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Dec. 16, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
58:23
Edition 776 - Tony Healy, Dr David Whitehouse, Professor Simon Holland
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the Unexplained.
Well, it's coming up towards the back end of December now, Christmas very, very near.
This may well be heard by you over the Christmas period.
There are still more podcasts, though, to come before we get to the end of this year.
But whatever you're doing, I hope you're not too frantic, and I hope that life is okay.
Weather in London, damp, mild, grey.
Three words that sum it all up.
I don't have any more to say.
My thanks to Adam for his work on the show lately.
Thank you to you for getting in touch and being in touch.
If you want to make contact with me, always grateful to hear from you.
You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the email link there, and you can send me an email.
And if your email requires a reply or response, then please put reply, response, required in the subject line, and then I will specifically see it, as they say.
This edition, some items from recent radio shows, number one, Tony Healy in Australia, about a yaoi development.
A yaoi attack, to be more precise.
You'll get some graphic details of that attack and what it means and how it happens.
So please note that in the first item, if you are squeamish, this is not for the kids.
There are some fairly graphic, nothing too serious, but fairly graphic descriptions of what the yowie Bigfoot-style Australian creature apparently did to a wild boar.
So that's Tony Healy, first off.
After that, Dr. David Whitehouse, former BBC Space and Science editor, prolific astronomer and author of great books like Space 2069, will be talking about current 2023 space topics as the second item.
And then the last item is something that you suggested, Professor Simon Holland in France.
This man's a former BBC filmmaker on series like Horizon and many other things as he will tell you.
He's now a prolific YouTuber and he'll talk about the idea that some of the UAPs that people report may have an earthly but secret origin.
So that's Professor Simon Holland, item number three.
That's all I have to say for now, I think.
Only to wish you well as we get closer to Christmas.
Let's get into it then.
Tony Healy in Australia, yaoi expert, and this is on the back of a story that I read in a newspaper.
I think it was the Daily Mail a couple of weeks ago.
A yaoi expert has declared everything looks right in confronting footage of a wild boar that appears to have been sliced clean in half by a yaoi.
Dean Harrison, spent 25 years researching yaois, was first sent the resurfaced video two years ago, believes the footage is genuine.
In the one-minute clip that I think you can see online, in fact I'm sure you can, a group of workers discover several footprints beside the rear end of a boar before spotting the head and torso a number of meters away.
The footage is believed to have been filmed in Queensland several years ago.
So I spoke about that and other things to do with Yaoi with Tony Healy.
This footage, it's unusual, isn't it?
Or is it to see something that has apparently been attacked by the mythical yaoi and left, you know, left the worse for it?
Yes, we've had stories of animals torn in half or having their heads ripped off full.
But yeah, this is the first footage I've actually seen of a carcass like that.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting that, you know, I'm sort of a bit like Agent Mulder, only a bit less good-looking.
Like him, you know, I really want to believe in these things, and I'd like to believe this video is genuine.
Dan Harrison, as you mentioned, is inclined, very strongly inclined to believe that it's genuine, but we both have doubts.
I mean, really, before we could make a serious call on it, we need to know the provenance of the video.
And we haven't been able to track that down as yet.
We don't know who took it, and we're not sure exactly where it was taken.
But there are several things about the video that seem genuine to us.
You can hear the voices of the guys as they walk around filming the site with their phone and talking.
And their voices don't sound forced.
Their reactions sound genuine.
But yeah, it's a funny one.
It looks like the pig was killed somewhere else and then dragged to the site and then torn in half.
Which, you know, what did the AoE do that for?
It's strange.
I'd like to have seen close-ups of the wound.
You get a bit of a look.
Looks like a few intestines hanging out there.
But I would have preferred a close-up of the wound and a bit more footage.
On the other hand, the footprints of the yaoi, what ought to be the yaoi, look right.
They're much deeper than the men's boot prints.
But the only close-ups of the tracks appear to show a left foot.
You know, they may have just been the clearest.
But I would have liked to have seen a right foot as well.
There are a couple of things.
We'd like to know if the carcass was warm or not.
But as I say, there's a few things there.
There was something, supposedly some Indigenous Aboriginal workers on the project reported feelings of being watched and other strange occurrences, including sightings of Min Min lights and strange noises around the camp.
Well, those odd things have been reported at other yaoi locations.
Strange times in your book that we spoke about a couple of months ago, those sorts of strange occurrences are very common with yaoi sightings.
How rare is it?
How common is it maybe for evidence of a yaoi attack or a kill to be found or to be discovered?
Well, it's really, well, everything about the yaoi is fairly uncommon, but yeah, we have several similar, rather similar events.
In fact, Dean, just a week or two ago, recorded an interview with a fellow who had a dog ripped in half.
We've had several reports of dogs ripped in half.
This one occurred, if you can, the name of this location may cause a giggle.
It occurred at Blue Knob Mountain in northern New South Wales.
