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Jan. 1, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

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Edition 600 - 600th Anniversary Show

On this Edition Howard answers your questions about his life and career and his unexplained interviews and happenings...

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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 edition 600 of the Unexplained.
	600 editions.
	I can't believe that.
	That's such a lot of content.
	I tried to do a rough calculation just lying in bed last night as to how many hours of content that is.
	Probably it is something like 650 hours of original content.
	And we started, as you might know, if you've been with me on the journey in 2006.
	Here we are today in what is 2022.
	Happy New Year.
	I hope that it's good for you.
	As we go forward, nobody can predict what will happen in a new year.
	All we can do is hope for the best.
	And, you know, it doesn't have to try too hard to be better than 2021.
	Now, this edition is one that I've been building up to for a while.
	I really sat and thought and thought and thought about what I would do on this edition of The Unexplained.
	And, you know, I thought, shall I have one of our memorable guests back or shall I do something totally, completely beyond what I've done before?
	So, at your suggestion, I'm taking questions from you, and I've got some of them here, and I will answer them in the best way that I possibly can.
	Thank you for all of the questions here.
	We'll be getting through them in a moment.
	And one question that came in as an audio file from Sue.
	Thank you for making the effort, Sue.
	I'll be playing that too this hour.
	Okay, that's the story of this.
	You heard there the original theme tune that we were using in 2006 composed and performed, as both theme tunes have been, both versions, by a guy called Martin.
	And all I ever knew about Martin, a mysterious character, was that he emailed me and said, I can make you some original music for your show.
	Would you like it?
	I said, yes, please.
	I have no budget.
	He said, that's okay.
	Here's the tune.
	That's basically all I knew from Martin.
	I had a little bit of communication with him for about a year, and he disappeared.
	I've tried to contact him.
	If you know what happened to Martin, thank you, Martin, for giving me that theme.
	You know, you really created something that sets the tone and the scene for this show every single time that I do it.
	And it makes a big difference.
	And of course, being non-copyright material, it means that I can play it on a podcast without anybody leaping on me for infringement of copyright because it doesn't have one.
	It's mine, which is, you know, incredible to be able to do that.
	So, Martin, thank you very much.
	If you do get to hear this, you know, 16 years I've been doing the show now, very nearly, and I couldn't have done it, literally, without you.
	And with Adam, my webmaster, for all of these years, and before him for a short period, Graham.
	You know, the story of The Unexplained, it always makes me think of it at this time of year because on the 1st of January 2006, I'd been doing a show that I'd taken to a radio station called Talk Sport called The Unexplained.
	I devised it, created it, named it, and said, would you like to do this?
	So I took my show to them and it ran for 18 months or two years there.
	And on the 1st of January 2006, the radio station asked me to do the first ever daytime edition of the show, which was meant to be a sort of greatest hits of all the guests that we'd had since we started doing it.
	And I still, recently actually, still have a copy of that show that was done on the 6th of January 2006.
	I found a master tape quality recording of it, or a lot of it.
	And, you know, at some point I'll try and bring some of that to you.
	Maybe if I get time on the end of this, let's see how we go.
	So I did that show.
	It was unusual to do the unexplained in the daytime, but by that stage, it was getting an audience.
	And I was getting calls and emails and texts into the show, and it seemed to be going well.
	Five days later, I was phoned out of the blue by a man called Bill, who ran the radio station.
	Bill was a very good old-fashioned journalist and ran the radio station like that.
	And I appreciated that because those are the people who trained me, the old-fashioned Fleet Street journalists.
	He said, can you come into the office?
	Bill was not a man who would have difficult discussions on the phone.
	A lot of people these days in the radio industry, they'll send you a text or they'll, you know, maybe, if you're lucky, they'll give you a quick phone call on your mobile to say, we want to do something different.
	It's happened to a lot of my friends.
	Bill was old school.
	He said, can you come into the office in Hatfields in London to talk about the show?
	So it did.
	And Bill said, look, we're making a change.
	We're dropping your Saturday night show.
	And thank you very much.
	You've done well.
	You've done all of this yourself.
	We've never had to intervene, which they never did.
	And, you know, you'll be back.
	Ten years later, of course, I was.
	That's another story.
	And so I was quite relieved at the time, to be honest, because I was to make a living trying to do morning drive news, the big news on a London radio station, Smooth Radio.
	And also I had another little gig going, and I did the unexplained on Saturday nights.
	All of that took six and a half days a week, every week.
	Very few breaks or holidays, and I was emotionally and physically wrecked at that point.
	In fact, I can credit all of that effort with having given me a very interesting career, but a personal life that was absolutely zero.
	It ruined a relationship that I had and various other things.
	So that is the downside of doing these things.
	So when Bill called me in to say that your unexplained show is going, I think I was probably relieved.
	And I came back home and I thought, okay, time to plan for the future.
	At least I get my weekends back now, and that was it.
	I didn't think about it anymore.
	Until emails started to flood into my inbox from you, hundreds of them, from listeners who said that they wanted the show to return.
	And, you know, they were unhappy with the decision to end it and they wanted something done about it.
	Well, that was very kind.
	In my experience of radio, when you disappear from doing a thing, people will say, it's terrible that you're gone.
	And then two weeks later, they've forgotten all about you.
	So I think that was extremely kind.
	And the guys at the radio station had been good enough to link my own private email address up to the radio station email.
	So if the radio station got an email, my address there, about me, then I would get to see it.
	One of these emails suggested that I tried to take the show to a podcast format.
	Now, bear in mind, I didn't really record anything at home at that point and didn't know anything about it.
	In fact, you know, all of these years later, I'm looking around at the equipment I have, and at the moment I'm speaking into a microphone that I haven't used for doing the podcast for years.
	It is the microphone that I used for my first year or so, I think, of doing these podcasts.
	It's the one that they used to use at the BBC on their network stations.
	So if it sounds slightly different, this is the reason for that.
	For nostalgia's sake, I'm using a microphone that the BBC used from the late 1960s on stations like Radio 1 or Radio 2, right up until the 1980s.
	And I've got one of them.
