Edition 483 - Paul Sinclair, Sarah Cruddas, Seth Shostak And Dr David Whitehouse
A catchup with Paul Sinclair - plus Sarah Cruddas, Seth Shostak and Dr David Whitehouse on the discovery of "phosphine" around Venus...
A catchup with Paul Sinclair - plus Sarah Cruddas, Seth Shostak and Dr David Whitehouse on the discovery of "phosphine" around Venus...
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained. | |
Thank you very much for all of your emails recently. | |
Had a lot of email from new listeners, many of them in the United States, also Australia and the UK. | |
Good to hear from you. | |
If you've never contacted the show before, now may be a good time to do that. | |
If you want to go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link and you can send me an email from there. | |
And I do get to see all of your emails. | |
And if your email requires a personal reply, then of course I will give it one. | |
Thank you for all of the nice things you said, by the way. | |
You very much helped to keep me on track during this period that started with lockdown. | |
And I don't know where we stand now, because in the last few days, we've had news here that infections are rising in the United Kingdom and the government telling us that if they don't do something, then the number of deaths will inexorably rise as we go into the autumn and winter. | |
Very, very worrying things to hear. | |
And of course, people seem to be getting divided about this. | |
It seems to be dividing the young and the old. | |
The young, many of them, and I don't want to speak for all of them, want to get on with their lives and older people are worried that they may get infected because of the activities of younger people. | |
Then there are those who don't believe the science and those who do believe the science, those who think we should be wearing masks everywhere we go, which I personally do, and those who believe that we shouldn't be wearing masks. | |
There are Facebook professors, you know, people who claim that they've seen scientific evidence of all kinds of things. | |
And at the end of the day, I've got to say, I don't know what to believe. | |
It all leaves me with a headache. | |
All I can do is to listen to what the scientists and qualified people tell me and act accordingly. | |
And I think that's all any of us can do. | |
And have a think of it this way, if you would. | |
What is in it for scientists who are putting their points to us to exaggerate or fabricate anything? | |
I don't think there would be any point in that. | |
So that's why I tend to go along with what they say, because they are qualified in these things and I am not. | |
Got to remember that almost exactly a year ago, there was a report that I talked about on the radio show about the possible threat of a pandemic. | |
And it seemed to be a doomsday scenario, I think they called the disease disease X. But months later, when many governments did not act the way they should have acted on reports like that, here we are in this situation and staring into 2021 with the prospect of maybe more small lockdowns, more restrictions on our lives. | |
And it's almost too much for many people. | |
It got to the stage for me, I have to say, where it simply got too much for me and I had to get away from it. | |
So I did. | |
I spent three days up until Sunday last in Bournemouth. | |
I booked into a hotel there. | |
I was very careful to do the social distancing because Bournemouth was incredibly busy. | |
We had the last few days of nice sunshine in the UK. | |
There were one or two things that I was worried about. | |
I was getting up for breakfast on day one and noticed that the dining area, which wasn't the biggest dining area, which was self-service for your breakfast, was full of people not wearing masks. | |
Now, I'm not saying that any of them had coronavirus or any of them were exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19. | |
But in this day and age, you have to be careful. | |
And I noticed that if I went down for my breakfast at 8 o'clock in the morning, then the place I was having my breakfast was packed and I was not willing to take that risk, just for my own sake. | |
So I started getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning, going down to breakfast at half past six and being first up for breakfast. | |
And those were the sorts of things I did. | |
When I went down to the beach, which was a beautiful experience because I've been locked away for so long and I think it was starting seriously to affect me, I went down to the beach with my little six-pound chair at eight o'clock in the morning, and then would be leaving the beach three hours later at 11 o'clock when everybody else was starting to arrive. | |
And I think when you're going to a busy place that's full of people who've come from everywhere, I think those are the kinds of things you've got to do. | |
But, you know, I know there are going to be people who tell me why I am wrong. | |
But that is all I can do based on the information that I'm given. | |
What else can any of us do? | |
It is a worrying time, a time that most of us didn't think we'd see in our lifetimes. | |
Pandemics, diseases like this were things that happened in other countries, weren't they? | |
Or they happened in other eras, not this one. | |
But here we are, and hopefully, as I've always said here, medical ingenuity, medical science will find us the answer very soon. | |
Let's hope, hey. | |
And I know even saying those words, I'm probably prompting more emails from some people, but there you go. | |
Now, what I'm going to do on this edition, I'm catching up with myself here. | |
I put together a recorded show for the few days that I was away, a recorded radio show. | |
And I want you to hear some of the material that was on that. | |
And also material about Venus from the week before, the discovery of something that may indicate life in the atmosphere of Venus. | |
That's phosphine. | |
You will have, I'm sure, seen all of that. | |
We were the first people on the radio to talk about that story. | |
So you're going to hear, first of all, from somebody I know that you've heard from already in a special here, Dr. David Whitehouse, the former BBC Space and Science editor. | |
And we talk about the way this information came out and also what the information means. | |
Sarah Crudis, famous television space presenter, astronomer, and astrophysicist. | |
She's got a new book out called Look Up, which is all about exploring space and how you can get interested in that and why it's so interesting. | |
Great book. | |
Look Up from Sarah Crudus. | |
We'll hear from her. | |
And then we'll hear from SETI's Seth Szostak about what the discovery on Venus or around Venus could mean to exploring space in the future and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or life beyond this planet. | |
But maybe not as we know it. | |
So those three things first. | |
And what I'm going to do with them is I'm going to run them back to back to back. | |
So I'm not going to speak in between them because it'll be obvious who's speaking. | |
Then we go to Paul Sinclair and an update from him on his material that he's been researching for the truth proof books and his other work. | |
I know that Paul Sinclair is one of your favorite guests. | |
He's definitely one of mine. | |
I'm very proud that he did his first interview with me and is now internationally famous. | |
So that's the way it's going to run. | |
David Whitehouse, Sarah Crudus, Seth Szostak from SETI. | |
Then we'll have Paul Sinclair. | |
And I hope that you enjoy the material. | |
Please let me know what you think and thank you very much for being in touch with me. | |
Don't forget, of course, when you get in touch with The Unexplained, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show. | |
So, first off, Venus and Dr. David Whitehouse. | |
So, David, we both know that Twitter today, and to a small extent yesterday, has been on fire with unconfirmed reports that we're getting an important space announcement very soon, possibly signs of an indicator of life beyond this planet. | |
Now, I've seen, as you have seen, a thousand hoaxes and a thousand misinterpretations over a lifetime. | |
So I'm wondering, how much of this are you able to tell me? | |
Well, I don't think it's unconfirmed now. | |
I think it's definite that there is an interesting molecule called phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, which is very difficult to make, except in circumstances of life, except by bacteria that don't like oxygen. | |
