Edition 487 - Jason Gleaves & Tricia Roberston
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Well, out of my window, I've got grey skies and cloud here.
We've had a lot of rain in the last two weeks.
Amazing how the weather has changed, but I'm not going to harp on about the weather.
I know that in the southern hemisphere, you're heading into spring, and from what I'm seeing from the weather charts from New York City, you've still got some pretty good weather.
And maybe that's going to go until the end of the month.
And then, of course, we know what happens in New York.
You hit winter, and sometimes you hit winter big time.
But, you know, your weather reports from wherever you are, gratefully received.
That's mine.
What else is going on?
COVID-19, coronavirus.
The government brings in yet more measures here.
And I have now reached the stage where I just don't know what to believe and what to think.
People on one side saying, let's just forget all about it, get back to work, get back to normal life, ditch the masks, and other people saying time for a full lockdown to nip this thing in the bud before we go through a terrible winter of illness and death in this country.
So I now have reached the stage where quite often I just reach across to the radio or TV and I turn it off because you're not left any the wiser.
All you hear are conflicting arguments all the time.
And I know for a news person, which is me, that's a pretty controversial thing to say, but that's just kind of how I'm starting to feel about it now.
It is too depressing for words.
You know, I just hope that we come through this winter, you know, relatively unscathed and that this thing goes away, ASAP.
That's all I can say about it.
I really, I'm out of words now on this subject anyway.
What else is occurring?
I've had some really nice emails lately and thank you for them.
One of them, and you know who you are from a listener who said that she started listening when she was pregnant 10 years ago.
Now her boy, her son, is 10 years of age and she is still listening.
Thank you very much.
You don't know how much that email meant to me, but it just goes to show that life passes very quickly and you have to try and I wish I could take my own advice to make the maximum of every day.
Sometimes I've let bad experiences, work-wise or in other ways, deter me and put me off from doing things that I wanted to do.
And that's not a good idea.
My advice, if I ever had a son or daughter, which I won't now, is, you know, do the things that you want to do.
Have the experiences, because life passes by.
There's a snapping finger like that.
Gee, that's philosophical.
All right, keep the emails coming anyway.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
And thank you very much, by the way, if you've made a donation to the online show recently.
Very gratefully received.
All at theunexplained.tv.
Three guests from my radio show on this one, Jason Gleaves, UFO image analyst, ex-Air Force in the UK.
I sent him a video that one of my listeners in Essex sent to me, a video that he'd taken with his son, basically of what appeared to be UFOs way high up in the sky between two chimney tops.
It is a remarkable video, I think, and looks like a lot of the American UFO videos that I've seen over the years.
But I thought I'd let Jason take a look at it.
Now, to make sense of it, I've put the video, or I'm going to put the video, on my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
You will see it there.
Jason Greaves first.
Two guests who've been on the show a lot of times after that.
Tricia Robertson, Scottish paranormal investigator, talking about her new book and research.
It's life and death, but not as you know it.
We'll talk with Tricia, like Tricia.
And also, a welcome return to Claire Broad, medium, in the last part of this edition.
She's got a book out as well about her life and times and about experiences that she has had and she's gathered over the years.
So Claire Broad, the last person you'll hear.
So three guests, Jason Greaves first, Tricia Robertson, Claire Broad on this edition.
All of them taken from a recent radio show.
Thought you might like to hear them here in this format.
And of course, in this format, they will be around for as long as I can keep the website going.
Okay, what else have I got to say?
To get in touch with me through the emails.
Please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
It's lovely to hear from you.
And that's basically it.
Thank you very much for supporting me through what are difficult times that are astonishingly depressing one way or another.
I think you have to have resilience of steel to get through all of this, don't you?
But that's another story.
All right.
Guest number one now, Jason Gleaves, and we're going to talk about a video sent by one of my listeners.
And thank you for it.
This is Jason's analysis.
I get sent a lot of emails.
Sometimes people send me images of things that they believe are anomalous or need to be investigated.
And I try and point them in the right direction.
Every so often I get a so-called UFO video that I pass on to you.
Mostly the things that people think that they've seen that are UFOs turn out to be birds or planes or natural phenomena of some kind.
But the thing that intrigued me about a video that I got sent right after the show last week by Dan in Essex was that this didn't look like anything that I could explain.
And I'm not an image analyst expert or anything like that.
So I thought I'd pass it on to you.
This is a video that Dan and his eldest son shot in the back garden of his house in Romford in Essex about a month ago thereabouts.
And it has, as he describes it, white objects in a triangular shape.
And these objects move in a way that I have only ever seen move before on so-called UFO videos out of the United States.
So it's always difficult to do this when you're on radio.
But can you describe what we see in this video?
We see a camera pointing at a rooftop, don't we?
And in between two TV aerials and the clear blue sky, there is a lot of stuff going on.
Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting video, this one.
This is the sort of video I quite like a lot, really, to analyse.
As we just said, you can see the view from the camera operator pointing out towards a nice clear calm sky, very clear conditions.
And there's a rooftop, and it's obviously from a garden.
So you can see A hedge and two chimney stacks on houses, you know, that are directly in front of whatever the objects are behind in the sky.
And there's about four separate illuminated objects that are there, and they're actually ascending and descending at different rates to each other.
So they're acting quite like aircraft would, but the thing that's interesting, there's no actual aircraft strobe lights that can be seen at all.
So the objects either are illuminated by the sun, which could be clear day.
And within this footage, it's good because of those objects that can be seen, i.e.
the building, the trees, the foliage, they're great for perspective.
So you can put in perspective where the objects are behind.
And also within the shot, you can see a couple of birds flying to shot, which I show, you know, and they're illuminated exactly the same as the objects are, which proves the sun is behind, you know, little factors that go in the way of the analyzing of the footage.
And you were telling me once about how you zoom in on objects.
And there's a way, as you do in the explanation video that you produced for this, which I will put on my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of the Unexplained With Howard Us, but there is a way to zoom into objects so that they don't pixelate and you can analyze them better.
Yeah, like I say to anybody that goes into, you know, to go into this to analyze the image or any image that they want to actually blow up and look at.
To stop the pixelation, what I mean by that is when you actually go into a digital image, for example, if you go in straight on a raw image, when you zoom in, it just becomes very square and pixelated and difficult to bring out detail.
So what I tend to do is upscale everything.
So I upscale it the best I can in high definition.
You know, it does take a lot of memory and there is a lot of data involved, but you do get better results by doing that.
And as you zoom in and use your filters, etc., you can bring out even more detail that you wouldn't naturally see with the human eye.
So we have a number of objects here that look to me a little bit like sort of beads, you know, from a necklace.
At a distance, they look as if they're illuminated.
