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Jan. 21, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
49:10
Edition 696 - Malcolm Robinson, Dr Chris Smith And Dr Callum Cooper
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope everything is good with you.
It is still pretty damn cold as I record these words, but at least I'm reasonably warm with my little fan heater going here still in my apartment just to take the chill off it.
I'm also at this moment wearing a scarf with my t-shirt, as you can tell.
I'm looking forward to the arrival of spring in just weeks from now.
I'm counting the days, but then you know that.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Please keep them coming.
If your email specifically requires a response, please write that in the subject line of the email.
Then I know that.
But I will get to see, and do get to see each and every email as it comes in.
You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link for emails, and you can send it from there.
On this edition of The Unexplained, three items from my television show.
Number one, Malcolm Robinson, researcher on all things anomalous, based in Scotland, very well known to anybody who looks at any media anywhere in the UK, author and all-round good guy.
We're going to talk about the A70 abduction case, which is back in the news and is back in people's discussion at the moment.
So that's going to be item number one.
Item number two, we're going to talk with Dr. Chris Smith, the naked scientist from the UK, very well-known, very well-acclaimed man, shows on the BBC, always in the media.
Great friend of the unexplained, I'm pleased to say.
And we're going to talk about some news that I saw a week or two ago about a trial potentially of a potentially life-extending drug.
But there's a lot of work going on in this area.
So the conversation with Dr. Chris Smith is more about the general topic of life extension, the ethics and principles surrounding it, and also the ways that we might look at doing it and why we would need to do it or want to do it.
So those are two of the things that we're going to do.
And the last thing is we're going to hear from Cal Cooper, another great friend of the show from Northampton University, parapsychologist, on Alan Gould's book, which is out and doing very well, quite rightly, The Heyday of Mental Mediumship, 1890s to 1930s.
Alan Gould is now 91, very nearly, is a man that I met, as you will hear in the piece that we run with Cal Cooper very early in my career.
Alan has worked with Cal Cooper.
That's why Cal Cooper is talking about the book.
Alan Gould, one of the most accomplished, I would say, and distinguished researchers, especially of mediums, but of all psychic phenomena.
Going back decades and decades, I met him and recorded an interview with him when I was just 22.
I traveled to his base at Nottingham University and sat in his office as a trepidatious kid with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, I think, or maybe a cassette recorder that didn't record for very long, so we had to get to the point very quickly.
And I remember just being blown away by this man's ability to speak and put forward interesting material.
You will hear a little clip of him from that interview and a conversation with Cal Cooper.
So that's what we're doing.
Thanks to Adam, my webmaster, as ever.
Thank you to you for the emails.
Don't forget when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
All right, item number one then, the A70 abduction case.
Edinburgh Live reported this this week.
One of Scotland's most famous UFO cases has resurfaced and been discussed on a world-renowned paranormal activity podcast in America.
The terrifying A70 incident was said to have happened on August 27, 1992, shortly after 11.30 p.m., when ambulance technician Gary Wood and his friend Colin Wright were traveling between Edinburgh and Tarabrax.
As they passed along the Harperig Reservoir on their way to drop off a satellite system to their friend, they claimed to have encountered a two-tiered disc-shaped UFO that was larger than the width of the road.
They say that's definitely not any kind of aircraft or helicopter that we know.
They added that the object was smooth, black and shiny, had no windows.
A very precise description they gave.
The men were both awestruck and terrified at the same time, as you would be.
They blacked out during the ordeal and arrived at their destination after feeling dazed and confused.
But what was unsettling was that they had taken two hours to arrive at their friend's home with their satellite system.
The journey should have taken 30 minutes.
That's 90 minutes.
Count them of missing time.
And Malcolm, thank you for coming on.
I think that sums it up entirely.
What do you say?
Yeah, thanks, for coming on your show again, Howard.
It's nice to be back on.
The actual date of that particular incident was in point of fact, the 17th of August, not the 27th.
But it's one of Scotland's most perplexing mysteries, and it's the first officially reported UFO abduction.
So that takes it head and shoulders above a normal UFO sighting, yeah.
And when you say abduction, now we know about Calvin Parker and Pasca Gula, we know about Travis Walton and the guys out logging in the forest in the United States.
When you say abduction, we use that word advisedly.
Does it fit the template of those abductions?
Did they have subsequent recollections or just missing time?
Well, it did.
I mean, it does fit the parameters of other worldwide UFO abductions.
But having said that, Howard, there are differences as well.
You know, some of these creatures had these kind of perforated lines, red, blue, and green lines under their eyes.
And when these guys saw this craft, they were absolutely mesmerized because as they approached this craft on this road, and it was a, you know, it was a darkened road, there were fields on either side, so it wasn't a built-up area.
This object was hovering about 20 feet above the surface of the road.
And as the car was directly underneath this object, it emitted a silver shimmering curtain of light, which just descended down towards the car and impacted on the car.
