The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 515 - Lionel Friedberg

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Jan. 31, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:41:46

Edition 515 - Lionel Friedberg

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast.
	My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for being part of my life ongoing with all of your messages and thoughts and suggestions for the show.
	If you want to communicate with me, you know what to do.
	Go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can follow the link and send me a message from there.
	Thank you to Adam for creating the website and keeping the shows churning out to you, which indeed they have been through last year, 2020 and this year, 2021.
	Thank you to Haley 2 for booking the guests, including a remarkable man who we're about to speak with.
	His name is Lionel Friedberg, and he's been behind some of the amazing documentary series and films that you will have seen.
	He's based in California, where a lot of people who do that kind of thing are based, but his heart and his life is in Africa.
	His life story began in Africa.
	And the remarkable things that have happened through this man's life all connect back in strange, wonderful, and mysterious ways to Africa.
	Look him up.
	I'm not going to give you his full biography now.
	Look up Lionel Friedberg online and you will see what I mean about the things that this man has done.
	So I think we've got a treat for you.
	This is going to be a long conversation, so get yourself a drink of whatever you like to drink and maybe something to eat and just sit back and enjoy this one.
	I think you're going to find it uplifting.
	And God, do we need some uplift in these times?
	Thank you for supporting me.
	And thank you for the emails that tell me that in some way I'm supporting you too.
	So I don't think we're a sort of mutual aid society here.
	I promised I'd do a shout out.
	This is for Paul, who's in the police in the UK.
	All I will say is that he's in the CID, which is what they used to call the plainclothes branch.
	In other words, police without uniforms, detectives.
	Paul, promised I'd do it.
	Hope you hear this.
	Let me know if you have.
	And, you know, always good to hear from you.
	When you get in touch with me, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
	And when you stop by the website, theunexplained.tv, if you feel you can make a donation to the show, then please follow the link and do that if you can.
	And if you have done that recently from the bottom of my heart, thank you very much indeed.
	Okay, I'm not going to say another thing.
	Let's cross to California now and say, Lionel Friedberg, thank you very much for coming on my show.
	Oh, Howard, it's an absolute pleasure to be with you.
	Thank you for having me.
	Now, your story is truly fascinating.
	In fact, I don't think the word fascinating is adequate, really.
	You've had a tremendous life, a life that started in South Africa.
	But the interesting thing with you is that even though you are now a success in the United States of America, in a very difficult field, Africa, and that's the point of your new book, never left you, has never left you.
	No, that's absolutely correct.
	The title of the book really plays on that factor.
	You know, what defines me is my African roots, my African background.
	I grew up there.
	I grew up in an apartheid society as a child.
	I completed my education in South Africa.
	And then my parents, I was an only child.
	My parents eventually left South Africa, primarily because of the apartheid situation.
	My father, who was originally from Latvia, he took a job at a little store up in northern Rhodesia, it was called at the time.
	Today it's called the Republic of Zambia.
	And it was a copper mining community just to the south of the Congo border.
	The Congo had just flared into warfare.
	Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo, Belgium gave it its independence, was the first prime minister.
	He had just been assassinated and the Congo was aflame.
	But in northern Rhodesia, on this side of the fence, everything was quiet and calm and collected because it was a British colony.
	And my father took a job at a little store in a little copper mining town and I decided to go up there.
	And the reason why I did that was because I was always in love with the movies.
	Ever since I was maybe four or five years old, my mother, bless her soul, took me to every single matinee movie that she went to.
	And I think the first film I saw was Bathing Beauty with Esther Williams.
	And I fell in love with her.
	And then I said to my mother afterwards, I said, where does she live?
	And my mother said, in America.
	It was the first time I ever heard the word America.
	And the idea of a film on a big screen made in a place called America appealed to me enormously.
	And by the time I was seven, eight years old, my dream, my ambition was to actually go to America and make films in whatever place it was that made that film that I saw with Esther Williams.
	You know, I'm talking Hollywood.
	And so that was my dream.
	But I went to see every single matinee adventure film that ran at the local theater.
	And, you know, Tarzan, The African Queen, King Solomon's Minds, all of those marvelous films which I saw as a child.
	So when my parents moved up there, I thought, oh my God, here's my opportunity to go and make movies like that because I had a little sine camera.
	We didn't have video those days.
	We had film.
	And I was given a used film camera when I was 11 years old.
	So I made films for my school, for my friends, birthday parties, sporting events, things of that nature.
	And so when my parents went up to Zambia, I had got my education behind me.
	And I said, I'm coming with you.
	And my mother said, for God's sake, you're not.
	You stay here in South Africa.
	Go to university, get yourself a life and a career.
	I didn't want to hear any of it.
	I wanted to go up there with them into the wilds of darkest Africa and make my own films about King Solomon's mines and the African queen and Tarzan and what have you.
	And so I followed them.
	And when I got up there to what was called the Copper Belt, I was horrified because there was nothing there except copper mining, little towns, surrounded by a sea of bush and wilderness from horizon to horizon.
	And I thought to myself, what have I done?
	Nevertheless, after a couple of months of just pondering around and walking around With my little camera going into the boondocks and taking movies, you know, one day there was a little ad in the local newspaper.
	There was a local brag that served these copper mining towns called the Northern News.
	And in there was a little tiny box, an advertisement, looking for staff for a new television station that was going to be set up in a town called Kitwi, which is one of these copper mining towns.
	The company that owned it was partly South African and partly British.
	And so they set up this television station and I knocked on the door and I had an interview.
	Now, of course, they weren't looking for top staff.
	All of those people were brought out from the UK, the producers, the engineers, you know, what in Hollywood you'd call the top of the line, the above-the-line people.
	But everybody beneath that, you know, they were looking for local staff, drivers and people to work in the props room and whatever else.
	And I knocked on the door and I said, please, you've got to give me a job.
	I virtually begged them to give me a job.
	And the man who ran the station, he was a retired British captain by the name of Ian Salmon, wonderful man.
	And he agreed.
	He gave me a job in the props department, looking after props.
	Why?
	Because there were live advertising shows for local trading stores.
	So, you know, you'd have a live, you'd have a person in the studio holding up a can of oil, you know, and a box of breakfast cereal and say, oh, there's a special on here and a special on there.
	So we had this live advertising program, two of them every night.
	So they call those here in the UK ad mags.
	That's exactly what we call them.
	They were outlawed, I think, not very many years into commercial television.
	But I mean, that is what we call seat of your pants broadcasting, isn't it?
	Absolutely.
	And we had an ad mag at 6.30, and then we had another ad mag at 9.30 every single night.
	And my job was to basically, you know, take care of the props for these shows.
	But what I wanted to do more than anything else was to get behind one of those studio cameras.
	And I was very good at my job, by the way.
	And I think one of the things that made them decide to, you know, give me a job behind the camera was I was inventive.
	And also, I knew how to compose images very, very quickly because I'd been doing it as a child.
	But for example, there was one evening we had a special on ice cream.
	You can't have ice cream in a studio because the stuff would melt.
	And so I invented, there was black and white television, monochrome, no color.
	And I took a dishcloth, a white dishcloth, put it in a little dish, poured motor oil over it and put a marble at the top and it looked exactly like ice cream.
	And they thought, wow, this guy's quite inventive and, you know, he's pretty smart.
	He knows what he's doing.
	And I said to them, right, if you like what I'm doing, then put me behind the camera.
	And they did.
	And thank goodness for that, because it changed my life.
	That's where my career began.
	And of course, if you'd stayed in South Africa and you hadn't moved then, now places like that, that became eventually Zambia TV, I know.
	And there were places like Bapu Tatswana that had its own separate television station.
	And, you know, what was Rhodesia had its own TV station, but South Africa didn't.
	No, South Africa did not have television.
	And because we had a Minister of Posts and Telegraph, so that was his department, broadcasting, fell under the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs.
	And he was a narrow-minded, ghostly little man by the name of Albert Herzog.
	And he always, you know, in South Africa, people don't talk about going to the movies or the cinema.
	They talk about going to the bioscope because the bioscope was actually the first projector imported into South Africa.
	It was an American invention.
	And it used to go from town to town.
	And so everybody talked about the bioscope and that name stuck.
	So right up until the 60s, 70s even, instead of saying to going to the movies or going to the, you know, we'd be going to the bioscope.
	And this man, Albert Herzog, he said to, and whenever people said, when are we getting television?
	He said, I'm not having one of those little bioscopes in the corner of every lounge in the country.
	And of course, the reason was that God forbid the black community should see how the rest of the world lived.
	Remember, it was at the height of apartheid.
	And they wanted to isolate the black community and not show them that in actual fact, in many parts of the world, black and white people could actually get along with one another.
	Because in South Africa, the twain did not meet between these two communities, white and black.
	I mean, people forget a lot of these things now, don't they?
	Sorry to jump in here, but, you know, I explained to you before this, and my listener knows that I had a lot of experience of South Africa, first went there to train broadcasters.
	And in the corner of the room, this was 1994 when I first went there, in the corner of the room in the newsroom in Durban was a desk.
	And that desk used to be the censor's desk.
	Yes, everything went past the censor.
	So no television in case people found out what was going on there.
	And also the other thing, and this is just before we get to the unexplained aspects of your story, but the other thing was that they only, in South Africa, they only had FM radio.
	And I wondered, you know, why there was, for most people, there was only certainly the state radio was FM.
	You could buy radios only with FM.
	And I thought, I wonder why that is.
	That's remarkably far-sighted of them.
	You know, it took years for FM to be adopted in the UK.
	And then I thought about it.
	Of course it would all be FM because FM is local only.
	So you couldn't listen to foreign broadcasts.
	Now, in spite of all of that, and it's part of your story, there is something that I discovered there.
	When I first went down there, I thought, you know, I'd been warned in London, what are you going down there for?
	It's an apartheid state.
	I said, well, then, you know, Nelson Mandela is in charge now.
	It is all changing.
	This place has a new future.
