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July 10, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
59:38
Edition 737 - Guest Catchups

Some items from a recent tv show - including Professor Avi Loeb on his mission to Papua New Guinea on the trail of a "mysterious meteor", Space latest with Dr David Whitehouse, Spy writer and historian Nigel West on Hitler's alleged "escape submarine". Plus the legendary Tony Healy in Canberra, Australia with the latest on his Yowie research...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, as they used to say on television in the UK, few, what a scorcher.
It's absolutely boiling outside and inside.
Very humid, 30 degrees.
So I'm trying to keep my composure in the middle of it.
I think I'm just about succeeding, but it's going to be a bit of a sweaty one here.
You didn't need to hear that, did you?
Thank you very much to Adam for his hard work on the show.
Thank you to you for all of the recent emails.
If you want to get in touch with me, you can always go to the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link for emails, and you can send me a message from there.
And if your message requires a specific response, then please put response or reply required, and then I will see it.
But I do get to read all of the emails exactly as they come in.
Now, a number of items from the television show on this edition of The Unexplained.
First off, it is Professor Rvey Loeb, a Harvard professor, of course, and the man behind the Galileo project, talking about his expedition to Papua New Guinea and what they found on the seabed there.
I will tell you more about that in moments.
Then after that, a very interesting look at some space news with Dr. David Whitehouse, writer, journalist, and broadcaster, good friend of mine, great friend of mine for many years, some interesting topics there just to keep us up to speed on space.
After that, a mystery, Nigel West, British spy writer, very well known in this country, intelligence historian and spy writer, on the supposed discovery of what might be, see all the caveats I'm putting in there, Hitler's escape to South America submarine.
Migel West will give his thoughts about that.
And the last item here from my TV show, the great Tony Healy, Yaoi Hunter from Australia.
We did this conversation on the television with a nine-hour time difference between the two of us.
So it was already Monday morning for him while it was still Sunday night for me.
And his new book on the yaoi phenomenon that I think you're going to find interesting.
Now, this is a conversation that's not as long as it could have been if we'd had more time.
So what I'm doing is that next month in August, Tony Healy will be coming on and we will talk about yaoi and other strange phenomena that he spent his life investigating in great depth.
So if you have a question for Tony Healy, then you can email me it through the website, theunexplained.tv and just put in the subject line question for Tony Healy.
And then when I come to record that in August, I will know exactly what we're talking about.
But Tony Healy on this edition.
Okay, first item then, Professor Arvi Loeb, good friend of this show, and that expedition that he's been talking about for the last year to Papua New Guinea, or the ocean off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and what exactly it discovered, what exactly he was able to recover from the ocean bed, and what that means, the way the Daily Mirror put it was UFO debris pulled from Pacific Ocean floor may be proof that aliens visited Earth.
The story is maybe not quite that, but you're going to hear that conversation now with Professor Arvi Loeb.
The Independent newspaper yesterday, and I'm going to show you two, well I'm going to say to you the way that two newspapers ran the story.
The Independent, Professor Arvie Loeb, has just completed a $1.5 million expedition searching for signs of a mysterious meteor dubbed IM-1 that crashed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014 and is believed to have come from interstellar space.
Arviloeb told The Independent he oversaw a team of deep-sea explorers who found 50 tiny spherules, little tiny metallic spheres they are, or molten droplets, almost like if you drop, and I don't recommend you do this, certain molten metals into water, then of course they will instantly form globules.
That's what these look like.
I think we've got a picture here from one of the newspapers that might illustrate this.
Daily Mirror put it this way, maybe more succinctly, but whether it's more accurately, I don't know.
Headline, UFO debris pulled from the Pacific Ocean floor may be proof that aliens visited Earth.
And there are those metal values that we'll talk about in just a second here.
This week, scientists were able to recover items from the bottom of the ocean that landed there about 10 years ago, nine years we know.
And Avi Loeb says they could be proof of extraterrestrial life.
Well, does he?
He's online to us now.
Arvi, thank you very much once again for making time with me.
Thanks for having me.
It's a great pleasure.
Two versions of the same story, Arvi.
You know that we have big papers in the UK and we have little papers who put things more succinctly.
The Daily Mirror that puts things more succinctly says, implies that you think that they may be proof, these things that you found there, that aliens once visited Earth.
Is that what you meant?
No, we have to find out in the coming weeks what these droplets, as you refer to, these metallic marbles that we found at a two-kilometer depth of the Pacific Ocean are made of.
And they are definitely molten spirals from the surface of an object that entered the solar system a while ago from outside and collided with Earth in January 8th, 2014.
And now almost a decade later, we went after them.
We are trying to figure out what this object was made of.
And one thing we know is that this object moved faster than 95% of all the stars when it entered the solar system in the vicinity of the Sun.
So it was moving unusually fast.
And moreover, from the fireball of this meteor, we know that it was tougher than most space rocks that we are familiar with.
272 of them in the NASA catalogue of meteors.
It was tougher than iron meteorites.
So it was made of a material that does not resemble solar system rocks.
And by examining the remnants from this object, we can figure out what it was.