	Used to use it for podcasts.
	Don't anymore, but I brought it back for edition 600.
	So anyway, there we are.
	2006, and it gets suggested that I do a home-recorded version of The Unexplained.
	Now, that was never going to be an easy undertaking, but it was in 2006 easier than it ever had been.
	I knew that people were doing podcasts.
	You could do them by interviewing guests, as most radio stations did anyway, on the phone.
	So I looked through eBay, and I found a thing called a telephone balancing unit being sold by a guy in Cyprus.
	He wanted £200 for it.
	In the end, I think he gave it to me for £200, no, £150, I think.
	I think he lowered the price slightly.
	And I got this telephone balancing unit, figured out how to connect it to my telephone line.
	You can't do recorded conversations on a telephone network without one of these things.
	And they're expensive.
	They cost about £800.
	So I got one of these things.
	In America, I think they call them hybrids.
	Nothing to do with the aliens.
	Plugged it in, plugged it into a little mixer that I had, an Elesis.
	I loved those early Elesis mixers.
	They still stand up very well.
	And then a microphone, this one, and started to record.
	And then I thought, okay, that sounds interesting.
	So I bought a web domain name.
	I went to a company that sold them, tried to find TheUnexplained.
	Of course, theUnexplained.com was gone and other variants.
	But the one that was available and reasonably priced was theUnexplained.tv.
	So I bought it.
	I think I bought it for five years.
	And, you know, obviously still now I'm in ownership of that.
	And I thought that's going to be useful.
	And I put on it a holding message that said, hello, this is Howard Hughes.
	I brought you The Unexplained on the radio.
	The show is coming back.
	Started getting feedback from that.
	That was all done with the help of a guy called Graham Mullins.
	And Graham helped me voluntarily through the first six months, I think, or so of the show, maybe a year, before I found Adam, who was working, actually working in his part-time.
	He was still at school working at Radio City in Liverpool as a tech genius who would come in after school and fix the IT problems that the radio station had.
	So good was he, and I realized he had such a lot of potential that we talked about my podcast.
	And he's been with me for all of these years.
	Thank you, Adam.
	I know he's going to be listening to this.
	So that's how it started, really.
	I wasn't sure how it was going to go, how people would find it and how they would respond to it.
	And it started to do reasonably well.
	The first couple of years were quite difficult, not only because of the difficulty of doing a podcast, but also the fact that in 2006 my mother died.
	It was very close to my mother.
	I'll never get over that.
	And that stopped me from doing anything very much for a period.
	But I got into it and gradually built up the flow of podcasts.
	If you go back to the very beginning of the podcast, you will hear a variety.
	It was a slightly different format when I started.
	I had a variety of guests recorded for a short time.
	And the very first person I spoke to, because I knew him and I went to his home, was Uri Geller.
	And then I had, I think, Alison Dubois, who was on that TV series about a medium, had an interview with her and various other things.
	So that was the original format.
	And then I turned it into the long-form one-hour interview with a guest.
	And that's the whole story of The Unexplained.
	Then in 2016, I got an email through LinkedIn asking me if I would be interested in talking to the people who ran TalkSport because they were running a talk radio station, or they planned to launch a pure talk radio station without the sport.
	I wasn't very sure whether I wanted to do that, and Adam's advice was that I shouldn't do a radio show because it would have an impact on the podcast.
	But I went there and eventually agreed to do the radio show, which I now do.
	You know, I own the title of the show, etc.
	But I'm now doing that on the radio as well.
	So that is probably the entire story of The Unexplained Today.
	Of course, the radio show could be cancelled, as any radio show anywhere could be at any time.
	So I'm always sort of partly prepared for a phone call like the one that I got in 2006.
	So far, no phone call, but we'll see in 2022.
	As they say, you never know.
	Okay, well, that's a lot of talking, isn't it?
	And that's what this edition of The Unexplained is all about, I would guess.
	Just some shout-outs, some listeners who've been in touch recently.
	I'm sorry if I can't respond to everybody, but please know that I see all of the emails that come in through the website, theunexplained.tv.
	Heidi, thank you for your email.
	Chris in Australia, thank you.
	Great email.
	And I did reply to you by email, Chris.
	Peter on the Isle of Man.
	Brian Harty, thank you.
	Gabriel in Maine, USA.
	Brett, who listens to The Unexplained on Spotify.
	Amanda, a new listener, Thomas.
	Thomas, can you email me some more details about those researches that you've done?
	Thanks, Thomas.
	Julian, JW in the US Pacific Northwest.
	Terry and Phil.
	Kay near Clacton-on-Sea.
	Richard in Brisbane, Australia.
	And also in Australia, Daniel.
	And I think that's about it for now.
	So thank you very much.
	If you've sent an email in recently, and if you sent a donation into the show, vital for the continuation of the show, thank you very, very much indeed.
	And I hope that your new year is a good one.
	All right, let's get to the questions now.
	This is the nerve-wracking bit for me, because I've decided to kind of cut and paste them, and I'm just going to do them as they come.
	Let's start with Derek in Cheltenham.
	Derek says, hi, Howard, seasons, greetings.
	Back to you.
	Derek, thank you, and thank you for a great show.
	My question to you is this.
	If you had to choose a favourite conspiracy theory of yours, what would it be and why would it be?
	says Derek in Cheltenham.
	Derek, that's a real tough one because there are so many.
	I kind of have a soft spot for the people who say that we never went to the moon.
	People like Marcus Allen from Nexus magazine, who's featured in many documentaries about this.
	And they have such a welter of evidence to say that we couldn't possibly, you know, physically, technically, we couldn't get there.
	You know, we'd have been fried by radiation.
	And if you look at the photographs taken on the surface of the moon, where are the stars?
	And then again, there are people who come back and say all of those things can be explained.
	But I find it fascinating that people believe that we never went.
	And contrary to one person who emailed me when I had somebody who wrote out the conspiracy theory about the moon, I'm very open to listening to all of this.
	I think we did go.
	But I'm willing to be persuaded.
	Like most of the things that I talk about here, I don't take a dogmatic approach about it.