	And if I've been asked to go down there and train people at the SABC, then I can help to be a part of that future.
	And, you know, I discovered that there was the regime, that's the government.
	And then there were ordinary people living their ordinary lives as best they could.
	And I came to understand that doesn't forgive any of it or forgive anybody for their part in it.
	But what I saw were ordinary people living their lives, and they were extraordinary.
	Absolutely.
	One must never forget that racism Was not always a choice in South Africa.
	It was the law.
	You had to behave that way.
	You had to have a separate entrance and exit.
	You had to have a separate beach and a church and a bank and a this and a that and an entrance to a store or whatever because it was enshrined in the statute books by law.
	And God forbid if you broke that law.
	And that's why people had to behave that way.
	But it was a voyage of discovery from, I remember going to the Botanical Gardens in Durban.
	Yes.
	And it being pointed out to me that there used to be white benches and green benches.
	I was born in Liverpool, a great mix of a city.
	I've lived in London for most of my adult life.
	And the green benches were for everybody else and the white benches were for the whites.
	Now, my blood boiled when I heard that.
	But in spite of it all, you know, people had to try in the midst of all of that, just as they did in wartime.
	They had to make a life.
	And you did.
	And you built a life and a career.
	But your career enriched very much by the cultures of the people who you met.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Which brings me back to this whole Northern Rhodesian story.
	Let me just briefly go back to that.
	So I got this job at the television station.
	And now Northern Rhodesia was given its independence by Britain.
	Britain was giving all its colonies away.
	You know, the colonies were all becoming independent.
	And so in 1964, Northern Rhodesia became the Republic of Zambia, as you said earlier.
	And when that happened, the station was nationalized by the state.
	It was taken over by the new black government under Kenneth Kawunda, who was a wonderful man.
	I'd met him many times.
	He'd been in the studio very, very often for interviews.
	You know, we had people from Whitehall and Washington and all over the world inside this little television station, which was just a big box in the middle of the bush, talking about independence and how things would be once independence came about.
	So we were exposed to all sorts of amazing things.
	And I'd met Kenneth Gowinder many times in the station.
	However, once we got independence, we, all of us white technicians at the station, eventually got a pink slip to say, thank you very much.
	You've done a great job all these years, but it's time for your job to be taken over by a local black person.
	To be Zambianized was the term that was used those days.
	So basically, we were all fired.
	We were given six months to find alternative work and to train someone to take over our jobs.
	Well, we didn't find this surprising.
	And of course, we totally understood the reasoning behind it.
	And it made perfect sense.
	The country now belonged to the local indigenous people who this was their country.
	And so as much as we understood the reasoning behind it, it was pretty shocking, particularly for me, because I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.
	I still wanted to go to Hollywood, but here I was, living in a small town in the African bush, working in a television station.
	That was an unreachable dream.
	How on earth would I do that?
	So we had a very, very nice young man who worked for us.
	I was living at home with my folks and my parents.
	And I went to him the next day and I said to him, David, and he wasn't much older than me.
	He was a member of the Bemba ethnic group.
	He was a lovely guy.
	David Firi was his name.
	And I said, David, I've been fired.
	And he said, oh, no, that's terrible.
	And I said, you know, I don't know what to do with my life.
	I really don't want to go back to South Africa.
	And the reason was because of apartheid, even though South Africa had a pretty thriving film industry even back then.
	And I'm talking about 1964 now.
	I said, I don't know what to do.
	And he said, well, maybe I can find someone to help you, to tell you what you should do.
	And I thought, that's interesting.
	You know, what on earth would he have?
	Who would he know who could tell me what to do with my life?
	I want to go and make movies, you know.
	And he said, I will arrange for you to meet someone.
	And I thought, okay.
	And I trusted the guy implicitly.
	And a few days later, he and I in my little secondhand car went trundling through on a dirt road into the bush near the town where we were living, which was called Ndola.
	And there was this little black community, a little village.
	And on the edge of it was a single house.
	And he said, park there.
	This is where we're going.
	And I thought, you know, where are we?
	What is all this about?
	Anyway, we parked outside this little house and he knocked at the door.
	And an ancient, very, very old, hunched-up little old woman opened the door.
	She was also a member of the Bemba ethnic group.
	This is the largest ethnic group in Zambia, in that part of Zambia.
	And this little lady, actually, she was an albino.
	She had a skin pigment problem, so she was more white than black.
	And she was all wrapped up in trench coats and blankets and whatever else, even though it was a piping hot day, and invited us into her little house.
	And in the front room, there was no furniture, but the walls had little canisters and pots and bottles and calabashes and various containers of all sorts of things that I couldn't identify.
	I had no idea what they were.
	Feathers and skins and little herbs and all sorts of odd things.
	And on the floor was a grass mat, and she asked us to sit down, which we did.
	She spoke no English.
	David was going to be my translator.
	And she picked up this little bag, a little wild animal skin bag, and she shook it.
	And I could hear clink, clink, clink inside.
	And she turned it upside down.
	And all these little bones and stones and little trinkets fell out onto this grass mat.
	Now, these were the bones.
	And the shamans, even today, in that part of the world and in many, many parts of Africa, the method of diagnosing a patient's ailments or of foretelling the future or of communicating with someone of the family who had passed on,
	all of these or how to or what sort of medication one needs, the Way they do this is to communicate with their ancestors, and the medium to do that is through the bones.
	The bones are, as they throw them on the mat, the belief is that the ancestor influences the way these bones fall, and the pattern that the bones fall speaks to the shaman.
	And that's exactly what this dear woman, little old lady, was doing.
	And was this the nganga?
	This was the nganga.
	In Zambia, they call them gangas.
	In South Africa, they are known as sangomas.
	Yeah.
	But it's basically the same thing.
	A traditional shaman is essentially called a sangoma in South Africa.
	And most of the ones that I've met are Sangomas, the ones I write about in my book.
	Anyway, she started to read my bones.
	And you know, the very first thing she did, she was very old.
	She had almost half blind.
	But the minute she looked down at the bones, she jerked herself back as though she'd got a fright.
	And she said to David, oh, I can't see anything.
	I can't see anything.
	And she was alarmed.
	And I was shocked.
	David was shocked.
	And she said to David, ask him, what are these lights?
	I can't see past the lights.
	And David said to me, she wants to know what these bright lights are.
	Well, you know what?
	It struck me immediately that what she was seeing was probably the lights in the television studio where I was working.
	And the minute I heard that, I thought, you better pay attention to what this little old woman has to say to you because she's probably seeing things that you're not seeing, but she is.
	And you better listen to what she has to say.
	Anyway, she started to read my bones and David was translating for me.
	And it was absolutely the most extraordinary experience.
	She told me so many things.
	I made notes of some of them, but a lot of them were just committed to memory.
	I did try to keep up with her because it was just pouring out of her.
	She was saying all sorts of incredible things.
	None of them made sense to me.
	None of them really, I didn't understand what she meant most of the time.
	And I don't even know if she knew what she was seeing in the bones.
	But she was saying things, for example, she said to David, he will cross the big water and he will go in that direction.
	And she pointed to the north.
	She pointed the direction that she pointed, sitting in her little room.
	She pointed in a northerly direction and she says, crossing the big water.
	Well, Zambia is a landlocked country.
	This poor lady had probably never been more than 20 miles away from where she was born, let alone see the ocean.
	She probably didn't even know what it was.
	But she said, he will cross the big water and he will go in that direction to the north.
	That's one of the first things she told me.
	And, you know, as my life unfolded, all of these amazing things that this woman told me came to pass.
	And she told me some really extraordinary things.
	Like, for example, another thing she said to me was, one day, when he goes to that other place in that direction, in other words, to the north, there will be more lights and he will work with very famous people.
	She said to David, one day he will go to a world where there is no color.
	There is only white, white everywhere.
	I had no idea what any of this meant.
	She said to him, one day he will be in the bush and the big beast will come and almost kill him.
	Another thing she said is he will go again to the big water and nearly die because the big water will try to take his life.
	Now, she's telling me all of these things.
	I really didn't know what she was referring to.
	One of the most amazing things that she said to him was, one day he will meet a man who knew the most evil man who ever lived.
	When I heard that, I was kind of, you know, I was almost unnerved.
	I didn't know what on earth this meant.
	It sounded kind of very scary to me.
	And, you know, it was only as these events came to pass that I reflected back and thought, oh my God, this woman foresaw all these events.
	And the very first thing that she told me was, you know, crossing the big water, going in the northern direction, is what I did was, and this is what I was hoping for from her to find a way to my future, to my career, was I did go back to South Africa.
	I had no choice.
	I joined the film industry.
	I had a wonderful time.
	I worked in the film industry there for a couple of years.
	And then I emigrated to Canada, to North America.
	And I went by sea.
	And the year was, we're talking about 1966 now.
	And of course, those days, most people, you know, if you traveled abroad, you went by sea.
	You didn't fly.
	It wasn't as popular as it was later on.
	Sea was still the way to travel abroad, particularly if you have lots of luggage.
	And so I took a ship from Cape Town to Southampton.
	And from Southampton, I was going to take the train to Liverpool.
	And from Liverpool, I was going to take a ship across the ocean to Montreal.
	Empress of Canada.
	That's exactly the ship I was going to take.
	My father worked on the dock police in Liverpool, and I went on the Empress of Canada to see it many times.
	So you went on that ship, wow.
	No, I didn't, but that's another story, because it was the year of the dock strike.
	Remember the big dock strike back in 1966?
	They cancelled all the sailings.
	So in actual fact, what I did was they flew me from London on Er Lingus to Montreal.
	I missed that voyage on the Empress of Canada, unfortunately.
	I was looking forward to it.
	Nevertheless, I did go on the S.A. Valle, which was a wonderful ship from Cape Town to Southampton.
	And halfway, it was a 13-day voyage.
	And halfway along the voyage, I went up on deck one night.
	And I used to look back over the stern of the ship every single night at the Southern Cross, which is a very prominent, you know, constant in the southern sky.