And you tell me that, you know, they're clearly reflective because they're reflecting the sun.
They're being illuminated by the sun.
They're not behaving like balloons because they're going laterally and they're going up and down.
They're not behaving like aircraft.
So what could they be?
Well, it comes under the realm of unidentified, you know, UFO, which is an unidentified flying object.
So, you know, we've tried to eliminate things, birds, those sorts of things.
It could possibly be drones, but they'd have to be quite huge in size because of the distance that they're actually showing up.
But could you coordinate a number of drones?
Sorry to talk over you there, but the way that they appeared to be moving was in coordination.
Now, it would take some effort to coordinate some drones in that way.
Yeah, it can be done.
I mean, you can see that in the past, Olympic Games, for example, where they've used drones for night displays, where they put them into shapes and, you know, the Olympic symbols and things like that.
It can be done, but these are acting a very peculiar way, very similar to the sightings and the footage you get from Peter Slattery via Australia or James Gilliland via the Esseti Ranch.
Or indeed, listen, I've just, I don't know whether you've seen it yet, but the phenomenon, the new documentary by James Fox that I recommend everybody sees, there is something that looks exactly like this in that presentation.
Yes, there is.
And, you know, it's a worldwide phenomenon.
It happens everywhere.
It's not exclusively, you know, to certain places on the earth.
You know, people see these things in their own back garden, as this gentleman has here.
Right.
So what can we do about this?
You know, these are unidentified.
Is there anything that Dan, my listener, can do to take this forward to investigate it further?
He could contact his local authorities and military bases, etc., air traffic control, anything in that area, if there's any private airfields around that area, too, because it's in a rural area where he lived.
You can see in the distance, if you go on Google Maps, you could look there for where you were standing and the view of where you actually took the photograph or the footage in this case.
And you can basically do, as the bird's eye can see across that distance to see if there's anything behind, are there any military bases in the distance?
He can do very simple things to eliminate other things to try and get a conclusion to what he's seen.
Right.
And the greatest unexplained thing about these objects, apart from the fact that they look weird, they don't look like balloons.
They don't look like aircraft.
They look like they are aluminium baubles hanging in the sky.
That's the best way that I can put it there.
But they are moving rather like the cursors on an old 1980s computer game in some respects.
What do you think about that as a way of describing their movement?
Yeah, it's a good example of describing what they're actually moving under intelligent control.
So, you know, they're actually ascending and descending separate to each other, you know, and they're acting very in a strange manner, you know, to any conventional type of aircraft that we would know.
And again, there are no strobe lights there.
And in part of the video that I analyzed, that the viewers can see, listeners can see, you can see in the video where I've actually inverted and used filters on one of the objects.
And again, there's no strobes that are, you know, exhibited in any way.
So, you know, it really, you make your own mind up what you think it might be, but it definitely comes under unidentified.
I mean, most of the ones I send to you, you say, no, that's a bird, that's a plane.
I know what that is, that's the reflection of this, that, or the other.
This one quite excited you, didn't it?
Yeah, yeah, like I said, this is this is the ideal sort of footage because of everything else involved within the footage itself.
You know, the buildings, like I said before, the aerials, the chimney stacks, the trees, the foliage, because it gives you a great sense of perspective to actually, you know, the distance for the objects in the distance and the birds flying in front are even better because you can eliminate those straight away because they're not acting in any way,
shape or form as the four separate objects in the distance.
Right.
So if any of my friends in the newspaper trade are listening to this right now, you will find the video analysis by Jason on my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Judge for yourself, but I have seen a lot less credible pictures make newspapers than this.
So I think it's worth taking forward.
Just very quickly, Jason, how's the new book coming on?
It's nearing completion.
We're to get into the final stages.
And thank you for your contribution to the book.
Well, this is a book of stories from all kinds of people, including myself.
It was my grandmother's Liverpool UFO experience in my case.
But it's a whole bunch of real-life stories, isn't it?
Yeah, I've taken people from UFology and generally people on my journey through UFology.
I've just tried to ask them basically how did they get into UFology, what actually pulled them into the realm of UFology.
And then I've actually wrote up and illustrated if there are any images available of what actually their story entailed.
And I find a very fascinating read.
And there's a lot of famous people in the book.
So, you know, hopefully it'll be a good addition to publications similar to what they are.
And there are some not famous people in there like me.
What's the book called then, Jason?
And when do you think?
Have you got a rough date for the book to be out?
So, you know, the title and an estimate when it might be available?
Well, hopefully sooner than later, but probably early next year, it'll be up to Philip Mantle through Flying Disc Press who will actually publish the book.
But it's called UFO Encounters and it's up close and personal.
And again, like I just explained, it goes into what people have actually, what pulled them into UFology.
You know, we all started somewhere and it was interesting to find out where we all started.
It was my grandmother's sighting, but it's going to be in the book.
Hey, Jason, listen, thanks very much indeed.
Enjoy what remains of the weekend.
And Dan and Dan's son, I hope that helped.
If you want to see the video that we've just been talking about, go to my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, and I will put Jason's video analysis on that page.
Jason, thank you very much.
Thank you.
It's always a pleasure.
Jason Gleves, like I say, the video should now be on my website, or rather my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Tricia Robertson, now, Scottish Paranormal Investigator, talking about her new research and her new book, which should be out by the time you hear this, called It's Life and Death, but not as you know it.
Just finished that third book that we're going to talk about and looking forward to it coming out very, very soon, possibly within the week.
Okay, we'll try and truncate a bit of history, if that's the right word here.
Two books before this one, Things You Can Do When You're Dead and More Things You Can Do When You're Dead.
Packed, as we discussed with remarkable stories.
The one that will stick with me always is the pilot passing through one of the Scottish airports who meets another pilot friend who'd actually died days before.
And his funeral cortege was going through the airport at that time, but this man didn't know that.
That was a great story.
So that's the kind of thing that's in your first two books.
Yes, indeed.
And not a story, Howard, an account.
Remember, we had this conversation?
Yes.
No story.
True life account.
The pilot you spoke to about that, by the way, because I got a lot of email about it.
Is he still with us?
No, Captain Bob died a few years ago now.
He wasn't terribly old, but being a test pilot, he did have a lot of injuries at his back, you know, latterly.
No, he passed, unfortunately.
Amazing story.
And you got it from the horse's mouth.
Okay, that's what the first two books are about.
You say about this third book, it's life and death, but not as you know it.
In my first two books, I wrote fairly well-recognized topics, including Poltergeist's Drop in Communicators, Reincarnation Out of Body Experiences, da da da da da.
This book is a bit different.
This book is a bit different.
I felt that if I could just quickly recap, I had in my life no intention of writing any books at all.
As you know, I was a maths and physics teacher, quite sort of normal.
