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May 9, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
57:05
Edition 633 - UFOs In The UK
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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.
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Okay, two guests from my TV show, from the first edition of it on this edition of The Unexplained, both of them you will know.
Philip Mantle, of course, founder of Flying Disc Press, leading ufologist in the UK for more than 40 years of effort on his part.
Always a fantastic guest talking about his new book about UFO landings and encounters in the UK.
A wonderful book, full, absolutely packed with stories.
So we'll talk with Philip about that.
I actually spoke with him on May the 1st on the TV show when he launched the book on that date.
And before Philip Mantle, Professor R. V. Loeb, Harvard astrophysicist and of course founder of the Galileo Project, who got himself into the New York Post and the Sun newspaper in the UK, I believe, with an astonishing story.
And we're going to start with R.V. Loeb on this edition of The Unexplained.
As I say, two edited interviews from my TV show here to be kept for posterity on this edition of the show.
New York Post.
This is the story.
A top scientist is plotting a mission to find what he believes is alien technology lying at the bottom of the Pacific.
Controversial astrophysicist, that's their phrase, RV Loeb, believes an interstellar object that crash-landed on Earth in 2014 was some form of spacecraft.
A U.S. Space Command report released last week, this was two weeks ago now, confirmed the object was from another star system.
The agency concluded the projectile, which streaked across the sky off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, was a meteor.
Avi Loeb has a different view of this, and this is our conversation from my TV show.
It's a great pleasure to join you, and this time I can actually see you.
That's wonderful, Howard.
Your chair is much more impressive than the one that I've got, Arvi, but so nice of you to do this.
Now, look, let's start with this.
How do you feel about being described as controversial?
Do you see yourself as controversial?
No, I don't.
I think I'm using common sense.
And it's possible some of my colleagues have a problem with dealing with the unexplained and exploring the unknown.
And that's why they resist discussions of this type.
But all I'm saying is based on facts.
And we can discuss this in the context of this meteor in particular.
It was discovered by military sensors that the US employs as a missile defense system.
And the data was online since the discovery on January 8th, 2014.
And I asked my student, Amir Siraj, to look at the data and check if any meteor in the catalog that the government released, if any of them, could have come from outside the solar system.
And we looked at the fastest moving objects and found this one.
And it was clearly from outside the solar system because it moved at 60 kilometers per second relative to the sun, way far from the sun.
So it was clearly unbound to it.
And so we wrote a scientific paper about it.
And then the reviewer of the paper argued, we don't believe the US government.
They didn't release the uncertainties in the measurement.
And for me, it was obvious that if the government reports data, they know the measurements very accurately because they need to tell if a ballistic missile is heading towards Boston or New York City.
And nevertheless, my colleagues rejected the paper from being published.
And then I reached out to some people in government.
And it took three years for the office of, I mean, the U.S. Space Command under the Department of Defense to release a public letter to NASA stating that the conclusion we had in our paper is correct, that this object indeed is interstellar.
It came from outside the solar system at the 99.999% confidence.
So they confirmed, the government confirmed our conclusion.
And moreover, the government released the light curve of the fireball.
When this object entered the atmosphere, it exploded in the lower atmosphere about 18.7 kilometers above the ocean near Papua New Guinea.
And we used this light curve to calculate that, in fact, the material strength of this object was unusual.
You know, it was 20 times stronger, tougher than stony meteorites.
So it cannot be rock.
And it was even tougher than iron meteorites.
So just think about it, an object that is very rare in its composition and in its speed.
It was moving faster than most stars relative to the sun far away.
So clearly unusual.
Now, the bottom line is this is intriguing enough for us to design an expedition to scoop the ocean floor that we are planning to do in the coming year.
And basically, we will mow the lawn, I call it, basically have a magnet with, you know, on a sled that will scoop the ocean floor and attract all the fragments from this meteor and collect them.
And, you know, if we find that the composition is of some rare alloy of metals that nature never puts together, that it's artificially made, you know, it might well be a spacecraft that well.
I'm going to bring you back to the beginning of the conversation where I said controversial.
That is going to be the bit that is going to get you criticized, I guess.
The idea that it might be something that somebody has made.
Now, you said the same thing about Umuamua, that cigar-shaped piece of rock that flew past us, and you were brave enough to encourage us to think out of the box about this thing, which you're doing with this.
What do you think is the likelihood that somebody made this, as opposed to this just being a naturally occurring thing that is not something that we find anywhere within our purview, anywhere within our immediate region?
It's from a long, long way away, so it's different.
What do you think is the possibility that it's something that somebody or something actually created?
Well, the fact that the fireball was generated low in the atmosphere means that the object was very tough, tougher than iron.
And that makes me quite inspired to go and find out what its composition was.
Now, this object was roughly half a meter in size because the fireball released 2% of the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
So that tells us about the size of the object, half a meter, much smaller than Omuamua.
Omuamua was the size of a football field, about 200 times bigger.
And there are probably many more small objects.
You know, NASA never launched a spacecraft as big as Omuamua as the size of a football field, but it did launch a lot of objects the size of this meteor, half a meter.
So I would say, you know, the Earth is serving as a fishing net that collected this object.
Let's figure out what this fish is.
And even if it turns out to be natural, you know, it will cost us a thousand times less to examine the fragments.
We can put our hands on the fragments of this object.
If we wanted to do the same with a space object like Oumuamua, it would cost us about a billion dollars.
