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Oct. 26, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:15
Edition 491 - Terge G. Simonsen
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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.
Many thanks for all of your emails.
One thing I've noticed over the last week or so, I'm hearing from a lot of new people.
That's always a good sign.
Mainly United States and UK, but also Australia and various countries around this planet.
It is amazing now how technology allows us to reach people.
We're coming up to the 500th edition, as I mentioned before, of The Unexplained, which is going to be towards the end of this year.
If you have any ideas of the kind of thing we might do, please send me an email through the website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam.
Follow the link, send me an email from there, and if you put in the subject part of the email, edition 500, whatever, something that just shows me that it's the 500th show we're talking about.
If you have an idea, something you maybe like to hear again or something like that, and we'll come up with a plan.
There's always a plan to be had.
Strange days we're living in.
The United Kingdom going into autumn time, so it's quite stormy.
It's not exactly cold at the moment, but it is off and on stormy.
The nice days are nice.
You know, I've been going out bike riding with a t-shirt on, but the worst days are very, very rainy.
And I think the weather forecast is telling us that there are some storms to come.
But this is autumn time, very close to winter, and I guess that's what you would expect.
And of course, by the time you hear this, the clocks in the United Kingdom will have gone back.
I wish we didn't do that.
But I know there are people who argue both ways about that.
But, you know, I find it really depressing when we get less daylight because the clocks have gone back.
But, you know, other people have different experiences.
But I can remember many, many, many years ago in this country, we had an experiment where for one year, they didn't turn the clocks back.
And I don't know what became of that experiment, but it's just something that I wish we didn't do.
Because as you know, the winter is hard enough, and especially this winter with coronavirus and everything else.
Had some great emails.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Please keep those coming.
I will try to reply.
If you require a response, I'll try and get a response back to you quickly.
But please know that I see every email that comes in.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests, by the way.
The guest on this edition is something that I did for my radio show here.
Tarier G. Simonsen in Norway has written a new book.
And the book is called, it's a great title, A Short History of Almost Everything Paranormal.
We're going to be speaking with him in the south of Norway, but it covers basically everything.
It's a long and very well put together book, in my opinion.
It would make a great present for somebody, but 500 pages, and we'll get into that coming very soon.
Don't forget, if you email me, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
I'd love to know those things.
Okay, let's get to Norway now.
Tarie G. Simmonson is the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
Tarie, thank you very much.
I know you heard all of that.
How are you?
Well, I'm quite fine, Howard.
Thanks a lot for having me on the show.
My pleasure.
It's been a while since we've connected with Norway.
I think you're in the south of Norway, are you?
Yes, a little southern town called Mandal, quite close to Christensen.
Oh, right.
Okay.
And what is it famous?
Well, apart from yourself, is it famous for anything?
Well, it used to be quite a lot of famous painters here in the old time, perhaps because of the beautiful light, something like Cornwell in Britain, I would suppose, you know.
Yeah, no, it's, you know, that part of Norway I would love to explore.
And especially at this time of year, although I'm sure it can be very cold, I'm sure the air is clear.
And I'm sure when you look up in the sky, you see some amazing sights there.
Well, yeah, it happens.
Okay.
Well, look, I tried to describe you, and I didn't do very well.
So how would you describe yourself, Terry?
Well, my education is as an historian of ideas, and I have specialized in the esoteric and the occult, you know, Kabbalah, Sufism, Hermetism, Occultism, Golden Dawn, and all this kind of fringe movements that has been part of religions, but the secret part of the different religions.
Esotericism, yes.
And are all of those things, I suspect they are, for a whole variety of reasons, but all of those things popular in Norway?
Well, yes, there's quite a great milieu, but you know, people are more into the modern brand of these things in the form of New Age, going to healing seminars and going to psychics and alternative therapies and that kind.
I have been more into the historical, you know, perhaps a bit more scientific, which has been a part of the European esoteric and also the European philosophical tradition.
So a bit I'm not into the latest fad into the alternative things.
I'm more into, say, classical occultism and also into modern parapsychology.
Okay, now the book seems to me to be a bit of a roadmap for how we got to the understanding of the paranormal and parapsychology that we have today.
Is that what you set out to do?
Yes, I would say so.
It is a description how important the paranormal has been in the European tradition.
Because today, if you are a scientist, you rise your eyebrows if someone of your colleagues started to talk about these phenomena.
But you know, in the traditional European history of science and philosophy, these phenomena has had their place, and also with some philosophers, quite important place.
