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Sept. 18, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:29:24

Edition 663 - Steve Aspin

66 year old businessman Steve Aspin lives in Lincolnshire. You won't have heard his name - before now. Steve says he has been a contactee/abductee all his life. And he decided to do something about it. Steve tracked down and got to know some of the luminaries in this field - including Budd Hopkins and Dr David Jacobs. Now , in 2022, Steve has decided to publish the full story of his unusual encounters in his book "Out Of Time"...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Well as I'm looking out of the window right now, it looks like we're observing the change of the seasons.
	The temperature's still into the 20s Celsius, which I think is like late 60s, maybe early 70s Fahrenheit, and the sky's grey.
	But it's kind of nice to get a break from all the heat that we had and all of the rain that we had recently, too.
	So that's the weather report from London.
	Thank you very much for keeping up with me through your emails and also your comments on my official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	It has, as I think I've indicated in the last couple of podcasts, been a busy and unusual time here.
	My TV show was cancelled last weekend.
	For obvious reasons, the nation was in mourning for the passing of the Queen and the changes that are coming to this country.
	And that position will continue, I think, for another week or so as I record these words.
	I'm not sure whether the TV show scheduled for the 18th of September will air.
	If it doesn't, we'll be back the following week, that is the 25th.
	But I'll keep you posted, of course, through my social media about all of that.
	And I will be ready for whatever comes.
	You know, for me, a lot of changes that meant.
	I had to go out and buy a dark suit and borrow a black tie and become the news presenter that I always used to be.
	You know that I left news bulletin reading behind quite a while ago.
	All of that's changed in radio.
	You know, it's all become a faster and cheaper operation, I think, in a lot of ways.
	So I don't do that now because I don't think I would get the flexibility and the freedom that I was allowed in previous years.
	And so, you know, I chose not to do that, to do something else with my life.
	And I'm glad that I did.
	And I now, you know, present and I now do my unexplained shows.
	And that's the way I am.
	So I had to go back into a mode that I hadn't been into for a very long time.
	It's been quite a revealing few days.
	And thank you for bearing with me.
	Thank you also for your kind comments, both by email and through the Facebook page.
	If you want to check that out, it is the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	Thank you very much.
	If you want to get in touch with me through email, please do through theunexplained.tv, my website designed and created by Adam.
	And you can follow the link there and just send me an email.
	If it requires a reply, please put in the subject, reply required.
	I'm a little behind myself right now with emails, but I am reading, seeing, and noting them all.
	And thank you.
	And if you're one of the couple of people who sent in images recently, UFO images and stuff like that, because of everything that's been happening, I'm a little behind on that too.
	But hopefully I'll be getting ahead very soon.
	I think that's all there is to say, isn't there?
	The guest on this edition of the show is, I think, a very special one.
	The man's name is Steve Aspin.
	No, you won't have heard his name, I don't think.
	But by the end of this, you'll be very aware of him, the things he's done and the things that he's experienced.
	Steve Aspen, I guess you could call an abductee and contactee.
	This has gone on throughout his life.
	But until recently, Steve Aspen didn't talk about it.
	It's only now that he's decided to write a book about it.
	He is a very different kind of guy.
	But as you will hear, he has diligently and quietly researched what's been happening to him, he says, and other people around the world, for decades, and has known and met and had acquaintance with people like Dr. David Jacobs and Bud Hopkins and John Mack and Peter Robbins and Tim Goode in the United Kingdom and many, many others.
	This man has put in the time, traveled the miles and done the work, as you will hear.
	And the book has taken him a lifetime to put together because the book is his lifetime.
	It's called Out of Time, Steve's first book on this subject of UFOs and abduction research.
	We're going to talk about him and where he's coming to this from in just a moment here.
	Thanks again very much for your communications.
	Keep them coming like I say.
	Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his work.
	And don't forget, of course, bookings are still open for the Unexplained Live, the cruise through the most beautiful parts of the Mediterranean, and a chance to see, up close and personal, me and a lot of the guests from The Unexplained over the years for you to interact with and ask questions with on board a Morella cruise ship, the Explorer.
	If you want to know more about that, theUnexplainedLive.com is your place.
	Let's get to the guest now.
	About 120 miles north of me, I think, in Lincolnshire, Steve Aspen is here.
	Steve, thank you for coming on.
	Hi, Howard.
	This is going to be a fascinating journey, Steve, and there are many departure points that we could have started from, but I want to start this way, if I may, with a quote from your book.
	You say the issue that we're going to be talking about, this contact and abduction issue, has been successfully normalized in popular culture to become background noise to the point where most consider it as of little importance, relegating the subject to a minor comic footnote in their busy lives.
	Yes, I do.
	If even only a few curious people read this work, enjoy the experience, and learn something about this intrusive phenomenon affecting millions of people all over planet Earth, the effort will have been worthwhile.
	Yes.
	Now, very considered words, and I think they're right on the money for what we're about to discuss.
	Right.
	I was writing predominantly about the whole UFO phenomenon, which has been with us since, you know, classically since 1947, but there were sightings during the Second World War of the Foo fighters over Europe, and they were always considered to be Nazi technology or something, you know, because nobody knew what they were.
	So the whole thing about unidentified flying objects appearing in the skies and being seen by airline pilots and military pilots and tracked on radar and so forth has been around for probably the best part of 70 years now, maybe 80 years.
	So that has been so ubiquitous and it's been so common.
	There are literally millions of sightings around the world in the past 80 years that most people just take no notice of it anymore.
	It's background noise.
	I mean, if it were a new phenomenon this year, it would be in the news all the time.
	But it's become normalized.
	And it was only in 2017 when Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal and what's her name, Helen Cooper, wrote that article in the New York Times about the ATIP program, the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Programme run by the Pentagon, that it came to the top of the agenda again and gained a certain amount of serious credibility among the scientific community.
	And it also enabled a lot of people, I think, to finally talk about this subject and engage with it.
	Was it a mile marker for you?
	Yeah, not in 2017.
	I've actually been planning to write the book on and off since about 2009 or 2010.
	And I noticed the fuss about the API revelations because it finally meant that in the US, at least, the thing was gained proper traction in the US Congress.
	And people are asking questions in Congress about where the money came from and what the Pentagon were up to, having a whole department devoted to investigating what they call unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs.
	I only started writing the book this year.
	I had about 10% of it in draft in notes for several years, but I just started in earnest this year.
	And I don't really, it's a confluence of several things.
	It's very, very difficult to put my finger on it.
	First of all, I'm 66 and that's about as old as I want to be before I start a writing career.
	So I just plowed on with it.
	I'd planned it out.
	And with this Pentagon UAP issue as background for the probable audience, what I wanted to do was write a book that would appeal to and inform people who didn't really know about the abduction issue as being related to UFOs.
	Yeah, no, I was going to get into that because the book is important for a whole bunch of reasons.
	It was a surprise to me when I read it, too.
	You meld in your own story with a narrative around the subject.
	In other words, this is a primer.
	You know, if somebody wanted to buy one book about this phenomenon, this subject, then I think they could do much worse than get yours because it's all there.
	Plus, of course, you're not just talking on the basis of here are some people whose books I've read.
	You've met a lot of them.
	You've actually spent the money and, you know, worn the shoe leather to go and see them, which we will talk about.
	But you've also experienced it.
	Before we talk about you and your early years, which I want to do at the beginning, just another quote from the book.
	You say, although I later worked extensively with the highly assiduous Dr. David Jacobs, who helped me to successfully recover deeper memories buried from some of the encounters outlined in chapter one of the book, the narratives related here are exclusively those retained in normal memory at the time.
	So lacking many details buried in quotes missing time.
	Why did you do that?
	Well, I wanted to deter any potential criticism from debunkers that might say, oh, this is somebody's memories that he claims were retrieved by hypnosis.
