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April 19, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:45
Edition 537 - Paul Ascough
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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 definitely The Unexplained.
Springtime continues in London Town.
I'm going to do some shout-outs on this edition.
If you've been in touch recently, listen up.
I'm not able to mention everybody, unfortunately, but if you would like a shout-out on a show, let me know, give me notice, and I will attempt to do it, because that's the kind of guy I am.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Thank you for you've made a donation to the show that's gratefully received and helps me to keep going through this year of 2021, which is rapidly slipping through our fingers like the sands through an hourglass, as they used to say on a famous American show.
What was it called?
The Days of Our Lives, which I think was seen for a while in the United Kingdom.
I think it's quite hard to find on digital television these days, but it's still out there.
The Days of Our Lives.
Yes, I remember watching that for quite a couple of years, to be absolutely true with you.
Okay, guest on this edition is a man called Paul Askoff.
He's written a book called UFOs, The Real Story, and like the best books, it is based on his life story, which I think you'll find is pretty remarkable.
So we'll speak with Paul in just a moment.
Thank you to Adam, as ever my webmaster, for his hard work on the unexplained.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests, including this one.
Thanks, Haley.
And thank you to you for being part of this.
Remember, when you get in touch with me, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
Shout outs then.
Hello, Mr. Hughes.
Call me out.
It's okay.
I'm just emailing you to say how much I enjoy your podcasts.
My son introduced me to them as I'm a believer in the spirit world.
I have seen things since I was a child.
I am now 74, says Carolyn.
If you want to tell me what you have seen, Carolyn, I'd love to hear it.
And very, very nice to hear from you.
Thank you.
Bernay in the United States.
Thank you, Benet, for your email.
Godana in Switzerland.
Nice to hear from you.
Stephen says, don't touch anything about your show, Howard.
I like it just as it is.
Thank you for that, Stephen.
That's a word of support that is very gratefully appreciated.
Megan, who is a nurse.
Megan, thank you for your hard work over this period.
And Jay, good to hear from you.
Lee in Stockton on TE's, who's been a regular listener for a long time.
Thanks for that recent email, Lee.
Andy, who's a Brit listening in Denmark?
Nice to hear from you.
And Gurudat in Mumbai, thank you for telling me what's going on with you, Gurudat.
My thoughts are with you and all of the people of India.
I know that the COVID situation there is very difficult at the moment, and I know that you personally and your family have suffered.
So Gurudat, you're in my thoughts, and I'm sure in all my listeners' thoughts in India.
And Cindy, thank you very much, Cindy, for your guest suggestion.
If you want to get in touch with me, just go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can send me a message through the link on that website.
And if you want to check out what's going on with the show, you can always get the latest information by going to my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Okay, Paul Askoff, UFOs, the real story.
Let's get to him now.
Paul, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Thank you for having me.
So whereabouts are you, Paul?
I know that you're in the north of England, and I think you're in Yorkshire, but whereabouts?
We are just south of Leeds on the M62 corridor.
No, it's handy for everywhere.
I had to go there and do some work a couple of years ago.
And, you know, Leeds, a lot of people from down south don't go to Leeds and they should because Leeds is fab.
It really is.
Fabulous place.
Well, there you are.
We've done our bit for the Leeds Tourist Board.
Let's hope they're grateful.
All right.
Talk to me then about you because your background does not necessarily suggest UFO enthusiast.
I mean, you have a background of military service.
I think of service in the health sector.
They're not things that automatically screen to me, you know, here is somebody who's interested in UFOs.
But this has been a passion for you all your life, yeah?
Well, since I was 11 years old, just very briefly, my career's always been medical.
I've done 47 years in the medical field, 34 of those with the NHS, and 13 with the regular army and territorial army.
But my interest in all things UFO and paranormal started when I was just after my 11th birthday.
And what happened was, I mean, I was just a normal geeky sort of skinny guy who was like the usual things and you went out on your bike and playing out with your friends.
And our last job of the day, myself and my younger brother, was taking, we had a disabled neighbour and he had two dogs and it was taking his dogs and our dog for a walk.
So we used to take the dogs for a walk, come back, say goodnight to our parents and go to bed.
And my father was in the front garden and our home was on the edge of a small village looking due east.
And we came back in, he was tending his roses, we went into the garden.
Now, he wasn't an astronomer or anything like that, but he was always interested and he had a telescope.
And it was just becoming dusk, sort of beginning of September, I would say it was 1968.
And as we sat there, the first of the constellations, you must think there was no of the light pollution that we get around the cities now.
You know, we're going back to 1968, so there was only half the aircraft in the sky for one thing.
And we were looking at the sky.
To the north was a big bank of cloud where the sky was solid and you couldn't see anything, but to the south it was completely clear.
And my father is pointing out to us the stars.
And as we're looking, two UFOs came out of the bank of cloud and then immediately just stopped dead.
They were perfectly still for a few seconds and they were brilliant sort of pearly white balls of light and then they zoomed off again, no acceleration.
They were moving quickly away from us, 90 degrees from when they come out and you could actually see the light from them shining onto the cloud.
Right.
And you're sure the UFOs, I mean, look, Yorkshire has got, and, you know, the eastern side of the country has got a number of, always had a number of air bases and stuff like that.
But you were sure that These were unidentified flying objects without question.
The thing was, they came out of, if you can imagine like a V formation, so they were just perfectly circular balls of light that came out of the cloud and then just stopped dead.
There was no deceleration, there was no noise throughout from one end from coming into sight to not seeing them any further.
There was no sound whatsoever.
Also, there was no flashing lights or strobes within them.
They were just perfectly circular.
Except I noticed when they moved away from us, there was the tiniest little sort of teardrop shape, almost like it was a, not, I wouldn't say a vapor trail, but like there was something on off, sort of, just sort of, what can you say, condensing off them, off these balls of light.
And when they went near to the cloud, you could actually see the light reflecting off them onto the cloud.
