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Nov. 10, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
45:23
Edition 767 - Professor Avi Loeb & Mark Olly
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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.
I hope everything is good in your world, and it's good to be catching up with you now.
Sorry that I'm a little bit behind on the podcast, but now back from the cruise up the eastern seaboard of North America, and you're looking raring to go again, raring to get engaged with it all.
As ever, your guest suggestions gratefully received.
If you know, when you suggest a guest a way to contact them, bearing in mind that I'm one person working alone, that would help me a great deal.
Just make things a little speedier when you do that.
If I sound a little chokey and if I sound a little chesty, it's just because I've got the remnants of this chest infection that I've had for, oh, God, more than a week now.
And, you know, I hope you'll understand if I wheeze a bit, that's the reason for it.
But I'm coming through it, and I think at this time of year, there's an awful lot of this stuff going around.
If you've got it, you know what I mean.
I even lost my sense of taste for a while, which was a bit of a nuisance one way or another.
But, you know, we cope.
And I'm fine.
And I'm here and I'm back.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, as ever for bearing with me and for getting the podcasts out to you.
If you've made a donation to The Unexplained online recently, thank you very much indeed.
You know who you are.
Very gratefully received in these very difficult times.
I'm going to work to develop The Unexplained, as usual, as we go into 2024.
More about that when I have it, as they say, on news desks all around the world.
If you want to get in touch with me, you can, of course, always go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
Just an important thing to say here, and I did say it on my social media, my official Facebook page.
I know that a lot of you have comments about the loss of the TV show.
Please know that it is impossible for me to make any comment about Talk TV, Talk Radio or News UK.
For obvious reasons, I am not permitted to do so.
So I can't answer your points about that.
If you have points about the TV show, please contact them.
They have a feedback address.
It's feedback at talk.tv.
And I'm sure they'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have.
But please understand why at the moment I cannot go into dialogue about the television show.
And I know some of you are glad that I'm back on radio and some of you want the TV show.
Remember, I don't control any of it.
I control this podcast.
I own the brand and the intellectual property of the unexplained.
But beyond that, of course, I don't control what is a corporate operation, the television station, the radio station, and the overall media empire.
I have no say over that.
And I'm sure you wouldn't expect me to, but I just wanted to explain that.
And I quite understand why you'd want to be commenting to me and asking me questions about that.
Most of them are questions that are above my pay grade.
Let's put it that way.
I can't answer them.
But I can keep doing podcasts for you.
That's what I'm going to do now.
This one starting with Professor Arviloeb from the Galileo Project.
An update from him on the spherules that he discovered on the ocean floor and the analysis of those, you will remember.
They are said to be of extrasolar origin.
And also an update on the search for extraterrestrial life.
So that's Professor Arviloeb, item one from the radio show.
And item two, as I say, Mark Ollie talking about Europe's Roswell, his new book.
So let's get into it right now.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
Hopefully I'll be a little less chesty when we next speak.
But first item, this is Professor Arviloeb.
It struck me, I've been observing the US media for the last two weeks, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of news of this kind in the US media at the moment, unless I've been missing it.
What has happened to the story about the spherials, which were believed to be of extrasolar origin?
What do we now know two months on?
We are continuing to analyze the spherols.
We have 700 of them.
And out of those, about 10% were analyzed so far.
And so in order to process them faster than before, we use a new method by which we can tell very quickly based on the surface composition of the spherols which ones are candidates to have this unusual composition that we identified for the unique type of spheros found along the meteor path.
And this allows us to save a lot of time because we are able to tell quickly the minority of those that we want to analyze more thoroughly.
And so this is done with an X-ray fluorescence analyzer in Berlin, Germany.
And we sent most of our spherols there this week so that they will return to us the labels of those spherols that appear to be of unusual composition.
Then we will analyze them with a mass spectrometer and get a much more detailed information about their elemental composition.
And then after that, we hope to have of order 50 to 60 spherols with unusual composition.
This Bellau composition that is enhanced by factors of hundreds relative to the standard solar composition in elements like beryllium, lanthanum, uranium.
And if we have of order 50, 60 of those, we can make a map of where they were and correlate that with the meteor path.