And then I took an intellectual interest in psychical research, which is what this is, looking at the paranormal in a scientific manner.
And gradually it sort of draws you into these things.
And I eventually worked with Professor Archie Roy, although I did do work on my own before that.
And Archie and I gave lectures at the University of Glasgow for, it was between six and eight years, I can't actually remember.
And we had so many lectures, we had so much information, we had so much personal experience that when Archie died in 2012, I thought, I have all this information, evidence for life after death.
It would be a sin.
And I mean that in the correct context.
I thought it would be a sin if I did not write a book about this and let other people know that these things are available to them.
The evidence is there.
So many people think that when you're dead, you're dead and they've lost that loved one forever.
I actually don't like the term loved one, but you know what I mean, per someone they've actually adored And they think it's gone.
Now, psychical research and investigations into life after death give these people hope, but I do not want it to be false hope.
And that is why my motto is: let the evidence speak for itself.
And in the first two books, it was more or less, not entirely, but more or less about different forms of phenomena, including mediumship, but not only mediumship, that would lead us to believe the evidence is there, that when the part of you that is the real you, the consciousness, call it what you will, survives after physical death and can communicate in a lucid manner after they actually die.
I feel I've done all of those things, but in the world of paranormal phenomena, there are so many really weird things you've never heard about.
And that's basically what the third book is about.
If you hadn't read at least one of my first books and you only read the third book, you would think I was off my head, I was loony.
But if you read the first two books, you will see that I am not.
But in the third book, I'm presenting phenomena, little known phenomena at times for certain people.
The people who are psychical researchers will know about.
But once again, this is for the man and the woman in the street who do not know that these things actually happen.
And I found it quite exciting.
And I also illustrate the trials and tribulations of psychical researchers when we're trying to look at these things and how we are hindered in our plight by many, many people of all descriptions.
But we plow through trying to get the truth about these matters.
And I found it quite exciting.
It's quite tiring.
There's quite a lot of research in it as well.
And there are new accounts of things that you've never heard of before because they're new.
They're mine.
And there are also very exciting photographs near the end.
But you would have to read the text to put the photographs in context because if you looked at them, you would think this woman is mad.
These photographs are fake.
But I can assure you they are not.
And I give all the reasons why they are not.
I find it quite exciting as to who we are as human beings.
And it's not all about life after death.
It's about latent talents we might have while we're still here, about our subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is what we're using just now, having a lucid conversation.
But we all know, especially in the COVID times, that we all suffer from stress.
And that stress can actually show itself in many, many different ways.
But pre-COVID, when you're under stress, you can also, because you're so stressed, project pologas activity from yourself.
It's crazy.
We do not know how it happens, but it's a cry for help from your...
To prove which particular part?
To prove the projection of some kind of force that would be interpreted as a poltergeist.
Well, you see, I don't like the word poltergeist.
I'm very against a lot of definitions and labels because you say the word poltergeist, you've said that word, and immediately someone has their own idea of what a poltergeist must be.
There's actually no such thing as a poltergeist.
There's poltergeist activity, things moving in the house, etc., etc., etc.
And more often than not, that activity or movement in the house is someone that you've loved that's coming back to move objects to let you know that they are actually still there.
That's the most common form of poltergeist activity.
Or indeed, we don't need to go into this now, but for example, in the Enfield poltergeist case and other celebrated cases, the poltergeist activity, the activity that is put down to a poltergeist, is thought to have come from perhaps a teenager going through that period of puberty, where all your hormones are all over the place.
And sometimes that can cause that kind of thing.
But we don't need to go into this now because there's a ton of stuff in the book.
So would you like me to skip the section at the beginning about mediums then?
Since that's material that we've kind of covered before.
Or would you like to do something about mediums?
We shall pass on mediums and go on to some of the more modern things like electronic voice phenomena.
But why don't we do first, if we do it in the order that it comes in the book, retrocognition, which is a great word.
You tell my listener what that means.
Okay.
Retrocognition, everybody knows what precognition is.
It means that you can see something that's going to happen in the future.
But there is such a thing as retrocognition, where you can suddenly find yourself in a pastime and you can actually view what has happened in the past.
And there are examples in the third book of people who have come across, for example, battlefields and let's do the story of Mrs. Dorothy Strong then, since you said that.
Mrs. Dorothy Strong in 1960, 60 whole years ago, she was on holiday in Northumberland when she and the taxi driver with her were suddenly surrounded by a crowd of ragged soldiers.
The soldiers appeared to be confused.
And it appeared these soldiers were dressed in the way that they would have been dressed and appeared as they would have appeared at the Battle of Otterburn, which happened in 1388.
Yes, Mrs. Dorothy Strong and the taxi driver certainly came across that.
But the point is, actually, was it Otterburn or was that the one that was Nectan's Mira get mixed up with the two of them?
I've not got my script in front of me.
No, that one was Otterburn and the one we'll do next is Nectan's Mia.
Right.
Well, it was Mrs. Dorothy Strong and her taxi driver were suddenly surrounded in the middle of nowhere by these ragged people.
And it turned out to be they were on the site of the Battle of Otterburn, but they did not know that because it was way back in 13 something or other.
And in that case, later on, she found out that that had been a place.
They were both absolutely shocked At the time, this taxi driver was quite stunned.
And then we have the other case of the lady.
Well, if we can just go back to one case from that incident with Mrs. Dorothy Strong, because the one thing that strikes me about that is you say the soldiers appeared to be confused.
Does that suggest that the soldiers, if they were from the Battle of Otterburn, were confused about why they were in 1960?
That would be a matter of speculation, and I would have absolutely no, I could not answer that, but certainly that could be a possibility that perhaps they could see them as well.
But we have absolutely no way of knowing that.
But certainly the people came across this scene from 1300 and something all those years ago.
And it's very strange.
It must have been a most peculiar feeling.
Well, I would imagine it would be.
And this thing is obviously more common than any of us perhaps would imagine, because you have another story in 1950, 10 years before that.
A Miss Smith, we don't know her first name, was journeying from Breken in her car, accompanied by her dog.
The car went into a ditch, and she had to walk home late at night.
And then she was approached, as she approached rather, the first houses in Leitham village in Angus.
She saw moving figures bearing flaming torches.
Unknown to her, this was the site of the Battle of Nectensmere.
That's right.
And the interesting thing was in that particular one, she watched for a while, but the most interesting thing to me was the dog appeared to see them as well.
The dog growled at them when the figures were visible to them at the front.
And the lady also saw, noticed that there were dead bodies on the ground and the soldiers or whatever you want to call them, they were turning bodies over to see if it was one that they recognised.
And if it wasn't the one they wanted, they turned the bodies back on their face again.
