This is the whole first hour of the recent radio-only show (Jul 16 , 2023 ) many of you have been unable to find on the station's website. It features Nick Pope - UAP update, Cal Cooper -Parapsychologist, Kelly Jaakola - Dolphin expert, Ivor Davis - Veteran British Hollywood reporter and expert on the 1960s Charles Manson cult-murders.
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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. | |
| Very, very weird weather in Europe. | |
| They've had temperatures up to 47-ish degrees Celsius down in Italy, North Africa too, and Spain, nearing 50 degrees, I think. | |
| That's like 110, 120 degrees Fahrenheit. | |
| So they're baking. | |
| Meanwhile, up here in Brighty, as we call it, United Kingdom, the weather changes almost every couple of minutes. | |
| I look up at the sky one minute this week, and it's either bright or it's very dull. | |
| Occasionally it rains, rather like tropical rain that goes very quickly, and it is humid throughout. | |
| And at the moment, they're trying to tell me the temperature is about 24, 23 maybe Celsius, something like low 70s Fahrenheit. | |
| But because of that humidity that really gets you, it just feels a lot worse than that. | |
| So that's me. | |
| Now, if I don't sound entirely like me, whatever that is, I've had this problem with my throat all week that I think is to do with hay fever. | |
| I'm bunged up with all kinds of stuff. | |
| Let's not put too fine a point on that. | |
| And I've been coughing all the way through the week. | |
| So my voice is a little bit weaker than normal. | |
| I'm driving it as much as I can to get through all of this. | |
| But just in case you notice that something sounds a little different, it does, and that's why. | |
| This edition of the show, I'm going to play you the first hour of my radio show from last week, because a lot of people have been saying that they didn't get it, they didn't hear it, they can't find it. | |
| So what I'm going to do is offer it here. | |
| The various, we do them in what they call segments. | |
| There are three segments to this show, and I'm just going to tap them together. | |
| And the segments are Nick Pope, UFO update first. | |
| Following that, there is Cal Cooper, parapsychologist, talking about, when we die, might we somehow go on? | |
| Maybe in some other dimension, in some other form, linked to a news story. | |
| Then linked to another news story, Kelly Yarkela from the Dolphin Research Center in Florida, Key West, talking about dolphins on the back of a story about a man whose life was apparently saved by a pot of dolphins. | |
| You'll find out why. | |
| Coming soon. | |
| Then at the very end of this, veteran Hollywood reporter Ivor Davis, who followed the Charles Manson case and the trial half a century ago on a development that was missed by most of the UK mainstream media. | |
| That is the freeing of one of the people convicted and jailed over those horrible crimes that rocked and shocked the 1960s, though. | |
| Ivor Davis is last. | |
| So that's what I'm doing. | |
| And the reason that the show was on radio last week is a long and complicated one, but I'll try and tell you. | |
| I was told on the Monday of that week when I start planning for the show that it was not going to be on TV. | |
| Only my show was affected. | |
| They were taking my show off television because of engineering maintenance work to the studios. | |
| Then on Friday afternoon, about 4.15, 4.30 p.m., I was told, having then recorded a radio show only for that week, I was told that the show could be back on TV because they weren't doing the studio maintenance after all. | |
| It was too late by that point because we'd put together the show. | |
| It was too late to just rustle up another show with all the guests and everything. | |
| So, you know, that's why we did a radio show. | |
| Now, I'm not sure whether that engineering maintenance will be done again or whether it will affect me. | |
| I will let you know, of course. | |
| And the way to find out what is going on with me and that show and everything that I do is go to my official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, the one with the logo on it, and I will tell you whatever is happening there. | |
| And if you want to email me, you can always do that through my website, theunexplained.tv. | |
| Follow the link. | |
| And if your email requires a response, then please put reply required in the subject line. | |
| Right, got through that. | |
| Did I say thank you to Adam for his work on the show? | |
| I think I did. | |
| But if I didn't, I've just done it. | |
| So, this in its entirety, including the introductions with a tiny pause in between each of the three segments, is the hour of the radio show that you missed. | |
| Hour two has already gone out in a much expanded form, a much longer form than was broadcast. | |
| That, of course, was Philip Mantle talking about Pascagoula. | |
| That was a special extended version of the podcast that was based on the second hour of the radio show. | |
| So this is the first hour. | |
| First thing you will hear is Nick Pope talking about the latest in UFOs. | |
| There is much more to come, of course, with the latest hearings happening in this coming week, I believe. | |
| So let's hear the entire show, and I'm going to edit it all together. | |
| This is how it runs. | |
| Back in June, you may recall we heard a new name in the field of UAPs and research into them. | |
| David Groosch adds to the list of names we already know. | |
| Former intelligence official, essentially saying that there is a truth that we need to know. | |
| At the time, he claimed the U.S. has been collecting crash craft for years and years and may be back-engineering some of the material that came from them and may be involved in other things as well. | |
| There may be more revelations, I think, was the implication of the pieces involving a number of people who made their revelations and made their reports. | |
| Of course, a lot of media outlets have featured this. | |
| Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal, of course, were involved in this, as was Ross Coulthard in Australia and now doing a lot of work in America. | |
| This is a very, very important time, it seems to me, in the affairs of man. | |
| And in the week or two that followed that news, we were told that more whistleblowers are waiting to come out. | |
| There might be new legal provisions to make firms involved in such dark projects divulge that or face losing their funding, a very serious thing. | |
| And there'd be immunity somehow for individuals to come forward and say what they know. | |
| This report from The Hill recently asked June 26th about allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse engineering. | |
| Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio, Republican Florida, made a number of stunning statements in an exclusive interview. | |
| Rubio told NewsNation, multiple individuals with very high clearance and high positions within our government have come forward to share first-hand UFO-related claims beyond the realm of what the Senate Intelligence Committee has ever dealt with. | |
| The New York Post reflected on this news. | |
| Tim Burchett, Republican Tennessee, we've had him on this show many times, speculated extraterrestrial life forms could have technology that humanity can't handle. | |
| Quotes here, we couldn't fight them off if we wanted to. | |
| That's why I don't think they are a threat to us or they would already have been. | |
| That makes sense. | |
| Viewed from this side of the pond, then, it seems there's a number of U.S. committees vying to be the first to hold hearings on all of this. | |
| And speculation on when David Grush will appear and be questioned somewhere, sometime soon, perhaps. | |
| Politico reported on Thursday, the House Oversight Committee, which Tim Burchett is on, is finally planning to hold a long-teased hearing on UFOs. | |
| And now, legislation backed by Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, would create a review board to declassify documents related to unidentified aerial phenomena across the government. | |
| This has been described as a bipartisan measure to force the release of UFO records. | |
| Remember this, though. | |
| The Pentagon said a month ago just over there is nothing to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse engineering of materials have existed in the past or exist now. | |
| Confused? | |
| You might be. | |
| Where are we up to? | |
| What happens next? | |
| Is a lot happening or is it just a lot of nothing? | |
| First person I go to for these things. | |
| For a British perspective from the United States, Nick Pope, former MOD UFO man, now independent investigator, of course, famous for his work with ancient aliens. | |
| Nick, thank you very much for listening to all of that. | |
| I hope it made some sense. | |
| People are getting confused, aren't they? | |
| They are, because there is such a lot going on. | |
| And for example, the average Brit, when they hear talk about Congress, they don't appreciate that, of course, there's the Senate and the House of Representatives, and that within that, there are at least three committees involved in this, the Armed Services Committees, the Intelligence Committees, and the Oversight Committees. | |
| And a lot of those have subcommittees who are also involved. | |
| And as you say, it's something of a scramble to see who's going to be first to break this wide open. | |
| Well, it does seem that way. | |
| It almost seems like the Kentucky Derby. | |
| Who do you think is going to win this race? | |
| Who will be having the first hearings? | |
| And David Grush, crucially, who was at the center of everything from June the 5th or 6th on, when's he going to be appearing and what's he going to say? | |
| I don't know, but the Chuck Schumer amendment to the new defense bill is an absolute bombshell. | |
| And for anyone who hasn't read it, go read it. | |
| I mean, it's absolutely phenomenal. | |
| It is the strongest UFO-related language ever to have appeared in draft legislation. | |
| And when you read it, there's a sort of degree of surreality about it, that you're suddenly reading these definitions. | |
| So it talks about declassification. | |
| And of course, you have a definition of things like national archives. | |
| And then the very next definition says non-human intelligences. | |
| And you read a paragraph on that. | |
| And you have to pinch yourself and say, wait, is this the language that's going into the defense bill? | |
| And the answer is yes, absolutely. | |
| That's what they want to go forward. | |
| Using that definition then, using that form of language implies that there is something that we are going to have our eyebrows raised. | |
| When we hear it, it implies that there is something that needs to be declassified that is very serious, does it not? | |
| It does. | |
| And the other interesting thing about that term, non-human intelligence, is it is precisely the term that David Grush mentioned. | |
| Whereas previously, of course, people have talked about extraterrestrials or extraterrestrial biological entities, whatever terminology you use. | |
| But NHI has suddenly exploded into the lexicon. | |
| And the fact that it has appeared in this draft legislation from the Senate majority leader is no accident. | |
| Clearly, Grush has briefed them. | |
| And clearly, he is going to play a role in all this, as, well, he should. | |
| I mean, after all, he served on the UAP task force. | |
| This is not some anonymous person or somebody who's come from left field with no verifiable background. | |
| This is one of the intelligence community people who actually worked on this issue for the U.S. government. | |
| And what of those who said at the time, and I'm talking about when David's revelations were first made in early June, who said that there are effectively a garage load of people waiting to come out and blow their whistles? | |
| Is that still the case, do you think? | |
| Yes, it is. | |
| Very much so. | |
| There is a problem. | |
| I mentioned earlier, of course, the plethora of different committees and subcommittees involved in this in both the Senate and the House. | |
| So it is a little confusing because some of these whistleblowers have gone one way, some have gone another, some have gone to the Pentagon's Arrow unit. | |
| Some have gone both to Arrow and to Congress. | |
| So it's going to take some untangling, but there are at least two dozen of these people, if not more. | |
| Obviously, they all have to go through congressional vetting to make sure they are who they say they are and they served where they say they served. | |
| But, you know, that's in one sense, that's a fairly simple binary question. | |
| Is this person the real deal or not? | |
| And in most cases, the answer seems to be yeah. | |
| What happened to Lou Elizondo? | |
| Well, that's a very interesting question. | |
| Lou has kind of gone a little bit quiet, but he's been working behind the scenes. | |
| He has a book coming out, I think, later this year. | |
| So, of course, his publishers probably don't want him to say too much. | |
| But I think the other thing is he has been working behind the scenes. | |