	And a lot of people don't accept that hypnotically recovered memories are necessarily reliable.
	So I wanted to knock that one on the head.
	And the second thing I wanted to do was I wanted to bring the reader by the hand through the experiences I'd had, which led me to realize that this thing was going on with me and by extension with my family and not have the hypnotically retrieved memories as a major issue.
	Because in those days, I just had UFO sightings and encounters of missing time and so forth.
	So I wanted the reader to appreciate that I went through these things and slowly realized that this was what was going on.
	And these experiences in total normal consciousness and normal memory were the ones that added up and collectively motivated me to seek to understand it better.
	And I have a ton of respect for you for doing that.
	And we can get into, in book two, I'm sure you can do the hypnotic regression memories and recollections.
	Okay, let's get into a quick discussion about you, because I know that at the moment you're living in Lincolnshire.
	That's where you settled, beautiful county.
	But I want to get a handle on where you've been and what you've done in your life because you've done a lot.
	Your dad was an academic and this was an enlightened household, it seems.
	Well, he was an academic.
	He was a school teacher when I was younger.
	And as we grew to maturity, he became a college lecturer and then finally a professor of French at Liverpool University.
	So that was his career track.
	And we moved around the country to follow my father's career through our childhood.
	He was a passionate collector of antiquarian books.
	And simultaneously with his academic career, he ran a small business buying and selling antique books.
	And eventually, in his early 40s, he left his academic job at Liverpool University and he moved to Hayon Y and bought a shop and started settling down as a full-time bookseller.
	And that's what he did for the final 20 years of his life.
	I don't actually discuss that part of his life in the book at all, but that was his passion always, pre and post moving to Hayon Y. Now, isn't that interesting?
	Not only is Hayon Y probably the book capital of the UK, but because I worked on Radio Wyvern in that area for a number of years and still have connections with it.
	Oh, you know it well.
	Yes, I know the area very well.
	And I know that that's an area where a lot of people who think freely live.
	So I think it's probably a very good place for your dad to be.
	Yeah, very much so.
	All right.
	Now, I know that there was a pivotal episode in 1972, which is frighteningly 50 years ago.
	And we talked about that.
	We had a little pre-conversation a couple of days ago about this.
	What fascinated me, though, is that actually your experiences, like a lot of people who are affected by this, began a long time before that.
	I mean, your first full-on experience, and we will talk about that, was in 1972, and that was all singing, all dancing.
	But as a boy, you had issues of kinds.
	You had an unexplained fear of medical procedures, injections in particular.
	Yeah, it's very common with adepts.
	Yes, it's very common with adepts.
	The night terrors, I wouldn't have characterized them as night terrors at the time.
	They were, I was, a lot of kids who are adaptes go through this.
	You feel your body is paralyzed.
	You're awake and you know you're in bed and it's dark.
	You're awake, but you can't move a muscle.
	You're completely paralyzed and you're lying there and things, you can, at some point you feel you're levitated, you're moved upwards and moved.
	And you can just kind of blanket out and try and go back to sleep, but you can't go back to sleep because it's not like a dream state and it's not like being awake or being asleep.
	It's something else, which when your neurolog, your nervous system is kind of paralyzed.
	And these events happened maybe every couple of months throughout my childhood.
	I didn't keep a diary of them, obviously, but they went on for all these years.
	And I think in your early teens, the character of the phenomenon changes a bit.
	For some reason, it just changes.
	Well, maybe because you're trying to rationalize it.
	Once you get into your teens, you have more rational and maybe more academic ability.
	So you're trying to make sense of it, whereas as a kid, you just accept it.
	Yes.
	I like to stress that at no point in my pre-teen years did I connect these nighttime experiences with extraterrestrials or life on other planets or UFOs or anything like that.
	They were all part of the dream world, the other world, the Magonia stuff, you know, the kind of Magonia ideas, the fairies and the pixies.
	That's where I plugged these phenomena into.
	This part of my life was, that's where it lived and that's what was responsible for it.
	This was different, wasn't it, in a way that a lot of us, in fact, I still have them now, this periodic feeling of paralysis and terror that you get sometimes in a pre-waking state.
	However, yours included, I think, things like encounters with snakes and that sort of thing?
	No, I just had a fear of snakes, an unnatural fear of snakes.
	I think that was probably brought about by the little greys grabbing hold of my legs with their long spindly fingers in the bed.
	And I just used to have, it's very difficult to rationalize it so long ago.
	But I think it was a phobia caused by that, you know, then them actually moving me about.
	But you weren't aware of that then?
	No, I just was terrified of something in the bed.
	And I had about a year's, I couldn't sleep and I insisted my parents left a light on and so forth.
	But that was soon, you know, that eventually subsided.
	You kind of change as you grow up.
	You kind of get hardened to things.
	And you also become more accepting.
	Did you I always ask people who talk to me about these things, did you tell anybody about this?
	Because as far as I can see from the book, the only person you really confided in was your maternal grandmother who called them pixies.
	Yes, I'd learned, I remembered to, you know, the abducting entities do communicate with you and with each other telepathically.
	Those people who know the phenomenon well or are abductees will obviously know this.
	It's very difficult to get this across to non-abductees that this is actually what they do.
	They talk to you and you hear it like a voice, but you hear the voice in your head.
	And one of them, I asked on one occasion, why are you doing this to me?
	And I was kind of respectful and I just really genuinely mystified.
	And he said to me, with his back to me at the time, he said to me in a really deadpan, bored standing way, it's because of your mother and your grandmother and your great-grandmother.
	And then he turned around and got on with what he was doing.
	And I asked my grandmother about this when I was about 11 years old, 10 years old, maybe, something like that.
	And she said, oh, Stevie, that's just the Pixies.
	Don't worry, they'll always bring you back.
	So she knew something about this.
	She knew a lot about it.
	Well, the paradigm that she attached it to was this fairy world, this Pixies, fairies stuff, because it's easily confused with that.
	And she just thought that any child who asks about this just needs to be told at the right time, you know, it needs to be explained to them that they don't take you away forever and they don't harm you, they just bring you back eventually and then you'd be okay.
	The word being they.
	So let's be very clear.
	Before we get into this pivotal incident in 1972, and I know that you were born and had your formative years just across the river, the River Mersey from me, you were in Cheshire, and I was across in Lancashire.
	Well, we moved to Cheshire when I was nine.
	Right, okay.
	So a lot of this stuff will have happened in that location, including this thing in 1972.
	However, let's just be very clear about what happened to you in childhood.
	You said that the sleep paralysis issues were things that you couldn't put a handle on.
	You didn't know what they were.
	They were just kind of fears.
	But you also referred just now to beings that were using telepathy to communicate.
	So it seems to me that two things were going on.
	Can you explain how that worked?
	Well, I just...
	I go into this in some detail in chapter seven of the book.
	And that means that if you have a daytime abduction or an abduction when you're awake, what you just notice in the blink of an eye, you suddenly notice that it's two hours later than it was a second ago.
	And you might be walking from one part of the house to another part of the house.
	And then you suddenly find yourself maybe 20 meters away in a different room and slightly disorientated.
	And it feels like a second later.
	But when you look at the clock, it's two hours later.
	So they have what's happening there with what's called missing time, which is completely seamless.
	It's like an old-fashioned celluloid film.
	If you cut a big chunk out of it and you join the two ends together, that's what it's like, you know.
	Or indeed, if you've ever had a medical procedure, I had to have one of these gastroscopies a few years ago.
	And I'm always, I had a few of them over the years, but I was always very nervous about these.
	And the particular physician, and not all of them will do this, used like a Rhohipnol type drug that literally edited time.
	So we started, I was lying on the couch there, lying on the whatever they do this procedure on at a slight incline.
