Edition 570 - Nikku Madhusudhan, Dr James Giordano & Dan Baldwin
Three guests - Nikku Madhusudhan from Cambridge University on exciting news that could help us find life in space, Dr James Giordano with an update on strange so-called "Havana Syndrome" Plus a longer conversation with Dowser Dan Baldwin...
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.
Well, we've had about three weeks of grey skies here in London.
We have now crossed over from August into September.
We're looking at most of 2021 now in the rearview mirror.
And it's a year that's gone.
There's me snapping my fingers like that.
God, let's hope that, well, no, I'm not going to say let's hope 2022 is better.
Let's just see what 2022 delivers.
But I cannot believe how quickly you may feel the same this year has gone.
Now, what I wanted to do on this edition of The Unexplained is catch up on a few items from my radio show that I wanted to put here for posterity because you may not have heard them and I'd like them to stay here.
The first one is an update on so-called Havana syndrome that if you're in North America and parts of Europe, you may well have heard about.
This is the idea that potentially and possibly some kind of directed energy weapon or something is being used against members of teams who work for various governments, including the US and Canada, in various foreign locations, hence the name Havana syndrome.
The problems that people experience are neurological headaches and that sort of thing.
But the man who's done a lot of research into this, possibly the world's leading researcher into it, is Dr. James Giordano, professor of neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington.
So we've got him first.
Then after that, we've got Niku Madhusudan, reader in astrophysics at exoplanet science at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, about a massive space story, maybe the year's biggest, astronomers discovering a new class of planets that may be more likely to host life.
We'll get into that with Dr. Niku Madhusudan from Cambridge University.
And then my longer conversation with Dan Baldwin, the dowser in the United States.
We'll hear all about dowsing, how it's used, how you might be able to, if you believe in these things, to deploy it, and what Dan Baldwin has used it for.
Principally, actually helping police with their inquiries, helping to locate missing persons, potentially solve murder investigations.
You'll hear him third.
So that's what we're going to hear.
If you want to get in touch with me here at The Unexplained, please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
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You can always do that by going to the website, theunexplained.tv and following the link for that.
Now, at the moment, I've got to tell you where I'm recording this.
There is some building work going on a couple of floors down from where I am.
So if you hear the occasional knock or bang, I'm using a microphone that will probably remove that.
Probably not pick it up.
But if you do hear that, you know what it is.
And it's not psychic or paranormal or weird in any way.
It's just one of life's little irritations.
Okay, let's get into it then.
And thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work.
And to Haley for booking the guests for the online show.
First off, Havana syndrome.
Let's speak with Dr. James Giodardo, professor of neurology, Georgetown University, USA, about this.
This is the conversation.
These incidents seem to be becoming more common, don't they?
Relatively, yes.
Certainly since the first reported incidents that were verified back in 2016 in Havana, hence the namesake Havana syndrome, we've had over 100 verified cases of these types of anomalous health incidents, both as regards to those effects incurred by United States personnel, as well as some others, most notably the Canadians.
Who do you think is deploying something that could cause potentially these symptoms?
Well, that's a bit above my pay grade.
I'm but a humble neuroscientist.
But we can speculate.
And the reason we can is that we know there are a number of nations that have developed these types of technologies.
First, actually, let me mention what the technologies appear to be, the most probable technologies involve.
Either some form of sonic and or ultrasonic device, some form of shielded, very rapidly pulsed microwave device, and or some form of laser technology that can be either used for targeting and ranging, or to which the electromagnetic pulsing of either a microwave or some form of sonic device can then be yoked.
And then the question then becomes, are these things being administered singularly or in some combination?
And I think that the latter is what we're leaning towards at this point.
Now, who could this be?
Well, this opens a number of doors.
Certainly the United States has developed technologies along these lines, particularly with regard to long-range acoustic and intermediate-range acoustic devices.
We also know that various forms of microwave technologies have been developed, both here in the United States as well as elsewhere, formerly the Soviet Union, now Russia, China.
And these are being used and developed further for various forms of commercial and industrial testing to be able to assess the vulnerability and volatility of both inorganic and organic materials.
And certainly humans constitute organic materials.
So absent any direct finger pointing, we can take a look at those countries in which there is the most advanced development of these technologies.
And then we have to consider those nations where there is a relatively seamless engagement of government, the research enterprise, and the commercial enterprise that could therefore rapidly uptake such technologies into what is referred to as dual use.
In other words, the use of these types of technologies and tools as forms of non-kinetic engagements.
It's a fancy way of saying weapons.
We first got to hear about this, and of course it gave its name to the condition, to the symptoms or syndrome.
In 2016, 2017, the people who were affected and had to be sent home were U.S. and Canadian diplomats, I think, in Havana, Hence, the name of the syndrome.
What symptoms did they suffer, and what symptoms are associated?
A bit of clarification there because I think it's also important to point.
The individuals who were affected were not diplomats per se.
They were individuals who were working in an ancillary capacity with the United States Department of State at the embassy in Havana.
These were not diplomats.
These were individuals who were involved in support operations, particularly support operations that would involve strategic and tactical information gathering, as what happens with any embassy anywhere in the world.
The symptoms that were originally reported were what we call a constellation of objective signs that are valuable, accessible, and therefore documentable using objective means and subjective symptoms, how these individuals felt.
In the main, they felt vertigo, feeling of tumbling, disorientation, problems with learning, executive tasks, memory, coordination.
Many of them were reporting what appeared to be abnormal head pain, not exactly a headache, but a feeling of pressure.
And that feeling would come and go intermittently, primarily when they were in their place of living.
Again, what's important to understand is that these incidents occurred not in the embassy itself, but in these individuals' private domicile in their apartments.
As we then explored what was occurring medically somewhat further, we recognized that this didn't only involve the inner ear, what we call the vestibular or balance organs, but these individuals were also presenting clinical signs and symptoms of what appeared to be some form of traumatic brain injury, concussive injury, perhaps.
Yet in all cases, there was nothing reported, not only at that time, but in the medical history, which then led to further speculation, working with my colleagues at the time and subsequently, it was then determined that what seemed to occur, our most probable supposition at that time, based upon the available evidence and all of the information that was assessed, is that this represented some form of sonic device.
These individuals were subjected to some form of sonic stimulation or sonic effect, primarily in the ultrasonic range.
And what this then causes is an effect called cavitation.
In other words, an expansion and contraction within both relatively flexible media of the skull primarily, as well as fluid media.
And working with that presumption based upon the available evidence, we suggested that this represented a cavitation injury, not only to the inner ear, but also what's called a communicating cavitation injury to the blood flow that went from the inner ear up into the brain.
Now, that was the most probable speculation based upon findings available in 2017.
Our subsequent work, 2018 to the relative present, suggests a more perhaps extensive picture.
Not only do we see that there was some acute and sub-acute effect, but there was long-term effects.
And based upon what we've now learned with regard to information gained about the development of various technologies worldwide, it seems very likely, if not completely probable, that there was not only a sonic effect,
a cavitation effect, it would be very, very similar, for example, to what one might see in decompression sickness, but a far more insidious and powerful effect that was probably produced by some form of directed energy in the microwave range, very, very low microwave range, very rapidly pulsed, which then created a disruption in the network activities of the brain.