| I'm pretty sure he is in contact with some of the congressional representatives and the staffers, and that he himself is playing a role, I think, in some of the vetting Of these people, and it's interesting when I talk to some of the retired intelligence community personnel that I'm in touch with about this, they'll give you a very quick answer on all this. | |
| And when David Grush came out, I had from two or three different people, oh, I know Dave. | |
| And so, what does that add in your mind? | |
| It must, mustn't it, to his credibility, the fact that these people know this man and you know, I know Dave sort of connotes a kind of respect for the man? | |
| Yes, very much so. | |
| These are people who had dealings together, and even though now some of them are outside of government service and some are still in position, you don't, I don't want to say the cliché, but I guess I will, you don't ever really leave, but it's kind of true. | |
| In the intelligence community in particular, there's a sort of camaraderie that you've been together, keepers of great secrets. | |
| And just the fact that somebody retires or resigns doesn't change that. | |
| You're still in touch with each other, and that's going on. | |
| So Lou Elizondo is definitely still in the game and will play a part in all of this, I am sure. | |
| This is probably an unfair question, and I'm sorry for it if it is. | |
| What's going to happen? | |
| How is it going to play out now? | |
| What's the time scale? | |
| It confused. | |
| I don't pretend to have all the answers. | |
| Over the next two or three weeks, we're going to see maybe the firming up of some of the timelines. | |
| We're going to see, I think, you know, there's like Parliament in the UK, Congress has its breaks and things. | |
| It's a question of can some of this be snuck in before the summer recess, so to speak? | |
| In one sense, it's good if it can be, but on the other hand, you don't want to rush it and get something wrong. | |
| So it's going to take some careful handling, but I think we will know more in the next two or three weeks. | |
| And of course, at the end of July, so really now just two or three weeks away, we should have the next NASA report, possibly the next update from the Department of Defense. | |
| So there is a lot in play at the moment. | |
| Do you think that there are various offices on this summer night in Washington with lights burning late, perhaps into the wee small hours, where they're considering what the implications of what may be to come would be. | |
| Once they even just start talking about things that are going to amaze people, that are going to maybe frighten some people. | |
| This surely has got to be news managed on some level. | |
| This is the greatest story ever told, and it always will be if it comes out in the way that we think it might. | |
| It's got to be controlled, hasn't it? | |
| It has. | |
| Now, one retired intelligence community officer told me about a month ago. | |
| He said, Nick, there is a time scale for this and things are on track. | |
| And I said in response, that's fine, but things are moving so quickly at the moment that I recommend you have an emergency crash plan ready to go at almost no notice, that you do this within 24 hours. | |
| And the individual concerned undertook to take that suggestion back up the chain of command. | |
| So I think, yeah, two words that you'll be hearing a lot, I think, over the next month or two, is societal impact, because the societal impact, and we've discussed this before, is immense. | |
| This is like nothing that's ever really happened before. | |
| And it is a challenge for some people, I think, to get their heads around it and yet get their heads around it, they must. | |
| You once told me, I think about four years ago in a conversation, but we've had so many. | |
| It could have been three years ago, that when and if this kind of information comes out, and when, if it is a reality, that reality is available to and in the consciousness of ordinary people, you thought that you might have a role yourself in helping to guide people through that. | |
| Do you still feel that way? | |
| I hope so. | |
| I think I do talk to a number of players in all of this, and I do have some back-channel conversations. | |
| I see my role as a communicator. | |
| I'm lucky enough to have a mainstream news media platform. | |
| And if called upon to help with this in any way, because I think it will be challenging for people, both at a societal level and on an individual level, if I can help with that, I will do so, absolutely. | |
| I know you know stuff, and I always ask you for guidance. | |
| Sometimes off the air before we begin recording things, and I have done that for a long time, and you've helped me to understand a lot of these issues, Nick. | |
| Do you anticipate, and I'm asking for an informed guess here, that there might be any more bombshell revelations, information to come out in the next week or two? | |
| Are we on the cusp of something, or as you implied, is it likely to go quiet now until the autumn? | |
| I really can't call it. | |
| I think there are people who want to keep the momentum going. | |
| There are certainly more revelations to come. | |
| It is a question, as you say, of whether this is done before the various congressional representatives go away for summer recess or not. | |
| And I can't call it because there are factions, and we've chatted about this before. | |
| There are factions who just want it done and dusted and over with. | |
| And there are factions who are digging in their heels and they are the forces of inertia that we have to overcome. | |
| I've said this to you so many times, it's almost become a joke between us at the end of our conversations. | |
| Nick, we live in interesting times, don't we? | |
| We do, and there is more to come. | |
| And I know I've said that before, but there absolutely is. | |
| Hang on to your hats. | |
| It's going to be one heck of a ride. | |
| And be patient, those people who keep Emailing me saying, there's nothing happening. | |
| Well, there just might be. | |
| Nick Pope, thank you so much for helping me again. | |
| Thank you. | |
| In the nighttime special edition of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, the show, I believe, returns to the television format this time next week when the normal maintenance has been finished. | |
| Some news stories. | |
| Sorry, I haven't got as much time this week to fit in the news stories that you've been sending to me and the ones that I've found. | |
| So we'll catch up with it all next week. | |
| Just a couple, though. | |
| The Guardian, Elon Musk, launching an artificial intelligence startup that will be, quotes, pro-humanity. | |
| He said the world needs to worry about the prospect of a Terminator future. | |
| We'll talk about that definitely next week. | |