And interestingly enough, in modern physics, especially some quantum physicists have taken up that relay button and say that if you have a right understanding or correct understanding of a consciousness, these phenomena are not unexplained at all, but is somehow very rational and a part of, say, a modern Picture of the world.
And indeed, you chart the stories of many people, and we'll go through some of them in this book.
You know, the stories of those people and how they came to that conclusion that, well, some of them came to that conclusion that these things that we believe are paranormal may in fact be just something to do with the way that our brains work, an aspect of consciousness, perhaps something like a global internet of mind where everybody is connected, which I know and we will talk about this, things like remote viewing and ESP come into play.
Exactly.
And if there is a message in the book, I would say that is to make people aware of this collective dimension of consciousness.
Because usually by thinking inside the box, we say that consciousness is just something I have inside my head, or you have inside your head.
But that is like saying that the internet is inside my mobile phone.
That is not correct.
Internet is between all the mobile phones and all the PCs.
And my view of consciousness is that it is also a collective thing.
It's a web where all individual consciousness connect.
And that is what I call the mental internet.
And if you view consciousness that way, which some interpretations of quantum physics certainly allow for, then these phenomena will find a quite natural and rational place.
And we're coming to more and more understand these things with every passing year.
I wonder if I can just ask you quickly about something else before we start on about the book.
Yes, of course.
Because the book actually mentions this person, but towards the end, and he's been in the news this week.
We've talked about him a little earlier in this show.
James Randi, the magician, and I guess you could call him, I've called him anyway for years, the debunker in chief.
This was the man, of course, in America who offered famously a million-dollar prize if anybody could prove to his satisfaction and to the satisfaction and repeatability of science that any paranormal phenomenon exists.
And the prize for all of his years, and he died this week at the age of 92, that million-dollar prize remained unclaimed, didn't it?
Yes, it did.
He became a kind of what is called in English pensioniste when he retired in 2015.
And then the prize was discontinued.
But I have a chapter in my book about that price.
And you know, Randy was a magician.
And when you deal with magicians, they are very likely to trick you.
That is kind of the trade.
So if you see, go closely into the conditions for that price.
It is no wonder that it was unclaimed.
I can go into this in some detail if you want, but basically, there were conditions there that was not, I would say it was close impossible to satisfy because there was a clause in the contract that said if he did not agree with the result, somehow it would not be deemed valid.
And of course, if his life works and a million dollars was a stake, I feel it will be very difficult for him to somehow agree to that this and that phenomena have been proved.
Well, there were a couple of things going on.
You suggest that nobody really took this prize seriously.
And then there was whether the prize would actually be paid if anybody could demonstrate it, which we have to stress, nobody ever really did.
In fact, nobody did.
But you also have a quote here that I've never seen from James Randy.
And I interviewed him 15 years ago on this very show.
But the quote was, you always have an out.
In other words, I think that means that because somebody said to him, you're not worried that this is going to bankrupt you if somebody wins the money, you're going to have to pay.
And he said, you always have an out.
Yes.
And that he said to Dennis Rawlins, a famous astronomer, that was his friend and also a part of the same skeptical community that Randy was at the time.
Rawlins asked him about that.
And after Randy gave him that reply, Rawlins also lost faith in Randy's, say, accountability for this competition.
It is basically considered a scam among serious psychologists.
Well, I mean, I don't know whether I can comment about that.
And poor James Randy is not here to comment on that suggestion himself here.
But we have to say that he did do a lot to expose a lot of fakery.
And we know that in this field, although both of us would agree, because I do a program like this and you do research like you do, there are things in heaven and earth that we cannot explain.
But equally, I've come across some egregious, what I would consider to be fakes, or certainly people who delude themselves that they have powers.
So I think James Randy did a lot in his lifetime to call out such people.
Of course, and a very good work he did on that field, and especially some kind of fake preachers in the U.S., some guys that were faking miracles, you know, to get followers and to get the money and power over their minds and such things.
So Randy did a quite formidable job in that respect.
But, you know, as the old expression goes, you can throw out the baby with bathing water.
And I felt that Randy did that because in my perception, these phenomena are, as I said, natural and rational phenomena.
They are not kind of bogus things that just are made up to get power over people.
But if someone choose to use this phenomena that way, of course, that is very unethical.
And Randy exposed quite a lot of those people.
But his philosophical approach to them, I feel, is quite superficial.
