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Nov. 30, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
45:28
Edition 682 - Roy Stemman
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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.
Hoping that everything is good with you, whichever part of the world you reside in, please keep in touch, keep sending me the emails.
And like I say, I hope that your world is reasonably sorted and reasonably stable as we come to the end of what has been a particularly unstable year in a whole convolution of ways, if that's the right word.
Whether here in London, you don't want to know.
It's looking every inch like a November day outside.
But the great thing about it is, here in the northern hemisphere, once we get to the 21st of December, the days are getting longer, and we're looking towards spring then.
You know, I always think of it in terms of get through December the 21st.
Before you know it, it's the end of January, and before you know that, it's March, and then it's spring, and we can forget all about the rubbish weather.
I think that's the only way I've coped with it all my life.
But, you know, I'm no better, even though winters seem to be warmer these days, I am no better at coping with winter than I used to be.
You'd have thought that after all these years I'd have learned, but no, I haven't.
I hope everything's okay with you.
If you want to get in touch with me, go to the website theunexplained.tv, devised and created by Adam.
Thank you, Adam.
And you can follow the link and send me an email from there.
Guest on this edition is somebody from my TV show, Roy Stemman.
A man who's had a million paranormal encounters of various kinds.
He used to be the editor and a director of Psychic News, which was a newspaper and is now a magazine in the UK.
Roy's a tremendously interesting character.
Thank you very much to the listener who sent me his details.
Sorry it took so long to get this together.
So he's the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
If you want to get in touch with me, remember always to tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Maybe how long you've been listening to this show, too.
Always good to hear from you.
All right, let's get to the south coast of England now and from my TV show the other night.
This is Roy Stemman.
Some while back, a listener to the podcast, whose name I'm sorry escaped me, suggested that I talk to a man called Roy Stemman.
And for some reason, probably a lapse of my mind, I forgot to do it at the time.
And I only remembered recently this week, and Roy Stemman, a man who is well worth talking to for reasons you're about to hear, is about to appear on this show right now.
Somewhat belatedly, so my apologies to the listener who suggested that.
But Roy Stemman, before we meet him, began writing for Psychic News as a freelance contributor at the age of 17 in 1959.
He eventually, according to another biography I saw of him, became a director and the editor of it.
He's got such a long curriculum vitae CV or resume here.
I'm trying to see if I can encapsulate all of it.
All I can say is that in terms of his authorial prowess and the things that he's done, he's pretty damned amazing over a period of four or five decades.
Let's get him on.
He can do this better than I can do it.
Royce Demon, thank you very much for coming on.
How are you?
I'm very well, thank you.
And thank you for inviting me.
Well, it's a little belated.
Whoever it was who suggested you, thank you very much.
They even gave me your email address and I was just very tardy on doing this.
You've very kindly sent me a biography here that's got at least 20 bullet points on it.
If I was to ask you, say I met you in the pub or somewhere, what have you done in your life?
What would you say?
A lot.
I can vouch for that because I've got the list.
The subjects you've already touched on were just part of my life because for much of my life, I've been a full-time employed editor of corporate publications, including a global magazine for a security company,
which involved lots of travel, which was fortuitous because that often enabled me on a visit to a security company somewhere in the world to diverge and find somebody locally who were having paranormal experiences that I thought might be interesting to research.
So you're one of these people, wonderful people, who had a job that allowed you to travel and also explore your passion, which is the paranormal.
Absolutely.
Yep.
Yep.
And it's been good.
It's been very good, according to this list.
You started doing this at the age of 17, which makes you sound like, at the time, a very motivated teenager back in 1959.
I wasn't, actually.
It was a little fortuitous.
Like a lot of boys of my age, UFOs caught my imagination, but no more than any others.
But for some reason, somehow I can't remember how, I got introduced to Flying Saucer Review, which was a prestigious publication in those days.
In fact, the Duke of Edinburgh was one of its subscribers that was kept very quiet at the time, although I heard about it.
And so I bought a couple of issues and found them very interesting.