	So, you know, moon conspiracies, yes.
	9-11, of course, is always going to have a place in my life because a year after 9-11, having covered it from the London end on Capitol Radio, where I was doing breakfast news on the Chris Tarant show then, a year later, the radio station, just as I was about to leave it, sent me to New York to report on the first anniversary live from Ground Zero.
	I stayed at the Marriott Financial Hotel.
	I met and spoke with many of the staff there.
	A lot of them simply were still too traumatized a year on to talk about it.
	In fact, I don't think I spoke to any of the staff for the radio because they didn't want to.
	But they were enormously warm and helpful to me.
	You know, New York has a heart and a soul, and I saw it there.
	I spoke to many, many people who were affected, and it did change my life.
	Of course, I've done many shows about the various conspiracy theories about 9-11.
	Everything up to and including remote viewing.
	There was one show that we did, certainly on the radio, about remote viewing 9-11, about there was some kind of hidden mastermind behind it all, although the remote viewers couldn't say what was motivating that person.
	And then, of course, there are people like Dr. Judy Wood, the scientist who gave up her career and published a book about the Twin Towers that I think is very hard to find on Amazon, commands a lot of money now, deeply illustrated with photographs, showing such things that I can't explain, like, for example, some of the emergency vehicles that were destroyed appeared to melt from the inside out, not the outside in.
	And also, the differential patterns of burning within the buildings.
	Now, those things may simply be explainable by extreme physics, because they were the most extreme of circumstances.
	But I don't know, Judy Wood put herself on the line for this, is enormously controversial.
	Rebecca Roth is on one of my podcasts talking about the things that she didn't believe add up about 9-11, like how people were able to make mobile phone calls, cell phone calls from planes when apparently above a certain height you can't do that, and the idea that maybe the planes that were hijacked landed somewhere.
	So 9-11, in terms of a sheer conspiracy theory, has always fascinated me.
	In terms of the human tragedy of it, because at the time I had a personal connection through somebody that I knew to it, it will always be burned upon my heart.
	And the people that I met in New York and interviewed in New York a year on reflected to me the dignity of those people who went through that experience and were prepared to go back into New York City and do what they had to do every single day.
	You know, I'm biased.
	I love New York.
	I had relatives in the depression of the 1930s who left their lives in Liverpool to go and try and find a better life in New York.
	That's a long story that is fascinating.
	Some of them came back.
	Some of them stayed and made successes of themselves, one of them in particular.
	I can't tell that now, but one of these days that'll make a fascinating story.
	It is very much of its era.
	The story of Billy and how he went to America while he was a baby and ended up having a very successful career on Wall Street.
	I didn't know him well, but that's another story.
	So New York I love, and the story of 9-11 is always going to be in my heart.
	So I hope that is kind of an answer for you, Derek.
	Probably when I finished recording this, I'll think of a hundred other things to say.
	Jack, emails from the place that I was brought up in, Crosby, in Liverpool.
	Crosby is a place that has produced a lot of broadcasters, like the BBC's Jane Garvey, the famous Kenny Everett, Ray Moore, and many, many other broadcasters seem to come from Crosby.
	I don't know why.
	Perhaps it's in the air.
	It's near the sea and I love it still.
	Jack says, being a fellow Crosbian, I'm intrigued about where you went to school and how you found it.
	Secondly, I'd like to hear more about your encounter in Liverpool, where it was, and if you know an investigation may be plausible in the future.
	Jack, thank you.
	And thank you for the nice things you said about the show.
	Okay, school.
	Schooling for me, I have to say, I'm just going to move the microphone slightly a little closer so I can sit back.
	And you hear that creaking.
	That's an old mic stand and not a ghost.
	I went to a school in Liverpool from the age of 11 called Crosby County Secondary Modern School.
	Thankfully, it's brick dust now and no longer exists.
	It was not a good school for me.
	It was motivated very much by creating people as they saw it to become woodworkers and engineers, noble crafts and people who earned a lot more than I do these days.
	But I couldn't do those things.
	I was interested in radio and, you know, reading things.
	So they weren't interested in me.
	They were interested in sport.
	You know, That place ran on punishment.
	There were a lot of defiant teenage boys in that school, but then, as a teenager who isn't defiant, and punishments were given out freely, we'd be taken into the hall to watch somebody being caned.
	I hated that school.
	It was a very bad place for me, and I'm afraid it left indelible marks upon my life and made me less confident, made me less able to believe that I could achieve things.
	Thankfully, though, there is a happy ending because the school closed, merged with the girls' grammar school, so basically two schools became one, and we inherited the grammar school teachers, and they took an interest in me, saw the academic side of me, actually allowed me to talk about my interest in radio, and they changed my life.
	They encouraged me to apply for university when I didn't think that I was good enough to do it, because nobody from my family had ever done that, certainly not.
	And I don't think I would have achieved anything that I have achieved had it not been for the comprehensive school, the merged version of those two schools, Waterloo Girls Grammar and Crosby County Secondary Modern School for Boys, became Chesterfield Road High School in Crosby, and I owe everything to it.
	It allowed me to live my dreams.
	There are some wonderful teachers, one of whom I'm still in touch with, Zarina, who was the geography teacher, and she helped me enormously, as did Gordon Smith, the English teacher who I don't think is with us anymore, sadly.
	They were wonderful people.
	I remember Gordon Smith bringing me a book about journalism and saying, maybe you should read that, and giving me a copy of a John Steinbeck novel, Cannery Row.
	You know, they encouraged me to dream.
	And I remember being at that school, I'm telling you a long story here, sorry, and during my lunch hours when I was in the sixth form, taking calls from radio stations who were thinking about employing me one day.
	Wow, a long time ago.
	So that's the school question.
	I'm sorry that I couldn't be more positive about Crosby County Secondary Modern School.
	It was a bad experience for me, let's put it that way.
	Maybe one day I'll write some more about it, but I found it a very difficult place, and it very nearly crushed my ambitions, my dreams, and me.
	Secondly, says Jack, the encounter in Liverpool was the ghost that I saw at the Radio City Tower when I was there filling in for the legendary Pete Price.
