Guest catchups - featuring British aviation expert Richard Godfrey on plans for a new search for the wreckage of Flight MH370, journalist/author Nicholas Schmidle has the latest on Virgin Galactic - now selling space tickets again .... And Rick Minter has an update on big cat sightings across the UK and how they're verified...
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| Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained. | |
| Well after a raft of storms that have battered the UK, including awful storm Eunice recently, I'm looking out of the window right now. | |
| Looks to me like the weather has declared a truce. | |
| You know, it's always changing in the UK. | |
| That's part of the fun of living here, I guess. | |
| But it's very calm and peaceful. | |
| The sun is setting, and there are a few clouds that are beautifully uplit by a setting orange sun. | |
| It's a gorgeous thing to see, but after the storms and fear and worry that everything was going to stay in place while we were being battered even here in London by high winds, you know, this is a bit of a gift, I have to say. | |
| And let's just look forward to the spring when hopefully things may be a little quieter. | |
| Hey, I mean, I'm leaving the political and international situation out of this at the moment because let's not go there. | |
| We're doing something different here. | |
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| There is nothing like it. | |
| Three items from my radio show here that I wanted to save for posterity. | |
| Number one, tireless investigator, aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey in Frankfurt, Germany, on his latest research on flight MH370 and the possibility that the search for that missing jet, eight years it's been now, and a total mystery, a lot of sadness for the relatives, everybody involved in this, eight years on, there is a possibility that search may be restarted. | |
| So Richard Godfrey, item number one, item number two, the latest from Virgin Galactic. | |
| You might remember that last year, Richard Branson made a flight. | |
| It garnered the world's attention. | |
| We got live pictures of him from the craft as it was ejected so high that it left our atmosphere for a while. | |
| The latest from them, they've had some issues and difficulties. | |
| So a catch-up with Nicholas Schmidtel, the man who for a while was embedded with Virgin Galactic and wrote their amazing story in a book that we talked about last year on the podcast called Test God. | |
| So Nicholas Schmidtel, item number two. | |
| And item number three, a fascinating catch-up with Rick Minter, man who gives so much of his time to investigating the appearance of and phenomenon of big cats in the UK, everywhere from Scotland all the way down to the southwest of England. | |
| So Richard, not Richard Godfrey, Rick Minter, another Richard, Rick Minter from Big Cat Conversations, third item on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| All right, let's get to it then. | |
| Richard Godfrey, the Sun newspaper had this headline just over a week ago. | |
| The hunt for missing flight MH370 has been restarted, said the newspaper, as bombshell technology could help pinpoint the exact location of the Malaysia Airlines plane eight years on. | |
| This is my conversation with Richard Godfrey. | |
| This is a breakthrough from what I understand. | |
| According to the Sun newspaper, the work that you did that we discussed the last time we spoke has led to a reopening of the case or certainly the prospect of a new search. | |
| Is that so? | |
| Yes, that is the case. | |
| The search authorities, this falls into the area around Australia, where we believe MH370 was finally ended up. | |
| They have previously searched for quite a few years back in 2014, 15 and 16, but they are now considering reopening the case. | |
| And from what I heard, the Australian authorities who have been very proactive in this, we must remember that in the driving seat of this investigation is the Malaysian government because it's their airline involved, but Australia is also heavily involved because it's local to it in the southern Indian Ocean. | |
| The Australian authorities have been very proactive in reviewing the information that you presented them with recently. | |
| Yes, they've been very supportive of my research. | |
| They've been showing great interest in the work that I've done and the papers that I've submitted to them. | |
| They are actively reviewing my work and actively reviewing the data that they have from previous underwater searches. | |
| You mentioned the Malaysian authorities and they have issued a statement this week saying that they are working in collaboration with the Australian authorities and they're following the case as well. | |
| Now, we did explain and we did talk about the research that you've done recently when we last spoke. | |
| I think it was in December last year. | |
| It may have been slightly before that. | |
| But I think we need to refresh my listeners' memory for this. | |
| And I wonder if it can be best explained, but you tell me if this is completely wrong as an analogy, that you've investigated radio waves, and these are radio waves emitted by radio amateurs, people who broadcast, transmit for joy, for fun around the world, of whom there are tens of thousands around the world, and they're a dedicated community, and we depend on them in times of emergency and other times. | |
| You've investigated the data of the radio wave traffic at the time the plane vanished. | |
| And if you can imagine that the radio waves are a little bit like, now this is probably a terrible analogy, Richard, but you tell me, are a little bit like a wave machine at a swimming pool. | |
| And you are going to go across those waves. | |
| So you're going to go from the side of the pool, not the edge where the waves are being shunted over from. | |
| You will obviously make a sort of arrowhead-shaped indentation in the waves as you swim across. | |