	The Southern Cross, almost as popular as the Big Dipper is here in North America.
	It's breathtaking to see.
	Exactly.
	The Southern Cross, you know, and every time I go back to Africa or to the Southern Hemisphere and I see the Southern Cross, I say, oh, this is my sky.
	You know, this is the sky that's in my blood.
	It's in my childhood.
	And every night, the Southern Cross was getting lower and lower and lower and lower on the horizon until it eventually disappeared beneath the horizon.
	And I thought, oh my Lord, I suddenly felt aware of the fact that I was going from one hemisphere of the planet to another because you could see that in the changing pattern of the stars every night.
	And it was a realization that really, when I suddenly realized what was going on, it was incredible for me.
	I was traveling from one part of the earth to the other.
	I was going from south to north and I was going on the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean is huge and it suddenly dawned on me.
	This is what that old woman had told me.
	I would cross the big water and go to the north.
	That's exactly what she had foreseen and that's exactly what I'm doing.
	That's the first time one of her predictions came true.
	And all of the others that she told me, as the years unfolded, they all came to pass.
	Every single thing she told me.
	What about the encounter with the big beast, where you nearly lost your life?
	I can tell you exactly about that.
	So I was in North America for about a year.
	My father took ill and I had to go back to Africa to get my mother back to South Africa.
	She was born in South Africa and to get my father to South Africa for proper medical care.
	So I had to return to South Africa.
	And in 1967, and then once I got back, you know, I started working in the film industry again.
	In 1967, I got a call asking me whether I would be interested in doing a film in covering a luxurious safari, a hunting safari, in Mozambique.
	And Mozambique, as most people know, is just to the right, the east of South Africa.
	At those days, I'm talking about the year 67, it was still a Portuguese colony.
	Actually, it was a Portuguese province.
	That's what they call it.
	And these three hunters came out from America, California, on a hunting safari.
	And they wanted a film made of their adventures and the carnage they were going to wreak in the African bush.
	I mean, it's horrific.
	I'm sorry to jump in here, but by today's standards, those things make the newspapers.
	It's horrific to think of.
	But those were the things that went on 50 years ago.
	They still go on today, unfortunately, to a lesser extent and in lesser, fewer areas.
	But hunting safaris are still very popular in Zimbabwe and even in Botswana.
	You know, Botswana for a while stopped all wildlife hunting, but now they've opened it up again because it brings in cash, it brings in money.
	Anyway, the reason why I took the job was hunting wild animals, innocent wild animals, never made any sense to me at all.
	And I wanted to find out what was the kicks that people were getting out of shooting wildlife for fun.
	What was the purpose of that?
	How did you, you know, what's the joy in that?
	I wanted to find out what made these guys tick.
	And that's why I decided to take the job.
	So anyway, there I was with my camera outfit and batteries and whatever else.
	And, you know, off I flew from South Africa to Bayra in Mozambique.
	And I met these hunters who arrived from the States.
	And then we went to the hunting concession, which was right in the middle of Mozambique.
	This was just before the Civil War began in Mozambique because it was still Portuguese territory.
	The War of Independence was sort of kept under control by the Portuguese.
	Later on, of course, the Civil War was pretty brutal in Mozambique and decimated the wildlife population.
	It was absolutely awful.
	But those days, there was wildlife everywhere, prolific all over the place.
	And we went into this wonderful area called the Zinav Reserve, which was in the middle of Mozambique, with these three white hunters.
	And we were met by two South African white hunters who were in the employ of the company that operated this hunting concession.
	They were going to be the leaders of the expedition.
	And these three white hunters were going to have a bull shooting the hell out of wildlife.
	And, you know, my job was to cover this.
	Anyway, it was awful to see.
	And, you know, it was a very well-funded safari.
	There were portable coolers that were taken everywhere.
	You know, there was booze at night.
	And they arrived with an absolute, you know, like an arsenal of weapons and guns and telescopic sights and rifles and God knows what to shoot the animals.
	So it was fascinating for me.
	But anyway, to cut a very long story short, one day it was the turn of one of these American hunters to shoot an elephant.
	They all had a license to shoot one elephant each, which for me was absolutely the most unbelievable.
	Nevertheless, that's what they did.
	And this particular guy, we had tracked a herd of elephants, which in itself is a whole story.
	And I talk quite extensively about that in the book.
	Nevertheless, the white hunter who was leading the safari, he said to this American white hunter, he picked out the elephant.
	He said, this is the one, that's the one you should shoot.
	He's an old bull.
	He's probably about 60 years old or so.
	He's had it.
	He's not a leader of the pack anymore.
	He's on the edge of the herd, as you can see.
	You can take him out.
	That's the term.
	Not kill or shoot, but take him out, you know, is the polite term used.
	And so the guy who was going to shoot positioned himself with his rifle in front of me and his telescopic sight.
	I positioned myself with my camera right behind him, looking over his shoulder.
	And he was pointing his rifle towards that bull elephant.
	It was, you know, about, I don't know, maybe 100 yards or more away.
	And he shot and missed.
	And the herd began to trumpet and scatter in every direction.
	And it revealed in the middle of the herd, once all the dust had sort of settled a little bit, there was a single cow, a female elephant, and she was just standing there guarding her calf.
	There was a baby.
	And she saw this white hunter with his rifle.
	And of course, these elephants, these animals understood what guns and hunters were all about because they'd been hunted for all these years.
	And when she saw him in front of me with his rifle, his gun, she decided to protect her calf.
	And the only way she was going to do that was to stampede.
	She wanted to kill him.
	And she started thundering towards him, running towards him.
	And here I am with my camera right behind him, rooted to the spot with this very, very heavy camera on my shoulder, film camera.
	And he was in the frame.
	All I heard was the white hunter in the background saying, run, move, go.
	So the white hunter, the American in front of me, ran out of frame.
	So all I had in my frame, and I'm running film, was this elephant charging towards me.
	She was actually charging towards him, not me, but he'd now gone.
	So she was charging directly towards me.
	I couldn't move.
	I was frozen solid.
	I absolutely could not move.
	And all I could see in the viewfinder was this charging elephant getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and filling my frame.
	And at the very, very last minute, I'm not exaggerating when I'm saying she was probably no more than about six to eight feet away from me.
	There was this bam over my shoulder.
	And the white hunter, the leader of the safari, shot her between her eyes.
	Right between her eyes.
	And she stopped charging immediately.
	And her front forelegs folded up.
	She fell on her knees, if you like.
	Her legs folded up and she looked at me.
	Her eyes were beginning to glaze over.
	And she and I made some kind of metaphysical connection at that very moment.
	And I can tell you why I'm saying this is because many, many, many, many times in years to come, when I had my bones read by Sangomas, by shamans, they always said to me, they always asked me, why is this Nglovu?
	And Lovu is a Zulu word for elephant.
	Why is this elephant with you?
	I am absolutely convinced that she at that moment and I, her soul, her spirit and mine, made a connection.
	And that animal has been with me ever since that day she died in front of me.
	So that experience must have changed you?
	Oh, I mean, I always had an incredibly deep relationship with animals, particularly wild animals.
	And, you know, if you want to, if my office, right, there are elephants everywhere.
	There's an elephant hanging from my rearview mirror on my car.
	They're everywhere because I know that this female elephant, the spirit of that elephant, is with me and is protecting me.
	I know, and that might sound crazy, but I know that that is the case.
	Anyway, this poor thing died in front of me.
	And it was only that night that we were sitting back at base camp and the booze was flowing and everything.
	And I was trying to process the day and thinking about this.
	I could have been killed that day by this animal.
	I don't think she intended to kill me.
	She intended to kill the hunter.
	But I was the one that was left in her path.
	And then she died.
	And I was nurturing a bear, I think, and everybody else was partying in the background.
	And I was sitting on the edge on this veranda of this hut where we were, which was the bar.
	And it suddenly dawned on me, oh my God, this is what that old woman had meant all those years ago when she said, beware of the great beast in the bush.
	It may kill you.
	This is what she had foreseen.
	She foresaw that event.
	And you know, again and again and again, there were so many incidents like that that that woman had described, which then actually took place.
	They actually happened exactly as she described them to me.
	When she described them at the time, I don't think she knew what she meant.
	She was only seeing images in these bones, and I didn't know what she was talking about.
	But when they happened, I suddenly realized, ah, that's what she meant.
	And that one was with unquestionably, she had foreseen that event.
	And those people, the Sangoma, I'm not pronouncing this properly, the Ngunga, they are ingrained within Africa.
	I remember interviewing a Sangoma who was, a lot of these people have, you know, regular jobs.
	And this particular person was working as a nurse at a resort.
	So I was staying in a rendezvous, you know, a hut overnight in the middle of nowhere.
	And she was the nurse for the complex.
	And they said, you know, this person is a Sangoma.
	So I interviewed her.
	And, you know, as you say, she didn't tell me anything about myself, but she gave me a thumbnail sketch of the work that she did.
	And it was just transfixing how she would instantly, if somebody came into the place and that person was a criminal, she would know.
	Oh, absolutely.
	But I wondered, as you must have wondered all the years, how?
	Well, you know, what I have come to learn, and these are one of the many lessons one learns in Africa.
	Africa is an extraordinary place.
	And you, in our little conversation before we started this recording, you know, you said to me that you had been to South Africa and you were profoundly moved by your experience.
	I don't know anybody who has not been to Africa and then come away from it and been mentally, emotionally, and maybe even physically changed by the experience.
	There is something about the continent that has an effect on everybody.
	Now, what is it all about?
	I don't know.
	Is it because, you know, we as humans, our ancestors, were originally from there, that it still courses within our veins, it's in our blood, it's in our DNA.
	Or is it more than that?
	I don't know.
	I really can't.
	I can't put a label on it, but Africa is, for me, it's absolutely omnipotently powerful.
	It has a lasting impression.
	And there's so many mysterious things that go on in Africa all the time.
	You can never foretell what's going to happen from day to day.
