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May 21, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:30
Edition 724 - Linda Moulton Howe/Guest Catchups
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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.
I think I sounded surprised when I said my old name, then.
What's wrong with me these days?
I don't know.
Come on, Howard.
Get yourself together.
Another swig of coffee, and I'll be fine.
Hope everything's all right in your world.
Nice spring-like day here, temperatures around about 20 degrees Celsius here, 68 Fahrenheit.
I know that the southern hemisphere is lurching towards winter, if not in it already.
And my thoughts are with you.
But I'm very pleased that some decent weather is here now, because it has been a long, wet, grey, vile winter.
So I'm very happy to be here, very nearly in the time of the Gemini people, and celebrating the fact that the weather is hopefully going to be all right for a few months.
I know that in a couple of months from now, they're going to be saying, oh, isn't it hot?
It's 38 degrees.
We'll deal with that when we come to it.
Now, on this edition, some of the material that was on one of my TV shows recently, and I haven't included here, I want to put it here for posterity.
The great Linda Moulton Howe from Earth Files, great friend of mine in this show for years, talking about some cattle mutilations in the United States recently in Texas, and I think there have been others in other places recently, so we'll talk with her about that.
Mark L. Cowden in Northern Ireland, filmmaker investigator with a strange and under-remarked case from 1956, a UFO in rural Northern Ireland.
Something that actually, they say, landed there.
A not very often told story.
You're going to hear that briefly here.
What else have we got on this edition of The Unexplained?
We've got Christopher Plain from The Debrief.
He's the head writer there on some new technology.
Now, we've talked a lot about AI and we'll continue to.
This is some new technology that can literally and has the potential to read your mind.
It's here.
You know, all of these things happening very fast and far sooner than I think most of us thought.
The technology to start to read your thoughts could be around the corner.
And just imagine the potential for that.
And finally, Stephen Talty, journalist and author, he's written a book about David Koresh and the story of Waco from 1993.
The fire in the compound, the people who perished there, and the story of the bizarre character, David Kores, behind it.
So Stephen Talty, slightly longer interview on this edition of The Unexplained.
So Linda Moulton Howe, Mark L. Cowden, Christopher Plain from the debrief, and Stephen Talty about Waco on this edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
Thank you all very much for your wonderful messages of support recently.
I'm still a bit wheezy after the fire in the flat, and I'm guessing that situation is going to last for a little while.
And I've got a mountain to climb here to try and get things into order and sort myself out.
And, you know, like I said on the last edition of The Unexplained, I think the fire here was a cosmic wake-up call for me.
The actual circumstances were a one in a million.
How could that have happened?
An aerosol can sparks an enormous blaze, but it did.
So, you know, if I was meant to be given a message by them up there, then I got it, and I'm going to make some changes in my life.
Okay, thank you very much for all of your messages.
Let's get to it now.
Thanks to Adam, by the way, my webmaster, for his ongoing hard work.
Item number one, the great Linda Moulton Howe, investigative journalist from EarthFiles.com and the Texas cattle mutilations.
CBS News reported this six, well, at the time when this was written, it's now eight mutilated cows have been found dead on different properties along a Texas highway spanning three counties, authorities announced during the week.
While investigating the death of a six-year-old cow, five other similar occurrences, as I say there are more now, were reported along the area near College Station spanning Madison, Brazos, and Robertson counties.
So we've talked about cattle mutilations on my show, both on the podcast and on television and radio before.
Let's get an update on this.
A veteran researcher, multi-award winning Linda Moultenhow, is with us, old friend of mine.
Linda, how are you?
It's so good to be with you in the we can see each other mode.
Wow, Linda, it doesn't happen that often.
It's nice to see you with your enormous great library.
Now, Linda, look, you go back with this phenomenon, these cattle mutilations, which are done in an almost surgical way.
Your history with this story is longer than, well, they are indeed the way that they're performed.
Your history with this is the longest in your nation, isn't it?
You've been looking into this for more than 40 years.
1979, September, I began, and I was director of special projects in the CBS station in Denver.
And my beat had always been working with the governor of Colorado on various state issues where we would do live studio with the governor in the KMGH-TV studios.
I had done a show with one of the CIA people at the time on a series of investigations in the state of Colorado.
I did a lot in science, medicine, and the environment.
It is that context that in September, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News both had headlines.
Bloodless, trackless mutilations of cattle, and it was in the state of Colorado.
What caught my attention was a word that News was using.
Again, they said again, and they were talking about repeats.
And I had lived in Pennsylvania and I had lived in Boston.
And I was, what is this?
And it was in that mode.
I want to get to the bottom of whatever these animal mutilations are.
And in September of 1979, my crew and I spent a month on the road interviewing ranchers, sheriffs, deputies, anybody, photographers for newspapers who had seen strange lights in the sky.
And eventually that led to the documentary, A Strange Harvest, that was first broadcast May 25th, 1980.
And it is interesting that to this day, 44 years later, it is still the largest audience for a KMGH-TV produced documentary ever.
And what all of that population of people who were tuning in said to me, there's a lot of people who are aware of the animal mutilations more than I would have thought.
And there were so many ranchers who had been afraid to talk with people about the lights and the beams that they had seen over their pastures.
Ranchers that I would end up interviewing saying, I saw one of my cows go up in a beam of light into a round circle of light in the sky.
And that is why Sheriff Tex Graves in Northern Colorado then had gone out, had gone out sometimes with the deputy, but he had photographs that he had taken.