And it's tantalizing, and people are going away trying to think of other ways to produce this interesting molecule that doesn't involve life. | |
But it's a fascinating subject. | |
There'd been speculation for decades that the dark streaks in the Venusian atmosphere had some absorber. | |
They should call it the unknown absorber and may have properties like bacteria. | |
But these are observations made with Hawaii in South America, which look at the spectra. | |
And yes, a case, it is phosphine. | |
Where it came from is the question. | |
It could be life. | |
This could be a wonderful, amazing, history-making observation. | |
But there's more work to be done on it to see if you can find another way to explain it. | |
But it is absolutely fascinating. | |
And as you pointed out, it is fascinating the way the story came out. | |
Well, it's bizarre. | |
Well, yes. | |
In fact, what happened was it's been rumours about this for many months. | |
But I think about at the beginning of the month, Skype Night magazine tweeted that they were postponing their Sky Out Night, which is about tonight, till tomorrow because of a big discovery. | |
Now, you and I both know in journalism, if you're going to announce a big discovery, you don't give people two weeks plus advance warning that something's going to happen, but not tell them what it is because somebody's going to be able to do it. | |
Well, no, you don't. | |
Because human curiosity is everybody will want to try and find out, and inevitably somebody will. | |
That's right. | |
And in fact, it was also badly organized in the sense that MIT, one of the universities involved, had on their YouTube website a video explaining all of this that was accessible to the public until a few years ago. | |
And can I just stop you there, David? | |
I've seen that. | |
Did that come from them? | |
Yes, it did. | |
It's a MIT PR department-made video explaining what it's all about. | |
And it was presumably meant to be released when the embargo on this story lifted at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon. | |
But as you and I have journalism backgrounds, you know that embargoes happen all the time, especially in science. | |
And we have to explain, just to our listener quickly, that an embargo is where somebody believes they have a great story. | |
They want all the media to cover it simultaneously. | |
And so what they do is they send out a news release to everybody and they say this story is embargoed. | |
In other words, you cannot use it until a particular date and time. | |
But unusually and bizarrely, this story was flagged up to journalists a couple of weeks ago, but it's crept out already. | |
And indeed, as you say, on a video released by one of the research organizations involved in the research already. | |
That's right. | |
And by a website which probably accidentally jumped the gun on this. | |
But it's everywhere now. | |
And, you know, if I remember as a journalist, you know, you had embargo, you know, you do the preparation for it. | |
You release it when the announcement is made. | |
And in fact, a lot of people were invited to the press conference and not told what it was about. | |
So they weren't subject to any embargo because they didn't know what the subject was. | |
But there comes a time when the embargo is broken. | |
And I reckon, by my estimates, millions of people on Twitter and Facebook and the internet have already seen this story in front of them. | |
So it's rather like politics. | |
You know, you get the Prime Minister giving a big speech on Tuesday. | |
It comes out in the Sunday newspapers and everybody forgets about the embargo and the story goes. | |
Politics should be the same as science in this respect. | |
Science journalists are not behaving like journalists, standing around thinking, well, it might be all over Twitter and there might be lots and lots of the public talking about it, but I'm not going to talk about it at all for 24 hours later. | |
I think the story's out and that's why I feel happy talking about it. | |
And I feel happy to let you talk about it because you are the man we used to see on BBC's 9 o'clock news when it was 9 o'clock news and 10 o'clock news talking about space. | |
So you know your stuff and you've also seen the genesis of this thing and you confirmed to me that that video that appeared on YouTube actually came from the people who did the research or at least some of it. | |
So look, we've said in a very roundabout way, and forgive me for having tiptoed my way into this instead of having jumped into it shouting, wow, what an amazing discovery. | |
Let's just underline it now for my listener, because we may be the first to talk about this, who knows? | |
But there will be others, many, I'm sure. | |
Let's just explain that something called phosphine, they call it a very smelly gas, has been identified, they think, in the atmosphere of Venus. | |
Now, it would have to be up there because the actual surface of Venus is a very forbidding place, yes? | |
Exactly. | |
The surface of Venus is 460 degrees centigrade hot. | |
You would be crushed, fried, you know, it's an inhospitable place. | |
But there are certain parts of the clouds of Venus, which aren't, it's a nasty place in general. | |
There are layers of sulfuric acid droplets in some parts of Venus's atmosphere, but there are certain parts of it which are quite temperate and may be a temperature rather like the Earth's atmosphere. | |
And it's postulated that this phosphine might come from bacteria in those regions. | |
And certainly phosphine is a very difficult molecule to make in other circumstances other than life. | |
We may not find out more about phosphine in the future and find that it's not life, but this does look very, very promising. | |
The problem, of course, as you said, is the surface, is that nothing could live on the surface. | |
So a theory I've heard is that perhaps in the past, billions of years ago, when Venus was much cooler, was much more like the Earth, perhaps bacteria started then and somehow found a part of their life cycle being blown around in the clouds. | |
And then as the surface became hotter and the atmosphere became thicker, they carried on and they've been there for a long time. | |
This is all speculation, all interesting, but it is, this is potentially one of the biggest discoveries of all time. | |
It is, and we're talking in very measured tones, and we're not screaming and shouting about it. | |
But, you know, what you may just have heard is the nub, the genesis of something absolutely huge. | |
First discovery. | |
Sorry, you were saying. | |
First discovery of life off the Earth. | |
Wow. | |
Yeah. | |
And you heard it here. | |
I can't believe we're saying these words. | |
Now, we may well discover more. | |
Of course, we will discover more because that's science. | |
But let me just quote this. | |
One of the things I read about phosphine was this. | |
As far as scientists know, there are only two ways to produce it. | |
You said this already anyway. | |
Either artificially in a laboratory, which they haven't got on Venus as far as we know, or by certain kinds of microbes that live in oxygen-free environments. | |
So if it's the microbes, then we have to start asking, how would microbes get there? | |
And isn't this exciting? | |
Because, as Esther Ranson used to say, that's life. | |
Well, and Jeff Goldblum said life finds a way, didn't he, in Jurassic Park? | |
Who knows? | |
I mean, it may well be, there's been lots of speculation for many decades that life might have started on Mars and rocks thrown off Mars by collisions might have reached the Earth and seeded the Earth or vice versa. | |
It might well even be that life started on Mars or the Earth and seeded Venus. | |
We don't know. | |
I mean, it's all great stuff of scientific investigation and speculation. | |
But if that phosphine comes from life, there is life on another planet. | |
It was quite amazing because had you, although there'd been talk about life in the atmosphere of Venus for many decades, everybody thought it would be Mars where you found it first. | |
And doesn't that just show you how science works? | |
Crept up behind us, Venus might be the first place we found life in the universe other than on the Earth. | |
And isn't that amazing? | |
If all this turns out the way we think it might, then it's also bizarre and so human the way that this actually has crept out. | |
It got out by accident in an unintended way. | |
Well, I think actually it got out because the management of the announcement of this story was very, very poor. | |