	And I'm talking away to the guy who's going to do it.
	And we're laughing with each other.
	And then we just continue talking and laughing.
	And I said, when are you going to do it?
	He said, I just have.
	And that must be exactly what you went through when you had these experiences.
	Yeah, every abductee has the missing time because one of the things that the abductors can do, it's extremely difficult to get to the bottom of this, but I think David Jacobs really worked it out over a few years because he's extremely tenacious and extremely assiduous about this.
	And there's a whole section in the book where I describe what is responsible for missing time, why it's, because the time is normal, you know, the time doesn't literally go missing.
	What goes missing is your memory of it.
	They remove it from the short-term memory and they put it in the long-term memory.
	And you can't recover it unless you have a technique to do that, which takes time and patience.
	So this is a vitally important thing.
	I think the reason they do that is part of the success of the program is it's a covert program.
	We didn't really talk about the program then.
	I think, you know, it's a covert program and they absolutely do not want abductees to remember what happened.
	You used the word program and I was going to ask you this question at the very end, but it fits nice.
	So it's a program to what end?
	That's what we don't know.
	We can only speculate about.
	It's obviously intergenerational.
	I mean, I know that my grandmother and my great-grandmother were mentioned by the abductors as former abductees in this program.
	And my mother also, my mother really knew about it, really knew something weird was happening to her.
	She cloaked it in a spiritualism kind of paradigm.
	But the program is that abductees are repeatedly abducted throughout their lives.
	And I think there's some evidence that they're modifying the genetic code in some small ways.
	And there obviously is a reason for abductees being abducted innumerable times, the same people being abducted innumerable times, and the same, and they ignore the rest of the population.
	And the reason they're doing this must be to change these people in some ways.
	And part of what they're doing involves this significantly large minority of the population, which are being engineered in this way.
	Have you wondered why it's you and your family?
	We have wondered.
	A lot of people have wondered why us.
	I don't really know, and I can't answer the question.
	We just know that it runs in families.
	And I believe in the book, I explain why I think the program began between 1890 and 1900.
	During that decade, it was initiated.
	And there's quite a fair amount of evidence that that's when they began this program.
	And there's a little bit too much details to discuss in ours.
	But it throws up a question, doesn't it?
	And the question is, if they did come up with the program in 1890, 1900, whenever it was, was it for their benefit or for ours?
	Well, indeed, some abductees claim it's for our benefit, But my perspective is: if it were for our benefit, why the obsessive secrecy?
	Why don't they reveal what they're doing to us?
	I think that's a very, very good point.
	Yeah.
	You know, why would you need to keep it?
	You see, they have extremely advanced technology.
	I mean, the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, maybe 14 billion years old, according to cosmologists.
	And planet Earth is only 4.5 billion years old.
	So about, according to what cosmologists tell us, it's about one-third of the age of the universe.
	So there are literally billions of stars in the center of the galaxy that are three times older than our solar system.
	And the chances of some race of beings developing among the 100 billion star systems in our galaxy, the chances of one or more race of beings developing to an extremely high level of technology is very high.
	And I think the technology they have enables them to move people through walls, suspend atomic structures, move people through walls, move people through car windshields, move people through floors, and to render the abductors and the abducted invisible for the duration.
	And these are all extremely exotic and fabulous technologies which we can't really contemplate at all.
	Many of the accounts through the years, including Betty and Barney Hill, the daddy of the mall, talk of such things which are astonishing.
	Of course they are astonishing.
	But it still doesn't give us a handle on it.
	If they're so clever, why do they need to do this?
	Why do they need to do good questions?
	Why do they need to be involved with us, I think is another one of those big questions that needs to handle.
	Now your father was a professor at my old and much loved university.
	Okay.
	So he would have been...
	So he will have had a rational mind.
	Yet he had a UFO encounter.
	Yes, he had a sighting.
	He wasn't involved in it.
	He had a sighting over the house.
	He was up early one morning in 1968.
	It was between January and March, because it was still very dark at six o'clock in the morning.
	And he was off to, he got up on his own and he was leaving to go off to London or somewhere on a book buying trip.
	And he opened the curtains and looked out and saw a huge white lighted disc moving slowly over the neighborhood.
	And he looked at it for a couple of minutes and then got on with what he was doing and went out, locked the door and got in the car and drove to London.
	And he only told us about it when he returned two days later, which a lot of people would hear that and think nobody would do that.
	But he was one of particularly incurious about strange things like that.
	He was particularly able to just shrug his shoulders and move on with his day.
	Okay.
	Now, I'm building up to this incident in 1970.
	There's a bit of ground we have to cover beforehand, chronologically going through the book.
	So you will notice, because you know the book you wrote it, I'm diving backwards and forwards through it.
	But in 1970, you were staying, I think it was a holiday, was it, in County Kerry, Ireland.
	Yes.
	And you encountered a mutilated cow.
	Yeah, we were staying on a farm in County Kerry, about two miles, two or three miles from the sea.
	And there's a young kid of the family.
	I was 14 at the time.
	My younger sister was 12.
	And the kid was about 11.
	And we rode the horses and helped them collect the cows and so forth at the end of the day and herd them down the road and so forth.
	One day he came to see me after breakfast and he led me, put his hand on my elbow and led me outside and said, I need to show you something.
	And we walked up a gully between two small mountains, you know, large hills.
	And there, about 10 minutes walk from the farm, was this cow lying on its back, upside down, dead and rigid, with the four legs were sticking out in there, rigid.
	They were like cocktail sticks, rigid.
	And the cow had this huge cylinder cord of its back end, which is red.
	It looked like it had been cauterized by a hot iron or something.
	Right, so the spinal cord?
	No, not there, below the spinal cord.
	It was the rectal and genital area that was carved out.
	And the part of its jawbone had been removed, so its jaw was white and glistening underneath the flesh.
	And one of its eyes had gone like it had been removed by a big ice cream scoop, whereas the other eye was still there.
	And similarly, that was cauterized.
	It looked like it was cauterized.
	So it was deep red cavity.
	Was there a lot of blood?
	No, nothing.
	Nothing on the ground at all.
	You know why I asked that?
	If you're familiar with the work of people like Linda Moulton Howe, who started researching all of that around the time you saw that in Ireland, these are precisely the way that mutilated creatures, mainly cattle, but not entirely deer also and many others, this is the way that they're found, surgically incised and bloodless very largely and with particular emphasis on certain places like, as you say, the jaw, the genital area of great interest.
	And all of this done in a precise way.
	What did people say about this, where you were?
	Well, the farmer wanted to keep it secrets because the vet was called out early in the morning and he came and looked at the cow, walked around it, and apparently, reportedly, said the cow had died of anthrax, which is absurd.
	But these were people in rural Ireland.
	They were extremely trusting of the vet's opinion, because the vet was a professional.
	So his verdict was it?
	Yeah, and that's what they thought was anthrax.
	Had it been anthrax, then there ought to have been a countywide or nationwide measures taken because there was no anthrax known in Ireland.
	And, you know, the anthrax spores live in the ground and can survive for years without finding a host.
	And it's not a highly contagious disease, but it's very dangerous.
	And so if it was suspected that there was anthrax at that location, the location ought to have been evacuated.
	And I didn't know this when I was 14 years old.
	But that's what they were told.
	And that's what I was told, you know, that was what the pharma's son reported to me.
	Of course, they'd have to find an explanation for it because it was so unusual.
	But a creature that gets a disease is going to foam at the mouth and collapse.
	It is not going to have bits of itself removed.
	Exactly.
	This was like a surgery performed on the cow.
	And it was about a mile from, not a mile, maybe half a mile from the rest of the herd, across a couple of fences.
	There's no way it could have got there under its own power.