And so that's the hope within the next couple of months to be able to accomplish all of that and report about it in an updated paper.
So far, what we have is about 10% of the spirals of all the 60 that were analyzed, out of which 6 actually have this Bellau composition, and they all lie within the meteor path.
So we are still working on this, and this is important because it will inform us about what we might want to do in the next expedition.
One possibility is we will go again to find bigger pieces.
Now that we know where the unusual spheroids were and where the meteor path was, we can look for bigger pieces of this object that could tell us whether it was a rock or an artificial gadget.
Another possibility is to go after the second interstellar meteor, which is in a very different location near Portugal.
And the decision on where to go next will depend on what we find.
The second meteor was bigger by a factor of two or so.
It was roughly a meter in size, so there is likely more material there to find.
However, the ocean is about five kilometers deep compared to two kilometers deep for IM1.
And moreover, the floor of the ocean is rugged.
So there are challenges for the second interstellar meteor, which was identified in March 2017.
So about three years after the first interstellar meteor.
We will probably make the decision within a couple of months where to go next.
And with the spherials that you have, the ones that have been sent to Germany this week for analysis, is it still an open question that these may be manufactured?
Is that still on the table, on the agenda?
Yeah, it's definitely a possibility.
Alternatively, it could be of a natural origin from, for example, a planet that was destroyed by a star.
I wrote a paper about that.
It turns out that the most common stars, which are about a tenth of the mass of the Sun, they're called dwarf stars, they're much denser than the Sun, 100 times denser.
They can destroy a planet like the Earth that passes near them.
The Sun cannot do that.
And so we wrote a paper suggesting that if a planet like the Earth passes close to dwarf stars, it could get spaghetified, basically made into a stream of rocks, and half of its mass will be ejected to interstellar space at a high speed, roughly the speed that we identified for the first interstellar meteor, IM1.
So that's a potential origin for IM1, but we don't know until we find bigger pieces as to whether it was a rock or something else.
And that's what makes it very exciting.
It had a very unusual material strength.
And so, and the composition is nothing like we've seen in the solar system.
The Daily Telegraph, Arvi, and we've had many conversations, referred to you, I think, in September this year as, quotes, the professor who, you must have seen this, the professor who believes in aliens.
So on the subject of the quest for extraterrestrial life, alien life, whatever it may be, wherever it may be, do you think it's interesting or noteworthy that the American media, certainly, which has driven this whole issue this year, seems to not be talking about it anymore.
It all seems to have gone off the boil.
You know, I was in America until, as I record these words, this morning, and I watch NewsNation, Fox News.
They were full of this.
Now they're not.
What do you think is happening?
I'm not sure.
Obviously, there was a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives, and there is more going on behind the scenes in terms of Congress people trying to get more information about what the U.S. government knows.
And that takes time.
And moreover, there are pressing issues.
There are two wars right now.
And so I think part of it is the news that come from the rest of the world.
This subject of unidentified anomalous phenomena can be studied in two ways.
One is to figure out what the government knows and perhaps they have some materials that we can learn from.
At the moment, we don't know if they know anything.
And the second would be to approach it scientifically, collect the data ourselves because the sky is not classified, the oceans are not classified.
That's what I'm trying to do with the Galileo project.
And we do have an observatory at Harvard University that over the past few weeks collects data routinely of the entire sky.
And we are now analyzing those objects that we see to figure out if there are familiar objects from Earth, like birds, balloons, drones, airplanes, or if there is anything else.
So for the first time in the history of the Galileo project, we now get our hands dirty in a way.
We have data that we are analyzing.
So that's exciting, but it takes time to do it properly.
This week it was reported the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aka RO, this is the one that evaluates unidentified anomalous phenomena, has launched, we're told, a new secure portal for getting information from U.S. military personnel who may know things and need to feel empowered that they can share that information.
I guess in your situation, you will get to hear things.
Are you hearing any rumblings, any indications of people perhaps approaching this portal or approaching other armatures of the American government with information that we really should know?
Are people telling you that this issue hasn't gone off the boil, that behind the scenes, there's a lot going on?
No, I haven't heard anything about that.
But obviously, we all heard that David Grush, who testified under oath, that he believes the U.S. government does have programs for retrieval and reverse engineering of alien spacecraft.
