a letter from a chap, myself and Mark Purzell, another little village.
So we arranged to go and interview him.
But when we got there, when I say village, it was like six or eight houses.
That was it.
And these houses Had no numbers on.
So we knocked on the first door and said, Can you tell us where Mr. So-and-so lives?
And they said, Oh, have you come about the ghost dog?
Of course, we hadn't.
And this lady told us that every now and again they'd see the ghost dog wander down through the village.
And basically, all they were seeing was two red lights.
And these were the eyes of the ghost dog.
They didn't see anything else, you know.
So when we dug a bit further, we found out all kind of weird and wonderful things happened in these areas.
And Christine's account is just, you know, another thing that came from this location.
In those days, these locations were called UFO hotspots.
They went on to be called window areas.
Now they call them portals.
I mean, you know, next year it'll be something different.
But for whatever reason, there seems to be areas, geographical areas, that do have a lot of sightings come out of them.
And certainly, you know, the Pennines area, North Yorkshire, you know, are definitely hotspots.
I think there are parts of East Anglia that you could definitely call hotspots.
We know that through Rendlesham Forest.
There is a story, and I'm sorry to hurry you on here, but there's so much in this book, and we'll never get through even a tenth of it, I don't think.
But there's a whole family in 1974 in Essex, a different area of the country, the Day family.
They had missing time.
They were all involved in this.
And the man of the house, John, actually suffered, sadly, a nervous breakdown after all of this happened.
What happened to them?
Well, John Day and his wife, Sue, they'd actually been to their in-laws that night in the car, kids in the backseat, going home.
And John was looking to watch something on television.
Because, of course, in those days, the TV would finish at a certain time of night.
And as they were entering the village of Avery in Essex, where he lived, they entered a bank of green mist.
And there was a bump.
And as there was a bump, his wife turned to him and said the most peculiar thing.
And she said, are you all here?
And they, you know, pulled into the village, put the kids to bed.
And they realized when he put the TV on that the program or whatever it was they wanted to watch had gone.
You know, it was finished.
And that shouldn't have happened.
You know, they should have been home in time to watch it.
I think they dialed the speaking clock.
I don't know if you can still do that these days.
You punch a number in on the telephone.
It used to be one, two, three.
Yeah.
And they also filmed the local police just to get the time because they couldn't understand where this missing time had gone.
So they went to bed.
They both had, it's a bit like Betty and Barney Hill in this respect.
Call it a vision, call it a dream, call it a nightmare, call it what you want, but it all came back to them.
What had happened?
They had had an encounter.
The whole car had been lifted into an object and put in some kind of bay.
They saw creatures that looked pretty much like you and I, but they had pink eyes and they had some kind of surgical mask on.
But they saw these other creatures, the smaller ones, that looked like they had the face of almost like a bat, very hairy, you know, with the flat nose.
You know, they were examined.
They were even given a tour of this thing, you know, shown around.
And it was almost like an out-of-body experience with John's wife, Sue.
She could actually see the car being lowered back down to the ground.
And when it hit the ground, that's when there was the bump.
And she turned and said, are you all here to make sure they were all there?
You know, they'd all been returned.
And like I say, John went on and did have a bit of a nervous breakdown.
He shielded his children from this.
And I'm one of the few people that ever got to interview John.
And I asked John this question, and it stayed with me.
I asked John, I said, you know, John, was this physically real, John?
You know, you knock on it, you touch it.
He says, yeah, Philip, he says, not only do you and I not have the words in our vocabulary, we as a species don't have the words to be able to describe what this experience is.
And he said, for example, I could take you to a film set where they're making a movie and you can touch it, you can see it, you can feel it, smell it.
And if you touch, you know, you knock on it, it will go thump.
But when you look behind it, it's all an illusion, isn't it?
It's not real.
And he says, that's the only way I can explain it.
I found it quite a profound explanation, Howard.
I still don't know what to make of it.
But, you know, this was coming from straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
This wasn't me imparting this.
And that's the way John described it.
And so unusual that a whole family was affected.
And that kind of thing is pretty rare.
It is, you know, and his wife, Susan, was interviewed.
No one ever managed to interview the children, even though they grew up, you know, and we've lost contact with John some years ago.
But one little story that I'll tell you, I went to a lecture in London, and there was a rather skeptical gentleman giving a presentation about close encounters.
And who sat on the front row but John Day?
Now, nobody knew who he was, you know, but I did because it hadn't been that long before I knew that.
Yeah.
So this gentleman gives his presentation and lo and behold, in the presentation, John's case was discussed.
So I come to questions at the end and I thought, oh, no.