	The unusual is commonplace, isn't it?
	And one of the things I think it taught, it teaches a lot of people, you know this much better than I ever will, but it teaches you that we think we're clever up here.
	And we think we know things that other cultures and civilizations don't know.
	We haven't even started, I don't think.
	Exactly.
	And that's the lesson, how little we do know.
	And I mean, I want to tell you that, you know, look, I've worked with institutions like, you know, the National Academy of Sciences here in the United States.
	I worked at Princeton University.
	I worked with NASA.
	I did a retrospective of the Voyager mission to the outer planets and all of that.
	And I've met extraordinary people in my time.
	I'm a National Geographic.
	I've done shows on all sorts of scientific topics and social issues and whatever else.
	But really, some of the most amazing, insightful, intelligent, thoughtful people that I've ever met in my life live in mud huts in the middle of the African bush.
	And they've had incredible left impressions on me.
	They look at you and they know all about you.
	Or they can tell you all about, I mean, I've had my grandfather described to me and I have never met my paternal grandfather.
	I never met him.
	But my father used to describe him and had some photographs before my father passed away.
	And the person that they've described is exactly what my father described.
	That's my grandfather.
	How do they do this?
	They're obviously tapping into some realm or some sphere or some level that does exist.
	But we in the West, with all our knowledge and all our technology and all our education, we haven't even begun to even begin to understand that.
	Well, it's all zoned out by interference, I think, from this technological society.
	You'll get no argument from me about that.
	For my listener's sake, I think we have to complete the roadmap because you said that the Onganga told you a number of things, including, I think, your life would nearly be claimed by water, wasn't it?
	Yes.
	And also the encounter with somebody who was connected with the most evil person in history.
	Yes, let's talk about the water one first.
	I've had a number of extraordinary experiences at sea.
	Once I was doing a film for BP Oil off the coast of Angola, and the only way to get from this huge big fishing factory ship where they were processing fish into fish meal for fertilizer, there was a storm coming, and the ship was due to take us back to what was then Southwest Africa, now Namibia.
	But we were actually off the coast of Angola on the west side of Africa.
	But the ship couldn't go back because of this impending storm.
	And the only way, and my crew and I had to get back, but there was one of these trawlers that brought fish to this factory ship that was taken aboard and then crushed up into meal, was heading back to Walfus Bay in what was then Southwest Africa.
	The only way for us to get back was to actually go back with this trawler.
	That was the first time I was nearly killed at sea.
	I mean, really, waves the size of mountains at night with lightning and thunder.
	It was straight out of a movie, out of your wildest nightmare.
	And we nearly perished on that trip.
	But the one that I referred to in the book is one that took place in 19, it was in the 80s.
	I was on a scientific research ship in the South Atlantic, and we had gone to Marion Island.
	I was doing a series on how humans and the environment live together or don't live very well together.
	And I wanted to find a place that was pristine, that was unaffected by industry and societies and large communities and cities and whatever else.
	And there is a place like that called Marion Island.
	It's actually a South African possession in the South Atlantic.
	And so we went there on a research ship.
	And on the way back on this research ship, we were steaming in a westerly direction on this vessel.
	And we could not turn around to head back towards Cape Town because another storm was on the way.
	And all we could do was to keep heading west and to keep ahead of the storm.
	These waves and the weather and the pouring rain, it was unspeakable.
	It was unbelievable.
	We could not turn around and we were steaming like for about a week.
	The ship was being tossed about.
	There wasn't a single plate or glass on board the ship that remained intact.
	Everything was smashed to pieces.
	And one night the captain said, we've got to turn around because we're heading towards South America.
	You know, we're heading towards the Falklands.
	We've got to turn around.
	And at midnight tonight, I'm going to try and turn the vessel around and head back towards Cape Town.
	And, you know, it was a terrifying thought.
	We believed that, you know, if he did that, we'd probably be capsized.
	So you're going back into the teeth of the storm.
	Absolutely.
	And remember, trying to make a U-turn in those conditions.
	So he said, at midnight tonight, when you hear the horn going three times, hold on to anything that you can hold on to because I'm going to try and turn the ship around.
	Well, came midnight.
	Boy, I tell you, he turned the ship around, but we had listed so far over to the starboard side that I was absolutely convinced that that ship was going to overturn.
	And again, and it stayed in that position leaning over so much, it seemed like an eternity.
	And very, very, very, very slowly, we slowly righted and came up again.
	We came about and we managed to head back in an easterly direction.
	It was miraculous that that ship did not overturn.
	We should have overturned it by all, you know, I don't know how it didn't happen.
	So again, this woman had seen that.
	She said, be very, very careful of the big water.
	It may try to take your life.
	And that was, again, what she had foreseen.
	As for the other incident, that is even more interesting.
	I'm going to go to the year 1983, and I was doing a series of television documentaries on the history of South African Airways.
	Now, South African Airways was originally formed in 1929 as a private airline called Union Airways, but It ran out of money very, very quickly.
	And in 1934, it was nationalized by the state.
	It was bailed out by the state.
	And they renamed it South African Airways.
	And when they did that, and South African Airways was a very, very, it had an excellent safety record.
	It won lots of awards.
	It was a very, very efficient airline in its time.
	And it connected South Africa with all the continents of the planet.
	But what was so interesting about South African Airways in its early days was pioneering routes through Africa, before there were air fuels and weather forecasting facilities and refueling conditions and all of that.
	It's a long story and it's an amazing story.
	And it's one that I wanted to tell in this documentary.
	And so when I got the opportunity to do a documentary about its 50th anniversary, I was really very excited about that, apart from the fact that I'm a little bit of an aviation fanatic myself.
	But anyway, while we were doing our research into the history of the airline, we learned that in 1934, when the airline was nationalized, they bought three brand new aircraft from a company in Germany.
	And it was the Junckers Aircraft Company.
	I think they were based in Bremen, but I may be wrong.
	And the aircraft was called the JU-52.
	It only sat 14 people, but it was metal-skinned, and it had three engines, one in the nose and one on each wing.
	And they were the latest airliners available anywhere in the world at the time.
	And the airline ordered three of those.
	Eventually, they bought more.
	But one of the delivery flights of these aircraft, you can imagine in the early 30s, how do you deliver three aircraft all the way from Germany to South Africa across the whole of Africa when there aren't many airfields?
	There's a lot of stops in the desert then, isn't there?
	And not only that, but airfields were very primitive, or you had to scrape a field into the ground that didn't exist so that the plane could land in order to refuel.
	And then how do you get the fuel there?
	The whole thing was an adventure story in itself.
	So that was going to be part of the documentary that we were going to tell.
	And then while we were doing our research, we learned that one of the pilots who flew one of those ferry flights, one of these delivery flights, was still alive.
	He was in his late 80s and he had retired in a small little town in Bavaria.
	I thought, my God, we've got to interview this man.
	He'd be able to tell us this extraordinary story about that flight down Africa.
	Can you imagine that?
	Not only that, but he had a movie camera and he covered the flight.
	He did a film of that entire flight.
	So I was hoping for images of these brand new aircraft sitting on these newly scraped runways in the middle of nowhere, pouring kerosene into the wings with elephants and hippos and whatever else in the background.
	And sure enough, when we eventually located the film, which still existed in a lab in Frankfurt, that's exactly what you could see.
	That's what he photographed.
	People refueling these aircraft with wild animals around.
	And it was unbelievable.
	So what we needed to do was to interview the guy.
	And so we're in Frankfurt.
	We went to the lab.
	We selected the footage we wanted from this film that this guy had shot way back in the 30s.
	And now we had to drive all the way down to Munich on the Autobahn, which is no speed limit, great drive, and to go and meet the man and interview him.
	And the entire thing was facilitated by the German government together with the aid of the German aviation industry and the officers of South African Airways based in Germany.
	They used to fly to Munich and they used to fly to Frankfurt.
	And so the man from the, we called him the man from Bonn.
	It was before the Berlin Wall came down and West Germany, East Germany are not yet combined.
	So the capital was not in Berlin yet.
	It was still in Bonn.
	And this guy came from the Foreign Office and he came to facilitate this interview with this man who apparently was quite famous in aviation circles in Germany, unsurprisingly.
	And he spoke a perfect English.
	And so he was going to be my translator during the interview with this old pilot.
	And so he joined us in Frankfurt and came down with us to Munich.
	And along the way, the night before the interview, we stopped at a little hotel outside of a little town called Amersey, which is not too far from Munich, which is where this old pilot had retired.
	His name was Hans Bauer, B-A-U-R, Flug Kapitan Hans-Bauer.
	And that night, we had dinner at the hotel.
	The interview was scheduled for the next morning.
	We were going to meet this old man at his house and do the interview there.
	And the man from Bonn and I, you know, struck up a friendship and we started chatting.
	And about midnight, after having a lot of wine and good stuff to drink, he said to me, he said, how much do you really know about Hans Bauer, his history?
	And I said, well, not very much.
	What else is there to know other than the fact that he flew that delivery flight?
	That's what this is all about, isn't it?
	And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, but he has a history before that.
	And I said, well, I'm not surprised.
	I'm sure he does.
	You know, why?
	What are you trying to tell me?
	And he leaned forward and over his glass, he sort of looked at me and he said, I have to tell you something.
	I do not want you to discuss the war with him, the Second World War.
	I said, well, no, that's not my intention.
	Why would I?
	Why would I do that?
	But then if that was me, and I'm sure part of you, you'd think, I've got to know now what this is about.
	Yes, of course.
	I was most curious, but I wanted to not be impolite.
	This guy had, you know, he'd facilitated this entire trip, this meeting and so on.
	And I said, no, no, no, of course I won't discuss the war.
	Why would I?
	That's not what the interview is about.
	The interview is about this amazing flight down Africa in the 30s.
	That's what I want to talk to the guy about.
	Yeah, yeah, good.
	He says, that's very good.
	As long as you do not discuss the war, because he has a war injury.
	And I thought, ah, that's the reason why.