| The independent different types of organic molecules have been found on Mars by the Perseverance rover in the Jezero crater. | |
| Researchers are unable to rule out that the materials have a, quote, biotic origin or are the result of life there. | |
| But they might also be formed in other ways, but nevertheless, they think it is interesting and is worthy of much more research. | |
| We'll talk about that. | |
| ScienceAlert.com carried a piece this week about cellolytics, so-called anti-aging molecules. | |
| Quotes, studies in lab mice showed that eliminating senescent cells using cellolytics can ameliorate these diseases. | |
| And they give a list of the diseases of aging, including osteoarthritis and cancer. | |
| These drugs can kill off zombie cells while keeping healthy cells alive. | |
| This research apparently aided by machine learning, a form of AI. | |
| That's fascinating. | |
| Finally, the Daily Mirror, a tourist inadvertently snapped an alleged UFO while taking a selfie in some sand dunes in California. | |
| Ramiro Navarro said he didn't notice the mysterious object in the background of the photo for a number of weeks. | |
| Then he looked and what he saw is a sort of classic UFO format, but you'll see that by looking in the Daily Mirror this week. | |
| Let's get to this now. | |
| Also in the mirror, in a video that has stunned social media users, a popular TikTok creator, I'm not going to give their TikTok ID here, suggested it's possible we never really die, referencing quantum immortality theory and the physicist Hugh Everett's many worlds interpretation. | |
| Now, I wonder if all of this that we see and hear around us is some kind of simulation, or if we're part of a big multiverse, maybe we as we go on. | |
| In the words of the Titanic film, maybe we do go on. | |
| Who knows? | |
| Maybe Cal Cooper, parapsychologist, psychologist, is here with us now. | |
| Cal, thank you very much indeed for doing this. | |
| I think this is a great story. | |
| I'm not sure whether it's got what we journalists call legs. | |
| What do you think? | |
| I think it's got some legs in terms of the need to actually discuss these ideas. | |
| For me, though, it's nothing particularly new. | |
| For parapsychology and psychical research, this idea of if we are surviving after death in some way, in what way is it surviving? | |
| How does that sustain itself? | |
| So there's been all kinds of ideas about multi-worlds and a psi field, so a psychic field of information where information about our personality and intellect is stored. | |
| And then even Rupert Sheldrake discussing ideas like morphic resonance as well. | |
| So they're all different ideas, variations of this idea of how information gets stored and might be retrieved even beyond someone's death. | |
| I'm not sure what the implications might be if we knew that we went on, how would we then regard life? | |
| And of course, the other question that plays into it more than any other question is, how could we prove this? | |
| It's very difficult to prove. | |
| So we were involved, myself and colleagues, in the Bigelow essay competition a couple of years ago, which was supported by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. | |
| And in that, we had to produce the best essay in 25,000 words for evidence of life after death. | |
| So in our particular essay, they're all available to read online by the VIX website. | |
| You can look at any of the essays that are involved in the competition. | |
| We decided to take an approach on mediumship, deathbed experiences, after-death communications, reincarnation, and look at what we consider to be the best examples. | |
| And in doing so, you've got to find particular case studies that were studied so thoroughly to look at all these conventional explanations that were considered for how it seemed unusual when actually it was not, they just couldn't be applied in those cases. | |
| For me personally, I think there's some really good evidence out there for survival. | |
| The essay competition was a good example of that very fact, that there's good evidence out there. | |
| But I don't see much strong evidence that there is a conscious survival beyond death. | |
| But certainly there's this retention of information, which is what this very article is discussing in some ways, that, you know, the personality, that intellect, the memories, they get stored somehow and maybe someone can retrieve them or gain access to that information. | |
| But we could sit here and debate it until the cows come home. | |
| It's something that for a very, very long time, humanity has been interested in. | |
| And trying to demonstrate that in the lab is a very, very difficult study indeed, because there's all kinds of alternatives and possibilities that could take over. | |
| Just have to explain to my listener, your line's breaking up slightly, but we can hear every word that you say. | |
| I think it's fascinating. | |
| I think it's worthy of further research, but I don't know how you would do it because it seems to me in the last 200 years or so, we have tried, haven't we, Cal, almost every gambit to try and research the idea of whether we continue either as a form of consciousness or energy or spirit or even as our physical selves somewhere else. | |
| What more can we do now? | |
| Well, as you say, there's been various tests. | |
| Houdini, when he died, he died with a code that he said, if a medium comes forward with this code, then I have indeed survived. | |
| Various psychical researchers, they applied what they called the lock test, and that again, they would write down somewhere, have kind of kept with their solicitor a code for a safe, a combination, or where a key is deposited. | |
| And that if a medium came forward with that, it would demonstrate their survival, or indeed their ghost appears and says where it is. | |
| There's been EVP studies that people consider a live, so electronic voice phenomena, a live study of life after death. | |
| I think the only way forward, and indeed the Bigelow Essay Competition has moved forward to what they call the challenge. | |
| So they've given out funding for a live empirical study of this. | |
| We've thought, well, how could you do that? | |
| And most academics are in the same boat as me in that you would have to get someone professing mediumship and put them to the test. | |
| Like some famous characters over time, Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Leonard, Mrs. Garrett. | |
| And these people that were constantly tested. | |
| And you need someone like that in modern day that really is your medium, your bridge to anything that may be out there beyond death and actually put that idea to the test, really. | |
| That's your life study. | |
