Nick Pope has an update on Washington "UFO testimony," Extragalactic Astronomer Professor Christopher Conselice on "36 civilisations" in Space and Tony Douglas in Galway on the "ghost" in Glasgow's oldest bar...
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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'm hoping that everything is good with you. | |
| For reasons that I will explain, this has been a very weird week. | |
| And the weirdness of the week is going to impact itself upon this show in a way that I'll explain. | |
| And I know I'm being very cryptic, but there's a reason for it. | |
| Weather in London, raining, dull, little bit milder than it has been of late, but not quite spring yet. | |
| Although I did, while I was walking in the park yesterday, I did see both a wasp and a bee. | |
| So I think it's all moving in the right direction, just not quickly enough for me, to be honest with you. | |
| Thank you for your emails, plus your messages of support about everything that's been going on with the TV show or the radio show or whatever it is this week. | |
| That's another story. | |
| Well, in fact, that's the story that I'm going to be telling and it impacts upon this show. | |
| Thank you for your emails, your support, everything that you've given me over this time. | |
| It has been stressful, definitely. | |
| And everything that you've said has helped. | |
| So thank you. | |
| Thanks to Adam, my webmaster, also for bearing with me through this. | |
| Remember, if you want to communicate with me, please go to my website, theunexplained.tv. | |
| Follow the link for emails, and you can send me an email through there. | |
| And I'm always pleased to get them. | |
| If you want to know what's happening with me and this show, go to my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, the one with the logo on it, no other similar site. | |
| You'll see it because it's got the official trademarked and everything logo on it for The Unexplained with Howard Hughes. | |
| And, you know, I love it when you comment and communicate with me that way too. | |
| Okay. | |
| So on this edition of the show, two things that were going to be on the radio show this week. | |
| But plans have changed and we had to rejig everything because I got a text on Wednesday, about 4 p.m. thereabouts saying, you're on the TV this week. | |
| Okay, so we'd been planning for a radio show, but I'm going to be the 19th of March on television again. | |
| Now, you know that there are some rules when I do the TV, not allowed to use any music, certainly copyright music, which means that Junior Walker we can't use, and not allowed to do anything that is not live, so no pre-records, which was a bit of a pity by Wednesday because I'd already done two for the radio show. | |
| But good news for this podcast because both of them are here. | |
| I will explain. | |
| So three items I've got on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| One, Nick Pope, who's going to be talking about something that was in the U.S. Sun about 10 days or so ago. | |
| And I quote, one of the world's leading experts on UFOs has claimed whistleblowers involved in top-secret U.S. government programs have already begun giving testimony as part of the long-awaited review the U.S. Sun can reveal. | |
| So essentially, what that means, I think, and we'll clarify that with Nick Pope here, a former MOD man, of course, and now living in America as an independent investigator, a man who appears on Ancient Aliens and their live events all the time. | |
| So what that means is that the ball has begun to roll in Washington. | |
| I think that's interesting. | |
| Hope you will too. | |
| And the two items that are going to appear on this edition of The Unexplained that were going to be on the radio show and I'd already recorded a couple of days ago. | |
| One of them is Anthony Douglas, Tony Douglas. | |
| He is in Galway, Ireland. | |
| But he made the papers because he was part of a team of paranormal investigators who said that they captured a photo, and it's in the Daily Record in Scotland for one, a photo of a spirit haunting what is said to be the oldest pub in Glasgow, the Scotia Bar on Stockwell Street, | |
| established in 1792, and the ghost that was apparently photographed, the Green Lady, or not as the case may be, as you will hear, with a very nice man, Anthony Douglas, who is from an organization called Paranormal Supernatural Investigations Ireland. | |
| And he'll tell you on this edition of The Unexplained how he happened to be in Glasgow when the said event happened. | |
| Plus, we're also going to be talking about something that I think has all of us or will have all of us gripped, and that is an investigation, or rather a piece of research, into one of the biggest cosmic questions. | |
| And that cosmic question being, of course, is there intelligent life beyond this planet? | |
| God knows we've asked the question here many times, haven't we? | |
| Still no proof of that. | |
| But some new research says that our galaxy could be home to 36 civilizations on other planets. | |
| A study that says that if life can evolve on other Earth-like planets, three dozen intelligent civilizations could exist across the Milky Way. | |
| So this study was headed up by a man called Professor Christopher Consolice, a professor of astrophysics physics, professor of astrophysics at the Universities of Manchester and Nottingham. | |
