The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 650 - Evelyn Hollow, Ivor Davis

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July 17, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:12:13

Edition 650 - Evelyn Hollow, Ivor Davis

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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.
	Where the heat wave here in London continues.
	It is dang hot right now.
	I don't know what it's like where you are.
	But our homes are not built for heat like this, right?
	I can't bear the cold in the winter, but the heat is something else right now.
	And they're telling us that the way to deal with it is to keep the curtains closed, like my curtains are closed at the moment during the day, which has probably helped a bit, but it's still too damned hot.
	And then open up the windows at nighttime so the cooler air can get in.
	That's how it's supposed to work.
	But I have to tell you, I'm wearing a pair of shorts at the moment and a t-shirt.
	And that's, you know, even that's, you know, that's a lot for these conditions.
	It's just so hot.
	Oh, well, enough of that.
	We'll be playing this recording back, won't we, in a couple of months, thinking, what was all that about?
	And it will all have gone.
	Now, from my TV show, a couple of guests that I haven't put out as podcasts.
	A couple of very interesting and different people and two contrasting guests on this edition of The Unexplained.
	The first one will be Evelyn Hollow, Double Academy Award-winning Scottish writer and paranormal psychologist.
	A remarkable person.
	Check her out online.
	And a fantastic guest from my TV show a few weeks ago.
	So we'll hear Evelyn in Scotland first.
	And then after that, veteran journalist and author Ivor Davis.
	The last time I spoke with Ivor, it was about the Manson case and killings.
	This time we're going to talk about Elvis Presley, about his life and paranormal interest.
	Now, it's a conversation that is not strictly unexplained.
	So it's not all about ghosts and it's not all about aliens.
	It's about Elvis in the round.
	And yes, some ghostly sightings of Elvis after his death.
	And yes, we'll touch on Elvis' claimed UFO sightings and stuff like that.
	But it's an interesting portrait from a man who knows and is very well connected with a lot of celebrities and stars, have known a lot of those people in his time, Ivor Davis, the second guest from a recent TV show.
	So two very contrasting things here.
	Thanks to Adam, my webmaster.
	Thank you to you for being part of all of this.
	And please keep your emails coming through my website, theunexplained.tv.
	And remember, if you're interested in the cruise that's happening connected with this show, the cruise is put on by Tui Morella and the sessions are hosted by me on that.
	The details of that will be at theunexplainedlive.com.
	That's that.
	If you want to check out my Facebook page, please do that.
	It is the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	I think that's just about it.
	Oh, and also using my Twitter again.
	I did stop using the Twitter for about a year, but I'm now using Twitter again, so I will be making periodic tweets at HughesOn Air.
	At HughesOnAir.
	That's the Twitter.
	There are not very many of them now, but I will increase those.
	Okay, and that's just about everything, I think, in the heat.
	So before I get myself a long cold drink, as they say, let's hear from the first person from my TV show recently.
	This is Evelyn Hollow.
	Evelyn is a double Academy Award-winning Scottish writer and paranormal psychologist.
	She was, and I'm reading from her biography, a resident author at Esoterica Zyne for more than four years, was the recipient of the 2015 Lonely Planet Travel Writing Scholarship, the occult columnist for COVID culture, and has taught writing classes at everywhere from universities to arts festivals.
	She's also been featured in exhibitions at ESAF and is the creator of the Bear Archive.
	She's a former psychology lecturer and holds a Master's of Research degree in paranormal psychology.
	She consults as a paranormal psychologist and expert for various TV shows and podcasts, including the Smash Hit BBC shows, The Battersea Poltergeist and Uncanny.
	She's also one quarter of the team, 25%, of the show Spooked Scotland, which is airing on the Discovery Channel and I think one other place right now.
	She'll tell me.
	Evelyn, thank you for coming on.
	How are you?
	Thank you for having me.
	I'm good, Howard.
	How are you?
	Very, very good.
	You know, that is an incredible resume, as the Americans would say, curriculum vitae.
	You're such a mix of things.
	I am, yeah.
	I like to be busy.
	I've been doing things, doing things for years.
	I'm actually technically on holiday right now and I'm still working.
	I can't turn it off.
	Talk to me about this show that you're doing, Spooked Scotland, because it got a lot of media coverage, newspaper coverage in Scotland, not as much south of the border.
	Yeah, so Spooked Scotland, I think we're up to episode three now that's just come out.
	It's on Channel Wheelie and Discovery Plus, the streaming service.
	It's myself, Gail Porter, Chris Fleming and Ryan O'Neill.
	And we cover 10 episodes all across Scotland investigating various locations and everything from castles to smaller stuff, some of which have never been filmed in before.
	And we sort of go there and cover the history and then at night time try to actually investigate it.
	But it's quite an unusual show because normally you have sort of ghost hunters, that sort of thing, with equipment going into places.
	But I've been brought on as a parapsychologist to sort of look at it scientifically, categorize phenomena, look at the history.
	And then you've got, you know, Gail Porter there as a presenter, just sort of experiencing it.
	And Chris Fleming is quite a well-known American television personality as well.
	He does a lot of medium shipping.
	You know, they did like I am Dead Famous and things like that.
	It's a great lineup.
	I think when Dead Famous was on, I had Chris Fleming on here.
	This is a couple of years back now.
	But, you know, it's a terrific lineup.
	So are you, is your role meant to be debunker in chief?
	Yeah, actually, which is an unusual role for me because on BBC shows like The Fantasy Postgeist and Uncanny, I'm usually the parapsychologist that comes more from the believer perspective.
	I usually work alongside the likes of Dr. Kieran O'Keefe, who's a hardcore sceptic.
	So usually my role is to be the kind of the voice of the sort of paranormal.
	Well, okay, if it is paranormal, how is that possible?
	Whereas on this show, that's more, you know, Chris is very, very ultimately pro-paranormal.
	And I'm sort of going on to go, okay, well, let's see what else it could be first.
	And once we've ruled out everything else, if it is paranormal, what is it?
	And how is that scientifically possible?
	Okay.
	And I know, of course, with a lot of TV shows, they go through a kind of story arc with these things.
	And it goes, I think, mainly for the American shows, but, you know, they tend to do it all in the amount of time they have compressed to fill.
	But you start off with all these spooky tales and people saying how terrifying this particular location is.
	And then you end up with somebody saying, but actually, it might be this.
	And it may not be something to do with the serious haunting at all, which, you know, you have to do for balance.
	Have you ever had, in the shows that you're doing currently, the ones that are airing now, Spook Scotland, have you come across anything that has, I don't know whether it would scare you, but impressed you to the point where you thought, well, actually, I don't think there is a rational explanation?
	Yeah, there's definitely a few instances.
	I don't really get scared.
	I'm a parapsychologist.
	It would be dreadful if I did.
	But there was definitely a couple of instances.
	We had one at Bannockburn House where one of the camera guys got a full rig ripped off of his shoulder.
	He's a big guy and it's a big rig.
	And it's bolted in.
	And Adam, our camera system, is the hardest working camera system I've ever known.
	That rig is triple, quadruple checked.
	And it's not like even if the bolts were loose, it could have come out.
	I mean, it's literally four bolts screwed in and it was ripped off the back of him.
	Did you see that happen?
	Yeah, I was in the room with him.
	I was in the room with him.
	He was the one filming us.
	He had the rig on and he was sort of covering something.
	Something had happened and he was sort of bending, you know, sort of looking down with the camera.
	He's a big guy, this rig on looking down and then the whole rig just came off the back of him.
