The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 695 - Duncan Lunan

Jan. 21, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:07:51

Edition 695 - Duncan Lunan

A deep dive into the world of Duncan Lunan - science and science fiction writer near Troon, Scotland - We talk about everything from space object Oumuamua and the "Black Knight satellite" to the real story of tv inventor John Logie Baird...

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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.
	Thought I'd give it the big build-up this time.
	I've got to raise my spirits.
	It is a bright day, but it has been a freezing cold night as I record this temperatures down here in the so-called Barbie southeast, down to minus seven degrees Celsius, which, you know, is deeply sub-zero in America.
	I think that's into the 20s Fahrenheit, something like that.
	So I'm looking out and through the cascade of condensation on my windows here.
	I mean, it is like Niagara Falls this morning.
	I can just about see that everything is still white, and I'm recording these words at nearly 11 o'clock in the morning.
	So we're in for a few days of cold weather, and then hopefully things will improve.
	That's the weather report from here.
	I hope everything is all right with you.
	No shout-outs on this edition.
	Just to say one thing, a few of you have been sending me recently, and thank you for them, pictures of weird things that have happened in and around your abode, the places that you go and places that you live, including one, Valerie, who sent me some pictures of objects being moved in her home.
	And she sent me pictures of before and after.
	Now, they're interesting for me to see, and they add to the tapestry of this show.
	And I might put some of those people, if they want to, on the air sometime to explain what exactly is happening around them and what they think is going on.
	But I would always recommend in these situations to try to contact an expert and maybe start with the Society for Psychical Research, especially in cases like the one I've just talked about, where it must be bemusing at least.
	Maybe to some people it would be disturbing to have things that you put down in one place either disappear or move.
	Now, I've heard of this kind of thing before, and indeed in my own home, I have this strange thing of finding, and people often say, I don't know whether it is, but they say that when you find new pennies, new penny coins, I think the same size as the one-cent coin in the U.S., when you keep finding those, there might be something in it, that maybe somebody is trying to use those things as a way of contacting you.
	Now, I have to say, I don't use cash a lot these days, although I'm not a defender of the cashless society at all.
	I think we should still have banks that have people in them, and we should still tender currency, but maybe I'm just retro and old-fashioned and out of step.
	But I don't get pennies, especially new ones, that much, if at all, in my change these days.
	So how they keep appearing in my apartment, in my flat, I have no idea.
	So look, cut a long story short, if weird things are happening around you, don't just leave it.
	If it is something that is of genuine interest to you and you want to get the answers to it, then, you know, please contact the likes of the Society for Psychical Research.
	I'm just saying that for starters and see what you can do about it.
	Of course, in some cases, the newspapers are interested too, if you can show evidence of that and if it happens on a consistent basis.
	And, you know, I can get the views here of people who listen to this podcast and people who watch the television show, which is ongoing as we speak.
	And at the moment, they're putting it on YouTube as well.
	So if you want to see the TV show, it should be there free for you to see at the moment, unless things get changed again by just putting into the YouTube search Howard Hughes on Talk TV.
	And that should yield you a few of the recent TV shows.
	They won't be there forever, but they are there.
	And, you know, as you know, I tend to archive here on the podcast the best of the conversations from the TV show so that they are preserved for all time here in this audio format.
	That's that.
	Thank you to Webmaster Adam, as ever, for his work on the show.
	Thank you to you.
	If you want to contact me, then you always can by going to the website theunexplained.tv.
	Follow the link, time-honored fashion, and you can email me from there.
	And when you get in touch, please tell me, one, who you are, two, where you are, and three, how you use this show.
	It's always great to hear from you.
	Lots of emails from people who are new to the show coming in recently.
	And a lot of new people discovering the TV show, too, which is gratifying, to say the very least.
	And if you've made a donation to the podcast recently to keep it going, thank you very much indeed for that.
	That's kind of you.
	All right, here we go then.
	The guest on this edition is somebody that we had on the radio show Distant Memories here about six, seven years ago.
	His name is Duncan Lunan, and he is a researcher and author.
	Been doing this for more than 50 years in Scotland.
	And he's been pretty prolific too on a lot of subjects that I think you'll find very interesting that we will talk about here.
	So Duncan Lunan, coming right up.
	Let me give you a little bit of his biography from his website first.
	Full-time writer since October 1970.
	Researcher, speaker, broadcaster, editor, critic, tutor, and other aspects of the written, sung, and spoken word.
	At the time of writing on his website, 10 published books.
	Loads of articles, 42 stories.
	Main field, he says, is astronomy and spaceflight.
	Although he does talk about other things, as you will hear.
	So I don't think we should mess about or hang about.
	I'm going to turn the fan heater on for a moment here, just to warm my back slightly in the freezing cold.
	And let's talk to Duncan Lunan.
	Duncan Lunan, thank you very much for coming on my show.
	How are you?
	Very well, thanks.
	How's the weather where you are?
	Well, look, whereabouts are you?
	Are you near Glasgow?
	Well, we're 30 miles from Glasgow.
	We're on the coast.
	Are you?
	So we don't get a lot of snow, but there's a dusting out there this morning, about half an inch or so.
	Right, because it's been, I was telling my listener here when I was doing the intro, that it's very, very cold down here in London.
	We don't get as much of it as you do, but it's absolutely white and freezing here.
	I think you're quite protected, though, knowing that coast as I do, because I used to do training for Radio Clyde in Glasgow, so I would have to go up periodically and see the people there.
	But you're quite lucky on that coast because I think warm currents sweep up, don't they, past the Isle of Man?
	Indeed they do.
	But even more to the point, Troodon is in the lee of Gortfell on the island of Aran.
	So the worst of the incoming weather from the Atlantic splits to either side of it, and we miss it.
	They call it the Troon Hole.
	Do you know?
	I've been talking recently on the TV show and on the podcast, I think I mentioned it most, about what appears to be a bit of an exodus of people out of the cities, you know, going to places like Troon in Ayrshire and other places perhaps way more remote than you are or I am because they just want to get away from it all and the world has gone mad.
