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June 25, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
54:05
Edition 733 - Ross Coulthart/Whitley Strieber

Investigative journalist Ross Coulthart on the massive fallout from the David Grusch revelations... Plus acclaimed author Whitley Strieber on his new "alien" book "Them"...

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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.
Another boiling hot day here in London Town as I record these words.
Couple of things from my TV show that I think you might want to hear.
Number one is Ross Coult, Australian investigative journalist who, of course, made headlines around the world recently by doing that interview with David Grush, the UAP whistleblower.
The man whose name is all over the world now, and who we spoke with Ralph Blumenthal, of course, recently about when that story first broke the story that he did with Leslie Kane for the debrief.
That's still available to see at thedebrief.org.
Ross Coulthard did the interview that was broadcast, what, 10 days or so ago as I record these words.
So I think interesting to speak with Ross Coulthard to get the thought processes behind his interview and also his thoughts on the things that David Grush said.
I think we are living in the most interesting of times and I would be a fool if I tried to predict what is going to happen next because I don't think anybody knows.
All I think we can do is to watch as far as we can the news media in its various kinds and bear in mind that some of the news media misses out on these stories, misinterprets them or doesn't bother to report them.
But having said that, I just think we have to keep our eyes open in this day and age.
So Ross Coulthard, guest number one, Wickley Striber about his brand new book, Them is guest number two.
If you're listening to this, I guess you will know who Wickley Striber is, the man who brought you the famous book Communion, the man involved in a ton of projects, including the movie The Day After Tomorrow and a lot of other stuff.
A man who had a chilling personal alien encounter, of course, that started it all off for him.
And he's told that story many times, including on my show.
So I think you'll be familiar with Wickley Striber, and you may certainly be familiar with his many communications and his many conversations with the legendary late Art Bell.
That's how I discovered him.
And I was always entranced and enthralled.
And Wickley Striber and Art Bell, it seemed to me, had the most tremendous rapport on air.
Art used to call him Wit, and the conversations used to flow quite beautifully.
I'm not sure whether I've achieved, I doubt I have, that kind of level of fluidity with the conversations, but Art Bell was a genius, a master, and the man who gave birth to this genre of broadcasting.
So Whitby Strieber, talking, among other things about his new book, Them, the second item from my TV show on this edition of the podcast.
If you want to get in touch with me, please go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and you can email me from there with your thoughts.
If you want to follow what's going on with me, what's happening with the TV and broadcast show, what's happening with the podcast, generally what's going on with me, the news of all of those things will always be online at my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Thanks to Adam, my webmaster, for his continued hard work.
Guest number one from my TV show about his conversation with David Grush that made headlines all over the world.
This is Ross Coulthard.
Revelations of David Grush and the fallout from that.
The whistleblower, of course, David Grush, impeccable bona fides this man has, worked in security, the military at the highest level.
Was he a 14-year veteran of Afghanistan?
You know, this man has great credentials.
In short, a man with great security and military credentials, former co-lead for UAP analysis at the National Geospace Intelligence Agency, he reveals the so-called truth that the U.S. and other countries have exotic materials and crashed craft that have been withheld from members of Congress, the information that is, and the people of the world at this crucial time.
It's all come out because he claimed he was being harassed and impeded in doing what he was doing and filed a law case to that effect, essentially.
Investigative journalist Ross Coulthard's interview with Grush has been viewed worldwide many times, probably millions of times by now, and I'm delighted to say that Ross Coulthard is with us here on The Unexplained.
How are you, Ross?
G'day, Howard.
How are you, mate?
I'm really good.
It's always up.
Did you ever have to do these in your days, you know, doing live stuff, Ross, the hot seat handover?
We do that here at the studios.
I do that a lot, my friend.
I do that a lot.
And in fact, I've been doing an awful lot of it in the last couple of weeks because of this story.
A lot of skeptical mainstream media who still have their heads up their butts, reluctant to admit that this is a reality.
I mean, it's funny, you know, I just literally had a conversation with somebody here in Australia who told me that a speech I'm giving in Melbourne in a few months' time, they've declined to give publicity to me speaking about Dave Grush because they've said that he's a conspiracy and, you know, he's not a whistleblower.
It's just a conspiracy.
And people are missing so much about the significance of this story because Dave Grush, the interview that he's done, one, as you've rightly said, his credibility is without, you know, without any doubt at all.
It's absolutely rock solid.