But here we go.
Because John put his hand up to ask a question.
And, you know, the chap who were doing the lecture didn't know where to put himself, you know, because John put him right on a whole host of points from a sceptical point of view.
John did remember most of what had happened.
I think he did have some hypnosis later on, but they pretty much remembered the whole encounter anyway.
But again, very unique, very bizarre.
The creatures that they saw, I don't have any recollections of these bat-like things.
You know, they were humanoid, but they've got a face like a bat.
And I believe that at some point they were even used in an episode of Doctor Who.
They'd copied them.
And believe it or not, two years ago, there used to be a little UFO museum run by a chap called David Boyle in Blackpool.
And it had closed.
And I went to see David with a view to buying some of his exhibits because I collect UFO memorabilia.
And what did he have on display?
But one of these bat-like creatures that was related to the John Day incident in Avery in Essex.
Very strange.
Now, we've only got minutes here, and I want to cover a lot of ground in these minutes.
Two women on the M5 motorway, Bobby and Vicky, they reported physical effects.
And one of the effects that was reported by one of them is that I think it was like a skin cancer, something like that, went away.
They think or she thought after this encounter.
A curious encounter.
I mean, they lived right down on the south coast.
And I went to interview them in person.
And what had happened is that they used to go and visit Bobby's grandmother.
So it was a journey they'd done before.
And she always liked to look nice when she went, you know, to cheer her grandma up.
And Vicki was her friend.
So a couple of days beforehand, she got a coat, dry cleaned.
It was a white coat.
So off they went.
You know, the baby's in the back seat.
The outbound journey was fine.
But on the way back, Bobby was sitting in the passenger seat and she looked to her left and she looked like she saw an object going behind a hill.
The driver obviously didn't see it.
And peculiarly, they saw the signs for the exit where they needed to come off.
They saw them twice, the same signs.
And that puzzled them.
Now, again, they knew roughly how long this journey should take.
And there was a shop.
I believe it was the local co-op that they wanted to get to before, you know, but when they got there, it was shut.
Or it was just about to close, I believe.
So they thought, well, we should have plenty of time.
So there was this missing time aspect as well.
So when they got home, Bobby hadn't used her coat.
It had just been left in the back of the car.
When she got it out, it was covered in mud.
Her boots were covered in mud.
And both her and her friend Vicky also had these, afterwards, had these visions about being taken to this hill, which they believe was Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, nowhere near where they were.
Seeing this hundred miles away at least.
Yeah, yeah, this object going behind the hill.
Like you say, they developed, you know, call it a skin complaint directly afterwards, but then it seemed to go.
And I do know they were considering hypnosis, but I don't think they went under it at all because, you know, one of the ladies' husbands, where they lived, was by the naval base.
He was a sailor, so he was away for long periods of time.
But they were, again, I can remember sitting in their house now and talking to them and just the sheer look on their face as if to say, what on earth happened to us?
And of course, one of them claimed that she had a melanoma that appeared to go away, I think, after this, which may have been coincidence.
Yeah, it could well be.
But what they were doing is being honest and just answering the questions that myself and my colleague put to them.
Because we often said, you know, anything unusual happened, you know, trying not to put words in their mouth, of course, but it's very difficult.
So just the sheer look on their face of not horror, not terror, but complete bewilderment as to what happened.
You know, and you know, again, just two lovely ladies who both were, you know, one's got a family and they've been friends for quite some time, had no idea what had happened that night.
And like I say, it was a journey that they'd made many times.
You know, they knew roughly how long it should take, you know, give or take five or ten minutes.
But it took a lot longer.
And who knows?
You know, we done a chapter in the book.
We call it the Nearly Files, you know, because it's missing time.
And this was one of them.
Now, that wasn't in the original version of the book.
That's been languishing in my files.
I don't know why it wasn't, but it just wasn't.
But it's now in the revised edition.
And I can still see both those ladies now, Howard, and just the sheer look of bewilderment on their face.
Another fascinating case happening to ordinary people.
Now, on the radio show, I have to say, Philip, we're out of time.
What I'm going to do, if you don't mind doing this, we'll continue for another 10 minutes or so on the podcast, but I'm going to say goodbye to radio listeners now.
So what's the name for radio listeners on Monday morning early hours?
What's the name of the book and how would they get it?
It's just called Without Consent.
You know, punch that into Amazon and Philip Mantle and Carl Nagatis and you'll find it.
Don't buy any of the old hard bucks.
They'll charge you a fortune for them.
Buy the revised edition.
Philip Mantle, thank you.
Stay right where we are.