	Are you finding that?
	Well, we're in a bit of a backwater here, which is in some respects a very good thing.
	COVID has been very light here.
	I think it only once got into double figures for the whole town.
	Yeah, and we do tend to miss a lot of the stuff that hits other places.
	Well, that gives you more time to reflect.
	So some of life, some people might say some of life has passed you by, but maybe you've got the march on all of us.
	You've been writing, Duncan, this year, according to your biography on your website, for 53 years.
	That's astonishing.
	That's only since I went full time.
	What prompted me to go full-time was my first major professional publication when Galaxy ran one of my stories.
	And they got Jack Gaughan to do the cover based on my story for that particular issue in June 1970.
	And everybody said, who's the new guy who gets a Gawkin cover on his first published story?
	And I thought, if I'm ever going to go full-time as a writer, this is the moment.
	So I did.
	And immediately my work started selling and I was up and away.
	And then I was cut off from the US market by the 1971 postal strike.
	I had an exclusive contract with an agent in New York and just couldn't get my work to him anymore.
	So realizing that there would be too many stories by British writers on the US market when the strike ended.
	And this is entirely science fiction, sorry for jumping.
	It was then, yes, it was.
	But this was why I started writing non-fiction, because I realized that if I went on churning out stories while I couldn't get them across the Atlantic, there were going to be too many.
	And sure enough, when the strike ended, half the stories I'd written sold, but the other half took years to get into print.
	They all did in the end, I must add.
	Well, that's a tribute to you, and to be able to work in those two genres, which are connected, I think is also tribute to you.
	One thing I would say, and one thing I would ask, is what do you think the connection between science fiction and science fact is?
	Because I think we're seeing more proof of that, proof that there is a connection every single day where things we thought would be fantastical are actually happening.
	Well, there's certainly a cross-current in ideas.
	That first story, for instance, was inspired by an editorial in Fantastic about the Dyson Sphere concept at the time it first came out.
	A friend of mine had given me some back issues, and I was catching up with those.
	And I realized after nine years, nobody had done a story set in it or on a Dyson sphere.
	And thinking about it with the background knowledge I had, I realized something I don't think anyone else had, that a rocket in orbit around the central star in a Dyson sphere couldn't actually land on it.
	It's not dynamically possible.
	And yeah, that gave me the idea for the story, which grew out of that.
	But it happens the other way.
	You get a lot of people who, Carl Sagan, for instance, and Robert Goddard both developed their initial interest in rocketry and astronomy from reading science fiction.
	And even specific ideas out of SF are often picked up by scientists who say, well, I wonder if there's anything in that.
	So, yes, it's a two-way cutting.
	Do you think that when people read science fiction, look, I have this great belief that what we want, somehow we create.
	So maybe if enough people read a work of science fiction and they see something in there that they feel should be fact and should be truth, that collectively somehow, maybe it's just because effort gets deployed in a practical way, and maybe it's something else, these things tend to happen if people want them.
	If I'm making any sense here.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, mobile phones are the classic example.
	Star Trek communicators.
	Somebody said, well, can't we actually do it?
	And so mobile phones came to be.
	And yeah, it does.
	I don't know if people actually will these things into happening, but I've known distinguished scientists who say, yes, it does happen.
	And we're way overdue for the anti-gravity drive, for instance.
	It's on the way, from what I hear.
	All right.
	Well, it was for a bit, and then suddenly everything went quiet again.
	It's strange that.
	2023 is going to be a very, very interesting year.
	You're interested in space.
	Just before we talk about some specific topics that I know that you wanted to talk about.
	What do you think about the pace of space discovery at the moment?
	Only last week, the James Webb Telescope brought us news of another exoplanet.
	More and more of these are being discovered.
	These are planets that are somewhat like Earth.
	Some, they say, may be potentially habitable.
	But we know of so many of these things now.
	We're discovering them almost every week.
	What do you think of the pace at which we're getting discoveries and announcements now?
	Well, it amazes me because I'm old enough to remember When it wasn't like that.
	And a comment I've sometimes made was it was inspired by two articles in Astronomy Now back in 2019 on Facing Pages.
	And I was looking at it and I was thinking, either of these stories would have been the astronomy story of the year back in the 1950s.
	And here we are.
	It's just a couple of news items in Astronomy Now and it hasn't even made headlines beyond that.
	And it's reaching the stage now, I must admit.
	I'm 77 now and I'm beginning, the pace of discovery has reached the level at which I'm finding it no longer possible to keep up with everything.
	I'm going to have to start to specialize.
	I realize that's inevitable.
	And I'm a journalist and I find that is also the case, that things are coming at me so fast and so many, thank goodness I have listeners and viewers who point out some things that I might have missed, but it's coming at me thick and fast like it's coming at you.
	It's a very exciting time to be alive, isn't it?
	Oh, yes.
	Yeah.
	I was reviewing just a year or so back a book by Rod Pyle about the space probe exploration of the solar system.
	And there's a piece at the end of it where he's leaving JPL after a planetary encounter.
	And the guard points out to him that it's time he renewed his pass, his journalist pass.
	And as he's driving away, it makes him think back.
	And he's thinking, God, well, so much is going on.
	I mustn't miss any of it.
	And it just reminded me of a book back in the, published back in the early 60s by Martin Caden.
	It was called Race for the Moon here and War for the Moon, which was a somewhat less suitable title in the States.
	But it was about the first generation of US moon probes.
	And there's a scene in that where he's driving out of Cape Canaveral and he's looking round him at the floodlit launch pads for the moon rockets and Project Mercury that's about to happen.
	And he thinks to himself, it is given to very few of us to see our dreams come true.
	Yeah, it's great to be on the cusp of all of this.
	As Carl Sagan said, you know, we're a very, very fortunate generation.
	There will never be a time exactly like this again.