So it's possible that even though I haven't heard about it, that something is going on.
And of course, the hope is that there will be a new Department in government that will look into those issued by the defense bill that is supposed to be signed by President Biden in December this year.
So that will be a committee of nine people who would look further into what information the U.S. government has and try to bring it to light.
And while they are doing that, of course, I'm continuing with my scientific work.
One way or another, my hope is that within a year or two, we'll know much more than we know right now.
Last question.
Do you think that it is science rather than revelation that will get us to this, if this information is there to be found, that will get us there first?
That depends on whether the US government has something substantial.
And I have no idea because it was never shown to me.
If they do have it, then that would be a faster route towards knowing what's going on.
But we have to understand that the US government and the Pentagon in particular do not have a day job that has to do with interstellar affairs.
They are mainly concerned with national security.
And so they are not a scientific organization.
They don't have the attention span of scientists, the expertise of scientists to deal with what comes into the solar system from outside.
So I very much hope that if they know anything, they will let scientists like myself work on it.
Avi Loeb, thank you very much indeed for making time for me at the weekend.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
And my thanks as ever to Avi Loeb for being a friend of this show and willing to come on whenever we want some comment and some elucidation, I think is the word.
Next up, Mark Ollie talking about his book, Europe's Roswell.
Let's talk about something that is marking a four-decade anniversary, more or less.
Europe's Roswell.
I'm holding a book here, published by Philip Mantle's Flying Disc Press.
Very impressive, full of photographs and diagrams.
It is about a supposed Roswell-style event that didn't get nearly enough coverage that happened in His Majesty's United Kingdom in the early 1980s.
Mark Olley has written a book about this.
Last time he was on, he was talking about crystal skulls.
Tonight we talk about Europe's Roswell.
Mark, how are you?
Very well.
Thank you very much.
Glad to be here.
Mark, why write this book?
You know, this particular thing you've documented before, you did a documentary in 2008 about it.
Why bring this story, which you will outline for us?
Why bring it up to date?
Well, number one, I was asked to.
Philip at Flying Disc Press, being finger on the pulse, spotted that 40 years were coming up.
And also, between the two of us, we hatched a plot to get some of the debris analysed.
Because to a point, Gary Rose, the finder, has been very protective of his debris, which we understand.
And then just out of the blue, as soon as Gary realized we'd plotted to produce this book, three little pieces of the metal came flying into Philip's office.
So it's like, right, okay, let's bring it up to date.
Let's find out what this stuff is.
So really, I mean, we'd already plotted to do the book because it didn't, you know, the whole event didn't get the coverage it deserved, you know, we felt.
And then all of a sudden, we can take it another step.
We can take it a step further.
So really, we had jolly good reason to resurrect it, shall we say.
Now, this is the early 1980s.
It's an era that was pre-internet.
Those who were interested like you were, like I was, in UFOs and ufology, we had to get hand-duplicated magazines from organizations like Bufora.
So we weren't interconnected like this.
So this was a time when something like this event, which we will describe, could happen and not be widely reported.
So let's just talk about the detail here.
This was early 1980s.
This was something that allegedly crashed on a farm in Wales.
Yes.
The nearest inhabited site, if you like, to where it came down is a sleepy village called Clanillar, which is just outside Aberyswith in mid Wales.
And basically something had hit trees, cut a sort of a 20 to 25 feet wide swathe through these trees and scattered debris over four fields, which is a hell of a lot of debris for any craft of any kind, which was discovered presumably the following morning by this chap called Irwell, who was the farm owner.
And he just got up to tend his flock and tend his lands.
And there was all this debris, which he described as sheets of metal, aluminium, foil, you know, bits of this, that, and the other.
And it was probably, we managed to work out, it was probably the first few days in January 1983 when this happened.
You know, first, second or third, give or take, 24 hours either way.
He then contacted the authorities who then came out to the site.
We know there was police, we know there was RAF, and then there was another unit, which nobody seems to know.
And then overnight, they basically cleared everything they could see.
In the meantime, one newspaper article appeared several days or possibly a week later in the Sunday Express.