And of course, there are those, and I've heard people say this in interviews over the years, who say that by doing what he did, to some extent he set back serious research Into parapsychology and the paranormal.
Because, for example, there was that famous ruse that he came up with.
He had two young magicians sign up for experiments at the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research, and the two misled the researchers, and the researchers went along with it.
And then Randy came and said, well, actually, these two people are working in league with me, and it's all a fake.
Yes, and he also, that is one of his little scams.
And also, he went to a laboratory in London.
What you just said was happening in the US.
But another time, he went with some electronical equipment to a laboratory in London where they did research, quite serious research on bending of metal with mental powers.
And he had this electronical equipment wanting to botch up the experiments.
He was exposed and thrown out of the laboratory.
But you know, generally when you have magicians doing these kinds of things, they are somehow doing their own thing.
And the American Department of Defense were doing quite a lot of serious research into this.
It is so-called Project Stargate at that time.
Which we're going to get into because it's a very important part of your book.
Yes, it is.
And their conclusion about Randy was that he was a showman basically out to promote himself rather than doing serious research into this field.
That was the Department of Defense's conclusion.
Well, you know, I still think that he did do a lot to call out some people and to at least make us think, because it is possible to be duped in all of this.
And, you know, I don't want to get into a discussion in any way about Uri Geller, who's been on this show a lot of times, but Uri Geller was very much in the sights of James Randy.
I think James Randy even wrote a book about Uri Geller.
And just to end this little segment of the conversation, in your book, there's a quote that I've never seen before.
And James Randy talked about his death.
And he said, I want to be cremated and I want my ashes to be blown in Uri Geller's eyes.
Yes.
And I think he was saying that jokingly.
And I think both Uri and James Randy had something in common.
They both had a sense of humor.
And I think that was part of it.
But I will never forget the interview that I did with him 15 years ago.
And I'm sad that, you know, that is now going to be the last time I ever got to speak to this man because he was undoubtedly a character.
Okay.
In the couple of minutes we've got left here, let's just ask this question, and then we'll get to some commercials and come back and really get stuck into the book.
The book starts with Abraham Lincoln's dream.
And I'm going to quote from the book, and this is quoting Abraham Lincoln.
About 10 days ago, I retired very late.
I'd been up waiting for important dispatches from the front.
I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary.
I soon began to dream.
There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me, and then I heard subdued sobs as if a number of people were weeping.
So this all starts, if I don't have this wrong, with Abraham Lincoln, a very famous character from all of our histories, America particularly, having what appeared to be some kind of precognitive dream.
Yes, and if you had, say, what is called, recited the whole dream, you would, it's a quite eerie thing because he sees himself laying as a corpse and there's lots of people around sobbing.
And he asks a soldier standing close to the corpse, what's happened?
And the soldier says, it's the president.
He was shot by an assassin.
And this happened three days before Lincoln went to the theater and famously was shot by an assassin and died from his wounds the following day.
So it's a quite hair-raising dream if you read it in its entirety.
And if we are to believe those words, and why shouldn't we?
There might be reasons why we shouldn't, but if we're to believe those words, then it's a very high-profile case of somebody predicting their own future and that future not being a good future, as history proved.
No, what is typical for these phenomena, regrettably, we could say, that is often events that are emotionally strongly charged that will come through.
And of course, crisis, death, wounds, and all these kinds of things.
And of course, a person's death is often at least accompanied by fear.
Well, I have no proof that these things exist.
But anecdotally in my life, I've certainly seen instances where bad things that have happened, maybe they've happened to me, and I've in a way been aware of them beforehand because they have a backwash through time.
So I think we can agree on that.
Vian Explained with Howard Hughes brings you Terrier Simonson in the south of Norway and his book, A Short History of Almost Everything Paranormal.
Why almost everything, Terrier?
Well, you know, of course, a book does not cover everything because this paranormal field is enormous.
And also, of course, it's a little hint to the famous book by Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything.
So I just added paranormal, you know.
Okay, no, I missed that.
Yes, obviously.
Yes, I know.
I didn't get the Bill Bryson connection.
I should have.
All right, you talk about Psi, this thing that we investigate out there, PSI, Psy, and you talk about the big five elements and aspects of it are.
And I think it's a good idea for us to list them, and you do in the book.
Number one, telepathy, thinking the same as somebody else.
Number two, clairvoyance, psychic sight, remote viewing, mental television.
Three, precognition, paranormal, four, knowledge, Abe Lincoln being an example, premonition.