| Callum Cooper will talk again. | |
| Callum Cooper, parapsychologist, University of Northampton, Cal, thank you very much for your time. | |
| Thank you for having me, Howard. | |
| Just quickly to get in this segment of the show, this story, Livescience.com reported Martin Richardson was swimming in the Red Sea of Egypt when he was attacked by a Mako shark. | |
| He was bitten approximately five times, waiting to die, when something unusual happened. | |
| Quotes, there was no reason for the shark to stop, he said. | |
| But apparently he was waiting for the feeding frenzy. | |
| I knew the shark was turning around me, and I thought, this is it. | |
| Looked at the mountains and prepared to see my last. | |
| But he said, at this moment, a group of dolphins appeared just behind him, me, and the attack stopped. | |
| That's according to this piece in Livescience.com this week. | |
| We've heard a lot of stories where dolphins have apparently saved human beings or acted in their interest. | |
| Interesting, hey. | |
| Let's talk with Kelly Yarkola in Florida. | |
| She is the director of research at Dolphin Research Center in Florida, United States. | |
| Kelly, thank you very much for doing this. | |
| You have two great pluses going for you. | |
| Number one, you work with dolphins. | |
| Number two, you're in the Florida Keys. | |
| I think, you know, you have two great ticks on the great checklist of life, Kelly. | |
| So far, so good, huh? | |
| Now, I'm sure you hear many stories like this one that I latched onto about this man called Martin, whose life was apparently saved by dolphins. | |
| Stories like that, when you see them and when people like me report them back to you, what do they make you think? | |
| Well, it depends on how they're reported. | |
| I think very often, well, let me say it this way, dolphins and sharks have lots of interactions in the wild, right? | |
| And sometimes we humans are in the middle of them and sometimes we're not. | |
| So when you hear cases like this, is it likely that the dolphins saved this man's life? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| The question is whether or not the dolphins were intentionally trying to save this man's life. | |
| Right. | |
| So one possibility is, sure, maybe dolphins are altruistic. | |
| And this is how the stories are usually reported is that dolphins somehow see some sort of kinship with humans and therefore they go out of their way to protect us. | |
| That's one possibility. | |
| But another equally valid possibility is, look, the dolphins were in the area and there are sharks around and sharks are dolphins' natural predators. | |
| And so the dolphins chased the sharks away and the people just happened to be there. | |
| Hmm. | |
| I guess you can, as you rightly imply, you can run that story either way. | |
| But there is no doubt, isn't there, that there is a sort of supposed affinity between dolphins and humans. | |
| Look at the way that in places in your own state of the United States and throughout Europe here, we have dolphin centers where dolphins are trained to perform for audiences. | |
| I've seen a performance in Florida like that. | |
| So there does seem to be, does there some kind of bond there? | |
| Well, sure, absolutely. | |
| Certainly, if you're talking about dolphins like the ones you mentioned that were raised around humans, then yes, just like, you know, dogs that were raised around humans are very close to humans. | |
| Wild dogs, maybe not so much. | |
| And I think that's probably true with dolphins as well. | |
| When dolphins were raised around humans and humans are the ones who have given them all kinds of positive interactions and food and everything happy, then yeah, dolphins are very close to us. | |
| And certainly humans have an affinity with dolphins. | |
| And the question there is why, right? | |
| There are some possibilities. | |
| One is, look, dolphins are very reactive and interactive to us. | |
| And so that's great when we see them. | |
| They give us reactions. | |
| The other thing to keep in mind, though, is dolphins have this permanent smile on their face, right? | |
| And we know from human psychology that the smile is very, very important in human social interactions. | |
| And so even though that's not true with dolphins, that's just the way their face is shaped, humans have more of a psychological bond because they think the dolphin is smiling at them. | |
| So you think it's more about us than them? | |
| I think it's definitely about us, and it's a question mark whether it's about them. | |
| Right. | |
| And presumably at the dolphin center there in Florida, the dolphin research center, you're looking into those things, presumably constantly. | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| I mean, at DRC, the Dolphin Research Center, we pride ourselves on having great relationships with our dolphins. | |
| And so I certainly wouldn't say that we don't have relationships with the dolphins. | |
| We do, and we recognize them as individuals, and they recognize us as individuals. | |
| But again, these are animals who were raised with and around people. | |
| We're their pod, so to speak. | |
| And that may not be the same for a group of wild dolphins. | |
| So it's like the relationship that people have with a domestic dog, or to a certain extent, although they're much more independent, a domestic cat. | |
| How clever are dolphins? | |
| Because again, and I don't know if this is a myth that's out there, but there is this thought that dolphins have this tremendous brain capacity and they're able to understand things almost as well as we do. | |
| Yes and no. | |
| So what I want to say there is that when we talk about intelligence, there's a misconception in that people tend to think that intelligence is a linear thing of which animals and people have more or less of. | |
| But that's not how intelligence works because that's not how evolution works. | |
| It doesn't go along in a straight line. | |
| It branches off. | |
| And humans and dolphins branched off from each other 90 to 95 million years ago, and we evolved in very different environments with different body plans, et cetera. | |
| And so instead of the question, how intelligent are they? | |
| We usually like to tweak that and say, how are they intelligent? | |
| And that way we can look at more specific things like their tool use, their imitation, their understanding of number, their understanding of objects, et cetera. | |
| And so that way we can compare. | |
| And when we do, we find that there are a number of areas where dolphins do seem to be pretty clever. | |
| However, there are also some areas that might surprise you where things that are obvious to humans are really not at all obvious to dolphins. | |