You made a point before you did the interview with him.
You had him checked out.
Absolutely.
And more importantly, a lot of what Dave Grush says, I've been able to corroborate with my own sources privately.
I mean, journalists like myself don't just put somebody like Dave Grush on air without checking them out.
And so I've been talking to people in the so-called legacy crash retrieval program now for quite a number of years.
They assisted me in the writing of my book.
And if anyone reads between the lines in my book, you can see that I've clearly had people feeding me information.
And I've been very privileged because there are good people, believe it or not, there are good people in the U.S. defense and intelligence community who do want this story told.
They think it's time the world knew.
Now, I'm not an activist and I'm kind of uncomfortable being portrayed as an activist.
I'm a journalist.
And what I do is I confine myself to evidence.
And as Leslie Kaine, my co-colleagues, if you like, in the telling of this story, Leslie Kaine And Ralph Blumenthal revealed in their article, they've got corroborative sources who went on the record, including a colonel, Carl Nell, who backs the claims of David Grush.
And what shocks me at the moment is the, I suppose I was ready for it, but it's the degree of intransigent mainstream media pushback where the flagship newspapers and TV networks of the United States, and indeed in your country and mine, are turning a blind eye to this story.
They're completely ignoring it.
And I can tell you, it's real.
I'm absolutely in no doubt whatsoever that Mr. Grush is who he says he is.
And more importantly, a lot of what he says is backed by corroborative evidence.
Well, listen, my thought about all of this is that you have got the interview that all of us would die for.
I guess I just need to ask you before we talk about it specifically and where we're at with it right now, how did you get it?
Did he contact you?
I reached out to people who work in the legacy program.
And I suspect, I don't know for sure, I've never asked him this because I want to protect my sources as much as he wants to protect his.
He and I were working the same patch.
Essentially, there's a very narrow, small group of people who are working secretly for both private aerospace companies and the US government inside Black World secret special access programs who are working on, I believe, retrieved non-human technology.
And in the course of my work with them, they told me about a man called David Grush, who was working at the time for the UAP Task Force, tasked by the Congress, the Pentagon, to investigate the phenomenon of UAPs, to find out once and for all for the Pentagon whether or not there was any truth to the claim that there were these hidden programs that are being illegally and indeed criminally concealed from the US government.
And he, as I have done, has confirmed that this is a reality.
And so now we have this absurd situation.
Basically, what happened was I heard about him.
Various people then introduced him to me and we then started speaking.
That's how it works.
And you have a wide-ranging conversation with him.
You ask him a lot of the questions that a lot of us would have loved to ask somebody like this because, you know, there's one chance to do it and he is the man to do it with.
He clearly impressed you.
You told him that people were looking at his eyes and they would make a judgment themselves, which no doubt they have done.
But after this, the DOD, the Department of Defense in America, put out a statement, Sue Gough, the Pentagon spokesperson.
And I don't know whether you thought in the same way that this was interesting for this reason.
She said in the statement that what was needed and they hadn't got at the moment was verifiable information.
There still was nothing verifiable about back engineering, crashed craft, etc.
I thought the use of that word verifiable was very, very interesting because it depends on who's doing the verifying.
You know, my standard of verification may not be yours and their standard of verification, who knows what it is.
I would like to say a lot about the Pentagon's demeanor and its behavior on this issue, but frankly, I think the Pentagon is involved in an active attempt to cover up and suppress this story.
The simple fact is that if you listen to and read Sue Goff's statement, she confined her answer to RO, which is the Aldo Nomain Anomaly Resolution Office, which is the Pentagon office tasked to investigate UAPs.
It's a very plever weasel words device that she used to try and constrain on behalf of whom she was answering.
Her denial was not a denial on behalf of everybody in the Pentagon, some of whom are briefed into this program.
It was a very specific denial on behalf of RO, the all-domain anomaly resolution office, the Pentagon's UAP Investigation Office.
And the reason why she can do that is because what they've done is they've emasculated RO.
On the admission of the existing boss of RO, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the people inside RO who are doing the investigations have been muted.
They don't have what's called Title 50 access.
And Title 50 access is what gives you the security classification you need to be able to access special access programs, particularly the waived, unacknowledged special access programs, the WSAPs, that are almost certainly being used to conceal this incredible story.
And so I think the Pentagon, whilst it was tasked by the Congress to properly investigate, and whilst there are good people in the Congress who are determined to get to the bottom of this story, sadly, there are people in the Pentagon who have essentially tasked the body to fail that's doing the investigation.