Four, telekinesis, being able to move things by mental influence.
And five, healing.
Those you think of the five aspects of psi, as we would call it?
Well, they are the classical Main forms of psi.
And of course, it's just a map, you know, but it's a useful map.
And the first three of the phenomena you mentioned: the telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, they are often called ESP, extrasensory perception.
And the two others are called PK, psychokinesis.
So the first three is about transference of information, and the last two is about transference of energy.
And telekinesis, I haven't, I can't, in all the years that I've been doing this program, I haven't actually met anybody who could do that.
I've met people and spoken to people who said they can do it.
I haven't actually seen anybody who could do it.
Is telekinesis common?
Well, I used the quite funny example.
You move your body, don't you?
And that's telekinesis in a way because you use the psychic power to move your physical body.
But of course, we are not speaking about that kind of telekinesis here.
Well, it's difficult to say.
The parapsychologist, they choose to do with what is called random event generators.
For instance, a machine that gives red and green blinks with a little lamp, for instance.
And the point for the psychic is to somehow influence the machine to come up with more green blinks than red blinks.
And if you have an so-called even distribution from the machine's part, then you do thousands and thousands of experiments and you get a kind of tilt on the statistics there, then that tilt has to be explained.
And Dean Raden, who is the most famous pair of psychologists today, he has gone through lots of those studies and he concludes that this is the real phenomenon.
And Dean has been working also in Bell Laboratory.
It's a very famous laboratory in the US together with lots of Nobel Prize winners.
So he's no fool.
No, I've had Dean Raden on this show.
He's a very, I must get him back on.
He's an excellent guest.
Yes, he is.
In fact, I will be on air with him in another show before Christmas.
So yeah, he talks yesterday.
Please give it my regards.
Okay, so he thinks, and you think that telekinesis does exist.
I'm thinking back to James Randy here.
I'm sure I saw a TV clip of a young guy, I think it was in the 1970s on a TV show, who claimed that he could move the pages of a telephone directory, a telephone book as we used to call them, which were open on a table, and he was just spreading out his palm and willing the pages of this directory to turn over.
And indeed they did.
But it appeared on subsequent investigation, and I think James Randy was part of this on this TV show, and I must look that up again sometime, that there was some kind of phenomenon involving the movement of air that was actually moving those pages, and there was no telekinesis.
And I guess, you know, that kind of thing does not help the study of that phenomenon, I would have thought.
No, of course it does not.
So you should have a laboratory series with possibly with the magicians present so they can detect if there is any fraud going on.
So, you know, I am not into the sensationalist thing of this.
I'm more into, say, what can we make the controls as rigorous as possible and then see what we get.
Have you, of those five things we talked about, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, telekinesis and healing, have you seen yourself examples of these things at work?
I would say I had seen at work telepathy and clairvoyance and precognition and to some extent also healing, yes.
And of all of those experiences, can you think of maybe one or two that would amaze my listener?
You know, there can always be other explanations.
So without going into detail about that, I can tell a little funny story.
I was going to a date some years ago, and I was, of course, a bit nervous, how will that go?
And so I asked an old traveler, you know, there is a tradition amongst travelers for psychic phenomena.
And I asked an old traveler, gypsy, or what you call them in England, about this.
And he was known to be psychic.
And he said, oh, yes, this will go quite well.
She likes you a lot and so on.
And then he ended his kind of prediction by saying, and I can tell you, this woman is one meter and 64 centimeters tall.
And I said, huh?
How do you know?
Well, I don't know how I know, but she is.
And the average height of a Norwegian woman, I think, is one meter and 67 centimeters.
So he did not just come up with a number, you know, out of the catalogue of statistics or anything like that.
Well, anyway, I went to that date and it went quite well and so and so.
And I couldn't, of course, keep myself back.
So during the evening, I asked her, By the way, I mean, the first date, how tall are you?
Casually, I asked her, by the way, how tall are you?
And she then said, one meter and 64 centimeters.
And did she say to you, as I suspect she might have said, actually, nobody's ever asked me that question before on a date?
No, I have never asked anyone before on a date.
And did you tell her why you were asking it?
No, I was just doing it casually in passing, you know.
Well, I think, I mean, listen, you got me convinced with that story.
I think that's very good.
One meter, 64 centimeters.
I've no idea what that is in British, well, what used to be British feet and inches, but there we are.
You talk a lot in the book about psychic archaeology.
What is that?