And as soon as that happened, both men were enveloped in total and inky blackness.
They couldn't see their hands in front of their face.
They couldn't see the dashboard of the car.
They couldn't see each other.
What's happened here?
You know, they thought they were dead.
Thankfully, seconds later, or what we presume to be seconds later, they regained their sight.
The car was shuddering violently on the road.
They had to pull it back onto the left-hand side of the road.
They drove to their destination of Turbrags that you've just mentioned there, Howard.
And when they knocked on the occupant's door, the lady said, where have you been?
You're over, you know, just under two hours late.
So there was this period of missing time.
Now, that was a conscious recall.
The conscious recall was only ever of seeing this object above the road.
I decided to ask both gentlemen if they would agree to go under hypnotic regression, which as we know is a tool used by many psychologists and researchers to see if perhaps something else may have happened at night.
Lifting the sluice gates of the mind to see if any recall could come tumbling out.
We used a qualified hypnotherapist and we took both men back to that August night and they told this tale.
Now, this is where it gets interesting, Howard, because what they said was when they went into the silver mist, suddenly they saw these, I know it sounds bizarre, but they saw these small grey creatures, traditional greys, three and a half to four feet tall, pear-shaped heads, black, inky, almond-shaped eyes, coming towards the car.
Now, they took both men into this object and Gary found himself on this flat raised table.
He was completely naked.
He didn't know how he got to be like that.
And he says, Malcolm, I couldn't do anything.
I was immobilized.
I could only move my eyes.
And I desperately wanted to punch out at one of these wee fellas.
And Colin found himself encased in, if you can imagine, a man's cigar tube, but only about six feet tall, glass or perspex.
Colin found himself encased within that.
He was strapped down, he was completely naked, and he could only move his eyes.
And he says, Malcolm, to the left and to the right of me were similar big glass containers with males and females completely naked from all age groups.
And there was this kind of mist going round these cylinders.
And I saw these grey creatures as well.
What I have here, Howard, is a drawing.
I hope your viewers can see it.
Obviously, you're listening.
So what we're looking at here for those who's listening in is Gary's on this flat raised table.
He's completely immobilized.
And then suddenly he claimed that he saw this light.
It was like a pool of liquid gel formulating on the floor of this craft.
And then suddenly, coming out of this, were these small grey creatures.
One of these small creatures came out.
And this one here, again, for your listeners, you're looking at a can-shaped device.
Now, this can-shaped device came up from the floor of the object towards Gary's head and it moved a circular motion around his head.
Now, what purpose this could have made?
Who knows?
You know, it's just one of these things.
We also have another drawing here.
And this one shows a black lens-shaped object, which was free-floating above Gary's head.
And he said, Malcolm, it was majestic.
It looked wonderful.
It looked symmetrical.
It was just whirring away.
And again, when you spoke earlier, Howard, about, you know, did it have the same parameters as other worldwide abductions?
Yes and no.
You know, you've got the small greys.
But some of these creatures on board this craft, and it sounds bizarre, but we're here to talk about it.
Some of them had like heart-shaped heads, you know, indentations in the top of the head as opposed to the pear-shaped head.
And that is consistent again with other worldwide UFO abductions.
Some of these creatures on board this craft were not three and a half to four feet tall.
They were about six to seven feet tall.
And when Gary came back with scars on his body that night, he realised, he realized straight away something strange has happened here.
Did he take pictures of the scars, Malcolm?
Now, that's the thing.
I mean, when we talk about that as being routine today, because we've all got phones and stuff, it wouldn't have been as easy in 1992.
It wouldn't, no, for sure.
But I mean, people still had cameras then.
You know, of course, Howard.
But it annoys me to some degree that that wasn't taken.
I mean, Gary did pass a BBC lie detector test.
But certainly as far as the photographs go.
I mean, I'll tell you something else that happened.
Very bizarre.
About a year or so after this event, Gary was lying in his bed.
And suddenly he saw one of these small creatures in his bedroom.
And he jumped up and he punched this little fella on the chin.
He tumbled back like a circus acrobat.
Now, I know that sounds crazy, of course it does, but this is why we love the subject so much, Howard.
It's all these tales.
However, once he hit this little fella, the weird fella got as if he went, how did he see me?
And he just rushed towards Gary and an explosion of light pervaded the whole bedroom.
And Gary says, I was out.
I was out like a light.
And again, a couple of years later, Gary was driving to another part of Scotland, again a lonely stretch of road.
Only this time he was accompanied by his two young sons.
Now this is probably 1994, 1995.
And then suddenly this column of light came over the bonnet of the car and came through the windscreen of the car and came into the very vehicle itself.
At which point Gary's sons were screaming out, Dad, Dad, you know, what's this?
Right, so they were part of it too.
Yeah, exactly, but there was no abduction happened then, as far as we know.
So whatever it was, and we're getting this from Gary's perspective, and there was also Colin involved in this, but it seems that this is something that's been interested in him and continued to be interested in him.