And the fellow had gone to this abandoned property with a view to perhaps buying it.
He was looking for a few acres.
And the earlier occupants had said, well, there's nobody up there now.
You can camp in the old farmhouse.
But we're not going up there because there was this great big yowie hanging around, scaring the daylights out of our dogs.
So this guy and his mate went up there, and they had three dogs with them.
The old house was built on a slope, so it was elevated on one side on high stumps, about seven feet off the ground.
Anyway, at night, they're sitting around and they heard their dogs screaming and barking like crazy.
And two of the dogs charged in through the door and hid under the table.
And the other dog, a half-grown dog, unfortunately chose to dive under the house.
And they then heard great thumping and screaming from the dog under the house and growling, a deep guttural growling, and something thumping the floorboards under their feet.
You know, this yowie apparently was smashing the dog against the floorboards or thumping the floorboards with its fists.
And they grabbed torches and the noise subsided and they crept downstairs with their torches and found the dog underneath the stairs.
And they could see its head.
And then they realised that it had been torn in half.
The rear half was still attached here by a bit of hide, a bit of skin, and the intestines were spilling out.
The poor dog was still alive, but only barely.
So they put it out of its misery.
And under the house, in the morning, they went under the house again, and there were great tufts of orangey hair caught in the splintery joist that held up the floor there.
And he said the hair stanked high heaven.
Boy, I mean, my apologies to my listener, but this is the kind of thing you would expect from a late-night show of this nature.
But, you know, if you've been trying to retain your dinner, I hope you still have it with you.
You know, I guess the last point to bring up about this, though, Tony, and I do recommend people read your book, we'll give the title of it and details of it at the end of this.
But I think the thing that's surprising is that the thought that yaoi can be so violent in obviously pursuit of food, creatures have to be, and yet in encounters with human beings, yaoi tends to be shy and tends to move away, usually, sometimes with a warning call, but you know, mostly those situations end with a back off, don't they?
So this is a big surprise to hear that side of yaoi discussed.
Yes, it is odd.
I was saying to Paul Cropper, my colleague on the phone yesterday, well, it's curious that they have no compunction about killing animals of all kinds.
We've had chickens killed and pigs, other pigs killed and carried off, a steer, a young steer killed, and with its hind quarters ripped off and eaten.
Yet, yes, there seems to be something protecting us from them.
And in fact, something protecting them from us, if it comes to that.
But yeah, there's some, as you say, since you mention it, there is that episode from Blue Knob, New South Wales, the one about the dog being cut in half, that is not yet on Dean's Yowie Hunter's website.
He hasn't got around to editing it and putting it on.
But I had a look yesterday, and there's an older report from the vicinity of Blue Knob, Chuckle.
And it's like that place, don't you?
It must be quite a cold location, you'd think.
One might assume so.
But you were saying.
Anyway, there is amongst Dean's collection of hundreds of reports, there is another one from the vicinity of Blue Knob on a road, a dirt road nearby, a couple of years ago.
And a woman and her two children were driving along, just getting on to dusk, but she said she didn't have her headlights on.
There was still plenty of light.
And there was a great big yowie just standing beside the road looking at her.
And she pulled up and she said she felt reasonably secure with the motor going.
I think The kids were in the back seat with their heads down, but they didn't see it, and she didn't draw their attention to it for fear of scaring them or startling the yowie.
But the curious thing was that she said she was struck by the fact that it seemed to have a very sad air about it.
And it was looking at her, and she said she herself was quite an empathetic person, and she said to her it looked lonely and sad.
And she said, I know that sounds curious, but she's not the only one to have said that about yowis at close quarters.
And she felt there was this eye contact, and she felt there was some kind of communication.
But she had a phone on the seat beside her.
And she decided to drive on because it was almost the kids' tea time.
And she thought, well, time to go.
And she thought, she knew it was not going to work.
But she thought, well, I'll just see if I can photograph this thing.
And she reached for her camera.
And of course, the thing just buzzed off.
Such is the way of these things.
Such is the way of these things.
Yeah, she's not the only one who sort of feels that there is some kind of psychic communication.
But yeah, the sort of friendly or non-threatening encounters are reasonably common.
But there are many other reports where the things appear to be trying to scare the daylights out of people.
What a nice man and what a friend to this show.
Tony Healy.
Happy New Year, Tony, if you're listening to this.
Now Dr. David Whitehouse, prolific author, astronomer, good friend of this show.
And 2023 in space.
You know, I've never said this to anybody before, but the last time I saw you was on a cruise ship in various exciting weathers from the very warm Florida all the way up to the cold of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
That was a month ago.
And today, like I said, is December the 10th.
2023 in space, David, it's been a whirl, hasn't it?
You know, you turn off the computer one night, you get up the next morning, and there's another important space story.
It's been one heck of a year.
Well, it always is in the sense that there's such a lot going on, be it probes to the planets, be it space observatories.