And in one of those issues, I read that there have been reports that a sighting of a UFO often coincided with interference with radio, TV reception, even car engines, etc.
And I think within 24 hours of reading that, my mother and father were watching TV, which was a little tiny black and white screen in those days.
And there was a lot of interference.
And they were complaining.
Normally, a message would come up on the screen in those days.
Do not adjust your sets.
There is atmospheric interference.
But I thought, Well, it just might be something more than atmospheric.
And we had a balcony on the third floor flat where we were living.
And I stepped out, looked up at the night sky.
And within two minutes, a red light very slowly moved across the sky.
It was much too slow to be a meteor.
It was silent.
There was no sign of it being an aircraft.
And so I sent off a report to the Flying Saucer Review and thought little more about it until next day the evening newspaper was full of stories of jets being scrambled from RAF ODM to intercept objects that had been reported over the whole of southern England.
Too long a story to go into here, but it was eventually claimed that they were French jets who got lost.
And when they realized they were over the UK instead of France, turned around and shot away very quickly, which didn't sound a very plausible explanation.
But within a week of that, I was passing my local news agents and a copy of Psychic News was on display outside in Iraq.
Now, we have to say, just before you go into this, because people today may not know this, I remember this.
But Psychic News was actually a newspaper, wasn't it?
It was a regularly published newspaper that you could go into the news agent around the corner and get.
Well, I'd never seen it.
I'd never heard of it, but it was sitting in the rack and its headline mentioned UFOs or flying saucers or something.
So I went in and bought that copy immediately and took it home, read it.
It was full of stories about mediums and psychics, as well as reports of UFOs.
And I immediately went and saw my news agent and subscribed to it.
Interestingly, a couple of days after, there was a ring at the doorbell.
My mother answered and it was the news agent.
And he said, excuse me, Mrs. Stemman, but your son Roy has just subscribed to Psychic News.
Was there a bit of a stigma about that then, Roy?
Exactly.
And she hadn't seen it.
She didn't know what it was.
But she said, oh, if Roy's ordered it, I'm sure it's fine.
So I became a regular reader, wrote a letter about something that was in it.
The editor asked me to go and see him and said, would you like to write a review of a book on UFOs that's just been written by Carl Jung?
And I said, you bet I would.
And so I did.
And the rest is history.
From that, they started asking me to go and see mediums demonstrating and whatever.
And that broadened the scope of my interest in a whole range of paranormal topics.
Back in those days, when I was a kid and I used to work, I mean, my mother worked for a while in Murphy's News Agents in Waterloo, in Crosby, that was regularly visited, I believe, by Cherie Blair and Tony Booth, her father back in the day.
But a lot of famous people went in there back in the day, but they stocked psychic news.
And I used to watch people buy it or eye it, you know, pick it up, take a look at it.
Maybe they didn't particularly buy it, but I was always fascinated.
I never actually picked up a copy when I was a kid and, you know, had a look.
Back in those days, and we're talking decades ago now, because yes, I am that old, what sorts of stories would make the headlines?
What would be the top story, do you think, on a typical edition of Psychic News?
It was usually about evidence that had proved to an individual that you continue to live after death and could communicate through mediumship.
That was the main one.
But it was much broader than that.
It touched a lot on parapsychology research, ESP tests, etc.
But spiritualism was its main goal in life.
And the editor, Maurice Barbanell, who was the founder of the newspaper, founded incidentally with Hannan Swaffer, who was probably the most famous journalist in Fleet Street.
And they together launched this weekly newspaper.
And I'm forever grateful that I got involved at an early stage and got deeply engrossed in it.
I've never really called myself a spiritualist, but I had evidence very early on that satisfied me that mediumship at its best could provide pretty compelling evidence that we live beyond death.
One of the things that is in your life story is that you say that your future was predicted, and this is a very uncertain and a very difficult area.
The number of, you know, I used to, when I was a 20-something year old and not sure about my future and my career, I used to psychic shop and I'd be told a different thing by all of them.
And I stopped doing it in the end because I just thought this is getting me nowhere.