| So I think the picture is more complicated than is usually portrayed. | |
| There are some remarkable stories around, though, and I'm sure that individual dolphins behave in different ways. | |
| We haven't got to forget, and I think we often do, especially those people who like to go and pay money and swim with dolphins and get the supposed benefits from that. | |
| They say they feel calmer and all the rest of it. | |
| From what I've been reading, dolphins can be incredibly brutal, too. | |
| Well, sure. | |
| I mean, look, just like if you were to ask me, well, what are humans like? | |
| I would say, well, which humans are you talking about? | |
| I would say the same thing with dolphins. | |
| When you say, what are dolphins like? | |
| Or dogs or horses? | |
| Each of them have their own individual personalities. | |
| But it is true that in the wild, they're wild animals. | |
| And the way that animals protect themselves and their young and interact with each other can be very aggressive. | |
| And that's true with dolphins as well. | |
| I saw a video. | |
| I believe it was dolphins involved in this thing. | |
| You may have seen this as well. | |
| Somebody videoed an Arctic attack where a seal was persecuted and then I think killed ultimately by a bunch of dolphins. | |
| So, you know, they, as you say, presumably they regard themselves as protecting whatever it is they have to protect. | |
| And those things happen. | |
| Sure, those things happen. | |
| I mean, they're hunters. | |
| They're one of the top predators in the ocean. | |
| Gee, well, that's going to be news to an awful lot of people. | |
| Does the research that you're doing with the dolphins have an aim? | |
| Is there something that you're looking for? | |
| Or are you just learning more about them with every day? | |
| We do research in a variety of areas. | |
| Our specialty is cognitive research. | |
| So how dolphins think, learn, remember, that sort of thing. | |
| And what's the greatest thing in the time, that's a long time that you've been doing this, what's the biggest surprise, let's put it that way, that you've had from the dolphins? | |
| The fact that they can imitate each other when they're blindfolded. | |
| Gee. | |
| And how do you think that happens? | |
| Well, we think two ways. | |
| We know that they're not using sight because we put little suction cups on them so that they can't see. | |
| They can blink them off if they don't want them on, but they're very helpful and they wear them for us. | |
| And so I think it's two ways. | |
| One, if I said, here, shut your eyes, now imitate this, you might be able to recognize that that was the sound of hands clapping and you could do that. | |
| But also, the dolphins will sometimes, especially if it's a person in the water, so it sounds different, will turn and echolocate on the demonstrating dolphin or person. | |
| And so that they can use echolocation to figure out what it is the other one is doing. | |
| How lovely and how interesting. | |
| Are dolphins a species under threat? | |
| I actually don't know their IUCN rating. | |
| I don't believe they are, although I believe certain populations could be. | |
| Well, listen, thank you very much for talking with me about this story. | |
| It seems to me that there are a number of mysteries surrounding it, and you will continue to investigate those. | |
| Kelly Yarkola, thank you very much. | |
| And thank you. | |
| Kelly Yarkula, who works with dolphins in Florida. | |
| Now, very important story, I think, broke a couple of days ago, but we didn't really get it reported in the UK. | |
| Surprise, surprise. | |
| A lot of things that happen in the world, we just don't kind of see. | |
| Maybe they're buried down in newspapers. | |
| I haven't seen it. | |
| New York Times reported this. | |
| Leslie Van Houghton, a former Charles Manson follower who played a role in the gruesome double murder of a Los Angeles couple in the summer of 1969, was released on parole on Tuesday after serving more than half a century in prison, according to her lawyer. | |
| Her lawyer, Nancy Tetore, I think that's how you say it, said that she was taken early on Tuesday morning to transitional housing at an unnamed location. | |
| So this, I don't know. | |
| They said that the Manson crimes ended the innocence and the joy of that period of flower power, the period of love and all the rest of it. | |
| There was a rude awakening and that was the rude awakening. | |
| Charles Manson and his followers, of course, ended up in prison for a vast amount of time and this person has served 53 years in jail for her part in those brutal crimes. | |
| A man who followed the entire thing is a man who's been on the show a number of times before, Ivor Davis, veteran legendary journalist and author. | |
| His books including The Beatles and Me on Tour and Manson Exposed, a reporter's 50-year journey into madness and murder, which we talked about, I think, about two years ago during the peak of COVID in this country. | |
| Let's get on to him now. | |
| He's in Los Angeles. | |
| Ivor, thank you for doing this. | |
| How are you? | |
| I'm terrific. | |
| Thank you. | |
| And thanks for having me on your program. | |
| Do you think, Ivor, that the freeing of Leslie Van Houten, who appeared in and out of the headlines over many, many years, do you think that the freeing on parole of her is the effective, for this generation, the end of the Mountain story for most people or not? | |
| The answer to that, Howard, is no way, Jose, because this story keeps coming up. | |
| It just doesn't go away. | |
| And then we've still got, don't forget, Charles Tex Watson in jail. | |
| We've got Bobby Beausole in jail. | |
| We've got Patricia Kremwinkle in jail. | |
| And as your listeners, and you know, Howard, Manson died a few years ago. | |
| Susan Atkins, who was his right-hand woman, so to speak, died. | |
| So I think it's going to come up again and again. | |
| And believe me, it does, Because I was very involved in the case and covered it from day one, like a bad whatever, it pops up all the time. | |
| This was a case that shook the world. | |
| It certainly rocked Hollywood. | |
| Nothing was ever the same after this. | |
| I wonder for a generation who are listening now and only maybe know the name and have no conception of what happened, is it possible to sum up in 60 seconds what happened in 1969? | |
| Well, I'll tell you my story, which kind of capsulizes it. | |
| I got called by the Daily Express. | |
| I was their correspondent. | |
| They said, get over to a house in the canyons of Beverly Hills. | |
| Something terrible has happened. | |
| We don't know. | |
| Off I ran. | |