Could the white heat of re-entry, the white heat of this collision, have created some kind of alloy that is composed of elements that we understand, but put them together in a way that we Don't, or is that not possible?
Well, we understand what can happen as a result of entering the atmosphere, and what we find are the molten droplets that fell from the surface of this object.
Now, by analyzing them, we can figure out what the object was made of.
And also, we can, in principle, date it because we already found some radioactive elements in it that have a finite lifetime.
So, we can figure out what the age of this object is.
And if it's longer than the age of the solar system, we know it came from outside.
And in principle, we can even figure out from which star it came from, because we know the velocity that it had before entering the solar system.
And by multiplying that velocity by the duration of the journey, we can figure out where it came from.
So, stay tuned because we are currently analyzing the data.
The amazing news is that we found it.
We found the objects on the ocean floor.
It's two kilometers deep.
These are spherols that are roughly millimeter in size.
So it sounds like an impossible task.
Yes, it does.
How did you manage it?
Well, we used the magnetic sled that we dragged on the ocean surface and it attracted the magnetic particles.
And most of them were volcanic ash, black powder.
We filtered it out and then what was left behind, we looked at through a microscope and we found these beautiful metallic marbles that indicate that they came from this meteor.
And they were concentrated along the path of this meteor.
So we are confident that they were associated with it.
And we want to check whether indeed their composition is very different from solar system objects.
Why would we want to, this is a real dumb question on one level, but I'm going to ask it anyway because that's what I do.
Why would we want, if it isn't, as some have implied and almost certainly wrongly implied, if it isn't part of a spaceship, if it is part of something that is from way further away than we can comprehend or imagine, why do we want to know about it?
It's a huge investment, isn't it, that you made?
Yes, there are two possibilities.
Either it's a rock from an origin that is quite different than the solar system, because it has material strength different than asteroids or comets, or it's a spacecraft, an artificial gadget that was generated by another civilization.
So it's quite obvious that the second possibility is very intriguing.
It will change the future of humanity.
And I actually asked my students at the last class of the spring semester before I went to the Pacific Ocean.
I asked them, if we find a gadget and it has buttons, should we press any button?
And half of them said no, half of them said yes.
And I said, well, I will take it to a laboratory and examine it before engaging with it.
Now, this is in the case it's artificial.
And there is also the possibility that it's natural and from an origin that is quite different than the solar system, in which case we learn something new in astrophysics.
And it's a new frontier in the sense that instead of looking through telescopes to find what lies beyond the solar system, we are using microscopes, not telescopes.
And, you know, it was like a needle in the ocean to find.
And I was amazed that we were able to do it.
We had a team of professionals.
It was a very challenging task.
And we made it.
We found it.
And now we just have to analyze it.
And you can think of it as romantic rose petals that lead to the partner that we are aiming to find.
And in a way, because these sphericals that we found, they are just tiny droplets that were melted off the surface.
But there may be a relic from that object, the interstellar meteor, that is on the ocean floor right now.
And we need to search for it in a future expedition.
Now we know where to go.
When you say there may be a relic, what do you mean by that?
I mean the core of the object may have survived.
So we don't know if those molten spherols are just the surface of an object that survived and is on the ocean floor.
And of course, we need to search for it using a completely different method than a magnetic sled that can, you know, it was a size of roughly one meter.
It cannot really lift any big object.
And to find the big object, we need to use a sonar, an imager using sound waves.
And we plan to do that next in the coming year.
Why this object and why this place?
Well, it was the first object that was recognized to originate from outside the solar system based on U.S. government data.
And I discovered it with my student Amir Siraj.
The data was available for almost a decade now, and we found it five years ago by looking at this catalogue of meteors.
And then the government confirmed our finding about a year ago in an official letter to NASA.
They said that at the 99.999%, they are confident of the data that indicates that it's interstellar.
And at that point, I defined the expedition.
I said we need to go there and find out because whether it's natural or artificial is not a philosophical question.
We can actually collect the materials.
And we started planning and a wealthy funder, Charles Hoskinson, arranged a Zoom call with me and said, you have the money.
And so we arranged for an exceptional team of professionals.
And I should say every person within that team was crucial for the discovery.
It was a heroic effort.
And we found it.
That's the amazing thing.
We took the risk.
Many people said we will not find anything.
We went there and we found it.
And you know, and I know that there were some people, if we were to look at headlines a year ago, six months ago, who were a little disparaging of you and this mission to an extent.
I would guess they're not going to be so disparaging Now, because you found what you went to look for, and that's fantastic.
Have you brought any of those spherioles back to where you are now?
Have you got any?
Yes, I did.
We have 50 of them, and we're planning to look through the material to find many more.
And all I can say is, what a wonderful world, right?
That you just take the risk, you go there despite all the naysayers, and you find it.
I don't need to say anything to the naysayers.
It's a waste of my time.
I was asked to comment about things that people said, and I will not waste my time on that.
What these people said is irrelevant.
There was even a paper that was posted and published this week as we finished the expedition, a paper saying, oh, actually, you know, my model of rocks in the solar system does not fit the data that the government published.