And they walked and walked and walked past all of this site.
And as I say, the interesting thing to me was the dog growled.
So it wasn't just that she was reporting this.
Later on, she was examined sort of psychologically to see what type of person she was.
And she was not a lady of flights of fancy.
And it was only later on that she discovered, of course, a mere is a loch, but the loch, of course, is not there anymore.
And it was later on in the morning, she wondered how that was a most peculiar thing and found out about where she was.
And it turned out to be the Battle of Neptune's Mir.
So there was another example of someone going back and seeing something in time.
Now, I don't believe for a minute that the actual, we'll call it the souls, the spirits of these soldiers were there.
To me, it's like a video recording on the space and time.
Because where there's usually a negative influence, you can see like a holographic video recording in the space and time.
And she was just in that correct place and a dog to see that at that time.
All very peculiar.
I have absolutely no explanation for it, but it happens again and again to people.
And do we believe that Miss Smith, sad we haven't got her first name, but do we believe that Miss Smith was catapulted back in time or the soldiers from the battlefield were catapulted forward in time?
Well, I cannot answer that.
I don't know the answer.
these two things seem to just be in conjunction at that particular time.
And that's maybe why the soldiers...
It wasn't like the first one, where there didn't seem to be any interaction.
And that's interesting as to why the dog growled at them as well, because there's nobody else there.
The dog was looking in the same direction as the lady.
That's a truly bizarre story.
And we don't know what became of Miss Smith.
No, we don't.
As far as we're aware, she was given a psychological evaluation and found not to be wanting in any way.
Nothing like that had happened to her before and nothing like that happened to her afterwards either.
So we just have to accept that as an account given by a very rational person.
There are also very famous cases like the Versailles case many, many years ago.
That's been in many, many books.
If you look up Versailles retrocognition, you'll find it somewhere on Google because that's a very well-known one, the two ladies walking through the garden in Versailles, where they saw everything as it was at the time.
And I've heard people say things like that, but with no validation, I can't give you any validation on it.
I find it most peculiar.
Sometimes those things, I'm sorry to jump in, but sometimes those things are described as time slips, aren't they?
They are.
And I just wondered if George Orwell had a time slip when he wrote Animal Farm regarding what's happening in the world now.
A whole other thing.
All right.
We can flip ahead just in the last couple of minutes on this segment to precognition, where you allegedly are aware of things that will happen in the future.
And you give a number of cases here.
One of them is Jean or Jeannie Dixon, an American psychic who predicted, apparently, the time of deaths of JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Marilyn Monroe.
That's correct.
Well, Jean, there's no dissension about Jean Dixon.
Jean Dixon was a very, very well-tested unknown.
I don't actually want to call her a psychic.
I don't know what you would call her, but she was certainly someone that could, on occasion, predict the future.
Now, she put her predictions into two categories.
One were predictions on personal accounts like an individual person.
They were very much up for interpretation because an individual person can do things that would nullify any prediction.
But she also had these other predictions which were about world events.
And she said if she had a prediction about world events, grand things, they were almost certainly 100% correct.
In her particular case, the one that takes my fancy is the partition of India.
I think it was 1947.
She predicted openly in Nexet magazine in America that there would be a partition of India in 1947 on a particular date.
Somebody, one of the Indian government officials, laughed at that when she made the prediction.
And of course, the date came when she predicted India would be separated.
And on the day, nothing was in the news about it at all.
So this gentleman in government phoned her up and said, ha, what about your prediction then?
So much for your prediction.
And she said, the day is not over yet.
And the very next morning, it was in the paper, India had been partitioned.
And there's no doubt about her skills.
There's absolutely none.
She's a very good example of someone who can have premonitions, precognitions, call it what you will.
Many people claim to have precognitions or premonitions, but it's very, very difficult to pinpoint it.
In the book, I talk about the premonitions, of course, about the Titanic and Aberfan.
And it would seem to be that massively, it's a world event, really, it's a huge event that are going to cause tremendous grief.
There seems to be a wave before these things happen where psychics and people like that can pick up a pre-disaster, we call it the pre-disaster syndrome, where they know something's going to happen and they can get information about roughly where it is.
And indeed, you quote a professor, Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, of having checked out a lot of the precognitive accounts of the Titanic disaster and found a very high hit rate among those predictions.
Very, very high hit rate.
Well, it's not really funny, but the most interesting one to me is W.T. Stead was a gentleman who was a very high-flown spiritualist, very much a spiritualist.
And he was told by many, many mediums, do not travel by water on April, etc., etc.
Do not travel by water at all.
Something will happen to you.
And he traveled on the Titanic.
And of course, he died.
As I say in the book, you would have thought he would have known better to listen to what he was told, but he perished because he didn't listen to what he was told.
Well, that ties into something called the don't take the train phenomenon.
People who, you know, sometimes get it.
I mean, look, I can't name who this is, but I know somebody famous who told me that he did not get onto a plane.
I think it was from Belfast to London.
It may have been the other way around, but I think it was Belfast to London because he had a bad feeling about it, got off the plane, and that plane, there was an accident involving the plane.
So these things happen.
Arguably.
Yeah, we don't actually know why.
No one can explain it.
But as I say in the book, too, regarding accidents like planes or trains or anything like that, you'll often find that there are less people on those planes and trains than normally are at that particular time in any particular week.
It's as if our subconscious in some way knows something's going to happen and you just don't want to go.
So if you ever get a feeling you don't want to go anywhere, don't go.
It's subconscious telling you something.
Oh, dear.
Well, I frequently get a feeling I don't want to go anywhere.
I don't know what's going on at the moment.
But you know, it's a documented thing.
And I think there are cases of it having been documented, whether you believe this or whether you don't, before 9-11.
So, you know, it's a phenomenon worthy of more study.
It is definitely.
And don't let anyone tell you they understand it because we don't understand it.
But we have to say, this is what happens.
And that's what I'm all about.
This is what happens.
I don't try and explain it.
How you explain it is entirely up to yourself.
Maybe we will understand it in the future properly.
We don't know.
The Unexplained with Howard Hughes bringing you Tricia Robertson in Glasgow, talking about strange phenomena documented in her latest book that you won't have heard about.
EVPs, Tricia, electronic voice phenomena.
We've talked about that a lot on this show.
You and I have talked about that.
And a lot of these TV programs from America use EVPs.
You've got a case in the book from 2019, from last year.
Marcus Lang.
Oh, yes.
I would rather start at the beginning with that.
What I tend to do, I was a teacher of math and physics, so I have a very logical mind.
My logical mind has to start at the beginning.
EVP was not something that particularly interested me, but I started to actually look at it and it's more fascinating than you think.
It started off in a very minor way, but by a chap who was recording for television or radio, one or the other.