And that caught the attention of Gary Rowe, who at that time was running a UFO group, a sort of UFO observation recovery, you know, recording type group for that part of Wales.
He came down to the farm, chatted with a wealthy owner and noticed this huge cut through the nearby trees.
Everything had disappeared, except possibly he felt he could get some of the debris out of this woods.
So he dove in, had a look around the wooded copse and got four pieces of sheet metal and two pieces of honeycomb aluminium foil out of the woods.
He went back a second time, didn't find anything at all, decided to go back a third time.
And in the gap, the Forestry Commission had started destroying the woods, taking the woods away.
And when he phoned them up and said, you know, why are you doing this?
They said, it's wind damage.
So clearly, you know, they were very keen to make this thing disappear.
So you only had one public witness, you only had one newspaper report, you only had one recovery occasion when they could get in there and get bits out.
And that was it.
So the similarities to Roswell are far too many to go into great detail.
They are.
Because from the Roswell story of 1947, the site was extensively cleared.
I mean, various researchers have been back in various decades, including recently, looking for little bits of it.
But they did a really forensic-scale clearance of the site, more or less.
But it would seem, Mark, that an awful lot of people would have been in on this, even though the principal witnesses are, as you say, very few, and there was only one newspaper report.
But the fact is that all these agencies, of the police and the forestry commission, had some degree, it would seem, of involvement.
Well, we chased all of those up in the process of producing the book.
We did a Freedom of Information request and various other bits of research.
Andrew Chapman, the chap that actually wrote the article for the Sunday Express, had it in his notebooks and he went all the way back there.
No source for the story was recorded.
But I do assume that somebody in one of those teams probably leaked the story out, or certainly the local press leaked the story out somehow.
I mean, it crashed in the middle of the night.
So the villagers were unaware of it.
It was silent.
It came down in the middle of nowhere.
Irwell was pretty much the only sort of outgoing witness with any connection to any other organisations.
Members of the crash recovery team didn't actually see the majority of the impact.
They only got the fragments.
I mean, we covered this in great detail in 2008 for the 25th anniversary when we did this documentary for Reality Films USA, which went everywhere and was basically ignored by everybody.
It came as a real surprise, you know, it was like out it goes, you know, and I thought, yeah, we're going to get loads of response, you know, and no, nothing, absolutely nothing.
I think one USA radio show asked me, would I do an interview and then never followed it up?
So it was really strange, you know, it's strange the way that went.
The documentary's been knocking around for a while now.
And as I said, we really felt that it needed updating and also it carries slightly more weight if it makes it into print.
Again, me being archaeologist by profession, you know, I was hoping to go and dig up a UFO, you know, a couple of bodies, loads of engines, you know what you expect.
And I thought, well, we can go dig this thing out of the ground like a crashed, you know, World War II Spitfire or something.
But that just wasn't the case.
There was absolutely nothing on site.
And like you say, at Roswell, when they actually got to grips with that archaeologically, they were just getting tiny little beads of melted metal.
But until very recently, because only in the last few months, I couldn't even get hold of the photo I saw of this.
There was a photo of a tiny piece of aluminium foil that a metal detectorist had found in that vicinity, Roswell, New Mexico.
And it's identical to the foil that we've got.
So right at the very end, we have this tiny little punchline where there is a connection.
There's no doubt there's a connection of some kind.
And it's just come in right at the last minute.
So I don't have a photo of that.
There was a photo and it was floating around somewhere.
No doubt it will surface in the UFO community.
But as an archaeologist, it was kind of bitterly disappointing because I was almost out of a job.
It's a good job.
I do production as well.
That kind of helped to keep the ball rolling.
On page 11 of the book, you say, sure enough, the team managed to recover at least six pieces of the strange craft, two of honeycomb foil and four of shattered plate.
Just as they'd been told, all the pieces had fragmented edges and one honeycomb foil section was as light as a feather, but so strong that you couldn't crush it, the larger piece could be stood on and would spring back to shape unaffected.
Sounds familiar, hey?
Very familiar.
Well, that was the material that we sent off for analysis.
So this is where we go deep and it starts to get interesting because when it was first recovered, Gary was fortunate to have some friends in the aerospace industry over here.
So he sent a sample out to have it checked out.