But what was even more strange was all three of us were stood there or sat there in dumbfounded silence looking at them.
But when they came out of the cloud, I quite clearly got a really strong voice in my head that said, oops, we hadn't meant to be seen.
They hadn't meant to come out of the cloud.
And I got that.
It wasn't like, I don't know.
It wasn't like an impression.
It was like somebody physically speaking inside my head.
Okay, and you were not, presumably you were 11 years of age, you were not sort of used to that kind of thing, I'm guessing.
Oh, I mean, we weren't into anything at all.
I'd never seen anything, never read anything.
But they moved away from us and we probably had them in sight until they disappeared out of sight, maybe for one or two minutes.
And all three of us were sat in silence.
And my father, who, by the way, had done his national service in the RAF, and he said, my father was the first to speak and he just said, there's nothing that we've got that can do that.
And this is 1968.
Yeah.
And so for me, for that moment onwards, it was, and people will say, when you see something that, for want of a better term, unequivocally alien, it was so obvious, it was so bizarre, so odd that it couldn't have been a normal terrestrial aircraft.
And when you see something like that, it sort of makes you think, well, why don't I know about these sort of things?
Why isn't it on the news?
Why isn't it in the newspapers?
Well, of course, it was from time to time, but of course, the papers in those days, and, you know, until fairly recently, would usually scoff at such things.
Oh, yeah.
So official reports were few and far between.
We didn't have media like we've got now.
There was no social media or anything like that.
Do you know, I can't even think of who you might have reported that to if you tried.
I think there was a thing called the Air Ministry then.
Yes, it was.
That's right.
I mean, from that moment on, I wanted to know the nuts and bolts was how could something possibly move and stop and start and change direction that quickly?
You know, it was, again, so bizarre.
It was so obvious it was something odd that I wanted to know.
And from that moment on, that was it.
Well, a little later we'll get into some of the specific stories in your book that I've been going through today and enjoying today.
But just to ask you this before we talk about some other stuff, do you believe, as I have discovered in doing these shows that I do, that there are some people who appear to be magnets or attracted to those phenomena?
You know, there are people, and I've talked to these people.
They can be in a location and they will see some kind of ufological phenomenon and other people with them or near them won't.
Sounds to me like you've always been one of the first kind.
Well, I wouldn't, you see, I don't think I, I mean, I have, I'm very fortunate that I've experienced all sorts of things, both in the paranormal field and in ufology.
But I don't count myself as any different to anybody else.
And I wouldn't, certainly wouldn't class myself as like a psychic medium or anything on that lines.
However, I do believe, and one of the things I explain in the book, is that everybody has a specific magnetic field.
And everything, every thought, the chair we're sat on now, the room we sat in, the computer we next to, all have a magnetic field, all react to everything else.
It's all energy that's there all the time.
Every thought that you have is an energy and the intent behind it.
I mean, it's only now, sort of in modern times, that we're starting to get a handle on this.
And I saw going back to your statement earlier, yes, I do believe that some people are more, what can I say, more tuned into it, if you like.
And when you talk about this energetic stuff in the book, which I thought was a really interesting thing to include in a book about UFOs and not what you would expect, you talk about a story, something that you experienced in the 1980s, I think.
You were employed, I think, as a road layer.
You were putting down railway tracks.
Tell me that story.
Well, we'd been, we were doing, there was two things that happened.
One was we actually saw an old miner.
And that was one instance.
Because when we were laying the road, it was hot, dirty, dusty work because you were in the return air, but it was going back to the pit bottom once it had been round the face.
So what we used to do was when we had a break, we used to go through to the intake side where the fresh air was coming in the mine, which was much cooler and fresher.
So they used to tend, they tended to put the older guys who maybe had got some disability or just the older end, just to be kind to them and put them on the buttons over the transfer points for the coal going out of the mine.
So I went through and I sat with this old this old guy called Roger and we sat there having a sandwich and as we sat there the only lights down the mine usually were over these transfer points so that you could see if there was any problems and next to it was what we used to call a small heading where they put all the transfer electrical transformers big sort of they weighed about five or six tons you know for 11,000 volts they carried and while We were there.
We saw this.
We sat having a sandwich, everything's quiet, and then coming towards us, we saw this old guy, portly old guy there.
He didn't acknowledge us at all, and he came towards us and then he ducked underneath the belt into the small heading, maybe only 20 yards long, where all these transformers were.
And he went through there and we sat there watching him thinking, oh, well, you know, probably a deputy just checking the old seals because when they had an old workings, they used to put seals on to stop any gases coming out.
So the deputies used to come out and check the seals and make sure there was no gases coming out of them.
And we thought that's what he had done.
Well, after two minutes, he still hadn't come out.
And we thought, I hope he's all right, not had a heart attack or something.
So we jumped up and went to have a look, and there was nobody there.
Now, we'd both seen him quite clearly.
And we both commented.
And it was like, you're actually, it's not like we are now where you're outside.
When you're down a mine, you're surrounded by solid rock.
There was nowhere that he could go.
How did you just get just to, I think I've missed this bit, though.
How did you come to be in that location?
This was part of the railway work you were doing.
Yeah, well, you just go through what they did was very basically, there's an air system that goes round the pit, down round the mine.
So near, they'll have some fans which pull air round.
So fresh air is pulled in.
It goes down the intake side where the coal comes out of the mine.
So you were actually hanging, we just had, you were working in a mine at the time.
Yes, that's correct, yes.
Okay, so you were laying tracks, presumably for the coal carts.
Yeah, what used to happen was if they were doing any new areas or advancing to put a new face on to extract the coal, the heavy machinery, we used to put tracks in so that when the face was ready to start mining, all the machinery could be taken down on the tracks and the belting and the other things that used to get there could be taken out of the mine.
So it was a way of transporting the heavy machinery to and from the face.
I've got it.
They still do that kind of thing with heavy machinery, don't they?
Of course they do.
You talk about this person that you saw and I've got the description here.
