This Edition features a UK-exclusive interview with Steve Douglass - who recorded radio traffic from an AA jet that encountered a "strange object" - Plus a conversation with psychic and paranormal investigator John Russell....
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.
Hope you're doing okay.
Thank you for all of the emails.
Keep them coming.
Know of course that I get to see each and every one as it comes in.
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And if I haven't, then remind me about it and we'll take it from there.
It is March the 1st as I record these words.
It is a fairly chilly, but very clear evening.
And I think spring is on the way.
And that's going to have an effect on all of us, I think, one way and another.
But, you know, I hope you're getting by in the middle of it all.
A lot to do on this edition.
First of all, I'm going to bring you an item that I had as an exclusive on my radio show last night.
That's the 28th of February.
A man called Steve Douglas, who's at the heart of a story that's been making headlines around the world.
And I will read the story to you, and then we'll hear from Steve Douglas in just a moment.
American Airlines, according to one report, has not ruled out that one of its jets encountered an apparent UFO over New Mexico.
The passenger airline verified a radio transmission from Flight 2292, Cincinnati to Phoenix at around 1 p.m. CST a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday.
The pilot claimed the unidentified object was flying right on top of them.
Quotes, Steve Douglas is a man who monitors radio frequencies.
He's got a professional set up and does that.
Very well known as a blogger named Deep Black Horizon.
Check him out online.
He claims to have heard the strange transmission while recording from his arsenal of scanners.
I'm quoting from one of the media sources here that carried this.
So it's a fascinating story.
It is a sort of cigar-shaped object.
But what was it?
Was it a UFO?
That doesn't mean it's extraterrestrial.
It just means it's unexplained.
Was it a missile test of some kind?
Whatever it was, it was damn strange.
So we'll be hearing from Steve Douglas about that.
Second item is a new conversation that I'm about to record with a man called John Russell, psychic and professional paranormal investigator.
An awful lot of material to get through with him.
So two things on this edition of The Unexplained.
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All right.
Part one, then, is this short conversation, which was an exclusive in the United Kingdom, with Steve Douglas, the man who monitored and recorded, which you'll hear some of, the radio traffic involving that plane, Flight 2292, American Airlines, Cincinnati to Phoenix, that encountered something that the pilot at the time could not explain, as you will hear.
So from my radio show first, here's Steve Douglas.
Steve, thank you for doing this.
How does it feel to be worldwide news?
I tell you, it looks crazy out there.
I keep seeing it popping up everywhere, and I'm amazed how this thing is snowballed.
Now, listen, in my cupboard, I've got a radio set called a Sony Earth Orbiter.
It's years and years old, but what it's got is an aircraft band.
And because I don't live very far from London Cedaro Airport, I'm able to listen when we have planes.
I'm able to listen to pilots talking to the control tower.
You do the same sort of thing, don't you, on a much bigger scale?
Oh, yes, I do.
I have like 15 scanning receivers that are recording everything constantly.
It's all being fed to a computer so I can listen to it later on.
And how did you come to hear this?
There's a lot of radio traffic in the skies above North America.
How did you come to hear this specific thing?
You know, normally I review my recordings later when I have the time.
I have a full-time job as a photojournalist here in Amarillo.
And I just happened to be in my radio room when this came across.
I mean, it was just the normal Sunday traffic.
You could hear planes talking.
And then this rose up above it because the guy was, the pitch in his voice was definitely excited, which automatically, once you've been doing this as long as I have, you know that something's up.
Right.
Well, let's hear just a little snippet of that audio that you've kindly let us have here.
This is what Steve recorded.
Have any targets up here?
We just had something go right over the top of us.
I hate to say this looked like a long cylindrical object.
It almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing moving really fast that went right over the top of us.
Yeah, that was it.
Okay, well, you know, long cylindrical object with something moving over the top of it.
Now, pilots are trained to be observers, and they're trained not to get overexcited.
And he sounded like he knew what he'd observed.
He knew he'd observed something that was anomalous, but he wasn't getting overexcited about it because he was a pilot.
But that is a most unusual, isn't it, Steve, piece of radio traffic.
It's rare because pilots see things all the time.
And plus there's also a stigma attached to anybody who reports something that, you know, like a UFO.
They rarely do it.
And that's one of the reasons why it was surprising to hear it.
Right.
So when you found that, what did you do?
Well, the first thing I did was I made sure I was recording and saved the recording.
And then I went on to just various sites you can go to, like Flight 24 or ADS-B, to find out where the flight was flying.
And I was able to track it down by flight number.
I noticed it was over northwest New Mexico at the time of the sighting in a properly established commercial flight plane.
So it was very strange to hear a missile flying through where dozens of aircraft fly through every day.
Right.
So there is a speculation, isn't there, that this was some kind of cruise missile, but other people are using the term UFO.
Yeah, UFO is, well, you know, UFO doesn't necessarily mean little green man.
It means unidentified object.
And this is, of course, unidentified.
But to have something fly like this through commercial airspace, either means that something got off the leash out of one of the military ranges or there's something else going on.
We don't know what it is.
Is there any way that you can investigate this further?
Is there anybody else that you can talk to and try to get some answers?
Is the airline talking to you?
The airline is referring everybody to the FBI.
Military bases in New Mexico that have been called and military ranges, they're all denying they had anything flying that day.
So it's basically left up to the feds.
All I can do is file Freedom of Information Act request and hoping that they'll monitor it.
I mean, they'll respond to it.
And they either will or they won't.
And of course, the other way of tackling it, and maybe you started to get some response already, is people who may have been on board that plane, passengers I'm talking about, on 2292.
And that's one of the reasons I went public with it, was us hoping to get a hold of either the pilots or somebody who was on that plane who could verify or talk about what they saw.
But so far, I've only had pilots come forward who have seen similar things.
Okay.
So for you, it's a waiting game.
You've got to wait for two things.
Possible witnesses on board the plane who read all of the media reports that are slowly coming out.
I mean, this story's been dripping out over the last week or so, or the FBI to say we are investigating this.
And I'm not sure what the chances of them actually coming out and saying so would be.
Probably slim to none, or they might release some expensive statement.
I hope that the pilots come forward.
And sometimes they do, because sometimes, like I say, they get a stigma attached to them for reporting something like this.
And they would like to go on the record and say, no, what I saw was real.
And, you know, I wasn't drinking or doing anything, you know, smoking anything in the cockpit.
We actually saw this thing to help clear their names.
No, totally.
I think it would be great if they would and could.
In the pantheon of UFO cases, not only in North America, but also here in Europe, you know, there are many cases of pilots reporting enormous anomalous objects from their cockpit windows.
You know, not even a single plane, but sometimes two planes seeing something.
There was a sighting over Ireland.
There was a guy flying a plane down to the island of Guernsey some years ago here who saw something the size of a battleship.
So such things are reported by pilots.
There are stories of this kind.
But it would be interesting to know, wouldn't it?
And the question that both of us, all of us, I think, would like answered is, was this something military?
Could this have been some kind of weather formation?
Or is it something else?
Yeah, the fact that this flew right through a commercial airline lane that's going down to Phoenix is there's a safety issue involved in here as well.
Yes, I would imagine.
I mean, just remind me again of the, as far as you're aware of it, the relative distance between the object and the plane.
Well, and I talked to several pilots about this.