| And when I got to the house of the famous actress, Sharon Tate, who lived there with her husband, Roman Polanski, everybody was gathered outside. | |
| We didn't know what had gone on. | |
| We hung around. | |
| There were rumors. | |
| And then we discovered, holy whatever, Sharon Tate, pregnant eight months, was murdered along with a bunch of friends, Jay Sebring, a famous Hollywood hairdresser, Vojtok Frakowski, a friend of Roma Polanski, Frakowski's girlfriend. | |
| I mean, that was terrible. | |
| And then a young man who discovered to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. | |
| And we were just stunned. | |
| There was so many murders. | |
| And then we didn't know who it was. | |
| We thought it was a drug bust. | |
| We thought it was a drug deal gone wrong. | |
| And then 24 hours later, there was another horrendous murder. | |
| It was almost like copycat, if you like, about 15 miles away. | |
| Lino and Rosemary LaBianca, a grocery couple who owned a store, were murdered in their home in a similar fashion, brutally, stabbed many, many times. | |
| And Hollywood went into deep, deep shock. | |
| What was going on? | |
| Nobody knew. | |
| And for many months, we didn't know that Charles Manson and his crazy gang from the Spahn Hollywood movie ranch just outside LA were the perpetrators. | |
| And that's how we're back to today. | |
| I'm sorry, I talk more than a minute. | |
| That's fine. | |
| You know, when you say the perpetrators, Charles Manson's followers were the perpetrators. | |
| But Charles Manson himself distanced himself from it. | |
| He was the person who, as the court case that you attended subsequently showed, inspired and drove these people to do what they did. | |
| You're absolutely right. | |
| On the Sharon Tate murders in Beverly Hills, Manson never went. | |
| On the La Bianca case, the day later, Manson was in the car. | |
| He went to the La Bianca's house and he instructed his followers, Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houghton, to go out and do, you know what to do, he said. | |
| And they did. | |
| And that was a strange thing. | |
| He kept himself distanced from these horrible crimes because he was a canny so-and-so. | |
| Now, it was widely reported and expected at the time that all or most of these people would go to whatever form of death sentence there was in America at the time. | |
| But there was a change in the law that effectively made sure that that didn't happen and they spent long periods in prison. | |
| And that goes for Leslie Van Houten. | |
| It does. | |
| And as you pointed out so correctly, they were all sentenced to death in the gas chamber. | |
| But fortunately or unfortunately for them, the death penalty was abolished. | |
| And so they ended up spending life in prison, almost without possibility of parole until today, until yesterday, I should say. | |
| And as you pointed out, Leslie Van Houten, who was only 19 at the time, finally is going to go free. | |
| But I mean, I'll ask you, Howard, what do you think a woman who's been in prison for 50 odd years is going to do when she leaves jail? | |
| You tell me. | |
| Well, I have no idea. | |
| I mean, what is her current age? | |
| If she was 19... | |
| She's 72. | |
| She's 72 now. | |
| Yes. | |
| And I just wonder what she's going to do. | |
| Now, I think her life may become even more miserable if she starts doing media interviews, to be honest. | |
| But if she has any sense, she'll try and vanish into the woodwork. | |
| But on the other hand, I must tell you that if you've seen, and I've seen pictures, I haven't seen Leslie in person. | |
| I went to the parole hearings many times. | |
| Leslie now looks like an old lady, any old lady you might bump into in the local supermarket. | |
| So she may be able to vanish into the woodwork if she wants to do that. | |
| As far as I recall and my memory is hazy, over the decades, hasn't Leslie Van Houten been claiming in the media that she has reassessed herself, changed? | |
| Yeah, she has. | |
| I mean, she has done the right thing. | |
| She's become the model prisoner in jail. | |
| She's been, you know, she's been teaching young inmates. | |
| She's done all the right things. | |
| But don't forget, it's been very political until this week. | |
| Every time a Manson person comes up for parole, it's turned down by the governor. | |
| And because it's political, because if the governor lets the Manson people out, he's going to lose a lot of Brownie points at the election. | |
| How did she get out this time? | |
| Well, she got out finally. | |
| I mean, it was a technical thing. | |
| They went to the California Supreme Court. | |
| The California Supreme Court this week or last week said she should go out. | |
| She's tried parole eight times. | |
| She's never got out. | |
| And it finally came through. | |
| But as I mentioned a few minutes ago, Howard, there are other Manson people in jail, and I think they won't get out. | |
| I must just add that Leslie Van Houten was so young at the time. | |
| She was on drugs. | |
| But the mere fact that she stabbed the La Bianca 16 times tells you two things. | |
| First of all, that she must have been on some kind of LSD because Manson handed LSD out like candy. | |
| So, you know, you can come up with all sorts of excuses. | |
| The La Bianca family are not very happy at this turn of events. | |
| And is there any possibility, because we know what legality and what a litigious society the United States is, is there any chance that the family could campaign somehow to have her reinstated to jail? | |
| Well, they may do that, but I don't think there's much to be achieved at this rather late stage of things. | |
| But, you know, I must, if I have a second, I'd love to tell you about a lady who was a Manson girl that I'd become very friendly with since I'd been doing my book talks and stuff. | |
| And we're very good friends. | |
| And she, at the age of 14, was turned over to Manson by her hippie parents. | |
| And every time we get together, I say, I ask her, would you have gone along to the houses if Charlie had told you? | |
| And she, now in her 70s, says to me, oh, no, I was a very strong-willed young woman. | |
| Well, I want to tell you, my friend, the former Manson girl, would have done what Manson told her to do. | |
| And she may argue that with me, but it shows you the manipulation and the hold that Manson had over these young women. | |
| I'm sorry to go off tangent, Howard, but I had to tell you that story. | |
| No, I think it's a very valid story, and I think it's one that absolutely adds to it. | |
| And, you know, frankly, you know, as a personal view, whether it's 53 years or 53 months, I don't think that somebody who was involved in something like that should get up. | |