They are in my documentary, A Strange Harvest.
They are in my huge book, 477 Pages in An Alien Harvest, about only a decade of my research from 79 to 89 when that book came out.
Every year since I began the first telephone calls in September of 1979, every year, and we're now in 2023, I have had reports of bloodless, trackless animal mutilations, not only from in the United States and Canada, but Mexico, Central America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and so many places in Europe.
And right now, what I'd like to do is update you a little bit on what has been happening so far in Madisonville, both near the city and the county, Madisonville, and that I have talked with a man who works in medicine there.
I'm not prepared to identify him at this point.
I am working on a story with them on the medical aspects of what is happening.
I will be doing a report on my upcoming Wednesday, which is the May 3rd.
It's the first Wednesday in May.
And I will be doing that phase of the report that I can share with the audience.
And now, Howard, I'm going to at least confirm for your audience directly from this medical person that there was a six-year-old cow that was a longhorn cross.
That means it was a hybridized cow, six years old.
There was one yearling.
So that's old cow comparatively and young, young cow.
There were four adult cows.
That came up to the first six in the headlines in Madisonville.
Then this past week, it was announced in headlines, two more cows that were in Brazos and Robertson counties, which are directly west of Madisonville, straight on a map to the west.
They are essentially in the same area of Texas, which is approximately going probably southeast from Porpoise Christian.
And Linda, can you just explain for my viewer who may be new to all of this, I think people watching this now tonight will be familiar with this subject.
We've talked about it in the United Kingdom and in the U.S. over the years, so I think they will.
But, you know, those people who may be seeing this for the first time and saying, well, it's obviously some kind of predator.
It's, you know, in this country might be a fox or something like that.
Can you just explain, and I know you said these are bloodless, why that is not the case?
It's in the method of the actual dissection, isn't it?
You've gone to what is one of the single most important aspects of cattle mutilations in all the 44 years I've investigated.
It is the lack of blood.
And then when the excisions are examined, and all of the work I did for 10 years with Dr. John Al Schuler, hematologist, pathologist in Denver, over and over and over again, he confirmed, did photo micrographs.
So you're looking at the cell tissue that's in my book, An Alien Harvest.
Cut with high heat, high temperature, but no carbon residue, therefore not a laser.
What was the technology that was applied to the thousands of animals from the 1961 date up through when I was at the station and left to produce a documentary about animal mutilations and other aspects of UFOs?
I left in what would have been 1983, signed a contract with HBO.
And my book, An Alien Harvest, came out in 1989.
And over and over again, there was the mystery to highly trained people working in lasers that this was not a laser cut, but it was definitely hot.
And to put this in the perspective of how big this story is, how long it's been going with this whole issue of bloodlessness and what in the world has caused the bloodlessness, I'm going to share with you, I don't know if you could, it is, yes, it is mutilation method on Texas calf puzzles veterinarians.
If you can see at the top, the Gazette Telegraph, Colorado Springs, Colorado, February 8th, 1976, three years before I began.
But what I want you to hear.
Well, and listen to these words written in 1976: A female calf that did not bleed when it was mutilated, yet bled freely during an autopsy, has captured the interest of two veterinarians in southern Texas, where 25 suspected cattle mutilations have occurred since November.
This was in 1976.
And this particular area, this animal was Mission, Texas.
And if you go 164 miles southwest of Corpus Christi, you will get to Mission, Texas.
And Mission is 414 miles northeast of Madisonville.
But I'm stressing, essentially, this is the same area of the huge, gigantic state of Texas with 25 mutilations as of February 8th, 1976, and then adding this new female calf.
And here is what the veterinarians, Dr. Gary Crouch and Dr. C.M. Fish of Brownsville, said about this calf mutilation.
The animal was kept from bleeding, but not by any methods we know, quote, unquote.
So we are from 76 with pathology reports in national news in Texas, in the same general area of Texas, going from 76 to 2023.
So when those are on.
We haven't learned, we don't know what it is that is staunching the flow of blood.
It's the cut.
It's the technology that I reported about for the first time in A Strange Harvest, Strange Harvest 1993, working with Dr. John Altschuler in Denver.
It was something of a specific heat that could cook the collagen and cook the hemoglobin at the excision site.
And in my book, An Alien Harvest, and in my documentaries, A Strange Harvest and Strange Harvest 1993, you can see images that he took showing the cooked hemoglobin.
And in An Alien Harvest, I think it's five or six pages, a photo micrograph said I was reporting all the way back then.
But what has happened back when I started in 1979, calling the Central Intelligence Agency as an abiding American citizen in a government of, by, and for the people, I thought as director of special projects at the CBS station in Denver,
trying to investigate the strange, growing national problem of mutilated animals, and specifically for me in Colorado, that I could call the Central Intelligence Agency and introduce myself and say I would appreciate your help in the investigation of what could be causing these bloodless, trackless, the trackless part I'll get into in just a minute, of mutilations.
What did they tell you, Linda?
Unfortunately, this being television in the UK, they're always counting me down here.
But what did they tell you then?
And how is it different if it is from what they're telling you now?
Well, there was this cold voice that passed me over to another cold voice that said, under no circumstances does the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States make available any of its field agents for interviews with reporters.
And I will never forget that because it was a turning point in my entire life.
Not only did I not know that the next half century of my life would be dominated by the investigations of animal mutilations linked directly to the presence of extraterrestrial biological entities of a wide variety on this planet, which the CIA and other agencies knew about from World War II on.