	I'm sure you've heard this story before.
	I was filling in for Pete.
	The pressure is off you.
	It's a four-hour show at one o'clock.
	You then do one to two, and then you're done.
	So I went at one o'clock up to the lavatory, the toilet on the top floor, I think, of the tower, and then came back down, and as I was about to walk into the studio, there was a man standing in what I assumed was like a workman or a watchman's coat, a sort of three-quarter-length coat, very short little man, very solid little man, with a cap on his head and shiny boots, you know, like Doc Martin-style boots.
	He looked at me and disappeared.
	I went into the studio.
	Jonathan Dean, the producer, said to me, you've seen him.
	I said, what do you mean?
	He said, you've seen him, haven't you?
	Everybody there, apparently, or many people there, had seen this guy.
	As to an investigation, I don't think that will be done.
	In fact, I don't think the story is very much told, Jack.
	But, you know, that's going to fascinate and intrigue me because, yes, I have seen a ghost.
	And now I understand that ghosts can be as three-dimensional and real-looking as you or me.
	What a story.
	And totally true, I swear.
	Brian, in Calgary, Canada, my question to you is about paranormal investigators and entities.
	On a few of your shows, I heard investigators say they had to rush out of the area to avoid being injured by the entity present.
	Have you ever heard of a person being injured by a paranormal entity?
	I would not consider somebody coming out of an investigation and noticing a scratch had happened, but not being noticed as an injury caused by an entity.
	That's difficult.
	There are various people, and you will hear them on my podcasts and radio shows who claim to have been scratched or come out with apparent stigmata.
	I don't think, Brian, you would consider those injuries.
	I think I would consider them minor injuries.
	As to people being seriously injured, then Andrea Perrin, who's going to be on the podcast very soon and will be on the radio show, is the person behind the movie The Conjuring.
	She wrote a series of books, three of them, a trilogy called House of Darkness, House of Light, about the experience she and her family had in the 1970s at a house that her parents had moved into in Rhode Island, USA.
	And this house had the most intense paranormal activity that I've ever heard discussed.
	And as part of the experience, they brought in, for some reason, a seance team with a medium.
	And her mother, and you will hear the story on the podcast and the radio show with Andrea Perrin, her mother was bashed around the room, essentially, thrown around physically, physically assaulted, left in a very bad state by something.
	I would consider that injury.
	Other stories, well, injury has a broad range of definitions, doesn't it, really?
	There are a lot of people who say that they will forever be traumatized by their experiences.
	P.C. Alan Godfrey, for example, the police officer in Todmannen on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, who, you know, had a bad experience.
	It was traumatic for him for years.
	His colleagues in the police, my father was a policeman, and I know that your colleagues could be very tough towards you if you came out with something that they saw as outlandish.
	They gave him a hard time.
	So Alan Godfrey was scarred in his own way by that.
	So, you know, that's the story.
	I'm sure that my listener will email me with many instances where people have been physically injured, but those are the stories that I know.
	Steve in Finland says, hello, how'd like the show?
	Enjoy your style of interviewing.
	My question is, how do you keep on topic when the guest makes a far-out statement, such as, I have been to the dark side of the moon or I've been to Mars?
	It must be hard to keep interviewing after such wacky comments.
	Says Steve in Finland, I'm going to have to reach for some water very soon.
	Talking, talking, talking.
	That's all I do.
	Steve, in Finland, how do I keep a straight face?
	Well, you know, some of the things that I've heard make me smile from time to time.
	And they'll be the ones I'm sure that make you smile.
	You know, the people who say that they really have been to Mars.
	Well, I have to pinch myself at those moments and just say, I don't know whether they have or they haven't.
	I can't prove that they haven't.
	I can't prove that they have.
	And that's how I kind of get around those things.
	So I would say that laughing is my human side responding.
	But my rational journalistic side says, well, here's a good story.
	I don't know whether it's true.
	It isn't for me to determine whether it's true.
	All of us can have an opinion, but that's probably unless we have definitive, documented, or photographic proof.
	That's all we can do.
	We can express an opinion.
	And that's as far as it goes.
	So yes, some of the things I do find outlandish from time to time, but I always temper it with the thought that this may well be completely correct.
	And who am I, in my humbleness, to say that it's not?
	And I think it's very wrong for people to get angry or become dogmatic and say, how could you have that person on your show and then start accusing me of things?
	People are allowed to tell their stories.
	If you don't accept it or you find it annoying for whatever reason, gotta turn it off.
	You know, it's better than stressing yourself out about, I think.
	So Steve in Finland, I hope that that answers that.
	And give my regards to Helsinki.
	On a Christmas years ago when I was working with Chris Tarant on Capitol Radio, we took a bunch of competition winners.
	They were kids, little kids, to a place in the very far north of Lapland, very, very cold and snowy.
	We took out some children's nannies with us, and we had a wonderful time.
	There was a quiz that we had, or a contest, competition that we had during the week to find the location of Santa.
	And on the last day, we located Santa on a frozen lake.
	It was magical.
	You know, I know nothing about kids, but to see them experience the magic of Christmas meant a lot to me.
	Okay, what else?
	My question is this.
	I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
	I'm going to have that little glass of water now.
	Well, I say glass.
	It's a little bottle.
	I'm just going to open it here.
	Talk amongst yourself while you do this.
	I mean, this is proving that this is completely unedited and recorded as live.
	Hang on.
	Aye.
	That's better.
	Daniel, my question is this.
	How many listeners has your podcast got worldwide?
	Since listening to you, I've heard you mention paranormal encounters that included seeing the ghost that I talked about, the man with cloven feet who I saw when I was about 11 or so, being taken to Southport by my grandmother, and a fleeting glimpse of a grey alien in my bedroom.
	Well, I don't know whether it was, but it was something weird and spindly.
	Have you had any others?
	Daniel, too many.
	A lot of them involving clocks and time.
	One of them was at a studio in the BBC in Brighton.
	I was about to leave there to go to another BBC station.
	My best experiences in life have certainly not been at the BBC.
	Let's leave it at that.