	It was dropped from, it looked like it had been dropped from the sky, to be honest.
	It was only, this was 1970, it was only in the very late 1980s, maybe 1990s that I came across Linda Howe's work.
	And looking at the photographs of the still photographs that she had in her film, Strange Harvest, I realized that suddenly with a chill and a shudder that I'd seen one of these in 1970 in Ireland, in rural Ireland.
	And this was the first time that I could ever make any sense of what I'd seen because I had no reference point prior to that.
	And it was so obvious that it was the same phenomenon.
	Some of the people that I've spoken with over the years about phenomena of this kind who've experienced it, they say, of course, I was interested in all of these things for years and I was a big sci-fi fan and I read all the books.
	And some of them say I was absolutely, completely disinterested, uninterested in this phenomenon.
	And it was all new to me until it happened.
	Now, you did have an interest, didn't you?
	You first bought a book by Brad Steiger when you were 11.
	So you did have an interest in these things.
	That was the first time I'd heard about, I suppose I'd heard about flying saucers, which were pretty ubiquitous in American culture at the time.
	But, you know, we only had some American TV shows and so forth.
	So I don't really engage with the whole idea of flying saucers.
	But I was in a news agent shop at, I think I was 11, and I saw this magazine written by Brad Steiger.
	It was called The Flying Saucer Menace, which is still, you can still hunt down a copy on eBay.
	And if you get a good copy, they have quite high ticket prices.
	I bought it, and they only had one copy.
	The news agent only had one copy.
	Probably the distributor had been around, you know, saying, you know, you want 10 of these, 20 of these, and so forth.
	And would you want one of these?
	You know, it's a bit strange.
	Somebody might buy it.
	And, you know, they just bought it.
	And I had the sole copy that was in this news agent.
	And I had to go back two or three times and look at it.
	And finally, I bought it.
	And probably the majority of your audience won't know the specific publication, but it was a one-off magazine full of UFO sightings, a meticulously reported photographed, and witnesses interviewed and so forth.
	And there was a very, very small section on one page about alleged abductions.
	There was the Hill case and the Antonio Villas-Boas case and the Valenceol case from the French Alps, where Maurice Mas had seen, met two grey aliens who paralyzed him.
	And there was another case in Washington state, in the Northwest, and that was it.
	And the whole thing was about eight lines of text.
	And it was a double-columned publication.
	So in the 80 pages or so of the magazine, eight lines of text were devoted to this on page 72.
	And that was all that the mention of the abduction program.
	You know why I'm asking about this?
	Because there will be some of my listeners listening now.
	And people have various degrees of skepticism from, you know, naught on the scale to 10 on the scale.
	And they would say that you...
	But they would say, well, you read this and you just internalized it and created it for yourself.
	Well, it doesn't work that way around.
	It works the other way around.
	You have these experiences and viscerally, really deep inside, some part of you knows the origin of this.
	And I recognized something on this magazine cover and the flying saucer menace that something was, for some reason, it was really deeply important to me.
	And I'd never ever thought about the phenomenon in any way prior to that.
	And I read it and reread it and reread it and cover to cover.
	And suddenly I had a kind of revelation, but I still didn't connect the UFO phenomenon and the flying saucer issue as reported by thousands of people all over the place and photographed and filmed and so forth.
	I still didn't connect that with my nighttime experiences at the time.
	And I think this is very common, that unless you have an abduction experience that is juxtaposed with a UFO sighting, you don't really make the connection.
	You think it's something about the mysterious other world.
	It's like the fairy world.
	It's all this Magonia stuff.
	I understand.
	So you were not necessarily confused, but at that stage of your life, you were bemused.
	Yes.
	And you don't know the origin of it.
	And if you don't have any flying sources, you know, UFO sightings or sightings of really bright lights in the sky or something to match it up to.
	You don't know where all this is coming from because all you feel is the paralysis and the being manipulated and these creatures are surrounding you and that you have no idea that it's extraterrestrial.
	Okay.
	But this is a narrative, it's your life.
	And it's one of the great things about the book.
	We're taking this step by step, just like all of our lives.
	You know, you learn as you proceed.
	Believe me, I can tell you that.
	Okay.
	There is one other thing before we talk about the instance in 1972 that I think is important.
	And I think I wrote this down rightly.
	It was 1970.
	And I think you were living in Yorkshire, Gisborough then?
	Yes, in Yorkshire.
	You had a bleeding nose, which seems to tie into your later accounts of implants.
	Yeah, I was a little bit younger than that.
	I was in primary school and the second year of primary school.
	So I'd be about seven or eight, maybe eight or nine.
	I had, wasn't just one incident, I had nosebleeds for several months.
	Not every day, but maybe one a fortnight or one a month.
	And they were really, really prolific.
	And I was the only kid in the class that would be writing at my desk and suddenly I'd feel this thing at the top of my nasal pharynx, you know, inside the nose.
	And blood would start dripping out of my nose onto the desk.
	And I became quite notorious for it.
	And the school headmaster asked my parents if they could take me to a physician and get it checked out because it was obviously something that might be serious.
	And I was duly taken to the general practitioner who didn't really understand what it could be.
	And I don't remember anything being prescribed and I don't remember having any kind of x-ray.
	But these nosebleeds continued for a while and then they eventually stopped.
	But they lasted maybe six months or a year and they were really quite worrying.
	And I didn't equate this physical injury illness, whatever it was, to the nighttime abductions or to the nighttime incidence and certainly not to the UFO phenomenon at all.
	I didn't put anything together in that way.
	I just had a bleeding nose, you know, and so many kids who are in the abduction program have that also.
	They have prolific bleeding.
	They wake up with blood on the pillow very often and sometimes the nosebleeds go on for 24 hours.
	And in my case, they didn't go on that long or they stopped and continued later in the day.
	But this is something that I didn't know about until very recent years.
	This was to do with the phenomenon as well because they put small implants up and into the nasal pharynx.
	I've got a whole chapter on implants and scarring and which you have.
	And again, this was something I was going to get into later, but I'm glad that you raise it now.
	You have a lot of documentation in the book at the end of it and also a lot of photographs.
	Yes.
	Because I would have asked you, where's the evidence?
	But at the back of the book, you have photographs of the various wounds and gouges or scours that you have on your flesh.
	So you always took pictures.
	No, those pictures on my skin are as an adult.
	I have no pictures of when I was a child.
	Nobody would have thought of that.
	But when those things happened later, it's to your credit that you did attempt to gather some evidence.
	Yeah, my wife, she was my girlfriend in those days in 2008.
	But we've been married for several years now.
	But she noticed when I got out of the shower one day that I had an experience the night before that I talked to her about and was kind of a bit troubled by it.
	But she noticed a scoot mark that she'd never seen before because it was really prominent on the right shoulder, back of the right shoulder.
	And she said, Steve, I've seen these in UFO abduction books.
	And, you know, she pointed out it in amazement.
	And she photographed it with a camera.
	And we sent the, by that time, I'd jumping ahead a bit really.
	This was in 2008 when I decided to investigate the abduction.
	Okay, well, let's hold off on that bit.
	And we'll come to that chronologically because, as you say, you get more deeply into this.
	In fact, you had an encounter with Roger Lear, didn't you?
	The man who removed the...
	Yeah.
	And I had a correspondence with him for a few years.
	He died in 2014, just prior to his 80th birthday.
	a guest on my very early shows.
	Oh, really?
	We'll talk about that in a little bit, because this is such...
	All right.
	The main event then, what you call the trigger event, was in 1972.
	And I'm just going to shut up and let you tell me that story.
	Right.
	A lot of abductees who become aware, as a very small minority of abductees, know what's going on and are convinced that they're abducted by aliens regularly in the program, if you like.