	He must have been injured.
	Obviously, he must have been a pilot during the war.
	He probably flew for the Luftwaffe.
	If he did this delivery flight in 1934, he must have flown for the Luftwaffe during the Second World War.
	That made perfectly good sense.
	And, you know, maybe the injury that he had was he got during one of those flights as a Luftwaffe pilot.
	But that's not what I wanted to go for.
	I was curious, but I wasn't going to go there because he obviously didn't want me to.
	But you know what?
	He had not had his, he was not satisfied yet.
	He said to me, are you sure that you won't bring up the topic?
	And I said, I'm absolutely certain I won't bring up the topic.
	And he said, because how much do you really know?
	And I said, what else is there to know?
	And he came right up close to me and he almost whispered to me and he said, do you realize that Hans Bauer was the personal pilot of Adolf Hitler?
	When he told me that, well, I sobered up instantly.
	We'd had a lot to drink, but I tell you, I was suddenly stone-cold sober.
	I wasn't quite sure how I was going to handle the situation.
	You don't often get an opportunity like that.
	I'd interviewed many, many people in my time, but this was a very, very unusual situation in which I found myself.
	And I didn't know how I was going to handle it.
	Nevertheless, the next day, we pull up outside his house, and his wife answered the door.
	This was his third wife.
	He'd been married three times.
	And she welcomed us in.
	She spoke no German.
	She was a sweetheart.
	She was very kind and offered us tea or coffee or whatever it was.
	And he wasn't to be seen, the old man, the pilot, Hans Barr.
	And, you know, we were sitting around and we set up for the interview.
	I said to the sound man, you go there.
	Said to the technician, put the lights up here.
	We put the chair there.
	This is where we'll do the interview.
	I'll sit here behind the camera.
	The man from Bonn will sit next to me and translate.
	And then clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk down the stairs comes this little old man holding a cane and he had a limp.
	So obviously the war injury that I was told about was obviously in his leg.
	And he came and he was introduced to the man from Bonn first of all, and then the representative of the airline.
	And then he was introduced to me.
	You know, when I shook his hand, what went through my mind immediately was, you know, you talk about six degrees of separation.
	This was one degree of separation.
	This was one handshake away from a hand that had shaken the hand of Adolf Hitler.
	How many times?
	I have no idea if he was his personal pilot.
	He must have shaken Hitler's hands many times.
	And here I was shaking his hand.
	I was one handshake away from one of the greatest tyrants and mass murderers in history.
	And that was kind of quite something to grasp and to deal with.
	Nevertheless, he was very, very sweet and very polite.
	And he sat down.
	We put the microphone on me.
	We pinned a little lapel mic onto his collar and we put a boom mic above him, you know, the usual thing that you do when you do an interview.
	And I asked him about the flight and he gave us a terrific interview, about 15 or 20 minutes worth.
	And I was going to get 10 really good minutes out of that that I could put into the documentary.
	And, you know, whenever he spoke, we'd lay English, an English translation over it.
	And it went extremely well.
	And when it was done, I said, you know, thank you very much.
	We're done.
	And he seemed quite relieved.
	And he clapped his hands and he called his wife and he said to the wife, you know, let's celebrate.
	Let's have a drink.
	Everybody has a drink.
	So, and she brought out a big silver tray and on the tray was a lot of really good German booze, good stuff.
	Schliebewitz, Kerschwasser, whatever else.
	And she started bringing out snacks, you know, or lunch, if you like, and laid it out.
	And we started to chat.
	And Hans Barr and I, I had enough of knowledge of German to sort of get by.
	I couldn't have a one-to-one conversation, but I understood most of what he said.
	But my German wasn't good enough for me to converse with him.
	Nevertheless, we sort of, you know, hiccupped our way through a little bit of a conversation.
	And then he got up and he took his cane and he said, hey, Friedberg, come with me.
	And he took me to the end of this, on the side of this living room where we'd done the interview.
	There was a little alcove and on the other side of that was the toilet, the bathroom.
	And on the wall between the two rooms, there was a photograph.
	And he took me to the photograph and he points out the photograph to me.
	And in the photograph is him with Adolf Hitler in their uniforms.
	And in the background is a JU-52 aircraft, which is what we've been discussing in the interview.
	And that's, I think, why he took me to see this photograph.
	He said, that's one of the JU-52s that we've been talking about.
	And I said, yes, yes, that's, you know, very interesting.
	He didn't mention Hitler at all.
	Did you?
	He saw me staring at the photograph, and he looked at me and he said, to me, in German, and then he points to Hitler and he says, do you want to know about this?
	And I said, yeah, bitch, you know.
	And the man from Bonn overheard this and sort of covered his face in absolute horror because he knew, oh my God, now we're going to start discussing the Second World War, which is not what he was looking forward to at all.
	He didn't want that to happen.
	But Hans Bauer had invited me to ask him about Hitler and him.
	And so we went back into the living room and we sat on the couch.
	He said to me, patted the chair, the spot next to him, asked me to sit next to him.
	And he called his wife and he asked his wife to bring his photograph albums.
	So everybody else, the rest of the crew, were now sort of winding up tables and, you know, putting lights away and so on.
	But booze was there, the food were there, the snacks were there, everybody was having a good time.
	And he and I and the man from Bonn, because the man from Bonn was translating a lot of what this guy was saying to me, I said to the sound man, bring a tape, let's record this.
	Not that I'm going to use it, just out of interest, just as a record.
	And he brought the photographs albums were brought to him and he starts to open these albums.
	There were about four or five of them, beautifully leather-bound.
	Inside these photograph albums was a recorded history in photographs of the inner rankings of all those who ran the Third Reich.
	You know, Goebbels and Göring and Hitler and on and on and on, all of them.
	They were all there.
	And not only that, but in many of the photographs, Hansbaugh appears in the picture.
	Because apparently, he tells me he and Adolf Hitler were very, very close friends.
	And in actual fact, when he married his first wife, Adolf Hitler had given him his wedding party in Adolf Hitler's apartment in Munich.
	And there are pictures of that.
	And he shows me all this very proudly.
	And he tells me all about the fact that, you know, Hitler trusted nobody.
	And we now know, history tells us, that Hitler didn't trust any of those people who were supposedly close to him at all.
	He always thought his life was in danger.
	And we now know that there were many attempts made on his life.
	Well, indeed, there were, including one particularly famous one, and the conspirators nearly got away with it and ended up paying with their lives.
	Just to ask you, then, when you did this, this was not really the era of the conspiracy theorist, those who say that Hitler got away and was flown by a circuitous route and partly by submarine down to South America.
	Did you mention any of that to him?
	No, no, I absolutely did not.
	I absolutely, I was not going to open any Pandora's boxes at all.
	No.
	But let me tell you something that is quite interesting, and that is he tell me how he got his war injury, you know, why his leg was the way it was.
	It was all gummy.
	And he said, you know, and he pulls up his trouser and he said, he says, and he shows me there's an artificial leg there.
	And he tells me how he got the war injury, because he was with Hitler in the bunker the night Hitler took his life.
	He wasn't there when Hitler took his life, but he was there before it happened.
	And he said to him, he said to me, he said, Hitler, he had told him that night, he said, the war is over.
	There is no hope for me.
	I'm done.
	I'm going to end my life here tonight.
	And Hans Bauer said to him, you know, no, I will, let me help me get you out of here.
	I'll fly you somewhere where you can be safe, you know, an Arab country, a South American country.
	And Hitler said, no, it's the end of the story.
	Eva and I, we will die here tonight.
	He was referring to Eva Brown.
	And then he told Hans Bauer to leave the bunker.
	And actually, he gave him one of his favorite paintings.
	Hitler always traveled with this painting.
	I forget exactly what the painting was about.
	But anyway, he removed it from the frame, folded it up, and gave it to Hans Bauer.
	And he said, that is for you to remember me by.
	You take this.
	And he put it in a satchel on his back.
	He left the bunker and he started running through the streets of Berlin away from the bunker.
	But the Russians had invaded that very day, and he was shot by Russian troops.
	that's where he got his war injury, not by flying in a Luftwaffe aircraft.
	Did you get the impression that he still felt some...
	He had great affection for Hitler.
	He never called him Meinführer or any of those terms, but he certainly felt a great degree of friendship and I think even affection for Hitler because he told me how nice he was to him throughout his entire life and how nice he was to him and his family.
	He had great feelings for the man.
	You know, but as I sat listening to all of this, I could not feel any degree of anger or animosity at all because he seemed to be such a decent old guy.
	And I only saw him as a pilot.
	But there he was closer to Adolf Hitler perhaps than anyone else.
	And Hitler used to confide in him and everything.
	And there are pictures in that album of him at Berchtesgarten, you know, Hitler's retreat.
	His mountain retreat with Eva Braun.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	And so after that, Lionel, I'm just keen to know that after that, that's the kind of experience.
	I'm looking at it from my own perspective, that you can only make sense of afterwards.
	I don't think you can make sense of something like that when it's happening to you.
	While it's happening, I was completely enthralled.
	I was overawed by this.
	I mean, I was overwhelmed by what was going on, of course.
	And it was only the end of the day where we'd ended it all.
	The albums were put away and the gear was all stowed back in our vehicles.
	And, you know, we were driving away.
	And I looked back at his house and he was standing outside the house with his cane and his wife.
	And they were waving to us goodbye.
	And it was only at that moment as we were driving away and we turned a corner and he disappeared that I suddenly realized, oh my God, this is what that old Sangoma, that old Nganga, that old lady in a hut in Africa, in Central Africa, all those years ago had foreseen.
	You will meet a man who was very, very close to the most evil man who ever lived.
	I had just had that experience.
	So specific.
	So specific.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, and other things that she told me, you know, but I have never, I don't question any of those things.
	And, you know, one of the other things she told me, by the way, was, you know, you will go to a world where there is only white, no color, just white, white, everything is white.
	There's no color there.
	She didn't understand what she was seeing.