As a result, the data must be wrong.
And I say, you know, that's pretty arrogant for physicists to say if my model doesn't fit the data, the data must be wrong.
But that's what this paper said.
And moreover, this paper argued that the data from the government, you know, for the speed of the object is wrong by a factor of three or so.
So the speed is much lower than it was inferred.
And that this object should not be made of iron, cannot be made of iron, based on their modeling.
Now we got the materials and we checked it and it's mostly iron.
So at the time that this paper appeared, we already know that its conclusions are wrong.
And I say, you know, why not wait?
I mean, whoever wrote this paper knew about the expedition, but it just shows you that some people are arrogant enough to say, we know the answer in advance.
We don't need the data.
Before.
Just as you were bringing back the material.
Sorry to jump in, Arvi, but anything that we recover that is unknown like this, and this is at the moment a big question mark, right?
We don't know if there are risks associated with it, do we?
That you might be bringing back something that it contains, maybe even just, well, I say just radioactivity.
Have you checked it for radioactivity?
Yeah, that we checked immediately on the ship, and there is no unusual radioactivity.
We had a gamma-ray spectrometer.
We also had the Geiger counter, and no, there is nothing of this nature.
And if you find it to be from a place far away, and if you suspect it may have been manufactured by something or someone, how are you going to put that news out there?
Oh, I will share it openly.
You know, when I entered the private jet that took me to this expedition that belongs to the funder, Charles Hoskinson, the pilot said, welcome aboard, Professor Lowe.
And I corrected the pilot and I said, you can call me Abby.
I'm just a curious farm boy.
You know, that pretty much defines me.
I'm just curious.
I want to find out the answer.
And I think it will have great implications for humanity in the future.
At the very least, we will learn something new in astrophysics.
But otherwise, you know, we will learn that we are not alone.
How do you think very finally and very briefly, Avi, this will fit into everything else that is happening?
The revelations from David Grush, the other whistleblowers who are claimed to be coming forward, the claims that there have been back engineering projects for decades.
How does what you're doing at the moment fit into that narrative?
You see, I'm a scientist and I respond to evidence.
David Grush talked about other people telling him things.
He didn't really see the evidence itself.
Therefore, I cannot really consider that as evidence for anything.
Anyone can say anything.
He didn't show us the documents.
He didn't show us photographs.
He didn't show us any evidence.
So I don't know whether it's real or not.
It's hard for me to tell.
Therefore, as a scientist, I prefer to collect the evidence myself.
And believe me, it will be open to the public.
And it's easier, as far as I'm concerned, to collect the evidence myself than to wait for the government to release it.
And as a scientist, my evidence will be shared openly with everyone.
And my eternal thanks, as ever, to Professor Aviloe for being such a friend to me and a friend to the unexplained, always willing to come on the show.
And I'm always delighted to hear what he has to say because, as they used to say, he knows what he's talking about.
Now, let's get a space update.
Some of the current hot space topics with Dr. David Whitehouse.
The European Space Agency's Euclid spacecraft, this is the latest piece of space news, I think, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, space force station they call it these days in Florida, 11.12 a.m. on Saturday, beginning its mission to study why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, exciting.
Oh, a tremendously exciting mission.
Euclid has been many, many years in the development.
And what it's going to do is it's going to make a 3D map of space of distant galaxies.
It's going to measure their positions.
It's going to measure their velocities, their recession velocities, so we can measure their distance.
But it's also going to measure how the universe might be changing its expansion rate as we look back in the past and seeing if the universe is expanding.
Well, we know the universe is expanding faster than it was, but wanting more details of that.
And from the position, that will tell us something about dark energy, the major discovery of 20 years ago, that most of the universe is made of a substance we call dark energy because we have no idea what it is that's causing the universe to actually not just expand, but accelerate.
And we know very little about that.
And so far, understanding the acceleration history of the universe is important.
But also the positions of galaxies and their distances might tell us something about dark matter.
Now, 5% of the universe we understand, that's the stuff that glows like stars.
Dark energy is 70%.
Dark matter is 25%.
But it has an effect on the stars and the galaxies.
So if we are able to measure the 3D positions of the galaxies, we might be able to infer something about the distribution of dark matter.
But the interesting thing about Euclid is it's going to send so much data back, so much precise measurements, that it's probably not going to be to the end of the six-minute mission we get details.
It's going to take artificial intelligence to mine the data, to get the patterns out.
Most of those programs haven't been written yet.
So it's a profound mission that is going to take a while.
But if it comes back with results, it's going to be really amazing.
What times we live in.
You sent me a great story from National Public Radio, NPR.
Giant detector buried deep within the Antarctic ice at the South Pole has obtained the first evidence of eerie particles called neutrinos coming from the innards of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
This discovery is a step towards scientists being better able to use particles to study hidden or elusive phenomena in the universe.
This sounds like a big story.
Neutrinos are wonderful objects.
They have been called ghostly because they interact hardly with matter at all.
In fact, there are neutrinos from the center of the sun, which come directly from the core of the sun, reach us about eight minutes later.