They said for the pilots who have seen this and have it flying over them, most likely it had to be heading almost head-on at them because their availability is pretty limited from the cockpit.
They can't see below them very well.
They can't see the left or right because of the way the pilot's seats are sitting.
So they had to see this thing basically either at their altitude or slightly above it and coming straight at them.
That is utterly alarming.
What about radar?
Radar should have picked that up, shouldn't it?
It should have.
And of course, they're now saying the air traffic control said they were tracking nothing else in the vicinity of the aircraft at the time of the sighting.
So we do have that much.
And we don't know if that's true or that's a way for air traffic control to absolve themselves of any, you know, doing any mistakes.
Maybe they were tracking something and took their eyes off their scopes.
But they have said as much that we didn't have anything on radar at the time.
Of course, there are other potential explanations.
This thing may simply not have been visible to radar.
Or indeed, if it was something secret like a missile test, then, and it's an area where those things I'm sure have probably happened in the past.
They may not be able to talk about it.
Yeah, most of the times when they do missile tests, especially at Wai Sam's missile range, the FAA is pretty aware of it.
They're aware of what's going on, where it's going to go.
They're warned, and they also will move aircraft away from the vicinity so there is no conflict here.
This is not what happened last Sunday.
If it was something of our military, nobody's speaking up about it and saying, oh, yeah, it was one of ours.
But what if it wasn't our military as well?
I mean, there are other militaries in the world who might be able to field some type of cruise missile, some hypersonic maybe reconnaissance vehicle and fly wherever they want to.
Which is almost as alarming as little green men.
In the time that you've been doing this sort of monitoring, and you've got a lot of kit and equipment that allows you to do this, is this the strangest thing that you've ever heard?
No, it's not.
I've heard several, I mean, over the last 30, 40 years of monitoring, I've heard this more often than you would think.
Sometimes it's a misidentification of normal objects, but sometimes I have no idea what they're saying.
Some very strange stuff is flying out there, apparently.
Yep.
Well, that's the impression that we get.
Steve, thank you for doing this.
One last quick question.
When will you be getting some responses from your freedom of information request?
No, that's a good question.
There's no deadline on when they have to respond.
So, you know, it could be six days, it could be six months, it could be a year.
We never know.
Steve Douglas, thank you very much for letting me hear that recording, and thank you very much for talking with me.
Please take care.
I'm sure you'll be getting more response from the media, and it will be interesting to see if you get any passengers on that plane getting in touch.
That's Steve Douglas, experienced radio interceptor, the proprietor of Deep Black Horizon.
Now, there's a possibility that by the time you hear this, there may be some new facts or information, but I wanted to let you hear Steve Douglas.
He sounds like a very thorough and, you know, very precise researcher of these things.
So we'll check in with him in a little while to see how far he's got with that.
In particular, that freedom of information request in the US.
Okay, let's get to the main guest on this edition, John Russell, psychic and paranormal investigator.
We've got a ton of territory to cover, so let's get to him right now.
John Russell, thank you very much for waiting and for coming on my show.
Howard, it's a pleasure to be here.
I'm really looking forward to this.
This is my first international podcast.
Is it really?
Okay, well, let's try and make it a good one then.
And that's a little message to me, not to you, by the way.
It's going to be great.
Yeah, no, it will be, definitely.
You're in the east of Florida, whereabouts?
We're on the east coast of Florida.
We're about halfway between Jacksonville and Daytona Beach over on the east coast.
Okay, we've got it.
This is March the 1st.
We're recording this.
A nice for London spring day.
What have you got?
We're in the 80s with some sunshine, so we're almost summertime.
Gee, whiz.
Well, no, I can't get anywhere near that.
We've got about 14 Celsius, 57 Fahrenheit.
And if you're in the 80s, that's about 27, 28 for my European-inclined friends who use Celsius.
So that's pretty dark.
Florida is starting to deliver then for the new year, I think.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Okay, 50 years, a psychic.
Talk to me about that.
50 years.
Yeah, I had an experience when I was a very young child, five or six years old.
And that relates more to my paranormal awakening, the paranormal experiences that I've had, the supernatural experiences.
But it also activated my psychic gift at the same time.
And when I was around six years old, five or six years old, I became aware that I could read people's thoughts, that I could predict their futures.
I could tell them where they had been, what they had done.
I had accurate insights into their lives.
And I just kept learning and kept practicing and things kept growing.
And by the time I was 15, 16 years old, I was reading regularly for family and friends of family and friends.
And then by the time I became 18 years old, I started reading professionally.
And so I'm 67 now, been around the block a few times with this gig.
And I've read professionally since I was the age of 18.
All right.
It's very unusual for somebody to say that they've been able to do this since they were a little kid.
You know, I have the idea that there are people who don't believe that psychic things exist.
I'm inclined to think they do because of experiences that I've had, but that's by the by.
But having that ability as a little kid strikes me as being a dangerous thing.
It's almost like giving a chainsaw to a baby.
Well, I think the other side, that's a really good point, but I think the other side had limitations in place, governors on me, if you will, that kept me from misusing or abusing the gift.
And I had, from early on, I had a natural sense of conscience and ethics and morality that kept me pointed in the right direction and that made me only want to use my gift for good purposes and to help people.
You must have had situations at school, though.
I mean, you know, we all have friends at school, but there are also animosities and enmities in the schoolyard.
Oh, absolutely.
There must have been occasions when, you know, maybe the schoolyard bully or somebody like that, you felt you knew something about them that would completely disarm them.
Did you have any experiences like that?
I did, and the reactions amongst my peers was very interesting.
And the reaction kind of translates up to modern times, to now.
The reactions varied from total disbelief to tell me more to being scared to death of me.
And so that's basically the same attitudes that people still have today.
They either believe 100% in what I do and they want to know more and they're interested in it.
They want to get a reading with me, for example, or hear about my experiences.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, people deny everything, absolutely everything, you know, the skeptics there.
And then in the middle ground, there's the people that are afraid of it or that say it's a gift from the devil or a tool of the devil or whatever and fall back on their religious upbringing that castigates anything that isn't in their dogma and in their ritual and tradition.
So, you know, some people are going to approach you and what you do as the devil's work.
Oh, exactly.
And still do to this day.
I get that all the time.
And it's really funny because I'm actually an ordained minister, a legitimately ordained minister.
I was associate pastor of a mainline small church for a long time and well versed in the Bible and so on and so forth.
So I always get tickled when people hurl accusations at me that it's of the devil because How do you square those two things then?
The religious side and the psychic side.
The psychic side, yeah.
Because the Bible does denigrate any paranormal experiences except those that it sanctions.
And excuse me, I've done so much study and research on the Bible and in religion, all religions, and I came to the conclusion that religion doesn't hold the answers.
And while I don't dismiss those that believe in religions, I came to realize that no one religion holds the way.
No one religion holds the answers.
And some of those contexts where supernatural gifts are denigrated or are condemned in the Bible, there's actually some mistranslations in there in some of that.
Not in all of it, but in some of it.
And so that cued me in that, okay, you know, we're way off in left field here with a lot of this stuff.
And the more I researched, the more I experienced, the more I developed my gift, I came to realize that none of us have a handle on it, that there are these gifts, there are these manifestations, there are these things that we can do and Spirits from the other side that help us, and I don't think any of them belong to any certain belief system that we hold.
Okay, so you think that they transcend everything else.