And so we're in a really interesting situation right now where there's a massive pushback by the intelligence community and by their lickspittles in the mainstream media who are doing their level best to try and suppress this story.
And I just don't think it's going to work because there's a momentum here.
People now accept that Dave Grush is a person of credibility, a person of high reputation.
Multiple people have come out and vashed on his behalf for not only his credibility, but the fact that he did actually have the contacts and the access that he says he had.
So I just think we're going to have to wait and see.
It may not happen as quickly as the people in the UAP research community want, but I think you're going to see a slow dribbling out of this story in the next few months.
It's going to be a slow curtain raiser.
And I think even though I'm pretty sure the Biden administration has no plan in place for how to deal with this, there is going to be momentum because other whistleblowers eventually will Come forward.
And more importantly, I don't think we've heard the last of David Grush.
I think there's a good chance he will soon be giving evidence before a Congressional Oversight Committee hearing.
And more importantly, I think that the evidence is slowly starting to emerge.
What's holding all this back is I think there are people in the Defense Department who honestly think that we're about to go to war with China and we're at serious risk of a confrontation with Russia.
And they think that showing their hand, revealing what they have in their arsenal because of what they've been able to back engineer from retrieved technology is not a good idea.
But I think that the public are ready to be told, at the very least, that there is indeed a non-human intelligence that's been engaging with this planet for a very, very long time.
As you rightly said, and we can agree that the media in many countries, including the one in which I reside, have not done a great job of publicizing your interview, which aired on NewsNation and got all of those views.
So just for those who haven't seen the interview, we've got a very short clip of it here.
Let's see it.
When you say crash retrieval, what do you mean?
These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, you know, call it spacecraft if you will.
Non-human, exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed.
We have spacecraft from another species.
We do, yeah.
How many?
Quite a number.
You asked him, Ross, to confirm what evidence he had, or at least give you something, give you a snippet, give you a tidbit.
We'd all ask for that.
You know, can we see a picture?
Let's have some of this great stuff that you're telling us about.
You know, I love your story.
It's great and I have every reason to believe you.
But, you know, where's the evidence?
And of course, all he could say was that the event was classified.
That's the problem, isn't it?
Yeah.
In law, Howard, and what people ignore when they say that there's no evidence, that he hasn't provided credible evidence, this is a guy who used to hand carry the world's biggest secrets in a briefcase to the West Wing of the White House.
He was involved in helping draft the presidential daily briefing.
This is a guy from the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence community.
He's what you call a witness.
In law, witnesses get cross-examined, they get deposed under oath, and they give evidence.
That's exactly what Mr. Grush has done.
The problem he has is that all of his evidence is classified.
He goes to jail for a very long time if he reveals publicly the detail of what he knows.
He desperately wants you, the public, to know what he knows, but he can't just blab it.
But what he's done is the next best thing.
He's gone to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and the Inspector General of the Defense Department, and he's given that evidence under oath in a SCIF in a secure compartmented information facility.
And he's basically given evidence that's then supported by other witnesses, people from within the legacy crash retrieval program.
This is why this is such a nonsense argument, because the only reason why the Inspector General has referred David Grush's allegations to the Congress as urgent and credible, that's the word used by the Inspector General of the intelligence community, is because he, the Inspector General, independently proved the veracity of what Mr. Grush was claiming and was so concerned about it, he referred it to the Congress for investigation.
What's happening now, though, is you have a situation where even the congressional committees that are determined to investigate this, such as Representative Comer and Representative Burschette's oversight committee, they don't have the security classification to be able to even hear a lot of the evidence that Mr. Grush has in his head.
Because we had Tim Burchard on this show last week saying exactly that.
Is anything going to happen about that?
Look, I like Tim a lot.
I think he's a colorful character and he's the sort of person you need to rattle a cage inside the Congress.
But he doesn't have a security clearance.
The people on the intelligence oversight committees, the HIPSI and the SSCI, the House Select Committee for Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, they're the people that people need to pressure to actually start holding hearings.
You need to hold the feet to the fire of people like the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Warner.
You need to talk to the people who are the members of the Gang of Eight, which is the very, very, very exclusive club of people inside the Congress who are given access to these secrets and given the security classifications to hear them.
Now, I don't think what you're going to see is a mass unveiling of secrets about propulsion systems or weapon systems or things like that.