Well, some archaeologists have used psychics to Do important finds.
It's not so very well known, but quite serious persons have used that.
Most famously, it was a Canadian archaeologist, Professor Norman Emerson, and he often is the big archaeologist on the First Nations people archaeology in Canada.
And he several times used a psychic called George McMullen.
And he said that in about 80% of the cases, George McMullen, in fact, did find the artifacts that he sought using his psychic abilities.
And Norman Emerson is often called the father of scientific archaeology in Canada.
So his testimonial about this is very interesting.
And he's also written several essays about psychic archaeology.
So do you think that that is being used in Egypt at the moment?
You know, the Great Pyramid, I think, has been scanned using modern technology, if I'm right about that.
Somebody will tell me.
Do you think that they're using psychics there?
Well, I don't, you know, it's not normal among archaeologists to do that.
But there was a project in the 1980s called the Alexandri Project.
And there was a guy named Schwartz.
He used 11 psychics.
And he did, in fact, did quite important finds.
Among other things, he found the palace of Cleopatra.
And that was quite impressive.
And it was also filmed.
So he has documented this.
And he wrote a book about it afterwards.
That's astonishing.
Now, you said we would talk about this, and I think we should.
Project Stargate.
This is America's investigation.
We've talked about this with various people on this show many times, and I find it fascinating.
Most recently, we spoke with Russell Targ about four weeks ago, and he's quoted in your book as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where America, for purposes of prosecuting the Cold War, used or tried to use various psychic methods.
And from your account of it, it all appeared to be pretty successful.
There was somebody called Nina Kulagina who demonstrated telekinesis.
Yes, but she was Russian, and she could also have been part of a Russian propaganda act.
But you can find several of the videos with Nina Kulagina on YouTube.
So you can go and see for yourself and make up your own mind about that.
But as I said, she was Russian, and she could have been part of a Russian propaganda project.
But in the US, they used quite a lot of serious physicists doing this research.
And they concluded, I read reports, Russian TAG is just one of them.
And all the reports I have read concludes that this is a very real, but also very unstable phenomenon.
And I think from my memory of reading through your book, when they came to wrap all of this up, if they really did wrap it up fully in 1995, it had been going from the 1970s, they actually came and, you know, the U.S. military, the U.S. government wouldn't, I don't think, have wasted money on all of this stuff for so many years.
But they came to conclude that the hit rate for the remote viewing and many of those things that they used was pretty high.
Yes, they have an evaluation by, amongst others.
Well, the two persons, we can get back to the other, but one of the persons evaluating this was a professor in statistics, and she had made several textbooks in her field.
Her name is Jessica Utz, and I don't know if that's correct, but UTTS Utz.
And she concluded that there was a hit rate about 35%, and that's far beyond what normal guessing would have given her.
And she's very respected in her field.
Didn't you say in the book that chance, randomness, would give you 17% or something like that?
And they were getting at best 34%.
About that.
You know, the numbers, there were different types of experiments under different protocols and so and so.
So, but as I say, general idea, these numbers, we could go with them, yes.
And what do you think it was then if they were doing remote viewing experiments, which we know they were, and they were trying to divine what was going on the other side of the Berlin Wall, the Eastern Bloc in the Eastern Bloc?
What do you think they were using?
Were they tapping into this limitless, endless mental internet you talk about?
Yes, as I said, for me, this is a quite natural thing.
The nature of consciousness is to be ubiquitous, just like electromagnetism is ubiquitous throughout the universe.
Also, consciousness is a part, it's a basic fiber in the fabric of the universe.
And the only question is, how aware are you of what is going there?
As I used the metaphor of the internet, some people have a good search engine on the internet, and they trained special people to do this work and somehow loading down information from that mental internet.
And as you said, the statistics, at least according to Professor Utz, showed they were quite successful in doing so.
We don't have time to go into all of this in detail, but it's a great part of your book, I think.
You talk about the various beliefs of various groups of people around the world, like the Sami on the Arctic Circle, where you are, and the Bushmen of Africa.
And you say that Bushmen, they have a collective consciousness which is palpable, that you can see and is obvious.
Yes, there is quite famous American psychologist and anthropologist called Bradford Keeney, he's a professor in Louisiana, and he has been initiated into their century and century and century old tradition of the Bushman.
And he says that in some of the most absorbing experiences of this Sphere, the Bushmen call it classroom.
They download information about the ancestors, about different hunting techniques, about medical plants, and everything.