There were little fragments of things that might happen, but the roadmap I was looking for, I didn't get.
You say that there was a stage in your life when your future was accurately predicted by an amateur psychic.
Talk to me about that.
Well, from writing for Psychic News, which I did as a freelance, because my very first job was in an art studio.
My ambition was to become a commercial artist, but that never materialized.
But on the basis of my psychic news freelance work, I got a job on a magazine called The Outfitter, which was a weekly trade newspaper about men's clothing.
And I worked with a lovely lady called Trudy, who became a really good friend of mine.
And she had worked for a charity.
And once she knew, I kept my involvement in psychic news very quiet from my colleagues, because it's a very difficult period.
You don't really want to be arguing with people about spiritualism all the time or mediumship.
But Trudy said to me, you must come and meet Rini Askew.
She's a friend of mine I used to work with, and she's very psychic.
I'm going to have dinner with her next week.
Why don't you come over?
And I said, sure, it sounds interesting.
So I accompanied Trudy.
We went, knocked, rang her doorbell in London, and Rini answered.
And she'd never seen me before.
And before I'd even stepped through the door, she said, goodness, she said, you're going to be changing your job very soon.
And I said, I don't think so.
And she said, a little man, very, very active man, he's going to offer you a job and you'll take it.
And I said, oh, thank you very much.
You know, you're polite.
You don't want to argue.
It sounded impossible.
I was just a trainee journalist in those days.
And I didn't think the likelihood of anybody coming to offer me a job was remote.
And she didn't know you from a bar of soap.
Nope.
Nope.
She knew I was a journalist working with Trudy, but she didn't know any more than that.
And she said this man is a short man and very active.
And she gave me a description.
And I just shrugged it off.
And to cut a long story short, within three months, the editorship of Psychic News, which was then edited by a man called Bill Neach, changed.
And Maurice Barmanel, who had founded the newspaper but left after many years, returned to the newspaper to become editor.
I'd never seen him before, didn't know very much about him.
And within two weeks, he invited me to go and visit him and offered me a job as his assistant.
So it was her description of him and what happened was exactly as she had described.
Did you ever get the chance, Roy, to ask her how she knew that?
I didn't because she did it all the time.
Everybody that knew her, she gave readings to.
She didn't charge anything.
She actually had three daughters.
So the family name was Askew, and they ran the Askew Model Agency in London, which was probably the biggest model agency at that time.
And Reenie was just their mother, but any models that popped around to see them usually got a reading from her.
And she actually predicted to my friend Trudy that she would be going to America.
And if memory serves me right, actually gave the date.
And Trudy said she would never want to go to America.
And sure enough, on that date, she was on a ship going to New York.
So these stories will be in my memoir, which I'm just about to embark on.
But most of them I've never written about before.
And as we wrap up this segment of our conversation, before we have to take some commercials here, pay some bills, people who do that kind of thing.
And, you know, like I've just admitted here, and I'm certainly not advocating that people do this.
You know, all these conversations are offered to our audience for entertainment purposes only.
But when I used to psychic shop trying to find good news for my future, there were some who had little veiled impressions, little glimmers of lights, little things that I could relate to, but nothing very substantial that you could really put your finger on.
There was one, and that's another story for my memoir.
But what do you, in your experience, Roy, of people like this, the ones who appear to be able to do it, what do you think they've got?
I have to be honest and say I haven't a clue.
I must also be honest and say that I'm the sort of person that would say, don't listen to other people.
You follow your own path.
The reality is that when Barbara offered me a job with him, even if Reni Askew hadn't told me that, I would have taken it.
If I hadn't liked him, I would have rejected it.
But how she was able to tell that in such detail is just beyond me.
It ties your mind up in knots in terms of do we have any freedom in making decisions?
Well, yes, we do.
We can always say no.
And should we take guidance from somebody who claims to be psychic?
They might have got it wrong and you're doing something that's not you.
So it's a very complex area and I wouldn't recommend that other people necessarily follow what I did.
Good words.