	Do you know, we had to kind of cut for a second.
	It was pretty intense.
	What do you think did that?
	That's the $64 question, isn't it?
	$64 question.
	It's one of those things where some of these locations have lots of different phenomena.
	It's not just things like, you know, are we looking at ghosts or spirits?
	Are we looking at poltergeist activity, which is, you know, the higher end and really powerful, the stuff that destroys rooms and things like that?
	Do you know, are we looking at more like mythological creatures?
	Or, you know, what are we actually dealing with?
	That is the hardest question.
	So being able to go in and categorize what phenomena we're dealing with is so important so that we can all agree on what we're experiencing and then we can scientifically begin to analyze it.
	That's, you know, that's my job.
	And it's a great starting point that you have, a starting point of science.
	Science, but with a more open mind towards these things.
	I mean, that's a good place to be.
	Yeah, that's it.
	Because, I mean, I think for me, there isn't that many parapsychologists in the UK.
	And lots of them are hardcore sceptics.
	And so I have this kind of niche job of coming in and going, okay, well, I'm still a scientist and I'm still going to rule everything else out first and look at it.
	But then if I still can't explain it, instead of going, oh, well, it must just be one of these and I can't explain it.
	I will go, okay, well, if it is paranormal, what type of paranormal activity is it?
	Categorise it and then how is that scientifically possible?
	And everybody else kind of just, you know, sometimes seems afraid to do that.
	They just really want to cling to it being something, even if we've ruled everything else out.
	What is it about Scotland, do you think, Evelyn?
	You know, there was a famous researcher there, and I still know, as you will, I'm sure know, Tricia Robertson, who worked with the late and great professor Archie Roy, who, if you've never read about him, I'm talking here to my viewer, I mean, he was the daddy of all paranormal and ghost researchers.
	He was a serious academic person.
	What is it about Scotland that is regularly written about as being the most haunted place in the entire United Kingdom?
	I get asked this a lot.
	And I think for me, it's a mixture of things.
	The two core things are of it.
	It is Scotland is ancient, truly ancient, and she's a huge melting pot of different cultures and belief systems.
	So they all have their own kind of mythology and stories and things like that.
	She's also, and I mean, Edinburgh in particular, is, you know, is literally built on another city of the dead underneath.
	Scotland has experienced mass trauma for hundreds and hundreds of years.
	And you've got whole cities that are built on top of, you know, bodies.
	I mean, in Edinburgh, we're at the point where you can be late to work because there's a skeleton in the middle of the road when they're digging something up.
	It's that, you know.
	So I think Scotland, if we believe that all of this paranormal phenomena is truly paranormal, and then we look at why is there so much debt, you know, why is it so densely paranormal?
	And you look at the history and see how horrific it is and how bloody it is, and then you look at all the mythology and kind of cultures and belief systems.
	And if we believe that paranormal phenomena can be created by, you know, some of this trauma, whether it's moments in time that get replayed or looked like stone tape theory, or whether it's, you know, different entities, say, or mythological creatures, suddenly when you look at Scotland's history, it makes sense as to why she is known as the most haunted country in the world.
	Do you think there's any mileage in the idea that things and events happen?
	As you say, traumatic events, there were many in Scotland's history.
	We know Scotland has an illustrious history, but there's been a lot of blood and trauma involved in getting to where you've got now.
	Do you think that sometimes those events can impress themselves upon the location?
	And the fact that people venerate those events or give them prominence almost gives them an energy to persist?
	So in parapsychology, there's a theory called stone-take theory, which is controversial.
	And it is that an environment can record an event onto it.
	So say you have like a mass murder in a house.
	Somehow this alters the environment.
	Somehow this event alters sort of the physiological things around it.
	And under certain circumstances, that event can be replayed back.
	A bit like a record has grooves in it, but only when you drop a needle on it, do you hear the sound?
	That's kind of what stone-tape theory is.
	And when we look at things like, you know, haunted houses, per se, why do we get these things here?
	Why do people see, like, you know, old scullery maids walking around?
	You know, why do people see, I don't know, Bonnie Prince Charlie?
	Why do they see knights, monks, things like that?
	How are they in that environment and how are these events still being played?
	And it is incredibly controversial, but one of those theories is stone-take theory.
	Indeed, it is.
	And I actually live not too far away from Hampton Court, which, as you know, is one of, if not the most haunted place in England, it's one of the, it's certainly on the list of one of the most haunted.
	And if you talk to the people who've worked there, some of them have worked there as guides for 30 years or more.
	If you talk to some of those people, they'll look you in the eye and they will tell you that there are various places in Hampton Court where Henry VIII puts in an appearance and walks down a corridor and disappears at the end of it.
	I've been told that the chapel there, there is an historical figure from Henry VIII's time who appears, looks at people and then disappears.
	And the people who told me these things, and they've told me these things over years when I visited, they look you in the eye and I have no reason at all to doubt that they've experienced these things, which makes you think.
	We know that there was a lot of history there and certainly Henry VIII was responsible for a certain amount of bloodshed himself in his personal life, as we know.
	But how can that happen?
	How can that be?
	How can events imprint themselves upon a location and then be read back by you and me?
	Well, that's the thing.
	The big question is, under what conditions does that location need to be for it to be played back?
	So like the needle dropping onto a record to create the sound, what is the needle essentially?
	That's the main question.
	Is it when something is being observed?
	So is it like, you know, when we ourselves observe something, you know, it collapses to a singularity?
	You know, in physics we have this a lot where we as conscious observers have to observe something in order to alter the state of something else.
	It exists as one thing and then once it's observed it collapses into another.
	Is it that it happens regardless of whether or not people are there?
	You know, if a house is haunted, you know, it's a bit like does a tree fall in the woods.
	If a house is haunted do ghosts still wander around even if no one's there to witness it?
	You know we're assuming that these events only happen when we are there, but that might not be true.
	And a lot of people who do things like ghost hunting, if you can call it that, might go in and set up cameras in places and they do capture things when there is no conscious entity there.
	So it's hard for us to work out and that is why stone tape theory is so controversial because really scientifically we couldn't work out a way to justify that, a way to say that that is possible in an environment and yet people all over the world in every culture going back decades, hundreds of years report these experiences and report seeing ghosts.
	Ghosts are one of the oldest things I think the entire human race has.
	It's a fascinating field of research and I think one of the things as you will know much better than me is they suggest that Edinburgh may be so replete with these phenomena because of the rock strata.
	Isn't it a granite city?
	Yeah, Edinburgh is, Edinburgh in particular, is known literally as the city of ghosts and there's lots of different theories about how she has come to be so haunted.
	And when you look at the kind of, you know, if you look at the structure of her and things like that, sometimes we attribute, you know, people having paranormal experiences to them actually enduring things in the environment, you know, such as the fear frequency.
	So if you have a fan oscillating at a certain frequency, you can cause a person to feel really anxious, they feel like they're being watched, they get heart palpitations, they can see things out the corner of their eye.
	So, you know, it's called, it's also, for us, it's known as infrasound, but it's known as the fear frequency because that has, you know, military applications essentially.
	But you can trick someone into really feeling like, you know, like there's a ghost in the room and it's simply because of something vibrating at a certain frequency.
	It's giving off, I think it's about 19 or 18 hertz.
	And so when we look at all these like underground tunnels and things in Edinburgh and we look at the stone structure, is it that when certain things are happening, vibrating, it's oscillating, creating this frequency?