	They have an event, a single instance where they say, when I was 16 or when I was 20 or when I was 28, I was abducted by aliens.
	And they think it's a one-off thing that happened to them.
	The reason they're convinced it happened to them was it's totally undeniable.
	It's so powerful and there are so many markers that they can't ignore it.
	Now, in my case, in 1972, in the summer of 72, I was working at an agricultural nursery during the school holidays and looking forward to getting into a further education college in September.
	But in July, I was doing six-day weeks working in an agricultural nursery.
	Saturday mornings, I didn't get up because I didn't go to work on Saturdays.
	I went to work for the other six days.
	Now, this is going to sound strange.
	This weren't all strange enough.
	On the evening of the 20th of July, which was a Thursday, I had a very powerful compulsion to get up.
	I said, I'll get up on Saturday morning and I've got to go somewhere.
	And something in my head told me that I had to go somewhere.
	I had to carve out the time to do that.
	And on Saturday morning, I woke up at five o'clock in the morning.
	It didn't usually wake up that early.
	And I sprang to my feet, put my clothes on and walked out the door.
	And we lived in a suburban neighborhood, which bordered on a rural area.
	So it's kind of quiet on a Saturday morning at five o'clock in the morning.
	And I walked to this place about a mile away for no obvious reason.
	I just knew that I had to go there.
	And when I reached this location, there were some new houses under construction.
	So they were mostly just shells with the brick shells and roof timbers, but no interior fittings and so forth.
	And I remember getting there and thinking, it was a sunny, bright July morning.
	I remember getting there and thinking, okay, what now?
	And suddenly, I looked at my watch.
	I felt very disorientated.
	I looked at my watch and it was five past eight.
	So for some reason, two hours and 20 minutes had just disappeared, bang, like that.
	It was completely seamless.
	And concurrently, I was surrounded by blue and indigo lights in the blue and indigo part of the spectrum and whooshing sounds in my ears.
	And somebody was saying in my head, you're going to forget, it doesn't matter what we tell you about this because you're going to forget everything anyway.
	You're not going to remember anything anyway.
	And it was a really sort of bored, deadpan, matter-of-fact kind of voice.
	And I looked through, right in front of me, there was a rectangular aperture in the naked red brick where a window was to be fitted, but had not been fitted at that moment in the building process.
	And I saw a flying saucer drifting slowly from left to right.
	And it was big and it was in full view about 100 meters away.
	And this is weeping, whooshing noises going on and these spectral blue lights and so forth.
	And I thought, at first, I thought, what the hell is that doing here?
	And I didn't really connect the UFO to anything that was going on because the whole thing was so weird.
	I knew what flying saucers looked like by then from popular culture because you see them in comics and magazines and so forth.
	And I obviously had the flying saucer menace book magazine from when I was 11.
	So I kind of knew what I was probably looking at.
	And suddenly, back to normal.
	Zoop.
	Just like snapping your fingers.
	It's just back to normal.
	And I just, I remember thinking, okay, go home now.
	Time to go.
	And I walked back home and I had to keep putting my fingers on my left cheek because it felt wet and hot and it was weeping.
	And there was something on my cheek.
	I got home and looked in the bathroom mirror and there was a circular burn, like the size of a large coin, just underneath my left eye socket.
	And that scabbed over within 24 hours and it took three months to fully heal.
	So I had this strange missing time experience where two hours of 20 minutes went from memory when I was fully awake and fully dressed and fully clothed and walking through a building site.
	I had the sight of the visual sighting of the flying saucer in broad daylight.
	And I had this voice I remembered in my head telling me I was going to forget everything and juxtaposed with these blue and indigo flashing, whooshing lights all around me.
	And I had this burn on my face, which was perfectly circular and didn't heal for three months.
	And when your mother asked you, how did you get that mark, did you say I was abducted by aliens?
	I'm being serious here.
	I honestly can't remember what I said.
	I honestly can't remember.
	I didn't go to the doctor about it.
	I know that.
	I was reluctant to go to the doctor about it for some reason.
	And I actually, see, in 1972, Howard, in rural Cheshire, we didn't have alien abduction as a thing.
	And it wasn't in the popular culture at all.
	And it wasn't in the literature at all.
	And almost nobody had ever heard of such a thing.
	So it was completely, I had no reference point, nothing to hang it on, and nothing to connect it to.
	It was just one of those really weird things that happened.
	And it troubled me for years.
	And the missing time was probably the predominant thing because I kind of knew deep down that something had happened in that two hours and 20 minutes that I hadn't been unconscious, probably hadn't been unconscious because I was walking about.
	And I didn't wake up lying down from sleep.
	I was just waking up walking from one room to another.
	So I had this big chunk of time which had disappeared from memory.
	And the flying saucer sighting was very weird.
	I couldn't connect it to any of the other, you know, any of the other happenings.
	And that thing troubled me for years and years and years.
	Now, if it happened to somebody now, a 16-year-old now, you'd actually probably have the meme of alien abduction in the popular culture.
	Even if they didn't, you know, you can't miss this on Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel, late-night documentary.
	These were different days and all we really had back then.
	And we lived in the same area.
	You know, Granada Television, her local, used to show The Invaderers with Roy Thinnis.
	Yes, she was.
	and that was it.
	Do you remember that?
	I do very well.
	Yeah.
	So I had nothing to connect it to, nothing to explain it other than the list of odd, seemingly unrelated symptoms.
	I actually thought the flying saucer sighting at the time was nothing to do with everything else was going on.
	I thought the flying saucer was just sighting.
	It was just there.
	And these other things, like the whooshing and the flashing lights and the whooshing in my ears and the long period of missing time, I really couldn't make any sense of it at all.
	I just could make no sense of it at all.
	And in the meantime, you're 16.
	Yeah.
	You will have been taking exams.
	I guess you'd have been in a single form, whatever.
	And you will have had friends.
	Did you talk to them about it?
	Yeah, I'd done my O-levels and that summer I was waiting for the results, which came through about four weeks following this incident.
	And I was going to what used to be called, I was planning to go see what used to be called Carlott Park and is now called Westchester College of Further Education.
	So I was planning to go there in September and study for A-levels.
	I didn't really talk to anybody about it.
	I just didn't know what to say.
	I just didn't know how to describe it.
	I thought if I start saying, you know, I was compelled to go to this place by an irrational sort of urge on a Saturday morning, very, very early, just after sunrise.
	And when I got there, suddenly it was two hours later, and I remember being surrounded by blue and indigo flashing lights and whooshing noises.
	And I saw a flying saucer in the sky.
	And, oh, by the way, I've got this burn on my cheek.
	You can't open the conversation with that.
	Well, you certainly couldn't in 1972.
	I don't even think you could.
	You can't make any sense of it.
	I had nothing to attach it to.
	Nothing at all.
	Okay.
	You write in the book.
	No mechanism for understanding it.
	You write in the book in taking me on a Saturday morning in late July 1972 in the specific way they did, they revealed that they know exactly what they and we are doing.
	Not only did they know to abduct me precisely on the one day of the week and at the one time of the day when I was least likely to be missed, but they somehow placed in my mind the determination to rise from sleep at that specific early hour and walk for 10 minutes to the collection point quotes.
	Yes.
	Now, these are realizations that came 40 years later when I started to investigate the abduction phenomenon.
	And at the time, I didn't know anything about this, but now it kind of makes a bit more sense.
	I've talked to numerous abductees who've had not identical, but recognizably similar experiences.
	And I think they know, they are intimately involved with us, those of us who are unfortunately in the program, they know exactly when they can take us and they know when we're not going to be missed.
	And it's usually at night because when people are sleeping, they're not going to be missed generally if they're sleeping in a darkened house.
	But occasionally, they take people in the daytime, again, in situations where they're not missed because of their traveling alone in a vehicle or the two people traveling in a vehicle.
