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Oct. 15, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
43:17
Edition 763 - Can A Mongoose Talk?

Two guests from a recent radio show - Nick Pope with the latest on the UAP debate in Washington...And writer-director Adam Sigal on the true story of a family on the Isle of Man who claimed they had a talking mongoose and involved famous paranormal investigator Nandor Fodor- A new movie has been made about this tantalising tale - starring Minnie Driver and Simon Pegg.

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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.
Hope that everything is okay with you.
Thank you for the communications that keep coming in.
Reminding you, don't forget to check in with my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
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Follow the link there, and you can send me an email directly.
And if your email requires a reply, just put in the subject line response or reply required, something that alerts me to it.
But please know that I get to see and read and appreciate all of the emails.
And in the words of the great art bell, if you can keep your emails, if you're telling me stories to maybe two or three paragraphs, it just makes it easier for me.
At the moment, I'm running round and round and round like a man demented with the cruise to get ready for.
I mean, it's going to be a lot of hard work, but it's going to be fun.
And also podcasts and radio shows and various things.
And then sorting out my domestic situation.
My apartment, which continues to be, I think, probably the greatest worry in my life.
Can you believe that?
What else?
I think I've said hello.
And thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work.
Yes, I did.
And thank you to you for all of the emails that you send in.
So, two things on this edition of The Unexplained, both from my radio show, both actually done here because I'm now doing the radio show.
And sometimes I'll be doing it from my home.
But the first one is Nick Pope.
An update on the UAP and disclosure situation, if disclosure is coming.
Basically asking him what does he think is going on and he will tell you.
And the second thing is a man called Adam Seagal, who is the writer and director of a new movie about a really weird story from the Isle of Man.
Now, the Isle of Man is a little sort of semi-independent territory off the northwest of England, so it wasn't very far from where I grew up in Liverpool.
It has its own government, Tin Walled, and its own parliamentarians, its own equivalent of MPs or Congresspeople.
It passes its own laws, and it is called, I believe the phrase is a crown dependency.
So it's an independent place where people think independently, and it's rather lovely, too.
And even though it's quite, you know, quite north, you know, it's closer to Scotland than it is to the south of England, it gets, because of the way, I believe, the way the sea currents work, it actually has milder weather than it should for its latitude.
It's a remarkable place.
You know, I love the Isle of Man, and I used to listen to its radio station, Manx Radio, all the time when I was a kid.
So this story goes back to the 1930s about a well-to-do farming family who were convinced and wanted to convince everybody else that they had a talking mongoose called Jeff.
This is a true story, and a new movie, remarkable new movie, lovely new movie has been made about this.
So we'll be hearing that as the second item, Adam Segal, the man who wrote it and is heavily involved in it, about not only Jeff the talking mongoose, but the involvement of Harry Price, famous British paranormal investigator, but also a man who did something similar in the United States called Nandor Fodor.
So we'll hear about that as the second item here.
All right, let's get to it then.
Let's get to item number one, talking about what is happening with the possibility of disclosure.
This is former MOD UFO man and now independent expert, Nick Pope.
As far as you know, and you have your ear to the ground and you know all the principal players, what is happening at the moment?
Because I do think that some people, and certainly the ones who email me, are disappointed they're not getting what they thought they would get.
Sure.
It is confusing.
What's going on right now is that various people in Congress, obviously the congressional representatives, but oftentimes their staffers, are working to try and validate the claims that David Grush has made and claims that other whistleblowers who have come forward already and are in the process of coming forward are making.
But it's confusing because, as I think we've discussed before, when we talk about Congress, and you know, I don't know, people in the U.S. have visibility of this, but not necessarily other people watching and listening around the world.
In Congress, there are two parts.
There's the Senate and the House, and then within that, there are multiple committees who do have overlapping jurisdiction here.
The Armed Services Committees, the Intelligence Committees, and the Oversight Committees.