You say that he was dressed in the typical old deputy shirt and trousers with a waistcoat, not the bright orange outfits that you see most of the miners wearing, even in the 80s, that's what they had.
You said on his head was the old-fashioned compressed card helmet that many of the older people still wore, like a badge of seniority.
And you said that his lamp was hanging off the leather belt.
Yep, that's right.
Exactly right.
So you were able to take in, and I don't knock this at all.
You know, I saw something similar to this, and I won't tell my listeners the story again because they've heard it so many times.
But you take in a lot.
I was amazed.
I saw this apparition for about five seconds, but I took in every detail about him.
You did too.
Yeah, it was like, it was, I don't know, it was like really clear.
And the thing was that he didn't look like an apparition.
He looked like a normal guy, a normal old sort of man that you would expect to be there.
And that's why I think we weren't afraid.
We weren't scared.
We weren't, it didn't, you know, we had no reaction.
It was only afterwards when we went to see and there was nobody there.
And it was like, well, where can he be?
You know, because it would have had to come back past us to get out, you know.
And we both talked about it afterwards.
And it was like, did you see what I saw?
And it was quite obvious.
And we both sort of said the same similar thing, you know, and it was like, because people do see things differently.
But that was, I just put my side of it because that's what I observed.
That's what I thought I saw.
And what you all came to the conclusion that this was somebody who had been, you know, somebody who was there to inspect the mine in previous days.
And he was just continuing in the afterlife doing what he'd done before.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
That was that.
And you said that, I mean, before we get on to the ufological stuff, you said that strangeness and paranormality tended to follow you around.
Have you got any more stories like that?
Well, yes.
When another thing that happened, I was down the mines in 1982, and I can't remember the month, but we'd just put through a new roadway.
We'd built a new roadway to start a new area because they're all sort of cordoned off in districts and different areas.
And we'd just put through a new track to start a new face.
And it was heavy work.
So what we used to do, we would do our bit and then we'd have a break, finish.
And then what we used to do was part of our job, one or two days a week, we used to walk the track coming back out towards the pit bottom where you came out of the pit.
And we used to walk it and inspect the track to make sure it was okay and do any repairs or look for any repairs or place that needed replacing.
So we'd finish, we were having something to eat.
And the old guy I was working with there called Max and he said, we'll just have 10 minutes and then we'll start walking back.
So we sat there and I must have fallen asleep and I was just laid on a rolled up piece of conveyor belt and these are really big conveyor belts.
So I'm just laid there and then the next thing I know my ears popped.
I mean really.
You could tell there was a big pressure wave and they popped again.
They popped twice and then I could see this sort of light ball of light and fire coming towards me down the roadway because they were tended to be long straight roads.
And I sort of screamed at Max to get out of the way and at the side of me was a manhole.
So I just rolled over to roll in the bottom of the manhole and get my self-rescuer out.
And then as I'm doing that, I woke up and I was still laid in the middle of the middle of the roadway on the conveyor belt.
I hadn't moved.
And I jumped up, my heart was pounding in my chest.
And I would have, you know, bet my life savings then that there was going to be an explosion.
So Max sort of looked at me and said, what's the matter?
And I said, Max, there's going to be an explosion.
And he said, what are you talking about?
And I told him what had happened and sort of resigned.
And I said, I don't care what you say.
I'm going now.
There's definitely going to be an explosion.
And it's convinced me.
It was real.
It was something.
My ears had popped.
I'd felt it.
It was physical, you know.
And it scared me to death.
And I obviously must have convinced him because he came out and we left an hour earlier and we lost an hour's page.
so I must have convinced him too.
Okay, but was there an explosion?
You're going to tell me no now.
Yeah, no, there wasn't an explosion in our mine, but the following day there was one at a mine in Glasgow where nobody was killed, thankfully, but I think there were 14 men injured, some of them quite severely.
And I think it was just that I had the sort of premonition that I was in that sphere of influence, if you like, because I was down a mine and it was a similar sort of area, if you like.
Now, there will be people who will ask, and I understand why you've done this, why this stuff is in a book about UFOs or that has a title to do with UFOs, UFOs the Real Story.
So can you explain to me why paranormality and things that you perceive happens to, and from reading the book, I understand why, but you need to tell my listener why those things are in a book like this.
Right.
Everything is connected.
And that was one of the reasons I wrote the book, because as you must be aware, people tend to write books of single paranormal experiences or UFO sightings.
Like you'll find a book about the Pascagoula sighting.
You'll find a book about Roswell.
You'll find a book about Randallsham Forest.
But it's like you need something that covers all of it because it was like people were just doing small pieces of the pie.
And I wanted something that encompassed all of it because I'd experienced these things.
It makes you think.
And I were putting two and two together.
And after my first sighting, I was an avid reader.
I used to read literally hundreds and hundreds of books.
Anything I could get hold of on UFOs, I'd read.
But obviously, I went on to the paranormal as well because there really weren't that many books in the late 60s about UFOs.
And you had to go to the big cities, really, to find any bookstore that would even stock them.
So after doing this, I sort of had this, what can I say?
It's a theory that's developed.
And I was an avid reader.
And on one occasion, we actually lived.
I'll just tell you this story because it's relevant.
We lived near about 100 yards away from a spiritualist church.
So we're in this small village.
So when I'd go out with my friends as a teenager, I'd walk past the spiritualist church.
Now, at that time, I didn't attend it.
We had when we were much younger, but not then.
And as I'm walking past, there's this old man stood outside with a suit on and smoking a cigarette.
They used to go outside to smoke like people did in those days.
And as I'm walking by, he said, Paul, have you got a minute?
Now, I didn't know this guy, but he knew you.
But he knew me.
And he said, Paul, have you got a minute?
I thought, okay.
And I walked over towards him.
And he said, just a minute.
And he got this scrap of paper and this little scratchy pencil that you probably used at the bookies or something.
And he got that out and he wrote something down.
And then he showed me this bit of paper.