So maybe that abduction event, if it happened, and you know, there's lots of evidence there, including those sketches that you've got, if that happened, maybe it was planned.
Maybe it was something, you know, who knows?
Did you ask Gary whether he'd had any experiences, anything like that from childhood?
Because as we both know, a lot of people who have these things have some involvement with something that they perhaps don't understand when they're kids.
Well, I mentioned that in the book.
It's obviously a question that any investigator will ask a witness.
You know, did anything happen when you were younger?
And what Gary said is when he was in the scouts, oh, he was probably only about 10 or 11 years of age, and he was going towards a school for the scouts and that.
And then suddenly his friends shouted out, what's that behind the chimney?
And they looked and they saw this hideous creature.
It wasn't a grey, but it was just horrible.
It was like a tupacabra, for want of a better word, you know.
And that was well before that chupacabra came out here in the UK.
And then suddenly it just disappeared.
Now, of course, sceptics would say, it was just a young boy playing a prank with a mask and a rubber suit or something.
Gary's convinced that that hasn't happened.
And another thing I should tell you and your viewers is that I mentioned about the being in the bedroom.
Well, Gary's wife phoned me.
She says, Malcolm, as you know, I've never really believed my husband, but I do now.
Why?
Why?
She says, well, last night, I was sleeping in my bed.
Gary was sleeping in the bed next to me.
I was reading a book.
I closed the book, put it down on the bedside table, switched the light off, and within about 20, 30 seconds, small, childlike, clammy hands grabbed my ankles and pulled me, pulled me forcibly down the bed.
Whereas my head was on the pillow, it's now halfway down the bed.
And I looked, and in the light that was streaming in from an outside street light, I saw three small grey beings.
Very, very surprised that I could see them.
And they went through the wall.
And the wall was like a mill pond.
If you threw a stone into a mill pond, you've got the concentric circle.
So almost like those representations of a portal in time.
But this is interesting.
This is another, although there are aspects of this story that are not the same as others, that kind of being pulled from the end of your bed, I've heard that before.
That's a technique that, you know, if they exist, they use.
Yeah, I mean, that's the big thing.
If they exist, I mean, it's a million-dollar question.
It's a question that you get asked, I get asked all the time, if these truly are alien beings, why or why or why?
Are they not making themselves known?
For me personally, Howard, there is an agenda here.
There always has been.
As we know, these things have been seen since the dawn of man in biblical paintings, Renaissance paintings, cave art, et cetera, but why are they not?
They're clearly up to something.
They are abducting people from the United Kingdom, America, Canada, all over the world.
Why?
You haven't talked about Colin.
What about the other person involved in this?
Well, Colin, as I said, he found himself encased.
I've got another drawing here, just for the listeners here, what we're looking at here on screen, is that Glass of Perspex chamber.
And Colin was in there, he was naked, and he had this mist going around it.
Now, this is where it gets similar to the Travis Walton case, because Colin says that he was lying, he was sitting on this chair, and a needle came into his eye.
And again, that's consistent.
What are they doing there?
You know, this needle came into his eye.
And again, that is, as you say, consistent with other reports from the United States and other places.
It's the kind of thing that they're either putting a needle into your eye or putting one through your eye.
I mean, it's excruciating to think about.
It is late at night, so we can say it, into your belly button.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, we've got to bear in mind that planet Earth is but a tiny grain of sand on a huge cosmic beach.
It's incomprehensible to think we stand alone in the vastness of the cosmos.
I would not be dealing with this subject if I honestly, honestly, didn't believe we're dealing with a bona fide real phenomena here, an ongoing phenomena.
But as for the answers, we can only speculate.
They're trying to get our city.
Some people say they're looking for our souls.
Or harvesting DNA to create hybrids.
I mean, who knows?
There are so many accounts.
One of the things that I would have said, but then you told me about the experience in childhood, was that these guys were working with satellite systems.
Now, if you're working with satellite systems, you're talking about very high-frequency radiation.
It's quite dilute, but it's very focused.
And if you stand in front of a dish that's receiving that kind of stuff, or if you're involved in transmitting that kind of stuff, just like if I hold my phone to my head, then my ear will heat up.
It can affect your brain.
Has anybody, I don't want to knock it all down.
I don't want to be Mr. Boring Skeptic here, but has anybody suggested that?
No, I mean, well, yes, in this case, we've got to look at that.
I mean, there's a chap in England called Albert Budden who believes that people who live near substations or power stations or those big transmitters with the big drums.
I mean, I used to work for Vodafone in Brentford, and one day I was sitting at my desk and my head was going around like that.
And that's because of the frequencies that you just mentioned.
Now, to answer your question, could this have been a viable proposition on the A70?
Well, there's not any big transmitters really on that stretch of road, which again, we must remember.
But they were delivering a satellite system, weren't they?
They were.
I mean, obviously it was just in pieces.