Basically, they couldn't do the full analysis.
It would have cost thousands of pounds back in the 1980s to do that.
But they did a reasonable amount of analysis and they said, okay, we think it's aluminium.
We think it's geralamine.
And that was on the sample and that was as far as it went.
So this time, we sent one off to Australia to a lab over there.
And we sent another one off to the USA to a lab over there to see what they would come up with.
Now, it turns out the two samples we sent off, which we assumed were the same, were actually different.
One of the samples is the flat sheet metal, which, you know, you can bend it and twist it and all this, that and the other, but it won't form a shape.
It just, you know, springs back.
Now, it turns out that is aluminium, but it's a kind of aluminium foam.
Now, the kicker with that, without giving too much away, is that when the analysis came back, the analysis describes a modern-day material that didn't exist 40 years ago.
So straight away, you read it and you think, oh, right, you know, we know what it is.
It's just an aluminium alloy.
And then it's all of a sudden you think, as you rightly said, no internet, none of that kind of technology.
You know, we weren't living in the modern age.
You know, we were coming out of the 1970s into the early 80s.
This stuff didn't exist.
And then we got the shock of our life.
The second piece comes back, which is this fairly thick metal with the hexagonal sort of rubbery shapes on the top of it.
And that comes back as lanthium or lanthanum, which is an exotic metal.
It's difficult to extract, phenomenally expensive.
It's modern day, basically.
And even now, it's cutting edge.
It's found all over the galaxy.
So, you know, goodness only knows where this stuff comes from.
It's quite common.
It's just phenomenally hard to get at.
But we're talking here about sheets of this, in some cases, that are six foot.
Now, it would have cost millions, millions of pounds to extract that quantity of lanthium back then.
So we've still got, even though we've got this sort of, you know, another step forward, we're kind of stepping forward into the dark.
You know, we're still going into the fog.
We haven't got a clue what this stuff is, where it comes from, how it operates.
If it's Roswell-type material, it could even be back engineered, you know, to a UFO or to a craft of some kind that comes from somewhere else.
I think Gary hit the nail on the head in the documentary.
He said, you know, the furthest he was prepared to go was to say it's an unidentified flying object.
And that is precisely what this is.
That is exactly what we're dealing with here.
But it certainly, it takes the whole UFO issue an enormous step forward.
Obviously, there's quite a lot of pages at the end of the book that cover the analysis.
So I won't put any more spoilers out there for folks.
You can study it.
And to be honest, we don't really make any conclusions beyond what I've just said because it's evidence-driven.
But you do very clearly make the parallels and the very obvious parallels between this and Roswell.
But one parallel that there isn't is that, of course, at Roswell, there were claims that teams of military people quietly covered in tarpaulins and removed alien bodies.
There's no question of anything like that here, is there?
No, no.
There's never been any mention whatsoever from original sources, witnesses, and myself as the producer of this.
There's never been a suggestion that there were any bodies involved.
It could even have been an unmanned craft.
I don't know whether we were into the realms of experimental drones then or whatever, but it could have been something that had no pilot as such.
Although, you know, you do scratch your head.
If, you know, fields are fairly large in Wales, and if you can hit trees and cover four fields in debris, that's a lot of debris, you know.
So it doesn't, that raises an instant problem there when it comes to size.
I think there was somebody somewhere sensationalize the story and, you know, on their website, they had this thing sticking out of trees with aliens hanging out of it.
But no, that didn't happen.
Also, the evidence for Roswell, once you get past the physical news reports and the archaeology and some of the statements the military make, you're almost then hitting the same brick wall that we're hitting with our version of a Roswell incident, which is, you know, witnesses will say things and, you know, details will come out and some of them add up, but some of them don't.
So it's very difficult to speculate exactly what was, you know, powering this thing and where it came from.
But it certainly existed.
That's the real punchline.
You know, it was definitely physically there in that January of 1983.
Have you put in freedom of request, freedom of information requests for MOD documents, et cetera?
Yes, we did.
We did that in 2020, I think it went in, and we just got a total blank.
But there is a possibility in the fine detail in the account, when you read through the account, it begins with a witness who contacts the police.
The police then contact the MOD, who in this case, I think was the local Air Force base, who that's where the freedom of information, the last request went, was to them.