And those disruptions in network function most likely led to some form of structural reorganization, which is evidenced by many of the long-term changes that we've seen in those individuals affected.
So this is, well, we can only speculate, and I know that's all we can do, but this seems to be a particularly dirty form of counter-espionage, doesn't it?
Well, depending on how you look at it, sir, it could be very clean, because what it allows is three factors that are instrumental to this form of what we call non-kinetic engagement.
First is that we really don't know what we're dealing with specifically.
There's no proverbial entrance wound.
There is no proverbial exit wound per se.
And what happens in between is very difficult to assess on the level of granularity that would be necessary to determine exactly what is doing this.
In other words, what we'd need to see is tissue and cellular pathology.
And the last time I checked as a neuroscientist, it's not very easy to take someone's brain out of their head, assess it, put it back in.
So these are the types of things that would be needed to be done post-mortem.
Are there some more sophisticated forms of evaluation that we could use?
Yes, there certainly are.
Are those things time consuming, resource consuming, expensive?
Absolutely.
Might that be part of the, quote, plan and intent to be able to then commit a huge amount of resources of time, effort, money, literally tools, personnel?
Well, let's face it, if what we have is, let's say, 100 individuals who've been verified to be actually affected over and above the initial odd two dozen that occurred in Havana, look at the amount of time, effort, resource, service, and financial commitment that is going to be needed to truly evaluate, verify the level of cellular changes that we're seeing.
That's tremendous.
So there's something, if you will, very both tactically and strategically effective about this.
Point number one.
So you cause a little disruption with tremendous rippling effects if, in fact, what you're looking to do is to have whoever you're affecting get to the quote root of the problem.
So it can be done in a way that's relatively clandestine, if not fully covert.
And in so doing, creates the second point, which is what is referred to as the fog of engagement.
To be able to cut through that fog demands commitment of tremendous resources, as we're seeing to date, sir, With regard to the dedicated efforts here in the United States and elsewhere to be able to better understand what's happening, why it's happening, and ways to mitigate or prevent it.
And the third is that this essentially exists below the threshold of what might be considered an act of war.
In other words, is something really happening there?
What is the extent that it's happening?
How can we quantify these effects?
What does that then mean for thresholds of engagement?
What would reciprocity mean as regards perhaps some type of counteractivity?
One can look very easily to cyber events, cyber hacking, cyber terrorism, and examine and note the difficulty we have with trying to posture a response.
And that can be problematic.
Now, of course, I think the other thing that becomes very important to understand is that it's also politically difficult to fingerpoint.
As I said, there are a number of different nations that have these types of technologies underway at various stages of what's known as technological readiness level.
So to fingerpoint, to make some form of accusation gets into a rather delicate imbalance of who's done what, have they really done it, and where's the proof?
Right.
So we're waiting for somebody to admit to it.
We're waiting for some renegade agent to come and say, yes, this is what we did, because trying to actually find this while it's being done, while the crime is being committed, is going to be very difficult.
My last question then, James, and thank you for doing this, is short of putting every operative that you have overseas inside a Faraday cage where nothing electromagnetic can get in or out, how are we going to protect people who work in the service of the United States or the UK or any nation?
That's an excellent question, sir.
I mean, the specific answer to that, obviously, is not something that I can disclose because it remains in the classified space, as you would imagine.
But I think the short answer, the open source answer, is commitment of time, energy, and resources to engage three things.
Number one, better understand the nature of the effect.
What's doing this?
What's happening?
What are the mechanisms for this?
Number two, get an idea of pattern.
And as a consequence, number three, develop better strategies for detecting these types of incidents.
And number two, mitigating or preventing them.
Now, to go into further detail, obviously it would be problematic based upon the classified nature of the information, the programs involved, but do take heart, because I can inform you and your listeners that such programs are currently underway.
And there's been considerable investment by the Biden administration to be able to develop these programs of record program offices and projects dedicated towards better understanding and preventing these types of events.
James, I'm grateful.
This is both chilling and fascinating in equal measure.
But thank you very much for giving me your time.
I have a feeling we may well speak again about this.
I look forward to it.
And thank you very much for your interest in our work.
The fascinating and chilling and worrying Havana syndrome.
Who is using this and what equipment do they have?
I think are the questions that we're still asking.
The effects are pretty clear.
Professor of Neurology, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, D.C., Dr. James Giordano, had the information about that.
And if there is any update on that, we'll bring it to you.
Huge space news story in this last couple of weeks.
Astronomers, according to Metro newspaper in the UK, have discovered a new class of planets that could one day support life, greatly accelerating the search for life outside our solar system.
In the search for life elsewhere, researchers have mostly looked for planets of a similar size, mass, temperature, and atmospheric composition to Earth.
But University of Cambridge astronomers believe there may be more promising possibilities out there.
They've identified a new class of habitable exoplanets called Hysean planets.
The man who knows all about this is the lead researcher.
His name is Niku Madhusudan, known to his friends as Madhu, reader in astrophysics and exoplanetary science at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
Here's what he said.
Madhu, thank you very much for doing this.
This is extremely exciting news, but it seems that a lot of the media, not all of the media, hasn't really understood quite what this means.
So can you talk to me about, first of all, what it is that you've discovered?
So in this study, we have identified a new class of habitable planets, that planets that can potentially host life, even though their internal structures and atmospheres are quite different from what we see here on Earth.
Where are these planets?
So these planets are all over the sky, but we have identified specifically 11 targets, and these are known exoplanets that are about tens of light years, between 30 and 150 light years away from Earth.
And what exactly, in terms that I'm not a scientist that I could understand, is it about them that would make them more likely to host life?
Yeah, so there are the characteristics of this new class of planets we are talking about are that they would be largely water worlds, which means their surfaces would be covered in oceans.
Their atmospheres are hydrogen rich, molecular hydrogen and not nitrogen or oxygen that we have on Earth.
But the conditions on the surface of these oceans, at least, it could be at depth as well, the conditions in the ocean are such that the temperature and pressure at the ocean are such that they could be conducive for microbial life, at least microbial life similar to what we see on Earth.
So for the highest temperatures that these objects can sustain, you know, can be up to 200 degrees in the atmosphere, but the surface of these oceans can still be conducive to life.
This is a very important discovery, isn't it?
Absolutely.
And some of the newspapers have run it this way.
They've put their own spin on it and they've said that it is a possibility that we may actually confirm this discovery.
In other words, we may find microbial life, which is the kind of thing we've been looking for on Mars.
And so far, we believe we haven't yet found.
But we could make this discovery and confirm all of this within two or three years.
Do you think that is over-optimistic or is that a possibility?
So it's possible, but that is contingent on the fact that the James Webb Space Telescope launches by the end of this year as we expect it to and functions properly within a year of its operation.
And if the James Webb Space Telescope is able to operate and is able to look in the right direction, what will we be looking for?
So we have identified several of these targets, but within the James Webb Telescope's first year of operation, several of at least a couple of these targets are already planned to be observed.
We'll be observing their atmospheres, atmospheric spectra, basically, from which we should be able to infer the composition of the atmospheres.