You know, that's much more complicated.
And here we have a completely new window that was opened with this meteor that in the future we can find objects colliding with the Earth.
Just think about New Horizons, the spacecraft launched to explore Pluto that will exit the solar system.
In a billion years, it will not be functional, but it could collide with a habitable planet like the Earth.
And the astronomers there could search the relics, the fragments left over from New Horizons at the bottom of the ocean that they have on their planet.
And my point is, you know, there could be equipment floating in space that we will collide with every now and then.
So let's figure it out.
It's fascinating, Arvi.
And I love the fact that you think out of the box with this, because if we're to make any progress, we need to be doing that.
And the scientific community needs to be listening.
I'm sure large portions of it are.
How does this tie into the Galileo?
Just quickly, how does this tie into the Galileo project, that search that you're spearheading with so many well-known, famous, and committed people to try and get a handle on the reality, the possibility that we're not alone?
How does this tie into that?
Yeah, it ties very well.
I should say a few minutes before I joined your show, I welcomed the first postdoctoral fellow that I have within the Galileo project.
He came from the University of Cambridge in the UK, and he heard the British accent of your person calling me to join the show.
And overall, we had two objectives in the Galileo project when it was conceived.
One is to rendezvous the next to Muamua, basically take a close-up photograph of it.
And as I said, that will cost a billion dollars to do.
The second is to build telescope systems, which we are starting right now on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory to look at the unidentified aerial phenomena.
And now we have a third one, which is a fishing expedition, literally speaking.
We are going to the ocean, the ocean floor near Papua New Guinea within the coming year to scoop the fragments from an interstellar meteor.
All of this is very exciting.
And, you know, you will hear about what we find.
And, you know, that's the scientific method.
We shouldn't have a prejudice.
And of course, if we don't search, we will not find anything.
Absolutely.
And I commend everything that you do.
And I'm glad that you're comfortable with the term controversial.
I think all of the great scientists of our lifetimes and other lifetimes have been controversial people too.
If you don't think out of the box, what are we going to discover?
Arvi, thank you so much.
I'd love to talk with you at greater length again.
And I wish you well with this.
Just quickly, when does it start, Arvi?
Just has he gone?
Sorry.
When does this mission start?
The expedition, we currently have a ship committed at the end of 2023, but we might get it earlier.
We are trying to work this out, but it will be by the end of 2023, definitely.
Arvi Loeb, thank you very much.
Always a fascinating guest.
Always a pleasure to speak with Professor Arvi Loeb.
And that, a very interesting subject.
Let's hear how that expedition actually comes about and the way that they're planning to do it.
Coming next, spoken with on my TV show on the day that the book was released, Philip Mantle, founder of Flying Disc Press, distinguished ufologist of more than 40 years experience, wonderful guy to speak with at Pontefract in Yorkshire and my friend for a very long time.
As I say, I spoke with him on the release date of his book about UFO landings in the UK.
Here is that conversation.
Now, we're in for a treat this hour.
Philip Mantle, another old friend of this show, founder of Flying Disc Press, man who is a veteran ufologist, 40 years of studying these things, is online to us now, partly, in fact, mainly to talk about his new book, which is this one.
It's called UFO Landings UK.
This is an updated version of it.
This book is, I actually didn't count the number of pages in it, but let me see.
There are 200 and roughly 270.
I have never seen a compendium of so many stories, and they are stories collated over Decades, in fact, in some cases hundreds of years, of people who've believed that they have actually been part of, connected with, or affected by some kind of alien or UFO landing or encounter.
In this country, I'm not talking about Albuquerque, hot dog, jumping frog, and all that stuff, or I'm not talking about the Urals.
I'm talking about the United Kingdom.
Philip Mantle is one of the most diligent researchers I know, and he's collated a ton of stories that are all in this book, plus the documentation and the photographs that go with them.
All right, let's get him on in Pontefract tonight.
Philip, how are you?
Good evening, Howard.
Nice to speak to you.
My God, Philip, you've been busy this week.
You've been doing everybody's podcast and a lot of radio shows, I see.
Well, I do my best, you know, but the book won't sell itself, Howard.
Well, no.
Although, I should have got you to write the forward, shouldn't I?
Well, you know, I'm always available and very, as my boss here will tell you, very reasonably priced.
But what was it like to do American radio, though?
Because those American shows, they'll stick you on for three or four hours.
Yeah, and they always ask, where do you come from?
And when I say Pontefract, you know, they've never heard of it before.
So I think they know, if I say I'm about 60 miles from Liverpool, they've probably heard of that.
And I'm nowhere near London.
So, yeah, but they are different.
Pontefract.
Do you mean Podiac?
Oh, no, that's a part.
All right.
I don't know where to start with it.
Let's talk a little bit because we're being joined by new people tonight who perhaps never heard the podcast, which is available, 631 editions of it, at my website, theunexplained.tv.
Maybe they haven't heard that.
Maybe they never heard the six years of the radio show on Talk Radio.
So let's talk to me as if I've never spoken with you before.
How would you describe yourself?
Well, as a young man, you know, at high school, I always had an interest in all things paranormal, which wasn't a great way to attract the girlfriends at high school at the time.
But, you know, it's been with me all my life, Howard.
And I read a book that just had one chapter about UFOs on it when I was a teenager.
And it, you know, it sparked the interest.
After I left high school, there's a period I went to work in West Germany.