I mean, who can forget the wonderful pictures that the James Webb Space Telescope is sending back?
Not just pictures, but detailed information of the spectra of planets around nearby stars.
And that is completely changing our understanding, the precision of our understanding about the atmospheres of nearby stars.
We can actually say what's in them.
There's one particular planet where we know that there is sand in the atmosphere.
We know there is smog and methane in the atmosphere of others.
And this is remarkably wonderful data we didn't have a few years ago.
And James Webb is also sending us incredible information about the most distant objects in the universe.
Of course, we have the continuing saga of America Wanting to Go Out to the Moon.
And we have in a year's time the Artemis II mission, when four astronauts will go around the moon on a mission that's three or four weeks long.
In fact, the Artemis crew were in London the past week at the launch of the Moonwalkers exhibition at the Lightroom and delighted everybody.
So there is such a lot going on in very many areas that, as you say, every time you turn on your computer, there's something that makes you say, go, wow.
You know, the moon mission is going to be exciting for those of us who lived through some of the Apollo era.
That's you and me, David.
It will bring back a sense of deja vu, but this is a very different mission in a very different era.
And those people who came to London, the astronauts who will be flying round the moon and coming back, I'm guessing that they're completely different people.
The people who went to the moon on Apollo were former test pilots.
They were people who had what they used to call in the novels, Debbing Do.
They have the right stuff.
I'm guessing that in 2023, it's going to be a different mix of skills that they're calling for.
Well, you still, in the sense, if you're looking to pilot one of these aircraft, one of these spacecraft, or be the co-pilot, you still usually have a heritage of jet flying, of being a professional, usually military pilot in some sense.
So you have that experience behind you, because you have to be able to fly something at high speed.
You have to understand the controls.
You have to be comfortable in a clamped environment, in a difficult, you know, high up, traveling very fast.
And the experience of that, you know, you can only get it in a few places.
But the other members of the crew are professional working astronauts in the sense that they have experience on the space station, of performing experiments, of living, of maintaining the space station.
And they will be going through their duties of evaluating the spacecraft in a three-week-long mission to go around the moon for the first time.
People have gone there since, you know, in over 50 years.
So there is a mixture of skills.
They are a true team.
And it is wonderful to see them together because I hear the training is going extremely well.
And they are, as they say, a family.
Now, in order to get that mission to go off next December, they have to start assembling the rockets at Cape Canaveral in February.
And it does seem as though that is going ahead, but there's not a lot of slippage.
And the thing which is causing a lot of rumor and concern at the moment is not so much the next mission, Artemis II, to go around the moon, But the planned landing on the moon, which is only a year later, 2025.
And people are saying that this is really pushing it a bit because it relies on Elon Musk's starship, which has failed, which is on two test flights.
It's failed to completely do what it wanted to do, although they got lots of useful information from it.
But it really has to work.
They've got various other things they have to demonstrate, such as the transfer of propellant between spacecraft in space.
And the lander has to be designed and tested at least once in an unmanned fashion before the crew go on board.
And to actually get that all together working in two years, yes, in two mission in two years' time, particularly when the emphasis is on getting Artemis II off in a year, is starting to look like a tall order.
Now, NASA has said recently that it's holding its contractors to the timetable of the 2025 launch, but it's looking increasingly likely that in 2025, if they fly a mission at all, it'll be a non-landing mission and the landing could slip a year or two.
Right.
And does that...
Does that matter?
Or, you know, when America went to the moon the first time, of course, America had been in a substantial race with the Russians, but today, and there was a lot of face to be saved in making sure that that happened, you know, on time, on budget, and in the way that it was anticipated it would.
Today, of course, various nations are going and have been to the moon.
So is there an imperative to make this happen double quick?
Well, not so much double quick in the sense that it's imperative that America gets to the moon first, because there are indications that China wants to put people on the moon.
But they're not nearly as advanced as far as we know in terms of their technology and the testing of the equipment they would need to go there.
So the 2025 landing, it would be a useful date, but it's not the end of the world, so to speak, if they don't get there, because there is no hard race.
There's no presidential decree to get there by, as JFK said, before this decade is out.
So if it slips by a few years, provided everything stays safe and provided they hit the milestones, then that is no great big deal in the sense that getting there is the main thing.
The problem with big space programs, and this is part of the theme of space over the last 20 years or so, where you have a curious new mix of private companies and national space agencies.
The problem is a lot of the Artemis program is a lot of it, the big, big rocket that they're using at the moment, is based on large government contracts, which involve big aerospace corporations, which move slowly, which have an ingrade culture of inertia, as opposed to Elon Musk, who moves very, very quickly.
And that sometimes can slow things up.
At the moment, Elon Musk is a bit stalled because of the tests on the Starship haven't worked properly.
He's got some interesting data, but he hasn't flown a successful mission yet.
So we're in an interesting phase where everybody says everything's going seemingly well and we'll get to the moon in 2025, but nobody really believes that.
And we expect it to be a year or two later.