When you were young and starting to practice this and amazing people, as you were saying, with the things that you were telling them, what is it that you believed then?
And what is it that you believe now you're tapping into?
I believe that there are spirit guides that we all have.
And I believe that I have had guides with me since I was a child, and some of those have stayed with me and watched over me through adulthood.
I believe that we have guardian angels.
I believe that we have various spiritual entities that come and go and bring bits of communication to us.
I believe that there is, for lack of a better term, an ether out there, if you will, that we can tap into that's a reservoir of knowledge and experiences and that we can utilize that.
So there's a number of things that I believe that I connect with.
And then I believe some paranormal tools.
For example, I enjoy using the tarot cards and I have since I was a kid.
I'm an artist and a photographer, so the visual was always attractive to me.
And I believe that some of those actually do have some inherent spiritual capabilities.
So there's a lot of different things that I tap into, and that's my belief system of what I'm tapping into.
Call it God, if you like.
Call it the universal mind, the universal force.
You know, spiritualists have different words for it.
The Bible has different words for it.
Different belief systems have different words for it.
I like to say God in the generic sense of I believe there is a creative force out there that's created all this and oversees all this.
I don't believe that creative force manifests strictly through any one religion or any belief system.
And so what I tap into is I believe a higher power that manifests through several different levels, if you will, such as the guardian angels, spirit guides, so on and so forth.
And that's what I tap into for my readings and for my information, for my predictions, and for the experiences that I have.
How do your guardian angels, your spirit guides, whatever it may be assisting you, how do they, and how have they since you were young up to today, how do they intercede with you?
How do they communicate with you?
Can you tell me some experiences, you know, of you connecting directly to them?
Oh, I'll tell you one really great experience.
They communicate with me through intuition.
Sometimes they communicate with me through a voice in my head that's inaudible to others.
Sometimes they communicate to me in an audible voice that you can hear with your physical ears.
And one of the greatest experiences that I had, and I write about this in my first book, Riding with Ghosts, Angels, and the Spirits of the Dead.
And these books are, my books are available at Amazon UK, by the way, for listeners that may desire to get those.
But in this one experience, I'm a biker.
I've been a motorcyclist since I was about 15.
And I'll keep the story short for the radio here.
But I was riding and I was very, very comfortable.
I was going along about the speed limit, which was 70, 70 miles per hour.
And there's three lanes and I was in the right lane, which is supposed to be the slow lane, but everybody's running past you crazily anyways.
But I was just holding back around 70 and I was enjoying the day.
It was a beautiful day, sunshine, blue skies, not a lot of wind, and beautiful scenery.
I was rolling through.
And this voice in my head spoke to me, and I knew it was my guardian angel when they spoke, one of my guardian angels.
And they said, John, move into the left lane.
Well, first they didn't call me John.
They just said, move into the far left lane.
And I began to argue with them.
And after all this time, I should know better.
But I began to argue with them.
I said, look, the traffic here is crazy.
You know that I'm going to have to do some really wild riding to get over there.
And I'm happy where I'm at.
I'm lollygagging along.
I'm having a good time.
I'm having fun.
I don't want to move over.
I want to stay where I'm at.
And then they called me by name and they said, John, move into the far left lane now.
So I did some hefty maneuvering on the bike and got over there.
And I'm well below my high-speed riding capability, but it's not where I wanted to be.
I wanted to be lollygagging over in the right lane.
And I couldn't understand the purpose for it until a split second later, this wreck occurred in the right lane where I had been seconds earlier.
And this car was spinning around, actually spun around facing the wrong direction after it had been hit.
Detritus was blasting, rolling across the interstate, across the road like shrapnel, and I was dodging that.
And in the midst of all this, as this man's car is spinning around, I looked across at him.
We actually made eye contact.
He looked into my helmet and saw my eyes.
I saw his eyes as the car was spinning around.
And I looked to see if I needed to stop, but people already were.
And I knew the highway patrol would be there, so I rode on.
So by listening to the voice of my guardian angels, of my guardians that told me, move into the far left lane now, my life was spared.
And if I had ignored that and not moved, I would have been right in the big middle of that wreck.
He was in the lane I was in.
I would have hit him head on.
Whoever hit him and spun him around.
And I would have been in the middle of that and been hit by no telling how many cars.
So that's one example of the practicality And, you know, you might have thought that a voice told you something.
I mean, look, I have a similar experience.
I was driving just a few years ago in Scotland, and it was my first time driving in rural Scotland.
You know, I've been to Glasgow, the big city, but never been out in the country.
Beautiful road, beautiful road, no one for miles by the looks of it.
And I'm just about to round a corner in my car, and a motorbiker is right in the middle.
In fact, he's over on my side of the road.
Oh, wow.
And he comes within, I would say, 1.5 to 2 seconds of going right into my car in my lane.
And you know what happens, don't you?
Time slows down.
So it does.
I can still remember that guy cross-correcting, putting himself in the right lane and mouthing the word sorry to me, all in the space of like a couple of seconds.
I came as close to being killed on that day a few years ago, I think as it's possible to come.
And so did he.
And it was his error.
I don't know what he was doing.
He was doing a hell of a speed.
I was very thankful that he was able to get himself into the right lane and get himself away from me.
But nobody, you know, nothing said, something's going to happen.
We're going to save you here or you've got to save yourself.
It's just that that's how this particular event panned out for me.
How it played out.
Yeah, it was fortuitous.
If it didn't happen that way, then we wouldn't be speaking now.
But you think in your case, there's much more than that.
I do.
And I think in your case, there was.
I think that there were beings there that managed to maneuver the vehicles in such a way that you didn't have the collision.
And I always tell people, and like I say, the voice that I heard clearly, I heard these voices ever since I was a kid.
And it's been on more than one occasion that they've literally saved my life like that.
It's been a repeated occurrence, and they've spoken to me very clearly.
So I think that what people have to realize is, you know, our problem is, and what I try and teach people and try and teach my clients and even try and teach my readers through my books, is that we ask, we pray, we meditate, we want, we desire, and then we don't get quiet and listen.
We have to listen for that answer.
And so many people are always like, well, this happened to me.
Where was my guardian angel?
Well, were you listening?
Were you tuned in?
Did you make the practice of listening and growing your intuition and connecting with your guardian angel and listening so that they could communicate to you and keep you safe?
And then when you hear them, you've got to do what they tell you.
I'd have been dead if I hadn't have done what they told me to do.
And so that's one thing that we have to learn in our life.
We have to cultivate that ability to hear them, and then we have to listen to them when we do.
And one of the ways to cultivate that is to get quiet.
You know, we've always got the cell phone going or music going or the iPod or on the iPad or we're doing this or doing that or got the television going.
We have to turn all of that off and make some quiet time just to get away and just to listen, to ask the other side to speak to us and then get quiet and listen for those voices to come and to give us that guidance.
Okay.
You say also that you're a medium as well as being psychic.
Right.
You are a psychic medium.
What do you understand that term medium to mean?
I communicate with the dead.
I communicate with those on the other side, like in my readings for clients.
Their deceased loved ones will come through to me and give them messages for me that we can validate accurately, or they will tell them that they have seen their loved one that's left behind, that they've seen them do some particular thing, like, for example, at their grave site or some particular thing to honor them or something of that nature.
So it's a meumistic experience.
I'm actually communicating with the dead on the other side.