And I couldn't speak the language.
And so I phoned my mum and said, can you send me some books, mum?
And she sent me a box of books all on UFOs.
And when I returned home, I used to live about five miles outside of the city of Leeds.
It used to print and publish an evening newspaper, the Yorkshire Evening Post, still there.
And my aunt brought it round one evening.
She only lived around the corner and she showed me a small advert in it.
It was for the formation that Sunday.
We're talking 1979 here of the Yorkshire UFO Society.
And as you know, Howard, back in 1979 on a Sunday, it was like a ghost town.
But I got the bus, I found the location, and the society had been set up by two brothers, Mark and Graham Bertzel.
And they put on a presentation and I just felt I'd found my calling in life, you know, and from that day onwards, I've become a researcher, an investigator, a writer, an author of all things to do with the UFO phenomena.
Now, we've got to say, Philip, haven't we?
And you and I have known each other for a long time, that back in those days, and I was a student then and I was starting to get interested in all of these things.
And sometimes for the projects that I would do, I would do interviews with people like that.
There was no, you've got to imagine a world where there is no internet, where the only information about these things are the books that you might get, like you got sent occasional pieces in the newspapers that might be sensationalist, they might be taking the proverbial, they might be absolutely serious.
You paid your money, you took your choice.
There wasn't much out there.
And being able to connect with people who had similar interests to yours was very difficult.
I remember, and I've forgotten her name, but there was a woman behind Bufora, an organization called Bufora.
You will know who this is.
And I remember it took me the devil's own job to get this woman's phone number to phone her and ask for an interview.
That was probably my colleague, Jenny Randall.
Jenny Randall's.
Yeah, I was part of Bufora.
I was their director of investigations for some years.
I was conference organizer, press officer.
But yes, you know, back in the day, there wasn't no internet.
So it was information on the subject was hard to find.
And I was never satisfied just to sit there, Howard, and read about it.
I wanted to get up close and personal.
And the best way to do that was if you couldn't see the phenomena yourself, then speak to those that had.
And we were quite fortunate that in the early 1980s, as I got up and running, areas in and around the Yorkshire Dales National Park, around the town of Skipton, had a lot of sightings.
And somehow they found their way to us.
A lot of them did.
And of course, you know, we would go out to these locations, we'd speak to the local people that had seen these things.
And we'd make ourselves as visible as possible, hand out flyers, phone numbers, you name it.
And of course, in the early 1980s, one of the cases I investigated wasn't in the Dales.
It's just up the road from where I lived in what was then the mining town of Normanton.
And it was a lady and her family who reported a UFO landing.
And that, you know, spawned a lifelong interest, not only in the UFO phenomena, but in particular, you know, UFO landing cases.
And I use the expression that the late Dr. Alan Hynek uses.
He's the man who invented the phrase close encounter, worked on the movie of the same name, even had a cameo in it.
He talked of things that they call high strangeness.
So in other words, if you get up close and personal to these things and there's more witnesses and there's maybe some physical evidence and it's highly unlikely or less likely that you've misidentified it.
You know, you had an astronomer on earlier speaking about the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus.
I've seen that and it is absolutely beautiful.
But there are some people who still report planetary formations in the night sky as UFOs because they are just distant Lights and of course, you know, it's forgivable.
You can understand why people misinterpret things.
And I don't know about you, I would rather people reported things even if they were wrong in their interpretation than didn't report them at all.
I think we need to have that freedom.
I'm going to get to that Normanton case.
We've got an image from that from the book in a minute or two.
I just want to talk about some of the things that you've got in this book that go back, that fascinate me most.
So I'm being very selfish about this, but they're cases that are deep in history.
I've no idea how you got hold of these.
But if you'll bear with me, Philip, I'm just going to read a little bit from your book, okay?
Extract from British Magazine No.
8, 1767, right?
Way before Roswell, the era of modern ufology, and all of that stuff, 1757.
Quotes, Saturday, September the 12th, extract of a letter from Edinburgh, September the 8th.
We hear from Perthshire that an uncommon phenomenon was observed on the water of Idler, near Cooper Angus, preceded by a thick dark smoke which soon dispelled, and discovered a large luminous body like a house on fire,
but presently after took a form of something pyramidal and rolled forwards with impetuosity until it came to the water of Eric, up which river it took its direction with great rapidity and then disappeared a little above Blair Gowry.
Now, decoding that from the rather flowery and rather lovely language, that's a classic UFO sighting in 1767, isn't it?
Absolutely.
And of course, there was nothing that we had at that time that flew.
We didn't have hot air balloons.
That came much later.
So there was nothing that, you know, conventional that stands out that you could say, well, I think there might have been mistaken.
It was probably this.
But the word that does it, the phrase that pays, the word that really does it is pyramidal.
Because if we look forward in time to now, the number of times that people say, I saw something up there in the sky, I'm pointing out over the Thames River to Nightingale, I saw something up there, and it was pyramidal.
So to get that word appearing in something from hundreds of years ago, I think is very telling.
Well, a pyramidal or triangular, you know, a pyramid end on is triangular in shape.
And we have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of accounts of similar things.
There's being a piece of film, you're doing the rounds, allegedly from, you know, filmed on a US Navy ship that shows a pyramidal stroke triangular object in the sky above it, you know, flashing away.
And I mean, one of the interviews you mentioned, what it was like in America, they read that same account that you've just had and made the connection, you know, with that in the 18th century and things that we're seeing today without me saying a word.