| Similarly, with jet traffic in the sky, They will disrupt the flow of radio transmissions in a similar kind of way. | |
| Now, that is probably a very simplistic way of putting it, but that's what you've done, isn't it? | |
| You've analyzed the radio wave transmission data. | |
| Yep, that's the new part of the work. | |
| And you're quite right. | |
| There are thousands of radio amateurs around the world, and they are literally issuing hundreds of transmissions every two minutes. | |
| Their intent is to test out the propagation of radio waves when I know someone in Europe wants to talk to a friend in Australia or in South Africa, what the chances are, what's the best frequency, and so on. | |
| I've used that data, which they very kindly collect in a database going back to 2008. | |
| I went back to the 7th of March 2014 and looked at 100,000 signals during the flight of MH370. | |
| And these signals, as you say, when an aircraft crosses the path of a radio wave, it disturbs that radio wave. | |
| And you can pick up these disturbances in the database, in the signals, in the signal-to-noise ratio, and so on. | |
| So it's a lot of work, a lot of data, but it's proven very fruitful. | |
| And apparently you were aided by the fact that in the sky, in that vicinity at that time, there was only one other plane. | |
| Indeed, the Indian Ocean is a pretty empty airspace. | |
| There was just one other aircraft crossing the Indian Ocean at the same time in the vicinity of MH370. | |
| But even that was an hour flying time away from MH370. | |
| So you don't get to mix up disturbances with other aircraft. | |
| By using this technique, you've also discovered that counter to what we thought before now, we thought that the plane took a fairly straight route, it didn't. | |
| There were actually some twists in it. | |
| It looked as if the pilot may be circling for a while for some reason that we may get into. | |
| But you've discovered all kinds of things about the circuitous almost route of this plane. | |
| Yes, I have. | |
| And as you say, the assumption up until now was that it was either on autopilot just heading in one direction on a straight flight path, or it was a ghost flight and there was no active pilot. | |
| My research has shown that there's quite clearly an active pilot for the whole flight. | |
| And as you mentioned, it did not follow a straight path. | |
| So an active pilot, not autopilot, for the duration of the flight, it appears. | |
| Now, on a flight deck, there's more than one person. | |
| There's a pilot and a co-pilot. | |
| Can you speculate from what you have seen anything about the dynamic in that cockpit during that flight? | |
| No, I can't. | |
| And suffice to say that in my view, a senior captain, when he has a young co-pilot on his last training flight before finally getting his co-pilot wings, | |
| so to speak, can tell the young co-pilot to go take a coffee break and the co-pilot will do so. | |
| And once you're out of the cockpit, as we've seen in other incidences like German wings, the remaining pilot can shut the door and lock it for all. | |
| Indeed. | |
| And we often see that there is a climate of deference in many cockpits. | |
| I've watched a lot of documentaries about air crashes and how they happen. | |
| And sometimes if you get somebody who is very experienced, like the pilot on this plane, and somebody who is not nearly as experienced, they will defer to the pilot, do whatever the pilot says, and the pilot is ultimately responsible for the plane. | |
| But even in the most extreme circumstances, we can only speculate, but that's what might have happened. | |
| Yeah, that's pure speculation, but the evidence shows a pilot who diverted the aircraft, was not following the flight plan, was going in completely the opposite direction, and was following a path into the southern Indian Ocean where it was very clear it was a one-way trip because you have fuel to get there, but you can't get back. | |
| There was a little bit of dithering, though, on the way that your plot shows. | |
| And the speculation about that is, and it is all speculative, that the pilot may have been, the pilot may have taken control of the plane, have taken it off its course for some reason, and may have been involved in some kind of political negotiation by radio, perhaps, during that period, that we know nothing about. | |
| Or he was simply contemplating what he was about to do. | |
| Indeed, there was for 20 minutes in the earlier part of the flight into the Indian Ocean a holding pattern for 20 minutes or so. | |
| And you wouldn't go into a holding pattern if you were just trying to lose the aircraft in the furthest possible remotest part of the southern Indian Ocean. | |
| So the question comes, what was that holding pattern about? | |
| It could be a holding pattern waiting for some answer in some communication or negotiation. | |
| It could be he was checking to see if he was being followed by another aircraft. | |
| It could be he was just biding time and Trying to decide what his next step was. | |
| But there was, as you say, a certain dithering. | |
| It wasn't just a very goal-oriented, straight-line path to the furthest and remotest part of the Indian Ocean. | |
| The possible crash location that you've located is very specific. | |
| And it's not a huge area in terms of this vast area of the southern Indian Ocean. | |
| And, you know, if you look at the map, there is a vast space of nothingness between Perth on the right and Durban in South Africa on the left, isn't there? | |
| It's a huge, vast area. | |
| But you've pinpointed a very specific area for this search. | |
| But apparently that area has been searched before, hasn't it? | |
| It has been partly searched before. | |
| It is, however, exceedingly difficult terrain on the sea floor. | |
| We're talking a depth of about 4,000 meters. | |
| We're talking ridges and cliffs and canyons. | |
| There are even two underwater volcanoes in this area. | |
| So it is incredibly difficult. | |
| It's not just a flat, nice, easy seabed area to go and search with sonar. | |