That's another huge part of this story.
Linda, it is fascinating.
It remains a mystery, and we have to emphasize the point.
Not only is it happening in your country, it's happening in my country.
There are creatures that appear to have been dropped from a height.
Not only are they mutilated in the same way, but they appear to have been dropped from a height.
That is unusual.
We still don't have an answer.
It's still going on.
And it would be nice if those authorities that didn't cooperate with you back then would cooperate with you a little bit more.
Linda, your wonderful website.
Let me make another one more.
They're counting me down on fingers, but that's fine.
Go on.
From March of this year, there have been the same type of bloodless, trackless, precise excisions and removals of eyes, tongue, jaw flesh, genitals, and rectum in Australia, in England.
This is a story that I will be reporting about this coming Wednesday at EarthFiles.com.
Yes, I'm going to be talking about the Australia, the England, and the Madison bill, and doing it, I think, in such a way that no one has to be worried about what they are seeing because this is the truth and you know it, Howard.
You're not looking at anything that is bloody.
It's the opposite.
This is why right from the very beginning in 1961, in the first and oldest mutilation I know about, it was the same words.
No blood, no tracks.
How are there excisions of ear, eye, tongue, jaw flesh, genitals, and rectum, and no blood.
And then when I told you that the second most important part, no tracks.
As many.
In other words, when we say no tracks, in case anybody's wondering about that.
How Do they get there to do it?
I have been to how many?
I don't know, hundreds.
I think that is a fair say.
I've been to hundreds of mutilation sites since 1979, gathering tissue, doing photographs, going with ranchers, going with sheriffs.
I've been asked by sheriff's offices in the United States to go to states like Montana when they've had really bizarre things.
And I can tell you that the eeriest part outside of no blood on all of these missing is you're walking toward, let's say, a 1,700-pound steer or a 2,000-pound bull.
And they are lying with the hooves perfectly together, front and back.
They are absolutely perfect.
That's not natural to begin with.
Then you look around the animal.
It's mostly dust and dirt.
If it is late summer or fall in any of Colorado, New Mexico, any of these states, you do not have green grass.
And you have mostly dirt and sand.
And there's not one single track of the animals put together like this.
And you cannot come to any other conclusion but what Sheriff started talking about when I began A Strange Harvest in 1979.
I'm going to have to leave it there because I'm being counted out and they'll just cut me off.
But listen, please, will you do a podcast with me soon?
We do one a year and we're due for our latest podcast.
So Linda Moulton Howe, her website is earthfiles.com.
And the story of the cattle mutilations is ongoing.
Linda Moulton Howe, wonderful.
We'll do a long edition with her soon.
We do one a year at least with her.
So we will catch up with Linda on here very soon talking about the Texas cattle mutilations and there will be updates about that, of course, at her website, earthfiles.com.
Mark L. Cowden, old friend of this show, just a short one this, the story of a 1956 reported, reputed UFO landing in Northern Ireland.
Email this week from Northern Ireland researcher Mark L. Cowden.
Mark says, I found details of a 1956 UFO landing in rural Northern Ireland, and I did that through FBI files.
Mark L. Cowden is on to us now.
Mark, how are you?
Hello, Howard.
Talk to me about this story, the details of which you have uncovered.
Well, I was doing some research in Ireland as a whole, and I did the customary search of the FBI files just to see if there was anything that they had their eyes on, past, present, or future.
And I come across the gold mine, basically.
It was file 15 of the FBI's UFO files.
And there was a town called Moneymoor in Northern Ireland.
And the synchronicity is I was five miles from Moneymoor when I did the search.
And it details, there's 77 pages in file 15.
And there's everything from letters from J. Edgar Hoover to Soviet-detected UFOs on radar to anomalous aircraft in the Black Forest of Austria.
And then there's a file with a bunch of press articles that the FBI deemed of interest.
And one of those was an incident on the 7th of September, 1956 in Moneymoor.
Now, Moneymoor is a small little village, started as a plantation town.
Today it's got two schools, six churches, 1,500 residents.
In 1956, it had two schools, six churches, and 650 residents.
648 of those residents on the 7th of September, 1956 were going about their normal routine when two of them were about to have an out-of-this-world experience.
And there's a farmer and his wife by the name of Thomas Hutchinson.
They were sitting in their house about lunchtime, having a cup of tea.
And this object come out of the sky and lands in a bog 200 meters from their house or 200 yards, sorry, from their house.
And the thing is, there was only one dry patch of land in this bog, and the object landed on this dry patch of land.
So Thomas and his wife, they put their boots on and they slosh out through the bog and try to get a closer look.
They walk right up on this thing and they describe it as three feet tall, a couple of feet around, oval or egg-shaped, some could say tic-tac, maybe, and red, bright red, and seemed to be under intelligent control.
So they got closer.
Thomas bends down to get a real close look at this thing and it starts spinning.
So he does what any Irishman would do and he kicks it.
So the object falls over and a few seconds later, it rights itself.
And Thomas says to his wife, there's only one thing we can do with such a thing.
We have to take this to the police station.
And as soon as he said that, the thing starts spinning again.
And they described it as he jumps on it basically and puts it in what would be called now a chokehold and holds onto this thing.
He's able to pick it up.
So him and his wife are going to take this thing to the police station and they carry it to a hedge in the field.
They have to negotiate their way through this hedge.