And if these planets do indeed host life and do give out some of the gases that we know microbial life in the Earth's oceans give out, then those molecules are detectable, actually, with the instruments that we are going to have on JWST.
Could we end up being very surprised and perhaps discovering something like, I mean, it happened here on the Earth, we evolved this way, primitive fish.
You know, complex life is anyone's guess right now.
It's very, I mean, it's too early to say what kind of life form can emerge in these sorts of environments.
But, you know, like I think we have to be conservative here and we should expect the minimum, which is, you know, microbial life or life similar to what started on Earth.
And just hope for some of these biomarker gases that we know on Earth.
These are secondary biomarkers, not like ozone and oxygen and nitrous oxide.
I mean, nitrous oxide is okay, but not methane.
So these are gases not produced in major quantities.
We are talking about a part in a million sort of level.
But if these planets do indeed host life in their oceans and the gases are released at a level of a part per million, then we have shown in our paper that JWST should be able to detect them with modest amount of observing time.
Why do you think these are easier to, these planets are easier to characterize than so-called Earth-like planets, exoplanets?
Yeah, that's because the characteristics of these planets are such that you could have Haitian worlds up to more around two and a half times the Earth size, and their temperatures can also be hotter than Earth's atmosphere.
Those factors means that you have larger planets, slightly thicker atmospheres.
All those factors together mean that the atmospheres are easier to observe with our telescopes than it would be for an Earth-like planet.
Secondly, these planets, because of their sizes and temperatures, are also numerous, much more abundant, and we know them, the demographics, much more abundant than Earth-like planets.
So you get two advantages.
One, you can find these planets more easily, and then you can observe their atmospheres more easily.
And that means that you are basically both expanding and accelerating the search for life elsewhere.
So this was a discovery waiting to be made.
Absolutely.
Do you think then, bearing this important discovery in mind, that we're wrong to throw so many resources at Mars?
Do you think we should be looking elsewhere now?
You know, like the search for life is such an important question.
And, you know, we literally, we have been looking for many years, many decades, and we haven't found any.
So I think we ought to have a multi-pronged approach in our search for life, given the importance and impact of the pursuit.
We should be looking everywhere we can, to be honest.
So looking for life in the solar system is very, very important because that is the closest we can look.
But also looking far out is important for various reasons, you know, not to understand the propensity or the frequency of life elsewhere outside the solar system.
So these are complementary questions, not either or.
So we should be doing all of those things.
What sort of response from within the scientific community and maybe outside, but mainly the other scientists who you know, have you got to this news this week?
So, you know, there are various kinds of responses.
People who understand this particular aspect are open-minded.
We have, I mean, one thing everyone agrees is that we definitely have to look.
You know, because if we look for life on these things, the reason for that is otherwise, traditionally, we have been focusing on literally Earth-like planets.
We want to find an Earth 2.0 and atmospheric biomarkers in an Earth 2.0.
And that's not going to happen anytime soon.
If you want to find a biosignature in an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star, we are talking about a decade or more.
So people have been pursuing alternate options.
The best bet we have for Earth-sized planets is to look at them around low-mass stars, M dwarves, very small stars.
And that is at the edge of possibility even with JWST.
So even that we are talking about over JWST's lifetime, five to six, seven years.
But these sorts of planets that we're talking about, because of their specific properties, they make it much more accessible for atmospheric observation.
So it's low-hanging fruit for us, and it'll be not prudent to not explore this opportunity.
So, in that sense, from an exploratory point of view, I think, I mean, from what I have heard, people are on board that we definitely have to look.
The questions, there are many open questions, as you asked just now, is what kind of life might be possible, you know, complexity of life and so on.
That, you know, it's an open question and I don't think there would be any agreement on that anytime soon.
Okay.
So if we find simple life, I mean, that's a very big deal.
I mean, that is an absolute game changer and that will make headlines worldwide.
But I guess also those who are looking for more complex forms of life, something that we can identify with more readily, maybe even ultimately something that's a little bit like us, if such a thing might exist somewhere, you know, that should give heart to everybody who is looking for that kind of life, because that, do you think, means that eventually we will find more complex forms of life?
Absolutely.
We don't have any rock-solid evidence yet, but it's not surprising, it won't be surprising if we do find intelligent life, because the universe is very, very vast, as we all know.
If we find microbial life, that will be a paradigm shift in our approach to finding life in the universe and to the general psyche and the big question of how common, you know, are we alone, basically.
And yeah, I agree.
It will be a paradigm shift and that will give a lot of impetus to future searches of finding more complex life that we would be identifying with.
Madhu, thank you so much for speaking with me over a bank holiday weekend.
It was very good of you.
And also, congratulations on your excellent research.
I wish you well with it.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks for having me here.
It was nice talking to you.
There was Dr. Niku Madhusudan talking about that new class of exoplanets that appear to have got astronomers all over the world really excited.
And now for the rest of this edition of The Unexplained, my recent conversation with Dan Baldwin about the art of dowsing.
I think he's the first dowser that I've talked at any length with.
And you'll hear in this conversation details of how he uses dowsing to find and locate missing persons, potentially solve murder investigations, and even trivial things that can be used for, like if you want to locate something that you've lost, maybe you've lost a phone or something like that, then you can do this.
So here is the conversation with Dan Baldwin.
If you've watched the television over the years, as I have, and you've seen people using rods, and the rods intersect or interconnect at one point, and they say, I have found water, they call that dousing.
But that is not all dowsing is, by any manner or means.
We're about to go on a journey and explore what this is with Dan Baldwin in the U.S. He's going to tell us all about it.
Dan, thank you very much for being so patient while I tried to explain that.
How are you?
I'm doing fine.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So, Dan, before we tell your story, I wonder if we can just get into it all this way.
In my life, I've watched a lot of television, probably way too much, but as a kid, periodically, a guy with a beard would probably appear standing in a field somewhere with two rods, like 12-inch rules, rulers, and he would hold these things out with his thumbs.
And at the point where those things intersected, swung together, the person would usually say, and I found water now.
It's directly underneath.
And nine times out of ten, when the TV investigators looked underneath where he was, they would find a source of water.
And they called that dousing.
And up until very recently, I thought that was all that dowsing was.
But I'm wrong, aren't I?
Not really wrong.
But the only difference is what I do is exactly the same thing.
I just use a different tool.
I use a weight on a string.
It's exactly the same process, just a different tool.
Okay, so it's called a pendulum.
Right.
So the way that you do it, and I've seen videos of people doing these things, is that you have a pendulum.
It almost looks like a sort of neck chain type thing with a weight.
A weight on it.
Almost like a necklace or think of a plumb bob if you're into architecture.
Okay.
And could you, if you had an architectural plumb line like that, could you use that for dousing?
Exactly.
I'll oversimplify, but basically you hold the pendulum and you ask a question and the pendulum will swing to the right generally and that will be a yes answer.
If it swings to the left, that will be a no answer.
And if it swings back and forth, you need to rephrase the question.
You can only ask yes or no questions in pendulum dowsing.
I have some skeptical listeners.
They would say, isn't that coincidence?
Sometimes it is, but if you do it enough, and I've been doing this for 20 years, you will be astounded at the type of information and the value of the information that you get over time.