And then, if you read the fine detail, there are plainclothes people ordering the officers around from the Air Force.
So there's another level.
There's a kind of men in black level, if you like, that's above all of them.
And that's where I think all the information's disappeared.
I think they did a fantastic job of making this whole incident vanish.
I really do.
You say on page 55, which I have here, there's me flicking the pages of the book.
I am still left with the overriding impression that this was not one of ours.
Assuming they're telling the truth, the ordinary military and civil authorities appeared entirely unaware anything strange had happened at that time back in 1983.
In other words, whatever happened, despite the cleanup operation and everything else that occurred, this was a surprise.
I would definitely say so.
Again, hidden in the fine detail of the Australian analysis, they couldn't really get a really good analysis of the bonding agents, the glues and the resins.
But they came to the conclusion it was American.
But in actual fact, there's an American substance, glue or bonding agent or resin.
They came to the conclusion there's an American thing in there somewhere.
So it's possible the Americans were test flying something over here that the British didn't know about.
Although, looking at the rest of the technology and looking at what we're dealing with, it's exotic.
You know, it's extremely exotic for the early 80s.
I can't really stress enough how strange and bizarre the analysis was when we got it back.
You know, the alloys and the compounds and the various details are quite extraordinary to the point where at least one of the labs, I think, speculated that they're not even sure how this substance would have been used.
You know, even knowing what it was, it didn't tell you what it did, you know, or why it was the way it was.
So in a sense, you know, here's us all going gung-ho thinking, yeah, 40 years, we'll send in the analysis.
We'll sort this one out, you know, we'll find out that it's just some kind of tin can that's flying around.
All we've done is made the problem worse.
Okay, that's all we've done.
We really still haven't got a clue what it is.
We still haven't got the foggiest idea.
But, you know, we love a mystery.
That's what it's all about.
And importantly, and I'm pleased that you, an archaeologist, are talking about this and keeping on talking about this for one simple reason.
Sometimes people who are involved in operations, and there was definitely one that occurred there in 1983, don't feel that they're able to speak about them until very late on in their lives.
So there is a possibility that somebody now listening to this, perhaps in Wales, maybe they've moved somewhere else, maybe a relative was involved in this, might now feel willing to come forward, contact me, and I can contact you, and we can take this a little further because, you know, it's no great stretch of the imagination to think that probably 100 people were involved in all of this.
Yeah, I would agree totally.
If anybody anywhere knows anything more than we do, please make contact because that's in the book as well.
I tell my own story.
You know, this story now has gone on for a long time since the 1970s.
It would be nice to finally, you know, have an end to it and know what this was all about, no matter how mysterious.
No matter how mysterious.
Exactly.
Plus, of course, Mark, I would assume that there would have been people beyond those very few witnesses who may have seen something in the process of coming down.
I mean, things don't catastrophically career out of the sky without visual signs, without perhaps flaming trails or some kind of noise.
It wasn't an isolated incident.
I mean, there have been a sort of a, I'm going to call it, the Welsh Triangle.
It's known as over Cardigan Bay.
So there are other things that have been seen and there are other things that happened.
I've sort of scattered a few of them through the volume of the book, some new, some old.
So yes, by all means, stuff is going on in that area all the time.
So again, make contact.
You know, please, if you're out there and you're listening, make contact with the show.
With me and then I'll pass it straight on to you and to Philip Mantle.
But, you know, talking about that West Wales area that we've discussed here before, it is fascinating.
And one thing, because I stayed there in a farmhouse a few years ago that impacted on me, I didn't even know it was there.
There is a military airbase there, isn't there, Cardigan?
Yes, there is.
That was the one, I believe, that was contacted about this incident.
We had a Welsh researcher, chap called Scott Lloyd.
He's a fellow archaeologist researcher.
He's fairly high up in library services now.
He runs part of the Welsh library organisation side of things out of the Welsh Library.
He did a lot of the background digging around the local contacts and the local connections to try and find out what was going on.
I believe he did make contact with people like the Coast Guard, you know, the local RAF base, the police, fire, farmers union, all that sort of thing.
And it was just complete blank.