And he was really annoyed at nighttime because he was trying to record bird song.
And over the bird song, he kept hearing human voices.
And he was really annoyed about it.
And this happened again and again.
And he began to realize he was actually hearing voices.
And that started Jürgensen's quest looking for EVP.
But that went on.
There were different people tried to do EVP.
It was all very, very noisy until it came to Marcello Bacci, Italian chap, who used to get voices through a radio, an old valve radio, which wasn't, well, it wasn't even plugged in.
It was an old valve radio, but he could tune the valve radio to such an extent that he did get voices through it.
But they were very, very badly distorted voices.
And the more they did, they did get it to a certain extent where they actually were getting voices.
And then they managed to, well, if we take the idea that someone from the realm beyond helped them to do that with the tuning, it did get a lot clearer.
Now, the thing that sold it to me was Professor David Fentana and Annabella Cardozo and people I know actually sat with Marcello Bacci.
Professor David Fentana was a very, very well-known professor of psychology.
And he would ask the voices a question out the blue and the voices would answer.
And everybody heard the same thing.
So the sceptics, some sceptical professors came along quite correctly and did so and they eventually put a Faraday cage Around the radio, and still the voices came.
They examined it for any external input, and still the voices came.
They turned the radio upside down, took the valves out, and still the voices came.
And even with the valves out, the voices continued for about another 20 seconds when there was actually nothing in the radio that would produce that at all.
Where were the voices coming from, do you think?
It appeared to come from the actual radio.
That's where they appeared to come from.
But I mean, were they being generated by the other side?
Well, that would be an interpretation of it.
And then it goes on to other people like George Meek.
And it's too complicated to explain here.
I can't remember all the facts and figures.
But if you follow the progression of that through the book, it will tell you how it was refined and refined and refined.
Until at one point, I think it was Otto Koenig, he made the Koenig's generator, which was supposed to contact, we'll call it the Next Realm.
And they went live on Radio Luxembourg.
You probably know the presenter.
I've forgotten his name at the moment, but it's in the book.
And on live Radio Luxembourg, the Connings generator, the presenter asked a question, somebody in the studio asked a question, and the voice came back as clear as day.
And the presenter nearly, you know, he was absolutely shocked.
And he said, listeners, there are no tricks.
There is nothing attached here.
And I can only say, tell you exactly, you're hearing what I am hearing.
Now, the thing is, we never heard about that.
Nobody knew about that.
People don't want to put it into the public domain for some reason.
I don't know why.
I really don't know why, excuse me.
But that's where EVP comes in.
And now we're coming up to date.
I have been told by people that I trust that a chap in Australia, actually Marcus Lang, he has managed to get voice EVP through his Apple phone.
And he has a way of doing it with two Apple phones.
And he is perfecting the idea of getting voices directly through the two Apple phones.
Now, I don't know if he uses his laptop as well.
I'll need to see.
And I've written a little bit about that in the book as well.
I don't know the chap.
I haven't spoken to him, but people I know have said it works.
It has been witnessed.
And he's hoping to come to the UK next year and he's going to demonstrate it to me myself.
And I look forward to that.
Okay.
As far as you know, do the messages make any sense or is it just random things?
That I couldn't tell you because I haven't actually heard them.
But the people that I know that have heard it said that it's a quite definite voices from spirit.
But what they actually say, I will find out for you for the next programme.
I don't know.
Okay.
Marcus Lang, very recent.
In fact, just over a year ago, this was all thought to have happened.
You talk about photography.
And I had to remind myself what thoughtography is, but maybe you can tell my listener.
Well, thoughtography is where people aren't able to, it sounds crazy.
I know it's crazy.
The book's weird.
I know.
Where people can think images onto Polaroid film or any film in actual fact.
And there's a man called Ted Sirios, I think it was in the 60s.
He was an American again.
He was a Chicago bellhop with very little education.
Undoubtedly was able to think images onto film, whether it was 35mm or Polaroid, I'm not entirely sure.
I think possibly both.
Actually, I think it was 35mm.
And this chap was investigated by a lot of people.
And Professor Joel Eisenberg took on this task because he was absolutely fascinated.
He was a psychiatrist as well.
He was fascinated by the idea that someone could think something onto Philim.
And he spent three years and a lot of money investigating Ted Sirius because he was not the easiest person to work with.
Shall we just say he had a little drink problem?
But he also seemed to be able to do this better when he had a drink in him.
Now, I don't know why.
Well, maybe he was opening up a portal or something.
But did he do this under controlled conditions?
In other words, he didn't just do this on his own.
There were other people there observing whether there was jiggery pokery going on.
There was no jiggery pokery going on as far as Jose Eisenberg was concerned.
Jose Eisenberg, you would have to read it.
It's quite a long chapter, but it's definitely worth reading.
Jules Eisenberg saw an article somewhere about this man who claimed to be able to think images onto film.
And he was intrigued.
And he thought, just like myself, I wondered if this is true.
So he set out to find from various people who had seen this or knew something about it.
And he found out that a lot of people said, yes, he can do that.
We did it under test conditions.
But nobody wanted to follow it up.
And Joe's Eisenberg, like myself, thought, well, this is something, this is something.
This is not normal.
There's something going on here.
And he wanted to find out for himself if it was true.
And he spent three tortuous years examining Ted Sirius.
And when you read the book, you'll know why it was tortuous for him.
Because Ted was a very, very peculiar character, like a lot of other characters in this third book.
Well, you say this wild stallion that was Ted Sirios could not really be trained to perform to order.
In other words, when researchers came to him to try and check out what he claimed he could do, he wasn't always able to do it.
He wasn't always able to do it, but Eisenberg stayed with him and stayed with the project for a very long time.
And one of the other people he interviewed was a professor from another establishment altogether, some parapsychological establishment.
And it's actually quite a funny discourse.
It's really worth reading because the personalities are really quite funny.
And he interviewed this other Professor, and he said, Well, did Ted Sirius, under your conditions, put a picture on to film?
Yes.
And he said, Well, is that not worth investigating?
And the other professor said, Well, he projected the wrong picture.
It wasn't, it was Washington Town Hall instead of some other mansion.
And Ted Sirius was, not Ted Sirius, Eisenbud was flabbergasted.
And he thought, this guy has projected a picture onto film under test conditions.
And you do not think, he was thinking this, you don't think that this is worth pursuing.
But of course, once Eisenbud got into a project with Ted, he understood why nobody else wanted to work with him because he was not the easiest character to work with.
I wonder if anybody is doing this stuff now, because you'd have to be able to do it onto an SD card, wouldn't you?
Yeah, you would, but I really have no information on that.
I have not heard of anyone nowadays who can project an image onto a film.