And whether or not this works, Dan, and we were getting deep into it much earlier than I anticipated, but that's good.
Whether or not this works, does that depend on you and something about you, or does it depend on whatever forces you think are producing the effect?
Well, let me explain briefly the way I think it works.
One, when you hold the pendulum in your hand, your conscious mind focuses on that weight.
It's a lot like in hypnotism where they hold the watch in front of the patient's face, you know, watch the watch, watch the watch.
And while your conscious mind is focused on that physical object, your subconscious mind is freed up and your subconscious mind makes contact with a higher power.
Now, I leave that up to your audience.
You define that higher power however you've been brought up, whatever your culture is, whatever your religion is or isn't, but there is a higher power and your subconscious connects with that higher power.
The higher power provides the answer, downloads it to the subconscious.
The subconscious mind then controls your fingers and your finger muscles actually do the moving of the pendulum.
Right.
So you're actually working it.
You're an operator.
Put it this way.
You're part of a team.
Right.
Yeah.
So you're working it, but something's working you.
Exactly.
And I'll be the first to admit, any psychic who tells you they're right 100% of the time is either lying or deluded.
I mean, a psychic working a pendulum or any other mechanism is going to have good days and bad days.
And the operator's condition has a tremendous effect on it.
For example, if you have a bad head cold, you're going to have a bad day at the microphone.
You're going to have a bad day driving a taxi.
You're going to have a bad day working the pendulum.
Okay.
Well, I mean, that makes it a very human thing.
And I can understand that completely.
But what about those who might say that there is a randomness about this?
You say that people who have a psychic ability can do this.
And they would say, well, what is psychic ability?
And prove it to me.
I think that's where I'm coming to it from.
Well, I would say I've got two things to say.
One, I'm not a missionary.
I'm not out trying to convince anybody of anything.
Two, everybody has a psychic ability.
And if you're skeptical and you're serious about being a skeptic, then go ahead and try it.
Give it six months.
Pick out a psychic avenue and try it for yourself.
You will probably surprise yourself because it's an ability we all have.
How did this start for you?
It came out of left field.
It wasn't something I sought.
In one of my books, I described myself as a psychic on training wheels.
I came to it late in light.
I didn't get started until I was 50.
I was out by myself walking one day, and I had a clear, I'm not a clear audience.
I don't hear voices, but that day, that night, I heard a voice that told me to go find missing children.
I mean, it was definite and definable.
You could not ignore it.
Although I did try to ignore it for about three months.
And finally, I gave up and I said, you know, there's something here.
Something is calling me to go find missing children.
And at that point, I realized, you know, I'm not a detective.
I'm not a cop.
I don't have any training in finding missing persons.
And it just, it hit me that I'd always heard there's psychic ability in my family.
So I said, well, I will try that.
Let me see if this psychic stuff works.
I started hanging around, you know, psychic bookshops, meeting psychics.
And eventually somebody showed me the pendulum and I said, that's for me.
That's what works for me.
And I started from there.
I'm pretty much self-taught.
So how did you start actually practicing it?
You know, you've got to learn it first.
Then you have to make a decision.
Well, I'm going to make some use of this.
I'm going to do something useful with this.
How did that part start?
Well, it passed really fast.
One of the good things about pendulums and the people who want to try it, it's something that is extremely easy to pick up.
I mean, the learning curve is extremely short.
If you can hold a rock on a string and if you can concentrate, you can do pendulum dowsing.
Okay.
And the rest depends on you, whether the fluence is moving through you.
Yeah.
And in my case, you can pick it up in an hour.
The basic technique.
Now, obviously, you need, like any other technique, you need to practice and get better and better and better, but you can pick it up almost instantly.
And in my case, I started talking again to more psychics and some of the psychics, and I began working cases and it just kind of built from there.
Right.
I want to talk about your work with missing persons and your work with crime in the next segment.
I'm just interested in the nuts and bolts of this.
Yeah, and the nuts and bolts.
It's like I said, it's extremely easy to pick up.
It's extremely easy to do.
The equipment is if you want to purchase a pendulum, you can do it from probably $5, $10, $15 U.S. or you can go out, cut off a shoestring, pick up a rock in your yard and have one for free.
You don't need to spend a lot of money on it.
Do you think that anybody can do this?
Anybody can do that.
If you are somebody who is skeptical about it, but you still decided to try it, does that mean it wouldn't work for you?
No, if you have a sincere desire, it should work fine for you.
The trick is clearing your mind.
It's real easy to force the pendulum to swing one way or the other.
It's real easy to do that.
So if you want to be serious about it and you want to get accurate answers, you have to clear your mind and allow the subconscious to do the moving rather than the conscious mind.
That's the only difficult part.
And you can master that pretty easily.
Is the pendulum affected by the Earth?
I say that for a reason.
You know, that in the northern hemisphere, if you fill up a bowl full of water, turn on the taps, the faucets as you call them, put the plug in, fill it up, and then let it go.
The water goes around in one direction in the northern hemisphere.
I think it's clockwise in the northern hemisphere, but in the southern hemisphere, it's anticlockwise.
And that's the effect, the gravitational effect, northern and southern hemisphere.
It's something that it always amuses me when I go down to the southern hemisphere.
It's the other way around.
So what I'm asking in a very roundabout way here is, do you think that natural forces, along with your psychic ability, affect the motion of the pendulum?
Not really.
It really shouldn't at all.
Not at all.
No, it shouldn't.
And when you were learning, when you decided, okay, I'm going to use what psychic ability I think I have.
It's gone in the family.
So maybe I've got it too.
How did you train yourself?
What sorts of exercises did you do to make it work for you, to really hone it?
Well, really, you don't need to do any exercises.
You just need to practice the technique.
It's so simple that you can do it over and over and over and over again.
One thing that I do, part of my process that helps is I meditate before I do a major reading.
So if you want to improve your psychic ability in any field whatsoever, or if you just want to improve your life in general, meditation is a good exercise.
Something I highly recommend.
So you started doing this when you were 50.
What did you do with your life up to that point?
Up to that point?
Well, I'm a writer.
I'm a ghostwriter.
I write books with someone else's name on it.
I also write novels, Westerns, thrillers, mainstream fiction.
And in the last couple of years, I've started writing a lot of paranormal works, nonfiction.
So, yeah, the psychic thing just came out of the blue.
It was something I wasn't expecting.
It was something I wasn't wanting to do, but it was something I couldn't deny.
And you say that the decision to do it was not yours, really.
Somebody up there, if you want to think of it that way, communicated with you and said, Dan, this is your future.
That's exactly what happened.
I could have said no, but again, the feeling was, to me, it was so overwhelming.
It was something I couldn't deny.
I couldn't escape it.
So obviously, for whatever reason, this is something that I am supposed to be doing.
Now, when you were learning how to do this, presumably there were exercises that you put yourself through.
Did they include things like, oh, I lost a $10 bill a month ago?
Where is the $10 bill?
Is it in the porch?
Is the $10 bill at the post office where I went the day that I lost it?
Is the $10 bill in my garage?
Is that how you start?
Seriously, you've hit on something there.