I've never told this story before, but I can tell you, I'm not going to tell you who did this, but my sister recommended that I go and see a psychic that she knew in London when I first came here.
And again, I was looking for guidance and am I going to be successful in my broadcasting career, which, as you can see, I wasn't over the years.
But, you know, I was very, very interested in age 22 and I wanted the answers right now, like you do when you're 22.
You know, you don't want to wait.
You want the answers to it all right here, right now.
Because waiting to see if you were going to succeed and what was going to come right for you, that's boring.
So I wanted somebody to deliver this to me.
And I went to see this woman, whose name I shall not give.
And in fact, we've tried to trace her in recent years, my sister Beryl and I, and we can't.
But I think she had quite a posh house in quite a smart area of London, maybe Belgravia, somewhere like that, I'm thinking.
And I went there, and I was probably 22 or whatever.
Maybe 23.
I think 22.
And there was a lot of uncertainty around me.
I've been working for the BBC and it hadn't been the most fulfilling experience that I'd ever had in my life, let's put it that way.
And she just said the moment she saw me, so many disappointments.
And I just couldn't relate to that at all because, you know, everything was reasonably hunky-dory at the time.
But in the years that followed, the few years that followed, I had a mass of them.
Now, I don't know how, even if you were cold reading a person, if you were looking at them, I was going in there, you know, 22 full of bravado and, you know, look at me, I'm working for a broadcasting organization and this, that, and the other.
I wasn't radiating that.
But my God, she was right.
So maybe, arguably, and again, I'm not advocating that you see people like this at all, talking to you, my viewer here.
Maybe some people do have this, because I've never forgotten that encounter.
And if I ever come to write that volume, I'm going to definitely put it in because there's more to it than I've told you here.
We're talking with Roy Stemman, the former editor of Psychic News, prolific author, as I can see here from the list of books.
We're going to try and talk about reincarnation coming next.
He's done a lot of work on that.
Roy Stemman is here.
He is the former editor of Psychic News, prolific author and researcher on these matters.
Roy, before we talk about reincarnation, there's a name from my past who you researched and wrote a book about, Ina Twigg.
Now, when I was probably, well, when I was that 22-year-old boy, as I call him now, Ina Twigg was probably the biggest thing in mediumship in the tabloid newspapers.
How did you become involved with Ina Twigg?
She appeared regularly in Psychic News.
I was asked to interview her on quite a few occasions and report her public meetings and got to know her very well.
Her and her husband, Harry, were good friends.
And she used to ring me on a regular basis.
And it was, as a journalist, it was one of the most painful experience in that she would say, hello, hello, dear, how are you?
You'll never guess who I've had today for a sitting.
And of course, I couldn't guess.
And even if I could guess, she wouldn't confirm it because she wouldn't divulge anything about who it was.
And I was left guessing.
This was a game that went on for years.
But eventually I said to her, you know, there should be a book about you.
Would you be prepared to have a book written?
And she said, yes, I'd love that.
So to cut a long story short, we collaborated on a book.
Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, wrote the foreword to that, and quite a few other people, including well-known novelist Rosalind Haywood, was among the people that contributed and I interviewed.
I even got to speak to Donald Campbell, the speed ace, just before his, sadly, his last and fatal run on Constant Water.
Water speed, yeah.
And he'd had many sittings with her.
Because he was involved in that, he said he couldn't do an interview right away.
As soon as the speed attempt was over, he would be very happy to sit down and contribute to her book.
But that didn't happen, sadly.
So he actually, I knew that he was very superstitious and I knew that he was into these things.
In fact, I think the night before he died on Coniston Water, Donald Campbell, British speed ace, the land speed and water speed records he's noted for.
But he played in a game of cards, the ace of spades, and he felt that that was significant.
And of course, the next day he died going for that speed run on Coniston Water.
But he was consulting Ina Twigg, a famous medium, was he?
Yes, and had done so on a regular basis.
But he also had psychic abilities as well, and at times had seen his father, who was also a record speedster, in the cabin on one of his runs.