	And I didn't understand what she was saying.
	And in 1991, I did a show for PBS here in the United States, the public broadcasting system.
	We had a very good science series called The Infinite Void.
	And one of the shows was called Secrets from a Frozen World, where we were basically taking the temperature of planet Earth, looking at the health of the planet.
	And the way you do that is to go to a place like Antarctica, where you don't have any cities and large population centers that disrupt the environment.
	It's pretty natural, very sort of pristine, as pristine as it gets.
	But what you can do is you can look, are the oceans getting more acidic?
	Is the ozone hole getting larger?
	Is carbon dioxide going up in the atmosphere?
	And you can test the difference between the atmosphere now and hundreds of years ago by going deep into the ice and digging an ice core because the ice traps bubbles as the ice forms over years and years and years.
	And the lower you go, the older the atmosphere trapped in those bubbles.
	And you can see how much carbon dioxide and methane or whatever else are in those bubbles.
	So you can make a comparison to history compared to today.
	And you can see whether things are getting bad, whether the atmosphere is changing, whether climate change is real.
	What is, if climate change is happening, what is it doing to the biomass and to the ecosystems of the Antarctic?
	You can tell by looking at the krill populations, the penguin populations, what are they eating?
	Is there enough food for everybody?
	Is there enough food for the whales?
	You know, all that sort of thing.
	It's a great barometer to look at the health of the planet.
	Indeed it is, but the Nganga couldn't have known anything about that.
	She knew absolutely nothing about any of this.
	And you know, so here we are in 1991 and it's Christmas Day and we're on this research ship, this big scientific research ship, and the captain decides to stop the ship to celebrate Christmas.
	Now, you don't stop the propellers from turning because then you get trapped in the ice.
	You just feather the blades so that you don't get any bite.
	So the blades are still turning, but the ship is not moving forward.
	Besides, the ocean is completely covered by pack ice.
	There was ice on the water from horizon to horizon.
	And here we are in the middle of this frozen world, celebrating Christmas.
	And it's the southern hemisphere, remember, and it's December.
	So the sun didn't go down.
	You always have perpetual daylight, maybe an hour of twilight, but the rest of the time, the sun is shining all the time.
	And around about midnight or thereabouts, I went up on the deck of the ship because I always keep copious notes.
	And I went up there to keep my diary up to date, to keep my notes up to date.
	And I was sitting, I bundled up, put on my, you know, my pockets and my gloves and my scarves and whatever else.
	I went to sit on the deck of the scientific research ship and just looked at the world around me, trying to describe it, you know, in order to have some stuff that I can use later on for narration when it came to write the narration for the show.
	And as I was sitting on the deck, I looked around and there was a lone penguin on the ice near me.
	And we sort of looked at one another.
	You know, I looked at it.
	It looked at me.
	It ran around the ship.
	It was an amazing experience.
	And I was trying to describe, it was very, very difficult to describe what it was like sitting on this ship that had a red hull.
	And other than that, everything was white.
	The sea was white.
	The sea was white.
	The ice was white.
	The sky was white.
	You couldn't see where the horizon, where the sea ended and the horizon began.
	It was all the same white color.
	It's like being inside a big translucent egg, you know, white egg, a marble egg.
	It was incredible.
	I think those are the words I used.
	So as predicted, a completely white world, which makes you think, not only in that case, but also in the case of the guy who worked for Hitler and all the other cases, whether because these are, you know, I'm a great one for recalling impactful moments in my life.
	And I know that sometimes I feel that those are put like a marker down on the tape recording, on the digital recording of my life, a track marker has been put down there.
	It almost sounds like the Unganga and the Sangoma are able to, because they say cosmically, time has no meaning.
	You know, there's no forward, no back.
	It's just there.
	These people are able to read the markers.
	Absolutely.
	There's no question.
	And, you know, so this is the white world that that woman saw.
	And it only hit me when I was sitting on trying to describe it.
	I said, oh, my God, this is what she said.
	You were going to go to a world where there's only white.
	This is what it is.
	You know, I have worked with, there's an institute in Virginia called the Monroe Institute that looks at the nature of consciousness.
	What is it?
	And can we raise our consciousness to higher levels in order to relax or in order to get more out of who we are as humans?
	Can we do that?
	And then there's, I worked with them and I also worked with a man called Professor Robert John, who was at Princeton University.
	Unfortunately, he's now passed on.
	And he was also looking at the nature of consciousness and what his research was all about was what is consciousness?
	Is consciousness, is it only, does it only exist in the synapses of the brain with little, you know, firing neurons?
	Or is it outside of that?
	And if so, what is it?
	And where does it go, particularly when the human body dies?
	And if consciousness itself exists outside of the physical, what is it?
	Is it an energy?
	And can you use your consciousness to affect inanimate objects?
	And they did some extraordinary research at Princeton University.
	And I made a film because I did a two-hour special for one of the cable companies here called Beyond Death, which basically looked at the soul or the spirit or consciousness.
	What is it?
	And what happens to it, you know, outside when the body dies.
	We looked at people who had near-death experiences, people who believed that they traveled outside of their bodies and on and on and on and on.
	And this man had come without any question that consciousness exists outside of the physical.
	And, you know, they had proved in 25 years of work at their research unit at Princeton University that somebody could impact a random number generator, the height of a little fountain, make little cars move in certain directions on a tabletop.
	Unbelievable things can be done.
	So there is more to what consciousness is than we can even begin to imagine.
	And we're starting to think that there's some kind of field that exists above us and around us.
	And when we die, consciousness, exactly, consciousness migrates.
	No question about it.
	I end my book with a little, there's a, on my very, very, very last page of my book, there's a paragraph that says, you know, what I've learned over all of these years and all of these experiences that I've had, and I've been very fortunate.
	And I don't mean to be boastful or arrogant in any way, but I've had an extraordinary life.
	Oh, you have.
	And I feel very blessed to have had these experiences.
	But what I've learned more than anything else, I think, is that there is so much more.
	And the way I describe it is this: I kind of look at us humans, or what consciousness is, if you like, or the situation as it exists, as a sort of bumper ride at a fairground.
	And these are the words I use.
	You know, these are little bumper cars where people go around bumping into one another at a fairground.
	They have those little poles sticking up at the back of the car.
	And at the top of the pole, there's a little contact that touches a grid, if you like.
	We call them dodgeums in the UK.
	Dodge them cars, exactly, at the UK.
	That's exactly right.
	Yes.
	And that pole touching this field above the ride, which supplies the DC electrical current that drives the cars.
	I kind of think that we are all, in the same way as those little dodgeum cars, bumper cars, whatever you want to call them, we also have some kind of connection to a field that is beyond, that is above us.
	But in the case of reality, it's an unseen field.
	I think all of us, whether we people, pecuniaries, ponies, whatever, we're all connected to a grid, a field, a system.
	And I think it's on a cosmic level that connects us all.
	And, you know, time and place and geography has no relevance when it comes to this field.
	We now know there is no such thing as fixed time.
	Time changes, depending on how fast you're going.
	Time changes.
	We know.
	That's a proven fact.
	Einstein predicted it.
	It's now been proven many, many times.
	You take an atomic clock, you fly one in an airplane going 600 miles an hour, you leave one on the planet.
	The one that's gone and the one that's moved has actually, its time is different to the one that has been stationary.
	Time is irrelevant.
	It doesn't exist.
	There is no such thing.
	Time changes.
	And I think that the same thing applies to consciousness or events.
	There is no such thing as being locked in one place in time.
	It's like a spiritualist or a medium at a seance.
	You know, they foresee these events because they all exist at the same time.
	Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are the same thing.
	We don't even begin to understand it, but I believe it to be so.
	And time is a construct.
	I think, for what my view is worth, which is not my dream.
	But time is a construct.
	We simply put on events.
	That is correct.
	That is correct.
	And, you know, and here are these people, these Sangomas, some of them living in little villages in the middle of nowhere, who have not even exposed to Western society, never mind a university education.
	And they know how to access this field.
	They know how to go to another realm, to go outside of the box in which we are all constrained with all our education and all our institutions and all our accomplishments and all our inventions and our technologies.
	They know how to go way beyond that.
	And it just amazes me what an incredible universe and cosmos we live in.
	And they're these people who do this.
	Absolutely true.
	Again, you get no argument from me about that.
	And, you know, I think, and I don't know whether you will agree, but to a large extent at the moment with our technological world where we think we're so smart, we've lost our way.
	And to people who think that we've lost our way, I would say to them, and by the sounds of you and everything that you're about, you would say to them, if you want to know what it's all about, go to Africa.
	I would say, yeah, if you can't go to Africa, it's actually even simpler than that.
	But yes, in the ideal world, absolutely.
	I'd say go to Africa.
	Go to the Maasai Maru Reserve.
	Go and see those immigrations of the herds.
	Or go to a little bush camp somewhere in the middle of Botswana where all you can hear are crickets in the bush and cicadas in the bush and the eagle at night, the African fish eagle.
	It's a haunting sound.
	You know, we are bombarded by sounds all the time, traffic, radio, television, you name it.
	Everybody's staring at a little screen.
	We have lost our contact with nature.
	So all that people really need to do, go for a walk in the park, go for a walk in the fields, go for a walk through the brambles, go and reconnect with nature.
	Take the, pull the plug out of the wall, leave those electronic devices alone, particularly children.
	Get them away from those screens and let them reconnect with nature.
	We've lost our contact with the essence of what it's all about.
	Nature can teach us so much and we don't do that anymore.
	And we've got to do it while it's all still here.
	Now, you say in the book, you say many things in the book.
	There are so many great stories, but your life story is something that I would really like to spend four or five hours with you discussing because, you know, I've come to the conclusion during this conversation that I've interviewed two amazing people in my life who've had remarkable lifetimes.
	You're one of them.
	The other one was Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon.
	So I've got to go.
	Oh, yeah.
	You know, you've had an astonishing life as you know yourself.
	Now, Gordon Cooper, the Apollo astronaut, the more I read about him, the more interested I get.