I had a relative once, and we used to suggest days out.
And, you know, you sort of suggest a day out to Blackpool.
And this person would say, do I go to Blackpool?
I've been there before.
Why are we going back to the moon when we've been there before?
Well, you know, there are lots of answers to this.
In the sense that, how can I put it, there is the inspiration side of things.
There is the fact that when we look back at the Apollo programs, this was something that America is known for.
This is something that humanity is known for.
It is at a high point in the evolution of the history of our species.
It'll be remembered forever.
And we should be doing these high things.
It spurred America on.
It spurned the world on in getting kids to move into science and technology.
It developed the technology.
People went into other areas of technology and gave all economies a boost.
It was a return on an investment.
And so it is now.
And America, the most powerful country in the world, has decided it wants to go and it wants to spend its own money getting there.
And other countries want to be part of that.
You develop technology because when you go into space, early space, you spend it in the only on space, you spend it in the only place you can spend money, which is on Earth.
And eventually it ends up in a high-tech workforce, high technology, and money that's spent down the supermarket on houses and cars.
So it's part of a high-tech side of an economy that fertilizes other areas of the economy.
And China knows this all too well.
They see it as an essential part of their identity to be a major league superpower, perhaps the superpower, in a couple of decades' time.
And, you know, there's also the sort of vision thing, which is often derided in the sense that do we all feel better if we go to the moon?
Now, surely going to the moon only makes sense if you do the other things, if you tackle degenerative diseases, if you spend money on medicine and technology and climate change and stuff like that.
It doesn't work on its own.
But don't we all feel better that we're part of something that takes us out of our daily lives?
And there are few people around even today who've walked on the moon.
Doesn't it make you feel good that they are there?
Well, psychologically, and if we want to go down this particular avenue, psychologically, I personally think it is important to do these things and to keep doing these things and not to close them down because, oh, we can't afford it.
And, you know, we know what problems we've got here.
And I'll tell you why, and I wonder if this makes any sense, David, but we would want to do this Because it will boost the way that people feel, it will show that we have great capabilities.
It's an achievement, as you said.
But also, so much down here at the moment is out of control.
So many people tell me this, and you've only got to, you know, the evidence of your own eyes.
So many things are uncertain.
So many things appear to be beyond our control now.
So to see something that actually works when so many things down here are dysfunctional and don't work these days, I think that is a very important thing.
What do you say?
I think you're dead right.
I think you have to see it as being part of what we are.
Now, I know people say we are explorers, and if we don't explore, we lose something.
But we're explorers in so many sense.
I mean, when you listen to a symphony by Beethoven, or you look at a painting by Picasso or Leonardo da Vinci, you are glad that people can do those things, that somebody can actually achieve that level of performance, of achievement, that level of expression, that creativity, that it's part of us.
And we're glad that people can do it.
And we should be glad that people can build rockets, get to the moon, and come back and tell us about it.
We should be glad that people can build satellites that tell us what the weather forecast is going to be like.
We can build satellites and give us internet connectivity all around the world.
It's all part, really, of the same thing.
And there are, you know, why do we go into space?
Why are we going to the moon?
There's no one answer to this.
But if you didn't do it, then we would miss something in so many fields of human endeavor that would diminish us in so many ways, not just the bottom line of money, but our spirit as well.
You have to be a particular hardheart, not to be excited by these advances, I think.
But, you know, there are some people who feel that way.
Everybody's got a point of view, yes.
Well, think of the excitement that people feel when they see one of those James Webb pictures.
And sometimes they do the side-by-side before and after comparison.
So they say, this is what the Hubble showed us, or this is what whatever it is showed us.
Have a look at how clear this is, and look how far beyond this object or whatever it is we're looking at we can see now.
And so I think that effect will be magnified.
If we get a base and a foothold on the moon, we're going to be looking out into space from there.
And just imagine what we will see from that perspective.
Well, somebody living on the moon, we've been to the moon, as you know, six times over 50 years ago, but the longest we stayed there was something like three days.
We've camped on the moon.
Now the missions which return to the moon in a few years' time will probably stay there for perhaps a week, but they will increasingly get longer and longer until in the 2030s we have a base on the moon.
So that children on Earth will be able to be taught by teachers who are on the lunar surface as a matter of routine.
And given virtual reality and AI technology, you'll be able to put a headset on in a few years' time and you will be like standing at the south pole of the moon in the sense that it will provide all the information you need to simulate that experience, virtual reality, really on the moon.
And this is, first of all, people would pay for that and that's a revenue stream to help fund this type of research.
But that is something that takes us beyond our everyday life, as you said, just like listening to Beethoven and looking at great paintings and stuff like that, takes you out of your everyday life and gives you a sense of something bigger, broader, and up and around about us.
Because we can't all the time be worried about the cost of the supermarket and the heating and the politics and everything.
Car insurance this week, David.
Car insurance.
That's right.
That's right.