	So if they can do it covertly, they can say you convertly, the abductee isn't missed.
	And I think that Saturday morning abduction is significant because Saturday morning was the only day I didn't get up and go to work when I would have been missed.
	So they know everybody's life plan, which actually ties in.
	Sorry, you were saying.
	I can't say that with any definition, but the frequency of these abductions and the circumstances in which they happen leads me to, leads almost anybody to believe that they know what they're doing and they know about us and our timetables and they know when they can get us.
	All right.
	You talked about car journeys.
	There's one in the book.
	You were in Buckinghamshire.
	This was the 1980s fast forwarding.
	Yes.
	You know, we say that they might know everything about everybody.
	Yeah, it was actually the 1990s, Howard.
	I think it's about 97.
	Oh, something like that.
	All right.
	So that's a lot later.
	But this is in Buckinghamshire, much later than that trigger event.
	And there you are on a car journey.
	And we say that we think that whoever they might be, if they exist, they know everything about everybody.
	But they're not in fact.
	They make mistakes.
	They return people sometimes to the wrong place.
	And with you, you say that you were taken then in Buckinghamshire, but you were wearing a silver chain that you did not return with.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I'd worn it every day for probably 20 years.
	And it was very, very sturdy.
	It was around my neck, under my shirt.
	Never wore it on display.
	It was under my shirt.
	And so what happened was I went on a car journey.
	For those of you who know the geography of the southeast, from Reading in Berkshire, I had a business meeting in the afternoon.
	And I had a meeting with an estate agent in Amersham during the evening.
	Now, if you drive from Reading to Amersham, you can go through Henley on Thames or you can use the motorway.
	You can use a variety of other routes.
	So the journey time is usually about an hour, even at a busy time of day.
	My journey took two and a half hours.
	And I arrived in Amersham.
	I suddenly became kind of aware that I was in a traffic jam going into Amersham and it was dark.
	And I looked at the clock and it was half past seven.
	I thought, how did it get to be half past seven?
	And my appointment with the estate agent had been missed.
	And I drove home to West Yule, where I was living at the time in Surrey, because I was planning to move up to Amisham.
	When I got home.
	I got undressed and I realized my shirt buttons were misaligned.
	So one button was connected to the next eye downwards, you know, so all the way down they've been done up wrong.
	And my silver chain was missing and it's never been found.
	And that in 97, I wasn't aware that I might be an abductee.
	It was not something that I embraced.
	In fact, I resisted the whole idea of it for a long time.
	But you must have thought over the years, why do weird things keep happening to me?
	Yeah, I did.
	I think a lot of abductees have this.
	They live strange lives in which they have periods of missing time that they can't account for.
	They see colored lights in their homes and even in the daytime.
	They have a deep feeling of conviction that they have some kind of mission or are involved in something that they don't know what it is, but they think one day they'll know or one day they'll know what to do.
	They have a whole list of things.
	In the book, in chapter three, I go through this process and list 35 separate things that abductees report happen to them.
	And mostly they don't connect them to the abduction.
	Most people don't connect these to the abduction program at all.
	It's just weird things that happens to me.
	See, they have chronic low self-esteem is common.
	And they often lack confidence in their abilities and find it difficult to engage successfully with a career.
	Not always, but that's not usually.
	Well, I did find it difficult.
	I have to really, really push myself.
	A lot of abductees, these are psychological issues as a result of these experiences.
	I go into this in a separate chapter in the book, in chapter nine, not chapter nine, chapter eight, I beg your pardon, called Question Time, when I try and explore what its life is like for an abductee.
	In the same chapter, I explore how many abductees there are in the human population globally and bring quite a bit of evidence to the table.
	The evidence is that there are between 150 million and 400 million abductees in the global population at any one time.
	And there may well be more.
	There may well be more, but I think that's a pretty sound guess.
	But, you know, abductees sometimes recognize these things in themselves and they don't connect it to the program because they don't know their abductees.
	There's a lot of resistance to admitting your abduct because there's a certain amount of stigma about it.
	A certain amount of denial.
	People don't take you seriously.
	People can't make any sense of it.
	And fear of the different.
	You quote John Mack, who I have a lot of time for and recently interviewed Ralph Blumenthal about.
	John Mack said many abductees like yourself feel that they're serving a purpose and they come back with some kind of heightened perception, maybe a psychic sense.
	What do you think about that?
	Yeah, I think that's a feature of the phenomenon.
	It doesn't happen to all abductees, but a minority of them do really got a positive feeling from it.
	I think this is very complicated.
	I go into it in the book in some detail.
	The abductors are able to place things in abductees' minds during something called, which is referred to as a mind scan procedure, which every abductee undergoes during every abduction event, so far as I can tell.
	They place things in the abductees' minds that they're somehow special, that this is a very positive experience and that they should be grateful for it.
	And they are here to enhance us and take us to the next evolutionary level and all this stuff.
	I mean, this, for all I know, may be true, but I come back to, is that really likely?
	You know, if you look at the evidence coldly and dispassionately, is that really likely?
	Why are they so secretive about it?
	And why don't they allow any abductees to be seen?
	Or very, very rarely happens.
	They're mistakes.
	If it's so positive and benign, why the secrecy?
	And why the bodily implants?
	And why do they scar you and create such psychological problems when they never reveal anything convincingly that they're doing?
	They never give you any evidence of anything convincingly they're doing.
	Not in my case anyway.
	Fast forward to the 2000s then, and I know there's a growing realization in your mind that there is some pattern of events happening to you.
	You're in Sardinia in your bedroom.
	There are a couple of aliens there, and you see somebody you perceive to be your late father.
	Then in 2008, there were separate abductions two consecutive nights, which is very rare.
	So stuff was happening to you.
	My case is rare, yeah.
	Yeah, but it's still happening.
	I mean, there's an incident earlier this year, Howard, where I had a coughed up a nasal implant and inadvertently flushed it down the drain system.
	That's a whole series of things.
	How did you know that was what it was?
	Well, I didn't at the time, but I felt this thing at the top of my nose.
	I had a couple of hard sneezes because I had a cold.
	And I felt this thing in the top of my nose.
	I kind of snorted it down the track here.
	Sorry to be so graphic, so anasonical.
	But then 20 seconds later, I just coughed up something effortlessly and it landed in the sink.
	And it's maybe the size of a fingernail.
	And it was a bloody mass in the middle of which was a little seed-shaped Object.
	And I thought, oh, what the hell was that?
	And I was seized by a kind of panic and urgency to flush it down the sink, which I did.
	And to cut a long story short, about eight weeks later, they replaced it.
	The ejecting the objects was in February, and the replacement was in April.
	I talk about that, that's in the book.
	What, so they took you again and put another one in?
	That's what they do.
	That's what they do.
	How do you know that?
	Well, I don't know it for certain because I haven't had it x-rayed, but I woke up highly irritated.
	I suffer from chronic hypertension, which a lot of people of my age do.
	But in my case, it's really quite high if it's not managed.
	And I took my blood pressure when I woke up because I felt so irritated and so annoyed and so touchy.
	And my BP was more than 150, and it's normally these days down to 120 systolic pressure.
	And then I had, I suddenly, I felt irritation in my nose.
	And I noticed there was a little bit of blood coming out.
	And I put some tissue up my nose, and it was bleeding.
	And again, it bled for about 24 hours before it settled down.
	I think they probably replaced it.
	Now, I won't go to the GP and say, I need an x-ray because I believe I've got an alien in place of a nose.
	That would be difficult.
	Well, it shouldn't be.
	But, you know, in the society we live in, we don't accept this phenomenon as real.