And he'd written three letters.
And he'd just written UFO on this piece of paper.
Now, I just looked at him and thinking, how on earth did he know I was into UFOs?
And this is going through my mind because I didn't even speak to my parents or my siblings about it.
And as I'm looking at him, he says, I've just been told by spirit to tell you that you're thinking on the right lines.
Oh, my God.
And so you didn't know this man from a bar of soap.
No.
He knows your name and he knows that you're interested in UFOs.
How can that be?
Unless somebody tipped him off.
Well, that's just it.
There was only me that could have tipped him off.
Right.
And you hadn't done that.
No?
So it was like, so that was a bit mind-blowing, really.
And it was like, oh, my.
And it's to me, you have these moments, the epiphany, if you like, these wake-up calls that say, that keep you on track, if you like.
But was he somebody, obviously somebody affiliated with that spiritualist church.
Was he a medium or a sensitive or a psychic or something?
Yeah, something like that.
And to be honest, I do not know.
I spoke to my father afterwards because I went and I said, Dad, you know, this has happened.
Who is he?
And he says, oh, that'll be.
And he said he was called Arthur.
And I mean, I didn't know him.
And I wouldn't have known his name had my father not told me.
But anyway.
But I mean, that's a fascinating story.
And clearly you were and are interested in UFOs.
You know, did that help?
Did that confirm that you were doing the right thing?
Yeah, I think little things like that.
I'm saying little things like that.
I mean, at the time it was quite mind-blowing, really.
But I think that the things like that happen.
Everything happens for a reason.
And I believe it was just to give me a bit of impetus to carry on.
So whether I was at a low ebb at the time or was being distracted, which is quite likely being a teenage young man, you know, it just kept me on at it, you know.
I mean, listen, I was young and interested in these things, but it wasn't the kind of thing.
Certainly in my generation, your generation, not the kind of thing that young people mostly got involved in.
They were interested in football or motorbikes or dating or, you know, music or any one of clothes or any one of a number of other things, but certainly not UFOs in the afterlife.
Yeah, you're right.
And this thing that happened by the spiritualist church, was this before or after the first UFO sighting that you discuss in the book?
Yeah.
I mean, this is your first proper UFO sighting, which I think was with a man called Arthur Shuttlewood.
That was probably two years later, maybe even three.
And probably that was, I would say, around about 1970.
And the Warminster mystery and the Warminster thing was big news then.
Well, it was, wasn't it?
I mean, it's always been to an extent.
But in the 70s, It was all tied into the New Age thing, and there is no doubt about it.
In that Warminster area and around Stonehenge and in Wiltshire generally, there seems to be some kind of activity hotspot there.
But you describe in the book this encounter, this big encounter that you had in Wiltshire with this man called Arthur Shuttlewood.
So can you fill in the blanks on that one?
Well, it was quite by chance, again, I had an uncle who was sort of into it on the periphery and was interested.
And he'd been invited down with a group that he was involved with.
Now, it was something like Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, that sort of area.
But he lived near us, and he suddenly knocked on the door one night and said, and asked my parents.
I mean, how young we were then.
But we were quite, my parents were quite strict, you know.
And he'd obviously come to say, I'm going down to meet this group.
I'm going down on my own in the car.
Does Paul want to come?
Sort of asked my father if he minded if I came with him.
And my dad said, yeah, that's fine, no problem.
And for me, well, he was like, wow, great.
You know, what an opportunity.
Now, I didn't know any of the thing.
I'd never been with any groups at all at the time.
So we just went down in the car, went all the way down to Warminster through the night on the Thursday night, I believe it was.
And then on Friday, this group met in, I think, I may be wrong, but I believe it was Arthur Shuttlewood's garden.
We have to explain who Arthur, because he's got at least one book up.
Who is Arthur Shuttlewood?
Arthur Shuttlewood was the guy who lived in Warminster, who had had various experiences and witnessed sightings around the Warminster area.
Now, there was quite a lot of paranormal events with the UFO sightings, but it was quite famous at the time, even made it into the papers, and there were lots of pictures that had, I mean, some were later proven to be hoaxes, but there were allegedly some genuine pictures of UFOs at the time that was down there.
So there you are with Arthur Shuttlewood, or you go down.
Yeah, and he's written like the lead investigator, if you like, the man who everybody went to.
And he finished up, he wrote two or three books.
And we went down, had tea with him.
And then we spent one night up at a local sky watching place called Cradle Hill and another night at another sky watching place called Clay Hill.
And both nights we saw what you would term as lights in the sky.
Just unexplained lights that obviously not aircraft, obviously not satellites, but it is just a light.
You know, it could be anything type of thing.
But that was nice because it was, for me, on both nights, I was able to just talk to Arthur.
I mean, he loved telling stories and because I was a young lad and obviously eager to listen to people of experience, if you like.
I've got the description from the book here, and if you don't mind, I'll read it.
No, I don't mind at all.
Okay, and you tell me if this is the right one.
I think it is.
Suddenly, his reverie was disturbed as a couple of the watchers in a quiet, urgent voice said, look, followed by a few oohs from more.
We turned in their direction to our right, and immediately I could see a bright point of light moving slowly, quite low in the night sky.
It was dimming slightly as it moved across our field of view.
It suddenly appeared really bright, somebody said.
There was no noise as it moved or flashing lights of any colour.
It continued across the sky at about 45 degrees from our position, well above the normal horizon for about another 10 seconds, then gradually faded and disappeared.
That's the first of the night, said Arthur.
So big night by the sounds of it.
Yeah, it was what happened.
We saw a few during the night, and that was at the top of Cradle Hill.
But Arthur at that time had just been telling me where during the day, my uncle and I, we'd been down to Stonehenge and been round.
Now, in those days, you could actually walk up to the stones themselves.
And my uncle took a photograph of me pretending to be, you know, Goliath or Samson, that was it.
Samson between the Sarsons trying to push them apart.
Oh, we all did that.
Yeah.