We're going to continue for the podcast on radio.
We're out of time.
So, Philip, that's radio listeners done.
But for people joining me on the podcast now at theunexplained.tv, you do some classic cases.
I want to talk about one of those, but I want to go back to something first because we didn't have time for it.
A couple of things, actually.
There was a case of a man who had what is described as the ultimate encounter, Philip Spencer, after which he was unusually visited by supposedly two men in black.
Yeah, I mean, Philip Spencer is a pseudonym.
Philip was a former police officer, and he was hoping to get back into the police force.
And he lived in Ilkley, as he, you know, of the famous song on Ilkley Born by a tat.
All Yorkshiremen know that song, you know.
And he used to take a shortcut over the moors to, I think it was going to a relative's.
And the area where he goes is well known, Howard.
There's actually, there was at the time, hopefully they'll still be there.
There's a couple of white buildings and they're called White Wells.
And there used to be a cafe, but that had long since shut.
And it's just, I don't know, a mile or so from a more famous landmark, which is the Cowan Calf Rocks.
So he was trekking up, you know, over the over the, it's not a difficult trek or anything like that.
You know, I've done it.
It's, you know, and believe it or not, he used to have a little kit bag with him and he used to have a drink of water in there, a camera and a compass and a map and a few bits and pieces.
And up ahead, he saw this what you can only describe as a little green man.
And it was a small creature.
It was green in colour with a large head and it seemed to be beckoning him.
You know, so off he went up the moor and he managed to take one photograph of it and it moved around to the right and in this when it turns in the right, there's like a hollow.
I think it's originally been like a man-made hollow where they used to dig for, I don't know, whatever on the moors many, many eons ago.
And when he got there, this creature is now gone, but there's an object there, they call it a UFO that took off.
You know, off, it was gone.
Now, when you see the photograph of this little green man, that's exactly what it is.
But interestingly enough, to the right where this hollow is, obviously it's behind the dip.
There's a little something sticking up.
And people have speculated, is that the top of the UFO?
So Philip decided to abandon his journey and head off back into town where they were.
And he was surprised now.
It was light.
But it was, you know, it was a bit dark when he set off.
So again, there was a period of missing time there.
And he put the and he took some, strange thing.
This was the days of still, you still had film in your camera.
He didn't, he hadn't taken all the film.
So he took some pictures just to use the film up, you know, of nothing.
And he put the filming in one of these 24-hour labs.
And lo and behold, you know, there it is.
You know, there's the picture of the little green man on it.
Cutting a long story short, the picture's been analyzed uphill and down dale, you know, since day one.
And whatever it is, it is there and in the landscape.
It's not an after effect.
It's not, you know, there was no computers in those days to do this kind of thing.
So it's there and in the landscape.
Philip claimed that he was visited by someone who claimed to be from the Ministry of Defense, showed him credentials.
His compass had gone, you know, whappy.
He also went under hypnosis and recounted a rather typical alien abduction scenario.
But the compass was examined, I believe, at University in Manchester.
They couldn't figure out how it had been made to do what it was doing and that kind of thing.
So everything seemed to add up, you know.
And that photograph is still hotly debated today.
But I've been on that location.
I've been in that hollow where this incident happened, you know, and I don't know what that thing is, but it is definitely there and in the landscape.
It's not something that was added afterwards.
It's not been airbrushed or anything like that.
And Peter Hoff was the researcher at the time who researched it thoroughly.
And, you know, Philip Spencer handed over the negatives and things like this.
The only thing he didn't want revealing was his name because he was hoping to go back into the police force.
Whether he ever did or not, I couldn't tell you.
So we term it the ultimate encounter because he's got photographic evidence to accompany it.
Which very, very few encounters do.
I want to take you to the case of somebody that you're calling Kate Walker, not her real name.
This happened near Chard in Somerset, 1977, in a car with her two boys, and an absolutely terrifying encounter.
Something looking in through the window of the car, five black figures walking up to the car from behind.
I mean, it doesn't get any scarier.
Well, no, I mean, you know, it is a scary encounter.
And I'd rather talk, if I may, if I just change to a young man called David out in Wales.
He lived at a place called Pafelli on the northwest coast of Wales.
I know it well.
And David, like most of he was 18 at the time.
And this was a time when there was high unemployment in that part of the world.
And he'd been to a friend's birthday party and he was walking home on what he called the main road.
We wouldn't call it a main road by any description, Howard, but for where he lived, it did.
And he said, up ahead in the field, he saw this light.
And part of him felt compelled to go and have a look.
But another part of him was telling him to ignore it and keep on going.