| And sonar systems have to spend a lot of time avoiding the difficult terrain rather than actually checking for the wreckage. | |
| If the Australian authorities decide after reviewing the evidence that you presented to them that a new search immediately or very quickly is justified, can they act unilaterally? | |
| No, they need to agree with the Malaysian authorities. | |
| There were also a large number of passengers, Chinese nationals on board. | |
| And up until now, the agreement has been between Malaysia, China and Australia. | |
| Obviously, Australia have been asked to lead it because it's in their airspace where the crash took place. | |
| But there needs to be, obviously, an agreement. | |
| But as I mentioned earlier, the Malaysian authorities have indicated they're in contact with the Australian authorities and they're actively looking at and reviewing my report. | |
| I have also passed that on to the Malaysian authorities. | |
| It's been claimed just quickly and finally that there's been some foot dragging over all of this because the Malaysian authorities realize that if it is deemed that there was some nefarious action by the pilot or by somebody in control of the plane, then they may be in line for very expensive lawsuits. | |
| Yes, if it's proven that the pilot or the airline are at fault, then they are, of course, exposing themselves to expensive lawsuits. | |
| But on the other hand, what I'm doing is presenting new data with new technology, and it is perfectly in order, in my view, that they request peer review and other scientists have a chance to speak their mind on the work that I've done. | |
| What are you waiting for now? | |
| I'm waiting for the green light for a new search. | |
| If I had two million to spare, Howard, I would be out there tomorrow looking. | |
| Richard, well, congratulations on your work because it seems that you have taken things further than many other people involved in this. | |
| I think it's amazing what you have done. | |
| Let's see what happens next. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| Richard Godfrey in Frankfurt. | |
| You can read about that story in a number of newspapers, including The Sun, during this last week. | |
| Richard Godfrey, and I do hope Richard's research provides him and everybody else the answers that we so desperately need after eight years. | |
| Now, Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson, and the fate of his great project. | |
| Well, they are restarting the selling of tickets for Virgin Atlantic. | |
| According to CNN, Virgin Galactic is reopening sales of its $450,000 tickets that get customers a 90-minute joyride aboard an air-launched rocket that brushes the edge of space. | |
| You might remember that Sir Richard did this himself, and everybody saw it on TV, and then they had a few problems. | |
| So let's hear from my radio show, Nicholas Schmidtel, who wrote the excellent book, Test Gods, all about the evolution and development of Virgin Galactic. | |
| This is Nicholas Schmidtel from my radio show. | |
| Nicholas, thank you for doing this. | |
| What do you think has gone wrong for Virgin Galactic? | |
| Thanks for having me on, first of all. | |
| I mean, I think that Virgin Galactic has always been plagued by this identity crisis that the company has always been wrestling with, which is that it was created sort of with the DNA and the fabric of an experimental rocket ship company, of a prototyping program that has tried to translate that into a commercial viable business and a commercially viable business. | |
| And it just has always, I think that anyone who's been involved with the program has known that was going to be a challenge from the beginning. | |
| And I think that it's just kind of catching up with the company now, which is that it is one thing to put a spacecraft into space once or twice. | |
| It's another thing to make a business of it. | |
| And they're, I think, just finding this out the hard way. | |
| And Richard Branson has always enjoyed having fun in his projects. | |
| And it always seemed to me that this was a fun project for him. | |
| Of course, the person who spearheaded his test flight was him himself. | |
| And I can understand why. | |
| But Bezos stole all the headlines by taking William Shatner up and then repeating the feat. | |
| Well, that's the thing. | |
| So repeatability, right? | |
| I mean, has always been the catchword for the company. | |
| And if you look at now, Virgin Galactic has flown, has completed four spaceflights. | |
| Blue Origin has completed three. | |
| But Blue Origin did them in July of 2021, August of 2021, December of 2021. | |
| So they took longer to get out of the gate, but they are doing it consistently. | |
| Whereas Virgin Galactic had a spaceflight in December of 18, February of 19, May of 2021, a two-year break, right? | |
| And then July of 2021. | |
| And now they have been grounded since that July 2021 flight. | |
| And so I think what exactly what you're saying, which is that Bezos sort of took his time building a program deliberately, cautiously, and the whole configuration, I mean, it gets very technical, but Blue Origin is using a vertical takeoff and landing configuration, a very traditional, you know, it looks like we assume rockets look. | |
| It takes off vertically, it lands vertically, which is different, obviously. | |
| They're not just chucking the rockets into the ocean. | |
| But what Virgin Galactic had always, what their whole configuration was, and what they had pioneered was very much dovetailed with Branson's swashbuckling billionaire with the scarf flapping in the wind, which is that you were towed up to altitude by this mothership and then you were flying, you were aboard this flown rocket ship that was going to then enter this really steep incline and go into the steep turn, the steep ascent into space. | |
| And so for someone who spent four and a half, five years writing, you know, first magazine story and then a book about Virgin Galactic, that is always what I found to be so magical about the program was the way they were sort of doing it. | |