But he was telling me that he'd been there with a group at night doing a sky watch at Stonehenge.
And then he'd walk down towards the road on the avenue towards the heelstone, which was a large monolith, if you like, a very large stone, which is near the edge of the road.
And he'd walk down on his own.
And he said, I was looking at the night sky.
He says, and I leaned back against the heelstone and put my head back on it.
He says, and as my head touched the heelstone, he said, I got this beautiful musical note that went through his head.
And he said, it was like a colour almost that went straight up into the sky, you know.
And as he was telling me or narrating that story to me when the light suddenly appeared.
And did you see anything else there?
I mean, there are, as you say, there are famous photographs that have been taken in various eras in that area.
Did you see anything that looked like a structured craft or was it mostly lights?
No, it was just lights in the sky.
So you have to, I mean, that's it.
It's so unpredictable.
Like my wife and I saw a light today.
I mean, middle of daylight, it was 3.45 in the afternoon and looking east-southeast from our position south of Leeds.
And it was just an absolutely brilliant white point of light, looking like one of the planets, if you like, during the night.
Really brilliant.
I mean, but to see it in broad daylight and it kept fading to disappear completely and then it had come back and it didn't move, it was stationary.
And we saw that sort of fading and coming and going for maybe two minutes.
And I finally managed to point it to my wife because it was just a pinpoint of light.
But the problem is, or the thing is, it's quite natural, is people don't look at the sky.
Or if they do and they see weird things, I think a lot of us just try and rationalize them.
You know, we just say, oh, that's, you know, this or that or the other.
I've seen something From my front door, looking almost due north, and five neighbours saw it.
There were five of us all together, with myself and my wife.
And we had it in sight for maybe two minutes.
And it was, I managed to take a picture of it, I'll admit, not very good on my phone I had at the time.
And it doesn't really do it justice, but you can tell it's sort of a hockey pook shape.
But even then, one of our neighbors was just saying, oh, it's just an aeroplane.
And I'm saying, it quite obviously isn't just an aeroplane, you know, but people just poo-poo it, you know, and that's you will not change their attitude.
You've got a couple of stories from the 80s, more than a couple of stories from the 80s in the book.
There was one, your wife is Eve, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
You were talking about in the middle of the 80s, you lived with Eve in a small town.
So there's one story there where you see lights that look like car headlights, I think.
Oh, right.
And there's another one when you were with the British Army on Salisbury Plain.
So there were two big ones in the book in the 1980s.
Talk to me about those.
Well, the one that I saw in the 1980s, that was where I was with my first wife then living in Salby and came out one night and we had a very large dog, a Pyrenean mountain dog.
And I came out in the garden to give the dog a good brush before I took him for a walk.
And as I was in the house, my wife shouted, Paul, Paul, quick, come out here.
And I went outside and it looked just like car headlights through fog.
So there was two lights in the sky, just like you would see car headlights in the distance.
One slightly nearer to us was obviously slightly larger and slightly brighter.
But there was nothing apparently joining them.
And they were moving slowly, what I would say to be due west, over our position, probably at about 80 degrees from where we were.
Moved very slowly over it.
And then as they had passed us and we stood there looking at them, they suddenly accelerated like the Starship Enterprise where it just goes poof and it disappears out of sight.
It moves that quick.
So this is not the behavior of a commercial aircraft or even a military plane?
No, there was no, again, no noise whatsoever, no strobe lighting, no rotation, anything like that.
It was just two headlights that zoomed off.
And my wife sort of went, whoa.
So she went in to get the boys ready for bed.
So I said, right, I'll take the dog for a walk.
Took the dog for a walk and I'm most of the time looking at the sky.
And I must have been maybe, I don't know, 30 minutes, something thereabouts.
Came back.
And as I'm literally locking the gate, because it was obviously a very big dog, we had a six-foot gate.
And as I'm locking the gate, these two lights came back again slowly over, I would say closer and slower than a commercial aircraft and came over where we were again and just carried on at the same speed until they disappeared out of sight.
Now, this was July 1984.
And the reason I know this is because quite by chance, years later, I'm sat having a cup of tea with Philip Mantle.
Now, we were both in Bufora.
Philip was director of investigations.
And I'd been asked to do some investigating for Bufora.
And we just have to tell our American listeners that Bufora was the big, was the MUFON, really, of the UK.
Yes, that's right, yeah.
So the British UFO Research Association.
So we sat there talking, Philip and I, about over a cup of tea and just saying, and he mentioned this and he went, I'm narrating the story to him.
And he said, was it on this date?
And I went, yeah.
He said, I saw that.
And I went, you're kidding me?
And he went, no.
He says, at that time, he says it was actually reported.
He said, I was leaving, he lived south of Leeds on a ridge where the M62 is called Tingley.
And it's a very high road, the main road that goes between Wakefield and Bradford.
So Philip came out onto that road.
And he says, as I came out, he says, we were all leaving the factory at the same time.
He says, and I saw these lights.
He says, and I actually stopped my car in a bus stop in a lay-by to look at these lights.
And he described them.
He says they were closer together, but there were still two distinct lights looking over Leeds.
And he said it was reported many times between sort of the east coast and central and even North Yorkshire.
Isn't that amazing that Philip Mantle, who's published your book now and is the leading publisher of books like this in the UK, all those years ago, you both had the same experience?
Yeah.
And the thing with Philip is, I mean, bless him, I've known Philip for decades and he will not sort of he sits on the fence quite a bit, does Philip, bless him.
Not that that's a bad thing, but even though we saw this and a good friend, as in myself, and a lot of other people reporting it, he still just, he said, he won't say it's a UFO.
He just says it's something unexplained.
Okay, well, I think that's the only way to deal with this until.
Oh, absolutely.
Until we all know definitively what this was.
What about the experience that you had on Salisbury Plain when you were with the British Army there in the mid-80s?
Yeah, well, we were doing night exercise.
The British Army does different things with different people.
Everything's very compartmentalized.