	And that's why people are having, you know, so many experiences with ghosts and things like that.
	So we don't know how much of it is ghostly infestation and how much of it is hallucination.
	And that's the frontier of the interest, I think, that we're looking at.
	Evelyn Hollow is here in Edinburgh, parapsychologist and researcher on these things.
	Evelyn, you know, we touched on it at the beginning of this conversation, but can we define what parapsychology is?
	It's a comparatively, is it new discipline?
	Not particularly.
	So parapsychology is the sort of sub-specialty within the psychology that looks at investigating paranormal, not always phenomena.
	So you can have two separate bits of parapsychology.
	Some people investigate anomalous phenomena, try to apply hard signs to strange phenomena to work out what it is.
	That can be anything from testing psychokinesis to things like out-of-body experiences, ghosts, things like that.
	And the other sort of main aspect is looking at what actually happens physically in the brain when someone endorses paranormal belief.
	And, you know, psychologically, where does paranormal belief come from?
	Why do we believe in ghosts and demons and things like that?
	And, you know, what is happening in the brain.
	But no, it's actually a fairly old discipline.
	I think the Society for Psychical Research, the sort of the big group in the UK for it, has been around quite a long time.
	Well, included Arthur Conan Doyle, I think, in its membership.
	It is, yeah, it is actually.
	The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre is in Edinburgh for research.
	And I've done guest talks for them and things before.
	And yeah, that was one of their big benefactors was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
	And you know, he really strongly believed in the paranormal.
	I think he thought his nanny was a psychic, actually.
	Um, but he's uh, he's helped actually, you know, kind of beyond the grave, he's helped um fund a lot of research.
	But Edinburgh University State also has the Costler Parapsychology Unit, isn't it?
	Caroline.
	Caroline.
	Caroline Watt.
	Yeah, Caroline Watt.
	And they do, you know, world-class research and covering everything from looking at consciousness to comas to dream states, out-of-body experiences.
	And a lot of this stuff has really interesting applications in everything from medicine to AI to all other aspects of science.
	So you talked, Evelyn, about the mental aspect of this, that almost when you allow this in, the belief, I mean, in these things, then something changes.
	I think you were kind of implying, do you think that those people who decide that they're going to believe in these things then find themselves more likely to experience them?
	Is that how it works?
	Well, so when somebody endorses paranormal belief, and the thing is, it's hard to categorize what that paranormal belief is.
	Because when you look at psychometrics, they might ask you questions like, do you believe in things like fairies, you know, fairly fringe stuff?
	Fairies, werewolves, creatures, things like that.
	But they'll say, well, do you believe in ghosts?
	Or it might be like, do you believe in life after death?
	But some of those things are more readily acceptable.
	So belief in God, i.e.
	the Christian God, is a paranormal belief.
	But most people don't take it well when you tell them that because it's such a readily accessible belief and yet it is paranormal.
	If I interchange the word God with, say, you know, I don't know, a demon or poltergeist, you're still believing in something you can't really readily see or touch and yet, you know, you believe it has influence and that it can hear you and see you and things when it's in the room.
	The structure of the belief is the same and it is essentially the same belief in the brain.
	It has the same structure to us psychologically and physiologically and yet one is readily accessible and the other one can sometimes be used to categorise you as being mentally unstable and things like that.
	We actually, when we're assessing people for schizophrenia, there are categories on psychometrics like magical ideation, which is magical thinking, i.e., do you have beliefs in this thing?
	You know, these sort of things like, do you believe in ghosts?
	And that contributes towards our assessment of people with really serious mental illnesses.
	And yet there aren't questions about, you know, beliefs in things like the Christian God.
	So it's a bit of a weird area to be sort of looking at, you know, how when someone says they believe in, say, ghosts, what is happening in the brain?
	And, you know, who is more likely, sociologically speaking, to believe in things like ghosts.
	And does that make them more open to believing in other things?
	And yet, sometimes people who are not asking for this receive it.
	You know, sometimes people who are not interested in such things, I mean, look, I've bored my listener and I'll tell this in 10 seconds this time, not 15.
	I had one ghost experience in my life at a radio station in Liverpool in a tower.
	I'd been up to the loop, came down and went back into the studio 1 a.m., nobody else there.
	And by the studio door, big heavy metal door, was standing this guy dressed in a workman's coat as it used to be, very short guy, a cap and a pair of shiny boots.
	And I looked at him and as I was about to open my mouth and say, hello, what are you doing here?
	He disappeared in front of my eyes.
	And a lot of people in that building, in the big tower in Liverpool, you may know the one I'm talking about, have seen that man.
	So I wasn't particularly looking for it.
	Well, I wasn't looking for anything like that at all.
	I wasn't doing a show like this one that night.
	I don't know what happened.
	I don't know how it happened, but I know what I saw.
	But I wasn't looking for it.
	I wasn't predisposed on that night.
	What was going on there?
	Oh, absolutely.
	And I mean, these are the best cases because people are afraid to say that they've had paranormal experiences, even though such a large number of the population have, because they think they'll get written off as, you know, either being, you know, really mentally ill or that they're making it up for attention.
	And a lot of people write it off as, oh, well, it was a trick of the light.
	Or it comes up a lot, like sceptics will find ways to say, hardcore sceptics will find ways to say, you know, it's some sort of like mass hallucination.
	They'll say that you were tired and you've hallucinated it or they'll say that your job is really stressful and things like that.
	But, and I mean, that is probably true in a percentage of cases that people thought they saw something that wasn't there.
	Completely, that's completely normal.
	That does happen from time to time.
	But very specifically, having seen what you saw, you didn't thought, it wasn't that you thought you saw something at the corner of your eye.
	You saw that person.
	He was as plain to me as you are in your kitchen now.
	And he just is, the surprise of it was I didn't feel scared.
	I wasn't even, I didn't even have time to be surprised.
	But he was just standing there.
	And then I told the guy, it was only two people in the building, the producer of the show and me.
	And I said, something really strange has just happened, Jonathan.
	And he said, you've seen him.
	And it appeared that, you know, I was only visiting that place to do fill in.
	It appeared that a lot of people had seen this guy who may have worked building that great big tower in Liverpool, may even have perished.
	A number of people perished in the building of it, but certainly was like a caretaker.
	And the theory about it is, and that's all people have.
	I don't think anybody's investigated who he might be.
	But the theory was that he was coming back to check on the building because that's what he was in life employed to do.
	A most peculiar thing.
	But that was something that was experienced, I was later told, by a number of people.
	They'd all seen the same thing, the guy in the shiny boots.
	Yeah, you do find that in these cases, that someone will have a really strange experience when we're looking for it with no predisposition towards these sort of things, be really, really freaked out and then go and speak to someone and they'll be like, oh yeah, that's, you know, that's the ghost or that's so-and-so, because other people have seen it.
	And sometimes they historically go back numbers and numbers of years.
	And People might say, Oh, well, I'm sure you probably overheard someone talking about it, and then you thought you saw something, and then your brain has kind of filled in the gaps for you.
	But there's a lot of cases where, you know, it could be a person visiting the building for the very first time, a person who's never been there, a person who doesn't know any of the history, and they see what they see, and they've got no reason to even believe it's, you know, say a ghost, because they're as real as you and I are.
	And then they go to talk to them, or they follow them into a room, or they go out to touch them, and they vanish, or suddenly they're not there.
	And that's the bit where you go, what just happened to me?
	And it happens to an incredible number of people.
	And even if a small fraction of them can be written off as being tired or stressed or, you know, trick of the light, it can't be all of them.