So he sets the thing down for a minute, goes to the hedge, and when he goes to pick it up again, it shoots up into the sky, through the clouds, and disappears.
And they're so shaken up.
Yeah, yeah.
And this is 1956.
So they go ahead and make their way to the police station and file the police report.
And this is basically how the FBI get their hands on it.
And there was a comment in the report from the sergeant in charge of the RUC station at that time.
And he said, I know this man.
He's not a drunk.
He's a God-fearing Christian.
And if he says that's what happened, I believe him.
Now, hardly anybody in Moneymore has heard of this.
Hardly anybody in Northern Ireland's heard of this.
But it took America by storm.
It was coast to coast in the newspapers there.
I've found San Diego newspapers, Ohio newspapers that carried this back.
So why do you think the FBI were interested?
Well, the FBI were interested because this wasn't an isolated incident.
Similar things happened in New Mexico and other places as well.
But I think today, whenever they're having all these congressional hearings and they're seeing these objects that are under intelligent control, and they think that they could be from adversaries or enemies of ours.
But in 1956, these things were happening.
If that happened in the way described, there was no technology that we have here on Earth, as far as I am aware, that could replicate anything like that.
So isn't that weird?
And we've got to remember, of course, that what, 1956, that's just a few years since famous incidents like the UFOs seen over Washington, D.C. and all of that stuff.
I mean, this is right in the heart of the so-called UFO flap period, both in your country and to a lesser extent in mine.
Fascinating story.
Sorry we haven't got more time to tell it, Mark.
We've teased our audience here.
What are you going to do about it?
Well, I've tracked down some of the descendants of the family, and we're going to have a few words with them and see if we can get more of the inside story.
Were they visited by anybody?
Keep quiet.
In Ireland, I worked in Ireland for a very short time in the south.
But, you know, the same thing applies.
Once you start talking to people, you know this better than I do because of where you are.
You know, somebody will know somebody who will know somebody who will remember something.
Yeah.
Yeah, we were in the park the other day and just happened to mention to a gentleman a little bit about the farmer and outside of money.
And he knew exactly the name, the surname, you know, and that's how we started digging around and found out that they still live in that area.
So we'll get in touch with them and see if I can get you some more information on it.
There's somebody else we need to do more with, Mark L. Cowden in Northern Ireland.
And that is an amazing tale, isn't it?
Technology now, artificial intelligence, we've talked a lot about that and we'll continue to because the future is here.
We're not just looking at it down the track.
It's actually here.
So let's talk with Christopher Plain from the debrief about some new technology that uses brain scans to literally read your mind.
I mean, this is going to be a dream for some people and a nightmare for others.
Is this technology really capable?
I see it comes out of Japan, really capable of reading your mind?
It is eerily capable of doing that, Howard.
That's what's so amazing about this study from Osaka University in Japan is the fact that, yes, they're really, once they train this MRI on a series of images, and I can give you more detail on that, they're able to pretty much figure out what image you're picturing in your mind.
Gee.
And when you say, I mean, look, if I'm, say I'm looking at a cabbage here, right, I'm holding a cabbage, you know, alas, poor Yodick, I knew him well, whatever.
And we take a picture of this with that MRI system, are you saying that it would reproduce, rather like the old Etcher sketch, it would reproduce a picture of a cabbage?
Oh, it's a lot more detailed than an Etcher sketch.
So in the study, they provide a lot of images.
And for instance, if they determine somebody was picturing an airplane, they would determine the general shape of it, the orientation, whether it's facing left or right, oftentimes a lot of color and detail, and a lot more detail than just an edge sketch, yes.
Right.
And on the screen now, we can see, I don't know how great the detail is, the screen I've got is very small, but we can see some of these before and after images, and they are eerily accurate from what I can see here.
Yeah.
So what they did was they took these four volunteers, they have them look at 10,000 images.
So locations, animals, objects, trains, planes, whatever.
And they used an fMRI, which watches the blood flow in the brain.
And they can essentially get a map or an image of what your brain looks like when you're picturing something specific.
And once they did this enough times with these volunteers, they can then give them an image that wasn't one of the original 10,000 they saw.
So they could give them a completely new picture of a plane.
And based on all the data the AI had learned on that person's brain, it could come back and say, they're looking at a plane.
They're looking at a yellow plane.
It's facing from left to right.
It seems to look like a jet airplane.
And the diffusion model, something that AI already uses to make fake people images.
We've seen some of these faces where it's made of people that don't actually exist.
It uses that same software to generate what it thinks that person is thinking of.
And it's shockingly accurate.
Shockingly accurate.
Well, that sounds shockingly accurate.
It certainly does.
Has it reached the stage where it could work out what you're thinking about?
I'm starting to think about, you know, a case where maybe murder suspect is in custody and you would like to know whether this person is visualizing the scene of the crime and what they did.
Are we anywhere closer to that kind of thing?
Yeah, it's funny you would say that, Howard.
That's exactly the final point the researchers on the study made was with enough training on an individual subject, and as their software gets better, they believe it will do exactly that.
You won't need to show you an image and see what you're picturing, but it can actually pull images, as they said, right out of your imagination.
So forget the polygraph lie detector test.
This is something else.
Oh, a million times more sophisticated, Howard.
If you're asking somebody to imagine where they've stashed the loot or where they have somebody hidden away and they can't stop themselves from imagining that, a well-trained software could pull the image out and say, here's the location where that is.
Dear Lord.
I mean, I can think of a lot of good uses for this, but like all technology, it can be misused.