	Do you think there's your gut, Maybe life that might also be visiting us in ways that we don't understand.
	But do you think that we're on the cusp of discovering we really are not alone?
	Could happen anytime.
	As I said at the end of my first book, when you go out tonight, if you look at a dark sky, the big retrofire may be lighting it up because here they come.
	Yeah, at any moment, we could hit the breakthrough in any of a number of areas, be it organic compounds and meteorites or the new stuff that's coming up about the clouds of Venus.
	I'm about to do a major article for Analog on that.
	And there's still Umuamua, of course.
	I've got an article in Press with Analog.
	I've just returned the proofs last night.
	Okay, now Umuamua continues to influence and interest people like Professor Ave Loeb, the Harvard professor, of course, who's now with the Galileo Project.
	He's the man behind it.
	Spoke with him about two weeks ago on my TV show.
	Umuamua is this fascinating, anomalous, cigar-shaped piece of rock that sped past this planet about three years ago and is on its journey right now.
	And there were people speculating, well, what is this thing?
	Is this some kind of powered, in some natural, organic way, powered craft?
	Because it was so unusual and so different.
	What are you saying about Umu Omua?
	Well, to begin with, there's a couple of things that you've just said that are well out of date.
	It turned out that Umua, whatever it's made of, is not rock.
	It's as reflective as the clouds of Venus.
	It's got an albedo of over 70%.
	And the other thing is that when the shape was re-evalued, it turned out that the overwhelming probability was that it wasn't a spindle, but a flat sheet, a very flat sheet.
	And a chap called Maschenko did a very detailed analysis of it.
	I was commissioned by a concatenation, the online journal, to I offered them a review of Abby Loeb's book, and they said, no, give us an article.
	And then researching that, I came onto some of this stuff.
	And that review was picked up on by Dr. Alan Kalis of the Open University, who sent me a copy of Maschenko's paper.
	He had been following a lot of the same reasoning I had, but didn't go as far.
	I feel reading it that he wants to say it must be artificial, look at this, but he can't quite bring himself to do so.
	But what it comes down to is it looks far more like a solar sail of a specialized design than even Avi Loeb realized.
	Because Avi was the first one to put out there in public the idea that this may be some kind of, as you say, solar sail powered by effectively lighting it at one end like a rocket and watching it go.
	Yes.
	Now, what you have to fully account for the characteristics of a MUAMUA, it has to keep a constant reflecting surface towards the sun.
	It has to be rotate and yet be rotating on its axis in such a way that it maintains a constant appearance, apart from the fluctuating light curve, as seen from here.
	So you need a quite, Loeb himself said later, you need some quite extraordinary architecture to account for that.
	But there are solar sail designs already in existence That could account for it.
	And that's what my analogue article is about.
	I'm basically saying the case for the solar sail is even better than Loeb and others have made out.
	If that is so, then, Duncan, why do you think, and I've wondered this, because we did a lot of airtime, certainly on the old radio show, about Umuamua, sometimes with Avi, sometimes with others, and we covered the speculation and the theorizing about Umuamua, and everybody was fascinated by it.
	And then, as far as the media was concerned, it went away, I mean, literally and metaphorically.
	Why do you think if it is such an anomalous object, and if it may hold the key to so much, why are we not talking about it more?
	Well, I think it's looking at the quote and natural explanations that have been put forward, it's like an experience I had when I was interviewed about the green children's story for Ancient Origins.
	The producer said to me off-camera, you are the only person that I've interviewed who is trying to explain the whole thing.
	Other people are picking on one aspect and saying, ah, that must be the explanation, and we can ignore the rest.
	And in my concatenation article, I pointed this out, that this was what was happening with that people were latching onto one aspect of its oddness and saying we could explain that by, and therefore, we can ignore all the rest of the anomalies.
	But if you're going to deal with this, I would say you really have to look at all of the anomalies and say, we need an explanation for them as a set, not just one in isolation.
	How are we going to study Amuamua when Amuamua is currently moving away from us?
	Well, I think the story is not over.
	I'm in correspondence at the moment with a number of scientists about more that we might be able to deduce, particularly from its orbit, where it came from and where it appears to be going.
	Are you aware of where it appears to be going?
	Remind me.
	Ros 248, it is going to pass on its current course, if it's not modified on its way out of the solar system.
	It is going to pass the red dwarf star ROS 248 in 29,000 years.
	Very short at a distance of, at the moment, assuming it's not modified, a light year and a half.
	But you can tell quite a lot even at that distance if it is an exploratory probe.
	But Ross 248 is coming almost straight towards us.
	It will 30,000 years from now, it will be the closest star to us.
	And it will only be three light years away.
	And Omuamua, if it is following a targeted purpose, of course, couldn't have gone for anything closer other than Proxima Centauri.
	Yeah, it makes you wonder what the people who put Omuamua in our path might know about ROS 248 that we don't.
	I mean, if you want to extrapolate a lot, you know, if you want to make an enormous mountain out of this, a fascinating one, then from what you've just said, you could assume that maybe some intelligence has sent out Umuamua to fly by and check out this thing that is heading our way for some reason that might be altruistic, might not be, might not be connected with anything, but reason there may be.
	Yeah.
	The anomaly about Umuamua that nobody talks about is that it entered the solar system from within four degrees of the apex of the sun's way, the path that the solar system is actually following through space.
	And with zero velocity in all axes, it was coming, except that it was coming straight towards us.
	And nobody else seems to think this is significant.
	But when you think with a whole sky surrounding us, that it could have come from anywhere within, for it to be that close very strongly suggests that its flyby of the sun was targeted.
	Then immediately you have to ask, okay, if it's a gravitational slingshot, where's it going?
	Oh, look, it is actually going somewhere.
	There's a lot that's being overlooked at the moment.
	I mean, all of that may be coincidence, but even if it isn't coincidence.
	What a coincidence.
	As I was about to say, even if it isn't coincidence, the media, even though it's not the easiest thing to get your head around, should really be talking about this some more.