Have you got any stories where you've been able to divine things that you couldn't possibly have known?
And you think that you've maybe helped the person who's come to see you?
Oh, absolutely.
There's been several.
And sometimes it's just a very small thing, but it's really encouraging to other people.
I remember one time there was a radio show that I was on, and they had a new DJ.
And so she had not been on with me before.
I was a regular on the show.
And people would call in for very short minute, two-minute psychic readings.
And I discussed the paranormal, answered people's questions about the paranormal, and so on.
And I had been on the station for years, but this was the first time this new DJ had been on with me.
So during a break before we went on, I told her several things about herself that she was able to validate as being true, that my insights about her were accurate.
And then I told her that she had, I believe it was her grandmother, it's been a long time ago, I believe it was her grandmother.
And I said, you do something nearly every night in honor of your grandmother.
And there's some like a scented candle, a particular scented candle that you light nearly every night in memory of your grandmother.
And you speak to her when you do.
And she sees that you do that.
And she can even smell the camera, the candle.
And I believe it was like peach scented or something like that.
So I said, she can smell the aroma of that candle.
And I told her about the scent of the candle, what it was.
And she was just flabbergasted.
She was like, oh my God, there's no way in the world that anybody could know that because I do that for my grandmother.
I was so close to her.
And I've got like this table with kind of a little altar almost.
And I have these peach scented candles.
And every night I light one and I talk to her out loud.
And it was validation that her grandmother saw that from the other side.
And that brought great comfort to her to know that.
What happens when we die?
Well, when we die, we leave our body, we go to the other side, and we don't know exactly from there.
We have little hints, little bits and pieces, little glimpses of what it's like there.
We know that we retain our personalities, our senses of humor, our intelligence, what we've learned, I believe, our likes and dislikes, and so on and so forth.
And when we get there, I'm not real sure exactly the process from then on, and I don't think anyone really, truly is.
Like I say, we get glimpses of it.
We know that guardian angels, for example, meet us, deceased loved ones, friends come and meet us, greet us, are there when we cross over, and we reconnect and reunite with them.
I believe that we get to actually see physically some of the guardian angels, the entities, the guides that have been around us all these years.
And then we have learning processes.
We continue to learn there.
I believe that there is some type of judgment process in the sense that, for example, a Hitler can't die and go across and just everything's hunky-dory.
There has to be some process In place where that person has to examine their life and what they've done and have some kind of penance for that.
Right.
So, do you think that can all be?
Is there a hell?
You know, is there, as well as being a heaven beyond this, is there a hell?
And I don't know that I exactly believe in either one of those.
And that's straight of a definition.
I'm not sure that either one of those actually exists per se, as we've been taught, but I believe there certainly has to be some place where evil is held or contained or some such.
But like I say, we don't know for 100% sure.
We'll know when we get there.
And we have difficulty in communicating with those on the other side, trying to get that information more clearly.
You know, we've had reliable, accurate mediums for decades, and we've had methods of communication to communicate with the other side, such as electronic voice phenomena, where you record voices of the dead and all these types of things, and a lot of other ways to communicate.
And we still don't have as complete a picture as we'd like to have.
But that's what we continue to work on, what we continue to work toward.
And we still have a long way to go.
But I think we are making progress.
Of course, the problem is you said we have good, accurate mediums.
There are, of course, a lot of people who delude themselves into thinking that that's what they can do, but they can't really.
Exactly.
And of course, there are other people who fake it.
And that's part of the problem, isn't it?
Yeah, outright frauds, con artists.
And that's still a huge problem.
I've had to rescue a lot of people over the years that fell into the clutches of these phony psychics and these phony mediums.
And what a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of the people, the con artists, the phony psychics and the phony mediums, they will produce physical manifestations that to the untrained person look like genuine supernatural miracles.
And all they are is simple sleight of hand magic.
And if you know how it's done, then that takes the miraculous away from it.
But if you don't know how it's done, it looks to be a legitimate little mini miracle happening there.
And that's how they use the sleight of hand magic to convince people that something really is going on.
And then they proceed to defraud them from there and continue to use con artist techniques and sleight of hand magic, confidence techniques to continue to string the person along as long as they can and get as much money from them.
So there's a lot of fraudulent activity there.
Well, that's why I would advise people to be very, very wary when entering into all of this thing.
I've had my periods in my life where I've gone psychic shopping.
You know, I've been to various mediums and psychics looking for the message that I wanted to hear.
And I stopped doing that, but I did do it at one point.
I've never asked this question before.
Before we get into your investigations, which I won't go through, do you think that those who con people, who fake it deliberately, do you think that they are storing up some kind of karmic payback at some stage for what they've done?
I do.
And if not on this side, at least on the other side.
I've always told people, I said, I've been absolutely, completely ethical, honest, and moral with all my clients all of these years because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt the reality of the spiritual dimension and the spiritual entities that I interact with.
And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, Howard, that if I were to ever take advantage of this gift, the guys on the other side would throw me into a mix master here and now, and it would not be pretty.
So, yeah, I do believe that the con artists are storing up some type of karma, whether it catches them here or catches them on the other side.
I believe they'll have to answer for it to some degree, yes.
No, it's unusual.
It's not unique, but it is unusual for somebody who says that they have this gift and has been practicing it for so long to get involved in investigations.
It's almost like the poacher turning the gamekeeper.
It's like two sides of the same thing.
Doing investigations is not really...
They're usually separate things.
What is it that made you want to go on investigations, to investigate haunted places and that kind of thing?
Well, the main thing, Howard, was when I was young, I became obsessed with the truth.
Does this really happen or not?
Does this really work or not?
Is this really true or not?
And that became a lifelong guiding force for me, a guiding principle for me.
And even as a very young child, I was obsessed with the truth.
And I would examine things and examine people's statements, particularly about religion, the spiritual, the paranormal, and find out if it really did happen, if it really could work, or if it was just a delusion, someone's imagination, or a deliberately made-up tale.
And that continued to be a guiding force in my life.
And because I've had so many paranormal experiences myself, I've had well over 800 paranormal experiences.
And these are physical manifestations.
We've recorded them.
We've videotaped them.
We've audio recorded them.
We've got them in photographs.
Other people have been with me and seen them and experienced them.
Can you call to mind a couple of the most remarkable ones?
Sorry to jump in.
That's okay.
I think one of the most remarkable, well, gosh, there's so many of the manifestations that it's, gosh, it's hard to pick one right off.
Well, in the publicity material that I've got for you and some of the things that I've been reading online today about you, one paragraph begins with, imagine making a phone call to a ghost.
What's that about?
Okay, let's go with that one.
That's a really good one, a really amazing one.
I had a friend of mine, dear, dear friend.
He's on the other side now.
And we were good drinking buddies.
He's an artist, and I'm an artist, and he loved to hunt and fish, and I loved hunting fish.
And we both had similar taste in music.
And we just hit it off.
We became really good pals.
And we became really good drinking buddies.
And he lived by himself.
He was wider.
And I would wait till he had, we were always playing pranks on each other.
And so I would go home and I would wait till I knew he had fallen asleep.
And I would call him and wake him up and blather nonsense at him till he cursed me and hung up.
And that was one of the ways to get back at him.
Some friend you are.
We had a good relationship, had a good sense of humor with each other, played a lot of pranks on each other.
So I had talked to him one night.
Now, this was back before cell phones, and I had a cordless phone, landline phone, cordless phone, and it had the speed dial numbers.
