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July 23, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:54
Edition 742 - Mark Christopher Lee
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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.
Thank you for being part of my show.
Just to explain that I'm still suffering with this hay fever thing that appears to have affected my throat and my voice.
Sometimes I sound a little bit like Barry White, and sometimes like at the moment, my voice sounds a little bit like it's fading away.
I've just taken another antihistamine tablet, so I'm hoping that's going to help me through the next hour when we talk with somebody who's had an important part, one way or another, in the development of The Unexplained.
His name is Mark Christopher Lee, and he is the man behind an indie band called The Pocket Gods.
Now, before Mark got in touch with me, I've no idea who they were, but he asked me to do an intro to one of their albums.
He was a fan of the podcast, and I said, yeah, sure.
I'll record it.
And I've done a few of these for him.
Now, Mark's band, The Pocket Gods, were championed by a man called John Peel in the UK.
John Peale was a disc jockey who worked on illegal commercial radio in the 1960s, then transferred to the BBC doing the same thing, which was essentially playing new music.
Back in the day, he played Sgt Pepper on Radio London, a pop pirate ship.
And before his death, right up to the early 2000s, I think it was, maybe the very end of the 1990s, I lose track of time.
John was not only doing talk shows at which he was incredibly good.
What a raconteur that man was.
Very greatly missed.
But also championing the very latest music as a man in his 60s by then.
So if John Peel's behind you, you must be damn good, which the pocket cards are.
Now, the reason that we're talking to Mark is that he's had a lifelong interest in all paranormality and is now kind of working in that field.
His music has always reflected that too.
In fact, one of his tracks, I seem to remember, features in the background one of my podcasts.
So fame at last, hey?
I'm hoping that you can't hear the guy who's mowing outside my window here.
It's a couple of floors down, so I'm hoping that you can't hear that.
So anyway, that's the whole story here.
Biography.
I tried to find one, and I found this paragraph about his book, Weird, which is his own biography.
And this is it.
Weird is the biography of Mark Christopher Lee, lead singer-songwriter in Carlt Indie Band, The Pocket Gods.
The book charts the highs and lows of being in an unsigned indie band from being discovered by the late John Peel.
It also talks about Mark's relationship with the paranormal and the weird, unexplainable things that have happened in his rock and roll journey.
So, and also this biographical piece says it is a little bit like Spinal Tap if you ever saw that meet the X-Files, which you almost certainly did.
So that's the entire thing.
Okay, thank you very much to my webmaster Adam for his hard work on the show.
I'm hoping that my voice holds out for this one.
I'm going to have another sip of water and then ingest that antihistamine tablet for the hay fever, which I'm assuming it is.
Let's connect now to another part of London and Mark Christopher Lee.
Mark, it's been a long time.
Thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you, Howard, for having me.
Well, listen, it's better that you tell the story because you and I go back now probably 15 years, don't we?
Tell my audience in ways better than I can how that happened.
Yeah, well, basically, I mean, I've always been into the paranormal and UFOs.
Initially interested from Arthur C. Clarke's excellent TV series in the 70s called Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, where he investigated UFOs and anomalous phenomena.
And that was kind of rekindled back, I think it was, what was it, 2005?
I reckon I first heard your unexplained show.
And I think it was on Talk Sport Radio.
It was a long time ago.
And that rekindled my interest.
And then I kind of got in touch with you because I'm in a band called The Pocket Gods, as you know.
And because of your excellent voice and narration skills, we asked you to guest on a few of our albums, which is brilliant.
I can remember sitting here using various microphones and thinking to myself, I wonder what's going to sound best on these albums.
But they were all thematic, weren't they?
They were all done on a theme.
Yeah, they were all kind of about UFOs, about mysterious things.
One was called Lo-Fi Sci-Fi, which it was lo-fi, and it was all about sci-fi and going off to the moon and other planets and things like that.
That's one you did, I think.
And there was another one, I think it was called Plan Nub Behind the Fridge, which is a bit of a B-movie homage.
So yeah, there's all this theme going through all my music, really.
About weird things, I guess.
And was the idea that you were taking a rise out of it?
You were having a laugh at it?
Or were you seriously trying to weave it into your work?
Yeah, I was seriously trying to weave it into our work.
We did a song called Someone Else Is On Our Moon, which is based on the so-called fake moon landing theory, which I don't subscribe to, I have to say.
Though I did hear someone interesting on your show called Marcus Allen.
I think he was saying something about the photographs they used, the actual meat.
Marcus has been on Ancient Aliens and various other things.
He's from Nexus magazine, just to remind my listener.
And he's a lifelong believer that we did not go to the moon and the whole thing was faked.
And technically they realized, I'm not speaking for him here, we'll do another podcast with him.
We did do one recently.
That it was almost like a hubris thing, that we realized that we hadn't got the technology to do it.
So we had to fake it up effectively.
Now, you know, I don't, I have to say, and I'm sorry if this upsets some listeners, I've never really bought that idea, but I do respect Marcus, and he puts across a good case about the cameras and film and a lot of other stuff.