You know, whether or not people had just changed jobs, you know, I mean, 25 years is a fairly long time.
We were chasing sort of smoke and mirrors even then.
Now I think it would be, but like you say, there might be somebody out there who, you know, who knows something and remotes.
There might be.
In the Calvin Parker case, Pasca Gula, Calvin Parker, of course, we lost only a couple of months ago.
But, you know, witnesses, as Philip Mantle will be the first to tell you, are still coming out and coming forward to this day.
So it's not beyond the bounds of possibility.
In this segment, before we take some more commercials then, Mark, did you try?
Were you able to access the radar records?
Because surely radar would have shown something.
Well, in the original enquiries made at the time, which produced the newspaper report, it was said that nothing appeared on radar.
So that was one of our very early, we sort of rule that out fairly early on information.
You know, I still don't think they'd release them now.
But like I say, the whole incident just seems to have disappeared, just vanished.
It's exactly the same as Roswell.
There one minute, gone the next.
How very strange.
There is one very key fact in all of this that I've held back, and we'll get to it.
Let's get back to Mark Ollie.
Europe's Roswell, 40 years since impact.
And Mark, I said that there's a kicker fact in all of this from reading through the book today, and that is they cleared the forest.
Now, if nothing much happened, why would you totally clear the forest?
Yeah, that was, yeah, that everybody's response.
You know, Gary's, mine, Erwell's, everybody's response has been, why?
Why on earth would you do that?
And it's a bit, how can I put it, fishy, because, you know, you get Gary turning up to go and have a look around the site, and the only place he gets any debris is in the forest.
So he comes back about a week later or so, and he does the same again, but he doesn't get anything that time.
But by the third or fourth week, so you're probably edging now into the beginning of February, they start removing the forest.
It's almost like, and I'm not saying this, but it's almost like somebody was watching the site and somebody knew that somebody got back there and got debris.
That's, you know, the slightly worrying aspect, if you like, of that part of the story.
And Gary didn't say it in the documentary.
He's never said it on camera, but he took me to one side when we were doing the documentary and he said, you know, the men in black turned up.
And I said, oh, what do you mean?
And he said, oh, these guys, strange, you know, passes that were incomprehensible, dark glasses, black suits, you know, got out of, you know, black transports with no number plates on and said, can we have our material back?
Yeah, can we have our, can we have all that material, our material, that material?
Can we have it back, please?
Now, Gary, at this point, had been extremely clever because he'd broken some of it up into key rings and he distributed some of it to make sure that they couldn't get hold of all of it.
So he said to these guys, he said, well, you know, it doesn't matter how successful you are in getting my material back.
It's too late.
It's already out there.
And he said, as long as you just, you know, drive away now, we'll leave it at that and we won't say any more.
And I'm not going to tell these people to hand the material to the media.
And he stuck to that.
I mean, you know, good old Gary, he waited 25 years before, you know, producing the documentary.
But it does tumble back to this question of how did they know that bits had been found in the woods?
Because it's not standard practice for the Forestry Commission to be instructed to remove a woods, you know, based on wind damage when there isn't any.
And there would have to be, you know, somebody signed a chitty for that somewhere and a record of that needs to be found.
And there will be a reason on that record.
You know, maybe they'll say Dutch elm disease or something like that.
I don't know.
But they might say something else.
I was going to say in a later interview, 2018, Gary did an interview for a conference saying it's online.
You can go find it actually.
and in the interview, he said that the guy actually admitted to him in the phone conversation that's what he'd been told to say.
He'd been told to say it was being removed because of wind damage, and that's it, he wouldn't say anything more.
So, whether or not there is a written instruction, bearing in mind that this was done, like you say, at a time before internet and things like that, so there might not be any records.
You know, this guy certainly had a phone call telling him that he needed to get rid of the wood.
And, you know, this phone call obviously came from, you know, whoever it was at that level that was ordering these, you know, Air Force chaps around, as far as we can tell.
As far as we can tell.
And the other thing that we skipped lightly over, but is a great aspect of this story.
You have a picture in the book of one of these things, is that Gary is a bit of a hero, really.
He's a quick-thinking man because he turned some of this material into key rings and got those keyrings into as many hands as he could, I think, including yours.