	So I hope that that article that you wrote is going to light the blue touch paper somewhere.
	Well, I hope so.
	I'm getting some very interesting feedback on what I've been doing in the last year and three quarters is writing weekly articles on beginners' astronomy for Orkney News.
	And originally I offered them a series of 60 articles, but it grew to 90 because I kept thinking of other interesting things I wanted to talk about.
	And now that those articles have all come out, I'm starting to get feedback.
	It's been pretty quiet up until now.
	Dr. Howie Furs, the director of the Open Science Festival, has been in touch with me about a couple of the stories.
	But otherwise, nothing much has happened until now.
	Suddenly, people are picking up on this series that I've done, and I'm getting emails about it, which you think, well, where is all this going to go?
	It's going to be a busy one for you by the sounds of it, Duncan.
	You wanted to talk about the Femi paradox, which I've mentioned a couple of times over the years that I've been doing this, not nearly enough.
	The idea or the paradox that suggests itself, that if there are intelligences and civilizations out there, why have they not presented themselves more forcefully Than the anecdotes of some people who claim that they have been abducted or have had contact of different kinds?
	Yeah.
	Well, I was the only amateur scientist to speak at an IBM Heathrow conference in the nine years that they ran.
	They were extraordinarily high-powered affairs.
	They were actually held just across the road from one of the main runways at Heathrow.
	And you kept thinking if an airliner comes to grief here now, science in Britain is going to stop.
	And in the rest of the world, it's going to be very badly affected.
	But they were terrific affairs.
	And as I said, I was the...
	And one year the theme was science and paradox.
	And I suggested to Leslie Banks, the organizer of the series, that I could do the Fermi Paradox.
	And he said, all right, yes, go ahead.
	So I did.
	And as I said, I was the only amateur scientist ever to address one of those conferences.
	But the piece that I, particularly in the paper that I subsequently wrote for speculations in science and technology, a number of major questions arose just in breaking down what the possibilities are to explain the Fermi paradox.
	And the one I kept finding stuck out was we are already a protected species by whoever is in a position to enforce that.
	Somebody out there who's calling the shots is saying, now just leave them alone for a minute.
	They're at a tricky phase.
	They are problem teenagers of the galaxy.
	So some intelligence that's been through that tricky phase and gone along much further than we have is keeping a paternal eye out for us and saying, look, this is part of their development.
	And the prime directive is, just like Star Trek, you don't interfere.
	Yes.
	It was the only explanation that came up in all of the possible scenarios I looked at.
	And it raises some very interesting implications.
	If we are already a protected species, that means we have been visited and assessed.
	It may not have been very many visits, but there have been enough for the red flags to go up.
	So once we're capable of asking the question, is there any point in denying us the answer?
	I don't think so.
	I can't find one.
	My degree is in logic, and I can't find a reason.
	Well, no, that's a fact.
	You know, the old song, Why Are We Waiting?
	Indeed.
	Well, it would imply that somewhere close at hand, there is definitive proof that we have been visited.
	And it's really got to be on Earth somewhere.
	Earth is so difficult to get off that if a spacecraft came here and assessed the state of development on Earth, it's probably still on Earth somewhere.
	What we have to do is figure out where they put it.
	And I got together with an investigative journalist in Australia and a serving officer in British military intelligence who made it very clear that this was a private interest of his and not to be publicized.
	But we devised criteria to look for a spaceship concealed somewhere on Earth.
	It's a very interesting exercise.
	And I've never published it in full, but I'm seriously wondering if when I've got to this age, maybe like Copernicus, it's time I laid the whole thing out.
	But obviously you're not alone in that research, because as you said, this military connected person who did not want to be named, had this as a personal interest, didn't want to go public about that.
	And I'm sure that that person, he or she is not alone.
	So we can start to speculate.
	Sadly, he's no longer with us.
	Well, that's a good question.
	Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but there must be other people who think that way.
	But that actually gives me more of a push to complete the publication of it.
	At the moment, I've only published the theory.
	I haven't published the results of the search itself.
	Of course, the converse of all of that that was discussed at that conference and that is part of the considerations in that piece that you're thinking of publishing, the converse to it is that the reason we're not hearing anything is because there isn't anything.
	Well, it's possible, but I don't believe it.
	I think, in fact, we did come up, and I did publish this much of it, there's a very good circumstantial case to suggest that we were visited at least once in recorded history.
	And the sites specifically at which the touchdowns were made were Stonehenge 1 and Giza.
	And, of course, so much stuff has been published, so many different theories, it's very hard to get your head above the parapet with that.
	But the position on astronomy does strongly suggest that somebody came here and just possibly didn't even deliberately influence the building of those structures.
	But the fact that they were built in the vicinity just reflects on the, shall I say, there are alignments, the same alignments in Stonehenge 1 and in the first and last of the Great Pyramids that appear to, the same alignments, as I said, which really couldn't be achieved without a radio telescope and only make sense in terms of interstellar navigation.
	So it's not proof that somebody was here.
	But again, if it's coincidental, you're talking about coincidence multiplied by coincidence, multiplied by coincidence again, until it becomes so improbable that you are left saying, as Charlotte Holmes said, you know, what you're left with must be the truth.
	And of course, there's another factor, isn't there?
	The other factor is that we are only just beginning to literally scratch the surface of the people who preceded us, of the civilizations that may have preceded us, of the life forms that may have preceded us here.
	You know, we tend to think that our history is written and we understand it all the way back, but we're finding out more and more that, of course, we don't.
	And if you go further down and you look further back, you're going to find things that might surprise you.
	Well, maybe one of the things that might surprise you is further information, further evidence to back up what you've been talking about, the fact that we have been visited and assessed.
	Yes.
	I mean, ultimately, if you put it into categories, the category A object we're after is the artifact, the thing that definitely was not made on Earth.
	Category B would be something like the anomaly in 2001, a beacon.
	That brings us to the category A object.