And frankly, there are privacy concerns here because I don't want anybody knowing what I'm thinking about at any one time.
My thoughts are mine.
It's the scariest, One of the scariest storylines in 20th century science fiction was this idea of the thought police, the idea of minority report, where they could go into your brain, see what you're thinking, and police your thoughts.
And that's, yeah, on the more nefarious side of this, and as you noted with technology, it's always just a tool and how people use it and the motivations of the people that use it will determine the success or failure.
But this technology is real.
It's something that they're improving and perfecting.
It does take a big bolsingy piece of equipment.
It's not like a brain cap, like a brain machine.
We both know it doesn't take long to slim things down.
Oh, absolutely not.
As of now, you have to put somebody in a full-size fMRI, you know, a magnetic resonance imaging machine.
But yeah, ultimately, there's open-air MRI.
And so ultimately, you can have it where people walk through it just like a metal detector at the airport, and it just reads your brain while you're walking through.
Chris, I think it's a big, deep concern.
I think it's amazing technology.
And once again, I go, wow, gee whiz.
And I also go, I'm worried about that.
Thank you very much for sharing that with me.
Absolutely.
Wonderful Christopher Plain, Chris Plain from The Debrief.
Check him out on that well-known website and publication, The Debrief.
You will not be disappointed.
Stephen Talty.
The final item on this compilation from recent TV shows.
Stephen Talty is the author of a book called Koresh, The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco.
We're going to go back to 1993.
When I first started at Capitol Radio in London, the big-running story were the bizarre and terrifying events at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.
Stephen Talty has written about them.
Let's talk with him.
The segment that follows will contain some unsavory details.
Listener and viewer discretion advised.
Of course, this material is not suitable for children, especially in view of what we're talking about.
Let me take you back 30 years, spring of 1993.
Federal agents raided the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
There was a 51-day standoff, I had forgotten that it was that long, known as the Waco Siege.
It's become a founding myth of the extreme wing of American conservatism invoked by militiamen, gun rights advocates, and the alt-right.
The leader of the evangelical sect and extreme form of the Seventh-day Adventists was David Courish, born Vernon Howe.
He was a preacher, interpreter of the Bible, and obsessed with the coming of the apocalypse.
The Waco Siege, let me tell you, was something that was very much a part of my life because when that happened, and we're talking April 1993, I just started at Capitol Radio in London.
And in those days, we didn't have the internet.
You know, no newsrooms had the internet then.
What we did have was CNN.
And I had a television in the corner of the office that was constantly running CNN, just so that I could get an international perspective.
And the coverage of that 51-day siege was literally wall-to-wall and constant.
And it was a bizarre story.
By British terms, we'd never seen anything like this.
In America, there have been other situations like that, like Jonestown and those things where you have a so-called charismatic leader and a bunch of people who follow him.
Such was the case with David Korech, real name Vernon Howell.
The man we're about to speak with, Stefan Tolte, has written a book about this, which is out now, and it is called Koresh, The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco.
That is the front cover of the book, if you're looking for it.
And Stefan Tolte is online to us now.
Stephan, thank you for doing this tonight.
Great to be here.
30-year anniversary, that's one reason for talking about this.
At this length of time, 30 years, why are you talking about this?
You know, like you, I watched the entire siege on CNN.
It was really the first huge cable news event.
So I spent 51 days wondering why this was on my television and not really understanding the motives or sort of the forces behind it.
And I think, you know, part of that is if you remember that image from CNN, it was about from two miles away from the compound.
We couldn't see the faces of anybody.
We didn't hear their voices.
We had sort of no human intuition into what was going on, either on the FBI side or on Coresha's side.
So after 51 days, of course, it was a tragic fire.
76 people were found dead.
But I turned off the television and I said to myself, you know, what did I just watch?
I had no real clue about the elements that had gone into it.
And the sad thing about Waco is that it's only become more important and more prominent in American politics and life since then.
So I thought, you know, a deep exploration of David Kresh's life and Waco, you know, was worthwhile.
Right.
You know, from a British perspective, it was very hard.
I mean, just as it was for you, because you were watching these pictures taken from two miles distant.
It was very hard to understand what it was about.
And the media was not exactly talking very much about it.
They were talking about the siege.
They were talking about the, what was it, the alcohol, firearms and tobacco people who were sent in there and the FBI who were sent in there.
So we saw these people arriving.
We saw the place being staked out.
But I don't think we had any great clue as to what this was about.
We knew that there was somebody there who was in charge of a bunch of people who believed a lot of stuff and they decided to hold themselves off there.
But I think beyond that, most of us over here had no idea what was occurring.
Yeah, I think the American public shared the same sentiment.
And that's really, I think there are two reasons that so many conspiracy theories and myths and rumors have grown up around Waco.
It's that sort of mysterious image that we watched for 51 days that didn't seem to have any background to it.
And it's also the fact that the ATF, frankly, covered up some things, especially in the beginning.
The ATF was responsible for the initial raid in which four of their agents died and a number of branch civilians as well.
And as soon as that was over, President Clinton ordered in the FBI.
But the ATF wanted to cover itself and it started to blame the media for this horribly planned and botched raid.
And I want to make sure that I say that I spoke to a lot of ATF agents.
A lot of these guys have lived with this.
They've gone through divorces.
Some of them have terrible injuries.
They lost brothers in arms.
And they insisted to me the one thing that drives them insane about it is when it's called a botched raid.