Yes, I have one of these key rings.
Absolute genius.
It's a great thing to do.
You know, very far-sighted of him, but obviously he, as a UFO researcher, was keenly aware of what happened to Matt Brassel, you know, at Roswell.
Every single piece of debris and evidence was stripped out of that situation.
Although in recent years, it has been queried as to whether Matt's case is actually walled up in his old house.
So Gary might be incorrect.
That case might still be out there as well.
But certainly Gary's case, it's not kept at his house.
It's kept under lock and key.
Whenever he takes it out, it's always attached to him and he always has somebody with him.
You know, so he's very, very possessive of his pieces, which came as a bit of a shock when we got the three samples in the post.
You know, we were like, wow, clearly he's behind what we're trying to do with this, with this 40 years since impact book that we're doing.
He was as keen to find out what would happen as we were.
But yes, yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
He was very clever in doing that.
And my particular key ring is the one that's in the book.
The book is great because the idea of the book right from the outset was to make it show and tell.
Because the problem with a lot of the UFO books is they don't show you the actual incident or fragment or creature or, you know what I mean?
They're very good on telling the story and then they don't have a lot of the evidence.
But as you'll have noticed, because obviously you've gone through the book, it is show and tell.
Yeah, there's tons, absolutely tons of pictures in there.
Back again to, you know, if there's anybody out there that recognizes Debris or familiar with it or involved in the development of it or anything, again, they need to contact you.
They need to contact the show and let us know.
So I'm hoping somebody will recognize it, you know, but it is very show and tell.
The book is extremely show and tell.
And either these materials are expensive, as you said, it would have cost millions to produce one of, you know, something made out of one of these materials.
But also there's a picture here on page 85.
You've got a bunch of annexes to all of it.
And it's figure one, side A with graphite epoxy laminates.
Any bonding resin is problematic and extremely difficult to isolate or identify.
So there's some kind of resin that's been used for bonding here that what you couldn't identify?
Basically, yes.
If you look at that sample, that's one where it had like a sort of a paint coated on green paint coating on one side, which is not aerodynamic.
So that doesn't appear to have come from the external parts of any flying vehicle.
Then you've got the metal itself, which in that particular instance, that's the aluminium foam.
Then after that, you've got this layer of resin.
And this layer of resin seems to have impregnated the foam to some extent and then been attached to something else, which Gary speculated was probably the honeycomb, which was inside the structure, which then would have repeated on the opposite side.
So you would then end up with a sandwich of this substance.
That's the Australian analysis.
Yeah, I'm familiar with the details of that.
We had a more detailed report version of that actually come through, but it didn't say anything substantially different from what is in the book.
So it wasn't really worth putting any more detail in.
But they were just as baffled by aspects of it as we were.
It's the Lanthanum that does it, the Lanthium.
That's the real puzzle.
That's the million dollar.
Yeah, that is so, so expensive.
And even now, it's difficult for us to produce now with current technology knowing what we know now.
So if it was developed in the 1970s to fly in the 80s, where on earth did that come from 50 years ago?
That's half a century.
So there's more investigation to be done on all of this.
I think that's as far as we can probably take it, you know, tonight.
But I think it's a great book and it's something that you can slip into your, it's actually quite a slim volume.
You can stick it into your pocket and you can make your own judgment about it, I think would be what I would say to listeners tonight.
Yeah, absolutely.
We did it that way on purpose because I'm one for making things punchy.
You know, I don't want to drag things out forever.
I just want to make things punchy.
That's what I liked.
Yeah, it's done that way on purpose.
Absolutely.
You've caught the wind of what we're about.
Sit down with a cup of tea, get the fire on, kick it back, order it for your Christmas stocking, and off you go.
You know, you'll have that read by Christmas Eve.
Well sold.
Europe's Roswell.
40 years since Impact and a great story that deserves to be resurrected.
And it is in this book.
Mark Olley is the man you've been hearing.
It's from Flying Disc Press, Philip Mantle, in other words.
Mark, thank you very much for your time tonight.
Absolute pleasure.
Thank you for having me on.
Always a good guest.
My thanks to Mark Olley and, of course, Professor Harvey Loeb before that.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained Online.
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.
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