I think that whoever organized the press conference and then gave lots of time between the invitation and sending out a press release to some people and the press conference, you know, lasted far too long and was asking for somebody to nip in and break the embargo. | |
And it's one thing to, I mean, I remember in my days as a journalist, you'd see the story all over the place, even in newspapers. | |
But the original source of it would say, no, the embargo is still on. | |
You can't talk about it. | |
Well, nonsense to that. | |
If the whole world is talking about it, if millions of people are talking about it on Twitter and Facebook, then any mainstream journalist is doing a disservice to their audience if they ignore it for another 24 hours. | |
Why should suffer? | |
Very quickly then, David, I hear what you say. | |
One quick question, and then we have to take some commercials. | |
If you were doing the BBC Science beat now for television, would you have been on the television news tonight with this? | |
I heard about it on the air at six o'clock this evening. | |
I was talking with former BBC Space and Science editor, Dr. David Whitehouse, just before, who's also got a book out, Space 2069. | |
He's a very old friend of mine. | |
I've known him for years. | |
And we talked about a story that I can't believe I'm talking about in this way. | |
Because if this story had come out in an orthodox way and not just slipped out by being tweeted all over the place, by being put on science and space websites and then, in one case that I know about, taken down, and then a video, which David told me about, that actually came from the people who've made this discovery being actually out there. | |
So it is the strangest genesis of what could be the biggest story of one of the biggest stories of my lifetime, and that's longer than yours. | |
This is the story, and I appreciate if you don't want to say much about this, but it is all over Twitter, and it's been all over the internet, and David has told me a lot of the information as we think we know it about this now, that there is a possibility that something called phosphine has been discovered in the atmosphere of Venus. | |
Now, phosphine, we only know here on Earth, of two ways that that can be produced. | |
One is in a laboratory, which, as far as we know, they don't have on Venus, and the other is by life. | |
So what we are talking about tonight is something, and we don't know all of the details, we will get those in due course, that may be absolutely huge. | |
And I'm just going to say to you your thoughts, and I'm going to let you say whatever you want to. | |
Well, interestingly enough, I actually wrote about this in the book because the theory that there is life in the vents of Venus, in the clouds of Venus, is one which has been around for some time. | |
Now, what I would say is I think it's bad form in an era of fake news to be speculating about a story before it's been officially released. | |
I think as journalists, we all have a responsibility to not speculate too much, unless we are the astrobiologists or the exact scientists working on this. | |
We can't make assumptions. | |
But the idea that there's life within our own solar system is A highly hypothesis which is one which is gaining traction. | |
Obviously, Mars is one of the first places we think of where microbial life may exist. | |
There's then Europa, which is an icy moon of Jupiter, and then Enceladus, which is an icy moon of Saturn, and both these moons have liquid oceans underneath them. | |
And then there's other places within our solar system where we think life may exist. | |
Only microbial life, simple life. | |
And Venus is one of those where in recent years there's been talk that even within the clouds of Venus, there may be some sort of simple life because the only sample we have of life in this entire universe, which is too impossibly large to even begin to comprehend, is one. | |
It's planet Earth and all the life that exists on Earth. | |
So we only know life as we know it and how it exists on Earth, carbon-based life. | |
But what we're discovering by exploring Earth is even in the depths of the Marianas Trench, the depths of the ocean where we think life couldn't survive, we find life there. | |
And that's called extremophiles. | |
We find life in really extreme places on Earth where we think they can't exist. | |
And then we look at the weird and wonderful places in our solar system. | |
And just remember, ours is one of many trillions of solar systems, which most likely exist in the universe. | |
You know, for every star you see when you look up at the night sky, there's at least one planet orbiting around it. | |
There's more planets than stars out there. | |
So we look at these weird and wonderful worlds in our solar system. | |
And we know on Earth, with our one sample of life, life as we know it can exist in much more extreme environments. | |
And we've got all these candidates within our own solar system. | |
And Venus, this place which was, you know, Venus is one of learning about Venus as a child was one of the things which first got me into space. | |
It's almost like Earth's evil twin with this toxic atmosphere which will crush you within seconds when you land on the planet. | |
But we now, it's been talked for a while now that there could be life within these vents, within these clouds of Venus, microbial, very simple life. | |
So what's likely to come out in this press conference tomorrow is they found another piece of evidence. | |
It's highly unlikely they're going to say, yes, we've proved conclusively we are alone. | |
We are not alone in the universe because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, to quote the late, great cosmologist Carl Sagan. | |
And we don't have that extraordinary evidence. | |
If this is what it appears to be, if this is what it appears to be, what this is is another brick in the wall. | |
Yeah, it is. | |
It's another brick in the wall. | |
I like to say another piece in the jigsaw puzzle, but I like another brick in the wall. | |
That's a great expression. | |
It's another, we're just, you know, we're trying to build the house or put together that jigsaw puzzle. | |
We're gathering up pieces of evidence. | |
If you were to ask me off the record, obviously I appreciate it's on the radio, so it is on the record still. | |
But I think it's highly unlikely that we are alone in the universe. | |
It's whether there's intelligent life or not, which is the real question. | |
But this is another big step. | |
And I think when people look back at this century or this century in the last century as well, it won't so much be things which consume the news agenda right now. | |
So Brexit, maybe COVID, but a thousand years from now, people are going to remember Apollo, the first time human beings set foot on another world. | |
And they're going to remember the point in this century when we prove, hopefully, that we are not alone in this universe. | |
Right, because all of them are. | |
Again, I totally agree with you. | |
They're going to be looking at the big picture and those things are in the big picture. | |
And, you know, Dominic Cummings going to test his eyesight won't figure in anything. | |
Oh, let's not go there. | |
But they're the small beer of the great brewery of the cosmos, which is an appalling way of, that's a real Alan Partridge way of putting it. | |
But you know what I'm saying? | |
No, I do. | |
I'm a big fan of Alan Partridge, starting off in local radio. | |
There's nothing wrong with Alan Partridge. | |
But this is kind of why I wrote this book and why I hope this book inspires people and gives people hope. | |
So look up our story with the stars. | |
I just want more people to look up and be inspired because this year has been awful. | |
This is not how I expected this year to be for me. | |
I should have been back over in America. | |
I'm now, you know, in lockdown still in London. | |
But, you know, space still gives me hope and I hope it can give other people hope and wonder and just inspire people because we really need that hope and that inspiration right now. | |
And I think if people could just stop and look up and they could hear about that Venus news tomorrow and that next piece of evidence in that jigsaw puzzle, that brick wall that you're building for your house, it's just, we are living in the best time. | |
You know, obviously it's a terrible year, but we really are. | |
The advances in television, we're the most advanced we've ever been as a species. | |
You know, we are able to keep our own planet and look back at our own planet. | |
We're able to view our planet from afar. | |
We're able to send robots to other worlds. | |