I think what might happen if people apply enough pressure is these committees might be forced into an admission that, yes, there is a human, a non-human intelligence engaging with this planet.
I can understand why the U.S. may want to keep certain things confidential, things such as the technology, how they've derived technology from these retrieved craft, weaponry, propulsion systems, energy systems.
I can understand why any nation would want to keep that secret.
But what you need to understand, Howard, is your government, the British government, is deeply involved in this cover-up.
They have retrieved craft with the US government.
They're intimately involved in essentially a foreign exploitation retrieval program, not just of foreign adversaries' technology, but of technology that is indeed not of this world.
And I know it's breathtaking, and I know people will suffer what's called an ontological shock in terms of coming to terms with it.
And that's why there's so much mass skepticism in the mainstream media.
It just can't deal with it.
But the simple fact is it's going to come out and eventually the truth will emerge.
And people are just going to have to Be patient.
And in the meantime, the British government, which has been, as you will know, heavily involved with the machinations of one Boris Johnson, who they will vote upon tomorrow, and it will make news around the world.
So they're not saying very much about this, if anything at all, at the moment.
But you think, Ross, that eventually even our government is going to have to come out and say something about this?
You know, I find it hilarious at the moment.
I was just in Britain a couple of weeks ago, and I just could not believe the degree of obsession in the mainstream media with just utter irrelevant nonsense.
Okay, Boris had a party and got drunk with his staffers and lied about it.
By all means, force him to resign.
But why is this on the front page of newspapers?
The point is, is that as you're rightly about to point out, this is, if David Grush is telling the truth.
The greatest story ever.
The hugest story ever.
The hugest story ever.
And the thing that amuses me is either he's lying, which is incredible because this is a man who's risking going to jail for the rest of his life.
Because if he's lied, this is what he's said under oath to the Inspector General and what he's also said under oath to two select committees inside the Congress.
So if he's lied, he's going to jail.
They're going to kill me here.
I've just got one quick thing to ask at the end of all of this, and then we have to get commercials.
And thank you so much for doing this on a Monday morning, Ross.
You tackled him with the question of, do you believe that people have been murdered, silenced about this?
And the reply that you got was extremely interesting.
It was, he didn't exactly confirm it 100%, but it was extremely informative, wasn't it?
He expressed the strong suspicion, as I have as well from my own sources, that people have been not only harassed, threatened, and intimidated, but killed to protect this secret.
And that's how serious this is.
We're talking about grave crimes.
And no wonder the people responsible for this are trying to cover it up.
Why are we surprised?
Where is David Grush now?
Is he in hiding?
Nope, he's not in hiding.
He's determined to speak to the Congress, and he's determined to make a public statement about this when he's given the opportunity in the proper forum.
At some stage in the next week or so, I will be revealing a longer version of his interview.
We've recorded a total of about seven or eight hours of interview with him, and I'll be doing an edited, extended version of his interview, which I think will find a lot of attention.
Are you holding back some good stuff?
Oh, there's a lot that he said that hasn't been revealed yet.
And a lot of it I'm doing because, frankly, I think people need to be prepared for it.
I think there's an enormous amount that Mr. Grush knows.
And I know, you know, it's really funny.
One thing that I want to emphasize is it's two weeks now.
Two weeks.
We've had all the carping debunkers and all the skeptics.
Not one of them has laid a glove on the credibility of Mr. Grush.
And all he wants is the opportunity to have his allegations tested.
What are they frightened of?
He's called their bluff.
If he's lying, expose him as a liar.
If he's not lying, think about the implications of what he's saying.
Because we all have to make a plan.
If this information is confirmed to the public in your country, the U.S., my country, things are going to change.
Ross, many congratulations on what was an excellent interview and a wonderful piece of journalism.
And thank you very much for talking with me.
Ross Coulthard, this is The Unexplained.
My grateful thanks to Ross Coulthard for giving me his time.
What an absorbing conversation that was.
I love speaking with Ross.
Hope to bring him to you again, too, and who knows what's going to happen next.
Second item from my TV show on this edition of the podcast is my conversation with Whitley Striber, very largely to do with his brand new book called Them.
I've been reading it through the last couple of days and I heartily recommend it.
Whitley Striber is online to us.
Wickley, how are you?
Well, I'm very fine.
I'm sitting in a car instead of in my office because of traffic issues, but I'm here.
That's the important thing.