And like I say, apart from the flowerbury language, if you were to report that today, then it would be a UFO landing account.
And it's amazing that, yeah, we have one in there from the early part of the 20th century that visually looks very similar to it.
Is this the case of Mr. TW in the Midlands?
Yes, yes.
Because I especially picked that one out.
That's fascinating.
I mean, look, I am completely sold on this book.
It is amazing the amount of research that you've done.
I mean, I know that you're not afraid of expending shoe leather and putting the work in, but my God, you've done it here.
Mr. T.W. in 1908 in the West Midlands, quoting the book, the little men who came out of the vehicle were about four foot six inches tall.
They did wear a loose-fitting uniform, and on top of their helmets were two pieces of metal or something about a quarter of an inch thick and nine inches long.
The uniform, quotes, was a greenish-blue colour.
That's straight out of close encounters.
It was 1908.
Absolutely.
You know, so you've got to come to a conclusion yourself, which is what I allow the book to do.
I'm not out to indoctrinate anyone.
And, you know, reach your own conclusions on these accounts.
Now, this Normanton experience, I'm just...
This was 1980, wasn't it?
Normanton, West Yorkshire.
Yeah, the summer of 1980.
And I'd done some local publicity and a lady gave me a call and she said, Philip, you won't believe me.
You won't believe me.
You won't believe me.
Give me a chance.
So my colleague Mark Burtzall and I arranged to go and see this lady.
Now, she lived in a terraced house in a cul de-sac.
There was no houses opposite them, Howard.
And it was an elevated house.
So you went up, you know, half a dozen stairs to get in the front door.
Right.
And just to say for the we're seeing the image that you gave me on the screen.
And she was washing the dishes after lunch and she had five children.
They were all outside playing a ball game.
And one of them come running in and said, mum, mum, mum, there's an airplane crashed in the field.
So at the bottom of this cul-de-sac was some trees, little stream, and then a hill with some electricity plying on them.
They went out to Ferrier Breeze Power Station that is closed now, but there's still the remnants of it.
And when she came out the front door, because it was an elevated house, she could see across this field.
And she said, it wasn't an aeroplane.
It was like a Mexican hat-shaped thing, but it was like a grey colour.
So she got the children down the cul-de-sac, down the trees, and they lose sight of it at one point.
They come up the other side and the field was bordered by a fence.
And this thing is still there.
But not only is it still there, there's now three tall men all dressed in white boiler suits with big boots on with something over their face.
They were that close, Howard, she said, they didn't have gloves on.
They had mittens that I could see that he, and they were waving something over the ground.
One of the children tried to climb the fence and she held him back.
And then these three men went to the rear of this thing.
It rose into a clear blue sky, stopped and shot off like a bat out of hell.
And she was, to say, perplexed, to say the least.
Now, she sat down at night thinking, this will be all over the news.
Lovely sunny day, people out and about.
The M62 motorway goes right past Normanton, you know, but nothing.
So she bought the local newspaper that week.
Again, nothing.
She even knocked on some neighbours' doors.
We don't know what you're talking about.
So when we interviewed him, we even interviewed one of the children's friends.
He'd gone home for lunch and missed all the excitement.
And he came back afterwards and he was pretty miffed, you know, that he'd missed the excitement.
Now, this lady's husband worked down the local mine.
I was born and bred in a mining town.
My father worked down the mines all of his life.
And so these were the type of people I grew up with and knew Howard.
The children were the ballgame they were playing is an invented one, but it was the same one we used to play when we were kids.
So we've only got a few seconds on this segment.
That account, you believe, the way that you've delivered it and, you know, you spoke to the witness, was absolutely credible.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, she was as puzzled by what she saw and what no one else seemed to have.
Isn't that amazing?
Sometimes people see these things and nobody else sees them.
That's one of those occasions at Normanton.
Philip Mantle is here, ufologist, UFO publisher, and the man behind UFO Landings UK, that book told you about.
We'll tell you details of that at the end of this.
Let's come more up to date now, bearing in mind that the book is absolutely replete with stories and images and details that go all the way through, as we say, those centuries, right up to 1908 we talked about.
Let's come up to the so-called modern UFO era.
And I think, and you do this yourself in the book, we have to put the benchmark there of the Kenneth Arnold case.
You know, that is even beyond Roswell and all the rest of it.
The Kenneth Arnold case is something from which everything else is judged.
Everything else seems to spring from there.
This is a private pilot, isn't it?
Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw nine shiny UFOs flying past Mount Rainier at incredible speeds.
So the Kenneth Arnold case basically, you think, opens the door on what we call the modern era of ufology?
That's right.
I mean, it was June the 24th, 1947.
And Kenneth Alwood reported this to the media.
So when he landed his private plane, just a local journalist, Howard, you know, you know what they're like, they said to him, how did these objects move through the sky?
And Kenneth Arnold said, like skipping a saucer on a pond.
And it was that statement, that flying saucers then entered popular culture.
And of course, this year is the 75th anniversary of it.
So that's the benchmark we use.
It's the time when the term flying saucer came into popular culture.
All dates back to Kenneth Arnold.
But crucially, the book, and one of the great things about the book, and again, I say I don't know how you were able to do all of that research and put in so much shoe leather into it.
But you talk about stories that are just pre-that era.
There is one that is a fascinating one.