So that was all part of it.
Now, you ended up, and you're very Humble talking about it, but I mean, you've won a number of accolades with this work, haven't you?
Yeah, we've won uh Guinness World Records, we've had about 15, uh, including, including for the world's longest song.
Uh, how long is that?
It's 115 hours.
So, you're joking.
Did you sing continuously?
You couldn't for 115 hours.
No, I mean, the wonders of technology, uh, if it wasn't for technology, I wouldn't have been able to do it.
So, but it was called a quantum Christmas.
Again, that's exploring kind of quantum physics and spirituality maybe being explained by quantum physics.
So, that's a track that hopefully will stand the test of time, literally, if you've got five days to spare.
Okay.
Yeah, no, I was just going to say that, you know, you've been championed a lot by the BBC, haven't you?
Not only with John Peel, but also other parts of the BBC have given you a lot of support over the years.
Oh, absolutely.
And I'm very, very grateful.
There's been DJs like Steve Lamack, Tom Robinson from BBC Six Music.
People might remember him from 2468 Motorway.
But he's been a big champion of our off-beat style.
He loves the quirky songs.
One of his favorite is Jumble Party, which was written about a local jumble sale in our village.
And then another one, he likes Trailer Park on Mars, which does what it says in, really.
And I think, just before we get off this and we start talking about the power of normality, but I think one of my podcasts, doesn't it, features underneath one of your songs?
It does, yeah.
It's called The Unexplained.
And it's basically an advert for your podcast, which is brilliant.
And yeah, it's you narrating.
And then I did some electronic music underneath.
And that's on the lo-fi sci-fi album if people want to check it out.
It's on Spotify.
For a very short time, the podcasts were being put out by a radio station, an online radio station that was a recreation of one of the original commercial stations in the UK.
And I remember that edition, I closed with that song, right?
Oh, right.
And I remember the guy who ran it said, what did you put that on for?
He thought it was light because they were playing nice melodic music.
He thought it was way too raucous for what they were doing.
Yeah, maybe.
It's not light entertainment, is it?
It's not.
But needless to say, I'm not on there anymore and I'm elsewhere.
Okay, and I think you're also doing a TV show these days, aren't you?
Yeah, is that still going on?
It is, yeah.
We put it on ourselves on Sky on a channel called AOZAT, and it's online as well.
And it's basically, we interview some of the favorite paranormal people, ask them about their weird stuff, and also ask them about their music.
I mean, which is, you know, we're trying to mix both of these things up, music and the paranormal and UFOs.
It's been quite interesting.
I'll interview Nick Pope, who I've known a long time.
I know you have as well.
And he's a big country and Western fan, which is quite...
I spent a couple of days with him on the cruise last year.
I didn't know that.
Who's his favorite artist?
Did he tell you?
Yeah, there's some guy called George.
I can't remember.
He's quite a new guy.
He likes Kenny Rogers as well.
But I think because his wife's American, he's really getting into all the new country stuff, which is cool.
We talked about a lot of stuff, not for the radio or the podcast.
We just talked about life in general.
We never got around to the CNW.
Very surprising.
Well, actually, it's not.
Actually, they don't call it country in Western.
Sorry, country fans.
They call it country music these days.
Forgive me for that.
Yeah, of course they do.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I like Jodi Messina.
Do you know Jodi Messina?
I don't, no.
Oh, Jodi Messina is on the poppier end, I think.
And she had a great record.
And just for my listener here, she did a record called That's the Way It Is.
And when I discovered that record, I was in America.
I turned to a country station in Florida.
And I heard this great song about how crazy life is.
Just when you think you've got it sorted, it all falls apart.
You know, the money ran out and the engine blew is one of the lines of this thing.
Great song.
Should have been a big, should have been a crossover hit.
Jodi Messina, wonderful song.
But at the time, I was on Capitol Radio in London, where at the end of every news, I used to say, that's the way it is.
At 703, I'm Howard Hughes.
So I loved that song.
Sorry, that's very much by the by, Country and Western music.
Now, like a lot of people I've spoken with on this show, it isn't just a passing observational experience of paranormality.
You actually experienced it for yourself when you were very, very young.
Yeah, but this kind of was the first thing that opened my mind to there's more to life than just our material existence.
And it was a very strange experience, which I still can't fully explain, but had a profound impact on me and still does.
And basically, it was, I had a visitation from something.
I was probably about four or five at the time.
And it was like a face kind of appeared on my wall.
And the way I looked at it at the time, it was like a, I'd say it was an angel, but I guess you could reinterpret it as a kind of otherworldly being.
And it just gave me a message saying everything's going to be all right.
And it was there to comfort me.
And I felt a deep sense of comfort and that everything was going to be okay.
And then the next day, my life kind of turned upside down.
Didn't have a particularly happy childhood.
I won't go into the details, but this experience kind of was the timing of it the night before my life kind of changed.
It was so, so weird.
And but it gave me faith that everything would be all right in the end.
And I still can't explain it to this day.