| Very interesting man, and we'll have him on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| And again, that was something that was recorded for a TV show that would have been on Sunday the 19th. | |
| But because it was a sound recording done here, I'm not permitted to use it on TV. | |
| So it's going to be here. | |
| Three items on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| it's so complicated it's been And, you know, I feel like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards after it all. | |
| But I think we've got a plan. | |
| So at the moment, as I record these words, we're still finalizing what's going to be the TV show. | |
| And I'm going to have to remember how you do that, if I ever knew in the first place. | |
| It was all very sudden. | |
| And I'm not sure what's going to happen longer term, but TV it is on the 19th. | |
| And it'll also, of course, be on the radio. | |
| They put the TV sound on the radio, so you can still get it at talk radio, which I know an awful lot of the audience does. | |
| Okay, confused? | |
| You will be, I certainly am. | |
| Okay, first item then on this edition of The Unexplained, edition 710. | |
| Nick Pope talking about the fact, it seems, that evidence is already being taken in Washington in the big UFO investigation, which don't forget, Goes back or is going back all the way to 1945. | |
| Here's Nick Pope. | |
| Thanks. | |
| Good to be back on. | |
| You are man in a suitcase, Nick Pope. | |
| How was the last week for you? | |
| Hectic. | |
| Yes. | |
| I had just finished up a run of Ancient Aliens Live events, the 90-minute stage shows that's going all around the U.S. And then I did Alien Con. | |
| And yeah, it was quite a whirl. | |
| Now, look, the headline on this US Sun piece, and I'm guessing this is what you said, that they've already started taking evidence, depositions, presumably. | |
| They have, yes. | |
| Now, we've talked about this before. | |
| And as you said in the intro, this all falls out of the provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed just at the end of last year. | |
| But the update is that when you and I last discussed this, this was all hypothetical. | |
| This was all, well, this is what Congress wants to see. | |
| The new development is it's happening. | |
| It's happening now behind the scenes, but the conversations are going on. | |
| People have already had meetings with various congressional staffers, and we will see more about this over the next few weeks and months. | |
| What do you think it's going to mean? | |
| Do you think it will achieve anything, Nick? | |
| Yes, I think it will. | |
| It's part of a much wider ramping up of the pace of all of this. | |
| You've probably seen that in the last literally week or so, we've seen an uptick in all of this. | |
| We've seen new films and videos coming forward, new photos, and we've also seen various congressional representatives coming up. | |
| Okay. | |
| What did you make this week? | |
| I read this and I thought of you instantly. | |
| Steven Spielberg was speaking to Stephen Colbert, who I think you've also spoken with in the U.S. He said, I've never seen a UFO. | |
| I wish I had. | |
| I've never seen anything I can't explain, but I believe certain people have seen things that they can't explain. | |
| I think what has been coming up recently is fascinating, absolutely fascinating. | |
| And I think the secrecy that is shrouding all of these sightings and the lack of transparency, I think there is something going on that needs extraordinary due diligence. | |
| So even the man who brought us all of those bits of sci-fi that people said were trailblazers and mile markers for where we're headed, even he's saying that there is something afoot. | |
| Yes, and I think people should always pay attention when all these apparently different things crop up at almost exactly the same time. | |
| So literally within a week, we have had the revelations about people testifying before Congress. | |
| We've had Steven Spielberg's statement. | |
| We've had Professor Avi Loeb co-author a paper with the guy who's heading up, Arrow, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. | |
| And we've had some more photos and videos hit the public domain and some congressional representatives all speaking out, all ramping up the narrative all this week. | |
| Of course, you know what people are like. | |
| There are always going to be people who say, well, this is just part of the disinformation dance that is done. | |
| And we will be led a merry dance here. | |
| We'll be taken halfway up the hill, as we say in England, as you know, the grand old Duke of York, and then we'll be marched down again. | |
| Do you think that is likely? | |
| Because we have, you and I have been talking now for the thick end of 20 years or more, in fact. | |
| We've seen situations where it's looked as if something really significant is going to happen. | |
| I've thought, and I know that you've had an inkling that we might be getting somewhere, but as of March 2023, how hot is this issue? | |
| It's very hot in the United States, less so in the UK, though there are some things going on behind the scenes, even there, so far as I am aware. | |
| But I think the thing is, if people are thinking that there's going to be a single event, disclosure, if you like, then they're not going to get that. | |