It's at an RAF base, RAF Luddham or Luddom, in 1943.
I think we can see an image here now that relates to this.
This is Mr. Warren, John Warren, returning back to the base late after attending a dance at a local village about 12 miles away from the base.
He'd missed his last train, so he had no option but to walk 12 miles back to the base.
And once he left the village, there was nothing but open fields in front of him after walking for several miles.
And on the outskirts of the village of Ludham, Mr. Warren observed a green glow in the road up ahead of him.
But there was much more to this story in 1943 than that.
Absolutely.
I mean, I met Mr. Warren in the 1980s, and he was actually an armourer at the RAF base.
So whatever, you know, arms the fighter planes and the bombers had, he was part of that.
And he said, oh, as on what it, the one thing he was worried about, Howard, was getting back late because he could be in trouble.
And he's walking up, he says, it's the strangest thing you could ever imagine, Philip, that is this being stood next to the road with this box on its chest.
And this was shining a green light up into his face.
And behind it, there was an object shaped, what he described like a bell tent.
And that was also illuminated.
And to the left, that was two more figures.
And it just, he just froze.
Now, one of the things we don't say in the books, I interviewed Mr. Warren in the 1980s.
He still had all his marbles about him.
He'd recently retired.
And he said, it scared the living daylights out of me.
And he said, I'll tell you to the truth, Philip, had I been armed, I would have shot it.
Well, you can understand that he was a wartime.
Let's bring that image up again and let's just see the detail of that again.
Because when I first saw this, it reminded me of a TV character creation that I remember from when I was a kid.
The Cybernauts.
Do you remember them on TV?
I think they were part of the Avengers.
They kind of looked like that creature there.
And if anybody was a spaceman, that's it.
Well, you know, Mr. Wallen said, look, I don't know what this thing was, but I knew it wasn't one of us.
And if it wasn't one of us, then it must have been the enemy.
And I would have shot it.
And he scrambled back to the barracks.
And he was fortunate.
One of his friends was looking out for him and let him in through the window.
And he told his friend, you know, he reported this to Bufora in the 1960s.
And in the book, there's a copy of the letter.
But I spoke to him in the 1980s in person.
And it still was very vivid in his memory.
And he said, I have no idea what this thing was, Philip.
I cannot understand what happened that night.
This is, but I'll tell you now, I know what wasn't.
I wasn't inebriated.
You know, even if I had been, I've just walked 12 miles home.
That would have seen off any, any, any beer.
Yeah.
But look, the one thing, talking face to face with somebody, sorry to jump in here, Philip, but talking face to face with somebody, you can get an idea, even at several decades removed, which this was, you know, as to how frightened, and this was very scary for this guy, how frightened he was at the time.
So when you looked at him, even though it's decades on, you'd have got an idea of how that affected him.
Yeah, I mean, you could see he was sort of shifting in his chair when he was talking about this.
You know, he was moving around.
He wasn't trying to, you know, mislead me in any way.
And he was hoping that I might have some answers for him.
But I'm as baffled as he is.
Was anything else recorded at that time?
You know, did were there any since there was an RAF base close at hand?
And we know they didn't have all of the technical for sophistication of stuff that they've got today.
But did anything, was it monitored in any way?
Was it cause anybody to pique their attention?
Not that we're aware of, Howard, but we'll probably never know.
But he was adamant that this strange creature, he even described the page, the light going up.
He says, it's like when you were a child, if you got a torch and held it under your chin, it distorts all your features.
And that's what it reminded him of.
Apart from it, was a green light.
It wasn't a white light from a torch.
This wasn't somebody playing, you know, playing up and, you know, checking the fuck Mickey out of him.
This was the early hours of the morning.
How would they know he was going to walk past the road anyway?
You know, it frightened the living daylights out of him.
And was this a person who, such as it was then, and there was science fiction around, was he into science fiction and stuff like that?
I'm trying to get a handle on whether he might have been influenced by something else.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things when we're interviewing these people, that's a question we would ask.
Of course, in 1943, there was no such thing as flying sources or UFOs.
You know, those sayings didn't exist.
Science fiction did, but it was still in its infancy.
But, you know, I looked around his house.
It was just a normal house like anyone where else.
You know, he was more interested now, you know, in his retirement.
So it's like we talked about the family at Todburden.
They had no interest in the subject.
They didn't even call it a UFO or a flying saucer.
However, they just said this thing.
And Mr. Warren was the same.
He said, I just saw this creature, you know, for want of a better word.
And I had no idea to this day, you know, what happened that night.
He said, you tell me.
People know this.
And I'm sorry, I'm jumping in again here.
I'm just conscious of time as you always are when you do these things, Philip.
You know this.
They have a profound effect on people palpably.
You mentioned Todmoden.
That brings me to think about Alan Godfrey, the police officer who had something hovering above his car, might have had missing time, might have had some connection with it.
You know, those things, when you experience them, and I never have, but those people who have, they change you, don't they?
They can do, yes.
And like I say, when they talk about them, I learned this very early on, a young man I interviewed down in Wales, and we went back to the location where this thing had happened.
And I took a photograph of him at the location.
It was only when I had the photograph developed that I realized it was stood there as stiff as a board.
It clearly did not like being there.
He was going back to the scene of the crime, Howard.
And, you know, I apologized to him later.
And he appeared in one of my earlier books.
Just to give you an example, I sent him a copy and he thanked me for it.