And I was with a medic in the infantry at the time.
I was a section commander.
And we used to go out and doing nighttime exercises, doing orienteering.
And to make sure that you knew what you were talking about, and you could get from A to B via C, if you like, it was one of the things that they did.
But part of their, I was in a reconnaissance platoon.
So map reading had to be absolutely spot on.
So this is basically, you know, navigation, but for people on land.
Yes.
So this is navigation over a different area from point A to point B through the night.
And you had to get one or two checkpoints en route.
So I was with, there was four of us, and while we were Walking during the night, we saw these lights.
Now, we used to get a lot of obviously night exercises and things like that.
But you knew when people you recognized flares, you recognize the helicopters.
We'd flown in the helicopters, we knew what they all were.
This, there was no noise, it was just a white light with red and green flashes in it.
It actually flashed red, green, and white, but it was a single point of light.
And at first, we thought it was a mast.
So, we're getting our maps out and having a look because obviously, we had the best maps that they had at the time.
And there's no mast there.
And it was like, well, what the heck can it be?
And during the course of the night, it remained stationary.
And we plotted it.
And you could see we were trying to sort of triangulate to see how far away it was, if you get what I mean.
And during the course of us moving, we were trying to sort of get a position on it to see how far away it was.
Now, it never moved, never made any noise, never did anything any different.
It was just there.
It didn't sort of rotate as the planets and stars normally do.
It remained stationary.
And that's why we were looking to see if it was a mass, although it was very high, obviously.
I would have said probably at about 30 degrees, which would have made it thousands of feet high, you know.
So, but like everything else, people tried to rationalize these things.
And as we were getting towards the end of the night exercise, and it was becoming early morning, before it got light, as you get into those lily hours, and we went through, we'd been every time, we were almost using it as a point of reference.
And we'd just come through a wood line and went down into this gully.
And as we came up the other side to look over our finishing point, it should have been straight in front of us and it wasn't there.
And it was like, it was, we were so used to it being there, it was like, have we taken a wrong turning?
Have we done something?
And it just, it had just gone.
And after we, it must have been stationary for, I reckon, two hours.
Right.
So it couldn't have been a helicopter.
It would have made a noise and it wouldn't stay still like that for so long.
No.
And it wasn't there when we started the exercise.
We saw it sort of partway into the evening during the night and it was there almost until we finished.
So we reckoned it were there at least two hours, possibly two and a quarter hours.
Do you think it was interested in you?
You were a military unit.
You were in this area that is famous for UFOs and general strangeness of all kinds in Wiltshire.
Do you think it was interested in you?
I don't think it would have been interested in us personally.
We were just four little guys doing a little exercise, but there may have been other military things that it could have been interested in.
And did you look?
I thought military people had to report everything.
Did you report it?
I actually mentioned it to my company sergeant major, as it were, at the time.
I'm just trying to think.
I think I actually, no, I think I actually reported it to my officer.
We had an officer in charge of the reconnaissance platoon that I was with.
And he just more or less said, leave it with me.
And if I need to, I'll come back to you for a statement.
And then that was it.
Nothing else ever happened.
Well, that suggests that either he knew what it was or, you know, just didn't want to be bothered.
Yeah, I think he was purposely sort of playing it down, if you like.
Yeah, because, you know, if you report it, then you've got to do something about it.
And what do you do?
Yeah, exactly.
Years later, you talk about something that you call a pure white ellipsoid or ellipsoid item.
You were driving a Jaguar car, I think, and this thing happened.
I was actually maintained, was changing the fog lights on the front.
And I was laid on my drive.
They were really on the old Jaguars.
The fog lights were under the bumpers at the front.
And where the electrical connections were, the easiest place to get to them was by laying underneath the car.
So I'd actually found some, well, I'd managed to source a couple of new ones because being under the front of the car all the time, they used to get all the dirt and rubbish off the road and they used to rot.
So I was actually, I'd sourced a pair of new ones and I was under the car changing them and doing the electrical connections.
So the easiest thing to do was to have the front of the car up on ramps and you were laid underneath the car with your head against the bumper and you could just reach up and connect it and it was all right.
Now, fortunately, because the car was in the way of the sky, a daylight today, nice blue sky, the odd cloud about.
And as I'm there under the car, there was this white fluffy cloud.
And this, what I can only describe as it was like an oval tablet, like an ellipsoid, came out of this cloud and then stopped.
And it was like, because I was mostly sheltered by the car, I could actually look at it with my normal eyesight.
And I was lining it up with the bumper on the car to see if it moved.
And I watched this and it was just like I would think some of the tablets, like people would take a tablet and you get these little oval shaped tablets.
And I'm watching it.
And you're absolutely sure this wasn't, you know, like one of these airships.
Oh, no.
It came out of, I mean, we're talking, oh, I'm thousands and thousands of feet high.
It appeared to be really high.
It came out of the cloud, moved, and then it was stationary.
And I'm watching it because I've got it lined up with the side of the car from underneath the car.
So I could see it wasn't moving.
So I've been there for maybe a few minutes and I thought, this is really good, you know, because I could see it quite clearly.
I'll have to go in and get my wife get Eve and say, look at this, because she'd never seen anything, really.
So I jumped out from the front of the car, banged the door, Eve, quick, come and look at this.
And then went out and we could not see it anywhere.
And it had just gone.
The cloud was still there.
But you're definitely, Sean, in this area and in your area, every area.
Sometimes, you know, you'll get an airship come over advertising B and Q, which is like a DIY warehouse.
You sure it wasn't anything like that?
Absolutely nothing like that whatsoever.
It was pure white and it was extremely high.
With airships, it would never go that high.
You had an experience in 2015, more recently.
This was a silver.
Now, this was different because this was an actual silver bowl that you saw.
Yeah.
Well, it was one of our neighbours.
We live at the top of a small cul-de-sac.
And one of our neighbours had just had a little boy.
They've got two boys.
And she just had the second one.