| As I think we've said before, this is a process. | |
| And, you know, one day you say, and you're right, we've been discussing this 20 years. | |
| One day we'll wake up and everyone will wake up and we'll realize that it's been done. | |
| It's just nobody will have noticed because it was a process rather than a single day, so to speak. | |
| So, you know, we'll be having this conversation one day and we'll have the NASA study. | |
| We'll have the latest ODNI report. | |
| We'll have more hearings in Congress and the consensus will be, yeah, it's a done deal. | |
| It's happened. | |
| Is there any story that is, because you're always very good at tipping me off about these things, and I know you've been so busy, we haven't spoken very much recently. | |
| Is there anything that's bubbling under tonight here in the UK that might be about to make news that I might have missed? | |
| Well, I think there's a debate about whether the UK is going to reopen the X-Files, so to speak. | |
| And there are factions on that. | |
| There is a factional dogfight going on right now. | |
| Some people in the MOD want to have a straightforward UFO program reopened. | |
| Others say, no, the security review that followed the whole Chinese spy balloon saga is good enough. | |
| And that debate is still going on. | |
| So, you know, there may be some developments on that shortly. | |
| We'll have to wait and see. | |
| If there are, I will come on and we can talk about it. | |
| And is your suitcase packed today, going somewhere else? | |
| It's always packed, Howard. | |
| Yeah, there's always short notice requests for media. | |
| More Ancient Aliens Live shows coming up soon, but a few TV things before that. | |
| But as always, it's events-led. | |
| And that was Nick Pope, of course, former MOD man in the UK, now independent investigator and very busy guy, as you heard, talking about the latest on-UFO hearings and consultations. | |
| Now something that was recorded for what would have been a radio show this week and won't be on the radio now. | |
| It is about research into whether we're alone in the cosmos. | |
| It's a cosmic question that has stumped humanity for generations. | |
| Is there intelligent life beyond our planet? | |
| Still no conclusive proof, of course, but some new research suggests that our galaxy could be home to 36 civilizations on other planets. | |
| In other words, in other places that we know very little about right now. | |
| The man who's saying this is the man who headed up that research, Christopher Consovice, professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and a co-author of that research paper that was originally published in Astrophysical Journal. | |
| So I spoke with him. | |
| This was going to be on the radio show, but you can hear it exclusively here now. | |
| My main area of research and teaching is in the study of galaxies. | |
| So extragalactic just means outside of our own galaxy. | |
| So our galaxy is the Milky Way, of course. | |
| And so my expertise, my main expertise is looking at and studying and figuring out how galaxies formed and evolved from all the way to the beginning of the universe to modern galaxies that we see today. | |
| So my chair is in extragalactic astronomy, as we say in the UK. | |
| Talk to me about this study. | |
| What was the aim of this study? | |
| It almost sounds to me reading the tabloid newspaper account of it, that you set out to see if there was anybody out there. | |
| Well, it wasn't that we were looking to see if there was, as you say, anybody out there. | |
| What we were trying to do was calculate how many there might be there. | |
| That is, how many might exist. | |
| And so what we did was really do a very basic calculation and said, well, we know that life and the intelligent life, us essentially formed on Earth in a certain way under a certain conditions and in a certain time scale, right? | |
| So we know we've been around about four and a half billion years. | |
| So we know that how at least one intelligent life formed, right? | |
| No doubt about it, right? | |
| I mean, you could question whether or not we exist, but let's pretend that we do exist, at least, you know, for this, for this argument. | |
| So we do exist. | |
| We know how we were formed in many different ways. | |
| We know the conditions. | |
| And so you can ask the question now, if I take those same conditions and look throughout our galaxy and try to find similar systems, that is stars like the sun, stars that are at least four and a half billion years old, and stars that have what we call a metallicity, that is a metal content. | |
| Like in astronomy, metals are things like carbon and oxygen. | |
| It's not the same as a metal in chemistry, which is like iron and metal and lead and so on. | |
| So in astronomy, metals are anything heavier than helium, which is basically everything except two elements. | |
| So you need those elements like carbon and oxygen, nitrogen, et cetera, to form life as we know it. | |
| And some stars don't have much of it and some stars have a lot of it. | |
| So we know how many stars have various amounts of metallicity. | |
| So we looked at this and we asked a very simple question, said, okay, we take all the stars in our galaxy and we know enough about these to do this and say how many are older than four and a half billion years? | |
| How many are stable enough to last that long? | |