	It literally can't be all of them.
	You know, that would be more statistically incredible than paranormal belief for it to all be that.
	And, you know, that's why we keep investigating these things and we keep trying to look for scientific answers to these experiences.
	Yeah, I don't think anybody knows who that person might have been if he existed, but it was known that there were people who would have died in the construction because any big construction, this was in the 1960s like that, I'm sure would have claimed a number of lives.
	But I'm also sure that there would have been a little man just like him wearing an old-fashioned coat down to his, almost down to his ankles.
	And these fantastic, the boots were the thing that got me.
	They were shiny.
	And then there he is with his cap on.
	And I'm looking at him and I'm about to talk to him because I thought, well, he must have wandered into the building and come up in the lift somehow.
	And he disappears.
	And then, you know, you find a lot of people experience that.
	So it's interesting to know that that indeed is a common experience.
	Listener PJ in Inverness, somewhat north of yourself, Evelyn, would like to know, have you ever seen a ghost?
	I know you had that experience while filming with your cameraman, but have you seen anything like I saw?
	There is only one story that I've ever publicly shared, and I only ever talked about it very briefly recently, and it was something that happened to me when I was a teenager.
	In Edinburgh, in Hunter Square, I skipped school, sorry mum, to go and buy comic books.
	And I was sitting on the steps, so there's a sort of a large courtyard and there's steps all the way around, and I was sitting there reading, and there was a huge group of pigeons in the middle of the square.
	And this lady, quite dishevelled, quite clearly homeless or a bag lady, was feeding the pigeons.
	Quite normal, didn't think anything of it.
	As I'm sitting reading, I look up and she's talking to the pigeons.
	The pigeons are now kind of eating out of her hand.
	I think, oh, she must come here quite a lot.
	Next time I look up, she's got one of these pigeons, big fat pigeon, in her hand and she's bringing it up to her face.
	And I'm like, oh, she's talking to it.
	Like, that's really unusual.
	And then as I'm watching her, she sort of slowly leans forward and I think, is she going to kiss the pigeon?
	That's a little bit weird.
	And she leans this pigeon towards her face.
	And next thing I look up, and just as she's about to, you know, I think she's going to kiss it on the head, she opens her mouth like that and she shoves the whole pigeon in and bites down.
	And I screamed and I just sort of flipped like that just for a second.
	You know, just sort of closed my eyes just for a second, scream, looked up and she was gone.
	And I'm looking around me.
	There's lots of, you know, suits and office people sitting on the steps drinking coffee.
	And I look around me and nobody is looking up.
	It's like nobody else has seen it.
	And the weird thing was none of the pigeons had moved.
	Now, pigeons, if you go near them, you can put one step towards them and they all scatter.
	But none of the pigeons had moved.
	And also, all of the pigeons on the ground were still eating the bread or seed or whatever she was feeding them.
	So it wasn't like I'd hallucinated it.
	was feeding them the stuff and she was gone and the stuff she'd been feeding them was still there and she disappeared and it's a big old Because, I mean, that directly affected you.
	You saw something that nobody else saw and, you know, you're not the first person in the world who's ever seen something that other people didn't see.
	You will not be the last.
	You know, as a teenager, what's your takeaway from that?
	I mean, for me, it was so real that I never, you know, it never even crossed my mind that I'd seen, you know, what we might call a ghost.
	To me, I'd just seen a lady literally eat a pigeon in the middle of the street.
	So I was like, do I have to get a police officer or something?
	Like, what just happened?
	And it really stayed with me.
	And the most alarming bit was the bit where I looked round and it was like nobody else had seen it.
	But she was, the stuff was still there and it was so violent.
	And I went home and the only thing I can kind of remember was I was helping my mum with the dishes in the kitchen and I sort of mentioned, I didn't give her the full story because I thought it would make me sound unhinged.
	But I said to her that, you know, what I think I'd seen and then I told her that, you know, but then I looked up and she wasn't there.
	And my mum said something to the words of the effect of, you know, she was here, but she wasn't there, or she was there, but she wasn't here.
	And then just sort of carried on with the dishes.
	And so I had to kind of think about that of how can something be here in our realm or our universe or the way in which I can perceive it with my eyes, but it simultaneously also not be here.
	Gee, that beats my story, hands down.
	But you know, the shock factor, I think, I didn't have the shock factor that you had.
	The shock factor of seeing this woman who you think, oh, look, she's a pigeon whisperer.
	She's going to do something magical with this pigeon.
	And isn't that amazing?
	Some people are like that with creatures.
	And wow.
	But the next thing she eats it.
	I mean, that is utterly terrifying.
	Were you into horror movies?
	Yeah, I mean, I grew up with horror and things like that.
	The thing that it kind of closestly reminded me of was, you know, all the stories of like, you know, Aussie Osborne biting the head off the bat or whatever on stage.
	Freddy Starr and the hamster, yes.
	It was just, yeah, it was really violent.
	And I still sometimes think I'm going to see her.
	I'll walk through Edinburgh and see people feeding pigeons or see pigeons in Hunter Square and I will always look because I've always worried that one day as an adult I'm going to look back and the pigeon eater demon or whatever I saw is going to be in the Hunter Square eating pigeons.
	That's the perfect confluence between the two things that we've been talking about, the mental aspect and the fact that you saw something that was physical and real to you like that guy in Liverpool that I saw.
	You know, I don't know whether some psychoanalyst might say, oh, wow, this is all a metaphor for something else.
	Have you ever tried that with that story?
	Well, no, because I think as a psychologist, anytime I speak to psychotherapists who do that sort of work, I almost kind of just outthink them and just sort of be like, what absolute nonsense.
	That's an experience.
	And consciousness, you've done work on consciousness, and I've talked here to a lot of people about consciousness because there's a lot of research being done about what is it?
	Because it's what makes us us.
	It's what makes the fact that I think I'm sitting here under these bright lights doing this.
	If I wasn't conscious, then I wouldn't be experiencing this.
	And there are people who believe now that consciousness is this kind of universal curtain that hangs about there and we all sort of connect to it.
	And sometimes our connections can become intertwined.
	And that's how you get people who connect with each other psychically or telepathically or whatever you might say.
	What do you know?
	That's a big question, isn't it?
	What do you know about consciousness?
	So I was originally a forensic psychologist and then I swapped speciality to parapsychology at the tail end, but I mostly specialized in interactions between consciousness and quantum physics.
	So when I was younger, when I was in my early 20s, I was kind of working on, you know, solving Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness is the single greatest unanswered question in psychology and it will influence every other science once it can be solved.
	It is one of the last great questions of the human race.
	And so I was working a lot on this, trying to get my head around it.
	And then I started to get this idea that consciousness might actually be, you know, it could be reduced into individual particles.
	It could be reduced right the way down to atoms or even smaller.
	And if that is the case, then it must be governed by the quantum rather than classical physics.
	And when it's governed by the quantum, suddenly a lot of things that seem like anomalous phenomena, things like, you know, ghosts, things that can jump in and out of time, things that can appear and disappear and come from past times, almost appear to time travel, suddenly starts to make a lot more sense.
	And that's kind of what I've been working on for the last while.
	Because that would be, that would be, I'm sorry to jump in, but if you were able to prove, I don't know how you would, if you were able to prove that, then you'd have found the magic bullet, wouldn't you?
	Pretty much.
	So at the time, it seemed like quite an outlandish theory.
	There were other people that had worked on it.