So they'd come around with one of the other neighbours and her daughter.
And they're all sat in our back garden having a cup of tea, cooing over the baby, going, oh, isn't it beautiful?
Like they do.
So in the meantime, the elder one, who was about maybe two, two and a half, I'd been entertaining him playing football in the garden.
And then we were laid on a picnic blanket looking at anything in the sky because anything airplane, it was plain, bird, you know, like small children are.
So I'm trying to keep him entertained.
Between the houses, as I'm looking, because we were quite low down, I saw this flash in the sky.
And when I sort of sat up and looked at it, because I had just expected it to be an aircraft turning in the wind or turning to face the airport type of thing.
And it was just a ball, literally a silvery ball, just like the strictly come dancing glitter ball.
And I thought, I can't believe what I'm seeing.
It was like.
So I jumped up and I moved to the side of a conservatory on the back of the house.
And as I'm looking, I lined it up to see if it was moving.
And it was perfectly stationary.
So I said, Eve, and she's like cooing over the baby.
Eve, come in, you need to come to me now.
So she came over and she was like, oh my word, you know, look at this.
So one by one, everybody came over and we're all looking at this.
And it seemed to move very slowly towards us and then was stationary, maybe for another 30 seconds, and then slowly again moved due west.
And it just literally was very, very slowly moving due west.
So it moved from it was moving south towards us, then it was stationary, and then it was moving due west.
And it never changed its appearance.
At the side of me in the conservatory, I have binoculars and all sorts, and I've got a good pair of Carl's ice 1050s.
And I'm running and got those, and I'm looking, and it didn't look any different.
Except what I would say is it did look extremely large.
A long way off, though, miles away, you know, really, really long way off, and really, really high up.
And we watched it and it was sort of faded away behind the cloud.
It was that high up.
And what struck me afterwards was that it was quite a good daytime sighting.
There were five adults.
We all saw it.
We could have all given a statement.
And we had, would you believe, five mobile phones, we had two tablets, and I could have even got a camera.
And nobody even thought to take a picture of it.
Why?
Was that because you were all so stunned by it?
Well, I have a theory about this that we can come to later.
But it was, yeah, it was just, why didn't we even take, I mean, a really good sighting, multiple witnesses, and we had the facilities to take pictures, and it never even occurred to me.
Why do you think all of this stuff makes a beeline for you?
While you were talking and I was listening to your story, I looked out of the window that's next to me here.
It is evening time, nearly 7 p.m. on a spring day.
It's been a beautiful blue sky day.
There are clouds up there now, but they're all beautifully illuminated.
And I'm looking, there are no planes at the moment because of, you know, COVID.
And normally there are loads of planes.
And, you know, I'd love to see something up there, but I never do.
And it seems to happen to you all the time.
How come?
Well, I mean, honestly, I don't know how, but I do look all the time.
It was like today, we were actually on, my wife likes, we have a big swing in the back garden.
And my wife loves it.
But it's like most garden things.
You just cover it with a tarpaulin and it gets wet and it's a pain in the boom to look after.
So what I did, I bought a lot of wood and built a shelter.
So I've got this, what would look actually like a country bus stop, if you can imagine, over the swing so that it keeps it completely dry and weatherproof.
So we sat on the swing and as I'm looking, I was looking sort of east-southeast in that direction across our garden and there was a brilliant white spot, literally a tiny spot of light, like you're looking at a star.
But it was quarter to four in the afternoon and it was like, why can I see that?
I shouldn't be able to see that.
And it got really very, very intensely bright.
Didn't get any larger, but intensely bright and then faded away to nothing.
So I could see nothing whatsoever.
So I'm saying, Ian, look at this, look at this.
And she's going, there was nothing there.
And then it came back.
And eventually it sort of came and faded.
It didn't seem to be timed or anything.
And it was stationary.
And eventually she got where it was because it was such a tiny pinpoint of light.
And she said, how, you know, she said, I wouldn't have seen that had you not pointed it out because it was such a tiny little brilliant spot of light.
Even as bright as it was, it's not something people look for, you know.
So because of your experience when you were 11 years of age, you now make a point of looking.
And are you saying that if I made a point of looking up more often, and we all did, we would see things that would surprise us?
Yeah, I believe that we are surrounded by them constantly.
But where are they from and why are they so elusive, I think, are two reasonable questions.
Right.
Right.
I'll go down the electromagnetic spectrum, if I may.
We have, or we see, of what we normally use as a know of our electromagnetic spectrum.
It starts on the higher frequencies.
We've got radio waves at the top.
Then it comes down through the infrared to our visible light that we see.
And then it carries on going down to the ultraviolet X-rays and then gamma rays.
But we actually see less than, you know, even with the acoustic range, what we're here as well, we see less than on and here less than one-tenth of one percent of what's available on our normal ordinary matter, if you want to call it that.
So imagine we see less than one-tenth of one percent of ordinary matter, and the, what can I say, the cosmologists and astrophysicists and these people with much better brains than I are now saying that dark energy and dark matter make up the majority of our known universe.
Now, all sorts of numbers are banded about like between 75 and 95 percent of our universe is made up of dark energy and dark matter.
So what I believe is there, shall I use the words?
I mean, different people use different phrases and different analogies, but if I just say that for want of a better term, ET, being extraterrestrial, and I don't mean from far off in outer space, as we used to get in the 50s and 60s, anything that was UFOs would come from deep outer space type of thing.
And I think the ufology has changed over the years, and people are now getting more scientifically aware that this is possible, that it's just on a different frequency to us.
And I believe that they, where we are only learning, as we mentioned earlier about the electromagnetic field that we use and we can see and we can hear, we're still only able to measure a very small amount of it.
So in other words, these may be almost like a parallel universe, but different things that are there all the time, we simply cannot perceive them.
And I think that's, you know, that would be the catch-all, the describe-all explanation, I think, that science and everybody's been looking for for years.
You know, what explains paranormal phenomena and UFOs and everything?