So there's a lot going on, but most of what's going on right now is behind the scenes as they're trying to untangle all this.
Right.
The one that we were told to look out for was the Intelligence Committee.
And I seem to darkly remember that somebody back in July was hinting, that might be in September.
Well, this is October.
When might that be?
Well, you know, I think obviously a number of factors have delayed this, as is often the case in government.
Delay is the watchword.
Obviously, the horrendous terror attacks on Israel are just the latest factor here.
But obviously, we're in a very acrimonious political situation in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election in the U.S. That has a bearing too.
And, you know, frankly, I'll be honest with you, it's a bit of a mess right now.
And I do understand the people who are saying, hey, you know, we were just as we thought it was all coming to a head, it's all gone quiet.
Okay.
Well, certainly the indication given by the Department of Defense, the Defense Department, when they put out a statement straight after David Grush came forward, was that whistleblowers and others who have information need to be perfectly okay and feel perfectly free about coming forward.
You said whistleblowers have been coming forward.
Do you have any sense, Nick, as to where they might have been coming from, what sectors they might have been in?
Well, I think it's predominantly ex-military and ex-intelligence community personnel.
I guess all that comes under the umbrella of government in one sense.
But these people, of course, all of them have to be vetted.
All of them, I mean, first of all, are they who they say they are?
Did they serve in the agencies where they say they served?
And every time you're dealing with people who've been involved in highly classified programs, particularly if you're going back a few years, it's very difficult for the people sitting there now, say as staffers in Congress, to do that vetting process.
Arrow can help with that, the DOD unit with the lead, but as we've discussed again, there is some distrust of Arrow with some of these people.
One concrete date that I can give you is October 19th.
And this is tangentially relevant.
That's the next NASA update.
In fact, it's the date that the final report of the independent UAP Task Force will drop.
That will be televised.
Certainly it will be live streamed on YouTube and elsewhere.
So we're just days away from that.
That's perhaps the next tangible event that's going to drop.
And the link will be all over UFO Twitter and elsewhere in the run-up to that.
I'll put it out at NickPope M-O-D.
Well, that will certainly be something to look forward to, and I will be looking forward to that.
As indeed everybody listening to this will be, no doubt.
I got a link to a documentary, a YouTube documentary today.
It doesn't matter who necessarily did this thing, but the person in the documentary was claiming that David Grush on a documentary that is just out, apparently.
I don't know whether you've seen any documentaries featuring him or quoting him.
But David Grush, among the things that he said to have said, is that 2024 quotes might get wild.
I don't know if that's a quote that you're familiar with, but do you know anything about that?
Well, yeah, I recognize that quote.
I'm not 100% sure of the exact context.
I mean, I think it's a safe bet.
I mean, obviously, with all these whistleblowers coming forward, all it takes is one more to either validate David Grush in some way or to come up with some related testimony.
And that falls, to my mind, under the definition of getting wild.
And we know, actually, the figures are somewhere between 30 and 50 whistleblowers in the process of coming forward.
When Sean Kirkpatrick, who heads up Arrow, testified months ago last about this, he said nearly two dozen.
And of course, times have moved on since then.
So, yeah, things will get wild.
I've had a text in here from Jason in Birmingham, and he says just this one line, but I think I can understand what he's asking.
Ask Nick about Dr. Stephen Greer.
Now, we both know Dr. Stephen Greer.
He is a man who has been quite public in certain targeted locations, certain places where he has appeared in the last few months.
Do you think that we can expect something from the likes of Dr. Stephen Greer, Nick?
Well, he held his own kind of whistleblower event a month or two ago.
In fact, it was rather unfortunate timing for him because I think it dropped the day after or the week after David Grush had come out.
So it was somewhat overshadowed by all that.
I mean, he claims to have been working with a lot of whistleblowers.
So he's always someone to watch.
I should say, though, it's no secret that he's publicly accused Christopher Mellon, Luis Elizondo, myself, Leslie Kane, and a few others of still secretly working for the deep state and pushing a threat narrative in the media.