It wasn't botched by them on the ground that day.
It was botched really by middle management, by the planners, by the bureaucracy.
And once it was over, they said, well, David Koreash didn't know we were coming, which was a lie.
And the media tipped him off, which was another untruth.
They desperately wanted to sort of, you know, cover their tracks for what had become a fiasco.
The people inside that compound, were they able to watch the coverage?
Were they seeing the same pictures that I was seeing in London?
No, the FBI pretty quickly jammed their signals.
They also, you know, the Branch Divinians tried to call radio stations on cell phones or on sort of satellite phones.
And the FBI wanted to have one line going in and one line coming out, meaning they could only negotiate with the FBI negotiators.
So they weren't too cognizant, except for David, who was talking to the FBI about how this was really being received.
They were really focused on David, his message, and they really saw this.
Many of them saw it as a positive event.
The Bible was being fulfilled.
The FBI was part of Babylon.
This was foretold.
So even though everyone sort of from the outside was watching it as an unfolding tragedy.
An event, a tragic event.
But just to jump in here and say this, I got the impression, even though I didn't fully understand what I was seeing because it wasn't being explained to me as I sat in London in the office trying to write the story for the radio.
I got the feeling, as you hinted there, that here were a bunch of people led by this guy who were being pushed into a corner.
So it was not a great surprise when this ended terribly, as it did, with the place being set on fire.
Yes, I mean, there was a range of people inside that compound.
Some of them might have had perhaps a 15% belief that David was the Messiah.
And others were actually just as radical and sort of far gone, if you will, as David.
They believed he was the Messiah and they wanted this tragedy to happen because it would trigger the end times and they would become eternal beings fighting on Jesus' side against the forces of evil.
So a lot of them were sort of trapped by peer pressure and this mindset that if you leave, it's not an innocent thing.
Your soul is going to perish in hell forever.
So it was a big decision to make.
If you really believe David could be the Messiah, leaving him would put your soul in danger.
We had to tell the story of what happened before we get into telling the story of this man, Vernon Howell, aka David Korish.
You know, you cannot talk about him and what made him without understanding those events.
That's why we talked about that first.
I think we need to talk about him.
But before I do, just talk to me about the research that you did, because according to a note at the beginning of the book, the author note, it says, this is a work of nonfiction based on interviews, FBI and 911 transcripts, television and radio transcripts, taped sermons and published sources.
No characters or scenes have been invented.
All the dialogue is as recorded or reported to me by people who heard it directly and firsthand.
This book contains scenes of sexual assault and other forms of violence.
You know, there's a certain amount of that within this man's life, as we will discuss.
And that's why I mentioned that fact at the beginning of this.
So literally, you had to build the story from the ground up, go to the people involved and get the documents and everything else, the records?
Yeah, a lot of coverage of Waco focuses on the last 51 days.
I was more interested in the 33 years of David Koresh's life that led up to that.
So I went down to Texas.
I interviewed friends and family.
Of course, I read through the transcripts.
There are hundreds and hundreds of pages.
And a lot of times, David's talking about his childhood or his school years.
He's not really, you know, trying to get his people out.
He's reminiscing with the FBI agents, which was fascinating to me.
And what I found was he had a very difficult childhood.
He, you know, he grew up in a working class Texas family, born in 1959 and born out of wedlock.
His mom was 13 when she fell pregnant.
His father basically abandoned him.
His stepfather, who came in later, beat and humiliated him.
So there was this pattern of especially men rejecting him and telling him essentially that he was garbage.
And, you know, I met a lot of people who said, well, I had a very difficult childhood too.
I didn't turn out to be a cult leader who led his people to death.
But David Kores was born with a big ego.
He was a narcissist for sure.
So when you combine this extremely harsh treatment where his ego was really struggling to survive, I think, as a child, with the narcissism which told him, you know, you're destined for great things.
He had to sort of fill that hole within himself that his childhood had created.
He tried sports.
He tried music.
He was a decent guitar player.
But it was really his faith, this idea that he was a prophet, that gave him the worshiping that he felt he deserved.
You say that as a boy, he was surrounded by religion.
You say that he was smart.
He picked up factoids.
He collected facts.
He became obsessed with things.
So as you Say he became fanatical about bodybuilding was one of the things that he was interested in, very much into working out, bulking up.
And then he became obsessed with cars and he became obsessed with making music.
It seems that anything he went into, he went into it with an unnatural kind of zeal.
Yes, David had a lot of energy, and it really drove him to seek out ways that he could sort of, you know, affirm himself.
The tragic thing about David is, let's talk about Vernon Howell.
He changed his name in 1990, but Vernon Howell, you know, he really walked the walk.
He did try to be a good Christian.
He helped others.
He was selfless in many ways.
I met one friend of his from childhood who said, you know, if I saw Vernon Howell walking down the street, I would cross over and shake his hand.
If I saw David Koresh walking down the street, I'd keep walking.
So there was this transformation sort of once he got to Waco, once he saw the possibility that his dreams, his dreams could be fulfilled by leading this cult and sort of getting the things he wanted out of it.
Even though his faith was real, he saw an opportunity, you know, to get the things that had been lacking in his life, love, sex, money.
These things played a big part in David's life, but his faith really was real.
He did believe.
He did know the Bible very well.
A brilliant speaker in the room.
It's just that he sort of became consumed by his needs instead of by the scriptures.
And he used the Bible to justify his sexual desires.