	One day I will write about those as well.
	But I was leaving Brighton, and I loved living in Brighton, to go to a station in the East Midlands.
	And I knew that I'd made a terrible mistake by accepting the job there.
	But I was very young, and I couldn't go to the boss and say, please have me back.
	I don't want to go.
	So I was committed to it, and it didn't work out for me.
	Now, about a week or so before I left, I was opening the station, and we were relaying BBC Radio 2 before actually going live locally ourselves.
	And there was a man doing a thing called thought for the day, sort of religious thought.
	And he said, there are more things in heaven and earth than we will ever understand.
	I thought, that's really weird.
	For the light-hearted religious thought of the morning, that sounds a bit odd.
	At the moment he said that, the clock in front of me exploded, jumped forward, and every clock in the building stopped.
	I believe, but I might be wrong, that that was a sign to tell me not to go to this job in the East Midlands that I didn't want to go to anyway.
	And if I'd read the sign and cancelled that move, my life might have been a little happier.
	But I wouldn't have discovered many other things that I did discover after eventually leaving the BBC the first time.
	I'd been there a number of times and always left.
	Other experiences with clocks.
	I was spinning the digits on the timer, not on the timer, on the countdown on my watch when I was 20, I think, and the numbers 194 came up.
	Now, 194 was the frequency in London of Capitol Radio and also the frequency of stations like my local one in Liverpool, Radio City.
	194 Radio City.
	As I came up with the numbers 194, totally unexpected, the phone went.
	And a man on the other end who I'd never spoken to, didn't know, called Roger Wilkes, the news editor of Radio City, phone and said, is that Howard Hughes?
	I hear you have a voice.
	And I just replied with the word yes.
	He became my news editor.
	Radio City sent me on a training scheme, the University College Cardiff Journalism Training Course.
	They paid for me to go on that.
	And I will forever be indebted to Radio City.
	194 appeared seconds before that phone call.
	Was that just coincidence?
	I don't know.
	There have been others with clocks a few weeks ago.
	My bedside radio, the power failed on it.
	I was thinking very much about my future.
	What on earth is going to happen to me in this new year?
	I'm very, very worried about it, one way or another.
	And my clock radio stopped.
	It just went off and then rebooted itself.
	It's never done that before.
	It's one of these pure evoke DAB recording radios.
	I've had it for years and years and years.
	Never done this.
	It came back, but the date on the display was my mother's birthday.
	Now, that might be coincidence, but maybe another sign.
	Who knows?
	So I hope that that kind of helps.
	As to the question of how many listeners does my podcast have, well, there are many ways of measuring it.
	All I can say is that we have a vast and growing audience, and in the last year, and it's listeners who've pointed this out to me, I would never have seen it.
	My podcast has at times beaten content from big corporate organisations like Global Radio in the UK, LBC, and the BBC.
	I've actually Beaten them in some weeks with my homemade podcast.
	Now, if you think of the budgets that they have, the promotional budget, the outlets they have, and the staff that they deploy for their podcasting, Global Radio and the BBC, that is an astonishing achievement.
	And I hope that kind of partly answers your question.
	Regular listener, Tanya in Dorset in Wimborne, I think it is.
	How are you, Tanya?
	Tanya says, I'd love to know if you started your broadcasting career as part of a work or training program or a university program.
	Can you remember your first gig?
	What was it about?
	Oh, boy.
	Big question.
	I started making demo tapes, cassettes, to be a DJ when I was in my teens.
	And the story goes that I was at university in Liverpool and I could have been a disc jockey aged 18.
	And I decided in the end that although I was around radio in Liverpool, not actually on it, but around it at that time, I decided that I wasn't going to give up university, which, you know, none of my family had ever been to university.
	I wasn't going to give up university to become a disc jockey.
	And I think that was probably a good call.
	And of course, later I ended up working for Radio City anyway.
	Because of that phone call that I got on that synchronicitous day, I became a journalist.
	I later did, and I love music, and I love doing music shows.
	I've done some.
	Would I have been a very famous disc jockey?
	I don't think so.
	So I think the people who said that I would be better off as a journalist were probably right, Tanya.
	First gig was Radio City in Liverpool.
	They had a training program that they based around me.
	I was their first graduate trainee.
	They sent me on the University College Cardiff Journalism course where I was taught how to write by people who'd written for newspapers on Fleet Street.
	Very good, very kind, very, very able people who taught me exactly how to write type newspaper copy.
	The people at Radio City taught me the radio.
	And I remember going into one of the recording booths at Radio City to record a voice piece into a news bulletin about some news story.
	And a man, very famous, and hugely talented journalist, broadcaster, Kieran Devani, came in.
	And Kieran had a big Liverpool voice, still does, like this.
	And he listened to me doing an interview.
	Now, I didn't want to do interviews.
	I just wanted to be on the radio, frankly.
	All the rest of it was extraneous and peripheral to me.
	But he said, you're a good interviewer.
	Now, I was just a kid.
	I had no idea about that.
	But interviewing is what I came to enjoy the most.
	So Kieran was absolutely right.
	So my first gig was at Radio City.
	It was in an era where the 80s had just dawned and, you know, newsrooms were full of people who came from newspapers.
	They had cigarettes on the go hanging off their typewriters.
	I didn't smoke and it used to choke me.
	So sometimes my voice sounded very choked on air.
	The station had me reading the news.
	Can you imagine this?
	They thought that I would be a good newsreader.
	So having never read the news in my life, they stuck me straight on the air on one of the nation's biggest local radio stations, Radio City, covering the northwest of England and North Wales.
	They stuck me on peak time news bulletins at that time.
	So I started at 11 o'clock one morning in the summer, August the 1st, I think it was, Summer's Day, stepped into the building.
	I read the news at 2 p.m., three hours after joining.
	Boy, Radio City I owe everything to.
	And I was delighted to go back years later to fill in for some of their broadcasters doing phone-in shows.
	So that's the story, I think, Tanya.
	I hope that's a reasonable answer.
	Richard in Brisbane, Australia, I'd like to ask which guest or topic you were skeptical about but convinced you.