What ties them all together?
It's not just you saying this.
I think a lot of people are starting to think along those lines now.
Yeah.
Now, what I've said, the analogy I've used in the book is if you imagine an old vinyl record, an LP, that is the plane that we are on.
That is our ordinary matter.
That is the plane that we're on.
And our psychic is able, if you're not, it's not just one LP, there's a whole stack of them.
So the record that we are talking on now, the one that we physically interact with, is on one LP.
Right.
So if you imagine one of those old, remember those auto-changer record players where you could stack up the records.
Yeah.
Right.
And the spirit, if you like, spiritual world for the paranormal and maybe on the record underneath us.
And that's how you get psychic phenomenon and how some mediums, if you're looking at the spiritual, spiritualist and the mediumship type of thing, they're able to tune either up a record or down a record.
But again, it's very subjective and having and proving that, despite the stories and people saying, well, how could they have possibly known that?
Like the gentleman that came to me and wrote UFO, how do they know that?
How can they tune into that?
From a scientific point of view, there's lots and lots of circumstantial evidence, but no proof.
And I think it's exactly the same with UFOs.
They might inhabit the next 10 records in the stack above us.
They could have been, they'll be thousands of years in front of us, and they are absolute masters of the electromagnetic spectrum.
And that is how they're able to tune down to us.
And sometimes we see them, and sometimes we don't.
That's why sometimes they appear on radar, but you can't see anything.
Or sometimes people physically see things, but it doesn't appear on radar.
Makes you wonder, though, how aware of us on this plane they are.
Absolutely, completely 100%.
And to the extent that they, when I've spoken to, I mean, I've been very fortunate again, being in the right place at the right time.
And there's a lot of people like Dolores Cannon, Bud Hopkins, Kath Marden that have done a lot of, what can I say, research, but a lot of work helping people with hypnotic regression and generally, what can I say, using it as a medium to help people.
And Bud Hopkins was the typical example where he was an artist who was such a lovely guy, wanted to help people and became the trained hypnotherapist, literally, for the therapy to help people.
And it was when people that had been abducted would go to him and he would say, and he started off very skeptical.
And when he was very fortunate that one year I was with Bud and had lunch with him.
And he says, Paul, I didn't believe it.
And he says, it was only when different people at different times kept reciting the same story.
He says, so you've got people from all different walks of life, all different sort of life experiences and geographically different countries and places like that.
He says, and they were all telling me the same thing.
And he says, I began to be convinced that there's obviously a lot more to this than science would have you believe.
And you know, I think we know that science, as it stands at the moment, can't explain everything.
And that's what drives a lot of us forward.
I've really enjoyed this conversation.
Just before we park it, talk to me about your auntie and uncle's experience.
They've been on holiday to, well, they've been for the day to the beach, like a lot of us do.
They'd gone off and they'd gone to Blackpool for the day.
From where I am in Yorkshire, and we tend to go to the east coast, but this time they'd gone to Blackpool to do the pleasure beach, do their usual annual trip.
And when they were coming back, they'd been out for a meal and they'd been quite late and they'd seen the lights.
And so they're driving back.
And they said it was quite late at night.
And as they were driving along, it was my auntie and one of the sons, they had two boys, and one of the boys saw these lights alongside them.
They said it was a red light.
And the red light appeared to be following them.
Now, over as you know, coming down from Blackpool on the motorway, you're quite near to Liverpool Airport, you're quite near to the flight path from Manchester Airport coming back from the Americas.
And at first, she thought it was just an aircraft coming back into one of the airports.
But she said it was sort of staying parallel with us, it wasn't sort of flying away as they would do.
And she sort of became very concerned about it to the point where she became really frightened and wouldn't talk about it afterwards.
And the red light was tracking them, staying parallel with them.
And then it sort of zoomed over towards them and got really close.
And at that point, they were all both boys in the back and my auntie in the front were acutely aware of it and pointing and shouting and going, oh my word.
And then very fortunately, they came to a deep cutting on the motorway as they were coming south towards the M60 and M61 around that area.
And a deep cutting in the motorway.
And she said it seemed to move back away from them.
So it had like zoomed in towards them.
And then it seemed to move back a bit.
And she said, as we came out the other side, fortunately, they came across some more traffic as they were coming down towards, I suppose, where would it be?
Wigan, Eccles, and that sort of area.
And traffic became more frequent and they were getting towards the city, if you like.
And that's up towards the Pennines, don't forget.
Yeah, yeah.
And as they came down sort of back towards civilization, as it were, it moved away.
But she, even now, to this day, she will not talk about it.
One of the sons will.
It was him that narrated the story to me.
But she won't talk about it even now.
It's absolutely terrified her.
All goes to prove that these experiences, as I've always said, are much more common than perhaps people give account for.
Oh, yes.
The book is called UFO's The Real Story, and it is published by Philip Mantle's Flying Disc Press.
Do you have a website or anything like that, Paul?
I should have asked you at the beginning.
I only have a page on Facebook called It's the Real Story, where I put things on there occasionally.
And like I may put things on tonight after seeing the light.
And what I do is, if I see anything, because I do like going out and doing some Skywatchers and things like that.
But if there's anything interesting, I always put it on in case somebody else has seen something.
Well, you might be about to acquire some more Facebook friends, I think, Paul.
Thank you for speaking with me.
Good luck with the book.
Thank you ever so much.
It's been a pleasure.
Well, your thoughts about this story and this guest?
Gratefully received?
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can let me have them from there.
You know, I'm not going to please all of the people all of the time.
You never could.
But, you know, if our average is a good one, then we're getting somewhere, I think.
I hope that life is okay for you at the moment and that you're getting by in these difficult times, wherever in the world that you are, whether you're in the southern hemisphere, where you're now going into the fall period, or whether you're here up north and it's springtime, wherever you are, you are in my thoughts.
And it's really nice that you keep the faith with me and what I'm doing here.
It makes it all worthwhile.
Okay, until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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