But I mean, look, this is a tenuous thing, and the things that they describe, what mitigates against that, with the account that you've given so well and so clearly, is the fact that they recall it so clearly and it has parallels, not 100% parallels and not precise parallels, but with so many other cases from abductees that we know about and ones who filed their stories with the various abduction organizations, including Kathleen Mardens.
Yeah, absolutely.
But probably the most surprising thing that came out of the hypnosis transcripts is when, and I was there, you know, we were videoing the hypnosis, we're audio taping it, etc.
And then afterwards, when we came out for a drink of tea, and Gary started to tell me something, I said, he went, no.
I says, Gary, please talk to me.
Tell me, what is it?
He says, well, I asked him in my mind, I couldn't speak, Malcolm.
This is what he's saying.
I could not speak.
So I asked him in my mind, why are you doing this?
Why are you doing this to me?
And the answer, one word was sanctuary.
Sanctuary.
That's what they said to him.
We all know what sanctuary means.
It's a place of happiness where you can enjoy peace and tranquility.
So they are looking for something, an element that is going to give them something that, whether it's metaphorical or whether it's actual, it's probably metaphorical, gives them sanctuary.
You know, I mean, there's a theory that we're all looking for in here, a kind of sanctuary.
Maybe their civilization or civilizations are looking for that.
What a fascinating case, Malcolm.
We need to have more time to talk about this.
If you have time, can we do a podcast about this?
Malcolm, great to speak with you.
What's your website if people want to check you out?
Just check me out on Facebook.
The book, The A70 UFO Incident, is available on Amazon and all of the facts and figures are in there.
It's been a pleasure speaking to you, Howard.
My thanks, as ever, to Malcolm Robinson, old friend of this show.
The A70 UFO case.
We must talk more about that here because it is an enduring and fascinating story.
Coming next from my TV show, an item that I think whose time has come, and that is the growing pace of research into anti-aging or age reversal treatments, therapies, medications, techniques.
I read a headline, and that's basically all this was based on, and you'll hear more about that in just a second, that claimed that some new drug research was about to begin on a drug that might have the potential to extend life to possibly, loads of caveats here, 120.
Now, I did a bit of checking.
There's a lot of research like this going on this year.
So, who better to speak to about these things than the naked scientist, our friend on the show, Dr. Chris Smith?
This headline grabbed my attention on the internet on a website called iNews during this last week.
And the headline is enough to base this conversation on, okay, for reasons that I will tell you.
Headline, scientists will trial a new longevity drug in the UK in 2023 that says next year, but the story, in fact, went out at the very, very back end, in fact, the last day, I think, of 2022.
They say this drug might increase the life expectancy of some people, note the caveating, up to about 120.
Now, my grandmother made 97, and we all thought she would make 100 comfortably.
More and more people are making the centenarian milestone.
To make 120 is something else.
Let's talk with Chris Smith about this.
Chris, thank you very much indeed.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you, Howard.
I know it's a little late in the month now to be saying Happy New Year.
You may well be the last person I say that to this year, Chris.
I don't know what that means, but there we are.
Look, this headline is the thing that grabbed me about this story, irrespective of the story itself.
Then I started looking for other stories over the last year.
And I don't know whether you've seen this too.
I'm sure you have, but there appear to be a lot of organizations that are finding interest in, starting themselves up, and seeking funding for longevity research.
I don't know what you know about this specific story and this specific drug, but it seems to be this is going to be one of the themes of 2023.
What do you think?
Well, the story really gets at the aging process, because if we understand the aging process, because lots of things become more common with increasing age, if you understand why we age, then you do have some opportunity to understand what goes wrong when we age.
And therefore, you can control some of the likely outcomes of that.
And that's why aging matters, not because we want to try and make people live forever, not that anyone would probably want to live forever, but if you understand the mechanisms that make us clap out progressively, which is what happens at the moment, and it takes about 80 years on average for that to happen.
And some people are lucky enough to go a bit longer.
The oldest person on record, the lady in France who died, and she was into her 120s.
And she only gave up smoking in the last few years of her life.
She said that she did that for the benefit of her health, of course.
But the story that you're referring to is fascinating, actually, because what they've been looking at, this team at UCL, it's Alessio Lanna and team, what they've been looking at is why immune cells get older and also how they do stop themselves getting older.
Because here's the thing.
When a cell in our body divides or splits into two daughter cells, because it has to copy all its genetic material and divide it up, every time that happens, the ends of the chromosomes called telomeres get a little bit shorter.
And eventually they get to a threshold length where they can no longer divide.
And the cell then becomes what's called senescent and it goes into a sort of partially functioning switched off state.
And it's useless to the body after that.
Now immune cells, by virtue of being immune cells and having to grow a lot to fight infections, that's how the immune system works.
You've got an immune cell that knows how to fight a certain infection and it makes millions of copies of itself in order to go and make more of those infection fighting cells.