Our world of today is a world of science fiction for people only a lifetime ago. | |
And so this Venus News, it's incredibly exciting, but it's, you know, it's not going to prove either way whether we're alone or not, but it's likely to be that next piece of evidence. | |
And it's just within the next few decades, we will likely answer that question of are we alone or not? | |
And it's just such an exciting time. | |
And just you can't even begin to imagine what is out there. | |
Seth is online to us now. | |
Seth, are you intrigued and joyous at this news? | |
Oh, yes. | |
Absolutely, Howard. | |
I mean, this is like hearing rumors that you've won the lottery, but quite sure. | |
So, you know, you haven't bought that new car quite yet. | |
But what it means for you, I think, in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not here is life, but we're on the right track. | |
Well, there is that, but I think that to some extent, it's also the former, that here is life, because, you know, we've been looking for life anywhere in the universe beyond Earth for a long time. | |
And most of the attention nearby, anyhow, has gone to Mars, people looking for life on Mars. | |
And, you know, there's still, I mean, hardware is on its way to Mars right now as we speak to crawl around the dusty surface and find some rocks that look like they have, you know, preserved microfossils. | |
Who would have thought Venus? | |
Venus is just hell. | |
It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit. | |
And so if it's true that this is actually due to biology, I think the importance is not that these are intelligent beings, they're some sort of microbes, but that biology can get started just about anywhere. | |
So does it tell us anything about whether there had been life in an earlier phase of Venus when it was not looking like it looks now? | |
I mean, the actual surface of Venus is not a place you'd want to go and spend a holiday. | |
No, no, no, it'd be a very short holiday, and your car would melt. | |
But yes, it does mean that because you can't really, I mean, nobody knows how you could get life started up in the clouds. | |
It can survive there, but that doesn't mean it got started there just in the same way that, I mean, you know, polar bears can survive in the Arctic, but probably life didn't get started there. | |
What it means is that billions of years ago, up until maybe 2 billion years ago, there were oceans on Venus. | |
I mean, nobody has any photos, but that's plausible. | |
And life presumably got started in the oceans and maybe filled up the oceans with microbial life. | |
But as the oceans boiled away, the life either had to find a new place to go or it was out of there. | |
And some microbes were able to find a new place to live up in the clouds. | |
Now that we have this news, then what do we do about it? | |
Well, I think the first thing that people are going to want to do is send probes to Venus. | |
You know, that hasn't been done very often. | |
Venus is a really tough environment. | |
But one advantage is that it's closer to the sun than the Earth. | |
So you're sort of going downhill in terms of gravity. | |
And it's a little easier to go to Venus than to go to Mars. | |
But your spacecraft has to be able to take the conditions there. | |
I think what you want to do is drop something down through those clouds, you know, and grab things at the right altitudes and do some analysis and just hope that the spacecraft still works when it hits the ground. | |
You'll get the results. | |
So any kind of life that may exist beyond this discovery there is going to be life of what they call an extremophile type, obviously. | |
The kind of life that can survive, that has surprised us here on Earth by being able to survive in deep trenches in the oceans and various other inhospitable places. | |
Yeah, nuclear reactors, the fuel tanks of aircraft, stuff like that. | |
Yeah, of course, you'd call it an extremophile. | |
I mean, I don't know that you'd be happy floating in those clouds, but keep in mind, it's not all that bad. | |
When you get, you know, 30 miles, 50 kilometers, say, above the surface of Venus, the temperatures drop to, you know, something that you'd find in downtown Manchester or something. | |
I mean, they're not so bad. | |
So aside from the fact that there isn't too much to eat for a human up there, you know, you wouldn't find it all that bad, cloudy all the time. | |
Right. | |
So here we have this discovery on or around Venus. | |
That must indicate that there are other things to be discovered in other places. | |
And if ever you needed an impetus, if ever you needed a case to put to politicians for why you've got to put money into space research, I guess this is the greatest boost that all of it could have. | |
I think so. | |
Now, mind you, the people that did this work, and they were in Cardiff and MIT and elsewhere, are very cautious. | |
And they're saying, look, you know, it might be life, but it might not be life. | |
And one has to keep that in mind that, you know, some clever chemists may soon come up with a way to produce this phosphine gas that doesn't involve biology. | |
But if it turns out to be life, and if life could get started on Venus and then survive a little bit in the clouds, my goodness, that means that any planet that has oceans and whatever temperate environments is going to cook up life. | |
So there must be life all over the place. | |
Where would we go beyond Venus first then, do you think? | |
Where should we go? | |
Well, Mars is always the thumbs up place to go, but there are maybe even better places in the outer solar system. | |
Some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have giant oceans, so there may be something there. | |
If you're talking about intelligent life, I mean, who's to say? | |
Just because you have life on Venus, it didn't cook up any Venusians that were clever enough to, you know, come to Earth or anything. | |
So, you know, I think that SETI will continue to look at planets around other stars. | |
Will it change the way that you work, do you think? | |
Well, it is today. | |
I'm getting a lot of email, but no, I don't think so. | |
Because remember, we're looking for the intelligent critters, and you're not going to find them on Venus or Mars or any of the places in our solar system. | |
But it's very encouraging because it shows you that, well, what you're looking for is life that's evolved to something clever. | |
But life seems to get started easily enough. | |
So there must be a lot of places where it has done that, where it has produced intelligent beings. | |
Is there any possibility that the phosphine could have been deposited in the atmosphere from somewhere else? | |
I don't think from somewhere else, but unless you can consider the surface of Venus somewhere else. | |
I think that the most likely explanation not involving life would be volcanic action, because we have some evidence here on Earth of phosphine being detected from volcanoes, spewed out of volcanoes. | |
So it may be, and remember, Venus has a lot of volcanic activity. | |
It may be that that's the explanation. | |
But I don't think that anybody imported it, ordered it on Amazon or anything, bring that phosphine over here. | |
Right. | |
So this is a very exciting story that something that is connected with life, that is life or an element of life, is there around Venus. | |
And the possibilities beyond there would seem to me, and I know nothing about science, as you know, as you've heard on regular occasions, but they would seem to be limitless now. | |
So it is as exciting as we said, Seth. | |
I think it is. | |
I really think it's a huge story. | |
Yep, a huge story. | |
Hey, Seth, we'll talk at more length in the future, but thank you for making time for me on what I know is a really busy day. | |
Thank you. | |
Thank you, Howard. | |
It's always a pleasure. | |
Set he's Seth Szostak, and before that, you heard Sarah Crudus. | |
And before that, Dr. David Whitehouse on what we have discovered, it seems, in the atmosphere of Venus. | |
Watch this space, as they say. | |
Now let's get to Paul Sinclair in Yorkshire with an update on his research. | |
I think you're going to find this interesting. | |
So this is Paul Sinclair. | |
Always a pleasure to speak with you. | |
And we'll just, you lead me, tell me where you want to go, and we'll just begin. | |
Well, that makes sense to me. | |
But listen, looking at it as we are now coming to the back end of 2020, how has your year been? | |
Have you been busy? | |
I think you have. | |
It's been ultra busy. | |