So take that for what it's worth.
Are you working for the deep state, Nick?
You know, my Illuminati paycheck is not what people think it is.
You know, but you can't even joke about it.
You know I'm joking, but you'll be getting texts and emails now.
I know, I know.
I'm ready.
I can take it.
I've been doing this in SOV for long enough.
Last question.
As far as you know from where you are in America, but you've still got contacts here, what is the UK doing about all of this?
Because this has been big, and if there are 40 whistleblowers in the United States, there must be people willing to come forward here.
What are we doing?
Not much.
There is pressure, obviously, as there is from time to time, to reopen the MOD's UFO program.
We do know that behind the scenes with the Five Eyes Intelligence Sharing Alliance engaged, that the UK is finally doing something, but publicly, they're just falling back on the same tired old boilerplate, you know, no defense significant sound bites that they've been doing for decades.
Nick Pope, thank you so much for helping me again.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Nick Pope in New York, United States.
So 40 whistleblowers potentially in the boiler, ready to go at some point, maybe.
And we haven't got to give up the faith on this.
You know, those who email me and many people do saying, well, there's nothing happening about this.
I think we're just going to have to wait.
And if this is going to happen, if we are going to edge closer to disclosure, there are lots of things to think about.
One of which I would have liked to have talked about on the show this week, but we couldn't find anyone to talk about it.
We'll try again next week, is the psychological preparedness, right, of the world, of you, of me, for an event that might be akin to disclosure.
You know, if we get a hint or a sniff of it, people may say, oh, we want to know, but be careful what you wish for because you might get it.
And then what do you do?
Interesting.
So we'll see what NASA has to say on the 19th of October.
Nick Pope there.
He will be on this show again.
Now, as promised, the story of the talking mongoose from the Isle of Man, told by the man behind a new movie about that, starring amongst others, Mini Driver.
Jeff the Talking Mongoose is the character, and this is Adam Seagal, the writer-director.
A great British mystery, I would say, and the story that lies behind it, told in a new movie being released at the moment.
The legend of Jeff, the talking mongoose on the Isle of Man, is one of the most popular local tales of the past hundred years.
I'm going to read a little bit from a very good review of it here because I think it sets it all into context before we do anything.
Quote, Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose is a feature film based on a real story, real in the sense that for a while, back in 1931, on the British crown dependency of the Isle of Man, some people claimed that there was a mysterious creature, something like a mongoose, who spoke like a human being.
Some scientists came to investigate.
This movie is less about solving that mystery than the central question of this fake news.
You know, how do we know what we know?
And how is that different from what we believe?
Simon Pegg plays a real-life expert on parapsychology, the Austrian-American Nandor Fodor, with Minnie Driver in the movie as his longtime assistant, Anne.
For now, that is all you need to know, but here's a little bit of the trailer for this.
This is the strangest case I have ever encountered.
A family living in a farmhouse claim a talking mongoose lives in their barn.
Creature's name is Jeff.
Talking mongoose.
The urban family are peculiar.
Did you observe this creature?
No.
No.
I did hear.
We are going to the Isle of Man.
We have almost 20 years of research in this field.
You're ready to say Jeff is the creature here?
Well, because we can't see him, it was a maniac here.
The daughter is a mentalist.
Dr. Photo has a tremendous skepticism indeed.
I know now.
I know, Jeff.
This is an inexplicable farce.
Early state, clear state.
Can you tell him to come out so we can see him?
These people are lying.
I think he exists.
I'm certain.
Just show yourself me.
Please.
Just show me that you're real.
Wow.
And I have to tell you, the trail was absolutely superb.
It's one of the best trailers for a movie I've ever seen.
And I've seen quite a few.
So the movie is out, we understand, on the 20th of October.
Online to us now as Adam Sigal, writer and director of Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose.