So it's part of the collective memory that is available if you just tune into it.
And as I said, this is Professor Bradford Keeney, and he's written about 20 books in psychology and is quite respected in his field.
So we cannot say this is just bogus and vivid imagination this.
I think this quotation is from Bradford Keeney.
I wrote this one down from the book.
During this foray into some exotic paranormal forests, we have seen that qualified anthropologists have had their eyebrows raised and their jaws dropped in encounters with primeval cultures more open than our own to the enigmatic world of psi phenomena.
In other words, there are cultures around this world, and we know this, who could teach us a thing or two about all of this.
Yes, I think we have been forgetful.
And that is also what I do in my book.
I show that, say, the great German philosophers of the 18th century and 19th century, early 19th century, Hegel, for instance, even Kant, Schopenhauer, they all believed in this phenomena.
Not to say believe in, because then you make it kind of a religious issue.
They took it for granted that these phenomena was, say, objectively real and part of consciousness.
It's just become this reductionist materialist dogma that's part of modern science after Newton, the Newtonian science, that somehow excluded these phenomena.
And that is an important point for me because if you have a model, that model of consciousness, explanatory model, that excludes those phenomena from the outside, well, it's no wonder you don't find them.
So, and earlier European tradition do not have a model that excludes these phenomena.
And indigenous people all over the world do not have models excluding those phenomena.
And also within quantum physics, there are some of the physicists.
For instance, famous Nobel Prize winner in Cambridge, Professor Brian Josephson, his model of consciousness do not exclude these phenomena.
And I quote also Josephson in my book, and he has said these are very real phenomena, and he claims to have them demonstrated also.
So the might of the model is really the problem here.
If you have a model excluding those phenomena, you've got a problem.
If you open to other kind of models, based on quantum physics, for instance, or string theory, then you could much more easily include those phenomena in your science.
And it's all in the book, Therier.
And we're talking about paranormality.
We're going to get some Norwegian stories in the book.
And I'm glad that you, Therie, included some stories from your own land here.
You talk a lot about a guy I'd never heard about, a psychic called Jordaf Gerstadt, I think is his name.
The Snaßer, you can tell me what they call him the Snaßa man.
The Schnorsa man.
Yes, this old guy, he's living in northern Norway in a little village called Snossa, and therefore they call him the Schnorsa man.
And this is a guy you say he predicted the assassination, it is reported, of JFK just before it happened.
He got a frightful vision of JFK being killed, and he told to several friends before to have them as witness.
And some days after, it in fact occurred.
So, yes.
Now, did he, I don't know if he was well known, that's a long time ago, if he was already well known as a psychic there, but did he try and tell anybody about this?
I mean, anybody in America?
No, he did not.
And of course, usually if you see a plague crashing, you don't call for your innovation.
You don't call, say, KLM or British Aristotes to tell what you've seen.
You know, they will declare you insane right away.
And possibly with good reason, most of the case.
So this is the kind of stuff he does.
And how do you think he is doing that?
Is he again tapping into that mental internet?
That is what I think, yes.
I have a chapter in my book also about that, that our perception of time is probably, you know, we have limited capacity in our, say, day-to-day ego.
And I compare to if you go on a railway and you go to, say, you are going on the train in London and want to go to Scotland.
Okay, you are probably going through Manchester.
And when you enter the train in London, of course, Manchester is already there, but you have not arrived yet.
You need time to come there.
And I think also we somehow organize the events in linear time.
Einstein famously said that the only reason there is time is so that not everything should happen at once, because that would be overwhelming and confusing.
But in fact, also the American Association for the Advancement of Science had done some serious experiments with retro causality and the relativity of time.
So I think our common sense and day-to-day consciousness operates with linear time.
But basically, in altered state of consciousness, I think it's possible to somehow expand and leave the linear time and get a more, say, what is called, what would be the English word, say, eternity perspective on this, to be lifted out from your train wagon, getting up in a helicopter and see the totality of the railway from above.
Right.
So if you went up in that helicopter and you looked down from, I don't know, 5,000, 10,000 feet, you'd be able to look all the way back down the track and see where you'd been, but you'd also be able to see the stations ahead of you.
And that speaks to the fact that, as I've always kind of thought, that the past exists, the Future already exists, and our present, of course, exists because we're in it.
And they all have equal value.
Yes, that is very valid.
That is called eternalism, and that's a very valid opinion.
That several physicists share that opinion.
It's also called block time or the B theory of time.