| How many are stable enough that life can exist on for that long a period of time? | |
| How many have a high metal content? | |
| And how many have planets around them? | |
| This is a key factor. | |
| It's also used in the Drake equation, of course. | |
| So we know that from telescope missions like Kepler. | |
| Kepler was a space telescope that existed and flew. | |
| It's now no longer working, but it flew for about a decade or so. | |
| It started around 2009. | |
| And it found lots of planets around stars. | |
| So we now know something called Eta Earth, which is the fraction of stars which have an Earth-like planet in what we call the habitable zone. | |
| That is the zone around a star where it's not too hot and not too cold, such that liquid water can exist. | |
| And you need liquid water, as far as we know, to form life, like us, at least. | |
| So we know that from Kepler. | |
| And so now that we know that, we can calculate how many planets, sorry, how many stars have planets like ours, how many of those stars exist for a long enough period of time to form intelligent life, how many have the right metals. | |
| And then we use something, the most important factor here is, and this is the one that probably is the one that most people would be most interested in, is how long does a civilization that's technologically advanced like our own, how long does it last? | |
| This is the major question in all studies of trying to find out how many life forms might exist in our galaxy that are intelligent, is how long do they last? | |
| Because we know they're not going to last forever. | |
| Nothing lasts forever. | |
| So how long do they last? | |
| That has an answer. | |
| We just don't know it for sure. | |
| But if you assume that they last at least as long as we have as a technological civilization, and what I mean by that is not that we have an iPhone or not that we have vented fire, all that is a technology in one way or another. | |
| But the fact that we are emitting electromagnetic radiation into space, this is the key aspect here, because that can be in principle detected by extraterrestrial intelligence. | |
| And we can detect, in principle, any light coming from other planets that might be evidence for life on that planet. | |
| So a technological civilization is essentially when we've started emitting electromagnetic radiation into space that can, in principle, be detected. | |
| So you can consider that to be, you know, even the invention of the light bulb or radio waves being invented artificially about, you know, a little bit over 100 years ago. | |
| So if you just put in 100 years, let's assume that the minimum lifetime, because we're using us as a basis, and we have survived for 100 years as a technological civilization, if you just use 100 in this equation, you find that there should be at least 36, this is the number we came up with, 36 intelligent life forms within our galaxy. | |
| So that's not very many, but it's mainly due to the fact that we don't know how long these life forms last. | |
| And if it's only 100 years, we could destroy ourselves tomorrow or next year, right? | |
| We just don't know, or could be a million years or so, or even longer. | |
| Who knows, right? | |
| So it depends highly on that number. | |
| But at least we've lived as a technology that emits light into space for 100 years. | |
| And if you just use that as the minimum, you get 36. | |
| There's at least 36 intelligent species throughout our galaxy that formed in a similar way to us under the assumption that life forms in a scientific way, an intelligent life forms in a scientific way under the right conditions. | |
| And that may not be true either, right? | |
| This is an assumption that we've made, but everything else in science basically is consistent throughout the universe, right? | |
| The laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, and even the laws of biology, I would argue, don't differ in different parts of the universe. | |
| Why is Earth unique? | |
| So if the laws of how life forms is not different throughout the galaxy, then you should have, if you believe that, 36 at least. | |
| And what are the chances, Christopher, that we have a cosmic counterpart? | |
| In other words, another civilization a very long way away that has a similar stage of evolution, has a similar kind of technology, and a similar desire to quest to see whether or not they're alone. | |
| What's the chance that we have a twin? | |
| Well, it's basically the same number because this is how many are active civilizations. | |
| All of those could be twins. | |
| In a sense, yes, they could be twins. | |
| Not exactly twins in the sense that they wouldn't necessarily look like us, but they would have an intelligence and would have a technology, yes. | |
| So 36 is that number. | |
| That's the answer to that question. | |
| Amazing calculation. | |
| I'm sorry to jump in. | |
| What are we going to do with that information now that we've got it? | |
| There's a couple of things you can do with it. | |
| One of them is you can ask, if you know how many there are throughout our galaxy, you can ask simple questions like, well, if there are 36, let's assume that's right. | |
| How far away is the closest one? | |
| Because if you assume it's distributed, that they are distributed equally throughout our galaxy, then you can calculate how many, or sorry, how far away one of them must be. | |