So I had pressed the number for his phone, and he had picked up, and we had talked a little bit, and then I told him goodnight.
And so I waited about half an hour.
I said, well, if Whaley goes to sleep, then I'll call and aggravate him, wake him up.
So I pressed the exact same number on the phone, the exact same button that I had pressed when I had talked to him earlier.
And this woman answered.
And I was like, oh, okay.
So I took the phone away and looked at it and make sure I had pressed the correct button for my friend.
And I had.
And I said, oh, well, I'm sorry.
I said, I was looking for Bill.
I said, who is this?
Have I got Bill's house?
And this should have been my first clue, Howard.
She said, she didn't say Bill's not here.
She said, there's no Bill over here.
Over here.
I was like, oh, okay, that's a little chilling.
And I said, well, is this such and such a number?
And I recited his number.
And she said, she then began to say, this is John Russell, isn't it?
What?
And I was like, oh, my.
I said, okay, I know I've called Bill's number.
I know it's the right number.
And she said, there's no Bill over here and claims that she's not at Bill's house, however.
And then she calls me by name.
And I said, I'm sorry.
I said, yes, this is John Russell.
And I said, I'm sorry.
I don't know you.
I don't recognize your voice.
Who are you?
What's your name?
And are you at Bill's house?
Are you a friend of Bill's or a relative or what?
And she wouldn't answer me.
She just kept going, so this is John Russell with this really odd emphasis.
And again, I said, yes, I'm sorry, but I don't recognize you.
How do you know me?
And she goes, so this is John Russell.
And I said, yes.
And I kept trying to question her.
And she suddenly said, I'm very tired now.
I'm going to go to sleep and hung up.
And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And I grabbed the phone and I hit the same button again and got my friend Bill.
And I said, Bill, I said, I have to ask you something.
I said, between the first time I called you and just now, did we talk?
Well, no.
And he thinks I've gotten way too drunk or have gone nuts or whatever.
And I said, is there a woman there with you now?
Is there a woman in your house now?
And please be honest with me.
He said, no.
He said, I'm here by myself.
Why?
He said, what's with all the weird questions?
And I said, from the time that I called you before till this time just now, did your phone ring at all?
And he said, no.
And I said, he said, what is all this about?
And I said, well, I'll tell you tomorrow.
I have to think this through.
So that was one example of, like I say, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds that I've experienced over the years in the physical realm.
But how do you know that was, I mean, I want to believe that it is otherworldly, you know, because I think that such things do happen.
But how do you know that it wasn't a simple crossed line?
You know, in the old days of telephones, before digital systems, it used to happen a lot here.
Right.
Well, that was something that, like I say, I allowed for that, but if it was a cross line, how did this woman know me?
And you know, unless, of course, it was the operator, but I don't think the operator will be telling you that she was going to sleep.
No, no, and wouldn't know me by name.
I don't know how I could explain that.
That's pretty bizarre.
One thing that I gleaned from this, there were two things, two possibilities I came up with.
Now, like I say, he was widowed, and either his dead wife intercepted the call and knew of our friendship and talked to me a little bit, or some woman, some spirit, some entity on the other side who knows me somehow managed to intercept that call and go, ah, so this is John Russell.
I'm talking to John Russell.
So either one's kind of creepy to think about that either his dead wife intercepted the call or there's some woman out there in spirit that knows me that managed to intercept my call and she's keeping tabs on me for whatever reason.
So, okay.
You know, forewarned is forearmed now that you know that.
I've heard many stories, but I've never been able to speak with anybody who says that this exists.
You know, that sometimes the phone will go and it's somebody from the other side calling.
You know, I don't know whether you've ever come across anything like that.
I've been doing these shows for years and I've yet to find anybody who can stand those stories up.
I had an experience, another experience with the phone where one of our riding buddies, motorcycle riding buddies, he died and he was just a tremendous communicator from the other side.
He immediately began to communicate to his wife and to friends and he would communicate through all kinds of signs, phone calls, messages he had left from people before.
He would make them reappear on their phone and come in again.
And we had, my wife and I had purchased new cell phones and had disconnected service to the old phones.
So they couldn't receive incoming calls.
They couldn't receive text messages.
And I had turned mine off and put it away.
And for some bizarre reason, my wife had left hers on.
And it was in our living room on a glass top side table by the couch.
And we were eating dinner and we're talking about this guy that had passed over, this buddy, and how many people he was communicating with from the other side.
And about that time on the glass top side table, her phone began to vibrate like an incoming text and it just Vibrated all over the top of the table, just did a dance all over the top of the table.
And we looked at each other and said, Vic, it's got to be Vic.
And I went over and I got the phone, and there was no nothing in the display to indicate any destination of any origin of any incoming call, brother.
No text, no message, no voicemail or anything like that.
But we knew it had to be Vic.
So this other buddy that used to ride with us, we went riding one day and went to this watering hole where we all used to go.
And of course, we were talking about Vic.
And this buddy of mine had pins all over his leather vest, various pins from various bike events and things and so on.
And so we were standing there talking, leaning on our bikes, talking about our buddy.
And about this time, the pins began to fly off from the front of his vest and fly two, three, four, five feet.
And then from inside of his vest, the backs that held the pins on began to fly out from inside of his vest at odd angles.
And they would fly three, four, five feet.
And like several pins, like five, 10, 15 pins flew off and backs flew off.
So like he was standing underneath an electromagnet or something.
No, no, no.
It was our buddy from the other side communicating to us that he was with us.
He was letting us know that he was there.
And I said, it's Vic.
It's got to be Vic.
And he said, yeah, you're right.
This is crazy.
So he gathers all his pins up, pins it back on, gets everything back on, and we walk over and sit down at a table with a couple of beverages.
And he starts talking to me about some of the experiences that people have had with phone calls from Vic.
And when he starts saying that, the pins start flying off his vest again, and the back start flying out at these impossible angles again.
It's like, so our buddy Vic, he was one of the most powerful communicators from the other side.
That was just a small example of some of the really fantastic things that he did.
So he was giving you confirmation there by the side.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
He's like, I'm with you guys.
I'm here.
And like I say, some of the communications that he did were really phenomenal.
His wife reported that he would make hearts in the clouds.
And one time, I believe even their initials.
And another time they were on the way to scatter some of his ashes.
And they were at night and they were taking a picture through the window.
There was one or two bikers in front of them kind of escorting them.
And she was in the car.
And so they took a picture through the windshield.
And when they looked at the picture, there's the taillight of a third motorcycle in the picture when there was like only two riders or whatever.
And you can see this other motorcycle appear in the picture.
So he made all these incredible manifestations.
So you think he was the missing biker?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Okay, to the investigations.
You are particularly, as an investigator, you've been particularly drawn to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, not only to the place where it happened, but also to a co-conspirator in those days.
Talk to me about your interest in and the ghostly connections of the assassination of Abe Lincoln.
Oh, that was really fascinating.
And for the very first time ever, I write about that in my newest book, which is titled A Knock in the Attic, and listeners can get that at UK Amazon.
The investigation of Lincoln's assassination came about.
I was approached by one of the largest media companies in Manhattan when we were living in New York to do an audition tape to test for this, and they liked what they saw and had me do a screen test.
And then we signed to do the pilot, which unfortunately never aired.