That's a good way for somebody just starting out.
You might get your spouse or a friend to hide something.
Like you said, get your wife or your husband to hide the $10 bill someplace in the house.
Hide your car keys or whatever, and then experiment practicing with pendulum dowsing.
Something else you can do, which will help with the validation, pick a crime story out of your local newspaper and work it as if you were assigned to the case and keep notes on it and then follow the case and see how right you were in your dowsing.
So literally, you say that people can do this and presumably you've known people who have.
You did it yourself.
You can follow a crime case from the beginning.
Maybe somebody goes missing or some money goes missing or something like that.
You say that as an exercise, you can follow it through the papers and see if you are right.
Yeah, work the case as if you were assigned to it.
Keep your notes and then follow the case and keep working the pendulum as far as the case goes along and just see how it works out.
The more you do it, it's like anything else.
The more you do it, the more accustomed you will be to pendulum movement, the more accustomed you'll be to following your instinct and the better you will get.
What happens, Dan, if you're learning how to do this and you do what you've just suggested as an exercise and you uncover the name of the perpetrator or you uncover the location of the perpetrator, you believe that you may be right and the police haven't cottoned onto that.
If you're a learner, what do you do?
Well, that happened to me exactly.
I was working a case out of a newspaper and I worked an awful lot on it.
I'd been following it for quite some time and I got a lot of significant information that I thought was legitimate, including the name of it was a kidnapped murder case of a child.
And I got what I considered the name of the killer.
I got the location and I got actually the part of town where the guy lived.
He lived out of state.
And on my own, I started tracking down as much as I could.
And my information was validated through telephone calls.
There really was a person by that name in that specific town, which I had never heard of before.
So I went down to the policeman and said, this may sound crazy, but I would like to talk to the detective in charge of this case.
The guy led me into his office.
He recorded the session.
He accepted my information.
He was very friendly, very open, listened to everything I had to say and thanked me for it when I came, you know, when the session was over.
And then after the recorder was turned off and he was escorting me out and he said, you know, by the way, my biggest case last year was solved by a psychic.
So what did that make you think?
I mean, we've all read and we've seen popular dramas and stuff like that on TV.
And my father was a cop and I know this personally.
You know, we know from dramas or personal experience, if we're lucky enough, that police do use psychics.
They don't talk about it very much.
How did that make you feel?
I felt really good about it, especially because of the way I was received so politely and professionally.
And later on, there was a professional psychic, very well known at that time, working that case with the police department.
And this psychic came to me and said, by the way, the police wanted me to tell you that you have connected some major dots.
I never found out what those dots were that I had connected, but that made me feel great.
Isn't it faintly scary?
No, not a bit.
Okay.
Well, I want to pick that up.
Talk about your crime work.
Dan Baldwin in the U.S. is with us this hour.
Here on the Unexplained to Talk radio, we're talking about dowsing and how there is much more to it than men with twigs locating water sources.
We're talking about dowsing here.
It's fascinating yet controversial, as you're about to hear.
So, Dan, you gave us a little thumbnail sketch of how you started to get involved with the police, helping them with their inquiries, as they say.
Was that something that once you'd done it, they came to you, or did you have to keep going to them?
Generally, they would come to me.
And when I say me, I'm representing an awful lot of psychics, but generally they come to us.
I don't seek out cases.
I would like to say one thing real quickly, talking about working with the policemen and skeptics.
A lot of times you hear that policemen are skeptics, and that's something of a misnomer.
I was giving an address to a local civic club one time, and a policeman came up and approached me.
He said, Dan, I really appreciated your presentation.
I enjoyed it, but I just don't believe in this psychic stuff.
So I asked him, I said, do you believe in cop intuition?
He said, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I said, well, that's your psychic ability at Work.
And then, you know, the light bulb sort of went off above his head.
He said, oh, okay, I get it.
I think those things do exist.
And because my dad was a cop, he had a sixth sense.
He could always tell if somebody was driving a car that they shouldn't have been driving.
There was one occasion with me when my dad was teaching me to drive, and he was a great driving instructor.
He was better than any driving school dad.
And a guy came up to me at a junction, and he was angry with me over something that he thought I hadn't, that I'd done.
So this guy is shaking his fist at me, and he's pointing at me, and he says, get out of the car.
And in the end, I do get out of the car.
And my dad, who's sitting in the passenger seat, gets out of the car, too.
This guy doesn't know that my father was, he was only just retired then, retired policeman.
This guy starts shouting at me and I'm saying, but I didn't do that thing.
That is not what I did.
Somebody else must have done that thing and you thought it was me, which is the truth.
And my father just looked at him and said, you've been drinking.
And I said to my dad afterwards, because the guy immediately backed down once my father had identified the fact that actually he'd had a few drinks and that was making him angry and wrong.
But I said to my dad afterwards, how did you know that that guy was drinking?
Because I was nearer to him.
I couldn't smell booze.
I didn't know anything like that.
I didn't think, I just thought he was an angry man.
Dad said, it's my intuition.
So we know that those things exist.
Exactly.
In fact, cops, again, it depends on who you talk to.
The chiefs in charge can't say that they work with psychics for obvious reasons, political reasons.
The cop on the street is much, much, much more open to working with psychic detectives.
I was with a couple of deputy sheriffs up working a case out in the desert.
We were looking for a young man who had been murdered.
And I was walking, I was doing the search and rescue team with the detectives.
And we were walking through the desert.
And both the detectives said, you know, you know, Dan, we do not believe in this psychic business whatsoever, but your information is so accurate and you have information that only we have that we're giving up our Saturday to come out here and do this search with you.
That's really gratifying.
When you try and locate somebody, Dan, how do you do that?
Do you put the pendulum over a map?
How does that work?
There are different ways to do it.
The map dowsing is very effective.
You can look at a map, like, for example, I will take a major map like an Atlas.
Say the guy is missing in Arizona and get a state map and just say, you know, is the guy north of this point, south of this point, east of this point, west of that point?
And basically, you create a box on the map.
Eventually, you'll get down to a small area.
You'll get out a topological map.
And as you shrink the area that you were searching, you can say, is the missing person north of this road?
Is he south of this mountain?
Is he east of this creek?
Is he west of this rock feature?
And you can actually pinpoint the location of the missing person or whatever you're looking for.
If you're looking for a missing person, you can actually work it so that you get actually, you can work it down to street addresses.
Have you been able to do that?
Yes, yes.
We did a case, myself and several other psychics worked a case of a missing lad, a young man, I think he was 12 years old, in central Colorado.
And it was one of those cases where everybody knew who did the murder.
It was his father, but they had no evidence.
So we got a bunch of psychics involved and we did our thing.
And I did my map dowsing thing that I had just described.
And fortunately, I was able to go on the search and recovery team.
And I had located two places on the side of a particular mountain.
Again, this is north of Durango, Colorado.
And we searched the places for a couple of weeks.
And eventually the police told me that they had found some human remains at one of the locations.
And the human remains turned out to be the remains of the young lad.
And what they told me was that one, I had doused the site where the body had been dumped.
The other site I located, they said, we believe this is where the murder actually occurred.