	And one of the reasons why I put so much medical and scientific information in the book was to convince possibly skeptical readers that this thing is physically real, that the medical, the implants in the nasal pharynx and in the ears and other parts of the body are physically real.
	They've been removed.
	We mentioned Roger Lear earlier on, who was a podiastric surgeon from California and his surgical team, removed 18 in total implants, one of which, the analysis of one of which forms a 40-page appendix in the book.
	Is that 18 from you?
	No, no, no.
	That's a total of 18.
	I was going to say.
	18.
	Can I just a little tiny bit of housekeeping?
	Have you moved your microphone?
	You're slightly off your mic now.
	Okay.
	I think you might have moved.
	I know you're wearing a headset, just for my listener here.
	If you're wearing a headset, you have to be reasonably intimate, but not too intimate with the little boom that comes down.
	Sounding better?
	Yes, it is.
	It's clear.
	Just move down a bit.
	That's absolutely fine.
	Okay, Dr. Roger Lear, I know that you met him.
	Look, you spent a lot of your money, and we haven't talked about your working life.
	I know that you had some important jobs, which clearly gave you enough remuneration to be able to do these things.
	But you met Dr. Roger Lear.
	What did he do for you?
	Well, the implants analysis elicited in the book is not an implant that was removed from me.
	It was removed from an abductee who chooses to be called John Smith.
	But the analysis is by a materials analyst called Steve Colbert, who's working at a large institute in California.
	And you can find him.
	I give the reference webpage reference to this particular analysis.
	And it's very, very thorough and very comprehensive as to what exotic materials these implants are made from.
	This particular one contains isotopes which are non-terrestrial, which we assume applies to most of them.
	And an isotope is, as some of your listeners may know, is an element that contains the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons to another isotope.
	So terrestrial iron always has the same isotopic ratio.
	Iron from iron-nickel meteorites, which hit the Earth occasionally, have very different isotopic ratios.
	So they have a different number of neutrons in their nucleus.
	So they have a different atomic weight.
	These implants have non-terrestrial isotopes in their construction.
	There's no way you can find those unless you dig up a meteorite or unless you go off planet Earth and get one from somewhere else.
	So I guess the question for the skeptics would be, how could that be?
	I want to ask you this, and I ask you this, and I asked you this when we had our little pre-conversation as well, and I'm asking this with great respect of a guy who's got a very similar background to my own.
	I mean, you were born in the same kind of area or lived in the same kind of area.
	So you're a kind of honorary scouser as I am.
	I'm asking you this with respect, but have you ever questioned your mental state?
	I don't think I've questioned my mental state.
	I've felt stress, but sometimes you put it down to work and life things and difficulties and so forth and financial worries and so forth.
	I don't think I've necessarily questioned my sanity in the way, but some abductees do.
	But in my case, I don't think I would say I've questioned it.
	And in the meantime, let's be clear, you were living a life.
	You were a professional person.
	You had a career.
	You had a family.
	All of that was happening simultaneously with this.
	Yeah, I started a surgical innovations company in 2000, 99 actually.
	And I ran that as its sole director and shareholder.
	And I employed a number of staff to do all the office work and so forth.
	So I was able to enjoy a comparative Freedom of action.
	And I was able to travel, as an example, the United States.
	We already discussed, I think, 11 occasions, and visits and stay with Bud Hopkins and so forth, and visit conferences and meet all sorts of people, which many people in my situation might not have been able to do.
	So I didn't realize good fortune smiled upon you.
	I love the stories you tell about the gargantuan efforts that you went to to get to meet Bud Hopkins.
	It wasn't something that you were able to arrange immediately.
	You know, you had to work at that.
	It took me a year to get to him.
	And having read his books and realized that he really, really, really understood this phenomenon, like at the time, no one else.
	I mean, since then, other people have accepted most of what Bud discovered in the 1980s and 90s.
	And they've accepted it as part of the phenomenon.
	In many cases, they're not aware that he was the person who uncovered it all, or most of it.
	And I worked with David Jacobs, who Bud Hopkins introduced me to, because by 19, sorry, by 2008, Bud had basically stopped working with people with a couple of small exceptions because Breakthrough Films were planning to make a film about him, which never actually progressed because Bud was so ill.
	But they were involved with the story is I eventually got to Bud Hopkins by Peter Robbins, my dear friend, sending him or showing him photographs of my scoot mark scar that my now wife discovered getting out of the shower one day, which we mentioned about half an hour ago.
	And she'd photograph these scars and we sent them to Peter Robbins and a couple of other people.
	And Peter took them round to Bud Hopkins and showed him.
	And it just happened that Breakthrough Films were looking for a couple of abductees with fresh scoot mark scars that people were not in the literature.
	And Bud Hopkins contacted me by telephone and asked if I'd go over to Manhattan and stay with him and have this biopsy, scoop mark biopsy in my shoulder, biopsied and stitched and analyzed by a Manhattan dermatopathology practice in Upper Manhattan on the Upper East Side.
	So we went over there in December 2008 and Breakthrough Films took us up to the dermatology clinic and the scar was biopsied and Breakthrough Films owned the rights to the report.
	But of course, I think it's unlikely now that they're going to make the documentary because Bud's been gone 11 years.
	But I've got the letter which was written to Bud Hopkins and passed on to me.
	And I reproduced that letter in the text.
	Lively.
	It was fortuitous for you in many ways because it gave you the chance through your work to travel to America and meet a lot of these people.
	Of all of the people, and we're thinking Roger Lear and Bud Hopkins, I'm not sure whether you met John Mack, but of all of this panel of people.
	Fortunately, John died in 2004, actually in London, as you probably know, was hit by a drunken driver.
	Yes.
	And he killed.
	He was giving a presentation about Lawrence of Arabia.
	Yes, he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author as well as a professor of psychiatry at Harvard.
	And he was killed in London because he looked the wrong way.
	Being an American, he stepped off the curbside and looked the wrong way.
	And looked right instead of left or left instead of right.
	I can't quite work that out right now.
	If you think of the panoply of people, and I have a lot of time for John Mack.
	I always have.
	I've never met him, but I've loved everything that I've read about the guy.
	He seemed very sincere about it all, and he put his life and career on the line.
	But of all of these people who you did meet, who do you think has made the biggest impact on you and why?
	Well, that would be Dr. David Jacobs, who was a tenure professor at Temple University at the time I started working with him.
	And he retired in 2011, I think, aged 69 from Temple University.
	He worked with me very extensively over Skype and occasionally in person, but I met up with him maybe half a dozen times during the time we worked together.
	He's now, he used to live in Philadelphia, because the university is in Philadelphia.
	He enabled a lot of memories to emerge.
	He's very, very patient and took as much time as an abductee needed to get to grips with things.
	And if you didn't remember very much, he was fine about that.
	You do another session if you wanted.
	It was always down to the abductee to request a session.
	He would never, ever contact an abductee in any way between the sessions.
	The abductee had to do that.
	So he opened up the memories for me.
	And he also, during all the conversations I had with him offline, so to speak, when we weren't doing hypnosis sessions, he and I had a lot of dialogue about the phenomenon, a lot of dialogue about the abductors and how they do things and why they do things the way they do.
	And I'm very open in the book about what he is responsible or where the origin of a lot of my ideas I'm explaining in the book come in part from my conversations with David Jacobs, who I bounced ideas off and he bounced them off me.
	And we came to, I mean, David's stopped writing now because he's 80 years old in August, now 80.
	And he's moved to the Midwest to live near his son, one of his sons.
	And we have to interject here just to say that this man was important for many reasons, but the reasons include he offered the only university course on UFOs for 25 years.
	Oh, absolutely.
	He wrote his doctoral dissertation was Called The Controversy Over Unidentified Flying Objects in America.
	And he was awarded a PhD for this thesis.