Well, if you were to lose the telomeres, the ends of the chromosomes in those cells In the same way that other cells in the body do, your immune system would go haywire and stop working very, very quickly.
And it doesn't.
And what this team at UCL found was that some intriguing process takes place where when an immune cell activates to start growing and dividing like this, another cell comes along and sends it like a first aid package, which is some telomeres wrapped up in a special parcel that it incorporates into itself and adds them to its own chromosomes so it doesn't suffer this problem.
And therefore, you say, well, if we could make that happen in other cells in the body, in other tissues, then perhaps we've got a way to stop them aging and senessing and clapping out the way that they do at the moment.
And this is intriguing insights.
Buzzword that I kept reading when I did some research into this today, Senolytics.
That's the thing, isn't it?
This is the science of stopping errors occurring.
And if you can find the magic way of stopping errors occurring, errors are what, I mean, this is hugely simplified, and what do I know about this anyway?
But if you stop those errors occurring, then you can live longer effectively because you're not breaking down.
That's a trade-off.
That's fascinating.
It's a trade-off.
Because the problem is, if you allowed your cells in the body to keep on dividing forever, then as we age and our cells and our DNA get shot through with errors and damage, if cells had the capacity to keep on dividing in this way, they could accrue more and more damage and therefore more and more chances of becoming cancerous.
So it's a balancing act.
And the body accepts that there will be some cells that it can't make last much longer.
And the risk of them becoming cancerous has become high.
So it turns them into this senescent state that they don't just go quietly.
They unfortunately sit there and stew.
And it's a bit like peeing in the well and poisoning the water for everyone in the community because the cells sit there stewing in their own juices in this senescent switched off state.
They're not contributing anything useful, but they are producing other waste products and muck that messes up the environment for the healthy cells that are still trying to do a good job.
If we can stop that happening or get rid of those cells, then we can reverse some of the aspects of aging.
And this would be one way to do that, but it would come at a cost.
And that cost is you are increasing the chances of other things going wrong because cells that would normally have died off by then or switched off are allowed to carry on dividing.
And so there is potentially a higher risk of other things going wrong.
But until we try and look at these things, we just don't know.
If the immune system's got a way around it, then perhaps actually there is a way to surmount it.
And that's what they're aiming to find out with these sorts of studies.
And there are a lot of organizations involved in this.
It is obviously some kind of holy grail research.
And it's going to make some people rich if they discover the root of this, which is fascinating and exciting.
But how do you take this forward, Chris?
Ultimately, you have to do trials on people, don't you?
But if there is that downside risk you talked about, how can you do trials on people?
If you may be exposing them to a degree of risk and maybe some other trouble building up, how can you do that?
Yeah, everything in life is a risk, though, isn't it?
And if there is some way you can do this safely, and the best way we know of doing things safely is you start off in a dish with cultured cells, and then you move into animals that are small animals, which we understand quite well, and you see how things work there.
And then you move into bigger animals that are more akin in their physiology and their lifespan to humans.
And ultimately, by then, you've usually distilled out a product.
You have a clear insight into the mechanism of how you think your process is working.
You can normally do checks and balances to make sure that the risk is quite minimal.
And under those circumstances, if the ends justify the means, you're in good shape to do clinical trials.
And at the end of the day, it's up to people if they want to take part in those kind of trials.
You're not forcing anything on anybody.
And I think you and I have talked about this before.
And I've certainly talked about this with Dr. Andrew Steele, who you will know who's written a book about aging.
I think it's called Ageless.
And, you know, it's a fascinating area.
There are all kinds of other issues that are not medical or scientific issues connected with this.
Because if you start increasing people's lives, then you've got to decide whose lives do you start increasing.
Are there going to be people, you know, it's there going to be people who've got loads of money to spend on drugs and therapies that will allow them to live longer.
So that means that, you know, the superiors supposedly in society will be the ones who live the longest.
Plus, is it right or good that people should live to 120, 150, some people even saying 300?
What sorts of issues is that going to raise for society when, you know, at the moment we're having problems feeding the people that we've got?
Yeah, I mean, there's 8 billion people on Earth.
We recently acknowledged the existence of the 8 billionth.
And to put that into perspective, when I first started making science radio programs, it was 1999.
And I walked into a radio studio and I had a science magazine in my hand.
And on the front cover, it said, today the 6 billionth person was born.
Now, that was 20 years ago.
And we've added a third to that number in the meantime, or at least 25% to that number in the meantime.
No, it's 30%.
It's third.
It's a third.
And so at that rate of increase, we are already putting enormous pressure on the planet.
And that's with people living a normal lifetime.
If we then began to extend that, as you say, it becomes an ethical issue, not just because we have a population problem already, and not just because there would be some who could afford it and some who couldn't afford it.
It's a question of, well, at what age are you going to retire?
I know that the government probably loved this because they'd have the retirement age set at 150 or something.
But, you know, you go in that way.
It's a problem, can't you?
It's where does everyone live?
How do we feed everybody?
Who looks after the people?