Adam, thank you for coming on tonight.
Thank you for having me.
This is an astonishing story, isn't it?
And it's astonishing because I've done a number of pieces with experts on ghosts and stuff like that in the Isle of Man.
And this happened in 1931.
They are still talking about this, aren't they?
They certainly are.
And, you know, when I was coming on, I was listening to the guy before, and he was talking about the pyramids.
And you said we're going in a very different direction.
But it's not.
We know Jeff built the pyramids.
I don't know why you would say it was a transition to something else.
Talk to me about you then and what it is about this story of the talking mongoose, Jeff, on the Isle of Man, that hooked you in.
Yeah, you know, funny enough, you'll be happy to hear.
I first heard about this story on the radio here.
And this was years ago.
This was 10 years ago.
And there was a sports talk radio station that had this little stupid segment that they did.
And it was about like the dead guy birthday of the day.
And they would just talk about some person from history whose birthday it was today, who's no longer around.
And they said, today was the birthday of Dr. Nandor Fodor.
He's called the father of modern parapsychology.
His most famous case involved the legendary talking mongoose of the Isle of Man.
And I kind of said, did I just hear that correctly?
And I started to research it.
And I, you know, this, again, this was a long time ago.
And I, and I would always tell people in meetings and producers and everything, I'm going to write this talking mongoose script one day.
And they looked at me like I was out of my mind, which I was.
But I didn't actually sit down and go, okay, this is it.
This is what I'm going to write until I kind of peripherally experienced a very strange religious adjacent kind of thing with someone in my life who made a really, really difficult decision based on their religion that hurt a lot of people.
And it suddenly clicked to me.
And I said, okay, I can write about this experience that I had via the life of this guy and this talking mongoose.
And obviously the script and the film turned out to be very allegorical, if you will.
But I also tried to stick as much as I could to the facts, which conveniently were so incredibly bizarre that, you know, watching the film, even though it says based on true events, people every day are saying, there's no way this is true.
No, it is.
And that's the astonishing thing about it.
Now, I have to make a confession to you for a very good technical reason.
I have not seen the movie.
I was sent two links to it.
Neither of them worked.
So I've only seen the trailer.
So you're going to have to hold my hand and help me through this one, Adam.
I think we'll get there.
And maybe it's better that I haven't seen the movie so that we can talk about the story.
So bearing that in mind, let's first of all lay out as much as you know about this person who fascinated you and transfixed you so much, Nandor Fodor.
I've seen his name.
I don't know much about him.
Well, there's what's documented about him, and then there's what I kind of embellished about him to serve the sort of subtext that I wanted to tell.
What's known about him and pretty well documented is that Dr. Fodor, he was a disciple of Sigmund Freud, and he was around in a time when, as you obviously will know with that show, when spirituality and mediums and everything was exploding.
It was exploding.
It was, you know, just really like, you know, with Arthur Conan Doyle.
And, you know, there were a lot of just like people who were Really into this.
And he was a part of that wave in a way.
But he took a slightly different approach to it.
And he wasn't necessarily a believer, if you will, in the paranormal.
He believed that any paranormal encounters or whatever were related to, I guess, mental illness, for lack of a better word, and trauma in particular.
So, you know, and this is outlined somewhat in the film, in the opening, honestly, of like, okay, like Joe Blow here sees a ghost of his grandmother in his attic.
Dr. Fodor didn't believe that this was real.
He didn't believe that this entity or spirit or whatever was actually in the attic.
He believed that Joe Blow had experienced some trauma that was causing him to project this and to experience.
So he believed it was real to him, but he didn't believe it was real.
Right.
So he was a scientific skeptic then.
Exactly.
And he's documented as saying he wasn't a skeptic, but he was from the perspective that it's a very subtle and interesting sort of dynamic that I explore a lot in the film of what is real.
You know, like if you're seeing that thing, it is very much real to you.
And so if we establish what that definition is of reality, then it becomes a little bit more of a blurred line.