Anyway, he walked up what we call a little snicket and he could look into this field.
It was surrounded by bushes.
And he looked and there was a thing sat there that's almost like the space shuttle, you know.
And he was approached from behind was David.
And there's a hand on his shoulder, and there was this humanoid with a helmet on that looked like the shape of a 50 pence piece.
The next thing David remembers, he's on board this thing, he's lying on a slab, a table, call it what you will.
And there's a window or a screen, and he could see the planets disappearing past it.
Now, now David was a rock fan, and he had his Walkman with him.
You remember the old Sony Walkman's where you put your cassette in?
Oh, I do.
I had a few of those.
Yeah, and these creatures had taken his cassette and they put it in some kind of panel.
And he said it was the most bizarre thing you could ever wish to see.
You're in this otherworldly environment, and this rock music is blaring out.
So David was actually, you know, returned home.
He was actually picked up by a police car.
I found him staggering down the road.
Now, David lived with his mum.
And as soon as he got home, he told his mum everything.
You know, he remembered every single thing.
And he was literally, this is why I've jumped to this because I interviewed David in person several times, terrified.
And I mean terrified.
So the next day, his mum went to the local library and she found one book on UFOs.
And it happened to mention a UFO group in Oxford.
So she got the phone number for it and spoke to them.
And they said, you know, correctly, we'll arrange a time and we'll come and pay you a visit.
So the following night, David is still terrified, couldn't sleep.
So his mum put him in the back of the car and drove all the way to Oxford.
It's now started to snow and landed on this UFO group's doorstep unannounced.
And they told me, they said, we opened the door and he's literally on the back seat, you know, shaking and shivering.
He was that scared.
So I interviewed David several times.
But by the time I got to him, he'd now found a job at a local hotel.
And we talked about side effects earlier on.
But David had started to have these side effects.
He started to write spontaneous poetry.
And he said, whatever you do, do not tell my pals that I write poetry or I'm in trouble.
Too late now.
Yeah.
And I took him to the location and I didn't realize at the time, but I've got a photograph of him.
Stood there and he's frozen like a plank, you know.
And he told me that he actually had to have hypnotherapy, not regressive hypnosis.
David remembered every single thing, but he had nightmares.
He could not sleep.
So he had to have a hypnotherapy.
So he needed help for the trauma.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, when I wrote the book, I sent David and a number of others copies of it.
And he acknowledged it and said, thank you.
And I think it was three years later that I got another letter from him saying, I've just read your book, because he was still frightened of reading it and remembering what happened.
By this time, he'd now grown up.
He'd got his own family and had settled down, but it still bothered him.
And he was petrified, you know, absolutely petrified, Howard.
And I didn't realize at the time, because it's only when you look back, we'd talk about his job and his girlfriend and which was his favourite rock band.
And it was like any young man.
But then when you started to talk about this encounter, his whole, he used to change completely.
He'd start to chain smoke, he'd get nervous and, you know, not avoid your questions, but was, you know, absolutely uncomfortable talking about it.
And of course, when we went back to the location, he was even more uncomfortable.
And this location is not a million miles, for those who know North Wales, not a million miles away from Bala, where there was a very famous UFO incident in the 1970s that is often talked about in newspapers like the Liverpool Daily Post.
And that's probably 30 miles away from where he had his experience.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, again, we talked about areas that have, you know, a high concentration of, we'll call them paranormal events.
And that was one of them, you know.
And I'll never forget the look on David's face, like the two, like Bobby and Vicky.
I remember, you know, he would change from this happy-go-lucky young man with his, you know, his long hair and his denims, just like I used to be.
I think when I interviewed him, I still had long hair.
Sadly, no longer, I'm afraid.
That's two of us, although I've been doing a good job of growing it during London.
So he made a deep impression on you.
Somebody else who did, we were going to talk about a case from 1942 and a century called Albert Lancashire, but we'll leave that for another time and it's in the book.
But it's a nice story from the past and there's a whole section of stories from the 40s, the 50s that are worth looking at.
But somebody who made an impression on you is a woman in Filey.
Again, we're back to North Yorkshire, June Rice.
Now, what happened to her happened in 1956, but you met her many years later, and the story had made an impact on her that lasted decades?
Oh, yeah, Mrs. Rice.
I mean, I forget now how she contacted us.
It was probably via the news media that she found us.
And she was a grandmother by the time, you know, I interviewed her and was just a normal person.
She's like, you know, everybody's grandma.
If you pick an archetypal grandma, Mrs. Rice was like that.
But she went back to the 1950s.
And I believe she'd been out with a friend that night.
I don't know if they'd been to the local cinema.