And through every centimeter of our bodies, there are 65 billion neutrinos passing through every second.
But because they interact so rarely with matter, they hardly affect us whatsoever.
But they come from the sun, they come from exploding stars, and they come from energetic events in our galaxy.
And what this detector, this ice cube detector in Antarctica has done is that they've put thousands of photo detectors in a one kilometer cube of ice.
And what happens is that when a neutrino passes through, if it does interact, very rarely, it gives out a flash of light.
So you can work out where it's come from.
And they've produced over the years a wonderful map of the galaxy, which is the first ever map of our galaxy that's not been made in electromagnetic radiation.
So it's not a map of radio waves, of visible light, of ultraviolet, of infrared.
It's the first time we've mapped it in subatomic particles.
And it's a wonderful, significant, historic map in the cartography of the universe.
And it's going to take many years to work out what it shows and many, many new discoveries, no doubt.
This is a kind of sidebar to the story, but it's always fascinated me.
And a lot of people talk about it.
Sometimes they talk about it on the fringes of science, sometimes beyond the fringes of science.
There's a lot of research going on down at the South Pole.
Some of it is secret.
And, you know, a lot of people have a lot of conspiracy theories about that.
Why do you think some of that research down there is mired in secrecy?
Well, it's of course most of it is well known and is publicly funded.
And we know where everything is.
You've got maps of the observatories, of the detectors, etc.
There is some secret work which goes on at the South Pole, mainly due to the fact that certain types of spy and communication satellites can linger over the poles and make specific types of observations.
So they have to be monitored and detected and communicated with in special ways.
And there's an element of that at the South Pole.
But I've heard people say that the ice cube detector that has detected these neutrinos is actually part of a one of its functions is a dark, if you like, monitor, mapper, radar type facility to detect alien spacecraft.
No.
This is you can talk to people who've, of course, if you've got a conspiracy theory about this, nothing is going to persuade you otherwise.
But this is a series of photo multipliers in a cubic section of ice whose data can be seen on the internet, whose plans can be seen.
You can talk to people who operate it.
There are no military people anywhere near it.
So those who suggest, as was suggested very recently in the Washington Conference, that there is a reactor buried down beneath the ice for nefarious or highly secret purposes, they're on.
It's faster-than-light communication, I heard.
Yes.
Yeah, that is X-File stuff.
And it's not my bag, and I don't think it's happening.
I don't know whether you can do this in a minute or so.
If anybody could, you could.
Washington Post, major discovery.
Scientists say space-time churns like a choppy sea.
The mind-bending findings suggest that everything around us is constantly being rolled by low-frequency gravitational waves.
Wow.
That's a good way to put it.
I mean, Washington Post did very well there.
This is a major discovery.
I mean, it's been such a week.
I mean, there have been some James Webb Space Telescope discoveries we're not going to get around to that have been amazing.
But yes, gravitational waves, the distortions of space-time predicted by Einstein 100 years ago, detected for the first time in 2015.
They found that the whole universe is ringing to the ripples of these gravitational waves from distant galaxies that have black holes in their center that are growing by black holes, swallowing each other, and the ripples in space they create go out throughout the whole of the universe like a choppy sea.
And that's a new discovery.
And who knows where that's going to take us?
Because it is a new way of looking at the universe and a new understanding of the way everything is affected by ripples in space-time.
It's been a wonderful week.
Amazing.
As you say, we've only scratched the surface once again.
David, thank you for helping me.
One of these days, I'm sure you're going to give us Leila.
Dr. David Whitehouse, astronomer, writer, journalist, broadcaster, and superb guitarist.
The great Dr. David Whitehouse, don't forget, of course, to check out his many great books, including the superb one about Apollo and Space 2069.
There are other books, too.
Check them out.
Dr. David Whitehouse is his name.
He has his own website and the books.
And him in general, very well worth checking out.
Now, Nigel West, intelligence historian and well-known spy book writer in the United Kingdom about a story that appeared in the papers, not for the first time, about the claimed escape submarine of Hitler.
That, if you believe the conspiracy theories, took the dictator to South America after the hell of World War II.
These are the thoughts of Nigel West on the latest story to do with that.
Let's get to this story.
And it's an interesting one, although elements of it have been round before.
The Daily Mail recently reported this.
The world's top Nazi hunters are demanding the truth about a wrecked, quotes, submarine alleged to have helped Hitler escape to Argentina.
The 80-meter-long wreck was found near Quequean, now I'm sure I've mispronounced Quequean, but whatever, a port in central Argentina, by the Esler Bon Peridio Missing Link Research Group, who are looking for further clues about Hitler's alleged escape.
Their leader, Abel Basti, believes it was a Nazi submarine that may have carried Hitler to a new life in South America, despite the widely accepted view by most historians that he killed himself, and indeed Eva Braun killed herself too.
They went together in his Berlin bunker in April of 1945 when they realized the war was definitely not going their way.
And we all breathed a sigh of relief.
However, there have been those who have suggested otherwise for a very long time, and certainly in recent decades that Hitler may have made a circuitous escape.
Let's get the views of a man who knows all about this stuff.