	You know, I can't say I'm ever totally convinced.
	I'm just because that's my training, really.
	My training is to be skeptical.
	Many guests, it's really hard to answer that.
	I mentioned Dr. Judy Wood.
	I found her arguments very convincing.
	I wasn't completely won over to her arguments, and I can't say that I've been completely won over to the arguments of any guest.
	I hear what they say.
	Some are more compelling than others.
	Some are very, very compelling.
	But I guess it's not my job to be completely convinced, and I think I ought to stay that way, really.
	I hope that answers.
	Nicole de Haas, recently in Holland, I interviewed her about physical mediumship, about which I've always been very sceptical because we know there's a history of fakery in it.
	I found her very compelling, and I recommend you listen to her and make your own mind up about that.
	But I found her a very, very compelling and a very nice guest who I'd like to speak with again.
	I hope that that answers your question.
	Anthony and Sue in Nottingham, firstly, if we're not too late, may we wish you a very Merry Christmas, and I hope you had a good one, Anthony and Sue, and a healthy, happy, and prosperous new year.
	Our joint question to you for the 600th edition would be as follows.
	Having had your own experiences with the paranormal over the years and having interviewed hundreds of expert writers on the subject, do you now consider yourself more of a sceptic or a believer, particularly when it comes to the existence of our consciousness surviving after physical death?
	Cards on the table.
	I've always kind of believed that this is not all there is.
	And I've kind of hoped that that's the case.
	Sometimes I feel the presence of my parents more, my father, I think, than my mother.
	I think my mother's gone on to other things, if you do.
	But I think the more interviews that I do, the more that I would like to believe that there is more to this life than we see.
	And, you know, I'd like to believe that some of the terrible experiences we go through, and my God, I'm not going to detail them here.
	I've been through some terrible experiences.
	Some of them, most of them, connected with my professional life, but I would hope that there is some point in all of that, in the cosmic scheme of things, I suppose.
	Do we survive physical death?
	I would like to think that we do.
	And again, I recommend the interview that I've done with Andrea Perrin when that appears, which will be edition 601, just to get a perspective on all of that.
	Also, of course, the past life cases, the children who Appear to remember lives before.
	I've said here before, and this is absolutely true that as a kid in Liverpool, I believed that I'd had a previous life.
	Well, I didn't see it that way.
	I was three or four years of age, but I had memories of a very sunny place that I now know to be California and big Cadillac cars.
	Did I have a life in California before this?
	I don't know.
	But I can remember going with my girlfriend at the time to California.
	She was American, and I felt that I knew that place, and I was very, very comfortable in California and sort of felt that I could relax because I was home.
	Now, maybe that was just because I've seen too many movies.
	You know, soon too many movies about Clint Eastwood in Carmel play Misty for me.
	But I don't know.
	Or maybe I'd lived there before.
	So I hope that Anthony and Sue answers your question, and I wish you a very happy new year.
	Another Sue now.
	This is the Sue who sent me a question by audio file.
	So with a bit of luck, let's see if I can get, I'm going to have some water.
	Maybe make myself a coffee while this plays.
	But here's Sue with her question.
	Thank you for this, Sue.
	Hello, Howard.
	My name's Sue, and I've really enjoyed listening to your show for the last sort of year and a half.
	It's great because it sort of takes me back to a time when I really enjoyed reading about, hearing about strange, unusual, anomalous events and wondering how it happens and what it's all about.
	These days of the internet, it's a lot easier to find this kind of information, but maybe it's not always from a reliable, trustworthy source, and certainly not one that's as entertaining to listen to as your shows and podcasts are.
	So I'm very grateful, really enjoy it.
	It makes my week to hear the show.
	And when there's a new podcast, I always feel a bit of excitement.
	So one of the things that I've always enjoyed about hearing about your own personal background is some of the stories from Liverpool when you were younger.
	And I always get the hair stand up on the back of my neck when you talk about a time when your grandmother took you to the fair and on the way back she said, Don't look.
	And of course, you looked naturally.
	And there was a being, a short male, it seemed like, with cloven hooves or hoofy feet.
	And the bit that always gets me is when you say he was wearing a coat, like a little jacket.
	And I just think, oh, that is so odd, so strange.
	So it reminds me of a lot of mystical creatures, and I just think it's a wonderful image, something remarkable to have seen.
	And your grandmother seems like quite a remarkable person.
	She saw it, and so did you.
	Whatever that being was, whether it was an I don't know, who knows what it was, but your grandmother shared that with you and she seemed like a special person.
	So I'd really like to hear a little bit more about your grandmother.
	And was she somebody who also had some kind of psychic abilities, like I think you do?
	Did she have a number of experiences?
	Was she the person who carried that sort of knowledge in your family?
	I'd be very interested to hear more about her.
	So thank you very much, Howard, and Merry Christmas.
	If you can't use this question, that's absolutely fine.
	And I just hope that you have a good Christmas, a good 2022, and keep up the excellent work and the excellent broadcasting for all us people out here.
	Thank you.
	Bye.
	Sue, thank you for that question.
	That was really excellent.
	Very, very many thanks for doing that and for your good wishes, which I send right back to you.
	I actually went to the kitchen while I was listening to that just to make myself a cup of coffee and continue with this.
	But I'm recording this live and exactly as it happens, it's not going to be edited.
	About my grandmother, the wisest person that I've ever known, with an incredible turn of phrase and phrases, some of which I cannot repeat here, or we'd be banned from the internet, but they were always opposite to every occasion.
	She was a woman who'd known incredibly hard times.
	I mean, just to give you a little bit of the background, my mother's father was a Catholic in Liverpool, and my father's father, a Protestant in Liverpool.
	So I saw both sides of the religious equation in Liverpool and can understand and feel at home with both of them, really.
	I mean, I don't really do religion, but I can understand the both of them.
	And my grandmother had seen great poverty, as indeed had my father, enormous poverty in their lives.
	And I think both sides always wanted to give their children better than they had.
	And my parents certainly are the reason why I did all the things that I did, because they were enormously supportive to everything that I did.