	Category C, which at my late colleague's insistence I put in, it took some time to convince me that it should, but he convinced me in the end.
	Category C would be alignments like the apparently galactic ones at Stonehenge and the pyramids, which don't belong in this culture, but make sense in terms of a visit.
	But these would still be things that were man-made.
	So if A is artifact and B is beacon, then C is circumstantial.
	But category D stands for Danikin and would be all of the legends, imagery, and what have you.
	That might point us in the right direction.
	But you can't put any firm reliance on until you find any of the other anomalies.
	What do you think, just jumping in here, what do you think of research like, let's reference Avi Loeb again?
	You know, he's actively moving towards, and it's going to happen, investigating some strange fragments that are lying on the ocean floor.
	I don't know whether you've been reading about this.
	It's the South Pacific.
	And he's going to travel out there.
	And he believes they may well be extremely anonymous, in other words, not from here, and might give us some evidence, information about something.
	Do you think that this plays into that whole tapestry?
	It could.
	I think probably as far as he's concerned, the major interest is this particular meteorite from interstellar in origin, because we have, although we've now detected a number of such objects in space, we haven't yet got our hands on one for detailed analysis.
	If it turns out to be artificial as well, well, it's a terrific bonus game set match.
	But if it is simply an interstellar meteorite, then itself would be very interesting.
	It would be very interesting.
	So you win either way, really.
	But a lot of scientists and astronomers have been very dismissive of the idea that this might be artificial.
	But until we get there, we don't know.
	I've had a correspondence with Abby Loeb about all this, and I have not succeeded in persuading him that he should include past contact in the terms of reference of his inquiry.
	I think possibly he feels that's a step too far, because certainly I've found in my professional life that any time I mention it, I get flack.
	People are saying, you have no right to do this.
	You shouldn't be doing this.
	You're not a professional scientist.
	I say, well, professional science isn't doing it.
	So amateur scientists must.
	Was Tesla a professional scientist?
	I'm not sure.
	He skirted a number of categories, I think.
	He lived in a time when most scientists weren't professionals.
	They tended to be amateurs either with independent means or with sponsors.
	And yeah, if you can produce inventions that help to pay for these things, that may take you a long way forward.
	There's some very interesting questions about John Logan Baird when you come into this.
	He seems to have had all his famous ideas.
	He's the most famous Scotsman of all time, man who invented a form of television.
	Sorry, just to explain.
	Yeah, and a much underrated role in the development of radar.
	But the thing is, he seems to have had all his ideas at once around about the age of 12 after he had built his own telephone exchange and linked his neighbours' houses all that with connecting wires, which nearly beheaded a chap driving a carriage.
	So the council made him take it down again.
	But you almost wonder if, acting as a radio aerial, he might have picked something up on that.
	I wonder if anybody's ever speculated about that.
	I wonder if he was interested, if he ever picked up signals, because he was working in bands, transmission bands that, you know, I think all we had was radio, and that was comparatively low frequency.
	That was long wave, medium wave, as we call it here, AM radio, as they call it in the United States.
	Same thing, really, but just different ways of referring to it.
	But he was looking into VHF and higher.
	Well, there are big gaps, really, in what we know about Baird and what he was doing and where.
	His activities in Australia before the war are quite extraordinary.
	And it was alleged by Tom McCarter and Peter Waddell that he might actually have developed a mobile television system that was used by Australian intelligence on the Pacific Islands and has never been made public, which is cured.
	But there's a lot more like that.
	Things that Baird did or apparently worked on in one place or another that just don't fit into the history of 20th century science.
	How fascinating.
	I would love to talk more about John Lukey Baird.
	You know, I was, as a kid, I was, it wasn't radio first for me.
	It was radio from my teens on when I wanted to be on the radio.
	But my first interest was television.
	And I was, as an eight-year-old, I'm sure that you were as obsessive about all of the things that you do as I was about this, but I was a completist.
	I was always at the library getting books out about the way television works.
	And of course, the standard story about John Logie Baird for Americans who don't know the history, other people in other parts of the world don't know the history of this man, or indeed have another version of the history.
	I know that there are a number of versions of the origins of television, but John Logie Baird is the man that is credited with creating a mechanical television system, which the BBC trialled and goes down in history as being the man who lost out, effectively, to the EMI Marconi system, which was electronic, the basis of which we are still using today.
	So we tend to think, and I tended to think by reading, that John Logie Baird was a very, very famous and creditable Scotsman who did wonderful, amazing things, but ultimately didn't make the cut because his system was not adopted.
	But there's more to him, you say, than we know.
	Oh, certainly.
	Let me recommend a book.
	It's by Tom MacArthur and Peter Waddell, both of whom I knew.
	Both are no longer with us.
	But there were two editions.
	One was called Vision Warrior, and the other The Secret Life of John Logie Baird.
	And their thesis was that Baird had developed radar in the 1920s, well before Watson Watt, and that because of its strategic importance in World War II, his work on that and on who knows what else was never credited because he died right at the end of the war.
	Under pressure, the Ministry of Defence did go so far as to say that Baird had a role in the development of radar, and it had not been credited and should at least be noted that he played a part.
	But they reckoned that he had actually invented it.
	As I say, back in the 1920s, and they've got what appear to be eyewitness accounts of Baird using a form of radar in experiments prior to 1930.
	And there's so much more.
	The further you go into it, Baird organized an international network of scientists which continued to meet in Switzerland right through World War II as if the war wasn't happening at all.
	Whatever they were doing, they had much bigger things on their mind.
	Did that include people from the Nazi axis?
	Yes.
	So they independently continued to wonder what they were talking about then.
	This I had no idea of.
	I didn't know this.
	Well, one of the things that came to light, and I was able to shed a little bit of light on, was that I met Tom MacArthur in the street one day and we were chatting.
	He said, just a matter of interest, have you ever heard of the World Air Force?
	And I said, oh, yes, it's H.G. Wells, the War of the Things to Come.