Well, you've been a part of my life for about 25, 26 years, Whitley, because I used to tune in, as I think I've told you so many times before, to those Art Bell shows, Coast to Coast A.M., the late and great Art Bell, and you and he worked together so closely.
And it was Art Bell who introduced me to a cast of characters that included Whitley Streeber, Dr. Stephen Greer, Steve Bassett, and all of those people.
And I became immersed in the whole thing.
So obviously I had to eventually speak with you, and we've been speaking for 20 odd years.
So where do you think we're at in the affairs of man, Whitley?
This is a very heavy question, but then we're living in very heavy times.
We had the National Press Club event, Dr. Greer's event, this week.
We had David Groosh, the whistleblower.
We have other whistleblowers in the wings.
They tell me that there are 40 lawyers ready to represent these people should they be willing to come out and talk.
These are extraordinary times, aren't they?
Well, I've understood from the visitors for many years that as the planet's environment reached a crisis, they would become more and more into focus.
And that's happening now.
The problem is that what people are always asking for is proof, isn't it?
David Grush says that he can't give us the proof and the evidence because it is classified.
That always is the stumbling block, isn't it?
What we get are fuzzy photos.
I think looking at it from the perspective of our side is not all that productive.
Ultimately, what the visitors themselves do is what will finally end the question of their presence and whether or not they're real.
But then the bigger question is going to start to be asked, have to be asked, what are they?
And what are we?
And I also was an attendant at The Stephen Greer conference.
And while it was remarkable, and in one way, there is a way to suggest that a lot of it might in some way be true, which I'll get to in a moment.
The problem was that, unlike what David Grush did, there was nothing, there were no official, there was no official support for anyone.
These were simply things that they were saying that they had seen.
And what David Grush has done is he's gone to the intelligence community inspector general, and that inspector general has said that his statements are credible.
So that's an enormous difference in terms of the quality of the whistleblowing.
Let's put it that way.
Now, that said, if you look at the Pentagon's books, you find two things very quickly.
Every year, they announce that there is a vast number of, or a vast number of assets that they can't account for.
And there is also a vast amount of spending that they can't account for.
And that is the black budget.
That's the hidden stuff.
They say we've lost it, but that's not what the truth is.
The truth is that they're not willing to identify it, and it's illegal to quantify the black budget.
So it is a backwards way of saying how large that budget actually is.
And the truth is it's gigantic.
So what those men were saying about things going on in the Antarctic, something like that probably is real.
And this now, in my own personal experience, going back to a time I spent in Auckland in the late 80s on an author tour for communion, I was at a hotel that overlooked the airport, and night after night, there were hundreds of flights coming in and out, U.S. Air Force flights going back and forth to the Antarctic.
And to the point that there were complaints, letters of complaint in the newspapers, which we had then, saying that this excessive traffic at night was keeping people awake.
And it was really fantastic.
I sat in my hotel room one night and counted a U.S. Air Force plane taking off or landing every three minutes from two o'clock in the morning until 4.30 in the morning.
And I finally went to sleep and they had not stopped.
So something massive was being done down there then.
And so I wouldn't just walk away from these people who were in Dr. Greer's press conference simply because they're saying something incredible.
It might be that what's being hidden is incredible.
And a lot of material, a lot of knowledge is on a need-to-know basis.
So perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that nobody has the full picture.
When I found out that we had intact craft, which is what, of course, what David Grush's comments are about, I thought to myself, and I've said many times over the years, I found this out a long time ago.
I found it out from my uncle.
One of my uncles worked on the Roswell incident and his commanding officer, General Arthur Exhum, also worked on the incident under General Nathan Twining.
And my uncle said they had materials and intact craft.
I know now that they have 12 of them in various states of, yeah, in various states of intactness.
And I said early on that this, one of these craft, or frankly more of them, should be in the Smithsonian Institution available for anyone to see.
And the reason I said that is there is something very profound that happens to you when you're in face-to-face with this material.
You might be looking at it, but it's looking back at you.
And people cannot experience that except personally.
And that's why it should be out in public.
This has to do with all of us in ways that we can neither describe nor articulate very well at all.
One of the many things.
Sorry, you say.
Go ahead.
One of the many things that David Grush said was that some of the people who had worked on 12 is the number of craft, but some of the people who've been working on the back engineering and the understanding of these materials have actually paid the price themselves with effects on their health that they have not been allowed to disclose.