And I think that persuaded him to slow down or whatever, probably saved his life, I think.
So yes, he was consulting her on a regular basis and was quite open about it as well.
So it was a huge disappointment and a tragedy, of course, when he died.
But I'd have loved to have sat down with him and spoken about those sittings in more detail.
But in an era before there were loads of digital TV channels showing constant reruns of ghost shows, Ina Twigg was a celebrity.
She was never out of the newspaper.
She was very, from what I remember, very down-to-earth.
I'd always wanted to meet and speak with her.
Sadly, I think she died in the mid-80s, so I never got that chance.
But how did she become so famous and so well-known in an era before we had all of that saturation coverage?
It's difficult to say.
I mean, she was so impressive on a public platform, demonstrating to an audience that word got around very quickly.
She did a tour of the continent, Europe, and that went very well.
And then I think it was just the caliber of the people who went to have sittings with her that spread the word and people were prepared to listen to them and follow it up.
And she was pretty spot on.
I mean, for me, one of the most impressive aspects of my association with her was one of the people, I mentioned that Mervyn Stockwood knew her well.
Quite a few leading clergymen took their parishioners to her who had been bereaved And were impressed with the results.
And then Bishop James Pike from America, an Episcopalian minister, came over for a large meeting.
He'd been to Southwark Cathedral to speak to Stockwood and Callum Pierce Higgins, who I knew very well.
And they recommended he had a sitting with Ina Twigg.
And his son had just committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in a New York hotel.
Ina knew nothing about that, but she got that information, passed it to Pike, and he was also having like poltergeist phenomena in the hotel he was staying at.
And that's all covered.
He wrote about it and was very public about it.
I included in my book about her called Medium Rare, which I'm just in the process of updating because there's still such an interest in her mediumship long after her own passing that and a lot of new material has come to me.
So we're going to do an updated version of that.
But for me, the most impressive association I had with her was James Pike and his new wife, Diana, went to Jordan.
They were following a plan.
I think it involved the Dead Sea Scrolls or some Bible scripts that he was researching.
And basically, they went off in a vehicle into the desert and didn't take enough water.
The car broke down.
They got stranded.
This was the days before mobile phones.
And he was reported as being lost.
Ina Twigg phoned me and said that she'd seen him, got an impression of him.
She thought he was in a very bad way.
She didn't think he'd actually died, but she said that it was touch and go.
And then she called me one day and asked me to go over to her place, which was in Acton, in West London.
And within minutes of getting there, she began describing a scene where she saw Bishop Pike climbing up something and then falling.
And then she said to me, he's gone.
He's passed away.
So I was in a bizarre way, I was a witness to what was claimed to be the death of Pike.
And it didn't make any sense to me because I was told he got out to a desert.
So why was he climbing up something and falling?
It didn't make sense.
The story is that his wife, Diana, went off to try and find help and she just walked for miles and miles and miles.
And for some reason, he decided to climb up a cliff to see if there was a way out.
He fell down and he died from his injuries.
So exactly as she said and described to me was what happened.
And the inquest and the post-mortem confirmed death from a full wound.
I'm not sure how she could have known that.
That's pretty...
you know, there were claims that she'd been primed beforehand.
But I guess anybody who's in a situation like that will always face those criticisms.
Yeah.
Canon Piers Higgins took lots of notes of the sitting that she, the very first sitting she gave to Pike, and he shared those notes with me when I was writing the book.
And he said to me that Bishop Pike was just overwhelmed with the evidence.
And he said, there's no way, he said, even I didn't.
He never shared any of that information with me, Pierce Higgins said.
It wasn't public knowledge.
And there's no way Ina Twigg sitting in her home in Acton could have had any of that knowledge.
So, you know, there are always skeptics.
There will always be people that have a view that, you know, all mediumship is false.
But I'm just reporting the facts that were passed on by people whose judgment I accept.
And it's, Roy, deeply unusual.
And we have to say that for the generation today, they won't, and it's not their fault, they won't appreciate how big a star, is that the word?