	There was Joe Rosenblaum and there was other, and these were guys who were top aeronautics engineers at Princeton University, things like that.
	These were guys who are real top of the field scientists and started to look at lightning, quantum and consciousness.
	Now they'd already started to unpick it and it seemed outlandish at the time to tie in the paranormal with that.
	However, since then and now, you know, we've done experiments where we've shown things like you take caterpillars and you can train them in a maze, kind of like Pavlovian conditioning.
	You can train them to do certain things, remember how to get food rewards and things like that.
	Really?
	I didn't know that.
	Okay.
	So caterpillars.
	Now when caterpillars go into a cocoon, before they change to a butterfly, they completely liquefy.
	They don't like, you know, sort of shed apart and grow through the skin.
	They literally liquefy.
	There is no brain, there is no tissue.
	It's individual.
	It's basically just goo.
	And then it reforms into a butterfly from that.
	And once they hatch, if you put the butterflies back into the same conditions, they remember how to do it, which means that it must have the memory from when it was a caterpillar.
	But if the entire brain is liquid, and I mean literally, you know, liquid in a glass, that's what the brain is.
	What is consciousness?
	Where is it stored?
	It has to be individual molecules.
	So that's almost like genetic memory, isn't it?
	That's kind of what that is.
	Is that...
	And sadly, we're running out of time, which is, you know, we could have done another hour of this.
	But, you know, there are those people who've had transplants, other people's organs, and they claim that they have, by receiving that tissue, impregnated within that is some of the nature, the essence of the person from whom they received it, which theoretically can't happen.
	And yet there are many, many stories of people who say, well, I've suddenly discovered that I'm a baseball fan or I love Ford Capri Cars or something like that.
	And you go back into the story of the person whose organ you received and that's what they were into.
	Similar kind of thing?
	Yeah, so because when we talk about what is the essence of somebody, that is really what consciousness is.
	Because consciousness is the kind of quintessential spark of something, and we don't kind of know where it comes from or where it's stored in the brain.
	And yet it is essentially every single micro thing that makes you you.
	So it's the ship of thesis experiment.
	If I take every little bit of you apart and then put you back together, at what point do you stop being you?
	Consciousness is the thing that no matter if you change your limb, if I change my hair, if I change my teeth, my clothes, I'm still and you're still hovered.
	And that's what consciousness is.
	And so when you look at things like that, like potentially genetic memory, if consciousness is individual particles, these tiny things, could it be transported?
	Does that explain genetic memory?
	But my listener, I mean, herein, as they say, lies the dichotomy.
	My listener David's just tweeted to say consciousness is not stored in matter, as it might be.
	He doesn't think so.
	It is received by matter.
	So that's the issue that we have to try and work out.
	Are we a receiver with a skydish that receives this consciousness that's external to us?
	Or is it like the caterpillars within the goo that makes up us?
	How fascinating, Evelyn.
	Yeah, that's the big question.
	Is it external and then we somehow connect to or experience it?
	or is it emergent and that there are properties and only under certain conditions consciousness emerges from these set conditions, or is it something that's stored?
	And that's kind of the questions that we're starting to get to now, like the structural questions of how, not what is consciousness, but how is consciousness.
	Evelyn Hollow, fascinating information and a great way of delivering it.
	She really has a terrific turn of phrase, don't you think?
	We'll have her back on this show.
	Thank you to Evelyn Hollow.
	Something very different next, as I said, Ivor Davis and the subject of Elvis Presley.
	Elvis Presley, we're going to talk about now.
	The man who was there at the birth of rock and roll.
	The man who didn't necessarily invent the term, but he certainly aided and abetted it.
	And Elvis Presley, you've been telling me in your emails recently, that kind of remembered stories that appeared in the newspapers about Elvis believing in UFOs and being very into the paranormal.
	Now, Elvis Presley is a fascinating character.
	I wasn't an Elvis Presley fan, like Shane in Sydney is telling me on Twitter he is.
	But I respected the fact that he was a supreme performer.
	And there were probably, you might disagree with me, three ages of Elvis.
	There was Elvis who appeared on shaky little black and white TV shows, swinging from the hips, and then they banned him from the hip movements because those gyrations were seen as being, you know, absolutely against morality.
	I'm doing Ian Paisley.
	Why am I doing Ian Paisley?
	Absolutely against the principles of morality.
	So they only showed him from here to here, rather like they do with me, because anything else would be too much.
	In the early era.
	Then there was the comeback Elvis.
	That was after Elvis went into the army and made the movies and sang Viva Las Vegas.
	So there was the comeback Elvis, who was toned and tanned and looking great, and he did a TV special that re-established him definitively as a megastar.
	Then there was the Latter-day Elvis, who put on a lot of weight, did wonderful shows in Vegas and various other places.
	He never got to the United Kingdom, sadly.
	I think he did touch down.
	Maybe you can tell me this too.
	I think he touched down at Prestwick Airport in transit, maybe to Germany or somewhere else like that.
	But he was never officially here.
	He never played a gig in London or anything like that.
	But a truly fascinating man.
	So we're going to talk about Elvis Presley and the paranormal with a man who knows, who's written about him and many other things.
	This is, I think, the second time Ivor Davis has been on this show.
	We talk about him over more than half a century as a writer for The Express and The Times.
	Ivor Davis covered major events in North America.
	He penned a weekly entertainment column for the New York Times, syndicated for 15 years.
	You know, you do that in New York and you do it for 15 years.
	You've got to be really good.
	He interviewed some of the biggest names in show business, from Kerry Grant to Liz Taylor, my hero Richard Burton, Tom Cruise, Muhammad Ali.
	This guy has had, I mean, I've got several pages of biography, but take it from me.
	And I have huge respect for what I call proper journalists.
	He's one of them.
	He's online to us now.
	Ivor, thank you very much for coming on.
	Well, good evening, and it's a pleasure to be on.
	And before we get to Elvis, I would like to know, I mean, I think your Ian Paisley impersonation was superb.
	And because my late wife was from Northern Ireland, I spent a bit of time there and I heard Paisley.
	So you are good.
	But now the question I have.
	You haven't heard my Terry Wogan yet.
	Sorry.
	Oh, well, yeah, Wogan is not known on this side of the Atlantic, but that's okay.
	What about, do you do an Elvis impersonation?
	Only, I mean, everybody goes, oh, and that can easily be mistaken for Tommy Cooper, though, Carl, because he used to go, aha.
	Elvis is, uh-huh.
	And Tommy Cooper was, uh-huh.
	You know, they're slightly different.
	They're a gradation.
	But everybody does that, and everybody says, Elvis has left the building.
	Yeah, I think, sadly, Elvis became in his later years the target of a lot of humor, didn't he?
	Well, I mean, don't forget, as you pointed out, there was the periods of Elvis.
	And unfortunately, there was a period in the middle when he kind of started sagging.
	And then we want to rush forward to the period when he was, his comeback was fantastic in 1968.
	That resurrected his career.
	And then, of course, I went to see him.
	I'd met him a few times and I went to see him in Vegas when he was on the downhill slide.
	He was chubby.
	He had to be poured into his jumpsuit and he forgot the lyrics.
	And by the way, I don't know.
	I know it's your program.
	You asked the questions.
	I'm supposed to answer them.
	Have you seen the Elvis movie?
	I haven't.
	I'm longing to.
	I've got to.
	You've got to.
	Yeah, because the guy Austin Butler is brilliant as Elvis.
	The guy Tom Hanks is a little bit outrageous as Colonel Tom Parker, but it's worth seeing.