Like, you know, if you are seeing your dead grandmother in your attic and you're seeing her and it's affecting you to such an extent that it's affecting your life and your decisions and everything, then it is real from that perspective.
Can it be detected by scientific instruments and, you know, that type of thing?
No.
And so, yes, you're right.
He was a scientific skeptic from the perspective that he wasn't Arthur Conan Doyle.
He wasn't one of these guys who believed in the supernatural per se, or that we could communicate with, you know, ghosts and that type of thing.
And what fascinated me about him and the sort of conclusions that I drew with the story were he is documented as having lost his father, and it was a hugely emotional time and impact for him.
And prior to this, he had been kind of your more run-of-the-mill paranormal investigator.
He lost his father and did visit a medium in order to communicate with his father.
And after that, it's kind of when he shifted to sort of this like, like you said, scientific skepticism.
So I sort of drew this, again, sort of conclusion that made a parallel to Houdini, right?
And I actually reference Houdini in the script.
There's a whole section of the film where Houdini is, we actually cover something that happened at the end of Houdini's life, which again, you hosting this show, I assume you know a whole lot about Houdini.
Well, I know that Houdini was fascinated by death.
He did a lot of investigation.
Yeah.
Well, what happened with Houdini, and this was the parallel that I drew to Dr. Fodor.
So what happened with Houdini at the end of it?
It was him going in disguise to these mediums and these public sort of seances and stuff and explaining to the audience how they were being duped.
He would jump on stage and expose these spiritualists because he had previously was obsessed with that same subject of spiritualism and, like you said, death and, you know, communicating with the beyond and all this stuff.
But he was so clever that he could tell that most of these spiritualists were lying and that these were, you know, that they were doing tricks, essentially the same type of stuff that he did.
And so, but the interesting factor for me with the end of Houdini's life that again, this is documented, is Houdini and his wife devised a code word, for lack of a better word, or a phrase or something, that they told no one except each other.
And they said, you know, if one of us passes on, the other should go to a spiritualist and try to communicate with the other one.
And if that spiritualist can give you the code word or phrase or whatever it is, then it's real because they haven't told anyone.
And so allegedly, after Houdini passed, his wife Bess went to a spiritualist and allegedly he knew the code word or the phrase or whatever.
So, you know, it was this bizarre sort of parallel that I drew with Nandor of like, okay, like he is a skeptic, but he's a skeptic because he was traumatized by discovering that something wasn't real.
So I sort of drew this conclusion that he's searching for real.
So he's searching for something that truly can't be explained or that has a supernatural aspect to it, which brings the whole thing to Jeff.
And that whole thing is.
I want to tell the whole story after we've taken commercials here in the way that we do these things on commercial radio.
But lastly, because Nandor Fodor is the pivotal character in all of this, he's not the only character in all of this, we have to say.
There is the family, the Irvings, and there's Harry Price in this, the famous investigator.
But leaving them aside for a second, is Nandor Fodor the kind of character we would like?
Bearing in mind, as I say, for those reasons I haven't seen the movie, I saw the excellent trailer for it.
Will we like him when we see him?
Absolutely.
I think it depends, though.
It depends on your own outlook, because Nandor is a cynical skeptic.
And so depending on your own level of faith and spiritualism, you might find him a little bit annoying, or you might go, oh yeah, I really sympathize with this guy.
So, Adam, we've talked about Nandor Fodor.
Let's talk about how the story of a mongoose that could speak got around the Isle of Man from the family, I think they were quite well-to-do farmers on the Isle of Man, the Irvings, and how that story spread around the Isle of Man and got to the ears of Nandor Fodor.
Yeah, so he heard about it from Dr. Harry Price.
Dr. Harry Price went out there and investigated the mongoose.
And there's a section in the film that is taken pretty much almost verbatim from Dr. Price's journal during his time out there.