I mean, he was a man of faith, charismatic in many ways, but there were aspects of him that were completely out of guilt.
Yes, he was sexually abused.
I mean, he claimed to be sexually abused by a member of his mother's family when he was growing up.
So David was damaged, there's no question.
The tragedy is that, you know, once he got to Waco and he had this group of followers, he really recreated his childhood within Waco.
He sexually assaulted young girls in there.
He humiliated followers who disobeyed him.
He intimidated people just like his stepfather had.
So he was never really able to escape his upbringing.
You know, I'm not making excuses for him, but there is this feeling of history repeating himself.
And nobody, well, there was one person, but we'll get into that in the next segment.
We'll take some commercials now.
We'll talk about that in the next segment.
Nobody really tried to stop this guy.
Nobody saw that there was an issue here, apart from maybe one person.
But his progress and his taking over of this organization and the ending of it all as it did, there were not obstacles in his way, which makes this story even more bizarre.
We're talking about Waco, 1993, 51-day siege, and everything that led up to it with a man called David Korech.
We've got a lot of ground to cover, Stephen, so let's start here.
As you said, David Kores, or the man who became David Korech, Vernon, was a man who was a pillar of a number of church communities down the years.
And then he finds a place called Mount Carmel and a sect called the Davidians and joins them and eventually ends up taking them over.
But the process through which he did that is bizarre to say the least, isn't it?
It truly is.
It's almost, you know, Shakespearean in a way.
When he arrived at Waco, it was being led by a woman in her 60s, Lois Rodin.
She was the widow of the former leader of the Davidians.
And she'd been, you know, in the group for decades.
So it was kind of this isolated group outside Waco, kind of a dusty compound.
And Lois was telling them that the end times were coming, that her prophecies were going to be fulfilled and the end times would usher them into God's new army.
And what David found when he got there is that he was kind of repeating the same Bible studies and sermons over and over again.
And he really thirsted for what he called new light, you know, new prophecies.
He wanted to know that he was going to see God in his lifetime.
So what he did really to rise to the leadership of this group is that he seduced Lois Rodin.
He was about 40 years younger than her, but she was lonely and she had no one next to her.
So he was a charming guy.
Even in the FBI tapes, you can hear this kind of old boy charm that he had.
So he seduced her.
They became a couple.
And he slowly worked at undermining her authority.
He did this in different ways.
When the administration building burned down at Waco, he said, we're being judged by God.
We're not following his rules.
So he was giving the interpretation instead of Lois.
So it was an intriguing sort of approach because Lois' ministry was all about sort of feminism.
She talked about the, you know, the Holy Spirit being female.
And he parroted that for a while until he had no use for it again.
So he used this sort of elderly, lonely woman to gain power within the Branch Davidians.
There was a truly, I keep using this word bizarre, but I'm trying to think of another one, weird happening where, and it's disturbing, where the body of one of the members of the sect, somebody who died, Anna Hughes, who died 20 years before, she'd been buried in a metal coffin on the site.
For some reason that I hope you will explain or try to hear, they actually exhumed her body.
And that's when the police got involved for the first time.
Yes.
So Lois Roden had a son named George, who had a lot of problems.
He had Tourette's syndrome.
He had other mental illnesses.
But he was sort of the heir apparent.
So he and David became rivals.
And George suggested a Contest.
You know, if you're the prophet, if you're really the Messiah, raise this person from the dead.
And he exhumed the body, put it in the chapel.
He tried himself to work a miracle on it.
It didn't happen, of course.
So he was occupying the compound, and David wanted to take it over.
So he and his men approached one night, armed.
They were going to go into the chapel and take pictures of this corpse to show the police that George Roden had committed a crime.
You know, he had disturbed the resting place of humanity.
Violated and desecrated a grave.
Absolutely.
So there was a gunfight.
George fought back and it was gunfire, and it led to a trial in 1987.
And it became very important because Vernon and his lieutenants were acquitted.
It was a success for him.
But David or Vernon at that time felt that he'd been humiliated in the process.
It really brought him back to his childhood.
Again, you had these sheriffs, these deputies, these older men, forcing him down into the dirt, handcuffing him.
And it just brought back these memories of his childhood, which were very disturbing for him.
So when he won the case and he was leaving the courthouse, he said to one of the deputies, you'll never see me again.
I will never be in jail again.
And of course, had he left the compound, he knew he was going to prison probably for the rest of his life.
So this early incident is kind of a precursor.
It shows that David was very determined to keep his freedom.
Did it not ring alarm bells?
I mean, we know that this is an area where strange things, you know, happen in rural areas like that.
They do.
But this was as strange as it gets.
Were there not people in official positions raising alarm bells about this place and the kind of stuff that was going on there?
You know, had it been Massachusetts or New York or something like that, there probably would have been more alarm bells.
But, you know, Texas is a state where you can kind of do your own thing so long as you're not flagrantly breaking the law.
And so, you know, there were investigations.
There was a child sexual abuse investigation conducted by the state.
The investigator actually went into the compound, interviewed David, but she couldn't get any of the children on record.
You know, they were terrified of this man.
And his parents, of course, were followers of David Koresh.
So they weren't able to get, you know, enough evidence to prosecute.
So the thing that really turned the tide was David started buying large quantities of weapons.
And one day, a casing for a grenade dropped out of one of these packages.
And that's really where the Bureau of the ATF got involved.
And the whole federal case developed from there.
Right.