| And the answer is about 15,000 light years away. | |
| So that's not very close, right? | |
| So that's quite far away. | |
| So for example, if you wanted to send a message to that alien civilization, or if you wanted them to detect us, it would then take 15,000 years for our light signals to reach them. | |
| And then let's assume they can detect us, right? | |
| Which is a big assumption. | |
| Then it would then take 15,000 years for that signal, for an answer to come back to us. | |
| So that would be 30,000 years that we would have to wait. | |
| Moly. | |
| Okay, so does that mean that they haven't been here? | |
| You know, as much as people like to believe that we've been visited, given those odds, given those statistics, they won't have been here and we can't reach them. | |
| This is the interesting thing about this calculation as well, which is that we are searching for extraterrestrial civilizations. | |
| And effectively, if we do find them, and if they are closer than 17,000 or sorry, 15,000 light years, then actually it's a good sign that the lifetime of an average civilization is quite long. | |
| So the more of these civilizations that we find, and let's assume that one day we do have evidence that they exist, the more that we find, that would increase the likelihood that our civilization would last a long time. | |
| But if we find very few or none, that is a very bad sign. | |
| It either means that civilizations don't last very long, or it means that we're very unique and there's something really strange going on that formed intelligent life just on one place in the entire galaxy, which would be an incredible thing to be true. | |
| So there's really a remarkable answer to these questions. | |
| We just don't know what that answer is yet. | |
| But any answer is remarkable and profound in many ways. | |
| Utterly fascinating research. | |
| What the bottom line of all of this is, isn't it? | |
| I think, tell me if I'm wrong. | |
| This is the reason that we've got to keep looking. | |
| Oh, yeah, absolutely. | |
| We should still keep looking because it could tell us a lot, not just about what's going on in the galaxy and about the past history of the galaxy, but it also tells us about our future, how long we might actually be around, how long as a civilization that we might sustain ourselves and exist. | |
| Because if we find, as I said, we find many of these civilizations that are intelligence, it means that intelligence and civilizations have found a way to survive for what must be at least hundreds of thousands of years to make a technology that could be detected because it's very hard to detect our technology, even with what we're doing now. | |
| It's not very bright. | |
| If you go further out in the galaxy, it becomes hard to detect. | |
| Not impossible, but difficult. | |
| So that would be a real indication that an intelligent species is able to find a way to survive for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. | |
| So it would be a very interesting result no matter what we find. | |
| So even if we can't send them an email and they can't send one to us, we need to be taking some comfort from this because the more of these things that we find, the more likelihood it is there is that we as a civilization will last longer than some of us may fear. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| So that's another reason why we should do these searches is to find out about ourselves and about the nature of the history of humanity and how long we might be around. | |
| And, you know, I don't know if we can do much about this, but if we find there's no civilizations in our galaxy, you know, that won't happen within my lifetime or your lifetime or anybody alive now, probably. | |
| But if we did find that, that would be very bad news. | |
| And I think we would have to really rethink about how we, you know, how we deal with being humans and if we want to survive as a species for a very long time, which I think most people would like to see happen. | |
| Is it pointless to transmit and to send out probes in the hope that we might just be noticed? | |
| So the probes is probably not the best idea because they don't go very far. | |
| They tend to only stay. | |
| I mean, even the furthest probes that we've sent now are just barely leaving the solar system, right? | |
| And so they're not even approaching the nearest stars by any means. | |
| And so that probably isn't a very effective way to send out that we exist. | |
| So sending out signals, this is something that has been debated quite a bit. | |
| Of course, there has been a few attempts to do that, to send out signals. | |
| And you can say that doing so is a good way of showing that as humans, we're interested in these questions and that we want To be found, and that it's good for public relations or good for education, these kind of things. | |
| But will it actually work? | |
| Well, that depends a lot on how common life is in our galaxy, right? | |
| So, if civilizations are numerous, then it might work. | |
| And that was Professor Christopher Consolice from the Universities of Manchester and Nottingham talking about the mind-blowing research that there might be 36 civilizations out there. | |
| We know that they're going to be an awful long way away, and maybe that is why we need to change our thinking if we want to connect with them or even find out some more about them. | |