You know, I mean, you'd think, I know the COVID sort of slowed everything down for people, but not particularly for me. | |
And a lot of stuff that I'm doing, Howard, is in locations where there's no people around. | |
So it's not really restricting me. | |
I mean, we've found ourselves in the forests of North Yorkshire, spending nights in them, and all sorts of weird and interesting places, just chasing up leads. | |
It's been really good so far. | |
I've no complaints. | |
So it's kind of given you space and time to think, I suppose. | |
It really has. | |
I mean, obviously, there's been a few of us going in, but I mean, not excessive amounts of people, you know, three or four people, cameras, and just spending nights there. | |
And I'm really sort of excited about what we're doing in North Yorkshire at the moment. | |
I don't think anybody, well, I didn't appreciate the actual vastness of it. | |
It's 544 square miles of forest and moorland and the potential for unexplained activity. | |
And I'm not the first person to write about this, Howard. | |
You know, I spoke to Tony Dodd about it, who you'll have had dealings with, I would have thought, years ago. | |
I spoke to Tony about some of the things, and we're fortunate that we're going to be including some of his letters, which he sent to a friend about strange animals that were seen, allegedly seen, in the forests. | |
And it's tying in all these years later from the 1990s, it's tying in with what people are reporting today. | |
So exciting times. | |
Yeah, before we get stuck into it all then, Paula, you know, nobody is more diligent, I don't think, as a researcher than you are. | |
I mean, you absolutely live it and you have to do this stuff. | |
But let's just, for maybe anybody who might be new to you, let's just talk about the area that we're discussing. | |
So on the coast, how far north and south does it go and how far inland? | |
We're on the East Yorkshire coast. | |
So if we sort of stuck a pin in a map, we're like we've said, you know, Filey, Bempton, Speaton, around that area. | |
And then we're probably going 30 miles up the coast, 30 miles down and going inland 30 miles. | |
But having said that, Howard, there's so many people contacting me with really good information now that, as you know, we did Truth Proof 1, 2 and 3. | |
Those books now, the future books will be expanding out of the area. | |
They've got to do because I can't neglect first-class sightings and accounts just because they're not falling into the area that these first three books sort of went into. | |
Although there's no shortage of information, it just seems like you lift one stone and loads and loads of people are coming out with it. | |
Well, this is the thing, isn't it? | |
Since you started doing this, and I did the first interview, I keep boring people with this story, the first interview with you, and I knew that you were going places with this stuff, people started contacting me. | |
But more importantly, as all of this has got momentum, the truth-proof books and your other research, people have just been contacting you. | |
And it's all kinds of people in all kinds of locations, and even people you wouldn't think would believe in or be intrigued by this stuff, getting in touch with them. | |
That's true. | |
There's scientists contacting me now. | |
I had a meeting with a... | |
I met up with a scientist a few months ago. | |
Sorry, a professor a few months ago. | |
Let me correct myself. | |
Who's wanting to write a book with me at some point? | |
And there's another guy, a scientist from overseas, who believes that the stuff that I'm looking into, obviously I don't realize I'm doing it, but he says you're presenting it in such a way and you've got such a vast amount of information, like witness accounts and documentation to back up what you're saying. | |
Not proof, let me just stress people, but enough evidence to suggest that things of an unexplained nature have been taken place, have taken place, and it's not just from one person. | |
You know, you've got a lot. | |
He says that you're probably getting into a position where a scientific study could be conducted in the area of research that you're working in. | |
So it is, it's really interesting that I've found myself doing things like this. | |
Well, absolutely. | |
And, you know, amazing how you've grabbed the attention of people all over the world, not just in this country. | |
Now, we've got a whole lot of stuff to work through. | |
So let's start here. | |
Big cat sightings. | |
Now, I tend to associate those with, you know, Gloucestershire, maybe Dorset and places like that. | |
But you keep having those there, don't you? | |
We do. | |
And there was one just a few weeks ago. | |
I've not spoken to the witness. | |
And once again, we've got to name the place. | |
It was at Bempton. | |
And on social media, this chap put on that he'd been holidaying in the area. | |
And he said, has anybody ever claimed to have seen a black panther in the area of Bempton? | |
He said, and I've not got the literature in front of me, but pretty good memory. | |
And he says, I'm not mad. | |
I know what I saw. | |
And he said he was just coming out of the RSPB reserve and it was early evening, so it's still light. | |
And there's an area there as you drive down to it, people, it's like a little quarry area. | |
It's not very deep, probably 30 feet deep. | |
They call it the Dell. | |
And he said, a black panther ran out across the road. | |
Now, that went on to the social media websites around Bempton and Bookton and Flamborough. | |
And a few people commented, and I think my name were mentioned. | |
And I have reached out to this guy, tried to speak to him. | |
A good friend of mine's managed to speak to his wife. | |
But I think due to various people on those sites, the politest thing I can say is telling him he's not seeing it, which is all that's insulting if somebody really has seen it. | |
The thread's been removed and he's not talking. | |
He's just gone into himself. | |
What does he, well, I mean, what did he describe the cat that he saw or the animal that he saw as being? | |
He described a Labrador-sized black cat, long tail, sweeping down to the floor and sort of curling up, slinking shoulders, and it ran across the road in front of his car and up onto the fields. | |
But this is not the first time, Howard. | |
Close to Flamborough Lighthouse, there was a couple, I think it was last year, an elderly couple. | |
They parked up, probably having a flask of coffee or something and overlooking the sea. | |
And between where the car park is and the cliffs, there's an area of gorse bushes and sheep grazing. | |
And they claim that they saw a panther or that's how they describe it. | |
I mean, I don't know. | |
It could be a puman. | |
You know, I really don't know, but it's black. | |
And just slinking along the edgerows. | |
And then, obviously, a few years ago, the local paper said the Bookton Beast. | |
Bookton people is only two or three miles away from Bempton and Flamborough. | |
And the pond at Bookton, there's a little sort of pond there with waterfowl in and everything. | |
Five separate witnesses claimed to have seen a black panther. | |
But only ever one seen. | |
So what does that mean when you think, you know, are they breeding near there or what? | |
You know, how does that tie in? | |
I don't know how it ties in, Howard. | |
I find it fascinating because there's certain locations that they're seen year after year. | |
I wouldn't say every year, but there's a lane between Bempton and Bridlington called Short Lane. | |
There's no trees either side of it. | |
There's just open fields. | |
Yet the archives of the newspapers, I think it shows it in the 1990s, it shows it in 2006. | |
Then there's reports later of a black cat seen on the lane. | |
It's strange how certain locations are throwing this up. | |
The panther scene at Bookton, well, I suppose that's plausible because it's an area of water and things do have to come to drink. | |
But why are you only seeing it for four to five days intermittently, very early in the morning, and then never seeing it again? | |
Where do they go? | |
You know, if it traveled 10 miles, you would think that people would be talking about it in another area. | |
Unless, of course, it knows how to use the terrain. | |
You know, if you know how to camouflage yourself, you know this from like the army, the soldiers, they know how to hide in the natural terrain. | |
So presumably a creature that had been, that had bred and adapted to the terrain would know how to hide. | |
This is true. | |
Yeah, and that's probably what's happening. | |