It was a philosopher about the early 19th and 20th century, MacTaggart, he wrote a book called The Unreality of Time, and he defends that position.
We talked, and we'll just quickly cover this, and then we'll move on to something else.
But Jordalf Gerstad, the psychic, the Snorse man.
Yes.
Is he still alive?
Yes, he is 93 years old.
Yes, and he visited the Pope last year.
Okay, well, you know, I've never heard of him, and I'm sure my listener may well know of him, but I don't think they will.
But it would be more useful, wouldn't it, if you were able to go to him, for example, and this is a frivolous example, but if I was able to go with him and go to him and say, Jordaf, could you tell me the winning six lottery numbers for next week?
Please, can you see those?
He can't do this to order, can he?
That's the problem.
Well, someone have tested him, not on Lotto, but there's a famous lawyer in Norway.
He's called Kato Schutz, and he did a test.
He drew a card from a pack, and not knowing the card himself, he asked Jasta, can you tell me which card I just drew?
And he controlled the pack and controlled the card, and Jasta did not see when he drew it, and it was totally hidden.
And even so, Jasta could tell the number on that card.
He usually don't go into this party games.
He is a very serious man, you know, feeling he's got a gift from God.
He's usually mostly working as a healer and also helping the police finding lost persons and also helping the Red Cross when there has been avalanches and people have disappeared trying to find them.
And he has succeeded on several cases.
So that is what he's really into.
I don't know what he would answer.
Probably he'd just laugh.
I don't know if he would be able to do it also because that is a very precise information.
It's these kind of things, you know, the information very often appears as pictures as you get in your dream.
And they will not come with statistics and point zero two three.
And, you know, so if you ask to be too specific, I think that could be difficult.
I compare often if you see a bird approaching some several hundred meters coming, you cannot see if that is a seagull or a crow or whatever because it's far away.
But you see something flapping the wings over there.
And that is some, I think it is comparable to a psychic.
You get some impression, a general impression, what is approaching you.
But to say, describe the wings in the detail and every feather on the bird, that is close to impossible, I would say.
And that is, if you were doing remote viewing, you would get a rough outline of what it was, the target, whatever you're looking for, and then the subsequent details, the extra pieces of information come to you later, don't they?
That's how that works.
Yes, and the military, in my book, I give several links to reports from the military so people can go and check those reports for themselves.
You know, people very often think, oh, do I have to believe this?
Or do I have to believe that?
You know, belief and non-belief, then that you should take to church.
You know, this is not about believing and not believing.
It's checking the facts.
And if you go, you read the reports and make up your own mind.
I think that's the best.
I've always done this show that way.
If you get something out of what you hear, that's fine.
That's a matter for you.
Don't live your life by it.
But, you know, it just adds to the rich, what do they call it?
The rich and varied tapestry of life.
There is a great poltergeist story, a Norwegian story, from 2010 that, again, I've never heard of.
This is a kindergarten called Lalam, I think, in Gudbrandstalen.
Gudbrandstalen, is it Gudbrandstal?
You tell me.
Gudbrandstalen.
LALM i GULBURNSTALLEN.
Yes, I think you're quite...
I was very nearly there.
But if I can quote from the book, between April 26th and June the 15th, 2010, all 15 employees witnessed diverse objects, cups, mugs, stones, jars, flying through the rooms.
Sometimes these items seemed to appear out of thin air.
In addition, doors opened and closed by themselves.
Figures were drawn with crayons moved by nobody's hand, no human hand that is.
Feathers used for decoration organized themselves into specific patterns, and so on.
More than 90 seemingly inexplicable episodes occurred there, and interestingly enough, many of these events were observed by two or three adults simultaneously.
And these events there were investigated by a parapsychologist, Kiel Flekoi.
Yes, but he's in fact not a parapsychologist.
He's a professor in very ordinary psychology and is used very often by courtrooms and official instances in Norway to make reports.
So he's a very serious guy, this.
Okay, and these were very serious events.
Oh, yes.
Quite dramatic events.
I cannot go into all of it in my book because, as I said, it was about 90 different things.
But, you know, heavy objects moving around and sounds and as I said, crayons making drawings by themselves.
And some of those phenomena were witnessed up to 20 people at the same time.
And some of the parents were at first very skeptical about this because they thought some people were going crazy in the staff or they were being fooled by some tricks or something like that.
But three of the skeptical parents Also, in the end, ended up with seeing those phenomena happen right before their eyes.