And he didn't actually read it for a further three years because he'd grown up now.
It still spooked the living daylights out of him.
So it took him three years to drum up enough courage to read about what had happened to him in a book that I had written.
And then, of course, that's not even factoring into it, the fact that if you're talking about Alan Godfrey's case, but he's not alone, the ridicule that you have to go through, the fact that it has a material effect on your career, which it did with him.
Well, exactly.
I mean, Alan wrote his own book, come out, I think, a couple of years back.
I have read it.
It's an excellent read.
And it tells the story of how, you know, he went public as a serving West Yorkshire police officer with commendations in his line of work.
And he ended up losing his job as a result.
And, you know, it was disgraceful.
And Alan is still to this day.
He said, Philip, that thing on the road in his patrol car, bearing in mind, Howard, he was on duty, just finishing his night shift.
He said, I had a stone or a brick, I could have thrown it at you and it would have gone clunk, you know, and nothing will convince him otherwise.
He actually considered doing that, didn't he?
Which is something that you would do.
But he was so, as you would be, awestruck by whatever it was that he just couldn't bring himself to do that, even though it was so close to where he was.
I mean, he's in a great place now, though.
And as we both know, I spoke with him on the phone just weeks ago.
So, you know, he's come through it all, but it was a hell of a lot to come through.
I want to work my way through some of the stories in contemporary times here.
And there are, like I say, I don't know how many there are, but it looks like there are something like 200.
There are lots and lots of stories in this book.
Trevor Coons, 1948 in Wales.
A staggering sight in the sky.
I'm quoting from the book here, Silent, appeared very large, like an old airship, grey in colour, multicolour radiations at the front and back of it.
The sky was clear.
Whatever it was came out from one blackish cloud and then disappeared into another one about a mile away, stayed in the cloud, which drifted out of sight.
During the approximate one minute in view, I saw human-type figures at the window of this thing.
There are many reports like this in the book, with what's the head description, mainly head and shoulders bending over and looking out.
So here is somebody in 1948, you know, year after Roswell, who sees something over Wales that apparently has a crew in it.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, when you read the book, it's laid out in decade order and you'll see how, you know, the phenomenon develops where people, you know, really see something bizarre and then they say something bizarre, but this time it has beings or creatures with it.
And it kind of evolves down the decades, how, and it gets, as we use that phrase, hide strangeness, as the decades tumble away, it gets even more stranger.
And certainly the 1970s, for cases in the UK of a high strangeness nature, you couldn't beat the 1970s.
Why that is, is a different question.
I think we're still trying to work that out.
And the whole thing seemed to come to a crescendo in 1980 with Rendlesham Forrest.
just want to wind you back though before we explore the 70s and the 80s because some of these stories I've never heard of before, right?
And you've got them in such detail and they're from eras and years that we don't normally associate with these things.
1953, London schoolboy Jerry Arnold, I think he's away on a school trip and he had an encounter.
But this is interesting because the details of the first encounter, now this is a bit complicated, but it's a great story.
The details of the first encounter that he had as a 12-year-old schoolboy only really became apparent after he had another encounter with his wife years later and had hypnosis that brought out the detail in the first encounter.
Quoting from the book, and this is from the first encounter, as they closed on him, the youngster was aware of voices in his head.
That's like telepathy.
Voices that were telling him not to be afraid, that no harm would come of him.
And the strangers were with him, one positioned on either side.
They picked him up.
They began to carry him away.
It was like floating through the air.
So he was 12 years of age.
He was on a school trip.
It was 1953.
This was the UK.
It wasn't America or anywhere like that.
And this kid apparently, as became apparent through hypnosis later, hypnotherapy or hypnotic regression later, was the subject of an alien abduction.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's not uncommon either, Howard.
And similarly, these hearing the voices in their head, you know, that's not uncommon.
We call it telepathy for want of a better word, but they, I've heard people say, I heard what they said, but they didn't move their lips, you know.
And then so people have got different ways of describing it.
But like I said, that goes back to the 1950s, a young man.
And again, it's similar to a very famous abductee by the name of Travis Walton.
In a recent interview, Travis was asked the very same question.
Did anything happen to you before the encounter that you had that we all know about, that my movie was made about?
And he says, yeah, we did see a couple of other things, you know, when I was younger.
And it's, you know, as a UFO researcher, I think it's one of those questions we haven't asked enough, Howard.
You know, we've concentrated on what has been reported initially and we haven't said, oh, and by the way, did anything else come to mind?
Or, you know, is this the first time you've seen this?
And it is important that what you're saying, Philip, I think is very important because a lot of the people, and you interview more people than I do, of course you do.
But a lot of the people that I interview say that they've had experiences all through their lives.
Sometimes they're not aware of them until later, like this guy in 1953, Jerry Arnold.
You know, the full details of what he experienced or says he experienced only became apparent later.
But, you know, you will hear the story that people, for whatever reason, start having these experiences when they're young, and they continue and sometimes intensify as they get older.
And I suppose the question that we both must have thought about around that is why these particular people?
Well, it's a good question.
I mean, you know, people have come to me, like I've said, looking for that very answer, Howard.
Why me?
You know, why me?
And, you know, they'll then look for an explanation.
And I've asked individuals, what do you think happened to you?
Some were, you know, definite, or these were beings from another world.
Others thought this was some kind of spiritual experience.
A vast majority of them didn't have a clue, Howard.