How big a personality Ina Twigg was.
She was all over the newspapers at one time.
People were fascinated.
But of course, the thing, as you rightly said, the thing that used to intrigue the media most was who was she doing readings and sittings for?
Are you going to be, when you write more about her, will you be able to give us more of a clue as to the caliber of people that she saw?
The book I wrote does give some indication.
I don't have any big secrets in terms of names.
Are we talking royalty here?
No, we're not.
Royalty comes into the other book I've written, which is as impressive as Ina Twigg's book, in my view, which relates to the mediumship of George Chapman, who was a healer, who channeled the spirit of William Lane, who was a surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital.
And, for example, the King and Queen of Romania, who were living in exile, were among the patients that consulted William Lane and he would do spirit operations on people.
That sounds highly dodgy to me.
Well, I thought it was Highly dodgy, but I have enough testimony from people that went and it's in the book, including doctors.
I mean, George Chapman worked in France with a number of doctors.
I went out and met them, talked to them.
I know who they are.
They didn't want their names published, but they were over the moon about the help he was able to give some of their patients whose illnesses.
Was he medically qualified?
He wasn't, but he went into trance and the guy who controlled him was William Lang, who was a surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital.
And he conducted operations.
The first time I went to see him, I was a healthy young, I was still in my teens and I think I grow 19 or 20.
And I said to him, I think I'm fine, but could you do a checkup for me?
So he said, yes, young man, lie down on my couch and whatever.
And he sort of went over my body and he clicked his fingers a lot and did things.
And he said, well, you're absolutely fine.
But when he got to my eyes, he said, you might just have a problem here in your future.
I'm just going to do something with that now.
He said, you might have problems with the tear ducts.
That's very specific.
Very specific.
I've never had trouble with my tear ducts.
So that was a success if I had a problem.
What he could not have known was that both my mother and her sister had had to go into hospital and have their tear ducts replaced with...
So that's an assumption I jumped to, but that's just me.
But I had so many good reports from lots of people, including show business people and others that had operations from him.
But the big, the clincher- When you say operations, was he guiding qualified surgeons to do their operations?
No.
He was a medical doctor, a surgeon, an ophthalmologist, in fact, in his life, William Lane, the guide, and he was controlling the body of George Chapman, who had been a boxer and a butcher before.
Right.
Okay, well, that sounds like the kind of thing that could land you in this day and age, but could land you, you know, before legality in court.
No, I would argue not for two reasons.
One, he wasn't doing anything that, in fact, he didn't touch your body.
It was always above the body.
So he wasn't actually doing an operation.
Right, so this was like virtual laying on of hands almost.
Yes, right.
he was working on the astral body of the patient and it conveyed it to me there I think it's a highly contentious and controversial.
I mean, it's fascinating to hear that this man did this.
But I just have to say to my viewer here, both for common sense and for reasons of broadcast regulation, please do not, should there be such people, and I don't know if there are, and I don't care to look, should there be such people claiming or purporting to be able to do that kind of thing, please consult your general practitioner first before you even think about anything like that.
Go to your GP because that makes absolute sense.
But it's a fascinating story to hear.
Roy Stemman is here, former editor and director of Psychic News and prolific author.
Two books, I think, Roy, on the subject of reincarnation, one of which is called Fabulously, I think, The Big Book of Reincarnation.
Talk to me about your interest in that.
It stemmed from my days at Psychic News because Maurice Barbanell, the editor and founder, who I've mentioned already, was also a trance medium and channeled a spirit being, for want of a better description, called Silver Birch.
And I sat in on a couple of his weekly meetings.
And Silver Birch talked, his teachings were all about reincarnation and the fact that this was just one life of many that we would live and that the chances are we would come back.
Maurice Barbanel, who was the medium for these teachings, didn't agree with the spirit guide he was channeling and said he didn't believe in reincarnation.
He thought once we died, we would be in a new astral plane somewhere and we would progress there.