	Gordon Cooper told you something.
	What was it?
	Yes, yes.
	He was a Mercury astronaut.
	He was one of the original Mercury 7.
	He did not go to the moon.
	He flew one of the early missions in the early program that predated the Apollo program, that predated Project Gemini and Project Apollo.
	But Gordon Cooper, before he became an astronaut, he was a pilot with the United States Air Force.
	And he, for a while, was based at an American base in Germany.
	And it was the early 60s before he became an astronaut, where one day they get a call, scramble, scramble now.
	Go and investigate.
	There's an object in the sky and it's doing some really crazy, amazing things.
	Go and investigate what it is.
	So he and I think one other aircraft, there might have been four of them, F-86 Sabres they were back in those days.
	They scrambled and they went up there and what they did was to find up in the sky was this disc, what we would call a flying saucer, what used to be called a UFO.
	In fact, the term used today is not UFO anymore.
	It's a little cultish and little sort of, you know, not quite the right term to use.
	So now what people refer to as UAPs, an unidentified aerial phenomena.
	But those days they used to call them UFOs or Foo Fighters.
	During the war, pilots used to see them all the time.
	They used to call them Foo Fighters.
	Foo fighters.
	These are flying sources, discs that did things that physically no man-made aircraft could do.
	Anyway, Gordon was scrambled to go and intercept this, whatever it was, and they tried to catch up with it.
	It couldn't.
	He said it did things that defied anything we humans could do.
	It flew at three, four, five, six times the speed of sound, came to a screeching stop, and just hovered in the sky, didn't move, no propulsion system visible, no windows, no noise, no nothing.
	And the minute we approached it, off it took, going up or down or left or right at phenomenal speeds.
	We had no idea what it was.
	Now, you know, I have to tell you, Howard, that, you know, in 1966, I was living and working in Canada, as I think I mentioned earlier.
	And when I was in Saskatchewan, we were doing a film on the history of housing, how housing develops in Canada, little urban communities, how and why they develop.
	And one of the things that we went to photograph in Saskatchewan was a potash plant where they were digging potash out of the ground, which I think they use for fertilizer or whatever they do with it.
	I don't quite remember.
	But anyway, because there was a town developing around this mine, this plant.
	And so it was a very small crew, just three of us.
	And we were staying at a motel maybe 30 miles away from the plant.
	And the next morning we got up early.
	We're driving towards this plant.
	And it was a very, very quiet day, sunny day.
	And Saskatchewan is very flat.
	And so you could see the plant miles and miles away because of the white dust coming from this mine, this plant, going up in a sort of column and then a cloud above it, almost like a mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, just sitting there on the horizon.
	And when we eventually got to the plant, we get to the main gate, and the guy at the gate says to us, you guys better get down to the parking lot because there's something sitting up there in that cloud, you know, like what, you know, we say, and we hear the guy says, we've no idea, we don't know what it is, but it's up there.
	So we drove down to the parking lot and the director met the manager of the mine, of this plant, and we went into his office to discuss the filming that we had to do there during that day.
	But I stayed in the parking lot, set up the camera, and a couple of guys from the plant were with me.
	They sort of sauntered over to the car.
	And I put on the longest lens that we have, a long telephoto lens of about maybe 300 millimeters.
	And I looked up at the cloud to see if I could see anything.
	Because these guys said, there's something up there, you know, there's something in that cloud.
	And I put this long lens on, and there was nothing to be seen.
	Anyway, I was waiting for the director to come back.
	And then a little breeze came up and this cloud dispersed.
	It sort of diminished.
	It blew away.
	And inside where this cloud was, there was a glint of metal, what looked like metal.
	And I thought, oh my word, what is that?
	And the guy said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it, that's it, that's it.
	So I turned on the camera and I started running film.
	And then this breeze increased a little bit and revealed this huge disc sitting absolutely stock still in the sky in that cloud.
	And there was a sort of triangular shape beneath it and a tripod connecting the triangle to the disc.
	No windows, no propulsion system, no sound, nothing.
	You know, people have often asked how big was it?
	Well, I would say the size of an airliner, like the size of a 747.
	And completely noiseless.
	Did you get film of this?
	And I shot about 150 feet of film of that.
	And then eventually it got covered up again by the white dust, the smoke, and disappeared.
	Didn't see it again.
	Anyway, so we got on with filming the day.
	I removed that piece of film.
	We were shooting film, remember, it's not video, it's film.
	I removed that piece of film, canned it up separately, and labeled it unknown hold for arrival.
	And that night when I sent the dailies back to Montreal, the film that we'd shot that day, which I did every single night, I used to go down to the local railhead and send it back by rail all the way across Canada to Montreal.
	And weeks and weeks later, we get back to Montreal, and now it's time to look at the dailies, the rushes, if you like.
	And we'd sat in the theater for hours and hours watching a lot of boring footage.
	And at the end of all of this, the projectionist yells out from the back of the theater, do you want to see this role?
	The one that's labeled, hold for our arrival.
	And oh, yes, we said, please put it on.
	The head of the camera department was there, who was not on location with us.
	The director was there.
	A few other people were there.
	I forget who they were.
	They were experts in the topic of urban development or whatever it was.
	And we ran this film and it was as clear as a bell that there was this clearly an artificial, it was not man-made, that's for sure, object sitting in the sky.
	And you could see it very, very clearly.
	And the head of the camera department, his name was Dennis Jilson, he said, you know, this is really interesting stuff.
	We should send that down to the States, to the United States Air Force.
	They've got a thing there called, I think it's called Project Blue Book.
	Maybe they can use this.
	Maybe they can identify it.
	Maybe they can get some value out of it.
	Who knows?
	Let's send it to them.
	Did you not think about sending it to CBS, NBC, ABC?
	No, no, no one thought about that because we were more curious rather than making a news item out of it.
	Besides, it was old.
	It happened weeks ago.
	So Dennis correctly, you know, probably decided to do the right thing.
	Show it to the experts, people who are doing research into the field.
	Because he sort of, I don't know whether he was interested in UFOs.
	I always was ever since I was a child.
	I read George Dodomski's book when I was a kid, you know, Flying Saucers Have Landed, and I was intrigued ever since then.
	Oh, and the other thing that made a huge difference in my life was in 1953, I saw The War of the Worlds, you know, so I was all open to the fact that maybe extraterrestrials were about, you know, they were coming to the earth.
	And I kind of thought, well, maybe that's what's going on here.
	Anyway, we sent this film away, and weeks go by.
	And one day I was in the camera department, you know, just shooting the breeze.
	And I said to Frankie Johnson, the secretary, I said, Frankie, did we ever hear back from those folks in America about that footage?
	And she said, no, I'll make a call.
	And so eventually she made a call.
	And next time I saw her, she said, they denied receiving the footage.
	Oh my God.
	We know that they received it because it was couriered to them and it was signed for.
	They did receive it.
	So there was always story that there was a cover-up about UFOs ever since Roswell, which took place in 1947.
	But I mean, you know, aerial phenomena, UFOs, if you like, there are instances of devices like the one that crashed at Roswell that predated the Roswell event, going back back to the 2008.
	This footage, though, I mean, this was an era where, as you say, there wasn't videotape.
	It wasn't digital.
	You couldn't make copy, copy, copy.
	So you didn't keep a copy.
	Well, the problem is, and for people who remember way back to the days when we used to use film, there were two different kinds of film stock.
	You could shoot a film on negative, and from the negative, you make your positive.
	You make your positive print from the negative.
	The negative is your master, and you keep that safely in the lab, and you don't touch it.
	You only make copies from it.
	You can make a negative, you make a positive, and then you make copies from all those positives, particularly motion picture film.
	However, the film that we were shooting, this was 16 millimeter, was a reversal film stock.
	And reversal film stock, once you process it, it's already a positive image.
	It has a very sophisticated emulsion.
	Kodak, the Eastman Kodak company used to call it Kodachrome.
	And so what you shoot in the camera is what you can project on film, basically for amateurs, you know.
	But very, very good color quality, but you don't have to make copies.
	Your camera original has a positive image.
	So we were stupid enough to not make a copy because we had the positive copy already.
	And that's the film.
	The original was sent to Project Blue Book.
	So we had no copy for ourselves.
	Do you have anything, any remnant of it?
	Absolutely nothing except a memory.
	So all you have is, I mean, how many people would have been in that screening theater?
	Well, there was Dennis Jilson, then there was the director, and there was Bob, there was me, there was four.
	I would say maybe seven, six or seven people.
	So half a dozen people roughly know about this.
	Had seen the footage.
	Wow.
	Saw the footage at the NFB, the National Film Board, yeah.
	And then however many people saw it in.
	And by the way, the Project Blue Book, I think, was based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
	So a lot of others must have seen it, but they denied ever receiving the film, you know, because there has been a concerted cover-up denying that these objects are around, that they've been around.
	You know, people, they've been denying it ever since the Roswell crash in 1947.
	They brushed that aside as being a weather balloon.
	Well, that's absolute nonsense.
	And the biggest thing that is missing throughout ufology, as they call it, throughout the entire history of all of this, is, you know, large amounts of credible footage.
	You had some, and it's gone.
	That must make you incredibly frustrated.
	It is.
	But now, there have been so many more incidents since then.
	And the most recent ones, of course, was released very recently by the United States Navy.
	And that was an event, I think, about six months ago.
	The Nimitz was doing exercises off the coast of San Diego here in the Pacific.
	And two pilots flying, I think F-16s off the Nimitz, actually encountered UFOs flying over the Pacific Ocean and have footage of that.
	And that was released to the press.
	It was on television.
	It was on all the major news networks.
	I think it's been seen all over the world.
	And, you know, maybe we are being prepared for, and that's what the UFO community, if you like, or the ufologists say.
	Perhaps we are being prepared for disclosure.
	Well, they think this could be the, what a fascinating story.
	We're rapidly running out of time, and I could talk with you all day and all night.