But the pilot was my psychic investigation of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
And it was great to be a psychic in doing this because I'm a horribly, horribly poor student of history.
I hate it.
I don't know anything about it.
I don't like it.
I don't study it.
So I knew that John Wilkes Booth had killed Lincoln.
Beyond that, I knew nothing.
So I was the perfect candidate for this to go in and test my psychic impressions.
So because we had the cachet of this large production company and we had the cachet of the History Channel, we got to go in all of these incredible landmarks like Ford's Theater and so on and so forth without any other tourists there.
They would shut down just for us, for me to come in with a film crew and for us to film.
So we had all these magnificent places to ourselves.
And the psychic energies there that I felt in these places were just overwhelming, Howard.
They were just incredible.
And what people don't understand is an event can happen someplace and you can refurbish it, you can repaint, you can remodel, you can change the place, you can even tear it down.
But those psychic energies remain in the atmosphere regardless of what's happened there afterwards.
So I was able to pick up on some of the co-conspirators and their reluctance to carry on with the plot because it was a much larger plot than just Lincoln.
They were trying to assassinate the vice president, several other members of the government, and to basically throw America into chaos and to bring the government down.
And none of this I knew until we began this investigation.
I began to pick up on all these other figures and all these other people.
And the amazing thing I picked up about Lincoln when we were in Ford's theater was that, and it was well known that Lincoln did have premonitions.
And I picked up that he had a premonition of his death.
And that when Booth burst through the door into the presidential box to shoot him, in that split second, something in Lincoln's mind registered, here it is, this is it.
I think that he knew.
And Booth, I picked up that when Booth had jumped from the presidential box onto the stage, he yelled something at the audience, but I couldn't understand what it was.
I told them at the time, I said, it's either it comes across as gibberish to me, or maybe it's a foreign language or something.
And it was.
He supposedly yelled at the audience when he landed on stage, Latin, sic simper tyranus, always thus to tyrants.
And so I couldn't understand it when I picked up what was said.
I didn't know Latin.
I couldn't make sense out of the words, but they validated that.
And as we went on with the investigation, we went into the museum that they have where there's artifacts of like the door where the door into the presidential box, where they said that Booth had drilled a hole so he could look through there and see when Lincoln was seated and burst in and shoot him.
And I said, no, this isn't right.
I said, Booth didn't drill this hole.
Now, that's the accepted scuttle button.
That's what's in the museum as fact.
But I said, no, this is not right.
Booth didn't drill this hole.
He had it drilled.
And so, sure enough, after we shot the pilot, they did tons and tons of extensive research to investigate and follow up on what I had said and see if they could document it.
And they were able to document virtually everything that I came up with.
And they found, sure enough, that it was recorded in history that the theater owner said that one of the workmen there had drilled the hole, supposedly at the request of Lincoln's bodyguard so that he could keep an eye on him.
But Booth didn't drill the hole.
I was correct that the hole was drilled.
And I said, Booth had somebody do this that worked at the theater so that it would be someone that didn't arouse suspicion that could be there and do this and look like a natural matter-of-fact act.
And as history bore out, that's what happened.
And so my question then, as the conspiracy deepened, was, okay, if the hole was supposedly bored for Lincoln's bodyguard, where was Lincoln's bodyguard when Booth came up, peered through the door, burst in and shot Lincoln?
You know, was he in on it as well?
So it raised a lot of those questions.
And then we went across the street to the Peterson house where Lincoln was carried after he was shot and spent the night there and then died there early the next morning.
And I picked up several things there and I picked up that Lincoln was enraged at what had happened and felt that Booth was terribly cowardly acting and what he had done.
And at the same time, Lincoln was very stoic when he realized that his time was coming to cross over.
And he accepted it with a great dignity and a great resolve and with no fear whatsoever.
One of the interesting things I discerned in the Peterson House was that government figures, people were coming and going all during the night, of course, trying to hold the government together, trying to keep America stable and together.
And one of the things that I discerned was that Mrs. Lincoln would wail, would absolutely just cry out in these horrific wailing fits.
And I don't mean just normal sobbing, but like this wailing like a banshee almost for most of the night.
And they researched and they said that, yes, that she was so grief-stricken that she just wailed and screamed like that for a significant amount of time during the night.
Are those locations haunted?
As we might say, absolutely.
But I have to interject here that all locations are haunted.
Somebody builds a house, says, how can my house be haunted?
It's brand new.
Spirits are all over the earth.
And spirits have lived all over the earth.
People have lived all over the earth for all these, you know, however many millions of years or whatever that we've been here.
So there's always spirits places.
There's always hauntings there.
There's always energies there.
But yeah, all of those places are haunted.
And some of the people that were involved came back to present themselves to me and to give me information.
And then, you know, the energies there attract other spirits, other energies and things.
So it's incredibly fascinating.
And then from there, we went on to follow the trail of John Wilkes Booth after he had left Washington and went on out into the countryside.
And we investigated several other locations and several other things.
And I picked up a lot of things that we were able to validate.
And we actually got some phenomena on film, captured some phenomena on film.
What sort of phenomena?
It was, we went to the Mudd House, which is Dr. Mudd is the doctor that treated Booth for his broken leg after he was.
Samuel Mudd.
Yeah, right, correct.
And we were upstairs and we were, I think we were the very first.
It's fairly common now in paranormal shows you see on TV, but I think we were the absolute first to use FLIR, forward-looking infrared radiation camera.
And we were using that and it records heat as white and it records cold as black.
And so we were upstairs and we were using both conventional camera and the FLIR camera.
And we heard this noise downstairs, a loud crack, like a branch or a stick snapping real loudly.
And I said, there's our ghost.
We have to get downstairs.
And so I went down and I said, I believe it's the ghost of Mrs. Mudd.
And I said, Mrs. Mudd, are you here?
Was that you?
And psychically, she told me, yes, it was her that had made the noise.
And I said, she's here in spirit and she's walking toward me right now.
And I said, I feel this tremendous energy and she's walking through me.
She just passed through me and now she's walking out the other side.
She walked directly through me.
And as I said that on the FLIR camera, you could see a set of woman's small woman's black footprints indicating cold and in what look like period era shoes walk across from where I indicated and walk through me and walk out the other side.
And we captured that on camera.
That's quite an experience.
I've heard people talk about being walked through by a ghost.
How did that feel for you?
You know, nothing ever scares me or frightens me or bothers me.
It's a very interesting experience.
It's cold.
It's very chilly.
It's kind of tingly.
You get this sense of this presence, this energy, this force going through you.
And for a moment, it's like you're kind of in another dimension almost.
There's like this merging Of energies and personalities and thoughts and things.
And it's a very interesting experience, a very unique experience that nothing else duplicates.
And a paranormal cold is different from any other cold there is.
You can be under an air conditioner and that's cold.
You can be outside in the winter, that's cold.
Nothing approximates a paranormal cold.
It's very unique.
You've been involved in quite a few investigations of places.
I've never heard of an investigation at a stables.
That was great.
You went to some riding stables, I think, in the U.S. Northeast.
Talk to me about that case.
Oh, that was a blast.
I went there at the request of a friend because they were having so many paranormal experiences there, and it scared them to death.
And they wanted to know, number one, were they or any of the crew there in danger and were the horses in danger?
Where was this, John?
Sorry to jump in.
This is, yeah, this was in the northeast.
Okay.
Whereabouts there?