And I talk about it and it's like, well, that was so weird.
And I try and rationalize it.
And I know I wasn't asleep.
You know, obviously it's a possibility that it could be some sort of lucid dream.
But because of the impact that it had on me and the fact that it got me through some really, really tough times, I, you know, I put a lot of significance in it.
And this face that you saw on the wall, and very hard to recall precisely, I guess, something that you experienced aged five, but was it something familiar or was it very unfamiliar?
Very unfamiliar.
It was human or human looking.
It was, she was pretty.
It was There was a lot of light glowing from her.
It was a beautiful experience, I just have to say.
And it just left a lasting impression on me, really.
Nothing like that since?
No shadow people, anything like that?
No, nothing kind of sinister or like that.
There have been weird things that have happened to me as well.
One of them music related more recently, what you would say was a synchronicity moment, really.
You know, my wife and my family, we go on holiday a lot to a place in Suffolk called Kessingland.
It's a small fishing village.
Not many people know of it, but we go there all the time because it's really quiet.
We love it.
At the time, I had some music out there and I was listening to the radio at the time and it was Steve Lamack on BBC Six Music.
And he just had a caller in from Kessingland.
I was like, oh, that's weird.
I'm in Kessingland.
Okay, that's a bit of a coincidence.
I don't know that many people in Kessingland.
I've got to say, I thought I knew everywhere because I'd been on the radio everywhere.
Until you mentioned it, I'd never heard of it.
But then it got even weirder.
The next song that he played was The Pocket Gods and a song called Perfect Blue.
I was like, whoa, that is seriously crazy.
I think a lot of these things happen and we can't explain why they happen.
But they do.
I can be reading or thinking about or maybe talking on WhatsApp with my sister and mention something.
And then the next thing I'll turn the radio on and that very thing or that specific name, it happened only yesterday.
That specific name will be mentioned immediately.
Now, I don't know what that says.
And I guess you've given a lot of thought to what it might be about the way that things work and there are wheels within wheels.
And, you know, what was that song?
Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning wheel.
The windmills of your mind.
Windmills of my mind, yeah.
So I think all of this works in a very circuitous but connected way.
I do.
And I think it was a sign to me that I'm tuned into something.
I'm on the right path.
And there's something out there.
Like you say, you can't explain it.
Maybe you call it the ether, the psychic internet, people have called it.
And that sometimes you're allowed access to it.
And people with psychic powers, I guess, mediumship, are the ones that can have access a bit easier than we can.
But I think we've all got it.
And there are signs there for us all.
If we look for them and be still sometimes and listen for them, then we can connect to it.
Have you ever used this in your music?
And I'm saying this for a reason.
You know, sometimes I'm going to be in a situation professionally.
It's happened a lot, where I've wanted something to work that by rights shouldn't work.
I was always setting myself big tasks at Capitol Radio, you know, bulletins that were, news bulletins that were crammed with little pieces of audio in them and mixed in with music.
And it was all done live in front of a huge, ridiculously big audience.
It was, if I think about it now, utterly terrifying.
And sometimes I would look up and say, please make this work.
And invariably, not always, I'd be taught a lesson sometimes.
It would all go horribly wrong.
Invariably, it did work.
And most recently, when the news about David Grush came out, those revelations, I wanted to do something on the podcast really quickly, within like an hour of it breaking.
So I started phoning people up and I kept saying, please answer.
And I got to the man behind the story, which was Ralph Blumenthal, which he wrote with Leslie Kane for the debrief.
And I dialed Ralph Blumenthal's number and I looked up and I said, please answer.
He answered.
And he was busy and he realized it was me.
And I'd had him on the TV a little bit before.
And he was so busy, I thought he was going to say no.
But the thing that you do, if you're a journalist, you're working in radio.
Sorry, I'm struggling with my throat a bit here.
But if you're working with the radio, you're doing this.
The way to get somebody to speak to you is to call them from the place where you're going to record them.
So you can just, you know, they'll say, when do you want me to do this?
I can't do it now.
I said, I can do it right now with Ralph.
And he said, okay.
So I hit the button and recorded him immediately.
And, you know, if you're ever hoping to go into journalism, not that I would recommend that these days as a way of making a living, then be prepared like that and you will get the results.
So what I'm saying is I think synchronicities of these kind happen to all of us and particularly people like you who perform.
Yeah, definitely.
I've definitely used it.
I mean, I've used it creatively in terms of I can pick up a guitar and write a song.
I mean, I take it for granted now that, you know, my wife tells me, people tell me, wow, that's an amazing gift you've got.
And I feel like it's coming from somewhere else.
I'm not sounding too woo-woo here, but literally is, you know, I sat down and recorded an album of 1,000 songs.
You know, it's got the Guinness World Record, a number one for most songs on an album.
And I didn't have any trouble.
I had trouble technically with the album uploading it and things like that.
But creatively, I didn't have any trouble.
And it just flowed from somewhere.
So yeah, I think I am using whatever is out there.
I mean, the other aspect of this as well, I've used this in turning my life around, really.