But there was no doubt about Ted Series was never found to be fraudulent, but he could not do it to order.
And once again, you know me, my logical, it starts off at the beginning.
It goes through all the trials and tribulations, exactly what Jose Eisenberg did, the difficulties working with this man.
But there's absolutely no doubt that he could actually do it.
And three years later, Eisenberg did write about him.
And Eisenberg spent a lot of money himself doing this because, like myself, he was very interested in the phenomenon.
This could happen at all, which is quite amazing.
It is very, very quickly.
We've only got about two minutes to do this, and it's not really fair to do it so quickly.
But I really, in my life, I've come across people who've claimed to be healers.
And I have to say, I've really not seen any examples of this that can work.
You do talk about this.
I have to say, and we have to say to anybody here who might be thinking of doing such a thing, you have to go to your general practitioner first before you consider anything of that nature, obviously.
But there are people who claim to do things like psychic surgery, and most of that has been shown to be complete bunk, where people use fake pig blood and organs from offal and all sorts of things.
Do you think that healing really is a thing?
Psychic surgery?
Healing is definitely a thing.
Absolutely.
There are healing studies done by Western people, professors, all of them.
Healing definitely works.
It can work under blind conditions.
People don't know that they're being healed and they heal quicker than the people who are not healed.
But the ones that I speak about were investigated by Guy Lynn Playfair, who from London.
And Guy Lynne Playfair spent two years in Brazil.
Yes, doubtless there are fakes, as there are fakes in any thing in the world at all.
Guy Lynn Playfair was nobody's fool and he spent a full two years once again and with his own money out of interest to see what was happening.
And there's absolutely no doubt that there are genuine, they may be few and far between, but there are genuine psychic surgeons.
There are many, many good healers, just hands-on healers.
But once again, it's like everything else.
You have to get a recommendation.
You have to know who you're going to because there are so many people that cannot do what they think they can do.
Well, I have to tell you, just to conclude this then, you know, I'm not a big one for healing.
I'm not sure about any of that.
But I'll tell you one story very, very fast.
I was doing an outside broadcast from Rome with my colleagues from Capitol Radio.
I tripped in a hotel corridor running after somebody that I wanted to interview.
And I twisted my foot.
I hobbled around Rome for 24 hours.
Then one of my colleagues said I might be able to fix that.
And by that time, we'd moved to the Italian equivalent of a chateau, right in a lovely place to stay in Tuscany.
We'd moved on from Rome.
And he ran his hand at a distance from my foot that I'd twisted and just was very calm about the thing.
And within hours, I was better.
Probably mind over matter, Tricia.
Probably mind over matter.
There's an element of that.
There is an element of that.
But you may remember, I spoke about it.
I did a six-year study with not psychic surgeons, with spiritual healers.
And there is absolutely no doubt that there is something in it.
Some of it certainly can be applied to placebo effect, but certainly not all.
Certainly not all.
Healing, proper healing is a definite thing.
Well, but we have to acknowledge there's a lot of fakery and a lot of delusion.
And we have to say once again, you know, that for the benefit of our listener, you know, it's your doctor, your general practitioner you need to go to first rather than consult anybody like that.
Tricia, listen, that's just a thumbnail sketch of the book.
You think it might be out in a week or two?
I'm hoping everything's ready.
We've got a front cover and a back cover and we've got a middle.
So the publisher is just putting it all together and it's definitely going to be out in October and hopefully sooner than later.
And it is very bizarre.
If you didn't know me, you would think it was absolutely crazy.
But everything in there is absolutely true as I know it to be.
It's life and death, but not as you know it.
I think you and I kicked around that title about a year or so ago, didn't we?
We did.
I was trying to refine it.
I was going to call it It's Life and Death, Jim, but not as you know it.
But it would be too much of a Star Trek reference movie.
Some people might wonder who Jim is.
Hey, Tricia, more power to your psychic elbow.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you, Howard.
Bye.
Tricia Robertson, the book which should be out by the time you hear this just about, it's called It's Life and Death, but Not As You Know It.
Also with the book out is another old friend of the show, Claire Broad, medium, who lives in Northampshire, not too far away from where I'm sitting at the moment.
She's got a new book about what the dead are dying to tell you.
That's the title of the book.
Claire has been a medium for many years.
In fact, you know, had what you would call a corporate career and now does this for a living.
I like Claire a lot.
Here's the conversation that I had with her.
Thank you to Tricia Robertson, I'm sure she'll do really well with her book, as I am certain that Claire Broad, medium, will do very well with her book.
She's online to us now, old friend of the show.
How are you doing, Claire?
I'm really good.
Hi, nice to be back, and hello to all your listeners.
How's North Hampshire?
Then it's wonderful.
I'm in a good spot, to be honest.
If you're going to be in lockdown, I have to say, I've been walking through a lot of forestry and army grounds.
And, you know, actually, it's been lovely in that sense of the world.
Okay.
Well, no, I hear what you say.
Not lockdown.
Lockdown hasn't been lovely, but the area's been lovely.
Lockdown's a bit of a pig one way or another.
We're here to talk about your book, What the Dead Are Dying to Tell You.
And we have to tell our listener, and we are offering you this conversation for entertainment purposes only.
Obviously, don't live your life by this stuff.
But if you find the basis for further research here, then, you know, good on you, as we say.
So this is partly your story, isn't it?
But also a number of stories that you've gathered from over the years.
Yes, so basically I didn't want to write an autobiography because my whole ethos really is to help people understand how they can have that connection for themselves with something greater, the greater reality.
But in order to make it make sense, the teachings that I've been getting, I put it into the context of experiences I've had and then with stories of other people and scientific research and action points so that people can start putting this into practice in their own lives if they want to find out for themselves if there's any value in it.
Now, you know, you say that you're a medium.
Does that mean that you can be sort of standing in the, in the days when we used to do such things, you know, standing in the supermarket queue and you know what people are thinking around you?
Well, no, because that's telepathy.
So I would have to be reading their minds if I knew what they were thinking.
And I don't really want to know what people are thinking myself.
Would you think that you would see images or communications from people close to them?
If I expanded my awareness, mediums get their brains into an altered state of awareness, just the same way that monks do and, you know, anyone with a spiritual practice.
If I was to do that in a supermarket, I'm no doubt I could tune in.
I don't do that in a supermarket.
I work in an ethical way and I have boundaries.
So when I'm working, it's in a very disciplined manner.
And when I'm going about everyday life, I'm switched off from all this stuff and being very normal.
Well, I mean, you don't want to be on all the time.
That would be hell, wouldn't it, if you were connected constantly.
It would be like, what was that, Bruce Almighty?
You know, Bruce Almighty with the prayer request that wouldn't turn off.