	So if you haven't seen it, then we'll move on, as you say.
	So, I mean, is that performance as good as the performance a few years ago of Johnny Cash, which was brilliant?
	Remember that you see it?
	I think, well, no, I didn't see.
	I mean, I am familiar with Cash.
	I hadn't seen the film, but this guy, Austin Butler, is just unbelievable because you forget that he's playing a part.
	You do not forget that Tom Hanks is playing a part because Tom Hanks, as I said, wears a fat suit and looks completely unlike Tom Hanks.
	But that's the way Hollywood likes it because they give Oscars to people who change their appearance on screen, as who did it with Winston Churchill, the English actor.
	These people have done that.
	Oh, was it Tom Courtney who did?
	Was Tom Courtney Winston Churchill?
	My production team know all of these things.
	So one of the great British actors.
	Courtney, sorry to interrupt.
	Courtney Howard might have done Churchill, but the great Churchill one was Tim.
	Oh, gosh, I mean, I should remember it, but Tim, and he won an Oscar for playing Churchill and looking the part and spending eight hours in makeup every day and all that sort of stuff.
	Gary Oldman.
	Gary Oldman, got it.
	Well done.
	Nice one, Mark.
	That's Marky, my producer there.
	I wouldn't have known.
	Do you know, at home, I've got all my computers around me, so I can appear to be Mr. Clever, Clever, Dickie, and I can always get information up.
	But here, I can't do that.
	So I have to do it all in here.
	And, you know, as we both know, the mind sometimes lets you down.
	Let's get into the subject of Elvis.
	And I don't mind.
	And I know that there will be people saying, this show's supposed to be about ghosts and aliens.
	Well, not always.
	Let's talk about Elvis himself.
	You talked, and we got into the subject, Ivor, of the three ages of Elvis.
	There was the Elvis who was in at the dawn of rock and roll, who was banned from some TV stations in the South because of the way that he gyrated with his hips.
	He was drafted into the army for a while.
	He made movies which I used to love watching when I was a kid when they were shown on Saturday mornings on the BBC, but some people said were a little wooden apart from the music, which was always brilliant.
	He did jailhouse rock.
	That was like one of the very first videos ever where he appeared doing that, which was, you know, if you look at it now, it's how many years ago is it?
	Gee, it's 60 years ago.
	But you look at it now, and that performance of jailhouse rock is electric.
	So this man had various stages in his life, didn't he?
	And he was a different person in each of them.
	Yes, you bring up the movies, and it's very interesting.
	Oh, there he is.
	But don't forget, Elvis made three movies a year.
	That's 30, 40 movies over a period of time.
	So he only made the movies, they forgot the story later on in the movie career.
	They forgot the story and they went into only the music because Colonel Tom Parker wanted to sell the records.
	So every movie was done as a music boosting album for Elvis.
	So as a result, the stories turned up being pretty crappy, if you don't mind me saying.
	No, I think some of the storylines left a little to be desired.
	But the way they were, I mean, look, it's kind of style and substance, isn't it?
	The substance was maybe not really there, but the style of it, you could not deny.
	No, I mean, as you say, I watched the movies on Turner Classic Television in America.
	And I want to say some of them are better than I thought they were when I first saw them.
	I see, you know, he wasn't bad.
	He could act.
	But I'll tell you an interesting story that I heard from Barbara Streisand.
	She made a movie called A Star Is Born, okay?
	And we were on location, and she said to me that she wanted Elvis to play the rock star.
	And the guy who played it eventually was Chris Offerson.
	Yes.
	And so we were in Arizona where it was being shot.
	And she said she came very close to getting Elvis to do it.
	He wanted to do it, but the problem was Colonel Tom Parker.
	Number one, Colonel Parker wanted him to get top billing over while the Streisand never happened.
	And then he thought, why should I have Elvis playing an over-the-hill drunken, drug-taking rock singer?
	Not a good image.
	So he walked away from that.
	An interesting little sideline.
	That's an incredible story.
	And you got that from Streisand.
	Yeah, from Streisand on location.
	And as I said, the film did okay, but it wasn't a smash hit.
	And Colonel Parker said he wanted to have the billing on the film above Streisand.
	Well, Streisand wasn't going to go for that, was she?
	Now, Elvis Presley, in the days when he made his first demo record, and I think that was in Sun Studios, wasn't it, in Memphis or wherever it was.
	Yeah, it was Sun Records in Memphis.
	Sun Records.
	Thank you.
	Sun Records.
	He was a very clean living, very religious young man, wasn't he?
	He was a very religious young man, but you've got to go back in a way to his early start.
	A lot of people don't know that Elvis had a twin brother who died at birth 45 minutes after Elvis was born.
	So his name was Jess.
	And Jess died.
	And then 45 minutes later, Elvis was born.
	Can you imagine, I'm not a psychiatrist or psychologist, and maybe you are.
	Can you imagine the psychological damage to think Elvis had a twin brother who never made it?
	And what would he have been like?
	So, you know, do you think, and I think maybe this kind of scarred him a bit, but at the same time, it made him embrace the Bible.
	He told me Elvis made a movie called Frankie and Johnny.
	He loved Donna Douglas, the co-star.
	He loved her because they sat down over in a dressing room and they read scripture together.
	Was Donna Douglas the woman in the Beverly Hillbillies who played Ellie Matthews?
	That's the one.
	That's the lady.
	Yeah.
	So it was kind of interesting because Elvis had a habit of wooing his leading ladies.
	He did it with Anne Margaret in Viva Las Vegas, which was an interesting film.
	But with Donna Douglas, he said to me, Elvis said to me, I went on the location.
	He said, I love this lady.
	We sit down at lunchtime and we read the Bible together.
	So, you know, he was very that way.
	Gospely, he was inspired by gospel music and all that kind of stuff.
	So he was religious.
	But, you know, what is being religious, really?
	Elvis went off the path a few times.
	Well, the pressures that he must have been under.
	And of course, some performers, and just diverting quickly into Johnny Cash again, rediscovered the religion towards the end.
	I love Johnny Cash, right?
	Maybe not the case with Elvis, because as we will discuss, Elvis was looking into other things, wasn't he?
	Are there any signs in that early Elvis, the one that's religious and the one who was wooing his leading ladies and all of that stuff that we know.
	Were there any signs that he was interested in stuff beyond the norm?
	Because we've got to remember in those days, if we're talking 50s, 60s, early 70s, even, the kind of thing that we're talking about and we regularly talk about on this show was scoffed at and laughed at and derided.
	And if you were into those things, you were nuts.
	Yes, yeah, you know, you were what they would say in Hollywood, a woo-woo time.
	Woo-woo.
	That's me.
	But the thing is, I didn't get close enough to find that out, but he obviously had a passion for religion, which was kind of secondary to what he was doing.
	And of course, as you pointed out in your great opening, you know, he gyrated and every gyrated and everybody said, don't shoot from, you know, below the waist.
	So, and I think he was religious in a strange way.
	Now, strangely enough, when I know I was going to talk to you, I sort of did a little bit of research.
	And there are people out who say that Elvis' ghost shows up at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel and sometimes even in Memphis, Tennessee at the mansion.
	So listen, I've never seen a ghost, although I do go and talk to my dead wife from time to time.
	But, you know, being a practical journalist, I'm inclined to go, Howard, is this not quite my cup of tea?
	But if people report this, then, you know, I mean, maybe they want to get their names in the papers, or maybe there is something.