A great friend of this show, Nigel West, intelligence historian, spy writer.
Nigel, thank you so much for doing this.
Sorry there isn't much time.
You must have seen this story.
I know it's been around for about a year in various guises.
It is around again now, and those who are interested in this are calling for quotes, answers about it.
What do you think is the strength of the story?
And could it be possible, even remotely possible, that Hitler did escape?
Can I just, by way of background, explain my own involvement in this?
Four years ago at the Public Records Office at Kew, the National Archives, I found a file and dusted it off, which were the monthly reports written by MI5 to the Prime Minister.
And these are really quite extraordinary files, partly because the monthly report was written by Sir Anthony Blunt, who under the directions of the Director of Counter-Espionage at MI5, Guy Liddell, went into every department and wrote up what he thought would be interesting for the Prime Minister.
The Prime Minister was not allowed to keep these reports.
He was allowed to read them.
Sir David Petrie, who was then Director General, handed them to the Prime Minister and then took them away.
That's why there are no copies in the Cabinet Office.
Two of these reports refer to U-boats going to Argentina.
So this is a subject that has been of very considerable interest to me for the past four years.
And the short answer is that every U-boat is accounted for.
We know about the U-530 and the U-977 that went to Argentina, and neither of them carried the Fuhrer or Mrs. Fuhrer.
We know that.
We do.
We know a great deal about the U-530 because the leader of the Nazis in Argentina was going to travel by that U-boat to Argentina, but it turned out that his wife was pregnant and she wouldn't go on the submarine, so they had to go by ship.
And they were taken off the ship in Gibraltar, interrogated in London, and he then confessed what was going to be carried aboard the U-530, which did show up in Argentina, and which was then captured by the Argentine Navy, handed over to the Americans, and was then sunk in target practice.
And there was one other submarine that made it, the U-977.
And that set off after the end of the war.
So after the German surrender, the captain of the U-977 was ordered to return to port.
He refused to do so.
He went to the Azores, dropped off the married men in his crew who didn't want to go to South America, and he took the rest to Argentina, where they surrendered to the Argentines.
And then they were extradited to the United States, interned and interrogated.
So we know a great deal about both submarines.
Right.
But of course, overlying all of this is the fact that a number of Nazis escaped to South America and lived lives in South America, some being removed and discovered and retrieved and brought back to face justice from South America.
You know, I love that, and I'm sure you've seen it.
I've seen it so many times, that movie, The Odessa File, about an organization existing, whether it exists in reality or not, I don't know.
But that was largely true.
The Odessa line was the so-called rat line, which involved Croatian clerics hiding Nazis and taking them through Italy, through Genoa, down to South America.
And that all happened late 1945, 1946, 1947.
Nothing to do with the U-boats.
So you're pretty, you're absolutely convinced that although others may have got down there via various circuitous routes, this story here is not going to bring the kind of answers that the people who are calling for them want.
Well, listen, I'd love it to be true, but the fact is that every single U-boat has been accounted for.
The U-boat museum at Kiel is very impressive.
The archives are very comprehensive.
We know the name of every single person who served on every single U-boat.
There aren't any missing.
And the two U-boats that did get to Argentina are fascinating, but they didn't include Ernesto Hoppe, who was going to be the Nazi Gauleiter of Argentina.
He ran, by the way, driving schools in Buenos Aires.
Well, Nigel.
He was the senior Nazi that was going to be on the U-530.
Astonishing story.
Thank you very much for that level of detail.
You know, only you would have that, and I'm so grateful.
Thank you, Nigel, very much for helping me again.
Anytime, hope.
British spy book writer and intelligence historian Nigel West, another great friend of the show, and his thoughts about that ongoing story to do with the claimed escape submarine of Hitler.
A story that seemingly will never go away.
Finally, conversation with Tony Healy, Australian yaoi expert, about the latest on yaoi, his new book on that subject, and don't forget, of course, as I said, we'll be talking with him at greater length in a special edition of The Unexplained online only during August of this year.
Here's Tony Healy.
Really nice to have in Vision now, Tony Healy, Yaoi Hunter, in Australia, man who first appeared on this show talking about that cryptozoological character, I think about six years ago when we were on radio only.
Now we're doing it in Vision.
So Tony Healy should be here.
Tony, thank you so much for coming on.
Oh, thanks for having me on, Howie.
Nice to see you.
Great to see you in living colour.
Absolutely.
Glorious, what did they say on the movies?
Glorious Technicolor and Stereophonic Sound.
You remember that?
We're in Glorious Technicolor and Stereophonic Sound.
Sorry.
You get singing, dancing, the whole thing.
Listen, you've got a very moody background there.
I don't know what time of day is it where you are?
It's about 8 o'clock in the morning.
All right.
So you had to get up extra, especially early.
Thank you so much.
Whereabouts are you?
Yeah, yeah.
In Canberra.
Right.
About the coldest town in Australia.
Of course.
You're in the national capital.
Now, I noticed that we've got a little bit of a delay, so I'm going to be very circumspect and careful about how I'm asking questions.