And we have to say, just as we, I'm sorry to jump in, just to explain, I don't think there will be many people hearing this in the UK who don't know, but Harry Price was in his era the most famous investigator of ghosts and paranormality that we had.
Absolutely.
Exactly.
Yes, very famous.
And he gives kind of a very tongue-in-cheek account of his time with the Irvings.
And, you know, all of the sort of my favorite line from him is he said the Irvings were the Irving family was kindness personified.
They, you know, gave me everything I needed.
The only thing that they couldn't produce was the mongoose itself, right?
Which kind of is like gives you the sense of the whole thing.
And it's an incredibly bizarre story.
And the strangest thing about it is the motive and why this family who were pretty well to do, like you said, they did fine.
They weren't destitute.
Why they were doing this.
And, you know, hey, look, could it be real?
Absolutely.
Of course, that possibility is explored in the film.
But all of the signs sort of point to it being a hoax, the most glaring of which being that there's no actual documented, you know, sightings or encounters with the mongoose that I guess could be said to be reliable.
And then there's a lot of ancillary factors, like their house was designed in a very strange way where the walls were hollow and they had these sort of like passages in them where you could, it was said, he describes, Dr. Price describes the house as a giant speaking tube where you could lean against a wall in one room and say something in a normal voice and it would echo through the other room.
That's like the whispering gallery of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, if you've never seen it.
You can lean back and whisper and somebody all the way around the other side will hear you.
It's how their house was.
And conveniently, but I'm sure totally coincidentally, the daughter was an adept ventriloquist.
She was noted as being a ventriloquist.
And that aspect obviously is explored in the film.
But what's so odd about this story is that the Irvings went to their graves saying that it was true.
And especially the daughter, she died somewhat relatively recently, I think, and still went to her grave saying that it was true and that Jeff was real.
And, you know, it just, I think that that aspect of it was what I sort of, why I, I guess, postulated that this intrigued Nandor so much, was that the incident itself was obviously ridiculous, you know, a talking mom who's living in the walls of a farmhouse.
But the unexplained aspect of it was the fervency with which this family claimed that this was true and the fact that a lot of people on the Isle of Man bought it into it.
And the Irvings believed it was true to such an extent that they were extremely lictigious.
And anyone who said that it wasn't true or said that they were lying, they took legal action to defend themselves.
I mean, they were very strong in their sort of conviction about this.
And so where I found myself was just saying, why?
Like, like, really, though, why?
And I started to come to a place of like, okay, it was almost like the beginning of social media in a way, or just getting attention for something and sort of like propagating that and having that grow and grow and grow and then enjoying that attention.
Because, again, they weren't like charging people to come up and see the talking mongoose of the Isle of Man.
There was no financial aspect of it or anything like that.
It was purely just them messing with people, which was so odd to me.
And that part of it was quite intrigued me.
Indeed.
And I think you're right.
The parallels with today are, I mean, look, we don't know whether it was, maybe it was real.
Who knows?
They went to their graves saying that it was real.
And admittedly, their daughter was a ventriloquist, which has an interesting pecancy to the tale.
But, you know, the certain fact of the matter is that it speaks to today in that there are people who have a tendency today, aided and fueled by social media and what they see online, to propagate and believe things that are manifestly untrue.
But the problem with that is if you challenge some of these people about that, they will double down on it and dig themselves in even further, lest they look silly.
And that is at the heart of a lot of stuff, I think, maybe, that is going on at the moment in this crazy world of ours.
So do you think that the Irvings and the people around them were perhaps a manifestation of an early form of that in that if you tell the story often enough and you get so invested in it, then you start to absolutely commit to it and you will not have anybody say that can't be true?
Yeah, I go a couple layers deeper with it.
And really what my film is about is the relationship between religion and faith And cynicism and happiness, and how these things relate to each other.
And, you know, with regard to what you said, it's very interesting.
I almost feel like that, in a way, the belief in this thing itself was almost like a cult where you were special because you had encountered this talking mongoose and you were a believer.