	And if I came home one day and said, mum and dad, I want to be on the radio, that was fine.
	They didn't say to me, well, my father occasionally said, why don't you join the police?
	Because it's a good, stable job.
	And, you know, frankly, if I had, I'd be looking at a good pension and good conditions in retirement whenever that comes, instead of poverty, which, I mean, I'm laughing about it.
	It's no laughing matter.
	But I'm glad that I did what I did, and I'm really grateful for supportive parents.
	My grandmother was very perceptive and sharp, but more than being perceptive and sharp, she did have experiences.
	There was the one, of course, that you know about when we went to the fair in Southport and saw something that I was told not to look at on the way back to the train, and various people have written to me about that experience of this apparent human creature or human being, but with cloven hooves and the face almost of a goat, I thought.
	I don't think I was frightened.
	I was just shocked at the time.
	And I've never really understood that.
	My grandmother had a UFO experience, which Jason Gleaves has put in one of his books.
	And you'll see a sketch of what she saw.
	She swore.
	My sister's forgotten this.
	I never forgot it because she did a sketch of it.
	She saw what we would describe as a UFO, wedding cake shape, silver, hovering Over the main Liverpool-Southport railway line.
	Behind her home in Waterloo, effectively, they lived in a terraced street, and behind them was an empty space called the Bomb Patch, or the Bonnie, as they called it in Liverpool, which had been bombed by a German bomb and destroyed in World War II.
	So you could look through that and effectively see across to the railway line, more or less.
	And she said that she saw very early one morning when she woke up this craft that she described.
	And she wasn't a person for fantasizing.
	She wasn't a science fiction person.
	She described it very accurately.
	And that description and the sketch that she did is a classic UFO.
	So that was my grandmother's experience.
	My grandfather, my dad's dad, was very psychically inclined.
	And I understand he used to do teacup readings many, many years ago for local people in Bootle.
	My grandmother on my father's side was less inclined to all of those things, but my dad and my grandfather, very perceptive.
	My father had a couple of encounters when he was in the army and the police that are simply unexplainable with ghostly entities.
	And he always believed those things.
	And I know that my father was very superstitious.
	He wanted to...
	Okay, so this is listener discretion advice.
	Turn this bit off if you don't like.
	He used to ask that after death, he wanted his wrists to be slashed, to be absolutely certain that he was dead.
	He had a mortal terror.
	Now, he worked in the police and he dealt with coroners and mortuaries and all of those things.
	He had a mortal terror of being pronounced dead and buried and not actually being dead all his life.
	But he had some remarkable experiences and I think that anything of a kind of psychic nature I inherit from my father's side.
	But my mother was also deeply perceptive and very spiritual in many ways.
	I hope that answers that, Sue, and thank you.
	It's nice to remember my wonderful family, who I feel very lonely and very bereft without.
	Michael on the India-China border.
	What a location, Michael.
	I'd like to hear more about that.
	Suz, I've been listening to you for about five years.
	I listen to all of them.
	I appreciate some of the skepticism that you have.
	My question is, why do you think most sightings are from English-speaking countries?
	There's some bias in terms of reporting, an unwillingness in the West to associate strange stuff with folklore.
	But even so, it seems to me to represent a particularly Western anxiety.
	I live, as we said, near the India-China border with a big military presence and have neither seen nor heard about anything unusual.
	Why do I think, I mean, if you're talking about UFO reports and that kind of thing, I think that part of the problem is simply, you laugh at this, but I think some of it just simply resides in the fact that some of the reports are in different languages.
	And that's what Jacques Valley, who I spoke with for one of my podcasts earlier in 2022, 21 rather, what Jacques Valley was saying.
	He was saying that the aim is to get together reports of these things in many languages that haven't been brought together before.
	You know, there are lots of countries like Brazil and Russia and France that have very good UFO reports and China, but we don't get to hear them because they're in another language, but they may well have been recorded in those countries.
	We need to bring all of those things together.
	So my belief is that it is partly to do with the world is an English-speaking world, or some people see it that way.
	I don't, because I don't think we should.
	But, you know, English seems to be the lingua franca.
	And I think in this field, reports in the English language tend to push themselves to the front of the queue.
	So my answer, I think, in a roundabout way, Michael, is that we have to work harder to collate the reports.
	And I think the understanding that we will come to is that these phenomena are truly international.
	They probably happen to the same degree everywhere, but whether they're recorded to the same degree is a whole other issue.
	And maybe we will learn more as we go into 2022.
	I hope that that answers the question.
	James, still off the podcast?
	Never tired of hearing your voice, says James.
	Not everybody would agree with you about that, James.
	Quick question.
	Could you do a couple more shows of ghost stories from the general public?
	I like your normal shows, but love it when you have ordinary people.
	I will.
	We had a problem with doing that at one point last year, the last listener stories show that I did involving people calling in to the radio station.
	We arranged, I think, 12 good ones, and I think about six people pulled out at the last minute, leaving me with no show.
	So I would have to be very careful about doing that in the future, simply because if you're doing it live on the radio, which is really exciting, if people pull out, you're left without a show.
	And we had to scrap the idea of doing a listeners stories segment told by the listeners themselves, simply because half of them got in touch very close to the show and said, we don't want to do it now.
	So please, if ever you get in touch and you want to come on the radio, please do it.
	It's only me.
	It's only you and I talking.
	And please don't pull out.
	So that's why we haven't been doing them, but I do need to do more of them.
	And thank you for the question.
	Two Elaine Seat.
	Elaine, number one, was going to ask a question for the show.
	How do you keep a straight face with some of the more out there guests?
	and how do you keep a show fresh after 16 years?
	Elaine, I think the answer to the...
	So if you just heard a banging noise, it was me breathing loudly.
	Sorry about that.
	Elaine, the answer to both of those questions, I think, is I have no idea.
	I don't know how I keep it fresh.
	I just think I'm perennially excited by the topics and I love, more than anything else, leaving aside the paranormality and the science and everything.
	The journalist in me loves to tell a good story.
	When I'm recording here, I rub my hands together with glee when I'm getting a good story.