Are they going to have a good health span?
Because that's the other issue.
Life span is one thing, but the other thing people are dwelling on increasingly is health span.
How long do you stay?
How long do you stay functionally healthy, exactly?
Which the government like to call taxpayer.
Yes, indeed they do.
John Insutton, regular contributor to the show, has just texted in to say exactly that point that you make, that if we have people living to 120, the quality of life at 120, 130, whatever it may be, may not be so great.
I mean, we might have found ways to make it hunky-dory, who knows?
But if it isn't so great, and if there is a decline and a setting of the sun on people, then, then we will need, as John puts it, an absolute army of carers, and we don't have enough of those now to look after those people.
So This is one of those, it's fascinating, isn't it?
We do research into all kinds of things because of the mandate of science.
The fact that we can do it means that we have to.
And it seems to me that this is one of those cases.
The fact that we can do this means that we have to, because who knows what we might discover on the way.
Yeah.
Although I will say that probably the most important point to make in medicine, if you wind the clock back to about the late 1800s, when Queen Victoria was on the throne, and you look at the life expectancy of a person then, it was much lower than it is today.
And you would say, if you ask a person, why do you think there's that difference between 100 years ago and today?
Why do you think if you go to a graveyard and you look at the graves from the Victorian era, there are so many children under five in that graveyard?
And they'll say, it's because of modern medicine.
Now, that is slightly true, but it's not the elephant in the room.
The biggest contributor to lifetime and life expectancy is living conditions.
And what changed in the 1800s was better living conditions, better access to sanitation, fresh water and good food.
And putting people in those environments, we saw deaths from TB declining a long time before we even knew what the organism that causes TB was because people were healthier.
And that's made the biggest change to life expectancy.
And what modern medicine has added is a little bit more fiddling at the margins.
It's increased things a little bit.
Now, if these new other changes come in, maybe that will be a real step change, a bit like we saw in the Victorian era.
But this is a long way into the future at the moment.
We're not talking about suddenly turning our already aging population into an aging population of super-centenarians anytime soon.
But one has to have a plan for these things into the future, because if we do continue down this path, at some point, it will become a crisis if we don't have a plan for what we're going to do and how we're going to think about this ethically when the time comes.
Chris, thank you.
Beautifully explained as ever.
Thank you so much.
Dr. Chris Smith, The Naked Scientist, Consultant Virologist and Lecturer at Cambridge University.
Good friend of this show.
Dr. Chris Smith from my television show, aka The Naked Scientist, another great friend of the show who helps me out on a regular basis.
And I'm very grateful for that because he's very well known and a very busy man in the United Kingdom.
Last item then on this show is something very special to me.
It is a piece again from a recent TV show.
Cal Cooper from Northampton University, very famous, very well-known parapsychologist, does a lot of good work in this area.
And I'm sure you'll have seen his name and read about his work in newspapers over the last year and more.
We're going to be talking about his book, or not his book, Alan Gould's book.
Cal has worked over the years with Alan Gould, but Alan Gould is one of the United Kingdom's most famous researchers into mediums and psychic phenomena in general.
I first met him when I was a trepidatious 22-year-old.
I went to his office in Nottingham and on a cassette recorded an interview with him and was utterly blown away for reasons that you will hear.
Alan Gould's book, they're saying it's his magnum opus, the work of his life, is The Heyday of Mental Mediumship 1890s to 1930s.
And I spoke with Cal Cooper on my TV show about Alan Gould and about the book.
The Heyday of Mental Mediumship, 1890s to 1930s, in this book, which it is, Alan Gould, who is a man, as I said at the top of the show, I met when I was about 22.
He worked at the University of Nottingham, is still affiliated with them.
Great interest in ghosts and mediums in particular.
He went to great lengths and traveled great distances to investigate these phenomena.
And I was doing a student documentary back then, and I took my, I got on the train from Liverpool, I didn't drive then, went all the way down to Nottingham, sat in Alan Gould's office, just drank in everything that he had to say on the subject of mediums, and then got the train back home to Liverpool with my cassette and put it in the, caught it up as he do, edited it, and put it in the documentary.
So this is Alan Gould's thing, and this new book is, I mean, I haven't seen it, but it's had some great reviews, and I know a certain amount about it.
And Alan Gould has all of the presence of Jean-Luc Picard and a voice that is pretty similar to.
I mean, I remember being enormously impressed with this man.
He is and was the real deal when I met him all those years ago.
And before we talk to Cal Cooper, who's worked extensively with Alan Gould and is going to talk about this book, The Heyday of Mental Mediumship, I just thought I would, I dug it out today, play you a little clip of that conversation that I had with Alan Gould, author of this book, in his office at Nottingham University when I was, can you imagine this?
When I was 22.
Here it is.
The medium turned to me and said, now I've got to come to you and I have a Les here for you, as a pseudonym actually.
This was interesting because Les was an old friend of mine with whom I had been much involved in psychic research.