Up in North Yorkshire, Derby Forest and around those forests, I have a good friend who works for, if it's internet, or FITS internet, is that the right way to say it? | |
That's his job anyway, connecting internet to homes and remote places, farms. | |
He gets all over the place. | |
So when he's working on these jobs, obviously he's doing someone a service and these people are quite amiable and willing to talk. | |
And it's his interest as well. | |
It's Chris who's working with us on the Dark Forest project. | |
And he'd asked various gamekeepers and farmers if they knew anything about the black cats. | |
And they suggested the Pyumas that had been sighted in the area. | |
And one gamekeeper told him that there was four breeding pairs that they knew of up around Dalby Forest. | |
They even knew my name. | |
not the cats people. | |
It's just the, the farmer and the gatekeeper. | |
They didn't want the, And they're happy enough to let them exist because apparently they're not causing any problem to livestock and they're keeping deer population down. | |
So we're saying that these things are hiding in plain sight. | |
People know about them. | |
Certainly there's evidence that farmers know about them. | |
And they don't disturb them. | |
And as you say, they do a good job for the farmers. | |
And it's been estimated recently that there are maybe hundreds of big cats in this country. | |
I don't know whether you saw that survey. | |
There's a guy at some agricultural college, I think, in Sirencester, who made an estimate of hundreds of them. | |
I did see that, Howard. | |
And, you know, it wouldn't surprise me. | |
I mean, I wouldn't even dare take a guess on the numbers, but I'm more than confident in saying that I do believe that they're here and they're active and roaming these remote areas. | |
I mean, there's also the strange sightings, and I think we've talked about them before in the 1990s, I think it were 1997, where over a period of probably two weeks, there was a lion sighted and a female lion at Rudston, which is not far from us. | |
And it was sighted by more than one person, and it was also seen at Waldgate. | |
And you would think to yourself, Howard, if you've got something as ferocious as that, there'd be fatalities, but there were no fatalities reported. | |
So you just wonder sometimes where they fit in. | |
Because people are seeing them. | |
If there's three or four people seeing them, they can't all be mistaken. | |
But then you say to yourself, but hold on a minute, Paul, you're talking about an apex predator. | |
This is not possible. | |
This thing, anybody walking on road with the dog or the children, there's going to be a tragedy. | |
But there's none of that reported. | |
And the same goes for the Panthers, because you get children playing in forests and woodland. | |
They do say, though, that they are not dangerous. | |
They would be inclined to walk away unless, of course, their territory or their offspring were threatened in some way. | |
Other than that, they're not going to bother with us. | |
Well, you make a good point. | |
And that's, well, I'm going to say that's probably the reason. | |
That has to be the reason, I would think, Howard, because otherwise we would be seeing fatalities and we would be getting people reporting being attacked or something of that nature being aggressive towards them. | |
And we're not seeing it, are we? | |
We're just getting reports. | |
Well, I mean, let's keep an eye on this one, but the big cat thing keeps recurring in the news. | |
So I'm sure you're going to get more reports. | |
You've been working with Andrew Collins. | |
You can tell me about him, but you've been trying to track, and is this in the Bempton area, bursts of static energy coming up from the ground, which is a very strange phenomenon. | |
Tell me about that. | |
Well, Andrew's been a few times visited us with his friend. | |
And Andrew, how would you describe Andrew Collins for people who don't know him? | |
Andrew, Andrew's a very good researcher. | |
He lives and breathes the subject of the unexplained and UFOs. | |
And for anybody that doesn't know, he's written numerous books. | |
I can think of one off the top of my head, LightQuest, which is a very well-received book. | |
And I think he works for the History Channel now. | |
Does he? | |
Ancient Aliens. | |
Right. | |
No, I've seen him on a few things, but you know, they get put on different channels and stuff. | |
So that's him. | |
And you started to investigate reports of static. | |
Well, how it came about, Andrew came up, he was interested in the area. | |
And on each occasion, he likes to bring recording equipment and sort of sound-sensitive equipment that's basically it's recording noises that aren't audible to our ears. | |
And on the first time he came up, all his equipment went flat that were charged up, or most of it, which is not unusual. | |
We've taken equipment up there, fully charged camcorders that have gone flat. | |
But when he listened to his recording equipment, he got some very strange bursts of static. | |
And bearing in mind where we were recordings on the edge of the North Sea with nothing to the right or left of us or in front of us, or we perceived or assumed there was nothing. | |
And it was in bursts of, I think, when he had it analysed by a guy called Rodney Howell, an acoustics expert, it was in bursts of one, two, one, then a gap, and then one, two, one. | |
Now, please understand, I'm not an acoustics expert. | |
I'm just repeating what was told. | |
And he'd got these strange bursts of energy for want of a better word. | |
Well, what I've done since then, and I spoke to Andrew the other week about it, I took a friend up with me who was an acoustic expert. | |
I believe if you're not qualified to sort of look at these things, then take someone with you who is. | |
And he'd built some fabulous equipment with a big receiver on it that you carried. | |
And we went up with a laptop that were downloading the data. | |
And all the way down after we'd parked up at about 5.30, he'd got a machine or a piece of apparatus with him that were registering nothing because obviously there's nothing there. | |
But we sort of carried on walking. | |
We got up around the old REF base, outside of the base, might I add. | |
We don't go inside the perimeter. | |
It's private land. | |
And got the laptop switched on. | |
And we got a very, very powerful narrow beam, narrow band of energy that was constant. | |
Now, Peter said, all this thing, basically like a big aerial that he's made himself. | |
And please be aware, listeners, it's not makeshift. | |
It's made with professional components by somebody qualified to make it. | |
He said, all it out to sea. | |
I did that. | |
I held it left. | |
I held it right. | |
We held it to the sky. | |
We held it down to the floor. | |
The reading was the same. | |
He's never come across anything like it. | |
So he's got all that. | |
We don't know what it is yet. | |
He's putting it to some of his colleagues and they're analysing this. | |
Please forgive me anybody who's into sound and things because I may be wrong, but I think it were gigawatts of power. | |
Right. | |
I wonder then, and we know that there's a lot of military, I mean, there's always a lot of military operations in that area, right along the eastern seaboard of this country. | |
I wonder if it's some kind of radar, some kind of, I don't know, some kind of detection equipment that uses high energy. | |
The only time that I've known recording equipment to be affected in that way was when I was standing on the top of the Empire State Building in New York trying to record, and the motor on my old cassette deck that I was recording on was actually slowed down, and there was so much interference on the recording that I wasn't able to do any recordings at the top of the Empire State Building. | |
Kind of reminds me of that. | |
Now there was lots of radio frequency energy in that location because there are television transmitters, there are phone towers, radio transmitters for all of New York City there. | |
So maybe it's something of that kind. | |
I think it has to be, Howard. | |
I don't think we're looking at anything paranormal. | |
But you're not talking New York, though. | |
You're talking about in the country. | |
So who is using equipment of that power? | |
That's what we need to know. | |
You're absolutely right. | |
We're talking about on Edgett North. | |
In the middle of nowhere. | |
In the middle of nowhere. | |
We're actually going to go up again tonight and we're trying a different location. | |
We'll do that same location. | |
Then we're just going a little bit. | |