And so out of the entire state of Colorado, me and several other people were able to douse the location down to the size of probably a football field.
So the police had a rough idea what they were dealing with.
Without a body, you can't charge him.
So what actually happened in that case then?
Police brought a case and what happened?
Yeah, one of the things you'll find working police cases with psychic, psychic information is not admissible in court.
So they can't do anything with your information legally.
The value of the psyche is you can talk to the police and give the police information that they can use to go out on their own and get legally, legally get information that is acceptable in court.
You can point them in the right direction, in other words.
What is it that you believe is directing you in those cases?
Now, in the case of the missing young man, 12-year-old, a real tragedy, a murder case, is it the spirit?
Is it the vibrations of the crime?
What do you think it is that is guiding you to locations?
There are two things, and one of them I think we'll be getting into in detail in your next segment.
But one thing is the higher power.
The higher power is helping you work the pendulum and do what you do with the pendulum.
Sometimes you will involve spirits in that work also.
Sometimes spirits will come along to help.
Sometimes the spirits will come along to hinder.
Generally, though, you're working with the higher power.
How come this isn't used more often?
I think it's used more often than people realize.
It's just something people don't want to talk about.
Again, because a lot of your skeptics, they will ridicule the police, and nobody wants to be ridiculed.
But I think it's used a lot more than people realize because personally, I've never encountered a case where the police weren't willing to accept the information from a psychic.
They may be skeptical, but they were willingly accepted the information.
In every country on the planet, including my country and your country, many, many people go missing without trace every year.
One of the things that you do is locate missing persons.
How do you do that?
Again, you tap into that higher power and you just, in my case, with the pendulum dowsing, I just start asking questions.
Let me touch on something really important here.
It's key when you're doing pendulum dowsing to ask the questions and to know exactly what your questions mean when you ask them.
And let me give you an interesting, for instance.
When I first started out, I was working cases.
And the first question you obviously ask on a missing person is, you know, is this person alive?
And I would get a yes answer.
Then I would proceed and do my research.
And then later on, we would find out that the missing person was dead.
And this happened over and over and over and over again.
I would get a yes answer that the person is alive.
And then the person would have been killed instantly from the moment of the kidnapping within a short time thereafter.
And I couldn't figure out why was I getting all these wrong answers.
And then bingo, it hit me.
I wasn't getting wrong answers.
I believe in life after death.
So when the body dies, the person continues.
The spirit lives on.
So I was getting the correct answer.
Yes, the person is alive.
The person was alive.
It's just the body was dead.
So my answer, I was asking the right question, but I was interpreting it the wrong way.
So since then, I've been asking the question, is this missing person physically alive?
And that makes all the difference in the world.
So if, and some of my listeners will believe this and some of my listeners won't believe this, but if you are negotiating with a higher intelligence on these things, then presumably that intelligence doesn't have the latitude that we humans have.
It doesn't have a sense of humor.
It doesn't have the ability to fill in the blanks.
Your questions have to be very, very 100% specific.
Exactly.
And again, you've got to know what the question means when you ask it.
Can you think of a case where you've reunited, for example, I don't know, a son or a daughter?
We know that kids run off from home every year.
Sometimes, you know, they are never seen again.
Sometimes they build new lives for themselves.
Sometimes they are located.
Can you think of a case like that where you've reunited a family?
Yeah, several cases.
One of the problems with psychic detecting is we get called in at the last minute.
So by the time we get called in, usually it's a cold case and usually long after, say, the kidnapping of the person has gone missing, which means most cases, the person is already deceased by the time that we're called in.
So we're working cold cases.
But there have been some very nice, very rewarding cases where we have brought families back together.
One case, there were, there was a bunch, I was working a case of a missing girl.
For some reason, we were contacted by the authorities, but the case was 18 years old.
The girl had been kidnapped, had disappeared when she was a little girl, probably 10 or 12 years old.
Very, very young.
And she would, you know, for 18 years had been presumed dead.
About half the psyches came up with the fact that she was really physically alive.
So we explored that.
And through our efforts, after 18 years, the police were able to go there and actually rescue the young girl and bring her back and reunite her with her family after 18 years.
That's a fabulous story.
Did that make the papers?
That was a pretty big story here in the States.
Did you get media coverage for that?
We didn't know.
Yeah, if you go into psychic detecting work to get your name in the papers, chances are you're going to be disappointed.
But you don't do it.
If you're doing it for the right reason, you don't care anyway.
You talk to me about kidnaps.
What about people who leave home or run away or disappear, vacate their jobs, whatever they do?
Maybe they don't want to be found.
What do you do in those cases?
Yeah, that's interesting, too.
I had a case in cases like that, you just have to treat it one case at a time and decide what is the best step at the moment.
I was working a missing child case over in Texas.
And again, I was shrinking down the box, trying to locate the person, you know, East Texas, West Texas, yes or no.
This town, that town, yes or no.
This part of town, that part of town, yes or no.
And I was actually shrinking the box and I was moving toward getting what I hoped would be a street address when I have really an overwhelming feeling that I should not be working this case.
And that, I mean, it was real heavy.
You know, you're not doing the right thing.
So I doused myself and determined that it was not in the best interest to find this child.
So I stopped working the case and I filed my report that it is my personal belief that I should not be working this case because it's not in the best interest of the child.
It turned out a couple of years later that the people looking for the child were, I believe they were stepparents.
And their only interest in getting the child was she was due a lot of insurance money, a huge reward.
They cared nothing about the child, but they wanted to get her and they wanted to get so they could get to the money.
Isn't that interesting?
Yeah, so that was the case where I bailed out on it.
Why don't you get involved in cases that are celebrated, well-known cases like, for example, the Jimmy Hoffer case, the famous Teamsters union leader who disappeared, believed to have been murdered.
Certainly, I think with this amount of time, that's the assumption that the world makes.
And there have been various assumptions made about where his remains are buried, including underneath a major sporting stadium, football stadium in the United States, but nobody really knows.
Have you ever tried a famous case like Jimmy Hoffa?
No, this is not ego speaking, but I don't work a case unless somebody comes and asks me to work the case.
I might work a famous case like that just to hone my skills, but generally I don't work cases unless I'm asked.
If you were to be brought in to do that, to tie up some loose ends, would you do it?
Oh, certainly.
Certainly.
If I was requested to do that.
And what about other famous cases where your abilities could really help?
Like, for example, for years now, experts and searchers and teams of various kinds have been absolutely baffled as to what happened to Flight MH370.
You know, people have their theories about what happened to it, what that plane might have been carrying, what happened to the people on board, what the pilot and co-pilot were up to.
Nobody really knows, though.
I would have thought that somebody with the skills that you say you have would be massively useful to tracking down the wreckage of that plane, if indeed it did crash.
That's possible.
But again, in my situation, I wouldn't work that unless I was brought in.
And sometimes there are extenuating circumstances where you probably don't want to bring in a psychic because maybe you don't want the case solved.
In terms of crimes that you've looked into, which case of all the cases, and you can tell me how many cases there have been, which case are you most proud of?
Really, I can't say that I'm proud of any one particular case more than the other.
I'm particularly happy with finding the little who've been missing for 18 years because that was a case that probably should have had a horrible outcome and we were able to reunite a family.