We are more than that.
And if we deny that we are more than that, we lose something fundamental and we lose our spark to improve ourselves in the future.
What makes us us?
Apologies to the listener.
And if you would like to send in a question, you can by all means do that.
You can text talk, space, and then your question to 8722 by text.
And I've got a few that have been sent in during the day here.
Apologies to this listener whose name I've gone and lost.
That's me for efficiency.
Could you ask Dr. Whitehorse?
He says, Dr. Whitehouse.
I like Whitehorse myself.
I think you should change your name by Deepo.
Could you ask Dr. Whitehorse about Artemis, which is what we've been talking about?
I didn't know this.
This person says that from what he's read, it will take 12 to 15 refuelings in orbit to get it there and back to the moon.
This seems, he says, incredibly overly complicated and inefficient.
Is this so?
It's going to take several refuelings to refuel the spacecraft once launched to take it to the moon and to land on the moon.
And that is a difficult part of technology.
It hasn't really been done properly before, and it has to be demonstrated in short order that this actually will work.
It's not trivial.
And that comes to the heart of the transition you're seeing in the American space program.
Because the reason why, in the 50 years since the Apollo program put people on the moon, that only two programs have taken, two manned spaceflight programs, human spaceflight programs have worked in America, the space shuttle and the space station, is because they become institutionalized, they've become big budget, they've become associated with long-term, enormously funded, inertial major space companies.
Now, along come Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and shake things up dramatically.
And there are people who are saying that, okay, it's probably going to be okay that Artemis will work, although a few years later than expected.
But isn't it time to say that actually Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, who are designing better spacecraft, can do it faster and cheaper?
And that we should really make the transition that was made on the ground.
Like, you know, governments don't build cars.
They build roads.
They sometimes build railroads.
It's the private companies that build cars.
So why don't the transition in the space economy, that private companies build the things you want cheaper, competitively.
The cost of Starship that Elon Musk is building, which is going to be an essential part of the Ottoman return to the moon, as is the huge rocket which is being built by NASA and various other companies.
Starship is 10 times cheaper and it will be the most powerful rocket ever built when it works.
So there is an argument that you should do more private and let them get on with it.
But the listener is right that the demonstration that tanking and fuel and prop loading in low Earth orbit to actually provide the fuel is a technology that needs to be developed.
It could have gone a different way in the sense you could have launched more spacecraft with a Falcon 9 for a much cheaper, much more cheaply, and perhaps logistically simpler than a big rocket and then fuel up its components in Earth orbit to take it to the moon.
So there are various ways of doing this, but the ways of doing this are changing and evolving as private companies become more capable.
It's not easy to get to the moon in any era.
Never was.
Yeah, never was.
David Whitehouse is here and or David Whitehorse.
I'm leading towards this now, David.
David Whitehouse is here.
We're talking space and we will do so some more.
Questions from listeners.
Andrew in Salisbury, thank you for this, Andrew, says, what does David think is the most exciting space program at the moment?
For me, he says it's still NASA, but the Indian, Japanese, and SpaceX are looking very interesting.
That's a good question.
I mean, certainly we can expect wonderful things from SpaceX in the future.
I mean, when they get their Starship working, which is the most powerful rocket in the world, and when they start developing proper payloads to go on it, then you can expect towards the end of this decade remarkable things with people in space.
They could take, you know, many people up into space on tourist trips.
The Americans are starting to wind down the International Space Station in the sense that they are looking towards what's going to replace it.
And it's probably going to be replaced with a smaller number of commercial space stations, and some of those will be open for tourism.
India, we know India's got to the moon, first to the south pole of the moon.
Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries in the Middle East have all got interesting space programs.
China, there was released recently the first, if you like, wide-angle picture of the Chinese space station, because we've had pictures of it before, but they've been sort of fairly close-up from capsules that are docking with it or from astronauts who are spacewalking around it.
But we saw one of the very few wide-angle pictures of it, and it is a magnificent structure.
It looks like the International Space Station several years into that space station's development.
It is a major, major structure.
And people sometimes need reminding that there are two large space stations crewed in space at the moment, China and the United States.
And the International Space Station will probably be deorbited by the end of this decade.
And China will, undoubtedly, I think, have the largest space station in space.
So people are moving into space.
In this country and in America and in Europe, there are lots and lots of smaller companies who are poised, who are hanging on there with seed capital and brilliant ideas to move into space when it becomes cheaper and easier to do so.
Now, that's been the case for 20 years or so, but each year it gets easier.
So it's a wonderful, exciting time to go into space.
And if we go back to the moon, and we actually live in a time where there are new walkers on the moon, and the first person to walk on Mars, although they don't know it, has already been born.
He's already here.
He's already here.
I mean, this is a wonderful, wonderful time.
And also coming online soon is the Verarubin telescope, which is going to produce a very fast survey of the entire sky at incredible accuracy, at incredible time resolution.
And that's going to chase down many new phenomenon that we have only just got hints of at the moment.