| Very, very interesting stuff that will deliver more results, I think, as time goes by, to coin a song title. | |
| Now, a team of paranormal investigators have claimed to have captured a photo of a spirit in what is said to be the oldest pub in Glasgow. | |
| 1792, the Scotia Bar on Stockwell Street, is reported to have a ghost, well, among a number, I think, called the Green Lady. | |
| Anthony Douglas, Tony Douglas, from Paranormal Supernatural Investigations Ireland, went there recently for reasons that he will explain and came up with some pretty remarkable findings. | |
| I will let you hear him and his explanation of this. | |
| It was going to be on the radio show this week. | |
| This is the radio version recorded a couple of days ago. | |
| I'm not sure whether we're going to be able to get him live on the TV show. | |
| This is what we did for radio. | |
| This is Anthony Douglas from Paranormal Supernatural Investigations Ireland talking about what he discovered without expecting it at the Scotia Bar, 1792 on Stockwell Street in Glasgow. | |
| I went to Glasgow because my grandfather was from Glasgow, my father's dad. | |
| And he had one last remaining first cousin from his side of the family. | |
| So what we did was he's 91 in April and she's 91 in May. | |
| So we decided to get the two of them to meet up just in case they didn't get to see one another again. | |
| So we put dad in the plane and we flew over basically to do the return to Yank thing, trying to fire the Scottish relations. | |
| So we did. | |
| We met up and we met. | |
| There was eight of us in the room having a great chat and all of that. | |
| So that's what brought me over, brought me over there. | |
| Right, so it wasn't mainly to do a ghost hunt, but you ended up doing one anyway. | |
| Yeah, well, I do a lot of that. | |
| See, because we do a lot of it here, anytime I go away, if I'm in, we'll say Cornwall or in Manchester and the Pendle Witches in Lancashire there, I'd always do something because you have the camera with you. | |
| So if you get a feeling or a draw to some place and you're close by it, you go there out of curiosity because it's what you do. | |
| And you don't have the equipment naturally enough, but you can do an EVP and you can take photographs. | |
| So it's a kind of like a commando style, in-and-out job. | |
| And that's the quickest one I ever did because I had only two sups out of the drink when I got that. | |
| And did you deliberately pick the most haunted bar in all of Glasgow, the Scotia? | |
| I did not know that's what it was. | |
| I was walking down the street and I got drawn into the bar. | |
| I said, God, I'll go in here now and just have a pint. | |
| And when I went in, it was packed. | |
| And the only place I could sit down in Howard was the snug. | |
| So I was looking around and there was a girl in the snug and I said, oh, God, she's got a bunch of friends now. | |
| So I'm not going to get in there. | |
| So I grabbed the pint and I quickly went in and I sat down and I took one drink out of it. | |
| And as soon as I did, I got this overwhelming urge to look to my right. | |
| And there was two parasols up against the wall covering a sign, which, of course, I didn't know what was on the sign, but something was telling me to pull those parasols back, which I did. | |
| And when I pulled those parasols back, I could see the Scotia bar and the paranormal, blah, blah, blah. | |
| And the grey lady, the grey lady, and not the green lady, you know. | |
| And I went, oh my God, I said, I'm in a bar with paranormal connections and history and what have you. | |
| So I immediately took the phone out and I took a picture of the sign and I started taking a few photographs around the snug. | |
| And I took photographs down through the bar. | |
| And I sat down and I took another drink out of the pint. | |
| And I started going through the photographs. | |
| And when I saw the image, I started laughing hard. | |
| I said, how on earth could this have happened so quickly? | |
| That there was a distinct image of a woman with her head tilted to the right hand side. | |
| But it was, she wasn't grey. | |
| She was green, but that was a reflection from lights in the area. | |
| So that's basically what happened. | |
| You know, it was that quick. | |
| And could it have been a reflection of all of those people in that place? | |
| Could it have been, I mean, it doesn't look like something that is a reflection of, you know, a person maybe reflected back off a window or something. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It looks weird to me. | |
| But I'm just asking you. | |
| It's a, well, it's up above door height. | |
| So it wasn't a reflection of anybody. | |
| What is there is a reflection of a green security light. | |
| And I had several images taken. | |
| And if you look at the light first, there is absolutely nothing there. | |
| And in this sense, when you go back and you look at the second picture, you can see there's that image of something trying to transmogrify or manifest itself using the light. | |
| So it's the nearest possibility to what you would get to ghostly image. | |
| Transparent type of invisible type of image trying to come through. | |
| It did look like something, you know, that was emerging and trying to form. | |
| You know, we've all seen those things on the movies and people claim that's what happened. | |
| That's what this looks like. | |