You know, they'd been down that route.
They'd gone and asked their friends and family.
They haven't a clue.
Sometimes they'd ask professional people.
They had no idea.
And usually the UFO researcher, like me, was their last alternative, if you like.
And they were still looking for those answers.
And it's one of the reasons, Howard, why some of these people felt it important enough to go on the record because they felt it important that, you know, this was important information that we as a population should be aware of and should know about.
And they would risk any form of ridicule as well.
Which young people today may find difficult to believe because anything goes in 2022.
But if you're talking about 1970, 1980, 1950, attitudes were different.
The media tended to ridicule these things, which they don't to the same, they still do to an extent, but they don't to the same extent now.
1955, I love these historical cases.
1955, this is Bexley in Kent.
Margaret Fry, somebody else who I think that you've interviewed.
And you say, it's rare that several witnesses, unrelated to each other, observe the same thing.
It was a UFO landing account.
And this is all described in a matter-of-fact way.
July 1755, Margaret Fry spotted the object as she was making her way to her GP surgery in King, I love the detail, in King Harold's Way from her home in Hive Avenue.
Both she and Dr. Fukata, her GP she was going to see and around a dozen children playing in the street, saw a strange craft.
Now, it is, as you remark here in the book, it is unusual for a number of unrelated people to experience the same thing.
Yeah, well, this is, again, where the high strangeness factor comes in.
You know, more people, because more people witness something, it's less likely to misidentify it and they're close up.
This was in the town as well, Howard.
This is not in the middle, as you've been pointed out, the New Mexico desert, you know.
And I knew, I got to know Margaret in later years in person.
When I got to know, she lived in North Wales.
She sadly passed away not that long ago.
Margaret herself, as a result of all this, went into be a UFO researcher herself.
And, you know, what is interesting, there's a drawing to go with that.
And you see like a dome-shaped object with three balls on its underside.
And one of the things that cropped up during our early research when I first joined in the 1980s, sightings in and around, as I mentioned earlier, the Yorkshire Dales, we had descriptions of things that look just like the drawing that came from Margaret, this dome-shaped thing with these three balls of light underneath it, some of which was witnessed by serving beliefs officers on duty at the time as well.
And they're very much of their era.
I mean, we're running out of time in this segment, Philip, but you know, they look almost when you see these sketches, and this is, as you say, in the book, it's a classic sketch of this, but it almost looks like those little ball casters almost that you'd have on sofas and things like that.
You know, but that's how they look, isn't it?
Well, yeah.
I mean, people use everyday objects around you to describe things.
We still do it now, but we use a different vocabulary now.
We might say, oh, it looked like an iPhone.
Well, iPhones didn't exist in 1950.
But that's how this thing looked.
And the point of the story is that so many people have witnessed so many things.
Philip Mantle is here.
We're talking about his life in ufology, his book, UFO Landings UK.
And Philip, it's interesting.
Whenever you do something like this, you know, people tell you their own stories.
I've got this from Carl.
I just want to get a quick thought from you about this, only because it seems to tie into a story that we might both know.
This is Carl in Liverpool.
I had a UFO experience in Liverpool, 1989, 31st of March, 8.30 p.m., says Carl.
The UFO doesn't describe it in great detail, but was huge, 150 foot above me.
I think I lost time.
We need to be talking to you, Carl, if this happened.
About an hour at that time.
Later, I found out that two police officers in Shrewsbury saw something big in the sky of this kind of description on that same night.
I'm not sure if that is the thing that happened at that airbase near Shrewsbury, Cosford.
I'm not sure if it was that.
Well, if it was at the RAF Cosford, you know, there's a few of my colleagues think there may be a rational explanation for that.
Oh, really?
But it was some kind of space debris that was observed.
But we have to remember that in the late 1980s, Howard, certainly here in the UK and across the Channel into Belgium, where these flying triangles were seen in great profusion.
They were first reported by the Belgium gendarmerie out on patrol.
And some of them were reported as extremely large.
And at the end of 1990, of course, the Belgian Air Force sent two jets to intercept one of these flying triangles.
And whilst they didn't catch it visually, they recorded it on the onboard radar.
And unlike, you know, our Ministry of Defense, the Belgian Air Force released this piece of footage.
So, you know, in the late 1980s into 1990, there was a lot of things happening across the UK and across into continental Europe as well.
Okay, let's take ourselves then from the, I mean, there are so many great stories in the 50s and 60s, but we'll talk about those another time.
Let's get ourselves into the 70s, which, as you rightly say, the 70s, early 80s, rich period for all of these things.
Page 106 of the book, Andrew Westmoland in 1973.
Now, this is something that has come out of the conversation, but let's highlight it.
That the nature of sightings, rather like the dome shape with the little castas underneath it, seemed to match the era.
Now, in 1973, Andrew Westmoland, and you detail this whole case in the book, saw something that he described, well, I think I described when I saw the illustration of it, as a kind of cheese triangle, you know, like those cheese triangles that we all used to take to school years ago.
And that's how it looked.
He said in the book, as I approached it, I found it to be faintly glowing with sides about two feet long with a width of about eight feet.
It was lying on the grass verge.
This is the point.
The grass verge beside the road.
I approached within one foot and bent down to take a closer look.
That's 1973.
And that's something that this guy, if he is to be believed, actually physically up close and personal encountered.
Well, that's right.