We're going to go to the place where Andrew got the static bursts that he picked up on his equipment. | |
Where are we going to go next? | |
Strange lights that we've been talking about for years here, but strange lights beneath the sea this time, spotted between Filey and Speaton. | |
Yeah, that's an interesting one, Howard. | |
I've been telling people it's been a little bit flat as regards news, you know, along the coast. | |
Obviously, things can't be happening all the time. | |
And then a few weeks ago, I received a phone call from a guy who owns a bar in Filey. | |
And he told me that he'd locked his bar up. | |
I've not got the information in front of me, but I think it was something like 23 minutes past 11. | |
And he lives on the seafront at Filey. | |
And he was walking home. | |
And as he's walking home, he's looking out to sea, nice evening, and he can see two white lights and what he described as a purple light beneath the sea. | |
He said he thought they looked like they were about 10 miles out and they were a considerable size. | |
And he explained that they were between the bay and Speaton. | |
So we're probably looking at four miles from Filey Bay to Speaton. | |
So you're getting a rough idea if anybody wants to Google these areas. | |
And he's intrigued. | |
He's looking at them. | |
He says they're moving about. | |
You can see them moving about. | |
The surface of the sea is dark blue and there's two white lights and a purple one. | |
Is that sort of intrigued? | |
He decides to ring his wife. | |
He wants her to come and have a look at these lights. | |
But I don't know whether it were while he was waiting or he rang his wife after what happened next. | |
But they came out of the water, he claims these lights. | |
There can't be many music bars in Filey. | |
I'm not going to say the name of it, but I'm sure if you've actually found it and you went in and asked him, he'll back up what I'm saying. | |
He said these lights were moving about independently of one another above the sea and not just two foot above the sea. | |
They went up into the air. | |
At one point, he says they joined and became like one solid light. | |
And don't ask me if it looks purple and white, I've no idea, but that's what he told me. | |
Then they split up again and went beneath the surface of the sea. | |
His wife definitely came to look. | |
I don't know whether she saw them out of the water or not, But she saw them beneath the waves because he sent me some clips of film which she took on her phone, which were totally inconclusive because it just couldn't cope with the low light. | |
So are we talking, do you think, here, maybe I've jumped in too early, but are we talking USOs as they call them here? | |
Yeah, absolutely. | |
These things were beneath the surface of the North Sea, and for some reason or somehow they had the ability to come out. | |
If this guy's telling me the truth and I've known him a while and never spoke about anything to do with unexplained, obviously he knows this is my subject or my interest, should we say. | |
So that's why he contacted me, said, I've seen something highly unusual. | |
They watched them and it's something like 23 minutes past 11 they locked up. | |
So he'll be watching them at half past 11 and they watched them till half past 12. | |
Of course I said to him, I said, you should have rang me. | |
But obviously, I've still got six miles from Bridlington to Filey. | |
And if I'd have ran through, chances are they wouldn't have been there. | |
But I definitely would have jumped in car and drove through to see such a sort of spectacle. | |
At that hour, even you'd still think people might have seen them. | |
There's enough windows overlooking the sea on the seafront at Filey and along the coast, Reeton and different places. | |
But I can't think. | |
Listen, I'm scouring my head right now. | |
I've got reasonable general knowledge. | |
It's not brilliant. | |
I can't think of any natural phenomenon that would create something that is under the sea and then comes above the sea and then forms together and then splits apart. | |
What could that be? | |
It's a true unidentified. | |
It's a true unknown, isn't it? | |
I mean, I know that in the past, people have claimed to have seen spheres of red light entering the sea off Flamborough and Bempton. | |
Even one member of the staff at the RSPB. | |
And obviously, I don't know if they'd go on record as telling us that because of where they work. | |
But I mean, it shouldn't interfere or impede the job to say that they've seen something. | |
It's frustrating, actually, Howard, when you've got people who actually see something, but they daren't talk about it because the fear of no one believing you. | |
It's a strange position to be in. | |
But to jump back to the speat and Philey lights, yeah, they watched these for best part of an hour. | |
So I'm pretty sure other people must have seen them. | |
I mean, there's a webcam that overlooks Philey, and I contacted them. | |
And apparently, it does take images, the webcam, but they don't hold any data. | |
I think it's sort of eating it up as fast as it's taking them. | |
So it's a live webcam, which you can watch. | |
And if you saw something, I think it's probably there for three minutes. | |
So you could grab a frame capture, but you'd be pretty sad to sit looking at that all night, wouldn't you? | |
You know, so you guys have got what I've got on that sighting now, but there is a little bit more to tie into it. | |
As in a pod of dolphins, a basking shark, and a power outage. | |
What, at the same time? | |
Yeah, this happened at the same time. | |
I think it was the same day. | |
I wish I'd got this information in front of me, but within the power outage was days after, but the dolphins and the shark, I think, was the same day as, you know, during the daytime. | |
So what happened, I think it reported on social media and maybe in local paper, that there were a pod of dolphins, I think there were bottlenose dolphins in the bay that wouldn't leave the bay. | |
So obviously, we can't attribute that to the lights, but it was strange behavior, strange enough that people were talking about it because, you know, we've got dolphins in the area and pork boys, but there's a pod that will not go out of the bay, which they found odd. | |
And in the same bay, a basking shack, a 14-foot basking shack, beached and had to be destroyed. | |
They couldn't get it back out to sea. | |
It makes you think, Dunnic, it makes you think, you know, the basking shark and the dolphins, you wouldn't try and connect them to these lights normally. | |
But when you're thinking about it, like in the early hours or half past 11 till half past 12 that same day, these lights are seen. | |
And then the power goes out in Bempton. | |
Yeah, well, that were a few days after, and I got to speak to a guy that actually witnessed this. | |
This is why it's interesting. | |
It was on a place called Newsham Hill as you're driving down into Bempton. | |
So all these things, you know, all these little cameos of events, you think like, well, you know, probably none of them are connected. | |
But when you actually, nobody puts the pieces together, the dolphins and the basket shark. | |
Who would try and connect this with Bempton? | |
I mean, I'm not saying it is connected, but let me just tell the story. | |
There's some horses, I think there's three horses kept in a field about 50 yards away from where this tree split in half a few days after this incident with the lights. | |
So you think a tree splitting in half, what's this got to do with it? | |
Well, the guy who I spoke to, I've seen him since a few times, he said he was talking to the chap who owned these horses. | |
And he'd got hold of one of his horses and I think he was trying to stable it. | |
And then all of a sudden, the horse started acting strange and reared up and got away from him. | |
It bolted. | |
It stayed in the field, but it was really disturbed. | |
The other horses were running about upset. | |
And there was some sheep in a neighbouring field that all huddled in the top corner. | |
He said, then he looked over at the power lines. | |
He said, and there's a big tree there. | |
He says, and I'm looking at these power lines. | |
He says, and 30 yards right and left of this tree, the lines are cracking and banging, and blue sparks are coming off them. | |
He said, and then the next thing that happened was there was a loud crack and the tree split in half and fell on the power lines and put the power out to some of the homes in Bempton. | |
So I don't know what the mechanics of this are. | |