And I feel like that is definitely something that has a lot of parallels today with regard to religion and the social aspect of it and the chosen aspect of it, if you will, and the enlightened aspect of it with regard to a lot of religions.
And the sense that because you are a believer in this thing that is not obvious and that is not necessarily in many cases provable by science or logic for that matter, that you are special.
And I think that that aspect played a big part in Jeff and a big part in the sort of reason why people wanted to believe in this thing.
It was like, oh, you've seen Jeff.
You've encountered him.
Oh, cool.
Did anybody see a mongoose?
Did anybody see an actual mongoose?
I don't know if you could see me.
So I don't know if I'm on camera.
This is a regular.
If you do a Google search for photographs of Jeff the mongoose, you will encounter some hilarious images of what looks like a fur hat hanging on a fence.
And I remember when I was first getting Simon to, you know, when we were first talking about the movie and he was doing it and we were talking about the character and stuff, I started sending him pictures and saying, oh my God, look, Jeff is real.
He's proven.
It's a proven thing.
And Simon was dying because it's like a fur sort of hat, it looks like, hang on a stone fence.
So to answer your question, no, there are no documented sightings, you know, documented photographically for sure.
I think people, I think the Irving saw Jeff constantly and claimed to have seen him constantly.
And I think a lot of other people from the Isle of Man claim to have seen Jeff.
They definitely heard him often.
He spoke constantly, you know.
But when he spoke, Adam, I'm sorry, here I am jumping in and we're, you know, we can't see each other and there's a certain amount of digital delay.
That explains that.
When he spoke, what did he say?
Anything profound?
Well, yeah, and that's one of the things that also, I think, led to the mystery going on and becoming as big as it was, because there's a lot of documented incidents of Jeff knowing things, right?
And he knew secrets about people in the town that he could have never known.
So he was clearly flairboyant and was very intelligent.
And he spoke 12 different languages.
And he spoke of ancient times and the ancient pharaohs of Egypt.
And so he spoke about a lot of mysterious things.
And he's quoted as saying many things.
He's quoted as saying that he's the fifth dimension.
He's quoted as saying that he's the Holy Ghost.
He, you know, so he said a lot of weird stuff.
And I think that the, you know, it's kind of funny because if you think about it and kind of break it down and look at what was really happening, a lot of it sort of could have been figured out by, you know, the Irving's just listening to people.
And then, you know, sort of, it's almost, again, like almost as a parallel to me to like modern day psychics and these people who go visit psychics and they're like, you don't understand this person.
They knew they knew this thing.
And I just kind of roll my eyes because I'm like, I feel like if you research someone and you listen to them and you pay attention to their desires and fears and all this kind of stuff, that it wouldn't be that difficult to go, you are going to get a job interview next, you know, and they're like, oh my God, I've been wanting this.
And I feel like that was kind of a similar thing to what Jeff was doing.
Right.
So the Irvings, though, went to their graves defending this, and they became litigious about people who cast aspersions upon them.
Absolutely.
I'm starting to think that if the mongoose, and we have to say that as far as I'm aware, that mongoose are not native to the Isle of Man, so we could ask ourselves the questions, what on earth is a mongoose doing on the Isle of Man?
But leaving that gently aside at the moment, I guess one of the answers to all of this might be the daughter was known to be a ventriloquist.
The mongoose was said to speak 12 languages.
How many languages did the daughter speak?
Was it 12?
Well, no, I don't think so, but you said a very key thing there.
The mongoose was said to speak 12 languages.
I believe that the person who said that the mongoose could speak 12 languages was in fact the mongoose.
And I'm not certain whether he ever actually spoke those languages.
I think he just said that he could speak 12 languages if he needed to.
And there were fur samples that were sent, and that's also very well documented in the movie.
And, you know, they were, some of them were inconclusive.