That's probably the most rewarding, but they're all rewarding to me at some level.
And on a personal level, using this ability, presumably you can use this for yourself.
Have you been able to, I don't know, locate something or solve something in your own life?
Well, you know, I lost my car keys.
Where are my car keys?
That sort of thing.
And I also, sometimes when I'm out in the desert, I will, you know, do practice sessions.
You know, show me, is there, for example, in Arizona, we have a lot of Indian ruins.
So I will go to a particular desert that I've never been before and I will practice.
You know, are there Indian ruins in this area?
I get a yes or no.
Should I go north, south, east or west?
I get a yes or no.
Should I go 50 paces this way or whatever?
And I will actually practice dowsing out in the desert.
And many times I've come across, you know, ruins of Native American art, Native American ruins or other interesting artifacts from the cowboy days.
It's a good way to practice.
If you were to go to Roswell, New Mexico and take your dowsing gear with you and do it with good intent, if you were to go to the location of the supposed UFO crash, would you be able to douse out whether or not that happened and what happened to the wreckage and possibly the bodies within?
Okay, you are reading my mind, my friend.
This year, I am starting to work on a book combining my dowsing abilities with researching the UFO phenomenon.
And I've been to Roswell, and that's going to be one of the cases we will probably work.
But yeah, I will be doing a pendulum book on the UFO phenomenon this year.
And you're standing there in the field where the supposed crash happened, the debris field.
And they say that the army was brought in to clear it all up, and that's why nobody knows very much about this now.
What would be the first question you would ask?
Yeah, one thing let me point out.
You don't have to go to the location to do pendulum dowsing.
I could be just as effective sitting at my desk pendulum dowsing Roswell as I could in Roswell.
So, you know, I just wanted to point that out to anyone who thinks they want to start working pendulum dowsing on criminal cases.
You don't have to be there.
You don't have to be on site to actually do a good job.
It does help if you can be there, but you don't have to be.
If I was at Roswell, the first thing I would ask would be, was this a real incident?
Did this really happen?
Then I would ask, yeah, is this, did the event involve alien technology, for example?
And then just pursue that line of questioning.
And do you think that if there was anything to be found?
I mean, there are some people who say there are some people who've looked, that there may be little bits of metal and stuff like that that the searchers in 1947 missed.
Do you think that you would be able to locate that sort of thing?
That is an excellent idea.
I think if I can get out there, I will try that and let you know what happened.
But yeah, your answer is basically yes.
You should be able to.
Just quickly, I wanted to ask, and this is trivial, okay, but boy, it's bugged me.
This has been my year of things going wrong, losing things and just not being completely with it in some ways.
Earlier this year, I went out cycling and I lost my car keys and on that key ring were my apartment keys and my garage keys and the key to the lock on my, everything all went.
I retraced my steps.
I calmed my mind.
I tried to see in my mind's eye where I'd been.
I couldn't find those keys.
Only two weeks ago, a similar thing happened.
Now these things don't happen to me, but this year they have.
I lost my phone.
You know what a disaster these days.
If you lose your phone, then that's your world.
That's your life there.
And, you know, the thing is security protected.
But I've been back over my route on that day and I went cycling to the shops.
I've been back and back.
I've asked at every shop.
I've retraced my steps over and over again.
It's as if the aliens had snatched my phone and taken it away.
In the case of my keys, which I lost three months ago and, you know, they show no sign of turning up, so I've had to have new ones made, and my phone a couple of weeks ago, would dowsing help me find those things?
You should have no trouble.
Again, it's going to depend on a lot of factors, but yeah, you should be able to dowse the location of your keys, your phone, the lost Dutchman mine, you know, the missing king's jewels, whatever.
So if I was to ask, if I was to give it the name of a store that I visited that day, and I think I might have, you know, dropped the phone outside the store, could I ask a question like, you know, did my phone go outside Marks and Spencer's?
Exactly.
That's exactly what you would ask.
Okay.
I think that's, you know, I mean, that's an everyday use of all of this stuff.
Yeah, and then you would ask, you know, did someone pick it up?
Has it been found?
Was it turned into the store?
That sort of thing.
As a rookie, if I was trying that as a rookie, what would you estimate my chances of success?
At least 50-50 as a rookie.
Okay, well, I might give it a go and report back to my listener here.
For regulatory reasons, I just have to say to my listener that, of course, we offer you these conversations in the United Kingdom for entertainment purposes, and we do not advocate any of the things that you hear here.
They are offered to you for interest.
That's something that we say here on radio in the United Kingdom, Dan.
Okay, spirit communication.
I've never heard of anybody who says that they do dowsing say that they could communicate with spirits.
How do you think you do that?
With spirits, I think you make that again.
I think it's two ways of working with it.
One, you obviously connect with the higher power, but with the dowsing or pendulum dowsing, you make direct contact with the actual spirit.
And this is just my theory, but I believe pendulum dowsing is so effective because since you're dealing with the spirit world and the higher power, essentially, I'm oversimplifying, but you're dealing spirit to spirit and that comes down to you.
So I think it's a much more effective way of communicating.
Are you familiar with EVPs?
I am.
Electronic voice phenomena, where people go with a recorder into a place that is claimed to be haunted or possessed by spirits, whatever.
They ask questions and then they play back the recording and lo and behold, in some cases, there are voices answering the questions.
Yeah, your talk about finding your missing key or your missing phone made me think about something.
I was doing a case with a friend of mine up in East Texas in Arkansas, way out in the forest in a small family cemetery.
And my friend had brought me there, and he was a dowser, a new dowser, and we wanted to research something in his family history.
So I sat down, I turned on my recorder, and was about to begin my process.
My friend walks up and he says, I lost my pendulum.
I said, you lost your pendulum?
He said, yeah.
So we stopped the session.
I was recording.
We looked around for his pendulum, could not find it.
So we sat down and we did the session.
When I came back to my office and played back the recording, I heard my friend walked up.
He says, I lost my pendulum.
A third male voice comes in and says, it's by the truck.
Then I say, you lost your pendulum.
And the voice again comes back.
It's by the truck.
And was it clear?
You know, sometimes EVPs are like mumbles like that.
And we were out in the forest.
There was nobody for miles around, you know, and the digital recorder, so we weren't picking up radio.
So, you know, the spirit was trying to help us find a missing object.
We were too dumb to listen.
And who or what do you think gave you that information?
I think we were trying to contact a man's grandfather.
I think that's who it was.
Wow.
But it's clear as a bell.
It's not one of those very faint maybe is, maybe isn't.
It was as clear as, well, as you and I talking right now.
There are many people who say that they can contact the spirits, the remains of those who've departed.
As a dowser, how do you do that?
Again, I go to a location.
Again, you don't have to go to a location, but I like to because it makes it more real for me.
And I try to get kind of acclimated to whatever the location is, sit down, get used to it.
And basically, I bring out the pendulum and I ask, you know, is there a spirit here?
I ask for somebody to show up.
I generally don't ask for a specific person, but I ask for someone to show up.
And I will ask and let the pendulum swing.
And, you know, 100% of the time, somebody will show up.