Okay, man.
Which would mean that I don't plod all over you.
Okay.
First of all, then, for our viewer here, let's just explain that throughout the world, there are a number of hairy bipedal cryptozoological creatures that have fascinated, amazed, and tantalized mankind for a very, very long time.
And certainly you know that they've been tantalizing mankind in your country for much longer than people thought.
We've got the Sasquatch, we've got Bigfoot, we've got the Yeti.
There's one down in South Africa.
And in Australia, you have your own variant, Yaoi.
How is yaoi, for those who are new to this, different if yaoi is different from all the others?
Well, it's not too much different from the Sasquatch Bigfoot.
That's quite evident.
All of our data, all of the people we've talked to describe a creature that is pretty well exactly the same creature as the Sasquatch or the Bigfoot.
Same morphology, same behaviour, same indigenous legends.
Pretty strange.
And it's not just Australians aping their American cousins and imitating the Bigfoot phenomenon because in our new book and in our previous books we've documented the yowie from in European testimony from the very early 1800s,
around 1810, 1820, and continuously through from there.
And we've also documented a lot of Indigenous lore, which apparently dates back to when Adam was in short pants.
It's really ancient.
There are cave paintings.
There are legends.
So the Indigenous Australians have a long, long history with this and many other things and a depth of wisdom that we've only really been getting into within the last 50 years, probably, maybe 100 years.
But, you know, they're not surprised by this phenomenon at all because they've been encountering and recording it for maybe thousands of years.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah.
Yes.
They have a long, long, long tradition of it.
And some of them don't want to talk about it to non-Aboriginal people.
Others will.
Others will tell you a certain amount and then say, well, that's all I want to talk about, all I want to say at this time, or we don't talk about that.
Sometimes they won't even tell you the term, the local term for the hairy man.
When they're dealing with non-Aboriginal people or with other Indigenous people from different language groups, they almost always refer to the creatures as the hairy man.
Other than that, they have, I'll at least, I know, at least 20 different Aboriginal terms for the creatures.
Sorry, you're saying.
Incidentally, I've brought a friend with me here today.
Just in case I need advice.
Let me see, which way is this going?
Oh, there he is.
Okay, now.
Say hi, guys.
Oh, my goodness.
Is that a yaoi head?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I keep what he drops in every now and then.
I think we've just got sun up.
I can see your background now in a way that I couldn't see before.
Actually, look, on the front cover of your book, there is a picture of Yaoie that to me looks like no other Bigfoot creature that I've ever seen before.
In particular, it's the eyes that have it, isn't it?
Somebody wrote me a message to say, you know, whatever it is, looks like it's wearing a pair of Ray-Pans.
I mean, they are huge, great pools of eyes, aren't they?
Yes, yes.
Well, the artist, Barry Olive, I think he didn't direct him to do the painting in any particular way, but I think he left the eyes blank or shining whitely to just underline the mysterious quality of these creatures.
And so many people realize the eyes are very arresting.
To get back to the Indigenous Australian people, the question I was going to ask, and we've got that time delay between us that makes it slightly difficult, but we'll get there, is how did they record and how did they interact with what they were experiencing?
Well, of course, they don't have any written language.
It's all oral tradition.
So the stories were handed down from generation to generation.
And of course, they'd encountered these creatures periodically.
Some tribes would say they're very rarely seen, very rarely, perhaps every 10, 20 years.
Others say, well, we see them all the time.
But I think the clue to this is that as with North American, Native American people that we've talked to, Aboriginal people often say something to the effect, look, have fun chasing these things, but you're not going to catch them.
You'll never catch them.
They're part spirit and part man.
North American Indian, one North American Indian tribe that I spent a little bit of time with in Florida said, look, essentially, in white man's terms, these things are interdimensional.
In fact, that particular tribe calls the Bigfoot the Yatiwasagi, which means disappearing man or different man.
And in this new collection of reports that we've just published, we highlight what we've called the high strangeness reports.
Reports where people don't just see a big hairy ape that walks across the road or approaches them and runs away, but reports in which distinctly strange elements occur.
Floating lights or strange electrical effects, terror beyond all reason, odd things, high strangeness.
It occurs in North American reports as well.
Indeed.
You sent me very kindly one case in particular, case 269.
And if you're okay with this, I'm going to read a little bit of it.
Is that all right with you?
Sure, mate.
Okay, 13th of November 2018.
So this is recent.
Beachmont Road, near Kanagura Land Warfare Centre, Queensland.
53-year-old Glenn Kilmartin contacted AYR on 17th of November 2018.
Dean Harrison immediately interviewed him and visited the location.
Paul Cropper, who is your co-author on this project, this book project, conducted a long interview with Glenn on the 24th of November.
Glenn quotes, I'm a truck driver.
I work out of a quarry at Beau Desert.
I'm sure have I spelt that, said that right, Beau Desert?
Beau Desert.
Beaux Desert.
Beau Desert.
Beau Desert, delivering mainly road base.
It's, you know, gravel, I guess.
This thing scared the absolute crap out of me.
It happened at about 10.10 a.m. at Witheran, travelling north on Beachmont Road.