He was much older than I was and he'd recently died.
And if anybody I had thought at that period was going to communicate with me, it would be him.
So here comes the right name.
And it's not frightfully common, not frightfully uncommon.
And then she went on, blah, blah, blah, rubbah, rhubarb, keep up the good work.
Finally, she reverted to the main business of the day, which was somebody else, and then popped back to me and said, now, Les says, do you still like steak?
I thought, well, I like steak.
But I had no particular reason to associate this with Les.
But anyway, I wrote to his widow, sufficiently curious, and mentioned this, and she said, oh, yes, but whenever you were coming to stay with us, Les always used to say to me, Alan's coming to stay.
Be sure you get a nice bit of fillet.
Steak.
So that he was clearly convinced that I loved steak.
This was something that was in his mind.
Something that was in his mind, but was not in the mind of the sitter or the consciousness of the sitter until he approached the wife of the man who'd passed and asked him, the widow of the man who'd passed and asked her about it.
That's a pretty compelling piece of sound there, and that's from all of those decades ago, recorded by a very young me.
Let's get Now, to Callum Cooper.
Cal Cooper, senior lecturer at University of Northampton, parapsychologist, friend of this show.
Cal, thank you for waiting.
How are you?
I'm very well, thank you.
How are you?
I'm very good.
I was told that while you were waiting to do this, you were juggling oranges.
Oh, there's a lot of fruit here.
I thought, why not?
Would you like to give us a demonstration, or would you?
Is it too serious a conversation?
Well, we can start with two.
This is the best bit of TV we've ever had in the FANGS.
We'll drop one, can't we?
That's absolutely.
We'll do three.
Now, do you have to be a parapsychologist to do that, or does it help in any way?
You know what?
When I was at college, there were extracurricular activities at lunchtime.
I did three things.
I won't go into you.
I did three things.
One was filmmaking, and I made two films that got shown at Broadway Cinema in Nottingham, silly little zombie-type films.
I did British Sign Language and gained two qualifications out of that.
And I did the juggling club, and I went along and learned how to juggle.
So that's where it came from.
It's a great skill.
I mean, people say that it can have all sorts of mental benefits for coordination and calming the mind and all of those things.
It's weird.
Once you're doing it and suddenly you get the rhythm of three, you forget that you're doing it.
You don't have to think about it.
So something clicks and it is very calming.
So you're very right.
I'm very impressed.
These days I'm just a shambling old fool and I don't think I can do it anymore.
But when anybody can and demonstrate it, I'm always impressed.
Now, Alan Gould is a legend.
People, you know, keep using this word legend about people they see on TV and stuff like that.
But in the field of his work, Alan Gould is a legend.
You heard that bit of the recording that I made in his office decades ago at Nottingham University.
I traveled all day from Liverpool to speak to him about mediums for a documentary I was recording.
And that is straight off the cassette that that was done on.
You know, he is, and he was a remarkable man who cares very much about this material.
And this seems to me to be, one of the reviews called it his magnum opus.
You know, this seems to be the distillation of so much of Alan's work.
Yeah.
I'm glad you said that about legend.
I think we have to use that word sparingly.
There's a comedian, I've forgotten his name, Ryan something, but he said, legend used to mean people that could pull swords out of stones and things like that.
Now we just use it for someone who leaves the room and unexpectedly returns with Chris.
Yes, well, unfortunately, you know, it's anybody who's won the bake-off, isn't it?
But it used to mean something, and in Alan's case, it certainly does.
Now, Alan is, is Alan 91 now, Cal?
He will be 91 later this year.
Right, okay.
And so he is bang on 90.
And it is so heartwarming to hear that recording.
I'd love to hear the whole thing.
And I'm sure he told me that story as well before.
He's talking about Leslie Fielding, I think, who was one of the members of the Cambridge University Society for Psychological Research that they formed themselves while he was there along with Tony Cornell, who he co-authored Poltergeist with.
And they were colleagues for a very long time, traveled the length and breadth of the UK to document various poltergeist activities.
So I believe that would be Leslie Fielding.
And Alan is just a hotbed of information.
I always feel very silly in this company because the amount of things he's read that he asked me, oh, have you read this?
Have you read that?
And I just think, wow, he's retained so much information over the years.
He is an astonishing man.
And I have to thank him because he is the first person ever in my life to use a word that I hadn't heard before that day.
And that word was egregious.
Oh, egregious.
I love that word.
He loves that word when talking about mediums who are frauds, he says.
And some of them were egregious frauds.
I had to take that.
I wrote that word down.
I took it home and I started using it after that.
So it's Alan Gould I have to thank for it.
I mean, this period that he talks about in the book, this is the period of the parlor medium, the person who is known in the locale.
Everybody goes to them and they give readings.
They give the benefit of whatever talent they believe they have.
I think it goes two ways.