And this is, again, you know, the high strangeness factor that we talked about.
You know, how would you misidentify something, Howard, if you were so close to it?
So you're left with two conclusions.
And that's the same in a lot of these cases.
You have to draw your own conclusion as to whether they're telling the truth or other than not.
And in a lot of cases, you can't find any reason why they would want to be lying in the first place.
So, you know, with this incident, I put it in the book to show also that I just mentioned them actually, the flying triangle type of things, which first really came to the public attention was in the late 1980s, that there were observations of them previously and not just flying, you know, hundreds or thousands of feet above your head, but actually up close and personal and down on the ground, as you've just illustrated.
So many accounts, though.
I mean, there's one here, page 118.
I noted down all the pages.
I was particularly diligent about this when I was going through the book.
Trevor P at Machuntleth in Wales.
And I only put this story in so I could say Machuntleth because it took me a long time to learn how to pronounce it.
In front of him in Machuntleth in Wales, not 50 feet away, was a strange stationary object.
Just like you said, a stationary object, apparently resting on the ground.
It consisted of a large circular base.
It looked like a paddling pool.
Great description.
40 feet in diameter, 7 to 8 feet high, with large circular lights approximately 5 feet in diameter positioned around the base.
Each of these was shining brightly.
Each was a colour not recognised by Trevor P. at McHuntleth in Wales.
Evidently, no light was cast off onto the ground.
But here we've got another up close and personal.
Yeah, and not only that, Trevor was there at the beach where this happened with his father.
And upon seeing this, he climbed up some rocks.
You know, that's what youngsters do.
He ran down to the beach to his father and said, dad, dad, dad, you know, and off he ran back up.
And his father thought, what was he talking about?
And his father Looked up the rocks, and he could see Trevor hiding behind a rock.
He was hiding, and he kept bobbing his head up and down to look at this thing.
But the strangest thing, if this wasn't strange enough, Howard, is about the creatures that were allegedly inside this thing.
So they weren't the little humanoids with their, you know, with their uniforms on, as we talked about before.
These were two strange figures that were described like jellymen.
The inside of them all squirmed and wriggled.
And it's, I'm glad you pronounced that location in Wales, Howard, because me being a Yorkshireman, I've no chance, you know.
And it's again, it's that high strangeness factor.
It is.
And the fact that there are creatures involved in this.
And that's another thing that struck me about the book and the accounts in it.
The number of times when people say we looked at it, if it didn't land, it flew close and we saw windows like portholes and creatures within.
But if it did land, like whatever this was in Mahuntleth in Wales, there was something within the craft or that came from the craft that looked amazing.
In this case, and I didn't cut and paste that part of the account.
Did whatever it was appear to be in any way reactive to Trevor P who was observing this?
The dome on the top of this thing started to open and it was at that point Trevor thought, you know, I'm out of here.
And off he went.
I don't know.
And it's a reaction that we can all, you know, think about.
And you're absolutely right.
And here I am jumping in again.
It's just that thought, and you must have added a million times with all the people you've spoken with.
You know, you encounter something like this and you think to yourself, well, if I ever came across something like this, you know, I'd make some good notes and I would do this, that, and the other.
But actually, when push comes to shove and you're actually there in Bachuntleth or wherever you are, you might be so terrified that, you know, you wouldn't see your bum for steam.
That's what dad used to say.
Trevor had already done the right thing.
He'd run down and told his father.
Yeah, he told his dad.
And his father couldn't make head and a tail of what he was talking about and just left him to get on with it.
And it's a fascinating account.
It's one that you won't find duplicated anywhere in the science fiction literature that I'm aware of or in the UFO literature anywhere else in the world, Howard.
We have to do this, unfortunately, in about 90 seconds or two minutes.
But this is a story that you and I and other people on this show have talked about many times because it is so astonishing.
This is the Deckman Woods case in Scotland.
A forestry worker, Robert Taylor, reported seeing an alien spaceship in the woods near Livingston.
It was, what, 1979, wasn't it?
I think we have an image to show here.
That would be image three.
I think that's just a document.
We'll just flash it up quickly, but that's a documentation.
Yeah, I mean, describing it just to show you've got the documentation.
But this guy was actually chased by something.
Yeah, he claimed he was assaulted by it.
And he reported it to the police.
And it is the only case on record anywhere in the UK that the police conducted a forensic examination and couldn't come up with a rational explanation.
And among the details in the account, and I looked at some other accounts of this as well, was that there were rips in his trousers.
And I think there was some kind of stain or mark on his trousers that looked like...
They cordoned it off like a crime scene, Howard.
And I was fortunate enough to meet Mr. Taylor and interview him some years later.
Sadly, he's no longer with us.
And again, you know, I sat in his living room with him, Howard, and you see him shaking his head and telling you the story.
And he hadn't got a clue.
All he was interested in was his job, his wife and family, and his dog.
He was a very, you know, down-to-earth, honest, hard-working gentleman, widely well-respected in his local community.
That's why the police decided to investigate Howard, because he was such an upstanding member of the community.
And, you know, what's somebody else who it's made a lifelong impression on, and we're still talking about their case.
Philip, thank you so much for being part of this first TV pleasure.
You know, you've delivered for me again.
Thank you.
The great Philip Mankell, please check out Flying Disc Press.
For details of his many books on this subject, you will not be disappointed.
And Professor R. V. Loeb, good friend of the unexplained.
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.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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