That stretch of road forms the western boundary of Cannongru Land Warfare Centre, a vast rugged area that has for many years been Australia's main jungle training base.
Wow.
Quotes, there's a big 10 to 12 foot fence, so you can't get in.
It's wild on that side.
Miles and miles of deep bush.
On the left-hand western side, it's kind of half-bush with 10-acre property scattered around.
I was coming down the hill empty and started going around a sharp right-hand corner and thought I saw a boulder rolling onto the road off the embankment.
So I hit the brakes to avoid hitting this rock and it stood up.
Oh my God.
I managed to skid to a halt.
The creature had been in the right-hand side gutter, but it already started to step out as I was skidding, and it spun around to face me.
So when the truck stopped, it was standing right in front of my bonnet.
It seemed shocked that I was there.
This enormous creature was standing so close to the truck that all Glenn could see at first was its upper body from navel to shoulders.
A meter, meter and a half, four foot across the shoulders.
I reckon he would have been the weight of three good-sized men.
400 kilos seems about right.
Now that's not the whole story, and I know you will tell me more about this.
You've got a little sketch here.
If I may hold that up to the camera, I think we can probably just about get a sense, a soupsar, of what that might be.
What an astonishing encounter.
And let's just count them.
That's less than five years ago.
Yes.
yes, that was a, well, Dean Harrison, who did the initial interview, said, well, let's declare this the best Yowry event of 2018.
And the good thing about it was that that particular stretch of road, unknown to Glenn Hillmartin, the witness, unknown to him, there had been three other events on that road or just around the corner or two or three kilometres through the bush on the other side.
One of the events occurred virtually in the same spot as Glenn's experience.
So the cherry on the cake would have been if it had been a dual witness event, you know, if Glenn had had someone in the cabin with him.
But he does have corroboration in that other people have seen similar creatures on that road.
And one of the other witnesses was a soldier from that Kanungra jungle training camp.
And he said, yes, the infantry fellows in here have seen them quite often.
Yeah.
I mean, that's amazing, isn't it, Tony, if the people who are involved in that jungle, I didn't even know there was a jungle training centre in Australia, but I guess it makes sense that there would be one, that those people have actually encountered this.
And this guy, Glenn, with his truck, you know, it's a long and lonely road.
From what I read, and I haven't spoken to him, so I don't know, and I haven't heard him, but from the account that you've written here, he sounds like a very credible witness.
Yes, he did seem like a pretty steady sort of a guy.
And he said that at first he didn't know what to do with this experience.
In fact, he didn't tell his wife for a couple of days.
Eventually, he did.
And then he told the rest of his family, and then he told his workmates.
And he said he was reassured when he talked to some of the other truck drivers.
They said, yes, well, Yumuti is not the only one.
There have been stories around here for a long time.
Tony Healy is in Australia, and we're going to be talking a little more about Yaoi and this fabulous story from your new book, The Yaoi File, that you sent me, Tony.
Just to summarise it, for anybody who's just joining us after the commercials, Glenn is driving through Queensland.
He is driving through an area that is used, it's pretty remote, for jungle training by Australian troops and others.
He thinks he comes close to or encounters, connects with something that he believes is a boulder, first of all.
But this thing is no boulder.
It stands up.
I mean, there's a picture that sort of represents it, but actually what we're talking about here had a rounder face, but those big, buggy eyes once again.
And just to go back to the book, and I'll quote again from Glenn, the trucker, it had a rounded head.
It wasn't that conical head some people talked about.
It looked like a chimpanzee's head.
It looked too small for its body.
No neck.
Like its head was on top of its shoulders, but it seemed sort of pushed forward like it was growing off its chest rather than off its shoulders.
The face was largely free of hair, bearing in mind the creature itself had two inch long hair all over, from the lips to the eyebrows.
No hair on the top of its cheeks.
It didn't have any on its ears either.
Flat nose like a boxer.
That was my first thought when I saw the picture.
You know, this thing has got a nose that's in there like that.
And it's a big round face.
Now, let's just remind my viewer and listener of the scale.
We're talking about something that's three times the size of a man, much taller, and it's literally, you know, as they said in a famous movie, right ahead.
What did he do?
What did Glenn do?
Yes.
Oh, what did the creature do?
Well, both, really.
Well, Glenn hit the brakes and skidded.
The creature stood up, because as you know, it had been rolling down the bank.
It stood up.
And by the time Glenn came to a halt, its creature's chest was against the bonnet of the truck, virtually just about a foot away.
And Glenn said that the creature, there were three distinct expressions on its face.
First, shock and then indignation and then anger.
And he said it was all over in about five seconds.
After it collected its wits, it smashed the palm of its hand into the bonnet of the truck, shaking the whole truck, and then turned and walked away into the scrub.
And did it, I realize we have this time delay between us, so sorry for jumping across you there.
But when it smashed its hand, whatever you want to call it, onto the bonnet of the truck, the front of the truck, did it leave a yaoi-sized print behind that we could see?
No, he said that there was no actual sign of the hand.