I had some quite rough times in 2019.
I was in a bad place.
I was drinking too much.
I got into a lot of debts, had mental health problems.
And, you know, cut long story short, I had a failed, luckily, suicide attempt.
My life was rock problem.
I hid a lot of stuff from my wife in terms of debt that I owed.
But after that date, I made a decision to change, basically, to use the power of my mind, basically, possibly thinking the law of attraction, whatever you want to call it, to attract what I wanted, not what I didn't want.
So I kind of put a line under the past, my childhood, which kind of held me back a lot.
And then, because that led to a lot of secrets and lies, which was not good.
So I made a conscious effort to use the law of attraction, the power of the mind, to attract what I wanted.
And it massively worked for me.
I cleared all our debt, had it written off, I paid it off, started to make some money from music, which, you know, after 25 years of trying to, it actually turned it around.
And, you know, so much so that, you know, I'm now doing it full time.
So I do believe it is possible to use this power in a positive way.
And, you know, and that's what I'm trying to spread on my TV show and doing interviews and through my music is that, you know, it's possible for all of us to change our lives in a positive way.
Well, I'm inclined to believe that.
You know, if I put my mind to it and you've got to want whatever it is that you're aiming for to the exclusion of anything else, you haven't got to let any other thoughts in.
You mustn't dwell on it all the time.
You know, sometimes it will come to you.
Now, listen, I knew that you had some really rough times back then.
But the one thing that struck me is that you were still working.
You were still producing music at that time, I think.
I was, yeah.
And I made a film about it as well.
I'm always working.
I have this massive energy, I guess, and I'm always creating.
But I think now I'm more focused on, you know, not wasting my time really doing things that I don't really want to be doing.
I kind of follow my passion, which I think is very important.
And also, it's all right having these things, focusing on what you really want and using your mind.
But I think you have to listen and take action.
And sometimes you'll get inspired thought.
There's an author called Jack Canfield, who wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul.
And he's great.
He's a motivational speaker, but he's very dance worth.
But he says, you know, sometimes you will get these inspired thoughts.
It's like the universe telling you to take some action.
If you take this action, it will be beneficial to you or to others.
So I'm very much a believer of that.
And that's what I'm doing now with, you know, creating my music, my films and things like that.
I have enormous respect for everything that you've done like that.
I mean, did you buy like a guidebook?
I mean, look, I'm not here to advise people to do that kind of thing.
But if it works for them and they've researched it themselves, then, you know, fair enough, fair play.
Did you buy a book like there are loads of how to turn your life around books, you know, back 20 years ago?
Yeah.
I found a DVD in my garage the other day.
I've been trying to have a huge clear out.
Yeah.
And I found The Secret.
Remember The Secret?
Yeah, that's where it started from, really.
I was watching that.
But then I led on to Jack Canfield because a lot of the secret I didn't get at first.
I thought it was a bit woo-woo.
It was a bit.
But then that guy, Jack Canfield, the author, he was very down to work.
Said, yeah, this stuff exists.
And this is how it worked for me.
And basically, chicken soup for the soul sold 10 million copies or something.
And he used it, put these laws into practice, and it worked for him.
But I liked him because he said, you know, you can't just sit back and think about what you want.
You have to take action as well.
So I took that on board.
And then also it all goes back to kind of there's a book by an author called Wallace Wattles.
It's called The Science of Getting Rich, which is quite ironic because he was actually a socialist.
I need to be reading this, though.
But that was the essence of where the secret came from was this book.
And he's saying this thing out there called the formless substance.
I know people called it the ether, the mental internet.
It's the same sort of thing that psychics are talking about.
And it all ties in, I think, with what's happening at the moment with quantum physics and studies of the brain and the fact that consciousness may not be in the brain, the fact that consciousness could be outside the brain somewhere.
And there's more and more evidence that's leading towards this.
And I think that's a really interesting time.
And I guess my next grand theory is to try and tie all of this together somehow.
And the fact that we've got UFO disclosure coming, which you've been talking about a lot.
Although they say it is, but we'll find out.
There are more hearings this coming week.
We'll see what happens.
But I think we'll find out eventually there is some sort of consciousness psychic element to UAPs.
And the people that have experienced contact with them, I've spoken to a few, this is what they say.
There is some sort of psychic element to it.
Any stories that you can recount here?
Yeah, I mean, there's a chap I've interviewed recently for the God vs.
Aliens film.
It's called Tony Topping.
And he claims to be a UFO contactee since he was a child.
And, you know, he says that, you know, they communicate with him mentally.
They basically take him into psychic realms, I guess, is what you call them.
And it's not just a physical nuts and bolts spaceship, for want of a better word.
It's in another reality, another dimension, if you want to say.
And, you know, I think it's also interesting that at the moment, you've got the Large Hadron Collider, and it's just about to find evidence of these different dimensions, realities, universes.
So I think we're in really interesting times.
There is a tremendous amount going on now.
There is, yeah.
Absolutely true.