In fact, people may have died over the years working on these things because they're powerful materials that we simply do not understand.
In my book, Them, I report on 300 cases of pilots that have been injured in conflicts with these craft.
And these injuries take the form of demyelinization of parts of the nerves in the brain that is accomplished by a device that will beam microwaves into the brain, overheat the myelin sheath, and kill it.
It is a horrendous thing.
But there's another place you find it.
It's called Havana syndrome.
And I have to ask myself, as soon as I saw Havana syndrome descriptions, I immediately telephoned friends and said, This is them, this is their device, and either they are doing this or it's been back engineered,
and I think it's been back engineered in all likelihood by the Russians, and it's been tested on people, and it's been used to intimidate us by damaging the brain of someone who's walking out of the White House.
And it's a very fraught, complicated, difficult situation.
And it's going to get much more so.
I'm not saying, I'm not taking a position on whether or not the visitors, as I call them, are hostile or not hostile.
I think the situation is too complex to identify it in that way.
And indeed, in the book, then, you, I mean, there are some wonderful stories.
They're all from letters that have been sent to you that come from your archive of ordinary people who've had varying experiences, some of them horrible, rather like your own detailed in communion, and some of them potentially beneficial and quite good.
They run a gamut.
Well, in my case, there was an arc here.
It started out as a very violent experience, but now it is an extremely useful relationship.
I have learned to use, there was an implant put into my left ear in 1989.
And after my wife passed away in 2015, I gradually learned to use it as a communications tool.
And it has been the basis of the books I have written.
I have since then, Afterlife Revolution, A New World, Jesus a New Vision, Dem, and now I'm working on a new book, and I use this as my primary research tool.
When you say you use that implant as a research tool, how does that work?
Okay, I can tell you exactly how.
There are two things that it does.
Both of them are extraordinary.
The one thing that it does is it will open up a slit in my eye, and I'll see words racing through that slit that are too fast for me to read, but I can read sometimes snatches of them, and they often don't seem relevant to anything.
And what is happening, I'm led to understand, is that material that is in my unconscious is being brought forward, and it is enriching my ability to have insights.
So it's being projected.
Who put that information there, Wickley?
The information in my unconscious.
That's probably just from my life, from my reading and my work and my life.
In other words, it's not a mind control device.
The second thing it does is even more remarkable, and it's happening right now.
When I need material for my research, that material, if I just ask myself the question, it will appear.
As an example, yesterday I was thinking about a certain thing in my new book, and literally the hour that I was thinking about it, someone sent me a text making reference to a book that they were reading out of the blue.
They didn't have any idea of what I needed.
It's exactly what I need.
And this is so consistent over hundreds of incidents in the past seven years that it's obviously something that is a designed thing.
There is some kind of very high-level technology involved here to induce this to happen again and again.
I don't mean this in any way flippantly.
We've spoken many times.
Why do you think, Wickley, you have been chosen for all of this?
Because I would do it.
I would do it.
But there's two things about me.
First, at least is my opinion.
It could be their reasons are entirely different, is I can accurately describe things that happened to me.
I'm a good narrator of experience, a good witness.
That doesn't mean that my descriptions are accurately reflecting the actual physical events that unfolded.
But at least one thing it does mean is I'm doing my best.
And the second thing is I never lie.
I grew up in a family where that was basic.
You never lied.
Daddy was an attorney, and he said, in my career, I never lie.
And he said, don't you boys ever lie.
Never lie.
And so those two things are critically important.
It means that I will do my best to describe things.
And two, the second, I will not embellish and I will not try to connect the dots.
In other words, if it's a question, I'll leave it that way.
I'm going to leave it an open question.
I'm not going to try to explain it.
And when I can't.
So, Whitley, this book is partly, isn't it, a conglomeration of stories that people have sent you in letters and you've archived them.
And your dear late wife was part of the archiving process, wasn't she?
Yeah, the first part of the book, the book's in two parts.
The first part explores the experience of contact.
And it does that by analyzing very deeply 11 letters that we have received.
The second part of the book does the same thing, but with the military experience.
But to go back to the first part, the first thing that becomes clear is that this experience is vastly more complex than we have come to think.
These stories are simply not stories that end up in the public space.
The public space contains mostly stories of abductions, but abductions are rather rare.
What is happening is another thing entirely.
What is happening is a kind of contact that is so radically different from anything we might imagine that it is needs to be thought about very carefully and very clearly if we are to have any hope at all of actually having any kind of a relationship with this presence.