Others of them were dog hair, you know, and that, like, it's funny because it's one of these bizarre things where there's nothing that ever proved that this was real.
But there's also nothing that ever definitively proved that it was a hoax.
Nobody ever found a stuffed mongoose somewhere in the Irving house.
Or, again, none of the Irvings ever admitted such.
So I think that that aspect of it also is what's caused it to persist and just never quite go in.
Let's be fair then, Adam.
It remains a mystery.
Now, mystery though it is, possibility that it may have been a fantasy, an invention, or maybe a hoax, we don't know, or it may well have been real.
How did Harry Price and more importantly, Nandor Fodor leave it all?
So it's funny.
Again, like, keep in mind, again, that the Prices Were extremely litigious, and they were very fervent when somebody said that they were lying.
So, if you read Dr. Price's notes and Nandor, Nandor has a book called Between Two Worlds, and they don't ever in those say this is nonsense or this was a hoax.
They leave it open to interpretation, but they do it in such a way that anyone would read it and go, oh my God, this is ridiculous.
You know, like the daughter was a ventriloquist and nobody ever saw it and blah, you know, and all these aspects of it.
Like, you know, there's a really funny line that really cracked me up in Dr. Price's journal where he's describing the house and he says, he says, you know, this is where he says, he says, there were these chambers in the walls in the house, which, you know, because of the way they were positioned, you could speak into one of them and hear it in another room, which turned the entire house into a giant speaking tube.
Apparently, Jeff often did this.
And that line just tickled me because obviously, you know, like it's such a like tongue-in-cheek sort of like the house is a giant speaking tube and you can talk into the walls.
Apparently, Jeff was the one who most often did this.
Like you can just sense the sarcasm in his voice.
You know what I mean?
So that that's, I think that was generally the sort of like vibe that they, that there was to these, to the book and the journal and everything like that was leaving it undefined and never saying, my determination is that this is a hoax, but you know, making it so that anyone with a decent measure of logic would read it and go, okay, what's going on here?
It's an astonishing story.
And, you know, we're still talking about it.
It's close on, well, it's nearly 100 years, isn't it?
It's 90 odd years.
Yeah.
And was it easy to recruit the actors, you know, Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver?
Yeah, you know, Simon signed on first, and he loved the script.
And he didn't know the story of Jeff, but he really identified with the character and loved the character.
And he loved the writing and everything, and we got along really well.
And so once Simon came on, you know, obviously he's Simon Pegg, and then the rest of the cast all came together in Minnie and all the lovely sort of, you know, British character actors that I surrounded them with with like Tim Downey and Paul Kay and Gary Beadle and Ruth, Ruth Connell.
You know, it became easier after Simon came in and he was, he loved the story.
Well, I think it is amazing.
Is this a cinematic release?
Yeah, it's cinematic and on demand in the UK simultaneously.
So yes, go see it in the theaters.
I'll be there the 17th to promote it.
And we're doing a screening there and everything on the 20th.
And so I'm excited.
It's a very British movie, despite me being your quintessential American.
This is a very British film.
Adam Seagull and The Talking Mongoose from the Isle of Man.
A remarkable story.
And as you heard, the principles in that story went to their graves, insisting that it was entirely true.
And who am I to sit here in my little apartment on my father's old leather TV watching chair, which I've just polished?
Who am I to say that it wasn't true?
I don't know.
Do you?
But the fact that the daughter was a ventriloquist may have had something to do with it.
I don't know.
And before that, Nick Pope talking about the latest steps towards possible disclosure.
I think we're going to need to see some evidence quite soon, or a lot of people are going to start believing in any of this, is my fear, I guess I say.
And I still think that there is more to it all, more to life that is, and the universe, than we yet know or have been told.
But I think we need to be seeing a little bit more evidence, don't you?
Okay, more great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
With my apologies, this has been a slightly shorter edition than normal, but I hope you enjoyed what you heard.
And I will return soon here.
So until next week, 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.
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