	And the thesis was later slightly modified, two or three percent changed.
	And it was published by Indiana University Press and offered to the marketplace as a book.
	And you can still buy it.
	It was published in 1975.
	And it was the only the second UFO-related PhD that had ever been awarded by any American university.
	I think there may have been a couple more since then.
	But he published that in 1975.
	And he only got involved in the abduction program.
	I actually met Bud Hopkins.
	And I explain in the book, if any of my readers don't know the story, I explain in chapter 7 how that process unfolded and how he slowly became interested in the abduction phenomenon.
	He always knew about it.
	Obviously, everybody did in the 1970s that it was a thing.
	But he didn't give it any credence until he saw Hopkins' work and Hopkins' methodology, which he found extremely rigorous and very thorough and committed.
	And slowly he came to accept that this was really going on.
	Did any of these luminaries who you met in the field, like Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs, Roger Lear, did any of them in conversations that you had with them in your downtime, ever say to you, we think that you're an important figure with the things that you've experienced?
	Why aren't you telling?
	Why aren't you talking about this?
	Not in so many words.
	Yeah, not in so many words.
	But Bud Hopkins had seen, I was a top 50 Amazon reviewer for a long time, and I'd reviewed Bud's books on Amazon.
	And he'd read a lot of my writings, short writings, you know, not, I didn't write any books, but short writings.
	And he said, you know, he said, you're really quite a good writer.
	You know, you're not no mean writer yourself.
	You should think of writing all this down sometime.
	And this was, you know, 2009 or something on 2010.
	And I shrugged and said, thanks, Bud.
	You know, that's great.
	But I could never match his eloquence and richness and warmth as a writer.
	I've taken quite a lot of not of Bud's style, but as the effect he has on his readers.
	He had a way of taking his readership by the hand and talking to them as if they were sitting next to him and smiling and putting his arm around him.
	Well, I think you do yourself a small disservice because you do a lot of that in this book.
	And we're coming to the end of this now.
	And I want to be absolutely fair to you.
	It's 2022.
	What's happening to you now?
	Well, on the abduction front, I think things have slowed down a bit, but I still have incidents now and again.
	There was one incident less than a year ago, maybe 10 months ago, where I woke up, apart from the implant incident, which I've already described, I woke up feeling my hand was wet in the double bed I shared with my wife.
	I got up out of bed and went in the kitchen because I didn't want to wake her.
	And I turned the light on and there were three, an equilateral triangle of three puncture marks on the back of my thumb, the oozing blood.
	And I thought, this is, you can't get an equilateral triangle of three puncture marks when you're sleeping in a soft bed, you know, at 1.30 in the morning.
	That doesn't happen.
	Straight out of the invaders.
	Yeah.
	This is common for abductees to wake up with scars on their bodies, puncture marks, particularly on their hands and arms.
	Occasionally they wake up with fractures in their extremities.
	They wake up with bruising, heavily bruising sometimes around the legs.
	I know another abductee woke up with very heavy bruising one night.
	And I've got some photographs in one of the appendices of the bruising around my lower legs from, I think, about 10 years ago, maybe.
	But your wife sleeps through all of this?
	Well, they've got a, if there's an abduction, they don't allow anyone to wake up.
	So their mental control over human neurology is such that they can pacify and render unconscious any possible potential witnesses to what's going on.
	So she will be sleeping deeply and she will be unwakeable and I would be taken and brought back later.
	That's the way it works.
	Okay, one of my last questions is, don't you live...
	I would be afraid to go to sleep at night.
	Yeah, I was in that paradigm for a long time.
	And it's probably from 2007 until 2014 or 2015.
	Because one of the effects of hypnosis is repeated hypnosis sessions, which I go into in chapter 7 in some detail, is when you stop having hypnosis, the memories continue to emerge from the long-term memory.
	So you have, sometimes they emerge when you're half asleep and you sit up and start screeching when you remember something viscerally.
	And if you stop having hypnosis sessions, what happens is you stop digging into the long-term memory and digging out.
	So they begin to subside.
	Yeah, I just takes about three years.
	You know, I wonder how you live with it, how you live an ordinary life.
	I know that you've got family members staying with you this week as we record this.
	How do you do everything?
	You just get on with it.
	You just grit your teeth and do it, I'm afraid.
	You make yourself, you steal yourself up to, I mean, a lot of abdoxees which manage to be fairly successful in life have To really grit their teeth and just strengthen themselves up to deal with it and ignore a lot of stuff and push it into the background.
	And you know, you know, I know these people know what they're doing as they go through this process.
	But what else can you do?
	I mean, some abductees have psychiatric consultations.
	Like, there's an example, a lot of psychiatrists in the United States, John Mack was one, who treated 200 different abductees in his clinical practice.
	And John's overriding concern was not to research what the phenomenon is necessarily and what they are doing and what the purpose of it is.
	His overriding concern was the mental health of the patient.
	And the very real trauma.
	Yeah, and reconciling the patient to his trauma because he was a clinician.
	So the whole emphasis of his work on the abductions was patient-focused, whereas that of other non-medical professionals is more trying to investigate what is going on, you know, and trying to understand it and trying to notice common threads in what abductees are telling us.
	As I say, I was a big fan of this man's work.
	In the epilogue to the book, you say, what is my personal attitude to this situation?
	Question, quite honestly, I wish they would pack up and leave for good.
	In other words, you didn't bring this on yourself and you don't necessarily want it.
	No, I've never wanted it, Howard.
	I've never wanted it.
	And most abductees, not all, but vast majority of abductees who know what I call aware abductees are exactly of my opinion.
	They really don't like this.
	They don't like to live like this.
	They don't want this intrusion into their lives.
	They don't want the inconvenience and the traumas and the physical injuries and the mental disturbance.
	Everything that's commensurate with it.
	If they're going to come up and go back to where they came from tomorrow, I'd be absolutely delighted.
	But we are where we are.
	And you've decided to write all of this down.
	I presume the title Out of Time is a play on words because it's about the missing time and also the fact that, as you say, that all of us who get to a certain stage in our lives begin to realize that time is finite.
	Absolutely, Howard.
	The title of the book has two or three meanings.
	And if you read the book, you'll see what those two or three meanings are.
	Yeah.
	Well, listen, it's been a pleasure to talk with you.
	I know that you haven't done, in fact, you've only ever done one other interview.
	I don't like calling them interviews.
	Conversations about it's a process.
	You will do more of this and you will learn how it all works.
	Now, the book, the book is out this week as we speak.
	How do people obtain?
	We're pre-recording this on Tuesday, the 13th of September, and the book is available today to buy from Amazon.com.
	The base price is in US dollars, so I wanted the book to be available on Amazon.com as the, what is it, Amazon KDP call it, the sort of the original website, the governing website is Amazon.com.
	It will appear on amazon.co.uk in the next couple of days because it takes up to 72 hours for it to get around the Amazon network.
	So by the time people hear this, it will be out.
	Yeah, and they can buy it in sterling and whatever the pound is worth on the day that they order, it will be $22.50 converted into sterling is what they will pay for it.
	I think it's the first time we've talked when we talk about books about the price, but it's good to know these things.
	Steve, I wish you luck with it.
	I know that it's a difficult thing to talk about these things.
	And here you are trying to encapsulate your life in what has been a conversation that I think has been about 80 odd minutes here.
	But I thank you for it.
	Thank you, Howard.
	And I just want to put on record my thanks to Peter Robbins for facilitating this.
	Peter, thank you for thinking of me.
	You're a good man.
	What did you think of Steve Aspin's story?
	Your thoughts more than gratefully received.
	I think his book is going to become pretty significant.
	But what do you think?
	That's more important.
	We have more great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained Online.
	Until we meet next here, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	Whatever you do, please stay safe.
	Please stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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