And she was walking home.
And when she had her encounter with a UFO, was taken on board, met these entities that look pretty much human, Howard.
You know, we've got an artist's impression in the book of what they looked like based on the description given by Mrs. Rice.
And she was just another, you know, unassuming member of the public that had you put them in a room and say, pick, you know, do a lineup, pick a person out of this lineup you think had a close encounter, you would not have picked Mrs. Rice.
You know, she was you your grandma.
And she did make an impression, yeah, because again, it's something that had stuck with her all her life.
And she remembered it vividly.
And again, there was no hypnosis involved.
See, a lot of the debunkers, Howard, would have you believe that all these encounters are only revealed under hypnosis.
Well, that's not the case.
Most of them, of the ones that I investigated in the UK, had no hypnosis whatsoever.
That's partly because UFO researchers at the time and later with the British UFO Research Association agreed not to use it.
You know, they took the stance that we'll leave that out.
So most of them, in fact, remember everything consciously.
And what is interesting is that when you compare full conscious testimony with that that's revealed under hypnosis, they don't differ that greatly.
You would think if you were having fantasies, they'd all be completely different.
But there are certain parameters that fit all of them, Howard, in one way.
But Mrs. Rice, I'll never forget her.
I dare say she's sadly long gone now, but her full account is in the book, as is David's as well.
You can see pictures of me with long hair as well.
Well, she says, and you quote from her in the book, they were quite tall.
I don't want to spoil it for people who are going to buy the book, but we'll just tell a little bit of it.
She says they were quite tall and had whitish or silver suits on, like all-in-one suits.
I guess you call them onesies today.
It was a long time ago, but I remember thinking they were very pale, which is, that's just like my grandmother.
She'd say, oh, they were very pale.
They had lovely eyes, beautiful eyes, and white hair.
I don't know if they had any beards or anything, but I'll always remember the white hair and their beautiful eyes.
Then they just turned and I knew they wanted me to go with them.
So I followed them and I don't remember anything after that.
Well, what is interesting about the whole book, because you can look at certain cases in isolation, Howard, and study them till the cows come home.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But when you have a book like this, you can see the evolution.
Again, I don't know if that's the right word of how the phenomena itself has evolved down the decades.
So here you've got in the 40s and 50s, you've got the beautiful humanoids with their white hair or blonde hair and pink eyes, you know, or blue eyes.
But today, you know, in the 70s with things like John Day with the bat-like creatures, you had the guy by the riverside, Alfred.
Yeah, and in the 80s, you've got Alan Godfrey with his police patrol car.
Yeah.
But then you get more today.
They're more, I would say more of a spiritual slant on them, if you like.
I wonder if they are reflecting us and we are reflecting them in some weird way.
It's a question that I think people are starting to ask.
Well, it's a good question.
But, you know, again, we leave you to make up your own mind in this book.
As I always say, I say, don't believe me.
Don't believe anyone.
Make up your own mind.
But the information is there.
But you do see how things change down the decades.
Now, whether that's the phenomena changing or whether it's UFO researchers becoming more adept at what they're doing.
Because I give you another example.
One of the most famous abductees is probably Whitley Striber and his best-selling worldwide book, Communion.
Now, I hosted Whitley at a conference in London many years back.
And again, during the question and answer sessions, you know, somebody says, are we getting any closer to the truth?
And Whitley, again, I don't think he realized what he was saying, but he says, no, but what we are learning to do, we're learning to ask better questions.
So it could be that, you know, the phenomena perhaps hasn't changed down the decades.
It's just we as UFO researchers are learning to ask better questions.
You know, again, I found that quite a profound comment from him.
I reminded him about it some years later and he had no idea he'd said it.
He'd forgotten it completely.
All things evolve.
An amazing book.
Fantastic research.
Amazing documentation all included in the book and well worth reading.
I did a speed read today, but I'm going back to it and I'm going to read every word for information and for entertainment.
Well done, Philip Mantle.
Another success, I'd say.
Well, thank you very much, Howard.
And the, well, you basically go to your website, isn't it?
Flying Disk with a K Press, and you can find details of all of your books there.
That's the best way, isn't it?
It is.
They're all there.
Everything's there for you to have a look at.
Philip Mantle, thank you very much again.
We're done on the online version.
This is an extended version of the radio conversation.
Got a lot more information in there for you, my podcast listener.
Thank you very much for being part of this.
Philip, thank you.
We will talk again.
My pleasure, Howard.
And that's it.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online with an extended version of my conversation with Philip Mantle.
Until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
In the recent weather that we've had, stay cool and please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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