The only thing that happened was the bonnet of the front pinked somewhat.
Incidentally, I don't know whether this would come across, but under the we have an artist friend.
Okay, yep, if you can just move it to your You want to move it left slightly?
Yeah, it's fine.
Hold it.
There it is.
Chapter 13, The Modern Era.
That's it.
That's what we're looking at.
Well, Glenn, the truck driver, said that he directed our friend Buck Buckingham, who's an artist.
And he said, yeah, this is pretty much what it looked like.
And so he was happy with that sketch.
This thing was so big, right?
Did Glenn get out?
I wouldn't have got out.
I mean, there he is standing by the truck.
He's out there.
But when he was confronting this thing that was built like a brick outhouse in front of him, did he get out and try and understand it a little more?
Or did he stay where he was?
No way.
No, he just gunned it.
He said he went down to the bottom of the hill, stopped and had a cigarette and sat there for 10 minutes trying to gather his wits.
But no, but other people have had lingering encounters with them.
You know, I've been in their presence for a couple or some minutes of some people.
As I alluded earlier, the incidents that we put the greatest stock in are multiple witness events, where it's not just one person, it's two, three, four people.
30% of incidents involve more than a single witness.
And incidentally, Glenn's encounter took place at 10 o'clock in the morning.
50% of yowie encounters occur in daylight.
So this idea that people only see them when they're driving by themselves very late at night, that's not true.
50% of encounters occur during the day.
How does Glenn rationalise it now then?
What does he think?
I mean, did he know immediately from the legend, from the fact that these things have been in the media in Australia around the world, did he instantly think, oh, yaoi?
Or did it take him a while to rationalize what happened?
No, he had heard of the yaoi.
Most people now have, particularly up around there.
It's been a hot spot for many, many years, at what we call the Gold Coast hinterland.
So he knew of it.
He said he didn't place much stock in it.
But no, by the time he gathered his wits, he thought, okay, that was a yaoi.
Now I have to either keep quiet about this for the rest of my life or say, yeah, I've seen a yaoi.
And indeed, some people do say mum about it for the rest of their lives or tell just perhaps members of the family.
I've struck people like that who've kept quiet for 30, 40, 50, in one case, 60 years, and then finally told the story.
So it's, I mean, it does change their lives in some instances.
I don't think it messed Glenn Kilmartin around very much because he's, as I said, he knows he's not the only one.
He now knows.
He didn't know at the time that other incidents had occurred on that road.
Why didn't he take a picture?
This was 2018, Tony.
Why didn't he take a picture?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, this is the, of course, this is ammunition for skeptics.
He said the truck he was driving was not his regular truck.
His regular truck has a dash cam.
And he said, well, it's too bad I wasn't driving my own truck.
But this truck that he was given.
Didn't have it.
But if you've got a camera, the bloody thing's not going to work.
The camera won't work.
Or you'll forget that you've got the camera with you or you'll drop it.
This occurs time and time again in Bigfoot land over in Canada and the States and here.
We've got in this book a scientist who was out on a scientific jaunt up on the Queensland, New South Wales border.
He had a camera in his pocket and he came right up upon one of these creatures that was just sitting on a rock.
And he was just so shocked that he turned and bolted.
And he said later, well, yeah, I had a camera.
In fact, he had two cameras with him.
And he said, nothing could have been further from my mind.
So as I, I mean, your show is called The Unexplained, so you would have heard many, many strange stories.
As I said earlier, a lot of yaoi reports, not the majority, but a good minority of reports contain high strangeness elements.
So many odd elements that, in fact, after 50 years on the trail of these things, I now agree with what the Aboriginal people say.
These things aren't really fully real.
They're real to a point.
They're fully real sometimes, but they're from the spirit world or, as you might say, from another dimension.
So that would explain why it's so elusive.
Yeah, yeah.
Same with the Sasquatch Bigfoot, in fact.
I've spent years over there, too, and the same strange elements keep occurring over there.
And in Malaysia, for that matter, in there as well.
If you would like to, I would love to do a longer podcast with you where we don't have the constraints of television, that time is always pressing, always the problems with pictures and delays and stuff like this over a long distance.
So if you'd like to do a sound podcast with me, Tony, I would love to talk to you more about this because I know that you've Got many more stories, and I am fascinated by this phenomenon.
Sure thing, right?
Yeah, yeah, you're a very easy guy to talk to.
You too.
All right, well, thank you so much.
And we've got to say, the book is called The Yowie File, and it is available in the UK.
Yeah?
Yes, yes.
Right.
And there it is on the screen.
The Yaoi File Encounters with Australian Ape Men.
I could listen to Tony Healy all day and all night.
He really knows his subject inside and out.
And thank you, Tony, very much for doing that, despite the great time difference between the pair of us.
Before that, of course, you heard Nigel West on Hitler's escape submarine.
Before that, Space News, Dr. David Whitehouse.
And before that, of course, Professor R. V. Loeb with fascinating things to say about what was found on the seabed or the ocean bed of Papua New Guinea.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained coming soon.
So until we meet again, in the boiling heat or not, as the case may be, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
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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