And also the array of extremely large telescopes that are being built on the ground to come online this decade and next decade.
The use of artificial intelligence to analyze space data means that it has never been...
I mean, not just space and astronomy.
I mean, if you look at what AI and computational biology are doing in terms of understanding genetics and diseases and stuff like that, this is a tremendous time to be interested in science.
There are so many opportunities these days.
Of course, my passion is space and astronomy.
And, you know, I look, I lived through the first reconnaissance of the solar system, the first landing on the moon, the first space probes to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, the first space observatories observing in the infrared, in the ultraviolet, in the X-rays, etc.
And they were all absolutely wonderful.
So that's been a wonderfully amazing time of opening up new windows on the universe and going to new places.
But what's going to happen this century is that we're going to see in much more detail.
And whenever you see the universe in more detail, or you go to more places, you discover so much more things you couldn't possibly have envisaged.
Well, maybe including life.
Just before I get to another question, I just want to do something that I neglected to do.
And, you know, I like to keep the customer satisfied here.
So can I just say hello to Sally and Liz, who are listening tonight, among others, at Dereford Hospital in Plymouth on the night shift, doing great work, Sally and Liz.
This is a question from Robin, long-term listener of the Unexplained podcast and also the radio and TV show.
Robin says, strap yourself in for this one, David.
There will be some explaining to do for people like me and for most of my listeners, but Robin is very clued in on this.
I would be very interested to hear his take on Chiron, the centaur that's trapped between Saturn And Uranus.
Does he think Chiron has stable rings, or is it just carrying material with it?
Could it be developing into a moon of Saturn or Uranus?
Oh my goodness.
That's an interesting question.
Let me.
Chiron is an object.
It's about 100 kilometers across, and it's in an orbit which takes it from the orbit of Saturn to Uranus.
So it's in the outer solar system, not the far outer solar system, but in the cold outer reaches of the solar system.
And it was discovered, I think, in 1977 by Charles Cowell, who was doing a survey.
It goes around the Sun every 50 years or so.
And it's a peculiar object, as I say, 100 kilometers across.
And it's one of the very few objects, I think, which is classified as an asteroid, a ball of rock, but also as a comet.
Now, a comet out of that distance is a ball of rock and ice and dust.
And then when this comet gets warmer, it gets an atmosphere and the dust is shed, so it gets dusty and you get gases around it.
And the interesting thing about Chiron is that it is seen to be fuzzy in the sense it is leaking something into space.
And some people think, I believe it has this material, this dust that has come off the surface of Chiron, forms a ring.
And there are other minor bodies out there, asteroids, which do have rings of dusty material.
They're very, very thin, small amount of material, but you can detect them.
But I think Chiron is one of those leftover objects from the formation of the planet, of which there are so many out there in every permissible orbit, stable orbits, unstable orbits, cigar-shaped orbits, orbits in every particular direction, because that's what's left over from the mess of formation of the planets.
But I don't think Charon's likely to actually be captured by Saturn or Uranus to become a moon of those.
That's happened with other moons.
I mean, Saturn is the planet with the most moons, and dozens and dozens of them.
And I think many of them are captured asteroids, which have stayed too close and been in the right configuration to be captured by Saturn's gravity.
So I think Chiron is an oddity.
It's a fascinating oddity.
And it repays study because it is a very peculiar object way out there in the cold outer reaches of the solar system.
Robin, thank you for the question.
Fascinating question and great answer.
Thank you, David.
Over the last five, six years, the number of candidates that have been touted by the press as being possible sources and possible harborers of life, there have been so many of them.
But one of them, five, six years ago that we were talking about on this show, because yes, we've been doing it for that long, is the moon of Saturn Enceladus.
Are we hearing much about Enceladus these days?
Enceladus is a stay of incredible study and ambition for a space probe.
Because Enceladus is part of a group of objects of which the large moons of Jupiter are among them as well, particularly Europa, where it's a world smaller than the moon.
Enceladus is about the size of Great Britain, but it's got an ice-covered surface.
It's an ice-covered crust.
But Europa and Enceladus, underneath that ice, which could be a few miles thick or a few tens of miles thick, there is a warm ocean.
And that warm ocean is kept warm by tidal energy.
It's got minerals there.
And it's been protected from radiation from the outside universe for hundreds of millions, if not billions of years.
So there you've got the conditions where there could be the start of life.
There are some people who believe that life started in the deep ocean around ocean vents on our own planet.
But the interesting thing about Enceladus is that ocean is leaking into space.
There are cracks in Enceladus, in the ice crust of Enceladus, called tiger stripes.
And those tiger stropes are where the surface has been flexed by gravity and is cracked.
And this material from the warm ocean underneath is jetting into space in the form of gas with chemicals, with interesting molecules there.
And the Cassini space probe actually flew through one of these jets and sent back fascinating data, which is consistent.
It doesn't prove, but it shows that the conditions could be favorable for life.