	He said, is it, by God?
	And he says, I've discovered Baird was in.
	Apparently, something of that name Baird was involved in.
	So this thing may have existed, may exist.
	Well, or at least it existed on paper.
	And, you know, people may have been trying to achieve it.
	This idea of an international league of airmen preserving world peace.
	And, you know, all I knew about Jean-Logubert were the names that come to me from those library books that I used to read, about his mechanical television system effectively not being the winner in the competition in Britain, which was organized, I think, by the BBC, who broadcast in both electronic and mechanical systems.
	And in the end, the electronic system was more flexible, they say, and gave better, more dependable results.
	And there are other people who were involved in the creation of television.
	They say there's a man in America whose name I never forget, Philo Farnsworth, who you may be aware of.
	And there was a guy called Paul Nipkow-Nipkov, I remember from there.
	I think he was involved in the scanning process that is essential to television.
	But we must talk about him again because, you know, what a fascinating man.
	And this man, the world is full of unsung heroes.
	You know, a lot of people don't get the credit for what they do in this world.
	I've certainly seen that through the years.
	So I would be interested in talking with him about that some more.
	One thing you wanted to talk about was something that is very controversial, and I have obliquely, tangentially touched on before on the radio show, and I think on the podcast, but not really got anywhere with it, is this mysterious thing called the Black Knight Satellite.
	That is apparently a weird object that is claimed to be not from here, that hangs over, is it the North Pole, and is said to be some kind of observation satellite by those who believe this stuff.
	And somehow this is a controversy into which you have, over the years, been dragged.
	Yeah, it does not exist.
	It's a compendium of various false stories and hoaxes that started, as far as I'm aware, in the early 1950s when Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, was using Baker-Nunn cameras to search for undiscovered natural satellites of the Earth.
	What sort of cameras are they, sorry?
	Baker-Nunn.
	Baker-Nunn cameras were the best optical instruments of the kind back in the early 50s.
	Excuse me.
	And it was alleged that he had discovered two satellites of small satellites of the Earth in the equatorial plane about 10,000 miles out.
	And supposedly, the source of this story was a newspaper in Central America.
	But it was publicized by a UFO writer called Donald Kehoe, and it became a millstone round Tombaugh's neck.
	He insisted from the outset that it wasn't true, and he hadn't discovered any such thing.
	And he said so live on Sky at Night, talking to Patrick Moore many years later.
	And Patrick quoted him in several of his books.
	The thing is, these satellites definitely don't exist.
	They would have been discovered if not then, probably and prior to it, certainly afterwards.
	And with the equipment that's in amateur hands these days, everybody would know about them.
	They simply don't exist.
	And yet I still get emails from people telling me that I must do this subject on my show because there is evidence that I have not talked about.
	And, you know, I have to be an impartial ringmaster in these things.
	So I'm not going to approve or dismiss anything that appears here.
	But I keep being asked by people who say that there is credible evidence claiming the Black Knight satellite does exist.
	Well, I'm going to keep going here.
	The next thing was in 1959, Professor Ron Bracewell at Stanford wrote a couple of papers on interstellar communication by space probe.
	And he suggested that long-delayed radio echoes heard in the 1920s and not explained might be an attempt by such a spacecraft to contact us.
	James Strong of the British Interplanetary Society suggested that such satellites might be positioned at the Lagrange points, the echilaterals or Trojan points in the Earth-Moon system.
	And it turned out on further inquiry that indeed the sources of the long-delayed echoes were in the Lagrange points.
	And I attempted a translation of the echo, long-delayed echo patterns that had been recorded in the 1920s.
	It was published by the British Interplanetary Society, caused a considerable sensation at the time, made my first book a bestseller, minor bestseller at least.
	But in a couple of years, enough evidence had been accumulated to disprove my translation, and I withdrew it.
	In 1976, I published a paper taking, and getting difficulty publishing the attraction, I might add, but I did.
	I got it into print, and in 1976, I published a paper saying my translation is wrong, and I withdraw it.
	But it just went on leading a life of its own.
	People like Eric von Deniken and Joseph Goodavage wrote to me about it.
	I said to them, no, it's been discredited.
	And they didn't want to know that, so they just published it as if it hadn't been.
	And then people started contacting me about two mysterious satellites allegedly discovered in the late 1950s, early 1960s, by the U.S. Air Force in near-polar orbit.
	Now, just recapping as we go along, you've got tumbled satellites in the equatorial plane 10,000 miles out, possible baseball probes in the orbit of the moon, 60 degrees away from it, quarter of a million miles out,
	and you've now got these two mysterious objects in polar orbit, which turned out to be return capsules from the Discoverer series of satellites, very early spy satellites, which the US Air Force also used to buy an air re-entry techniques.
	Which came down all over the place because they were still learning how to do it.
	One came down off Spitsbergen and the Russians and Americans raced to recover it, which was the inspiration for Alison MacLean's novel, Ice Station Zebra.
	And another fell in the Pacific and was retrieved by the Basiskar Trieste, but was crushed by pressure on the sea floor, so it wasn't any good.
	Two of them, the retro rockets fired 180 degrees out of true, and they went into higher orbits, ranging from initial close to Earth up to 2,000 miles.
	These were the two mystery objects.
	And they were very quickly identified.
	I've got books in my collection that list them as lost discoverer payloads.
	So because, and here I am sorry for jumping in again, just to clarify, because they were mysterious, and these projects are still going on all the time, Black Ops launches.
	We didn't know too much in the public domain about them, but they have been misidentified.
	That's what they are.
	Yeah, that's what those two were.
	But somewhere along the line, the name Black Knight, which was a British experimental rocket being tested at the Woomera Rocket Range at the time, got attached to them.
	And the next thing after that was in the early 80s, my attempted translation of the 1920s radio echoes got attached to them, quoted out of context as well.
	And it's very frustrating because none of these things actually exist as far as we can tell.
	But if they do, they're entirely separate pairs of objects, three pairs of objects.