In terms of being a performer, though, just very quickly, before we talk about your Aliens versus Gods film, that was the purpose of this conversation really more than anything else.
But it did seem to me, and you know that obviously because we'd had this connection, periodically you would email me and say, would you record this for me for my album or whatever?
So I watched your career and followed it.
And it seemed to me that you were kind of known.
Certainly in the John Peel time, you know, you had a cult following, but it was not limited, but it was confined, confined to a group of people who knew about you.
Most other people hadn't heard about you, but there was a group of people who had.
But all of a sudden, around that time when you went through all of that stuff, and you say that you made a decision to change your life, you started winning awards, you started getting real media attention.
Something dramatically switched, didn't it?
It did.
And this is down to the law of attraction to Jack Canfield saying, act on inspired thought.
Because basically, most of my success as a musician has come through protesting against, well, I say protests as a rubbish word, but campaigning for better royalties from music streaming.
Okay, because I read an article in the Independent, basically from an American music professor called Mike Erico.
And he was saying, why are songwriters today still writing three minute pop songs?
The reason why the pop song is three minutes is because of the length of seven inch vinyl on one side.
He said, artists today should be, you know, recording 30 second songs because that's when streaming services such as Spotify Apple Music, et cetera, pay out a royalty.
And as they don't pay very much, why write longer songs?
And I thought that was my kind of Eureka moment.
I think that's an amazing idea.
I'm just going to write 30 second songs.
I'm going to do one album with 100 songs, all 30 seconds long, to create an impact.
And that was my inspired thought.
And most people would get these thoughts and think, that's just too crazy.
Why would you do that?
Why would anyone put 100 songs or 30 seconds long on one album?
It's just crazy.
But I did that.
And, you know, and it got me on BBC World News, BBC 5 Live, all around the world, Wall Street Journal and Guinness World Record.
But more importantly, got the issue out there that, you know, I ended up further down the line having meetings with the head of Spotify talking about these issues.
And, you know, I made a film about it.
So, yeah, it's having that inspired thought and not being scared of it and running with it.
And that's been the key to improving my life, I think.
I don't want to pry, but have you ever not been tempted?
That's wrong.
But have you ever slid back a little or once the corner was turned, it was turned?
Yeah, no.
I mean, I've had low moments, but I made a conscious effort.
I'm teetotal now for four years.
I spend a lot of time working on myself in terms of my mind and getting, you know, healing and things like that.
So, yeah, I mean, it is, you do have some moments which are a bit scary.
But my wife's been a great support.
I've got good people around me.
You know, I've got a family to support, which obviously keeps me going.
But it is amazing how that corner turned for you and the fact that you started to get all of that attention.
And I started seeing, this is Mark.
This is Mark whose album I appeared on.
And all of this has happened to him.
So I don't doubt these things can happen if you are single-minded about them.
And I know some people may say, that's all rubbish.
That's not true.
It's mind over matter.
Well, in a way, it is, actually, to be honest.
But I'm here to tell you, and I'm on your side.
I'm here to tell you that in my life, I have been one way or another to hell and back.
And if you work in the media, it may appear to be all smiles through what you hear or what you see.
But there's an awful lot of garbage that goes on in the background.
You have to deal sometimes, not always, though some marvelous, wonderful, inspirational people, but you also have to deal with the other sort.
And it can really take a toll out of a nice person.
And I'm not just speaking for me here.
And so you have to be focused and you have to make a decision that I want to go on this particular path.
Something up there is going to take me there.
And, you know, I'm a good person.
I'll be okay.
So look, long story short, I'm with you on all of that.
Yeah, I mean, it's important thing.
I mean, with Nub, which is my record label, TV show, et cetera, we're a small team.
There's me, my business partner, Guy, and my wife.
But we have a motto.
I won't say the actual words on your show because I don't want to swear, but it's an idiot-free zone.
We only want to work with people that are on the same frequency, the same level as we are, that want to put something good out into the world.
I mean, that's what we do.
I mean, I guess if someone big came in like Netflix and wanted to buy us out, we'd have to think about it.
But we want to keep it, I don't know if not keep it real sounds a bit cliched, but we just want to work with people that we like.
I guess that's the end of it.
Well, I think we all would aspire to that in our lives, Mark.
Now, this documentary, Aliens versus Gods, is very much a hot-button thing at the moment.
It's very much on the money at this time, because if we are heading towards disclosure, and as I record this, going to be some more hearings 26th of July, it seems to be reaching some kind of critical mass.
I've got to say that I'm hopeful but skeptical about whether we will hear anything.
But we might.
This could be it.
There could be revelations.
If Chuck Schumer has his way, we could learn what's been hidden for all of these decades, the world's worst kept secret.
However, I don't think many people are given much thought to what we do once that information is out there, because from that moment, nothing is going to be the same.
And government, number one, religion, number two, will have to make some pretty quick decisions.
So is that what this documentary is all about?
Yeah, that's kind of what I wanted to do, because it would have a massive social impact if we had evidence of disclosure, first contacts.
How would it affect society as a whole?
How would it affect the world's religions?