And there are plans in the future to send snake-like robots down there to actually go and measure in situ.
But there's a big argument going on.
Not an argument, but a debate, a sort of, you know, debate about where the best place in the solar system is to look for life.
And you've got the Martians, the people who say that life could have hung on Mars.
And if you drill below the surface or look in caves or under rocks, you might find evidence of ancient fossilized life and perhaps, you know, something hanging on that's living there still in the moist, deep, protected regions of Mars.
You've got the Martians, and then you've got the ice mooners who believe that in these sub-ice oceans on Europa, around Jupiter, and on Enceladus, around Saturn, that the conditions could be right there for another form of life to form in an environment which might have been like the early Earth.
And just think about that.
One solar system, and we know that there are planetary systems, galore out there around almost every planet, every star we see.
One solar system could have two or three sites or more where life could develop.
That means, you know, if we find life developed independently on Mars, Europa, or Enceladus, that means life is everywhere in the universe.
That means the universe is teeming with life.
Dr. David Whitehouse talking about space topics, which he will do again, I hope, through 2024 here on The Unexplained.
Finally, Professor Simon Holland in France, former BBC filmmaker, now prolific YouTuber, and the idea that maybe some of the UAPs that people keep reporting around the world may have an earthly But ultra-top secret origin.
Have a listen to this.
For many years, I worked for BBC as a film editor, working on everything from Tinker Taylor Silja Spy, Doctor Who, and then Panorama during the Maggie years.
And then found my interest really and passion in science or specialist factual and started working on Tomorrow's World and Horizon.
And very interestingly, oh, Howard, you'll know this.
A program like Horizon often would have five or maybe 10 shows a year if they were well funded.
But me and everybody else, the researchers, would come up with 100 brilliant ideas.
So when I eventually retired from broadcast television and now live in Belle France, I thought I would initially start making the programs that weren't on TV, the ones that got away.
There are so many good ones out there.
And then I started noticing on the demon called YouTube that to get serious viewers and the one thing that really interests people is phenomenons and ufology and weird stuff.
And while I was at the BBC, you wouldn't touch a flying saucer with a barge pole or even your barge pole.
I mean, it's just not going to happen.
I got slowly into it and realized that there's probably something more to it than meets the eye.
I was introduced to a couple of people who actually had experiences.
Probably the most important person I met was U.S. Air Force John Burroughs, who encountered something strange in a place called Randlesham Forest.
And he completely has convinced me that there's more stuff out there than meets the eye.
Right.
Yeah, no.
So do you consider yourself, and the reason that we're talking is because of something that I saw online and one of my listeners recommended to me.
But the reason we're talking is that some people have the impression that you're a debunker.
And I think that may be incorrect.
Oh, God.
You got me going.
Great.
All right.
So the other thing that apart from meeting this amazing U.S. Air Force person who obviously had an encounter, and I completely trust and know what actually he saw, I read through Dr. David Clark's FOIA request from Sheffield Hallam University, my old town, something called a Condine Report.
And this was an MOD report that was compiled after Nick Pope and the MOD closed the UFO desk to basically close the whole UFO story and look at what they had seen since World War II to about the 2000s and draw some conclusions.
And what the Condine report says, and this is to answer your question about why people aren't really a debunker, is that 80%, that's 8 out of 10 of sightings, are actually easily explainable.
And people like Mick West and other people are very good at saying, oh, that's actually Ryanair going into Stenstead, or that's an Elon Musk Starlink satellite.
It's a single point light source.
And, you know, or it's a balloon or whatever.
And leaving 20%, as said in the Condine report, that are one of two things.
One, they are things that we do know, but we can't tell you what they are, military secrets.
And then a small remainder, which are highly strange, which the Condine report actually confirmed existed.
But they, of course, were looking whether it actually was a danger to national security.
Remember, MOD, the DOD, the Pentagon, all these organizations, the military organizations aren't scientists.
They're not actually trying to explain what they are.
They're actually doing a role, which is, are they a threat to our country?
And so I decided to dismiss the 80%.
And that's what most people see.
And a lot of people believe and want to believe that they're all flying saucers because I want to use science to concentrate on what's left, to understand the extremely interesting weaponization of physics in modern military technology, and to actually find the very few, but they are out there, highly strange events.
And because I dismiss very easily or solve very easily the things which are mundane and prosaic, it gives me the reputation that I'm debunking swamp gas.
And it's so annoying because actually, I do actually want to see something highly strange myself.
I think there's strange things out there that probably we don't quite understand or even know how to look at.
But to get there, you need to cut through the other stuff, if you get what I'm saying.
And that's absolutely my position.
I want the real stuff.
And I think we want science to look at it because my other rant is a lot of people believe that the government and the military are going to tell you stuff through the horrible word disclosure, but they invented the rules not to disclose things.
They're never going to tell you.
Okay.