Exactly.
No, no, it wouldn't be good.
It'd be very draining.
Now, you say that for you, it started when you were a child.
One of your first was you'd lost your granddad, hadn't you?
And you said to your nan, granddad says, I love you.
Isn't that right?
That's right.
Yeah.
I'm impressed.
I've read the book.
Yes, no, I was four years old.
I was standing in Richmond Cemetery and my granddad hadn't not long since passed.
My nan and my mum were cleaning up his plot and I remember feeling the presence of him all around me and hearing him speaking into my mind saying, Claire, tell Nanny Grandad says I love you Ive.
And I didn't do anything about it because I was busy playing.
So actually I dismissed it because at that age I had no emotional intelligence to even really care that it was my granddad to even register.
Hang on a minute, he died, didn't he?
I had no afterlife concepts.
You know, I was too young.
So it was, he kept impressing the message upon me until in the end, through frustration, really, I stood up and shouted it over to my nan.
And that was really the start of it for me.
And my family obviously recognised, hang on a minute, that was unusual.
Well, yes.
But unusual, but rather lovely, though.
And what did your nan make of it?
Well, my nan died when she was 92, about five years ago now, and it stayed with her whole life.
She knew, because the story behind this is that my nan went by the name of Connie.
I obviously called her nanny.
My mum called her mum.
It was only my granddad who was allowed to call her Ive because Ivy reminded her of poison ivy.
I personally really like the name Ivy, but she chose to go by Connie.
And so I never heard people call her Ivy and certainly not Ive.
So when I said this, my nan just knew that it was my granddad.
And so it brought her so much comfort.
She talked about it right the way up until she was 92.
So for a good, she probably discussed that with me for a good 35 years.
That's how long that stayed with her and gave her comfort.
And that was the transformative power of all of that.
It was amazing, really.
And the book links your story with the stories of some other people that you collected along the way.
I mean, that's very similar to Joyce's story that you tell a little later in the book.
And Joyce, apparently, their neighbor died when she was a child.
An old man who I used to call granddad because he was wonderful.
One day, I remember saying to my family that I saw him in the garden.
I can't actually remember seeing him with my eyes, which is strange, but to me, he was there.
That's your story, too.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And I write in the book about how children are so much closer to the spirit dimensions because their brains haven't been developed enough yet to be able to use analytical logical thinking.
Their brain waves are in a theta state, whereas ours are in alpha and beta.
And so they're much more receptive.
They're able to perceive things that adults ultimately grow out of and we have to relearn.
So, you know, I think we shouldn't dismiss children's stories when we hear them.
They're very close to a reality that we leave behind.
How did this Gift, if you would call it that, go with you through your school years?
Did you continue doing those things?
I mean, were you sitting there in school saying, you know, Mr. So-and-so, the geography teacher's wearing odd socks today?
I don't know.
I wish I could.
No, I had any experience I had as a child was very sporadic.
So I had a lot of what I would say psychic experiences, not just mediumistic ones.
So I wasn't seeing dead people everywhere, but I would have premonitions.
I would, I can, I remember walking home from school one day, suddenly just this vision opening up in front of me where I saw a bird flying up into the clear blue sky and blowing up.
I knew that there was something terrible pending and I ran home and we turned on the TV and the space shuttle blew up.
That really stuck with me.
Can I tell you something weird?
I've got pages of notes here and that's the bit that I'm looking at now.
Is it?
Well, it doesn't surprise me.
Under premonitions.
January 1986, you were 10 then.
You had your first spontaneous premonition.
I mean, I think a lot of people did about that.
I mean, I had one about 9-11.
I actually saw a night or two before the plane that crashed into the field in Pennsylvania.
I didn't know that, of course, at the time, but I had a dream in which that happened.
And so I was really shocked when I watched the news.
And this is a true story.
After 9-11, and the unfolding story told us that there was a bunch of people who wrestled with the hijackers and the plane sadly came down in that field.
I mean, it's amazing, isn't it?
I write in the book about Dr. Julia Mossbridge, who is a premonition expert in this world.
And, you know, science has studied this.
We know that humans have premonitions.
So what does that say about time and consciousness and our ability to sort of travel back or forwards and to see into the future, glimpse it in that way?
You know, it's the same when Princess Diana died.
Lots of people perceived that.
They weren't necessarily perceiving her death, but there was a real marked imprint on the world as we, you know, as a collective consciousness, people were affecting the globe and the way that, you know, we were all connected then.
We don't understand consciousness.
We don't understand the half of it.
And all I know is that in some way, shape or form, it can survive physical death.
But not in every case.
I mean, that's the problem, isn't it, though?
That, you know, we only have our own examples.
And I was very close to my mum and my dad.
And I would have expected to be able to kind of communicate with them more clearly than I think I've been able to communicate with them since I lost them.
Because we were such a close family.
And I can't believe that I haven't had closer contact.
You know, if this stuff exists, then why haven't I had closer contact with them?
So it's not everybody who comes back, is it?
No, I mean, it might be that you're expecting it in a certain way.
Maybe even the fact that you have expectations that it'll be closer may be stopping it in some way.
Or it may be that they're very settled and know that you know they're around and don't feel the need or the drive.
It doesn't mean they don't love you anymore.
And from spirit side of things, they're not confined by space and time.
They don't understand our long days and years.
They're not experiencing it in that way.
And they know they're going to see us again.
I mean, do you think that's a universal truth that those, I mean, what happens if, you know, there are some people who have awful childhoods and they don't like their parents.
Thankfully, you know, there are not as many of them as there are of the other sort.
But, you know, there are people who have bad childhoods and they don't have any time for their parents.
Maybe their parents were just bad people.
Are we saying that in that circumstance, everybody gets reunited?
Well, I have done many readings over the years.
I've done readings for clients who have told me they don't want to hear from their parents and things.
But those parents have gingerly tried to come back and put an olive branch out, explain what they've now learnt since their passing, try and make amends in some way.
No, you don't have to be with anybody.
We have free will.
And in my mind, it's the love and the bonds that we hold that glue us together anyway.
So if that's not there, then why would you even bother to see someone?
We're not locked to people eternally, but spiritually speaking, we're all from the same soup, I believe.
So we're all connected at some level.
And also when we get over into that side of life, we've got a much broader viewpoint.
We can see the gains from those relationships.
Even the negative ones, we can see the self-growth out of them and, you know, what we've learnt and how we've, you know, grown in our own soul growth, really, is the way I want to put it.
But I've got friends, Claire, who will tell you that when you die and you turn your toes up, it's like turning off the TV.
You fade to black and that's it.
Tell them why you think they're wrong.
Because that charge and electricity and energy that's going to that TV is still there.
So it's like a light bulb, isn't it?