I mean, when we talk about the heyday of mental mediumship, it classes the mediums that were stood at the time in the heyday of the really impressive ones for whatever they were doing, whether fraudulently or otherwise, they were producing impressive phenomena.
And also the researchers as well.
They were entirely dedicated to that pursuit of trying to understand what one particular medium was doing and spending every day, every week, every month working with that medium and going into their seances, taking along magicians who would sometimes be members of the various UK or American Society for Psychical Research and really trying to figure out what is going on in this process.
Now, even though we have so many stage mediums in modern day, those that are studied under such a close lens are few and far between.
We don't seem to have that top quality kind of mediumship that's so intricately studied as in that heyday.
But I guess the $64 question today would be, in Alan's words, how many of those people were clearly egregious frauds and how many of those people seemingly might have had something?
I think there were probably 80% that were kind of clear frauds in terms of how we can apply Barnum scripts and cold reading techniques and sleight of hand to what they were doing.
And maybe under controlled conditions, they were quite easy to catch out.
And then the kinds of people that he's talking about in the book, for me, Eileen Garrett brings to mind as a particular nice example.
It's very hard to try and understand what's going on.
And there was the new learning process.
Eileen Garrett, for example, she was in London for a time.
She lived on the floor below Harry Price, which is now the College of Psychic Studies in London, just across from the Natural History Museum.
Harry Price in the 1920s spent a lot of time studying her and then she emigrated to America and set up the Parapsychology Foundation in 1951.
But she was always open to being testing.
She said, I'm making this claim.
Test me.
And she was willing to go under a number of conditions.
Even when J.B. Ryan started testing the general population for psychic functioning with Zenocards, so you have five possible outcomes.
It's a forced choice.
Your circle, your cross, your wavy lines, your square and your star.
She was tested for it.
She said, this is what I do as a medium.
But she was still tested and she gained statistical significance.
And they said, well, what do you work to?
How do you operate?
Well, psychometry Was her thing.
That was, you know, taking any object.
It's holding an object, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, someone's glasses or whatever there may be, and giving information related to that object and who may own it.
And again, she scored remarkably when it came to objects that were concealed, and she was only able to touch the box or whatever fabric they were wrapped in.
So these are the kinds of people we're talking about, where they are very, very skilled at what they're doing, and no one really seems to know the processes behind it.
I can't wait to see this book.
I haven't read it.
I will.
Last question.
And you're working in this field now, Cal, so you might know.
Where are these people now?
Those heyday people, they're all dead and gone.
Well, I mean metaphorically, really.
I mean, where are the people of their ilk?
That's cool.
It's fine.
It's the way I asked the question, which was a little clunky and heavy-handed.
But where are people of that kind today?
Let's put it that way.
For the mediums, they're all over the place.
I've asked some people that have worked with mediums as to why they've not been tested.
And they've said, I don't need to be tested.
I don't need to be challenged, which I find a very strange response from people making those claims.
We still even have Uri Geller, who's very popular with his social media.
He's set up his museum in Jaffa in Israel.
And he was tested at one time.
Indeed, by Stanford Institute, wasn't he?
Stanford Research Institute.
He's very hard to pin down to actually get some controlled studies done with him.
And there's a number of reasons as to why that may be.
But they are out there.
We have PhD students at the University of Northampton alone studying mediums at spiritualist churches who are willing to be tested.
But these really big players who went out there earning a lot of money, willing to be put to the test, and really well-known figures, setting up foundations, giving a lot of money to charities that they have dispersed in many ways.
We don't see that kind in present day, but the researchers are still very active.
In the UK alone, we have over two dozen universities that case the parapsychology.
Cal, thank you for doing this.
We'll talk again.
Please pass my regards on to Alan Gould.
He made a big impact on me, and I remember thinking on that train going back to Liverpool after traveling all day to talk with him.
I remember thinking, you know, maybe one day I'll learn to speak the King's Queen's English really well.
And if I become very good, I might be almost as good as Alan Gould.
I never quite made it, but he's a remarkable man.
And, you know, there are not many people like that.
Callum Cooper, thank you very much indeed.
Cal Cooper is Senior Lecturer at the University of Northampton, Paris Psychologist, and the man we've been talking about is Alan Gould.
Check him out online, G-A-U-L-D, and the book is called The Heyday of Mental Mediumship, 1890s to 1930s.
Quite a time, don't you think?
The marvelous Cal Cooper talking about the incredible Alan Gould, who I hope I get to meet again one of these days.
He's now 91.
Before that, we talked with Dr. Chris Smith, the naked scientist, about life extension, a subject very, very dear to my heart these days.
And before that, Malcolm Robinson, great friend of this show, and the A70 abduction case, all from my TV show and archived here for you to listen to for posterity.
Just a little note that, of course, the sound quality of the TV stuff is different because they're using these lapel microphones these days that I have actually clipped to the top of my t-shirt, but the sound is a little different, but still intelligible, just so that you know that.
You might have noticed that already.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained, so until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, stay warm, and please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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