And then you interview the person like you and I are interviewing each other now, only you're careful to ask yes or no questions.
And you said 100% of the time.
Yeah, I've never had a situation where no one has shown up.
You then go through a series of questions then, presumably, to identify what it is you're dealing with.
Yeah, for example, say if you're at a ghost town, you know, am I talking to a spirit who was here in the 1880s?
Yes or no?
Am I talking to a male?
Yes or no.
Am I talking to a cowboy?
Yes or no?
Am I talking to a Native American?
Yes or no?
Well, did you die naturally?
Yes or no.
Did you die in a gunfight?
Yes or no?
And if you're patient and you're willing to ask the questions for a long period of time, you can get an astounding amount of information.
Can you give me an example?
Well, any number of examples where I've gone to any number of locations from Native American sites to Western sites to sites all over the place out in the desert, in the mountains.
I was in an area called the Massacre Canyon over in New Mexico.
It was called Massacre Canyons because back in the 1880s, the Apaches loved to ambush the stagecoach there.
And I was hiking there, camping, and walking around, I came across an old grave.
I mean, a very old grave.
Well, I sat down, got out my pendulum, and asked if anyone was here.
I got a yes.
I said, is the spirit of the person who was buried here with me now?
Yes.
And again, through a series of questions, I discovered that the man had been ambushed.
He was part of a group traveling on the Butterfield Overland stage.
The Apaches had ambushed him.
He had been shot and he had fallen off the stage and was killed at that location.
The people went on back to town.
They later came back, found him, and buried him at that location.
That sounded pretty conclusive.
Yeah, it was definite.
No doubt about it.
In some cases, for example, if you're investigating a case, say, for example, in fairly modern times and you get a name, you can sometimes go back to newspapers or historical records and validate your information that way.
And have you been able to do that in, for example, that case?
Not in that case, because I couldn't really douse his name satisfactory to me.
And plus, he was in transit.
He was going from like someplace in Iowa to California.
Right.
So it would have been very hard to learn.
In other cases, we've been able to do that.
Have any of these spirits given you any indication about what happens when we die?
Where do we go?
Yeah, again, that's the focus of my latest book was What Happens When You Die, basically.
And it's in the form of interviews.
And this is what the spirits have told me.
It's not what I know.
It's what they have told me.
But at the moment you die, you know you're dead.
You enter the phenomenon of going to the white light.
You've heard about that, I'm sure.
Yeah, that is a very real phenomenon.
You step into the light and there is a sense of motion in the white light.
You're there by yourself, but they say you definitely sense motion.
It's very pleasant.
It's not frightening whatsoever.
You emerge on the white light into a very, very earth-like atmosphere.
It's very much like what you left.
And often there are friends and family and even pets there waiting to greet you when you arrive on the other side.
And when you arrive there, the feeling is overwhelmingly wonderful.
Does everybody go to a good place?
That's what they tell me so far.
And I've asked that question, you know, do you feel wonderful the moment you arrive?
And across the board, they say yes.
Do you think that goes for people who do bad things here?
Apparently so.
Again, the focus of the new book wasn't on good and evil, and I purposefully stayed away from religion.
That's going to be an entirely separate book if I ever do that.
But apparently so.
And what about coming back?
You know, some people think when you go, you go.
I mean, some people think there's oblivion after this.
Some people think you go to another place.
It may be better.
And some people believe actually you need to come back and do it again.
Have you had any indication as to whether stories of reincarnation are real?
Yeah, all of the above.
One of the things that really surprised me when I first started doing this work was the number of options that are available to you when you get over there.
You mentioned reincarnation.
We discovered that, yeah, reincarnation is a fact.
It definitely occurs.
What intrigued me was they tell me that reincarnation is not automatic, nor is it mandatory.
In other words, it's a choice the spirit makes to come back for whatever reason.
That's interesting because I always say, you know, if another life is going to be like the one that I'm having at the moment, I certainly don't want to come back.
But, you know, you get the choice.
Yeah, let me come back as a cat.
Yes.
I think that would be nice in the sunshine.
Yeah.
Another thing I discovered, and this has been through, I've discovered this through writing several books.
A lot of times spirit will come back basically as a vacation.
And I've used that term addressing spirits.
Do you come back as a vacation?
And I get a yes response.
In other words, they have a wonderful time that they remember, that they want to relive.
They can come back and relive that happy time.
That indicates that if there is such a thing as heaven or the other side, whatever you want to call it, there are some experiences that maybe you can't have over there.
Well, I think the experience that you want to relive happens over on this plane rather than over there.
So you decide to come back here and enjoy it.
A good example, we encountered a young man who had, he was a cowboy out here in Arizona back in the 1930s, and he got married to his sweetheart.
They had a big party back in 1939.
The owner of the ranch just turned over the ranch.
They brought out the guitars and the fiddles, and they had the dancing, and they were passing the jug around.
It was the happiest day in the man's life.
And World War II came along.
He joined the Marines, went over to the South Pacific, died on one of the islands.
And we encountered him back at that location.
And again, this is boiling down a lot of questioning, but he told us the happiest day of his life was his wedding day.
He comes back to enjoy that day, the happiest day of his life.
That's a lovely thought.
You know, I've got a list of maybe six or eight things that I probably want to experience again and quite a few things I wouldn't want to experience again.
It's nice to think that maybe you'll get the chance to do that.
But what about those who choose to come back as something or somebody else?
Again, that would fall into, I would think, fall into the area of reincarnation.
And that happens?
Yeah, I think they decide to come back probably because they want to, not so much maybe relive Earth life, but they want to get something right this time.
There is a life, you do undergo a life review on the other side.
You will meet with a, for lack of a better term, a committee or a panel who will go over your entire life.
It's not like a courtroom.
It's not an accusatory situation whatsoever.
But you sit down with a panel and they go through your life and discuss what you did right, what you did wrong, what you learned from it, that sort of thing.
And I think from that point, a lot of people decide, well, maybe I need to reincarnate and try that particular aspect of my being again.
Do you want to come back?
No.
Another option over there is continued spiritual growth.
I think there are the way I've asked it, are there classes for spiritual growth over there?
Classes is an inaccurate term, but there are opportunities for spiritual growth over there.
So when my time comes, I want to move on.
You know, I think I'm with you on that one, Dan.
Dan, thank you very much for talking with me.
So the next book is going to be about UFOs, right?
Yeah, I start.
In fact, we've already started research and I start doing pretty serious research in September.
It'll take us probably a year, but we're going to use the pendulum to investigate UFOs.
Let's talk again when you do that.
If people want to find out about you, what is your website?
Where's your place online?
Okay, it is www.4nightspress.
That's F-O-U-R-K-N-I-G-H-T-S-P-R-E-S-S dot com or www.danbaldwin.com.
So it's danbaldwin.com or 4nightspress.com.
Dan Baldwin, thank you very much for sharing that.
You've given me a lot of food for thought and I'm going to try and locate my phone now.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, my friend.
Dan Baldwin, check him out online.
Your thoughts on this show, always gratefully received.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
And thank you to the guests this time.
Nikul Madhus Sudan from Cambridge University, Dr. James Giordano from Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, D.C., and of course, the dowser Dan Baldwin.