And do you think that because the disclosure process seems to have slowed down in Washington at the moment, from what we observe, do you think that's a manifestation of what you've just said?
Yes.
The reason the disclosure process is currently slowed down, first of all, the disclosure process in Washington is a political movement.
It's about regime change.
It's about being dissatisfied with current regime and wanting more transparency in government.
And a lot of the people wanting that transparency just happen to represent constituents in the USA where there's very large vested interests of defense contractors.
And they've got the willy of them that eventually they're going to have to reveal what Is inside Hangar 79.
And I think they've put a lot of effort recently in the last week back to the people who want regime change, want disclosure, want transparency, and said, uh-oh, let's scale this back a bit.
And I think that's it's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen from government.
Yeah.
Yep.
No, I think science may be the way forward if indeed we do move forward.
And that's disappointing and I may be wrong.
Okay, which brings me to the point, and this is only a short conversation.
I think I'm going to regard it as a sort of introduction to you for my listener.
But brings me to the point why I wanted to speak with you.
It was pointed out to me that you'd made a couple of presentations about aerogel drones.
Now, I've got to say, I had never heard of aerogel or drones that may feature aerogel.
But you, it had been interpreted, were saying that many of the things that we call UAPs are in fact secret military technology made of aerogel, drones in some cases.
And the reason that this is not widely known is because it's all top secret.
But that is an explanation for not all of these phenomena, but could be an explanation for a significant number of them.
So can you talk to me about aerogel and aerogel drones and how you think they might be implicated here?
Well, let me tell you and your listeners how I actually work.
So I'm a producer, I'm a researcher, and I was very intrigued by Sean Kirkpatrick, the retired head of AARO, who has been investigating the unexplained in the United States.
And he made this interesting statement that a lot of what he's seeing are lighter-than-aircraft or balloons.
And I thought, well, balloons, like party balloons, that's very interesting.
And then out of the blue, I'm sure, Howard, you would relate to this, boing, email from a researcher in Canada and said, they're not balloons.
They're vacuum aerogel reconnaissance drones.
You remember the ones that flew over the United States that were claimed to be Chinese?
They're all made of a special material called aerogel.
I was going aerogel, aerogel.
Ooh, yeah, look it up quickly.
Okay, it's a foamy metal.
It seems at first sight that it's very fragile, but it seems that today that you can now make it have an incredible qualities.
It can contain a vacuum.
The pores of the actual foam are smaller than the atoms of our air, our atmosphere.
So you can actually make it buoyant.
You can also make it into a metamaterial, which I could talk about forever.
It's a material that alters something in frequencies, like making it radar transparent or even visually transparent.
And this has been worked on in secret.
Aerogels are inside hydrogen bombs.
Aerogels are also inside sports cars.
It's a very interesting material.
Also, with a very mysterious past, it's one of these things that seems to have popped into existence.
And no, I'm still researching it.
But no, I was contacted by somebody who spent his life trying to talk about aerogels.
And he thought I would be somebody interested.
And I certainly am.
So secret technology, then, Simon.
But could that secret technology really be capable of performing the aerobatics, the maneuvers that, for example, the Tic-Tac UFOs performed?
Aerogel drones exist.
Aerogel drones need to be publicized.
I made the connection because in the Aerogel drone patent, there's a picture of the Tic-Tac, literally.
And I said to this reporter, this researcher, Josh, I said, was the Tic Tac an Aerogel drone?
And he said, maybe.
And I thought, well, that sounds like a good subject for YouTube.
So in fact, it's slightly a red herring.
It's possible that the Tic Tac, I almost completely think the Tic Tac is man-made, but I think it's possible that the Tic Tac showed some of the actual qualities of these drones.
He thinks it's absolutely an aerogel drone because David, Commander David Fraver, actually, if you look at actually what he really said is it was hovering over the sea.
And then when he got there, it saw him, he saw it, and it shot vertically upwards.
And that's definitely a principle because it can change altitude.
It can hover at different heights.
It's stable.
It doesn't have horizontal speed.
It just has vertical speed.
So it can linger, long linger.
So that might account for, and I don't want to upset my many UAP friends here because I don't know this and I'm only putting it out there, might account for many of the accounts of things that are seen that shoot straight up into the air and, you know, shoot down again, but they don't do a lot of side to side.
Now, look, I know that there will be people listening to this saying, oh, yes, they do.
I'm just putting it out there.
Very quickly, because we're limited on time, Simon, just the last thing here.
You had some thoughts on the very famous early 1990s Calvine case, this strange craft in a photograph that disappeared for years, or rather was disappeared for years, being pursued apparently by what might be a Harrier jet or another military fighter.
Just summarize for me as the last thing that we say together, your thoughts on the Calvine case.
Well, Howard, it's so interesting.
I was contacted by a totally anonymous, unknown named person from British Aerospace, BAE Systems, and he said it's one of ours.
I went, whoa.
He said they're his Harriers, but he didn't understand what it was doing up in Perthshire.
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