| They were doing it in a way that was much more romantic, and yet they were doing it in a way that always seemed like it was going to be harder to make a real business out of it. | |
| And so, you know, you see that the chairman of Virgin Galactic, just Chamath, has just resigned. | |
| You know, you see the stock price tanking. | |
| You see that they've got no projected flights over the course of the next several months. | |
| And I just think that all of those challenges are, again, are just sort of catching up with them now. | |
| Plus, they've got another issue. | |
| Once they get themselves back on and they're taking bookings again, they've got an enormous backlog of people who've already coughed up this vast amount of money to do this. | |
| So before they can start looking forward, they've got to look back. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, so they have 600 people, apparently, on their customer roles. | |
| They are currently only able to fly four passengers per flight. | |
| The spaceship was designed to carry six passengers, but because of weight issues and because of performance issues, right now the passenger load is four. | |
| So that's a lot of flights. | |
| It's a lot of flights that need to go perfectly well. | |
| No mistakes whatsoever to even, like you said, to clear the backlog before you can really start turning a profit. | |
| And I just don't see how, I mean, let's be generous. | |
| Let's give them, let's say, okay, say they can get six people on. | |
| So they're going to fly 100 flights between now and when. | |
| They've flown four over the course of the past four years, and they're going to fly 100 over the course of the next how many years to begin sort of to clear that backlog. | |
| It's a really, really, really challenging road, I think, ahead for them. | |
| Again, as a company, as a technology, as a wow, as a wow, look at this incredible program. | |
| Look at this, configure this rocket configuration. | |
| And there may actually turn out to be unforeseen uses of their air launch system that could be used down the road. | |
| But it's just, it's hard for me to see how this company under this stock ticker is going to sort of do all the things that it says it's going to do. | |
| Which is a shame because we discussed when we talked about your book that you'd meticulously researched, you'd even been embedded with Virgin Galactic. | |
| Nobody else had been in the way that you'd been. | |
| But it's a shame because of their almost, as we say here in the UK, daring do aviator type approach. | |
| But the hard economics of it surely will catch up with Richard Branson eventually, if only for the cost of fuel. | |
| People booking in future are probably going to have to pay a surcharge, I would have thought, on top of what they're paying. | |
| And in any case, some of those people who might have been your potential clients may be feeling the pinch themselves and will decide not to go. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, so precisely. | |
| I mean, you so the first 600 put up $250,000 to get their reservations. | |
| The next, however many, the next sort of tranche of customers are going to be putting up $450,000. | |
| And suddenly this rhetoric that the company likes to use of that they're going to quote unquote democratize space, when tickets are going to be now selling, could be selling for, if prices continue to double, tickets will very soon be well over a million dollars. | |
| And yeah, it's just, it's not, it doesn't mesh with the rhetoric. | |
| It doesn't mesh with the reality. | |
| And it is unfortunate because I do think what the engineers and the test pilots and the technicians were doing out in Mojave, California for most of the last decade, I mean, well over the last decade, but certainly from late 2000, 2009 until 2019 or so when they moved to New Mexico, that flight test program was really kind of a, you know, it was a crazy experiment. | |
| I mean, they were trying to build a rocket ship in the middle of the California desert that was going to fly to space and that was going to, you know, it was going to be flown. | |
| This is what you and I spoke about last time. | |
| It was, it was going to be flown and not just automated. | |
| And that was, that was, that was really cool to witness and cool to watch. | |
| And it is a shame that they've not been able to make a go of it. | |
| But in the end, it actually raises some really interesting questions about automation and about the humans in the loop and all these questions we have about artificial intelligence, because you see a company like Virgin Galactic trying to do it the old way and not being able to make a go of it, while a company like Blue Origin does it in a way that is slightly more, shall we say, automated, shall we say sterile perhaps, but is ultimately going to be the one who probably is going to make a business out of this. | |
| And, you know, as I said, the question is, who do you want, which billionaire do you want to be the one taking you to space? | |
| Do you want the guy who has dressed in wedding dresses and has kind of done every bit of marketing buffoonery slash marketing genius to get his name out there? | |
| Or do you want the guy who's going to get your package to your front step in two days? | |
| And ultimately, one is less interesting, perhaps, but is more reliable. | |
| And I think if you're someone who's paying for a space trip, you want reliability. | |
| For a period, technical issues kept them off schedule, we were told. | |
| Do you think that those technical issues were actually practically more business issues? | |
| I think it's one and the same, to be honest. | |
| I think that the technical issues, which are that, you know, we could kind of name many of them. | |
| But for instance, let's use the fact that they have one, they're dependent on one mothership right now. | |
| So they have one vehicle that can carry their rocket ship up to altitude, and at which point then the rocket ship drops off and flies. | |