It could be just some freaky accident, but the horse bolting, the sheep perceiving some kind of disturbance, and the electrical disturbance on the lines happened before the tree split in half. | |
So it kind of, if he didn't, if I hadn't spoken to the first-hand witness, I wouldn't have got this story. | |
He actually saw it happen and the chap who owned the horse. | |
So just a sort of queer, quirky, if you like, strange account. | |
Whether it fits in with lights seen off the sea at Speaton a few days before and this basking shark and the dolphins, I don't know. | |
Well, it's another penny on the pile, isn't it? | |
Something weird that you've been looking into, and you look into a lot of weird things, but an osprey helicopter. | |
I don't know, is that a military helicopter? | |
I don't know, following a green orb off Hornsey. | |
Why would that be happening? | |
Really, no idea. | |
There was absolutely loads about it on social media earlier this year. | |
And we know social media has its disadvantages, but it does have its advantages as well, because there was a huge thread. | |
Well, over 100 people contributed to it, saying that they'd seen these Osprey helicopters. | |
I think they've got propellers on them. | |
To me, they look like a cross between a helicopter and a plane. | |
And they were pursuing or following a glowing green orb. | |
And as I say, lots of people contributed to this, Howard. | |
And what's interesting is in, I think it was Weaverthorpe, which is up on the Wolds, someone contacted me to say that their home overlooked some farmland and all the farmland was lit up and Osprey helicopters had landed on the field at Weaverthorpe and they'd seen a growing glowing green orb. | |
Now it is possible, people, that this orb was something being tested. | |
Not everything has to come from some other world, should we say? | |
So maybe it wasn't being pursued, maybe it was just being followed for test, but we don't know. | |
And what a strange thing to be happening there. | |
It is, yeah. | |
I mean, what can you say? | |
I mean, a sleepy little place like Eastern North Yorkshire or places, and you've got these things happening. | |
I find it amazing. | |
Strange beings seen at a place called Ticton. | |
When you say strange beings, what do you mean? | |
I was contacted by a guy who I've known for a few years. | |
He works for, or he has worked for Natural History Museum and a few other places. | |
It's quite a responsible job. | |
And his mum, we've been talking for years and his mum lives at Ticton. | |
So he contacted me to say that she'd told him something really peculiar, something that not only peculiar, but had disturbed her. | |
And she's not good at sleeping by all accounts. | |
So she'll get up at all silly hour and go downstairs and make herself a coffee and then sit down maybe for 10 minutes, I don't know, and then go back to bed. | |
And on this particular evening, and we're not talking, we're not talking that long ago. | |
I'll tell you when we're talking, Howard, it's when the I'm only using this as a reference people, it's not connected to it, but it's when the calf was mutilated at Todmodon. | |
So I can't think of the date, but this is when I received this information. | |
So as she's going back to bed, she walks along the landing with the landing lights on, and the bedroom door at the back of the house is open and curtains are open as well. | |
And she looks and she can see what she perceived as a window of next door, or the house opposite, the back of the house. | |
And she said, I walked to the window, she said, because there was a very, very tall, what she described as an alien-looking being in the window and two small ones. | |
So I'm absolutely intrigued, she said. | |
And then I looked at our grass or our garden and it's peppered with little red dots of light that she can't see projecting from anywhere, but she can see them. | |
And she's watching this for a bit. | |
And then she said the tall one turned and looked at her and it frightened her. | |
So she realized she was in full view because the backlight of the landing light was on. | |
So she walked onto the landing and turned the light off. | |
And when she turned back, everything had gone. | |
It was all in darkness. | |
Well, he went to speak to his mum the following weekend and they discussed it and she went upstairs and had a look at this because he's going to buy some kind of special camera to not a trail cam, he's got someone else in mind to try and record things. | |
But the interesting thing is there's a big tree in front of the house, the back of the house, so she can't actually see into next door's property. | |
So she was looking at some window or some opening that were just outside her own property. | |
She didn't realize at the time. | |
So just another interesting story that may develop. | |
I don't know. | |
We shall see. | |
One of many. | |
You're working. | |
I know that you're working on a project. | |
I know it's in the forests of North Yorkshire. | |
I know you can't say much about it, but what is being claimed to have been appearing or occurring there, you say has been truly terrifying. | |
You know I'm intrigued and you know I'm going to ask you what might this be? | |
Well, absolutely terrifying, to be honest with you, Howard. | |
I mean, we've got stories from a gamekeeper who claims he's seen something in the forest whilst working way back in 2002. | |
We've got three fishermen. | |
This is in the Forge Valley, which is up near Dalby Forest. | |
Do we call it Dalby or Dalby, but up there? | |
And they traveled over two hours into the forest and did a bit of wild camping. | |
They claim to have seen something truly terrifying that trapped them in the forest all night. | |
Well, not from not if we're going to go with the guys who were fishing and we've already filmed them, we've already got these guys to seem like genuine straight-up guys, and They've told us that this thing's silhouette, its profile when it turned to the right, was a dog's head. | |
Really? | |
And self-illuminating eyes, which I find incredible. | |
The night vision, if these things exist, people, the night vision must be just absolutely out of this world when you consider that you throw a torch onto an owl's eyes or something like that and the illumination that you get back. | |
And these guys are talking about eyes that were self-illuminated. | |
Well, this is deeply weird, and sadly, we're out of time. | |
This always happens, but we're talking almost like werewolves that have those luminous style eyes or cryptozoological creatures of some kind. | |
Yeah, I think that's where we're going with it, to be honest. | |
Well, Paul, you're always busy. | |
You never stop, Paul. | |
This documentary that I was a very small part of by doing a voice live for it, when's that going to be out? | |
I should think it will be next year, to be honest, Howard. | |
We've been so fortunate that you've helped us with it. | |
You know, we've got a fabulous guy in music industry professional that's helping us. | |
And yeah, we haven't got a date because we've still got people to talk to. | |
We've still got nights to spend in the forest. | |
We want to deliver something I'm genuinely serious here that's not been seen before. | |
Right. | |
Well, I'm looking forward to that for a whole variety of reasons. | |
But listen, you may not have a date, but you, Paul Sinclair, will always have an audience, and that's a fact. | |
And the number of emails I get about you, you wouldn't believe it if I showed you. | |
There are loads of them coming all the time. | |
So listen, thank you for making time for me. | |
Let's catch up in a couple of months, maybe six weeks, eight weeks or so, if that's all right with you. | |
Is that okay? | |
It's great. | |
Thank you very much, Art. | |
It's been a pleasure. | |
Oh, it always is, Paul. | |
Thank you very, very much. | |
Paul Sinclair, and we'll be catching up with him in about six or eight weeks from now. | |
So watch out for that on The Unexplained. | |
Thank you very much for being part of my show. | |
Don't forget, when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show. | |
You can always contact me through my website, theunexplained.tv. | |
And if you want to take a look at what's going on with the show, the latest news from it, you can go to my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes. | |
More great guests in the pipeline here. | |
My name is Howard Hughes. | |
It will always be. | |
This has been The Unexplained Online, and please, whatever you do. | |
Until next we meet, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch. | |
Thank you very much. | |
Take care. |