| How did it feel? | |
| How did you feel? | |
| Uh, well, I honestly, Howard, I did start laughing to myself when I, when, when I looked at the phone and I zoomed in and it popped out straight away because some people can't see it and other people have an ability to see it straight away. | |
| I saw it straight away and I just started laughing there was two other people sitting across from me and they thought i was laughing at a picture that i took of them because i was taking photographs trying to miss those people and not get their Well, good luck to you trying to explain that one to them. | |
| Yeah, I couldn't. | |
| So I went up to the barmaid and I said, Excuse me, and I gave her my card. | |
| You know, I said, I'm a paranormal investigator from Ireland and I just dropped in for a drink. | |
| And I said, you have something in there about the grey lady. | |
| And she said, yeah, yeah, that's right. | |
| They're the paranormal society, blah, blah, blah. | |
| So I turned the phone around and I said, have a look at that. | |
| And she stopped and her mouth opened and she went, where is that? | |
| And I said, it's just there on the wall. | |
| And sure, she was totally flabbygasted. | |
| And she showed it to the other barmen and their jaws dropped. | |
| And I was explaining how I took the photograph like when I explained to you. | |
| And I explained where I caught it on the wall. | |
| And she said, oh, my God, we're made. | |
| We're made. | |
| This is it. | |
| We've been trying to catch something for decades. | |
| And you walk straight in the door and you manage to catch it in minutes, you know? | |
| Well, you know, you've got the fluency. | |
| You were the right man, right time, I think. | |
| That's the truth of it. | |
| What sort of stuff, though, that you must have got told, you did get talking to them. | |
| What sort of stuff goes on there? | |
| Because that bar has got a hell of a reputation. | |
| It's got a huge reputation. | |
| And to be honest, Howard, they didn't speak to me very much because there was a band starting up playing and they were mad busy. | |
| And I only had time for the one client. | |
| So what I, because I was staying, I had to go back to the, my dad was in a wheelchair and my wife was back in the hotel with him. | |
| So, I mean, I was only out on a kind of a jaunt around. | |
| So I had to leave. | |
| You had to explain yourself when you went back. | |
| Oh, I did, yeah, yeah. | |
| What happened? | |
| What did you do? | |
| You know, so I showed her the picture anyway. | |
| And the next thing, we sent it off to the record, the daily record, and they put it in the Glasgow Times. | |
| And it went fire then after that, all over the East. | |
| And that's how I know about it. | |
| Okay. | |
| And what did the missus say then when you showed her the picture? | |
| Did she say you can't go anywhere? | |
| She said you're out of the game. | |
| Exactly. | |
| You can't go anywhere without doing something like this. | |
| Well, listen. | |
| Don't knock it. | |
| I think it's a gift if you've got it. | |
| Now, you're part of a group of investigators in Ireland. | |
| What is the best, spookiest, the most impactful investigation that you've done? | |
| I'd say possibly we did, if you look on our website, you'll see Castle Ellen, House the Man in the Attic. | |
| And that was the first real huge bit of imagery that we caught. | |
| And that kicked us off. | |
| Now, what we've tried to do is we've tried to get an EVP, maybe get the K2 going or the EMF going, and then something on the SLS and a photograph. | |
| And if we can get all of them three or four things going, we definitely know we've captured something. | |
| So in the case with the Castle Ellen and the man in the attic, as we called him, his face was, we had a medium with us and we had, she was saying, I'm getting an awful feeling that there's something up here, up in those stairs, up into this dark attic. | |
| And the K2s and the AMF, they were going off also. | |
| So I said, okay, stand back, I'm going up. | |
| So I went up into the attic and I took the phone out. | |
| And with the limited light in it, I started taking a couple of photographs. | |
| We came down and we just started immediately looking through the photographs because that's what we do. | |
| It's kind of like fishing. | |
| If you fish with one rod, you might catch a fish, but if you fish with a net, you're going to catch something. | |
| So yeah, we fish, we take loads of photographs. | |
| So going through the photographs, we were amazed at this face that was coming out through the rafters. | |
| And we clasped that as probably one of the most legitimate captures we've ever caught because it was caught on everything else and backed up by a photograph. | |
| So that would have been one incident. | |
| Duckett's Grove from Carlo is a very eerie place, especially out the back where there's supposed to be banshees under the bridges and that kind of stuff. | |
| What's Duckett's Grove? | |
| Is that what? | |
| Like a forest? | |
| No, it's a massive castle down in Carlo. | |
| Oh, right. | |
| Yeah, if you Google it up there, it's a huge, massive structure. | |
| And it's got huge access to towers, gardens, outdoor gardens, kitchen areas inside bridges. | |
| But it's also, I think, built on top of maybe some sort of Neolithic or close enough to a Neolithic site. | |
| Which we have found in our investigations, they hold an awful lot of energy. | |