	I'm wondering, of those reports, as far as you know, are they talking about Elvis in the white suit, Elvis in his larger days at the end, or Elvis at the beginning?
	I wonder which one it is.
	I think they say they see the entertaining, the Elvis image, not Elvis in scruffs.
	They see Elvis at Graceland, the mansion.
	And I happened to see a report some time ago of Elvis apparently in the balcony of the Hilton Hotel in Vegas.
	So they are genuine.
	So who can scoff at what people say?
	And, you know, this is your meat and potatoes to some extent, Howard.
	So, I mean, I am a scoffer, a cynical journalist, and I just, unless you show it to me, I don't believe it.
	Listen, my background is news desks, and the people who trained me were some wonderful people at University College, Cardiff, and Radio City who came off newspapers.
	So they taught me the newspaper way of doing these things.
	So I'm very skeptical about all of these things, and that's why I'm doing this show, because we drill down into those things.
	But the fact that people are reporting the ghost of Elvis suggests to me that perhaps Elvis was at times in his life, and we know this, troubled.
	He had issues.
	Yes, you know, I think when you look at it today, Elvis was probably what they call today bipolar.
	But don't forget, back then, back then, bipolar didn't exist.
	You were considered, if you were depressed, you were a nutter.
	And people said, I mean, we're talking about an era a very long time ago and the attitudes of that era.
	We are, we are.
	We are.
	I'm talking about the 60s and even back in the 60s.
	People didn't accept medical definitions, what bipolar is.
	A lot of people run around bipolar.
	And I think Elvis was, because after to get over his bipolar condition, as you all know, anybody that knows Elvis, he took drugs to go to sleep.
	He took drugs to wake up.
	He took drugs to go on stage.
	And all the enablers gave him so many drugs.
	I mean, he consumed an abomination of drugs, so many that most normal people would have dropped dead years ago.
	And the problem is, isn't it?
	And we've seen this in the history of entertainment so many times, so many hugely gifted people like Elvis Presley.
	He was doing those things and there was nobody to dissuade him from it.
	Nobody, he had a very close entourage and inner circle around him, you know, almost like a posse of people.
	But most people don't get that if you're that big and you live where he lived at Graceland, then you have people like that, but they're not the kind of people who would deign to advise you.
	So quite often you find that somebody who's at the top of the tree, at the very peak of the pinnacle, cannot be dissuaded from those things because why?
	Nobody's going to do it.
	You're absolutely right.
	I mean, he had the Memphis Mafia, the underlings, the Memphis kids he knew at school and knew as younger.
	And they basically came along for the ride because Elvis was generous.
	I mean, when Elvis was in a generous mood, he didn't go out and buy them a dinner.
	He bought them all Cadillacs or new cars.
	So they knew that he was their road to gifts and all the rest of it.
	So they would not buck the system.
	They would not say, Elvis, you're really screwed up.
	You better get off the drugs, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But look, in Hollywood, and you know this, and you told me a minute ago you could do a good Richard Burton interview, Richard Burton impersonation.
	Richard Burton, who I got to know quite well, was a brilliant talent, a genius.
	I mean, what an actor he was.
	But he killed himself early on with mainly drink.
	So, you know, the talented people, the ones you mentioned, the rock stars, I mean, look at all the actors.
	Well, I mean, Jim Morrison, there's an example.
	And there's lots of paranormality written.
	I don't know whether you've written about Jim Morrison, but Jim Morrison from the Doors, come on, baby, light my fire.
	There are a million reports about him and his own involvement in paranormality and his supposed return in ghostly guys.
	Yes, yes.
	And I think he's buried in Paris.
	I'm not exactly sure, but people say they see him in America.
	So how does that happen?
	I don't know.
	Well, he went there.
	I'm sure he was probably on the Ed Sullivan show a few times.
	Maybe he's haunting all of that.
	This is absolutely fascinating.
	Although we are deviating a little from the unexplained, I think look at yourself in the mirror and tell me that you're really not interested in Elvis Presley, one of the greatest entertainers that ever there was.
	So we're seeing a man here who's got issues, who is required to keep delivering because, you know, you're Elvis Presley.
	You came back.
	You did it.
	1968, you did the big concert.
	You started doing virtual residencies at Vegas.
	So, you know, people loved you.
	Yes, you had your issues.
	You are piling on the pounds.
	And life was not easy for you, but nobody was going to help you, particularly because of who you are and what you are.
	But do you believe, just as we get towards commercials now, that those issues that he had laid the foundations for the paranormality and the belief in it that we're about to speak of?
	I think there's no doubt there was an element of that.
	You're absolutely right.
	And he wanted normalcy and he had a bizarre lifestyle.
	And if you get a chance, I'll tell you, Steve Binder, the guy who you referred to as directing Elvis in his comeback concert, talked about the way he dealt with Elvis.
	I'm sorry to go on, but.
	Okay.
	And the way, how would you encapsulate the way that he dealt with Elvis?
	He dealt with Elvis in a kind of normal way that Elvis never dealt with people.
	Elvis was the king, and you don't argue with the king, do you?
	You don't even advise the king.
	But this guy, Steve Binder, told Elvis the truth, that he wore no clothes, you know, that way.
	And Elvis responded that way because he said, Steve Binder said to me a few weeks ago, I told Elvis your career is in the toilet.
	And Elvis, Elvis, he looked at Elvis and Elvis smiled and said, oh my, nobody tells me the truth.
	And so they got on very well and they did a phenomenal 668 comeback concert.
	And I'm sure you've seen it.
	Howard, it's just terrific.
	Elvis is back to the prime, to the Adonis in leather, in black leather.
	Brilliant, brilliant concert.
	Look it up.
	I mean, if you ever want to know, and I promise my producer, Marky, we're going to get to those commercials, but if you ever want to know what it is like to be a performer, to come back, to do it and nail it and nail it forever, then there are very few people who could do that kind of thing.
	Sinatra was one of them and Elvis Presley was the other.
	We're going to talk about Elvis Presley and Paranormality with Ivor Davis.
	What a great guest.
	Howard Hughes coming at you.
	We're talking about Elvis Presley.
	And Elvis's, I won't say obsession, but let's say nicely preoccupation with paranormality, especially in his later years.
	When, as you heard, the people around him, his effective posse of people couldn't help him away from his demons.
	So they are obviously part of the backdrop to this.
	Diane in Northern Ireland, thank you very much for your nice message there.
	I'm glad that you're enjoying this.
	I know that it's different from the other stuff that we do.
	Ivor Davis here, great journalist, biographer, and a man who's met many people.
	And we've both met Barbara Streisand, Ivor.
	What an amazing person.
	How was she?
	Was she great?
	Am I allowed to, Marky?
	Have I got we got time for this?
	You know, it's like the golden shot used to, we've got time for this now.
	We've got time.
	Sorry, a bit of a dated reference there, but there will be those who remember the golden shot.
	I was about 22, and I got myself what they call a press trip to a large health establishment in the United Kingdom.
	Let's put it that way.
	And I was there to do reports on all of the things that you could do there and how they could rejuvenate you.
	And they said to me, somebody very famous is here.
	I only discovered at breakfast one morning who the somebody very famous was.
	I think I'm allowed to, it's a long, long time ago.
	It was Barbara Streisand.
	And although I was, you know, what was wrong with me calling myself a journalist, I was too, in fact, I was not encouraged to talk to her because she was there for a private trip and wanted quite understandably, you know, her piece.
	But I remember watching her interact with the other people.