	Thank you for giving me this time.
	I hope this is not the last time we speak.
	Can we conclude with an astonishing story that you have about something that happened on a shooting session in Africa, where there was a ceremony, a tribal ceremony, and one of your crew was disrespectful and a lot of things, as we say here, kicked off?
	Yes, absolutely.
	It was in the 70s, and I was doing an ethnographic series called The Tribal Identity for television.
	And we were filming in an area, northern area of South Africa, where the vendor ethnic group make their home.
	They are a very distinctly different tribal group compared to the other tribes of South Africa.
	South Africa has got 11 official languages.
	They speak lots of different languages there because of the tribal backgrounds.
	And they're the two main ones, the Nguni group, which is Swazi and Zulu and Koza.
	And then you have the Sotho group, which is Lesotho and Tswana and whatever else.
	Anyway, I won't bore your listeners with that.
	But no, I'm fascinated by it because in all of my trips to South Africa, I came across Goza people.
	I could never say it.
	Yeah, you click, it's a click, you click a click, it clicks.
	I still can't do it.
	Sorry, you were saying.
	It's a difficult one to do.
	But the Venda are very, very different people, and they have very, very unique tribal rituals, spiritual rituals, if you like.
	And, you know, the supernatural plays a huge role in African communities, particularly tribal communities, because it's all about communicating with the ancestors.
	And it's all about not ancestor worship, but the way to God or the way to enlightenment or the way to Other realms, if you like, is always through the ancestors.
	The ancestors are your way, your medium to enlightenment or your way to speak to God or however.
	And once a year in this area, those days they used to call it Venderland.
	They no longer call it that since apartheid was dismantled.
	But once every five years in Venderland at a sacred lake called Fundutsi, which lies in the middle of this incredibly picturesque, beautiful green valley in Venderland, once every five years, the tribe make an offering to the Great Spirit who's the ancestor of the tribe.
	And it's a very, very hallowed event.
	And this area is virtually a sacred territory to them.
	Normally, people don't go there at all, except for every five years, they went down there to pay respect to the ancestor and the great spirit.
	And it was done, the man officiating at the ceremony was a very, very old priest.
	And they would pour offerings into the lake.
	And they would thank the ancestral spirits for their survival and for their welfare and so on and so forth.
	And it was very fortunate.
	It fell into the window of our production.
	And so we were able to go down there and film this.
	And my anthropologist, my host, my on-camera host was a man by the name of Peter Becker, a wonderful anthropologist who had great respect for the tribes of South Africa.
	And really, he could speak all the Nguni languages and a little bit of Suthu and Tswana as well.
	But Vender, he could not speak.
	So we needed a translator with us.
	And what was arranged for us to go down to the lake on the day they were going to do this ritual, which would happen every five years, extraordinarily colorful, because people from the tribes would come around dressed in their tribal regalia, beads, grass skirts, ruttles around their ankles, all that stuff, drums, you know, it's adventure stuff straight out of a movie.
	Just magnificent.
	And the day we went down there, Peter and our crew, we were all told to remove our shoes because it was sacred territory.
	Kind of like what happens in a mosque or in a Hindu temple.
	You take your shoes off.
	It's sacred ground.
	It's holy ground.
	Take your shoes off.
	It's a mode of respect.
	Well, we did that.
	And when Peter removed his hiking boots, before he stood in front of the camera to explain to the viewers what was going on in the background of the ceremony, he stubbed his toe because he was walking around barefoot and he stubbed his toe and one of the members of the crew started to giggle.
	Well, you know what it's like when someone starts to giggle.
	It's infectious.
	It goes from one person to the other.
	And here we are, this crew of ours.
	We started to giggle and laugh.
	And this ancient, very, very old, old, old, old man who had been brought in especially for the day from his house way up in the mountains, he had his arms held up high and he was chanting out towards the lake.
	And on the edge, these younger people were pouring homemade beer into the waters and throwing leaves and flowers into the water as an offering.
	And here we are giggling away, being very disrespectful.
	And this old man was chanting away and I had Peter in front of the camera and he was going, ow, ow, ow, you know, because he stubbed his toe on a thorn or a rock or a pebble.
	And this old man turned around and looked towards us.
	I swear that that man probably also, like that old lady that I met many, many years ago in Zambia, couldn't see very much.
	He was extremely old.
	He couldn't see very much through those very, very old eyes of his.
	So all he knew was the laughter.
	I don't even know if he could hear the laughter.
	I don't know how much he heard, but he was aware of what was going on.
	That's what's so amazing.
	Again, he turned around, he put his hands down, he stopped chanting.
	The minute he did that, my camera jammed, it stopped running.
	The tape recorder, which was a separate device at the time, the tape recorder that was recording the drumming and all, stopped working.
	Everything electronic that we had stopped working instantly as that man looked at us.
	And I thought, oh my God, what has happened?
	And of course, the laughter stopped instantly.
	And I said to our translator, Mishak Madava was his name.
	I said, Mishak, what's going on?
	Why has he stopped?
	And Mishak said, it's because you're laughing.
	He probably knows about that, or the ancestors know about that.
	And I said, well, please go and ask him to apologize on our behalf.
	See what you can do.
	We've got to fix this.
	And he went up to this old man.
	He sort of very humbly, you know, bowed in front of him and he said, what is going on?
	And the old man said, the ancestors are unhappy about the way these people are behaving and they do not want them to photograph the ceremony.
	That was it.
	And that's what he came to tell us.
	The old man just stood there still looking at us.
	He wasn't continuing with the ceremony at all.
	And I said to him, please ask him.
	And Peter begged with him, Peter, our anthropologist, please beg him to offer our apologies to the ancestors.
	We have to photograph this.
	This is absolutely precious, wonderful, amazing, incredible material.
	We've got to get this.
	And the old guy went back to the old priest and he apologized profusely to him.
	And the old priest just nodded very slowly, like this, didn't say anything, turned around, held his arms up again, lifted them up above these withered old arms of his, his wrinkled skin, and he started to do this chant.
	At that very moment, the camera starts to run, the tape recorder starts to run, the electrical circuits are starting to work, they go back as if nothing had happened.
	Our equipment was jammed by some extraordinary supernatural, whatever it was.
	We were not permitted to photograph it, but until we had apologized, and then everything ran honky-dory, nothing more was said.
	It's as though the ancestors said, all right, we give you permission.
	You can continue.
	And another reminder for Lionel and your team that there are forces greater than you.
	Absolutely.
	Wow.
	No question about it.
	One question.
	Lionel, I've loved every moment of this conversation.
	This will turn out to be the longest podcast that I've ever done.
	And that's fine because we haven't even covered the half of it.
	You've had an amazing life.
	Do you mind me?
	Do you mind me mentioning your age here?
	Are you 76?
	I'm 76 now, yes.
	Well, I hope that when I reach 76, I don't think I could be, but I hope that I could be.
	I hope that I'm as animated, enthusiastic about life, and all consumed by it as you.
	You are a remarkable man, and thank you.
	And you told me at the beginning, before we started recording, that you weren't sure whether you were prepared for this.
	My God, your life has been your preparation for this.
	Yeah, well, thank you for saying that, Hard.
	I do appreciate it.
	All I can say to your listeners is, you know, I'm humbled by what I've experienced because there is so much more than we know.
	And I keep finding every day to be an absolute adventure.
	And, you know, one of the other things, I'll just very briefly say this, this woman predicted, this old lady predicted that one day I would have an illness that almost would take my life.
	And I had this illness.
	My kidneys began to fail 30 years ago.
	Out of the blue, my autoimmune disorder, I developed an autoimmune disorder and my kidneys began to fail.
	She foresaw that.
	She told me that that would happen.
	And you know what has helped me through this?
	I have had access to some of the best specialists and doctors in the world here in Los Angeles.
	But I went back to Africa.
	I went back to the Sangomas.
	And I think it was my contacts and my experiences and my healing rituals that I underwent with them that I think have got me through my illness.
	In fact, I'm convinced of it.
	How astonishing.
	You've been through so much.
	You've seen so much.
	And, you know, sometimes we talk about people and we say that they've had a rich life.
	Boy, you have.
	Absolutely.
	What are you planning now?
	There must be something ahead.
	What are you doing next?
	Well, I have a book on aviation that's coming out in July.
	And at the moment, I'm busy writing a novel, which I hope will get to the screen as a screenplay.
	Hollywood at the moment is shut down.
	There's no production going on at all.
	But I'm writing, call it science fiction, if you like, science fiction fantasy.
	And hopefully I'd like to see that eventually get to the screen.
	So that's my next big one.
	It's going to take a year or two of my life, but yeah, I hope to get through to it.
	I get through to the end of it before the COVID gets me.
	I'm going to be vaccinated tomorrow, I'm happy to say.
	I managed to get an appointment tomorrow.
	And when will you get your second?
	You've got to get two of these jabs.
	When is your second one?
	It'll be done between two and three weeks after the first time.
	That's wonderful.
	Please look after yourself because we need to be.
	So I just hope we all need to be positive in these dark times.
	You know, we're going through difficult times, but folks, take hope.
	There's more to it than we think.
	It really is.
	And there are healing systems that exist out there that you can't even begin to imagine, but they're there.
	Well, anything that I say now is going to sound trite or glib.
	So I'm not going to say very much apart from thank you so much.
	The book that we were talking about, the story of your African life and everything that's been intertwined with it, and that's everything.
	What's the title of the book so people can look it up?
	The title of the book is Forever in My Veins.
	And the subtitle is How Film Led Me to the Mysterious World of the African Shaman.
	Forever in My Veins.
	And it releases this week.
	It's available now.
	Boy.
	Lionel Friedberg, thank you so much.
	Please take care.
	Howard, thank you so much.
	It's been an honor being with you.
	The remarkable Lionel Friedberg.
	I feel humbled to have spoken with this man, and I hope that you enjoyed that, because I think that was possibly one of our life's experiences.
	And I hope that we will speak again.
	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, until next we meet, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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