	And then you had voices allegedly heard by Cooper in orbit on the last Project Mercury flight, which I have been completely unable to verify.
	It's not in any of the official accounts.
	And then dust covers and similar things that were dropped by the astronauts putting the first two segments of the International Space Station together.
	And the pictures of them are alleged to be Black Knight, although that orbit is far closer to the Earth and completely different orbital plane again.
	They can't all be the same object, let alone two objects.
	And my work has got nothing to do with it at all.
	But to my ongoing frustration, more people go to my website looking for Black Knight than for anything else.
	And they don't even look at my real work.
	Have you anything to say to them here?
	Oh, yes.
	For goodness sake, read the section on my website that sets forth in detail everything I've just said.
	And you will see that Black Knight is a hoax.
	It does not exist.
	When you say it's a hoax, that's maybe at the unkindest end of the spectrum here.
	Misunderstanding, I guess, is that side of the spectrum.
	And on the opposite end of the spectrum is hoax.
	But you think it's more hoax?
	I think it is, because I keep contacting people and saying, look, this is A, not true, and B, nothing to do with me.
	And it just goes on being published and repeated from place to place.
	It does get very frustrating.
	Well, I'm glad that you had the chance to talk about that, and we had the chance to discuss this.
	I just want to say that there will be people with another view.
	Maybe they've got things that you haven't heard to contribute to this.
	And if anybody gets in touch with me to put another view of the Black Knight, would you like me to pass on their communication?
	Oh, dude, by all means.
	Right, now lastly, as we...
	We've got 10 to 15 minutes, which is good.
	I have talked about this before, and I think I might have talked about it with you briefly on the radio show those years ago.
	The Children from the Sky was your book.
	This is about the so-called green children of Woolpit.
	Back in the 12th century, this was apparently a boy and a girl who appeared in this village hundreds and hundreds of years ago in Suffolk.
	They were a different colour.
	They were green.
	And they claimed subsequently to come.
	They spoke a language that nobody understood.
	They claimed subsequently when they were able to communicate to come from a place where I think everything was green.
	And people have speculated for years about what this might have been.
	What do you know about that?
	Well, I discovered it when I was a student.
	One of the set texts in the history of literature was The Anatomy of Melancholy by Richard Burton, published in the, oh, around about 1620.
	And his huge work runs to three volumes in the Everyman edition.
	Right in the center, you get his throwaway reference to those green children which fell from the sky that Newberg Gensett writes on in his time.
	And eventually I decided to take this out when I was, in fact, when I was researching Man in the Stars, that's when I first looked at it.
	And I discovered that what the children had described, apparently, was life on a planet that wasn't Earth, a planet with a trapped rotation, specifically keeping the same face always towards the sun.
	And the thing was, Burton knew enough Renaissance astronomy to know that there was no such place on Earth, which was what led him to suggest that they had fallen from the sky, or specifically from Mars or Venus, because he thought that they would both be inhabited.
	And I eventually decided to start looking into this.
	I went to Woolpit itself in Suffolk and from there to the County Records Office because I'd got together with a historian friend to draft a set of questions to ask there.
	And people kept saying, oh, you have to go to the County Records Office for that sort of thing.
	And I discovered that I was getting answers to my questions.
	I'd hit on a line of inquiry that other people hadn't followed.
	The idea that Burton put forward needed to be taken seriously.
	And to cut a very long story short, I put 10 years of research into it and eventually wrote the book, which is by far the most speculative thing I've ever done.
	But, yeah, as William of Newborough, Newburgh Ansis himself said, it does not grieve me to have set down this most strange and extraordinary event.
	I think I've established that it really happened, that it was expected.
	Henry II had already annexed the village, and when the children appeared there, he put a garrison of cracked troops into the castle next door.
	The Pope intervened and told the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds to keep his nose out of it until the king had finished with whatever was going on.
	I believe I have traced the girl in the historical record.
	And that is, again, I can't prove it.
	It's circumstantial.
	But I believe that's the case.
	And if she's who I think she is, she married one of Henry II's most senior ambassadors, which takes away all explanations about runaway tribes in the world.
	Isn't that interesting?
	Because I was about to say, when you use the word expected, I was going to chime in with the thought, does that mean that they may have been seen as some kind of cosmic ambassador for somebody?
	And you've just used the word ambassador, the girl apparently married into that level of society.
	So what do you think was going on?
	Well, now we are in the realm of conjecture.
	Obviously, I have no proof whatever for this.
	But what it reads like is an experimental colony on another world established by extraterrestrials for their own purposes, involving abductions from Earth, probably without the consent of the people involved, but with the knowledge, if not the active connivance, of at least some of the terrestrial authorities.
	The knight to whom the children were taken is basically the head of Henry II's secret service.
	He was a very powerful and influential figure, but he was almost completely out of the historical record.
	Whatever he was doing for the king was very much on the quiet.
	And that's who the villagers took the children to, crossing the land Of two other barons to get to him.
	The more you go into it, the more it looks as if, A, it really happened, and B, the incident of the children is an accident.
	It's the tip of a much bigger iceberg.
	And what you're left with, as it says, abductions for experimental purposes within connivance of at least some of the terrestrial authorities, or the knowledge at least, it's the ex-files in the 12th century.
	Are there signs of this in that area now?
	Any signs or symbols?
	Not that I'm aware of.
	I've been around the area, visited all the places concerned, and I've done a lot of digging.
	There's plenty in the chronicles, if you know what to look for.
	The extraordinary thing is that over and over again, it's clear there were people who knew what was happening and were writing about it in such a way that other people who knew would recognize it and those who weren't in the know wouldn't get it.
	But, yeah, something big is going on.
	The late John Braithwaite, when I'd been on it for a few months, said to me, if it isn't extraterrestrial contact, you've got the political thriller of all time.
	Well, you have because of the connections to the Pope and the government and a special force being sent in to keep the lid on this place.