| So that vehicle, that mothership has been, it has been airborne since 2008. | |
| It has completed dozens of flights. | |
| The pylon that attaches the rocket ship to the mothership, it was just, it was breaking down. | |
| There were cracks in the pylon. | |
| There had been various issues with the pylon and the security of the pylons. | |
| That's one of the things that I understand that they're now working on over the course of this extended period in which they've grounded the fleet. | |
| So that is a technical issue. | |
| That is also clearly a business issue, because if you don't have a working mothership, then you don't have a working business that can launch rocket ships multiple times a week. | |
| And so some of these technical, I think it's all hand in glove at this point. | |
| And I think that it's hard to separate that. | |
| And there are, yeah, I think that the problem too is that you begin to build up the longer the business takes to get going, then you're going to lose some of your better technical minds. | |
| And then you are going to have your technical issues are going to only get worse. | |
| And it's only going to, you know, hurt the business more. | |
| And so it's a little bit of a, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, they're all, they're all connected very much. | |
| So last question, Nick. | |
| He's got to put on a show and put it on soon. | |
| He does. | |
| And I don't know how what can he do besides, I mean, they've now, I just saw the website, you know, they've kind of rebranded the logo. | |
| You know, they've just lost their chairman. | |
| You know, what's what's the big, what's the big move? | |
| They've, they can only do what they can do. | |
| And so, you know, at one point, I know there was talk about Lady Gaga doing a concert, you know, a brief concert in midair. | |
| So, I mean, something like that, could something like that sort of, you know, turned publicity in their favor? | |
| Maybe, but they still need to, that's the smoke and mirrors aspect. | |
| It still doesn't often, it still doesn't address the fact that, you know, can they do this multiple times a week? | |
| And that is what is ultimately going to drive, you know, the stock price and the reliability of the viability of the business and the, you know, the future of the company. | |
| And stunts have a habit of going wrong. | |
| I'm old enough to remember a broadcaster in the UK called Noel Edmonds, who was very popular on television on Saturday nights. | |
| And he tried to connect with a man called Fergal Sharkey, playing his latest hit record in a plane somewhere over the UK live, and it didn't work. | |
| So stunts are a bit of a problem, I think. | |
| So we'll see. | |
| Nicholas, thank you very much. | |
| Keep us posted. | |
| When do you think, realistically, we'll hear or see something from Sir Richard? | |
| I think that, you know, when they went down in September, they were going to go down for nine months. | |
| That was the projected period of time. | |
| And those projections often are overambitious. | |
| So I think it would be, it's hard for me to imagine how they're ready to start flying again anytime before this summer. | |
| And, you know, at that point, if Blue Origin has completed six, seven, you know, spaceflights, it's, gosh, you know, Virgin Galactic was out of the market out in front first, but it's going to be hard for them to catch up. | |
| Nicholas Schmidt, the latest on Virgin Galactic, and I do definitely recommend his book that is all about the development and internal workings of Virgin Galactic. | |
| The book is called Test Gods, and he is called Nicholas Schmidtel. | |
| Last up, a seasonal update on big cats. | |
| Never a week goes by now without the British newspaper reporting the sighting of some large feline somewhere in this country. | |
| And there is an ongoing mystery about these cats and how they're out there and apparently breeding and remaining quite elusive, depending on the conditions and depending on whether people happen to be in the right place at the right time to see them. | |
| But there is no doubt now that they exist in numbers in this country. | |
| There have been some recent sightings. | |
| So we're going to discuss here, this is from my radio show, some recent sightings, but also the research that is done on carcasses. | |
| Now, some of this is quite bloody stuff. | |
| So if you are squeamish, if you're easily disturbed by material like this, just to warn you that it might be a good idea to skip this item. | |
| If not, I think you'll find it fascinating. | |
| Here is Rick Minter from Big Cat Conversations. | |
| Rick, how are you doing tonight? | |
| Very well, thank you. | |
| I enjoyed the segment just now on perception and bias because it's so relevant, of course, to taking Big Cat reports. | |
| Of course it is, because people can be convinced they're seeing one thing when perhaps they're seeing another. | |
| They may not, like they say with crime reports, you can get three people and ask them to give an eyewitness report of the bank robbery and all of them will see it differently. | |
| Yeah, you just got to be as objective as you can and look for things like consistency and common factors. | |
| And of course, I always feel it's interesting when I'm asked for my view on, like you will ask me for a view sometimes on a photograph, a ledged photograph in the newspaper of a big cat. | |
| And I often think, well, actually, my view doesn't count much because I'm probably not that influential because people will perceive me as biased because I'm sort of seen as too involved in the subject. | |
| So I do get that. | |
| I do understand that sort of baggage that will surround people like myself. | |
| But that's the difference between a good investigator like you and maybe somebody who's just kind of doing it for a hobby. | |
| You know, you're not going into it from the perspective of I want to believe that every report that I get is what it purports to be. | |
| You know, you're willing to be very selective about which reports you believe and which you can verify. | |