You know, if the light bulb goes out, you can't see the light.
For all intents and purposes, it's dead.
But the energy, the electricity going to the light bulb is still there.
So, you know, you can't see it, you can't perceive it, but that doesn't mean that it's not there.
Energy just transforms and changes and, you know, each to their own.
If it brings you peace of mind, if you don't like the idea of a kind of eternal existence, I can totally understand that.
I have no problem with it, but it's just not my experience.
And I have to go by what I've experienced.
You know, a lot of people have dreams.
I have dreams that are three-dimensional, multicolored.
I have rational conversations with people I've never met before in my dreams.
God knows what that's about.
You believe, and you say in the book, that you think dreams are a portal to another world.
I do.
I believe that, you know, our conscious awareness is just a tiny part of our total awareness.
And when we're in the sleep state and our Brain enters into a different phase, we're able to access parts of our consciousness that we can't in waking state, and that's when you know you can have encounters with people that you don't necessarily know, and you can have encounters with those that you do know that have crossed.
And there's been many times I've spoken to clients over the years who've had what I would call night visions, dreams that are so clear and lucid, where they're having communication with deceased loved ones who look well, who are telling them they're well, giving them information.
You know, you can say that's the product of wishful thinking if you want, but in my mind, it's not at all.
It's the way that the spirit world can get through to us.
There will be people who would say, why don't those who communicate with, however they do it, with the other side if the other side exists, bring back something useful?
Like, you know, the envelope with the £50,000 is under the fridge sort of thing.
Well, I mean, they have actually come back and told, in readings, they have told me about money that's in envelopes and things like that.
Yeah, they have.
And one of my clients, in fact, one of the stories in the book is Sandy, who her mum told me about a ring that was in a handbag that neither her dad or her father knew about.
And she wanted her to have the ring.
And her mother, sorry, her deceased mother wanted Sandy to have the ring.
And Sandy was saying to me, no, we don't know about this ring.
We don't know about the handbag.
Everything's been cleared out.
I think you've got that wrong.
But she put it to the test.
She went back and lo and behold, they found the bag.
They found the ring and she's wearing it.
So can happen, but that is not the most important thing in the mind of a spirit person who knows that you're going to leave all your money, all your belongings and anything material behind.
What becomes important is your well-being and your mental state of being, your love and affection, because that's what you take with you.
And that is what's going to help you have a more positive experience in the spirit dimension.
So they work on that.
That's what they care about.
I'm not a big one for Ouija boards.
I think that people should not mess with those things.
Not because they connect with spirits or anything.
I don't know whether they do or they don't.
But some people get, you know, mentally very hooked up in all of that.
And I just, my advice would be for what my advice is worth.
And, you know, most people don't take my advice, but I wouldn't do it.
But you talk about your use of those things.
How do you use those?
Because some people I've interviewed about Ouija boards say they connect with the very darkest and lowest.
And if you believe in spirits, you're connecting with the bargain basement and below.
Well, anytime you open your mind out to the spirit dimensions with the intention, and that's the word here, intention, of connecting with spirit people, then you, it doesn't matter whether you use a piece of cardboard, a bit of wood, a pen, a piece of paper, ribbons, cards, whatever.
If you're opening your mind to that, then you're opening the doorway.
So no, I agree.
People should not play with or tamper with any tools like that that are going to open their mind up to an experience if they're not prepared and trained and mentally sound.
I had an experience when I was a child at school.
My friends were using a Ouija board and I had this sort of intuitive knowing I shouldn't go near it.
I came home from school one day and my mum had been speaking to a lady who was an energy healer and a medium and the medium had told her that I had been at school and there'd been a Ouija board there.
So I was dumbfounded when I got home because I didn't know how my mum could even know that was going on.
So for many years I didn't go near them because she told me, no, you're sensitive, you mustn't touch those things.
But one was bought to my front door literally by a friend who said she'd been given a, she'd seen an image and been given a message to bring one to me.
And so we very gingerly tried it out.
And I just found that I could enhance my mediumship.
I could use it as a writing tool because I'd been told for 20 years by spirit guides and teachers that I would be writing books.
So I think they used it as a writing tool, a way to develop my ability to channel.
So I was tapping into the higher dimensions and not the lower dimensions.
But, you know, for your average Joe, I'm very skeptical and very wary.
Just find that.
I'll tell you my I've told you this before, but my sister's pen friend, Debbie, in North Carolina, sent her, you know, the way pen friends back in the day, I don't know if they still do, send each other, if there are such things as email now, who needs those, but send each other gifts and, you know, tapes of, you know, what it's like to be in England and hi from everybody here in North Carolina kind of stuff.
One day, one of the, I used to get bubblegum and all sorts of stuff sent from America that we couldn't get here.
Oh, great.
But we once, bashed up by the international mail, a Ouija board arrived and my mother just looked at this thing with the planchette, the indicator, the pointer, and said, get that thing.
Get that thing out of the house.
And you know, the pieces of it stayed in a corner of a cupboard for years until they eventually got thrown out.
That's how people felt about those.
But I'm very skeptical and very wary about those things.
So let me just put that in.
Yeah, I respect that.
I respect that.
But, you know, I also think at the end of the day, it's superstition.
We lose our heads over a piece of wood.
There's no different from me picking up a pen and paper.
No one's panicking about that.
The connection comes through you.
And scientists say it's idiomotor response anyway.
So, you know, I don't know how effective they are.
To me, it's a tool.
It's a tool.
And I just keep a balanced opinion and don't bring fear in.
I hear what you say.
That's a good motto for life, really.
God, we're out of time again, Claire.
Wow.
You know what that means, don't you?
What does that normally mean?
Yes, exactly.
And we'll talk about some of the more absolutely specific.
I mean, there's a lot in this book.
And it's this book on the street now, then?
Can we get it?
Absolutely, you can.
Yes.
I've seen it in Waterstones.
It's in Amazon, on Amazon, and anywhere where there's a good bookstore, you can have it.
Claire Broyd.
It's also on Audible.
Sorry.
It's on Audible.
Oh, have you read it?
Have you done a reading?
No, I had an actress do it for me.
Get that.
What?
Somebody famous?
Did you have somebody famous do it?
A lady called Olivia.
I don't know if she's famous, but she's done a very good job.
Perfect name for an actress.
Oh, really?
Excellent.
I didn't know it was on Audible as well.
The book is called What the Dead Are Try Dying to Tell What the Dead Are Dying to Tell You.
Well, they're probably trying to tell you it as well.
Claire, it's lovely to speak with you.
You know that.
Thank you, Howard.
Claire Broad, and her book is called What the Dead Are Dying to Tell You.
Well, that's it then.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe in this mad, mad, crazy world that we live in.