And this is what I wanted to explore in this film.
Because, you know, I think we need to prepare ourselves that, as you say, there's more and more evidence that we may get the truth, which is what everyone's trying to aim for at the moment.
And that truth would just turn people's lives upside down, which is possibly One of the reasons why it has been kept from us.
So I just wanted to make this film just to look at the world's main religions and see how possibly they would cope.
Because there is evidence that, especially the Christian church, has gone through all these big paradigm shifts already in terms of we had Copernicus, Galileo, where Earth is no longer center of the universe.
And then we've got evolution, where humans are no longer center of our planet.
And the church has dealt with these things and managed to survive.
So I wonder if the world's main religions would survive such a massive impact as we are not being alone in this universe.
Your documentary includes a man of the cloth.
It does, yeah.
It's a friend of mine, actually, Reverend Daniel Thompson.
He speaks very eloquently about it.
But, you know, he says people's minds will be blown.
You know, he deals with parishioners on a daily basis.
I mean, luckily, Daniel has an open mind.
He's one of the few priests that do talk about this.
And, you know, I thought about it as well.
It would have a profound impact.
But, you know, he doesn't think Christianity is averse to the idea of there being other sentient life that could be part of God's creation as well.
It's just this different way of looking at things.
And of course, the previous Pope from the Vatican referred to loving your brother, I think it was, and also hinting that your brother might be a cosmic brother.
So maybe, I mean, we know that the Vatican has certain secrets, and who knows what those secrets might be.
We also know that the Vatican has not one but two observatories for a reason I would suspect.
So religion has been aware of this issue, but your documentary confronts it.
You had a man of the cloth, a friend of yours.
What did he tell you that he would on the day after the headline appears?
And the headline will say, we are not alone, in great big bold letters.
You'll see that headline everywhere.
Say it appears on a Saturday.
What does he go into the pulpit on Sunday and say?
That's a pretty good question.
Don't panic.
Well, exactly.
I mean, he would reinterpret the Bible, you know, as Jesus.
I mean, it is complicated because Jesus came to save us, you know, died on the cross.
But then if there's other aliens coming to us, did he save those aliens?
Do those aliens have their own?
And this is one thing we discussed as well.
Do they have their own beliefs, belief systems, gods, goddesses, whatever?
And would they impose them on us?
And he's worried about that colonial aspect that, you know, we as Christians went out to so-called primitive cultures, impose Christianity on them.
Would this be a reverse with the aliens?
In a very controversial period, exactly.
And we would get attacked by most of our own medicine.
Absolutely.
You know, maybe he shouldn't have done that.
But the fact is.
And would his church fight back if the aliens came here and they were propounding something that is not part of his belief system?
Is the plan to counter it or just to say we're going to take it on board and reinterpret what we know?
I think that's it.
I don't think you can fight it.
And I think you talked about that, that we'd just be reinterpreting what God means, what Jesus is in the place of things and how the aliens would fit into it.
Like you said, there could be our cosmic brothers and sisters.
We could be sharing the same God.
That's a possibility.
I mean, these are just crazy things to be talking about.
Or indeed, they may come here, and I don't want to appear to be in any way irreligious because I have time for all people and all faiths and all things.
And my life has been spent around the world meeting people and understanding what they're about.
But the aliens might come here and say everything you believed up to now is wrong.
Absolutely.
And that's one of the worries, I guess, for religions.
Here's the evidence.
There is no God.
There is no afterlife.
This is how it is.
And maybe that would just wipe out all sorts of religion.
But I guess on the other hand, it's a common human trait is the need, the want to believe in something bigger than ourselves, a creator, something that created the universe.
This is a universal feeling that we have inside that we've, you know, I guess we've evolved with.
So where does that come from?
That wouldn't just go away.
I think we would just find a different way of dealing with it, I think, and interpreting it.
I mean, these are just profound conversations that will need to be had at some stage.
Does your documentary address cave paintings that ancients have left there that appear to depict beings that are not like us?
They're very tall.
They have great big eyes or very long arms or very long fingers and only four of them, not five of them, or whatever it might be.
Do you address that in the film?
We do, yeah.
We do go and look at the evidence, like you say, in cave paintings, but also in the written texts in the Torah, in the Bible, they could be reinterpreted as evidence of extraterrestrial visitations.
I mean, the angels coming down could be interpreted as ETs.
I know this goes in the ancient astronaut theory and all that, Eric von Daniken.
But there's some very strange things, especially in the Old Testament and the Torah.
There's Ezekiel seeing a wheel within a wheel and shining, gleaming metal.
I mean, that's in the film.
That could be interpreted as some sort of UFO.
So there is a bit of evidence there.
And also, right on our doorstep in London, if you go in the National Gallery, there's a really, really weird painting called the Annunciation, medieval picture of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary.
There's what looks like a spaceship sending down a beam to the Virgin Mary.
I mean, it Could also be said to be a cloud or to be God, but it looks a bit like a UFO and it's sending down this beam to the Virgin Mary.
I mean, that's just crazy.