| I don't think there should be a place for them because we both know, and you partly described this, and we've spared our listeners tonight. | |
| We've spared them some of the details, but I think anybody who participates, whatever they're influenced by, she was 19 years of age. | |
| She was old enough to understand something of what she was doing. | |
| And, you know, I don't think somebody like that should ever get up. | |
| But I suppose now her lawyers are claiming that she's, what, rehabilitated? | |
| Yes, and she is full of remorse. | |
| But every time you get, you know, side A says she's full of remorse. | |
| She's a changed person. | |
| She's a mature woman. | |
| She's no danger to society. | |
| And then on the other side, you know, we talk about the horrendous nature of the killings. | |
| And as I mentioned, she stabbed Rosemary LaBianca 17 times. | |
| And then after the murders, she and Charles Tex Watson went to the refrigerator, sat in the kitchen and drank chocolate milk. | |
| I mean, it's kind of, I mean, just even saying that, the horrendousness, if you like, of that incident, it just boggles the mind. | |
| So in a way, I'm a bit sympathetic because she was a different young woman back in her 19, 19 years of age, because I think maybe all of us, I mean, you tell me, Howard, all of us were slightly different people when we were younger, when we were in our teens. | |
| Enormously. | |
| And of course, people can change. | |
| But, you know, you and I were not involved in anything like this. | |
| That is the difference. | |
| But look, I know that the lawyers and the family will certainly be arguing about this. | |
| Did she ever renounce Charles Manson? | |
| Did she ever say, I'm disgusted by all of this, I'm disgusted by him? | |
| Finally, she did. | |
| But it took a long time for the brainwashing, if you like, to wear out. | |
| And then in the last 25 years, she would do interviews. | |
| She would tell the parole board how sorry she was. | |
| And she did a complete turnaround. | |
| So otherwise, she would never have got out. | |
| A lot of the other Manson girls, Susan Atkins, who died in prison, never did relinquish the Manson hold. | |
| And there are still people around, believe it or not, who think Manson was railroaded. | |
| So the beat goes on. | |
| And, you know, quite literally, because I think he had a few goes at being a pop star from behind bars, didn't he? | |
| He did. | |
| He did. | |
| Yes. | |
| He was desperate to become a pop star. | |
| And that went into the makeup of his resentment to society, his hate for society. | |
| But again, I don't want to go into the whole Manson psychology, which I've been very close and studied a great deal. | |
| I mean, he was a rejected child from early age. | |
| But listen, does that mean if you're rejected as a child, Howard, does it mean you go out and tell people to kill people? | |
| Not really. | |
| Well, I'd say no and you'd say no. | |
| But, you know, lawyers argue all kinds of things, don't they? | |
| One final question, Ivor, and I know that we're going to talk again about other things, maybe even about your new book to do with the Beatles, which, you know, I'm a scouser, very much close to my heart. | |
| And you followed the Beatles in the United States. | |
| So I'd love to talk with you about that. | |
| I must just say, I know time is limited, Howard, but I just want to say the amazing thing about the Fab Four is there's only Fab two left, and they're bigger than they were back then. | |
| I mean, can you explain that, please? | |
| It's mind-boggling. | |
| Well, I can. | |
| And I think George Harrison in one of his later songs summed it up because they was fab, right? | |
| I think that's basically it. | |
| Long time ago when we was fab. | |
| You know, I think the Beatles were, obviously they were a phenomenon, but when you look at their story. | |
| Final question on the Manson thing, and we literally only have 90 seconds or so. | |
| Do you believe, because you still live in Los Angeles, you followed the system, you've worked out there for decades, do you think law enforcement and the people charged with these things, if there was another Charlie Manson and his bunch of followers, would they be sorted out and spotted these days? | |
| The answer to your question is a terrific question. | |
| Don't forget in 1969, they didn't have computers sophisticated to match genetic codes and all the rest of it. | |
| Back then, it was like it was ancient history. | |
| The cops in LAPD and the cops in the sheriff's office never got together. | |
| Today, if there was a murder, they would immediately match up genetic blood or whatever the whole thing is, and they would have solved the case within a week. | |
| Back then, they did, and it had none of that, and that's why it took so long to crack the case. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, it's a horrible portion of history, and it was a bit of a mile marker in an awful lot of ways. | |
| Iva Davis, thank you very much for joining me again. | |
| And what's your new book about the Beatles? | |
| What's it called? | |
| Well, it's going to be called The Beatles and Me on Tour. | |
| Right, this is the book. | |
| The follow-up, because I'll just say that since I wrote the book, I've now grown, I now have an extended family of people I know only because of the Beatles. | |
| And I guess you're in there, Howard. | |
| You're in there somewhere. | |
| Well, we're all connected. | |
| I mean, I know Paul's stepmom, Angie McCartney, who you know too, I think. | |
| I do. | |
| I just sent her an email, would you believe? | |
| She's coming up to do. | |
| So there it is. | |
| Two minutes ago. | |
| Give her my regards because Angie's lived in Los Angeles for years. | |
| Angie, Angie, and Ruth. | |
| Yep, and Ruth's husband. | |
| Great to talk to you, Howard. | |
| You too. | |
| Thank you so much, Ivor. | |
| Ivor Davis in Los Angeles talking about the Manson case. | |
| Still with us after all these years. | |
| So there you have it. | |
| Hour one of the show. | |
| Hour two, of course, in a specially extended form, has already been on the podcast. | |
| But that was hour one. | |
| So many people contacted me to say that we can't access it. | |
| We didn't hear it. | |
| We couldn't find it on the night, which seems to happen a lot. | |
| So I'm putting it here for you to hear, for posterity, on the Unexplained website, theUnexplained.tv. | |
| More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained. | |
| So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This has been The Unexplained. | |
| And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Take care. |