| Yeah, you've got to be honest as well. | |
| I think you also got to be very gentle with witnesses who are sending you information that doesn't tick the boxes, but they might come back again in the future. | |
| And you don't want to undermine their interest and their confidence because if they've got an interest and they get involved in the subject and the wider subject are just nature and the outdoors and wildlife, that's great. | |
| And you don't want to discourage it by just saying, no, that's rubbish. | |
| Don't come to me with dog prints that are clearly dog prints and not big cat prints. | |
| I try to encourage everybody. | |
| Now, that said, Rick, it seems to me, because, of course, I do scour the newspapers and one of the first search terms I put into my browser every morning is big cat sighting and see what it draws up. | |
| And there's usually something. | |
| There seems to have been a recent steady stream of them. | |
| I know that it may not be the biggest and most important sighting of all time, but there was one in a place that I know pretty well, Colwyn Bay, quite recently, North Wales coast. | |
| Yeah, yeah, that's right. | |
| You sent it to me, your producer sent it to me to have a look at. | |
| And yeah, it was sort of unremarkable, but interesting because of the location on the edge of a sort of residential area in mid-North Wales, near to where there's been lots of other reports in the past two or three years, and perhaps going back longer, but they haven't made the media. | |
| Yeah, so and it was interesting because although it was just a couple seeing a big black cat and it was potentially credible, there was nothing sort of that surprising about it, like many others. | |
| But in the newspaper report, in the comments section, five other people said they'd also seen one nearby in North Wales and wrote about it. | |
| And yeah, so it's an example of one report triggers another because people don't feel the odd one out so much. | |
| Of course, North Wales and the Cheshire border around Chester and those sorts of areas that those of us who are from Liverpool know so well is lucky in that it has an active monitoring group. | |
| Not everybody, you know, not every area has that, does it? | |
| That's right. | |
| Yeah, although there are lots of Facebook groups now across Britain, but there are a few black holes in the monitoring groups. | |
| And yeah, it's getting better coverage. | |
| But of course, a lot of it works by trust as well. | |
| Some people may not trust their monitoring group because they might feel there's some baggage or a lot of people, I think, just don't report the reports anyway because they fear sort of repercussions or they want to concerned about actually giving the animal away and potentially inviting trophy hunters and compromising the animal that they thought was very special. | |
| And most witnesses think it's sort of more positive than negative about these sightings. | |
| And what about in your bailiwick? | |
| Gloucestershire has always been fairly alive with these reports. | |
| Has it been a good month or so? | |
| Yeah, well, we've had a couple of lynx reports, and that's always number three in the list. | |
| It goes Black Panther, about 75% of the reports across Britain. | |
| The Sandy Brown puma, also called Mountain Lion and Cougar, gets about most of the rest. | |
| But you always get every year the odd few lynx-like reports. | |
| And we've had two in Gloucestershire, and there's been one in Scotland as well. | |
| And the one in Scotland is actually a photograph taken, which is, I believe it is a lynx. | |
| It's in the distance too much, so it'll never be proven. | |
| It's not a sort of influential photo, but it's got that slim sleekness, and the witness report said it actually followed them and their dog, and their dog got nervous on a forestry track. | |
| So follow-up investigations are going on there in southern Scotland following that one. | |
| I know you know a lot about the behaviour of these creatures, you know, what they do and how they, you know, they want to keep themselves to themselves like most of nature, but occasionally their paths intertwine with ours. | |
| In the period that we've had these last few days, this may seem a strange question, but when it's been blowing an absolute gale, peak gusts on the Isle of Wight, 122 miles an hour at the needles, even here in the suburbs of London, southwest London-Surrey border, you know, we had some very, very violent winds on Friday, like I've never seen here. | |
| What do these creatures do in conditions like that? | |
| Well, I think two things. | |
| They hunker down like they normally do because these cats will spend the majority of their time, just like a domestic cat, resting and conserving energy and walking around their territory, but not so much in these conditions. | |
| But of course, when they want to hunt in these conditions and be the predator, which they need to be to get their food supply, these stormy conditions are ideal. | |
| And so you do get actually predation events happening on these stormy nights because it disorientates their main prey, like their main large prey item, like a deer, and it masks their sound even more. | |
| So I think they actually see it as they take advantage of these conditions. | |
| And we're going to talk about, I've sent you some pictures the last few days of fox carcasses and deer carcasses. | |
| And that's been the standout trend of information coming to me in the last month is deer carcasses, three different events of deer carcasses photographed and reported to me, one from Somerset, one from Surrey-Sussex border, and one from Wiltshire. | |
| The Wiltshire one involved three different fallow deer taken at intervals on an estate, a shooting estate. | |
| And the fox carcasses have come from southern Scotland and an area. | |
| And again, I've shown you one of those, photograph of one of those, and also in the Chilterns. | |
| Now, these carcasses, we've got to be careful when we examine these carcasses in the photographs or for real. | |