	And we were all wearing toweling robes, all provided by the organization, all eating our whole meal toast with our decaffeinated coffee and whatever else we had.
	And she was just on the next table over there.
	And I have to say that she was lovely with the people.
	And because I was so young then, this is years ago, I didn't have the courage to go and talk to her.
	Can you believe that?
	Sorry, that's my Barbara Streisand story.
	We must, while we're dropping names here, we must get back to Elvis Presley, I think.
	So here we have Elvis Presley.
	He has his demons.
	And he begins in what is not exactly isolation because he's got loads of people around him, but you can have loads of people around you and still be very lonely.
	Let me tell you that.
	He begins to develop an interest in UFOs.
	Let's start there.
	And in fact, the reports are that he thinks that he saw, he believed he saw one.
	Yeah, I never heard that from him.
	But don't forget, Elvis was looking for something.
	He wasn't sure what he was looking for.
	I mean, I think at a certain stage, his mother had died.
	And when his mother died, that was a blow.
	Even though she brought him up as a young god in poverty, his father was, Vernon, was kind of a bit of a, you know, not really that bright.
	And so when his mother died, Elvis sought something, the afterlife.
	He wanted to see his mother again.
	So there is a certain element there in his life, in the 50-part makeup of Elvis.
	There was certainly that.
	Again, I don't want to make up a story, but I never got into Elvis' otherworldly activities, which is paranormal.
	But Elvis had Colonel Tom Parker, who is the man who ran his career with an iron fist, and yet Elvis called him like a second father.
	He would say that to him, like he's his second father.
	And he was.
	So Elvis was scrambling around looking for the meaning of life, like many people do, like many showbiz people do.
	Biggest names on the face of the earth that I've seen are insecure people who think, is that all there is?
	And I'm sure you've met them as well, Howard.
	So I don't want to go on endlessly, but I met many showbiz people who are looking for something.
	Religion, you mentioned Johnny Cash.
	Johnny Cash went through a monstrous drugs and drinks, and he couldn't stand up at times in concert.
	And yet he came back to God at the end.
	He came back looking for something to make life worthwhile in his own mind.
	And, you know, he recorded some remarkably gritty songs at the end.
	You know, there's a video that I think has made its way to YouTube now, but he sings, you know, I hurt myself today.
	You know, that.
	And those things speak to people.
	So back to Elvis at Graceland.
	There are, I mean, I'm just looking at some material that I found today.
	There was a book apparently called Alien Rock by somebody called Michael Ruckman.
	It said that a blue light was seen in the sky over Elvis' home the day that he was born and later in life.
	Elvis continued an interest in aliens, apparently amassing a large collection of books on paranormal subjects and documenting, according to this, this is something that I found online, right?
	Documenting at least two UFO sightings as an adult with his friend Larry Geller.
	Yes, Uri Geller, the guy who, is that Uri Geller, the guy who this is it's got in this biography here, Larry Geller.
	I've just searched that Larry Geller.
	Maybe he was a figure in entertainment.
	I think I've heard the name.
	But, you know, a great interest in all of these things.
	And as you say, like a lot of people who are kind of lost and they lose somebody close to them like their mother, sometimes they try to find solace, that's the word, in mediums.
	Yes, I mean, there's no doubt whatsoever.
	He was scrambling around.
	He had everything he wanted.
	He had more money.
	He used to spend like money was going out of fashion.
	What do you look for?
	But as you said earlier on in the conversation, Howard, many, many stars, Johnny Cash, and we could probably Alice the rock singer, Alice Cooper went, looked.
	Even John Lennon, John Lennon turned to religion to find out something else, you know?
	That's Elvis, by the way.
	You might want to get that.
	That might be Elvis.
	Sorry, it's my son telling me he's arrived and doesn't know I'm doing this conversation with you.
	But they all look for something, some message, some, I don't know, some higher power.
	So yeah, if you look at their lives, they needed something and they think, well, what is it?
	And please tell me what it is.
	How far do you think he took this interest?
	Well, I think he had unlimited resources to try and find out, to go where no man could go.
	And did he call in a minister?
	Did he call in a priest?
	Did he do that?
	I honestly don't know.
	But don't forget, by the time he came to that conclusion that he needed something to save his life, if you like, and he must have known it, by that time, it was too late.
	By that time, there was the cage around him, the invisible cage, and the only people that had access to him were people that had been with him.
	And Colonel Tom Parker made sure.
	He was the guard with the invisible key.
	He kept him in this gilded cage, and Elvis was never able to get out of it.
	And Parker kept the keys.
	And whenever anybody who Elvis might have been interested, wanted to see Elvis, Parker, especially if they were in Vegas at the Hilton Hotel, Parker would say, no, Elvis is not available.
	And he would throw them out.
	So he lost control of his own life.
	But there it is.
	A man had everything, but he had nothing.
	Talk to me quickly, Ivo.
	Sadly, we're running out of time.
	I could talk to you about all sorts of things forever.
	You know that.
	But the reports of Elvis not having died, of Elvis having faked his death, of Elvis not being the one that was in the coffin when he was laid to rest.
	What do you make of all of that?
	Decades of it.
	Well, I mean, again, those things happen.
	You may recall, Howard, there was a guy called Paul McCartney who was supposedly died.
	In 1966 in a car crash, they said.
	That's right.
	And they said he was replaced by a doctor.
	A looking Mikey, yeah.
	So, yeah, so we keep getting off of the Elvis thing, but those things happen.
	And I can assure you, somebody else asked me, what's all this stuff about Paul McCartney being dead?
	I said, well, I saw him in the early days and I traveled with him.
	And I saw him about two years ago.
	And believe it or not, although he looks a bit older, it's the same guy because we swapped stories and he remembered serving me a gin and tonic on the Beatles chair.
	It's the kind of thing that the doppelganger would not remember.
	I'm sorry, I kind of haven't quite answered.
	No, we could trade.
	I mean, my stories are worth a hell of a lot less than yours, but I remember meeting Paul McCartney and thinking to myself, I'm a scouser.
	We talked about Liverpool, right?
	And he was just like I was talking to one of my mates from Liverpool.
	I forgot that this was Macca.
	I didn't get very long with him, but an amazing thing.
	So a sad end to Elvis Presley.
	He was a man who was searching and questing.
	And ultimately, of course, in 1977, on what was, I can remember I was a kid then a hot night in the United Kingdom, it was announced that Elvis Presley had died.
	And I can remember people like Big Bob Stewart on Radio Luxembourg with a big American voice.
	He was a scouser originally, doing a tribute to him.
	There was Tony Prince on Radio Luxembourg.
	I remember tuning immediately across to Piccadilly Radio coming out of Manchester.
	There's a blast from the past and they were doing all that stuff.
	So this man we will remember.
	Ivor, thank you so much.
	I'd love to talk with you about the people you've met and the things that you've done at greater length in the future.
	We're out of time now.
	If people want to find you and your work, have you got a place on the web?
	Yes, I've got www.iverdavisbooks at gmail.com or just IvorDavisBooks.
	punch that in and you can find my books about the Beatles, about Charles Manson.
	Ivor Davis, one of those journalists who's known them all and heard the stories.
	And boy, can he tell them too.
	Remarkable man.
	And before that, of course, Evelyn Hollow.
	Thank you very much for being part of my show.
	This has been The Unexplained.
	If you want to get in touch with me, go to the website theunexplained.tv.
	You can always email me, follow the link, and you can do that through there.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained Online.
	Until next, we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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