So I was intrigued by that difference of opinion and began to look into it in more detail and found that there was a growing body of evidence from people doing research into cases, mostly in India or Asia, but in other parts of the world as well, which is impressive.
It's as impressive as any of the spirit messages that have come through mediums, in my view.
And in a way, reincarnation, to my mind, made a bit more sense rather than living in another world forever, that we might have to come back and learn a few more lessons in a different body.
But the person that really persuaded me of that in the very early days was a professor at the University of Virginia called Ian Stevenson, who made a number of visits to this country to visit colleagues in the Society for Psychical Research, of which I've been a member for many years.
And he agreed to me to do an interview with him.
In fact, I did about five interviews with him.
He was very reluctant at the beginning because as an academic, he really only wanted to see his views published in scientific journals, not psychic news.
But eventually he agreed to talk to me.
And the evidence he provided was not only compelling in terms of the memories that people appeared to have of their previous lives, which were corroborated, but also in birthmarks and birth defects that they were born with.
Now, that was a whole new avenue of evidence that had not really been looked at in any detail by anybody.
And he published a huge volume of cases with pictures to show how, for example, a girl in Thailand who had been run over and killed by a train, which actually cut her leg off when she was apparently born in her next incarnation, was born without that leg, which sounds pretty unfair to me.
That sounds horrendous.
I know.
And there are lots of cases like that, but the evidence is pretty compelling.
And I've touched on that in the big book of reincarnation and in my earlier work.
So it's a compelling subject.
But there are puzzles about it.
I visited, when I was in India, I visited a researcher called Satwan Patrisha, who had also worked with Ian Stevenson.
And she was complaining, she was based in Bangalore, and she was complaining that all the best cases to research were in northern India.
And she was having to travel from the south to go and examine these cases.
And her complaint was, why aren't more people remembering past lives in southern India?
I don't have an answer, and she didn't have an answer, but the whole subject is never as clear-cut as we would like it as investigators.
I suppose the only argument against it, and if I'm interested in reincarnation, I'm not sure that I particularly would want to come back, especially if it was better, then maybe I would want to come back.
But, you know, I'm not infused by the idea of coming back.
But assuming we do, how come there are so few people who have recollections of it or signs, physical signs or other signs that they've been elsewhere before?
You know, how come those people are very much in a minority?
If it was something that happens to all of us or most of us, you would expect there to be more of it about, I guess.
I can only suggest that maybe if it is reincarnation that's happening, that part of the mechanism of reincarnation is that you shouldn't remember in any great detail, and you need to go through some learning lessons the hard way rather than knowing what you've got to do.
But what's really intriguing is how many people who go to psychotherapists suddenly remember apparently a past life in some detail, and the remembering of that seems to overcome whatever it is that was troubling them and took them to the therapist in the first place.
Now, whether the therapist is encouraging them to remember a past life and knows that would have therapeutic value, even if the memory was really a fiction dreamt up by the patient to explain the problems they were having, or whether it's a real memory of reincarnation is difficult to decide in some cases.
But there are still some very impressive cases that my book deals with in detail.
And I leave it to the reader to make up their own mind.
Not everyone will find them convincing, but I think the evidence is not easily dismissed.
Do you think that you worked on psychic news for a long time, you rose through the ranks to become the person who ran it.
Do you think that psychic news, as it was, this newspaper that used to be at, you know, I used to see when my mother worked in Murphy's news agents in Waterloo, in Liverpool, all those years ago, would there be room for something exactly like that now, like a newspaper?
Or has the world moved on?
I don't know whether the world has moved on, looking at the state of the world today.
It's probably moved backwards.
But certainly I was at Psychic News for eight years, and then I left and followed another career.
I only came back to Psychic News in the early 2010s and was editor for three or four years, by which time it was then a monthly magazine and still is a monthly magazine.
No, when I first joined the newspaper, that was the heyday of spiritualism.
I mean, every year there was a demonstration and Ina Twigg, who we've mentioned, was one of the demonstrators at the Royal Albert Hall for the remembrance service that spiritualism put on to convince the world that we live beyond death.
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