| I sometimes get to see them in situ for real. | |
| And of course, it's far better than looking at photographs. | |
| But deer do die in the winter, of course. | |
| There are lots of deer across Britain. | |
| There will be natural mortality in cold weather. | |
| But these carcasses don't look like dead deer that have just sort of withered away or been scavenged by foxes. | |
| The one that you sent me looked as if it had been absolutely surgically picked apart by something that was well experienced in doing that. | |
| Exactly. | |
| I think even lay people look at them and think, wow, this is something different. | |
| This looks like a large carnivore's been, this is the calling card of a large carnivore. | |
| And of course, this is what these cats will do in their native countries. | |
| A mountain lion in North America, the data shows from the radio-collared ones there that they will take in total about 50 mule deer or white-tailed deer, very similar to our roe deer and fallow deer here, equivalent sort of prey items, about 50 a year. | |
| So that's one a week, and they'll be snacking small prey in between. | |
| And so they gorge them, they take them down, ambush them, take them down, gorge them, gorge about half of it. | |
| If prey is hard to get or if winter conditions are really tough, they might come back to finish it off, even though it'll be scavenged. | |
| But if prey is easy to get, like it is in Britain, because there's deer and rabbits and pheasants everywhere, they often just allow it to be scavenged and don't come back. | |
| But these carcasses are a chance for us to get better evidence. | |
| And we talk about these sightings, but we do need better primary evidence of photos and DNA and tooth marks. | |
| And these carcasses provide us with that opportunity. | |
| I mean, I didn't, the picture that you sent me in particular struck me by the precision with which this creature had been taken down and dissected and stripped clean. | |
| You see that kind of thing. | |
| I knew southern Africa very well. | |
| I used to go there a lot. | |
| And quite often there are always parks and places to go where you can see some of the big five. | |
| And you will see the results of what lions, for example, do. | |
| And it's a very surgical looking thing. | |
| And you don't tend to see that here. | |
| If something has been attacked by a dog out of control or something, they'll shake it around and they'll be If you are of a nervous or squeamish disposition, maybe tune out for a bit now. | |
| But a domestic dog that's gone wild will shake a thing about, I suspect. | |
| But this is something that's been done by a creature that makes its living that way. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| And you still have to be objective. | |
| Even though the sort of first glance is, oh, we're in business here. | |
| This looks like the large carnivore's been at it. | |
| You still have to go through a checklist and things like, you know, the grass will be normally flattened all around because they eat lying down and dogs, you know, eat standing up. | |
| And it's unlikely that dogs can kill a deer, of course, but they wouldn't sort of gorge it and eat 20, 30 pounds of meat overnight in that sort of clinical way. | |
| But another, some things on the checklist are, are the sort of rib ends really sheared by the carnassial teeth? | |
| And if it's foxes scavenging, they just chew. | |
| And things like the stomach is left out. | |
| Just like a domestic cat will leave a mouse's stomach out on the patio, for example, the deer's stomach will be left out because these are strict carnivores, these cats. | |
| They can't eat vegetable matter. | |
| And so a stomach of a herbivore is full of vegetable matter. | |
| Grassy remains being digested in the stomach. | |
| So that's a big tick if the stomach is left clinically sort of out of the way. | |
| And they just do that with their paws to not contaminate the carcass. | |
| But yeah, we can get evidence by swabbing the carcasses for the saliva of the culprit. | |
| We can look at the tooth marks on the bones if there are any. | |
| And there are a couple in these latest carcasses. | |
| Yes, you sent the photograph of the tooth marks and it's very revealing. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Now, again, in theory, they could be dogs' tooth marks. | |
| So you've got to go through this forensic process. | |
| And it's great that we have a university in Britain doing this, the Royal Agricultural University here in Gloucestershire, in Cirencester. | |
| And they've got 15 samples verified. | |
| They've looked at many more. | |
| And some of those other ones may be big cat related, but they can't quite prove it with the forensic process. | |
| Because there's a process where you look at the pattern of the little pock marks. | |
| They're called tooth pits. | |
| And they come from the little sharp cusps of the carnassial teeth, which are the shearing teeth. | |
| And they sometimes clamp on the bone and make these little pock marks. | |
| And the spacing and the distance of those can be measured with calipers, digital calipers, and looked at through microscopes. | |
| And the pattern of those is different in dog evolution from cat evolution. | |
| So they can say, yeah, these match, in some cases, we've got 15 of those and more being looked at. | |
| The 15 of them say these match the size of a leopard or puma size cat. | |
| They can't get you to the species, like DNA can get you to the species, obviously. | |
| But they can still help say, you know, we can verify this. | |
| This has been processed by a large cat in Britain. | |
| I guess if enough of this research is done, and I don't know how much of this kind of research has been done, but it would give you a map, wouldn't it? | |
| It would help you to quite accurately, if there was a lot of research of this kind done, it would help you to quite accurately say where the big cats are. | |
| Yes, but it depends on sort of good informance and getting to these bits of evidence fresh and quickly and whatever. | |