Across the New York state border, we were over into a...
Oh, no, we were not in New York.
We were out of New York State.
And they kind of wanted the location kept undisclosed for various reasons.
So I don't mention the exact location, the exact state that it's in in the book for those reasons.
So I went and I talked to the people.
And the first thing that I was able to tell them was that you're not in any danger.
You know, the manifestations are real, but they're not going to harm you.
You're not in any danger.
The horses are not in any danger.
And I asked them a few things that I perceived psychically and said, I just, I'm seeing this happening to you.
Can you verify this or validate this?
And they could.
And so one of the things that they had experienced there was in this long stable, which had doors that closed up on each end, and the horse stalls were in there, and then another floor with hay and so on and so forth.
There would be a wind that started at one end of the stable and rushed all the way through it to the other end.
And that would occur when there was absolutely no wind outside, when it was completely, totally calm.
So I was hoping I would experience this, and good luck I did.
We got there and we were walking through the stable and there was not a leaf stirring outside.
There was absolutely zero wind, Howard.
And this wind began at the end of the stable, blew through.
I was wearing a baseball cap and it was so strong and nearly blew the cap off my head.
I had to hold on to my cap and it stirred up straw and dirt and debris and things and blew out the other end of the stable and then stopped.
And so they were like, see, see, this is all we're experiencing.
I said, okay, it's just a manifestation.
Spirits letting you know that they're here.
It was a very active place.
There were Native American spirits that had been there and some were buried there.
There were people buried on the property, horses, other animals buried there.
So a lot of things to activate spiritual energies and spiritual manifestations and hauntings and so on.
So that occurred twice that night.
And the second time that it occurred, the stable, the barn was completely closed up.
Both doors were shut.
And again, there was no wind outside.
And with both doors shut, this wind roared through from one end to the other again.
And so that was a neat experience.
And there was a lot of other things happened there.
They had a radio that would come on and off, and the volume would go up and down.
It would change stations by itself.
And we heard that and experienced that and actually got to visually see it happen once.
So was it a previous occupant of that location?
Or what do you think was making those things happen?
Well, I think a lot of it was some of the people that had been there previously and then had just some places just kind of store energy and attract more energy and attract other entities and other people.
And some of those people came back, kind of wanted their stories told, I think.
There was a hanging there, for example.
I think people kind of just wanted the person who wanted to express what had happened to them there and have that knowledge brought out.
And then we have, look, you know, we have nature spirits that also hang around places and they will become active in places.
And as crazy as it sounds, now some people are going to cotton onto this.
Some people are going to say, Russell's around the bend here.
But nature spirits and sometimes other spirits can be appeased by offerings of food or candy or even alcohol.
And they seem especially fond of gin.
And I told the people there, I said, you know, some of these spirits, some of these energies are perhaps nature type spirits, that type of thing.
And I said, leave offerings out here, just, you know, put a little bit of food out here and there or something and tell them, say, hey, this is for you.
And I said, I'll talk to some of these spirits on the other side and see if they can mitigate some of their activity.
But I said, you have to understand, you're not in any danger.
Nobody's going to be harmed.
The horses aren't in danger.
They're not going to be harmed.
But there's just these energies that have built up over the years and have expanded and have aggregated and grown in power.
And they just, they manifest themselves.
And I said, you know, talk to them, acknowledge them.
Let them know that you're acknowledging them and interacting with them.
And I said, most of the time in my experience with energies, with presences like that, you can ask them to protect you, to watch over you, to guide you, to help you.
And they will.
Now, they still may play some pranks on you, depending upon their personality, or they still may have messages they want to get through.
But a lot of times these entities, if we will ask, will protect us, guide us, help us, and kind of watch over us.
I've been hesitant to say this, but as you've been talking to me, and I'm not a GeeWiz host, you may have gathered.
I'm a journalistic background person.
I try to be balanced.
I have had some weird and inexplicable things happen to me in my life.
One of which, I think, happened while we were talking.
And I've never had an experience like this when I've been recording or doing anything, okay?
And I am skeptical.
However, as we were talking about the temperature dropping, now it's been a spring day here.
My little apartment is pretty old and needs to be refurbed and it's full of my stuff.
I don't get drafts, okay?
I don't get cold air.
As you were talking to me about temperatures dropping, and this has happened to me once before in my life where I went to a place with somebody who is a medium and we sat down with some other people and a coldness enveloped me at about waist height.
Well, I'm sitting down at about your knee height if you're sitting down.
Something has enveloped.
This is going to sound crazy to my listener, but I'm telling the truth.
Something cold has been enveloping me for the last five minutes or so, and this room is not cold.
Yes.
Yeah, that's spirits communicating with you and manifesting and making their presences known.
And it's not unusual for this to happen when I talk to people.
I have clients that have told me, they said, John, you've got a very distinct voice.
I grew up in West Texas and I got that Texas accent still.
It's a very, very listenable voice.
Thank you.
They said, you have a very distinct voice.
And they said, sometimes I will hear your voice before you call me for my reading.
And it'll be like you will call out my name and say, hi, so-and-so.
And I hear audibly, audibly hear your voice in my home.
And that happens before you call me for my reading.
I've had clients tell me that while I was doing their reading on the phone, that they would feel touches on their body or they would hear audible voices in the air and that type of thing.
So I've always told people, Howard, I say, you know, people want to hang around me in this, that, and the other and experience some of these things.
And I say, you need to understand something.
I am a magnet for this stuff, and it really does happen.
It really does occur.
We have proof.
And so be careful what you ask for.
You might get it.
And secondly, people that tend to hang around me or get close to me or sometimes even like in this instance will have paranormal experiences and just by virtue of being in contact with me.
And sometimes that continues on with them and the energies will stay with them and continue to manifest even after we've been able to.
Well, I have to say this is the strangest thing.
And I'm, you know, my listener knows that I'm not a gee whiz guy.
I don't make stuff up.
But it's the weirdest thing because this little apartment here is completely closed up.
And at the moment, I'm doing my radio shows from here and my podcasts and everything from here.
You know, I'm alone.
It is weird.
I'm sorry, it's just kind of, it's thrown me very slightly because I've only ever known that once before.
And I didn't know what it was then.
And the person that I was with.
That's a spirit there.
That's a person there that's wanting to get your attention.
The person that I was with back then, all those years ago, when I was like 22, and this happened, we went to visit some people.
It was a weird feeling.
And he actually stopped it.
He said, right, we're going to go.
I don't think he wanted me to experience whatever it was.
And all those years, I've wondered what that was.
And that's kind of happening now, which is very, very strange.
Okay, so we talked about the haunted stables.
I suppose I need to talk to you before the end of this.
And I don't know whether it's something you get involved in at all, but what people might call demonic presences, lower-level entities, things that might scare ordinary people like myself, those presences that are perhaps ill, you know, they're of ill intent.
Let's put it that way.
Have you encountered those things and how do you deal with them?
Well, for one thing, I've never encountered like, you know, the exorcist type demon or anything like that, the Hollywood version.
That's not to say that evil doesn't exist.
Of course it does.
There's evil out there.
And if you extrapolate from the physical world into the spiritual world, you know, there has to be spirits there with ill intent as well.
And one thing we have to do, Howard, we can't see a demon behind every bush.
We can't automatically ascribe everything that happens to something evil or demonic or whatever, because that's not the case, because we also have, as I've said, all these positive energies communicating with us from the other side.