And once again, not necessarily talking about that representation, but thinking back even further back in time.
Once again, we're starting to realize that the ancients knew more and were more connected than we gave them credit for.
Definitely.
I mean, yeah, I think there's a lot of history lost, this ancient civilizations, possibly, that we know nothing about.
I mean, Graeme Hancock alludes to this as well.
And there's more and more evidence that's been found that, you know, life is older than we think.
Our civilizations are older than we think.
I mean, one of the theories now with, you know, disclosure coming is that these entities, whatever they are, they're already here.
They're not from outer space.
They're already on this planet, either hiding away at the bottom of the ocean or living side by side in some sort of different reality.
And we just can't see them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's a possibility.
So, you know, then we're into the interesting area that these beings could be the original occupants of the planet and we may just be hybrids.
Who knows?
People you spoke with for this included people like our mutual friend Nick Pope and Seth Szostak from SETI came on there.
Let's talk about what they had to say.
Nick Pope came up with an interesting thing.
Certainly in the trailer that I saw, he said, look, these beings may appear here and they may believe in something.
We have our beliefs here, various of them.
They may believe in something that we will find completely outlandish, totally out there.
Absolutely.
And that's one of the worries, I guess, because they would be in a position to impose these crazy beliefs on us.
The fact that they're probably far more advanced than us.
So yeah, we're in that situation where, okay, we will have to believe these crazy things that they're coming with, because that's probably what would happen if they had those beliefs.
So yeah, it's a bit far out.
But I also have to say, we had Seth Szostak from SETI, chief astronomer.
And just to have a bit of a balance, because we were talking earlier about evidence of possible visitations that we've already had.
I mean, but he quite adamantly says there's no, you know, there's no reliable evidence that we have been visited.
So we just wanted to have that balance on, because obviously there's a lot of outlandish things out there.
But so I also it's good to have balance in anything you're doing.
And Seth, you know, obviously his mission is to find this extraterrestrial intelligence.
That's what SETI does.
And he's on a mission to find that.
You know, and he's got his infamous bet that he will buy anyone a cup of coffee if he doesn't find extraterrestrial life by the year 2035, I think it is.
So yeah, interesting.
Well, I think I haven't checked the current bookies odds, bookmakers' odds on this, but I think they're probably very much in favor of us making some kind of discovery.
It's just a huge question of how we handle it.
So finally, in the documentary then, Mark, did you discover, did you get a sense from the people that you talked with about whether we're having those discussions now?
Because it's pretty late in the day to begin to have them.
I think so, yeah, especially the Vatican's already preparing for this, this evidence that they've got Monsignor appointed to deal with this issue and to prepare the Catholic flock to deal with, you know, the fact that we might not be alone in the universe.
So that's happening.
We've got evidence of that.
But also, it gets a bit murky when you go into the US government and what's happening there.
And, you know, we had an author on called Brian Allen who was stating that this secret organization that's been controlling the agenda since the 50s, and it's not Majestic 12, which is quite popular in UFO culture, but it's an organization called the Collins Elite.
Nick Redfern, who you know, has also uncovered this.
And they're the ones that have been kind of covering this up, so he states.
And that they've been investigating the psychic use of these extraterrestrials powers, because they've got these, allegedly, these down spacecraft.
And there's some sort of consciousness, psychic element to how they operate.
And obviously the US government's quite keen to look into that, reverse engineer it, to use as a possible weapon, I guess.
But as we speak at the moment, the Defense Department in the United States, the Pentagon, put out a statement after David Grush spoke a day or two after saying there is no, at the moment, verifiable evidence.
But basically, if you've got some verifiable evidence, bring it on.
Well, this is why it's getting interesting, isn't it, to see who comes forward and what evidence they can produce.
But it does get murky, as you probably know, with the situation with the U.S. military, because a lot of it is farmed out to private contractors, which are immune to freedom of information requests.
So, you know, you've got your black budget, so to speak.
Well, indeed, but they may be forced to divulge what they know by changes in the law.
Sorry, my voice is going again.
No, no, let's hope so.
Yeah, I mean, that's what we want.
We want the truth to come out.
And I know you've been speaking a lot with Tim Burchett, the US Congress.
You know, Finn, disclose the truth, really, because I think it's about time.
My take on this, and having done this film, is that it's not just a physical thing.
This is my opinion purely.
I think there's some sort of psychic mental consciousness element to this phenomena.
And that's the thing that the US government might know.
And that's the thing that would be the most scary.
Because it would be just so scary for the general population to realize that there's something out there.
Okay.
They can deal with it.
It could be physical, but if it's in some sort of woo-woo mystical psychological place, it all gets a bit weird and a bit strange and difficult to explain and comprehend.
That's just my interpretation of it.
So the documentary is called Aliens versus Gods.
What do you think is the single most interesting thing to come out of it?
The fact is that, yeah, first contact disclosure, I think is coming pretty soon.
And that is going to have a profound impact on the way church, religion, whatever you are, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be dealt with a major shock and blow.