And we have the additional problem of there being a hostile atmosphere, a seriously hostile atmosphere between us and these entities.
There's a war going on, apparently, and we don't get to know anything about it.
And in fact, all we do get about it is that we pay for it.
You mean a war between us and them or a war between the entities?
Well, it could be both.
I don't know.
Certainly there is a level of significant level of conflict, and it's very multifaceted in the sense that there is an us and them aspect to it, apparently.
But who knows?
I mean, there could be groups of entities inside that are all engaged in some other sort of conflict.
Maybe the stories in the ancient Indian sacred literature from India have some substance.
Maybe they were describing an actual war in space.
So all of that has to be accepted as a question, but not resolved, because if we resolve these questions too early, we make a grave mistake.
One of the things my wife always used to say is that the human species is too young to have beliefs.
What we need are good questions, and she was absolutely right, especially when it comes to this stuff.
Because, I mean, you can get dozens of people on your show that'll tell you exactly what's going on.
They'll tell you exactly who's who and so forth and so on.
But the truth is, we don't actually know those answers to those questions because we haven't ever had them answered in a way that would satisfy even the most basic need for a factual foundation.
And the phenomenon or phenomena, Whipley, is as you rightly said, and as the stories within the book, the communications that you've had, the letters that people have sent you, they're all so different that it's very hard for us as human beings to get a handle on something that is so multifaceted.
Well, for example, I'm going to have one of the letter writers on my Dreamland on my podcast in the next week or so.
And he's one that talked about having the following thing happen.
He was out at work late, got home at about one o'clock in the morning, and he lay down in bed beside his wife, and he had an experience that's familiar in the psychological literature about sleep disturbances.
It's called the exploding head syndrome, and it felt to him like his head had exploded and he had ceased to exist.
And, you know, if I'd read that and he just said that, I would have said, well, that's a known phenomenon.
And we'll go on to the next letter.
But that's not what happened.
They then heard this something come over the house, this noise of something hovering over their house.
And it began, and he said, I felt the presence of total evil.
And he began to be pulled out of his body.
And this is something most of our scientists would just discount because they say that we don't have souls.
Therefore, that couldn't have happened.
But it does happen.
And it did happen to this man.
And he and his wife, literally clinging together, fought against this for hours from two o'clock in the morning until dawn, when the sound that was hovering over their house slowly went away.
Now, this has got nothing to do with what we understand as alien contact, but whatever it is, it's part of this experience.
Well, this is the way it's described in the book is more like demonic possession.
The book puts it this way.
After a few seconds, quotes, the vacuum of what used to be me was filled by an entity of total evil.
This evil thing so terrified me that I wanted to start fighting until I became conscious that I was turning the page, unable to move my limbs.
Although I was screaming to my wife to wake up and help me, my lips barely moved, and the screams that I emitted were whispers.
Yes, but it did, eventually she did wake up and did help it.
But that's just one of many stories.
There are other stories in the book that are, well, like, for example, the story of the family, the story that's called The Visitors in the Trees, where this entire family had a whole afternoon or a whole day with graves and various other forms in their yard.
It's in their bajan story.
Utterly, I've never seen anything like that.
Exactly.
Because those stories are what happens, there's a sort of self-selection process among UFO investigators.
It's very natural.
There's nothing wrong with it.
They will take a story like that and say, this doesn't fit anything I've ever seen before.
We'll put that one aside.
And when they do publish, they publish groups of stories that are consistent.
And that's actually a mistake.
This isn't consistent.
And it's not all dark and evil and not all good either.
And a lot of it is not characterizable as evil or good in any way that we can understand.
But the entities in the trees, it was an astonishing account and so graphic, so detailed.
I don't mean graphic in a frightening way, but detailed.
And literally, the way that they could see them almost eye to eye with them was to go up to the bedroom because the entities were in the trees and they were at kind of bedroom height.
And at one point, the entities apparently built a platform.
Isn't that so?
In the trees, yeah.
I've met this family, and they were very sweet people.
And they're not telling us, they're not making this up.
They may not be telling an accurate story, but they're certainly telling a true one in the sense that they're telling the best, they are describing this as best they can.
So what happened as best they can.
But if you look in the way I broke the story up and analyzed it piece by piece, it's very clear that there was an effort being made to enable the mother in particular to remember the experience.