	When I was speaking with Andrea Perrin only yesterday as I record this for the next edition of this podcast.
	I hope that you can't hear me doing that in the background because I thought the story was so astonishing.
	So I love a good story, and I think it's the stories and the guests who keep it fresh.
	Nothing much to do with me, but thank you very much.
	Elaine number two, most memorable guest.
	Oh, Elaine, that's a hard question towards the end.
	What made you want to be part of The Unexplained?
	Okay.
	Most memorable guest.
	Very hard to say because, you know, they're all good in their own ways.
	I loved speaking recently with Chris Hadfield, the astronaut.
	It was a privilege to speak with Edgar Mitchell, the late Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut, a very spiritual man.
	Jacques Valet, wonderful guest.
	Paul Sinclair, of course, who did his first interview with me on this show.
	And so many more.
	It's wrong, I think, to single out individual people.
	And I will think of many others who've made an impact on me after I've recorded this.
	But those are some of the people who I think have been very good.
	But then everybody, that's why they're on the show.
	Everybody has a story.
	I've always believed whether you're a well-known name or whether you're Joe from down the street, everyone's got a story.
	And if you think about it, you probably have too.
	Okay, and the other thing, why did I want to be part of the unexplained?
	Well, kind of because of the life that I lived, the coincidences and strangenesses and synchronicities that happened around me sort of pushed me in that direction.
	And then one day I bought a computer that cost me an arm and a leg, 1997, connected it to a phone line.
	The first thing that I heard on Real, do you remember Real Player on Real Player?
	Coming back was a radio station in Paris called Enager playing French hits.
	Loved it.
	Then I heard in very high quality an American radio station relaying Art Bell.
	And from that moment, I realized that somebody was doing a show about these things that I'd been interested in and doing interviews on the radio as a young man about all of my life.
	And I thought, I want to do something like that.
	And fate brought the rest of it to me, I think is the truth of it.
	I think a lot of the things that we do are fated.
	You know, I got to do a lot of voiceovers on television and work with famous performers like, oh, Dennis Norden and Scylla Black I worked with.
	And I did the voiceovers on shows like An Audience With.
	I did the Bee Gees and Lulu.
	And of course, did the British Comedy Awards every single year, absolutely live.
	Nerve-wracking but exciting.
	They gave me my own dressing room for that one.
	So I always believed that some of those things are fated.
	How could that be?
	That you are the one person of all the people, everybody wants to do this, that gets picked to do those things.
	So there has to be a certain amount of fate, I think, in all of these things.
	Listen, I never thought that this listener questions session would run for an hour like this, but it has.
	Can you believe this?
	And this is, you're going to hear it exactly as I recorded it.
	I'm not going to make nifty, sly little edits in it.
	So warts and all.
	It is exactly as it is.
	In my life story, there are a million other things to tell.
	I have stories that I could tell that cannot be published, I think, at the moment.
	And other stories that I think people might find fascinating.
	It's been an astonishing life.
	You know, I could have had, I think, at times, money, but decisions that I made about the direction that I wanted to go in made that not possible.
	So here I am as I am.
	But at least I always did the things that I wanted to do.
	And I think you only pass this way once.
	And you have to do the things that you want to do.
	Otherwise, you're going to be on your deathbed full of regrets.
	So at least I'm going to be poor going forward, maybe.
	I hope not, but it's looking that way.
	But at least, in the words of Edith Piaf, I will have no regrets.
	Final question from Rachel.
	Rachel, thank you for this.
	Hope you had a good Christmas, says Rachel.
	Ditto to you.
	Just listen to your Christmas podcast.
	Hope you're okay.
	You should get someone to cook for you next Christmas.
	I should.
	I don't want to do it myself next year.
	It's, you know, too awful.
	Rachel went to York just before Christmas.
	That sounds nice.
	I love York.
	Thank you.
	And I do need to recharge my batteries.
	I've become a very dull boy, and I think it would help me and probably help the work that I do if I took more breaks instead of none.
	The question from Rachel is, I will sometimes listen to your show at night, and I do feel scared.
	I'd love to know what makes you scared and how you managed to stop any fear after your broadcast, wishing you a very happy 2022.
	Rachel, it's interesting, isn't it?
	I know people who say that there are certain parts of my show they find it hard to listen to because it's frightening for them.
	Now, I see it in a different way, and it goes back to my grandmother in Liverpool.
	She used to say, it's not the dead you need to be scared of, it's the living.
	And to tell you the truth, in my life, living people have caused me way more harm than anything beyond this life could ever cause me.
	And I think just when you think of it in those terms, it puts it all into perspective, really.
	If you just think that, you know, nothing...
	Some people are more susceptible to having these experiences, and I think that's partly because they are attuned to having them.
	So I think you could only be scared to the extent that you want to be, I think, on some subconscious level.
	So if you decide and program yourself not to be scared by these things, I don't think you will be.
	I don't think there's anything really much that scares me.
	Sometimes when people tell me on the show about shadow people or, you know, black masses of cloudy entities that appear before them, great dark clouds of shapeless beings that appear there, sometimes that's a bit scary.
	But I sort of get it all into perspective.
	I think you have to.
	But above all, I love telling the stories, and I love facilitating people to tell their stories.
	That's what I'm for.
	And I've loved spending my life in front of a microphone.
	It's kind of what I do.
	And I Can't imagine doing anything else.
	It's too late for me to change career now.
	I don't want to.
	So, whatever vicissitudes of fortune I may face, if that's the right word, I'm going to carry on.
	And there we have done Edition 600.
	I thought long and hard and agonized about what we would do.
	I'm really glad that I asked for your questions, and all of these questions are genuine questions sent in by genuine listeners.
	And I thank each and every one of them, and I hope that I've been able to go some way towards answering the questions.
	Unexplained Edition 601 is Andrea Perrin.
	That's going to be a hell of a conversation.
	Please listen to that.
	And that's it.
	So until next we meet, after Edition 600 of The Unexplained, as I go into 2022, not knowing which way anything's going to go, all I can say is, please stay safe.
	Please stay calm.
	And above all, you know.
	Please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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