And that is how that ATF siege, raid, whatever you want to call it, that's how that happened?
That's exactly how it happened.
An investigation was opened.
You know, they determined that he was housing illegal weapons, and he was.
They were automatic weapons.
It was a 50-caliber sniper rifle, which is truly a weapon of war.
So they put a surveillance team in the house across the street.
But from the beginning, the planning was awful.
The surveillance team didn't even realize that David Koresh left the compound really on a weekly basis.
He would go into guitar stores in Waco, restaurants, the mall.
They didn't realize that he was actually leaving the place to go about his business and returning.
Right.
That's astonishing.
It is astonishing.
This whole thing could have been a five minute arrest, and we would never have heard of Waco or David Corrach.
And it seems that nobody...
Nobody seemed to realize this man's on a hair trigger here.
He's not exactly balanced.
Anything could happen here.
And it just seemed that this thing progressed and went on like a running saw for 51 days.
So it's actually, it's tragic, but it's no surprise that it ended up as it ended up with this place in flames.
And how many people died in total?
We should have said this at the beginning.
Well, 72 died in the fire, but four more people were found under in the tunnels underneath Mount Carmel.
So the total for that day or for that compound was 76.
And then, of course, the initial raid had resulted in the deaths of four ATF agents and a number of branched Dravidians.
So the final total of really is 82.
And I think, again, watching it from over here, there were people, and I'm sure in your country too, who were not taking this as seriously as perhaps they might.
And that was aided by such things as the continual playing of I Got You Babe, wasn't it?
Was it I Got You Babe that was being played?
Or it was another song.
No, it's These Boots Are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra.
Was played on loudspeakers virtually 24-7 at them.
Whose idea was that?
Well, you know, this is, it sounds comic, but it's actually a serious point because that decision was made by the FBI's tactical team.
There were two sort of units involved in the siege.
The tactical team, the guys with the long guns who were, you know, in the field sighting down the compound.
And then there were the negotiators who were talking to David over telephone line, really trying to encourage him to make sort of a human touch with him.
And so these two factions within the FBI were often at odds.
The playing of loud music, the floodlights, the sort of intimidation approach was really the tactical team.
And the negotiator said, you know, this is undercutting our efforts.
We're trying to get people out.
We're trying to get him on our side.
And you're messing this up with these aggressive tactics.
But it was too late because in the end, what transpired transpired.
A lot of people died.
And it seemed that when that place was on fire, the whole thing was mishandled at that point, as I sat in the newsroom 30 years ago watching.
I can't say that from the FBI side, it was a huge mistake.
They didn't understand, Again, just as the ATF, they didn't understand truly the mentality of the people inside, and that was a mistake.
The people inside saw biblical prophecy happening outside their window, and the FBI was just trying to insert tear gas to slowly coax the people out and force them out.
And the controversy, of course, that erupted later is who set the fire?
And I think we can say conclusively it was the Davidians.
The FBI had bugs inside listening devices.
And we can hear them say on tape, bring the kerosene here, light the fire there.
So it wasn't the FBI starting the fire.
It was really the Davidians trying to hurry the apocalypse so they could be reborn and fight alongside Jesus.
But yes, the days before the fire, the FBI definitely mishandled a lot of things.
So after this happened, there would have been an inquiry, an investigation.
I'm afraid it's so long ago, I can't remember.
We've only got two minutes now, sadly, Stephen.
But when there was an investigation, an inquiry, what conclusions did it come to?
Well, it concluded that the ATF had done a horrible job, but it also concluded that the Davidians were responsible for the inferno.
And David Koresh really directed that tragedy.
I can't blame the federal government for that.
But the tragic thing about Waco since then is that it's become almost this sacred site.
Donald Trump launched his campaign a few weeks ago from Waco.
It's like the New Alamo.
And to me, it's such a disturbing place and event.
I just don't understand why it should be commemorated.
Unfortunately, I'm sure that in Waco, Texas, there are many law-abiding, decent people, but its name will forever be, certainly in the generation that's alive now, will forever be linked with those events.
And that's very sad.
Just very finally in a few seconds, do you think that anything, bearing in mind America's history of such things, Jim Jones and all the rest of it, do you think that anything like that could happen in this enlightened era?
I think it could happen and probably will happen again.
The good news is that the FBI and ATF sort of learned their lessons.
There hasn't been a second Waco because they've taken different approaches, more conciliatory tone.
So let's hope the next time a cult gets holed up in a compound somewhere that the authorities handle it in a sort of more humane and effective way.
And I agree with you.
It could happen again.
You know, it's not talked about a great deal, but there'll be families who are aware of this.
There are around this world of ours some very peculiar cults propounding some very peculiar beliefs.
And even today, 2023, there are few things, forces stopping them, holding them back.
So this is a lesson from history.
Stephen Torty, thank you so much.
The book is called Koresh, The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco.
Stephen Torty is the man we've been speaking with.
That's the book cover.
Stephen Talty, his new book about Waco, is well worth reading.
But it is difficult and chilling reading.
The memories chill me even today, 30 years on.
Before that, Christopher Plain from the Debrief and Technology to Read Your Mind, it's here.
Be warned.
You know, we've tried to tell you first about these things because I think we need to be concerned.
Before that, Mark L. Cowden in Northern Ireland about that strange 1956 UFO landing.
And before that, the great Linda Moulton Howe from EarthFiles.com.
Thank you very much for all of your kind messages for me.
I'm kind of getting there at the moment.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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