| So, and of course, we'd really like to get more of them swabbed very early and see if we can get the DNA. | |
| But of course, so often foxes will come upon the carcass and scavenge it. | |
| So you're swabbing and you get the fox scavenging saliva rather than the original culprit saliva. | |
| But also we must try and put these camera traps up looking at these carcasses to see if the culprit does sometimes return because it's our best chance to get really close-up, good, clear footage of a large cat. | |
| Strange left field question, but then I'm noted for these, Rick. | |
| I'm fortunate enough to live in a very humble and quite shabby these days flat that is urgently in need of renovation. | |
| But it's in a very nice location. | |
| I'm not very far from one of Her Majesty's royal parks. | |
| And you see all kinds of things in these royal parks. | |
| As far as you know, have there been any sightings of cats of the kind that you research in the royal parks of London, around the London fringes? | |
| It's a good thought because they would like those cases because they are very much like savannah environments full of deer, which is their prey, of course. | |
| I suppose the closest we have to that is Epping Forest. | |
| That is an ancient deer forest and full of wood pasture and full of deer, obviously full of traffic and full of people and visitors. | |
| But we do get reports, very credible reports in Epping Forest. | |
| And what I also would say is that there may be reports very occasionally. | |
| I don't think they'd be routinely in those locations because they're just too much disturbance for them. | |
| But when people do see them, they're probably extra likely to keep it quiet because they feel nobody's going to believe them. | |
| But also, if you're a ranger or a warden or a groundsman type person for those locations, it's a bit awkward to admit it. | |
| And those professional people who sometimes are in the know about credible sightings, reports tend to keep it quiet because they realize how awkward it is. | |
| So, yeah, there's the dilemma of the subject, isn't it? | |
| We have informants, but they don't always relay the information. | |
| For reasons that I totally understand. | |
| And of course, we are in no way implying that those things are there. | |
| We simply do not know. | |
| But it's the kind of territory, especially the likes of Epping Forest, where they might well inhabit. | |
| You know, the deer, I have to say, my local deer are astonishing. | |
| You know, you get to know them individually. | |
| I can remember once cycling, and here comes another one of my stories. | |
| I can remember once cycling around the park wearing a radio headset. | |
| There are still some people who wear those things straight out of the 1980s. | |
| I'm one of those people. | |
| You know, those radio headsets have got a little antenna on the top. | |
| Now, deer don't have great eyesight, I understand. | |
| And one particular deer thought that I was a threat because I was cycling around with this sticky-up antenna that looked like antlers. | |
| Another true story. | |
| And then there was the time I took my sister for a walk in the park, and my sister was wearing a camel-coloured cashmere coat. | |
| And a large male deer, I think, mistook my sister for a smaller female deer. | |
| So those things happen. | |
| Sorry, we're not talking about deer at all. | |
| Yeah, you've got to be careful because they can be dangerous, of course, deer. | |
| Well, indeed. | |
| I mean, that's the thing. | |
| And people, you know, this is just an important point on behalf of the people, certainly in the royal parks, people, I've noticed, sometimes in the summertime, you see people from out of the area attempting to feed them, which you must not do. | |
| You know, they have, just like all of nature, they have a specific constitution. | |
| And, you know, please don't do what I've seen some people do. | |
| Some people in the summertime who don't know better and don't read the signs telling you not to attempt to feed them. | |
| So please don't do that. | |
| So anyway, on the big cat hunt, back to the point, Rick. | |
| What's going to be your next task then? | |
| What are you going to be doing in the next week or so? | |
| I will be trying to coordinate some of the toothpit work with the Royal Agriculture University, and we might see if one of those carcasses has been delivered. | |
| I mean, normally people send the bone samples into the university and swab and send the swabbing material to a lab. | |
| But in fact, one of the deer carcasses has been delivered to the Royal Agricultural University, which creates a problem because you've then got a sort of a smelly rotting carcass to get rid of somewhere. | |
| And that's a practical problem. | |
| But we might see if it's fresh enough to swab for the saliva. | |
| Then you've got to guess where on the carcass the culprit's saliva might be. | |
| Where has it licked? | |
| Where has it sunk its teeth into? | |
| Where are the rib ends fresh enough to have saliva on them? | |
| So that's your tactical judgment. | |
| So it's real forensic detective work. | |
| Yeah, very tricky because foxes have normally been all over them very quickly afterwards as well. | |
| There's foxes everywhere. | |
| The remarkable Rick Minter from Big Cat Conversations on those elusive creatures. | |
| We will hear more from Rick, of course, very soon. | |
| Here on the podcast and on the radio show before that, Nicholas Schmidtel, the author of Test Gods about the current travails, I guess you could call them of Virgin Galactic. | |
| We'll watch for reports on how they do during 2022. | |
| And before that, Richard Godfrey, diligent and tireless aerospace expert, trying to find answers on the fate of Flight MH370 after eight years. | |
| More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained. | |
| So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This has been the Unexplained Online. | |
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