And it's how these organizations have, you know, kind of ruled their faith for thousands of years, how they react and adapt.
And I think there's evidence, especially with the Catholic Church, that they're already preparing for this, which maybe they know more than we know.
I think you've got a new book coming out, too, called Searching for the Divine.
Yeah, I mean, this is what I alluded to earlier.
This is about trying to tie all these things together, consciousness, the law of attraction, the mental internet, psychic powers, UFOs, the paranormal, quantum physics, and how basically the standard model of physics we have at the moment just can't interpret it what is happening with this strange phenomena.
And this searching for the divine is aiming to bring all this together in some sort of unified theory.
So I'll be talking with quantum physicists to religious leaders to people who've had paranormal experiences and trying to draw some conclusions to it all.
I'm starting to think that there may well be a common thread within all of these things.
And we weren't thinking this way 10 years ago.
I don't even think we were thinking this way five years ago.
But that is how it's beginning in ways that I don't understand to look.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, so we have this conversation in five years' time.
Where will we be?
Maybe we'll be having this conversation psychically via the mental internet.
And musically, who knows?
Musically, where are you at?
Are you still doing music?
Yeah, I am.
I did an album last year.
I don't know if you heard about it.
It's called Vegetal Digital.
I did one copy only on vinyl.
And it's on sale at our local record shop in St Albans for £1 million.
Okay, one copy for a million pounds.
Anybody interested?
We've had a few.
I mean, the idea is not for me to get rich.
That would be nice.
But we would use the money to start our own ethical streaming service where we would pay artists a fair amount.
So, of course, we've been campaigning for such a long time for fair royalties from streaming that we wanted to do something positive, not just moan about how bad it is.
Okay, we had this money.
We could start our own little streaming service up and this is how it would work and how we would be able to pay artists fairly.
Problem is, and I'm with you, the problem is that the vested interests who control everything are the people who've got the money and they're not going to invest in you.
Possibly.
Yeah, I mean, that's it.
But what we want to do is try and, you know, start some positive change.
I think, you know, a million pounds is not a lot of money when it comes to starting up a streaming company.
What we were thinking is it would just be a positive start and maybe others would come on board later and think, okay, we need to move to a more ethical system.
Because I don't want to get too much into music, but the music streaming model is broken in terms of nurturing the new talent coming through.
It's okay for established artists that are getting millions and millions of streams every week.
It's where the new talent of tomorrow and that's my concern.
And finally, what about AI?
AI is going to affect the industry that I've worked in all of my life.
It's all going to change.
There were some concerns expressed a couple of weeks ago about music and protections being brought in to stop people's voices and work being ripped off by AI, potentially even AI starting to create its own songs and material.
What do you feel about that?
Yeah, I mean, I've been delving into this murky world of AI as well.
I actually did two albums a few months ago, actually.
One was created by the band in the studio, and the other was the same songs created by AI, asking fans which ones they preferred.
Obviously, they preferred the human one because AI is not at the level where it can have the creative process.
You know, the AI can't get the blues, be down one day and write a song about it.
AI is not going to throw a TV out of a hotel window.
AI is not going to have that rock and roll mentality.
That's where I've come to with AI at the moment.
It's a useful tool and you've got great musicians like Peter Gabriel seeing it that way as well.
You can use it as a tool.
But in terms of being able to create its own music, decent music, it can't.
It can go on the internet and plagiarize other people's music and mix it up a bit.
But it's never going to have that spark of creativity, which I think comes from the mental internet, the psychic consciousness.
AI is never going to have access to that.
We hope.
And somebody, I think, did some research published this week.
I'm going to talk about it on my TV show.
Just basically saying that AI is getting dumber because it's feeding in a way off itself.
And so it's getting more and more dumb.
In other words, I think they're trying to say that AI is getting inbred.
And when you have a situation like that, then of course the basic building blocks are undermined or weakened.
So maybe that's going to be the salvation for the human race that AI is not as smart as all that.
Who knows?
Hey, Lou, really good to talk with you, Mark.
The documentary is Aliens versus Gods that we've been talking mainly about here, but also about a lot of other things.
Where do you get it?
Okay, it's going to have its premiere on Sky Channel AOZAT.
That's on the 10th of August at midnight.
And it'll be online as well at AOZAT, A-Y-O-Z-A-T.com.
And then it'll be going on most streaming services worldwide after that.
10th of August is when it's on then.
AOZAT is what you've got to look for.
Where's that name from?
AOZAT?
It's the owner of ASAT.
It's a small company, and it's the initials of each of his children.
So that's where the name comes from.
That's a good enough reason to name it that way.
A pleasure to speak with you after all these years, Mark.
And thank you very much for all of the emails and all of the text that you send me during my radio and TV shows.
And, you know, let's hope that the next year is great for you.
Absolutely.
You too, Howard.
Hope it's great for you.
Made it.
Mark Christopher Lee Ver from The Pocket Gods on his various works, including his new documentary, Aliens vs.
Gods.
Definitely recommended.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
I'm going to work on getting my voice back now.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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