| And generally what happens is it starts off Neolithic. | |
| It gets maybe some timber huts or stone huts and then it goes into a bit of a wrong tower and a castle and so forth. | |
| And then you have a big settlement there. | |
| And in our time is then probably a massive big gentry house built in there or a castle or something. | |
| Those places to us hold lots of energy and we usually concentrate on them to try and catch captures and etc. | |
| Ever been scared? | |
| Never. | |
| Once. | |
| Once, I tell a lie, and it was what I captured what we believed to be an image of a banshee underneath the bridge in Ducats Grove. | |
| I was out the back at half four in the morning. | |
| Couldn't see my hand in front of my face forward. | |
| Got this awful feeling that there was something under this bridge looking out at me. | |
| And I was thinking, if I put the flash on here and take a picture, I'm going to light up the area and there's going to be something I don't want to see standing in front of me. | |
| That was the feeling I was getting. | |
| So, of course, I took the photograph, didn't see much in it, and the eerie feeling passed. | |
| And we went back. | |
| I went back inside and met up with the rest of the team and everybody else that was with us. | |
| Did you have a lucky escape there? | |
| Yeah, I got back inside Hard. | |
| And when we looked at the photograph, you could see this latent image of like a woman's face with long flowing hair in the background, it was a real creepy one. | |
| But I was getting that feeling that there was something in there under the bridge. | |
| And that when I lit up the area with the flash, and it was a misty, foggy area, you know, I was going to see something that I didn't want to see. | |
| But of course, when you do light up an area with a flash, it blasts through everything. | |
| So you can't see it until later, until you go back into the photographs and zoom in and out on them. | |
| So, Anthony, finally, I'm told that you've invented a new device. | |
| What's that? | |
| It's called the Phasmatron GD2000 Ghost Detector 2000. | |
| You're kidding me. | |
| That's straight out of Ghostbusters. | |
| Exactly. | |
| But this was designed by a metaphysics engineer who had an interest in the paranormal. | |
| And he got speaking to me one night. | |
| I went to school with him years ago. | |
| And he was kind of giving me a bit of a slag. | |
| And what's this I hear about paranormal and ghostbusting? | |
| And I said, oh, it's a long story. | |
| So then he pulled me aside and he started talking about what he had an idea of. | |
| You know, it's a hugely amplified EMF K2. | |
| And what it does is give us readings of electromagnetic energy, etc., in an area, which makes us concentrate on that area. | |
| And it's worked to the extent that when we went back down to Duckett's Grove and we were pointing it into an area and with members of the public with us, they started taking pictures. | |
| And one of them captured an image in the window, which was fantastic because that hit all the newspapers. | |
| God so. | |
| He created a ghost detecting device. | |
| Yeah, Google it. | |
| If you Google Phosmatron GD2000, you'll see everything coming up for it. | |
| Photographs, newspaper clippings, the whole lot. | |
| Are you going to be selling this and making a fortune with it? | |
| Well, it's a bespoke bit of custom-built kit, so I don't know how we're going to sell it. | |
| I see commercial opportunity here. | |
| I've never been very good at exploiting those myself, but by the sounds of it, opportunity knocks. | |
| Hey, listen, Anthony, thank you very much indeed for talking with me. | |
| We'll talk again. | |
| Okay, Howard, thank you so much for your time. | |
| Thank you. | |
| What a nice man. | |
| Tony Douglas, Anthony Douglas from Paranormal Supernatural Investigations Ireland. | |
| And before that, you heard Professor Christopher Consolice from the universities of Manchester and Nottingham talking about the 36 other civilizations that may or may not be out there and may or may not be something like us. | |
| Interesting, hey, we'll follow that research with interest. | |
| Before that, Nick Pope on UFO latest and whether depositions are already being given to the American Congress on UFO UAP cases dating back to 1945. | |
| I think we're in for some interesting revelations, and I hope that we get to hear all or most of them. | |
| And if we don't, then I hope that we get to ask all the questions as to why that might be. | |
| Don't you think? | |
| I get the feeling that this is a very unusual era that we're living in. | |
| Not only is the world seemingly in flux and turmoil, and that definitely includes this country, maybe your country too, but also there's this growing sense, I feel, that something is going to happen. | |
| And a lot of people, be they astrologers or psychics or scientists, I think are kind of coming to concur. | |
| But I'm just a guy who does, you know, radio shows. | |
| What do I know? | |
| We'll have to watch this space, as they say. | |
| More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained online. | |
| So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This has been The Unexplained. | |
| And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm. | |
| And above all, please stay in touch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Take care. |