So, it's quite well documented.
This and again, if you have a model that says these things cannot happen, okay, then you have a problem.
You must say those are crazy or they have taken LSD or whatever, you know.
But if you have a model of consciousness that say that somehow and in some way and sometimes consciousness will kick in, also influencing the material world, well, then these phenomena are not that problematic, at least.
There's a quote from the activities that went on there, the activity, and I think this was from Kierle Flekoy's report.
Quotes, right after we, the skeptic and two other people, had entered the eastern part of the kindergarten's living room, we heard a kind of snap from the ceiling.
Then appeared a felt-tipped pen of the sort that we normally call a marker pen.
It came at high speed from the ceiling and landed in a window facing south.
The marker landed on the windowsill and stopped as if it had landed in glue.
There it lay motionless.
I picked it up and put it in my pocket.
Strange events.
Yes, it is.
Also, I mentioned that just in passing in the book, the professor in psychology investigating these phenomena, he has a brother that is a professor in physics at the university in Oslo, and he was also involved in evaluating and assessing these phenomena.
And together they reached the conclusion that most likely these phenomena were physically real.
It was not just people lying or wanting the 15 minutes and the line rate or something like that.
It's just kind of unexplained, it's unmapped terrain, to put it that way.
And was this a working kindergarten, wasn't it?
Oh, yes, it was.
So how did the children manage with that?
If things like that were happening around the children, were they terrified?
You know, as a child, I would have been terrified.
Yes, they were quite perturbed at what I heard.
And also, of course, the grown-up people, probably children tend to be more accepting, you know, because they don't have that fixed opinion what the world is supposed to be.
But at least some of the grown-ups, the staff, were quite frightened by these phenomena.
So were they able, I mean, what can you do?
But were they able to do anything?
Well, first they called a priest.
And after he did his thing, probably prayer or something like that, the phenomena disappeared.
But then gradually they started to reappear.
And then they called a psychic.
And then she came and did her thing.
I don't know exactly what that was, if she meditated or asked eventual spirits to go to the light or whatever.
I don't know what ritual or intention she set in the room.
But at least the phenomena after she had visited disappeared and did not come back after that.
And all of this happened 10 years ago.
So is it all quiet now in Gutbrandstalen?
From the last report I heard, it's all quiet these days.
As I write, these days only the sound and noises that should be in kindergarten are heard.
What a strange thing and how terrifying for the people who experience that.
So the final conclusion of this very Norwegian story, which I don't think was reported by the newspapers here in the UK, it should have been, is that these events were truly unexplainable.
There was no rational, scientific explanation of what happened.
Well, the report of the psychology professor played the ball on to future science.
So the objective reality of the phenomenon was somehow documented, but the explanatory model was not launched.
So that is the problem with these phenomena.
Already Freud said that probably if you investigate these phenomena, you will find that most of them are real, but to reach an explanatory model that everybody can agree about, that is a problem.
And if I must say, the most prestigious psychological journal in the world is often considered to be the American Psychologist, which is released by APA, the American Psychological Association.
And two years ago, in the May issue in 2018, Professor Etzel Kardenja of Lund University in Sweden wrote an article for them.
And he also says the same, that going through about nearly all research done in the field, he concludes, yes, those phenomena are real, but no, we have not reached an explanatory model that we can agree about.
Well, when we do, you and I have to have another conversation.
I don't know whether we haven't got time to talk about it now, but have you investigated ghost cases in Norway?
I would love to talk to you about those.
No, I have not.
I had to limit the scope of the book, and still 500 pages is quite a lot, you know.
Well, we've only scratched the surface.
It is a remarkable book that I think would make a great Christmas present for somebody.
The book is called A Short History of Almost Everything Paranormal.
It's by Tarier G. Simmonson.
And who publishes this?
It's Watkins Publishing in London.
It's England's oldest publisher for mind, body, spirit literature.
It was started in 1893, and it's also portrayed indirectly in the Harry Potter books.
Right.
Is it?
Yes, it is.
How so?
Oh, yes, of course it is.
Yes, and Watkins appears in the Harry Potter books.
Yes.
I think some of the Hogwarts pupils buy their curriculum books there.
Yes, Watkins, also a famous store selling books of this kind.
A remarkable place, very close to Covent Garden in London.
It used to be very close to a place where I used to work.
Talier, we're totally out of time.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Howard.
Talier G. Simmonson, your thoughts about him and what he's had to say gratefully received.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of 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, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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