Because when the human brain is faced with input that it has nothing to compare to, it has a tremendous amount of trouble with two things.
One is accuracy of description and two is permanence of memory.
Memories like that tend to fade away very quickly.
And this woman was taken bit by bit from just the first small instances to the end when she saw what was apparently a totally transformed human being so that she would remember everything.
And it's quite an amazing and frankly uplifting narrative because it suggests that mankind has an extraordinary destiny.
Whitley, do you believe that we need to give more thought to the idea that whatever it is, in its various guises and forms and in the many ways that it affects people, maybe not as we've traditionally, and some people have laughed at it, haven't they, in newspapers and other places, not ETs with bug-eyes who come on flying saucers from some planet somewhere that we can't quite see and haven't yet discovered.
But whatever it might be, the various phenomena might be, are in some way interdimensional.
In other words, they don't travel here.
They're always here.
Well, that's, of course, a possibility.
Another possibility involves movement through time.
And I'll tell you why that's a possibility.
We know that movement through time is a reality, that time does not necessarily have to go only in one direction.
But could you actually do that?
Well, if you were able to do it and you wanted to affect a certain period of time, you would have to appear as something that had never existed anywhere in that period or any other period.
Otherwise, you would not have enough latitude to affect the changes you were trying to affect.
This would mean if the aliens we think of as aliens are time travelers, they don't actually exist.
They are an illusion created by something that does exist, probably someone from the human future who is trying to alter their own present by altering their past.
So that's a possibility.
There's increasing evidence that there is at least one physical mirror universe that is here in, as you said, and separated from this universe by only a very thin membrane.
And if that's true, they figured out how to get through.
And that would be what we were seeing.
And once again, for them to have any latitude of action here, they might have to, in effect, disguise themselves as something that doesn't exist here.
So there's all kinds of possibilities.
And it could also be the ultimate possibility that the old-fashioned 1950s fears were right, that it is an alien presence and that the explanation for all of these huge efforts that are being made to apparently defend the planet are because it's not friendly to us.
You use a wonderful phrase in part two of the book, the tragedy of secrecy you refer to.
I wonder if you think, if you believe now, 2023, with all of the things that are happening that are being reported in some of the mainstream news, do you believe that that tragedy may be about to end?
Well, if it does end, another tragedy is going to emerge, and that is going to be that it's going to turn out that we're a lot further along with climate change than we've realized, because the two things are going to happen at the same time.
They will emerge, and we will realize that we are in great peril, planetary peril of some kind, both at the same time.
Of that, I'm quite sure.
Because whenever climate change is mentioned, I know that there are people getting ready to send me emails saying that there is no such thing as climate change and there are only natural cycles.
And we have to say to you, Wickley, that you were involved in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, which is one of my favorite movies and I've probably seen six times.
Well, you know, that debate has been over for a long time.
However, it's not framed correctly because both things are true.
If you go back to the last time that there was an enormous change like this, the last interglacial, not this one we're in, but the one before that, you find a tremendous increase In carbon dioxide and a huge spike in methane in the atmosphere.
Now, we didn't exist then.
Therefore, the people who say that this is part of a natural cycle are not wrong.
They must be right.
On the one hand, on the other hand, something caused the atmosphere to fill up with carbon dioxide and methane then, and now it appears it's us that's doing it.
And so we are part of the natural cycle, but that doesn't mean that we can't do anything about it.
Obviously, we can do things about it.
And crucially, in order to save ourselves, we've got to.
And you're saying that all of these things that are happening, it's all going to come to a great confluence.
It's going to come to a crescendo at some point in the affairs of man, and we're going to have to address the alien presence or whatever you want to call it.
Yeah.
I think we've lost Whitley.
I think his in-car Wi-Fi was breaking up at that point.
I did have another couple of questions, actually, but I can tell you this.
This thing I can tell you.
The book is called Them.
It has a terrific cover there.
Three aliens in a sort of pose that looks almost like the Bee Gees, but there they are.
Them.
Whitley Streeber is the author.
And you've just been hearing acclaimed author, Whitley Streeber, one of the guests from those early days of me listening to the Art Bell shows.
Maybe you too.
His new book is out now, and it's called Them.
And before that, Ross Coulthard, who's put in such diligent and hard work.
On this entire UAP story, are we edging closer to disclosure?
Are people like David Grush going to help us get there?
Only time will tell, I think.
But what interesting times we live in.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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