And these positive energies do their part in helping to combat those evil spirits and those lesser entities and so on and so forth.
One thing that we can do for ourselves to protect ourselves is to make sure of our motives, to be pure in our motives, to have a good heart, good ethics, good morals, and move in those directions and not cater to things or not court things that are evil or dark or deadly.
Okay, so you're saying that there are such things, but they're only there if you let them in.
Yes, it's very, very few things I've seen where something evil was able to override something and possess it and control it that hadn't somehow been given some type of an opening.
And so I, you know, and we worry way too much about it and we put way too much dogma into it.
You know, I get real tickled at people because they start calling out demons by name.
Well, if these demons are deceivers and liars and evil and of ill will, how do you know they're telling you the truth?
How do you know they're giving you the right name to begin with?
So you get off into all this silly nonsense and it's better if you just keep yourself on the straight and narrow and whatever spiritual work you're doing, ask for the, you know, the angels to come to you and the higher powers, the evolved powers to come to you.
And surround yourself like with the feeling of imagine yourself in a bubble of white light, pure white light that burns away all the evil and keeps away all the negativity and everything.
And do that.
And that will help you in your spiritual work.
That's a very strange thing you say.
I remember in my psychic shopping era, when I was probably about 24, I went to see, at my sister's suggestion, you know, I was having a difficult time in my life, career not going very well, life not going very well.
I went to see this woman.
I can't remember her name.
And I have mentioned it on the radio before, but she was in North London.
I remember that bit.
And We went into her front room, very small home, and she asked me to stand there in the middle of it, in the darkness, and she laid hands on my head.
This is a true story.
And what she said, you know, somebody had tried to influence me with, you know, something that was not good.
She put her hands on my head.
This is another true story here.
And I saw this halo within my closed eyes of white light around my head, almost as if it was going in a circular motion.
There used to be a TV program here called The Saint starring Roger Moore.
And at the beginning of it, a halo used to appear over his head.
It was a halo of white light around my head.
From that day to this, and I was a kid of 24, I've never been able to explain that, John.
Right.
That was something weird.
Yeah, that's that white light energy I'm talking about.
And we can manifest to that.
We can manifest it to others, or you can manifest it for yourself just by visualizing it and asking it to come and protect you and surround you.
And it can be people have captured it like with Curlyan photography, regular photography.
Sometimes it's so strong you can even see it as like a faint aura surrounding a person or whatever.
So yeah, that's legitimate.
That's absolutely real.
I have listeners who will say, you've been talking mumbo-jumbo.
That's both of us.
And I'm going to turn this off.
I don't believe any of that.
The guy's just deluded.
It's all garbage.
What do you say to those people?
Well, there's nothing you can say to people that have made up their mind not to believe.
I like people that are skeptical but open-minded.
But a lot of people go into something with their minds made up.
And no matter what evidence you present to them, it's never going to be good enough.
It's never going to be convincing enough.
They're going to refuse to be convinced for whatever reason.
And it literally doesn't matter what you present to them.
They're going to find some way to explain it away and to not believe.
And I feel very sorry for those people because it's, you know, it's got to be a very disconnected and a very lonely way to live to not have any belief system at all, not to believe in anything supernatural, paranormal, more than what we can just see with our eyes and experience with our physical senses.
I haven't had tons of proof, but I've always suspected there is more than what we see, but what do I know about anything?
Last question for you, John Russell.
What happened at the Roswell UFO Museum?
Oh, my.
I had gone to, they had a thing there, this was decades ago, and there was a thing called Alien Encounter 98.
Stanton Friedman spoke there.
I got to see him lecture, and I went to give readings.
I had rented a space there and was giving readings.
So one morning I left out early before I was to give readings, and I went to the Roswell UFO Museum, and it wasn't open yet.
So I was standing on the sidewalk out front and looking through the windows and looking at the posters and everything and just looking around the town.
And this woman came down the sidewalk, and for some reason, she stopped, and we struck up a conversation, and she asked if I were from New Mexico.
And I said, no, I'm from Texas.
And she said, oh, she said, did you come just to visit the museum?
And I said, well, no, actually, I'm a psychic and I'm giving readings at the Alien Encounter 98.
And she's like, oh, wow, that's interesting.
So we began to talk.
And she says, you know, she said, I saw the UFO.
We saw it come over when we were kids and we saw it crash.
And I was like, oh, my God, what?
And she said, yeah, my brother and I were outside playing.
And we saw this craft come over.
And it was not a weather balloon.
It wasn't a blimp.
It wasn't a plane.
It wasn't a helicopter.
It was a witness.
Okay.
Yeah, it was a UFO.
And she said, we could tell from the way that it moved that it was in trouble.
And we saw it go on over down the way and crash.
And we saw that when we were kids.
Wow.
And I was just flabbergasted because that was the first actual witness to the crash that I had, to the UFO that I had ever met.
And so I said, my, I said, with all of the things about UFOs and everything going on, why don't more people come forward like yourself and give us the real info on that?
And so this is what she tells me, Howard.
She said, at the time, there were people in the government, people in the military, and people we didn't even know what their affiliation was, that came to us and told some people, if you talk about this or mention this to anyone or give any interviews about this, your bones are going to be found out in the desert sand.
But she was telling you.
Yeah, but she's talking about at the time, at the time of the crash, that all of these military figures and government figures and everything came and threatened many, many townspeople with literal death if they were to say anything, if they were to speak anything.
And now all these years later, she suddenly snaps her head left and right, up and down the street several times and goes, I've said too much.
I shouldn't have talked to you.
I'm sorry.
I have to go by and walked off.
So all those many years later, that fear was still there.
So the biggest cover-up, perhaps, of all time, eh?
Yes, yes.
John Russell, pleasure to speak with you.
I could listen to your voice all day.
There used to be a guy on TV here.
He had his own TV series.
And he had a very relaxing voice when he was talking.
He was a country music star, George Hamilton IV, okay?
And he used to do a series.
And your voice kind of reminds me of George Hamilton IV.
I mean that as a compliment.
If people want to check you out, well, no, it's a compliment and well intended.
If people want to check you out online, John, where do they go?
They can go to my website, which is johnrussell.net, and that'll have all the information about getting a reading with me.
If they want more information on my books, they can go to writingwithghosts.net.
And for my newest book, A Knock in the Attic, it's just a knockintheattic.net.
And again, those are available, at least the Kindle versions are available on Amazon UK.
And they can get all the Information that they want there.
Find out everything about me.
And for those, like in the UK, for example, that want a reading, I've read for people in over 30 countries.
A lot of times people call, they don't mind phoning, or I'll phone them.
But if someone doesn't want to phone, I do offer Skype readings to people.
That's a pretty comprehensive commercial.
It's all at your website.
And John, thank you very much for your time.
Thank you.
Give my love to Florida.
I will do that.
Thank you so much, Harris, for having me.
I appreciate it so much.
I've enjoyed it and hope we get to talk again.
I hope so.
Please take care.
You too.
Your thoughts on this edition of The Unexplained?
Welcome as ever.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link from there.
You can send me an email and I will get to see each and every email as it drops into my inbox every single day.
I get new email and I check them out the moment I open my eyes.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night these days during lockdown.
First thing I've got to do is check the news and then check my email inbox.
That's the way that I am these days.
Maybe you're the same too.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained Online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.