	I mean, if it had happened in 1947, then it would be as big a story as Roswell, I suspect.
	Bigger, bigger, so much bigger.
	This is the greatest mystery in these islands, maybe one of the greatest mysteries in the world, and mostly it is unremarked and untalked about.
	How do you feel about that?
	Well, it mostly gets dismissed as a fairy story.
	But there aren't, now and again an expert remarks, the curious thing is there aren't any fairy stories like it.
	In fact, William O'Neill said as much.
	He said the other things he'd looked at could be the activities of bad angels.
	He says, but this I can't account for at all.
	He says, it's a miracle, but it's a miracle I don't understand.
	What point of scripture does it illustrate?
	But he said that he had interviewed witnesses of such, so many witnesses and witnesses of such quality that he was convinced it had really happened.
	And the other version of the story, which is identical in almost all details, was written quite separately, different vocabulary, different part of the country, by Ralph of Coggeshall, the abbot of Coggeshill Abbey, who knew Richard de Calna, to whom the children were taken, and was describing the girl's life in his household as an adult.
	And there's one major mistake there that has to be pointed out.
	She's described as in ministerial predictimilities in the service of the aforesaid night.
	And everybody seems to treat that as domestic service.
	But it's not.
	To begin with, medieval manor houses of that time didn't have women's servants.
	As one expert that I consulted said, the medieval serving wench is a Hollywood invention.
	But what it actually translates as administerial, it's not domestic service.
	She's not scrubbing clothes or anything like that.
	So in other words, it's the civil service.
	Yes, it's admin.
	She's running things for DeKalna.
	She appears to have been in charge of at least one of his estates, and he had many.
	And then, as I say, she goes on to this very influential marriage.
	And, yeah, there are still big gaps in the story.
	Her husband disappears out of the record for, oh, 15 years and suddenly comes back as the most respected ambassador in Europe.
	Disappears.
	And then reappears in an elevated station.
	There were two children, though, weren't there?
	There was a boy.
	Yes.
	Now, he died very shortly after his christening, in fact.
	Now, the interesting detail here is that he died of depression, according to the, that's what it translates as.
	Now, initially, when the children arrived, they nearly starved to death.
	And in the end, they began to eat green beans, not because they recognized the plants, but because they recognized the colour.
	And they would eat nothing else for some considerable period.
	Well, green beans contain a compound called tyremine, which accentuates melancholia.
	People who are subject to clinical depression are advised not to eat them.
	So rather like today with a lot of our processed foods, people say they have all kinds of impacts upon people's physiology that perhaps we hadn't accounted for.
	Maybe this was the cause of whatever that depressive malaise was.
	Perhaps at least part of it, I should imagine.
	But the other thing is to have acquitted herself so well at the trial, when it was assessed whether they were human or not, whether they could be christened, to have acquitted herself so well at that, I would say the girl had to be 10 at least and probably older, but still not old enough to be recognized as an adult, even although the age of consent at that time was 14.
	But the boy was younger, definitely younger.
	And, you know, I picture a modern teenager suddenly transported into a rice paddy in the Far East, or not a teenager, rather, but a sub-teenager, if you like, maybe five years old or so, just not able to cope.
	The girl was old enough and intelligent enough that she was able to adjust to the situation in which she found herself.
	And the boy had no chance.
	But the boy just didn't make it.
	That's my guess.
	That's an astonishing story, and I'm sure there's an awful lot more to it.
	Thank you for introducing me to this.
	I think we talked around this on that show all those years ago.
	I must go back through.
	I've got some digital archive here.
	I can access some digital archive.
	How do I read of my book?
	It's not short, but it's comprehensive.
	Okay.
	This book is Children in the Sky.
	2012 it was published.
	2012, Mutus Liber, Edinburgh.
	Illustrated by Sidney Jordan.
	Very talented artist.
	But yeah, it's all in there.
	Well, I say it's all in there.
	I have to leave some out.
	There's so much to this.
	So many interesting things we've talked about.
	And at least two themes we have to pick up again.
	One is John Logie Baird.
	I would love to be able to, I'm not going to say rehabilitate, because he is already famous.
	So he doesn't need rehabilitating, but he needs to be put in his proper place by the sounds of this.
	And hopefully we can, if we have another conversation about John Logie Baird, you know, we can talk about the man and what else he might have been involved in.
	And that conversation we've just had about the children of Wolpit.
	You're a very interesting man, Duncan Loon, and thank you for doing this.
	Thanks.
	It's been a lot of fun.
	It's nice to get to put these things across the way.
	The way I see them rather than relatively distorted accounts.
	Don't look at my Wikipedia page.
	It's written by a donter in Italy who has never been in touch with me.
	Okay, well, I hear what you say.
	I think I did look at your Wikipedia page, but I shall not look at it.
	And listen, Duncan.
	I've not seen errors at least.
	Okay, well, I think you can probably, if you say there are errors on your Wikipedia page, I think you can probably get them corrected.
	It's got me and my wife banned for trying.
	Oh.
	Excluded from Wikipedia then.
	I hear what you said.
	That's another issue.
	That is an issue of our digital age, I think, Duncan Lunan.
	But thank you very much.
	Go to my website.
	www.duncanlunan.
	It's Duncan Lunan.
	Is it duncanlunan.com?
	It is.
	Right.
	That's www.duncanlunan, l-u-n-a-n.com.
	And I repeat what I said.
	You're a very interesting man.
	Thank you.
	Thanks very much, Howard.
	I have enjoyed it.
	Guest on this edition, Duncan Lunan.
	Your thoughts on him, of course, gratefully received.
	If you want to email me, you always can.
	I get to see each of the emails as they come in.
	You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can send me a message from there.
	Always gratefully received.
	And if you have a guest suggestion, then I'm always grateful to see those.
	If you know of ways to contact the person that you're suggesting, that's always good too.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained as we cruise towards the end of January now.
	It's only two minutes ago we were talking about Christmas.
	So until we meet next here, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been the Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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