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Jan. 13, 2024 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

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Edition 782 - Guest Catchups

This time four guests from a recent radio show... Philip Mantle from Flying Disk Press on Disclosure in January 2024 and some newly emerged material on the Pascagoula alien abuction, Douglas Vakoch on how we should “speak to the aliens,” Dr Chris Smith - “The Naked Scientist” - on a “supercomputer” capable of vast numbers of calculations and Joe Pappalardo on the super-secret X37B space plane...

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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.
	This is The Unexplained.
	Very cold here in London, very grey, very damp, and very depressing.
	January is a month that you've just got to get through, I think.
	I've always had that opinion about it, but it just seems to be a real mixed bag, a real smorgasbord of weather that we've had from some very spring-like weather that fooled us all into thinking things were going to get warmer to a deep freeze that seems to be setting in now.
	We'll see what happens wherever in the world you are.
	I hope the weather is to your liking.
	Thank you very much for all of your emails.
	Please keep those coming in and also the greetings for 2024, which are also still coming in.
	And as they say, right back at you, thank you for the nice things you've been saying.
	When you get in touch, please don't be cryptic.
	Okay?
	Please let me know what it is you're emailing about.
	Otherwise, there's nothing that any of us can do if you don't do that.
	Thank you very much.
	And the way to get in touch with me is to go to the website, theunexplained.tv, follow the email link, and you can send me email through there.
	Don't forget also that you can check in with my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with How it used, the one with the logo on it, and no other similar Facebook page will do.
	Four items from my radio show on this edition, and I think they're all interesting and worth keeping here.
	Number one, an interesting contribution from the UK's Philip Mantle, a ufologist, the man behind Flying Disc Press.
	Been on this show many times, especially about Tascagoula.
	He's got some new information about that.
	And also a thought about where we might be up to.
	And remember, these thoughts are as of the show that aired on the 7th of January.
	Where we might be up to with disclosure.
	Remember that we're looking at this with British eyes and most of it is happening.
	Certainly the action that we get to read about is happening across the Atlantic in Washington, D.C. But it all seems to have gone very quiet.
	So let's try and get a bit of a handle on that.
	Item number two, something that I saw in a newspaper here and we were able to get hold of the man behind it, a man called Douglas Vakoch.
	He's an astrobiologist.
	We'll be talking about the world's first ever alien dictionary.
	If aliens land here, if we find them or they find us, we've got to know how to communicate with them, what to say.
	Many phrases have different meanings depending on how you say them, and you have to be careful what kind of phraseology you might use and what kind of words.
	We'll talk about that.
	Fascinating topic.
	Item number three, Dr. Chris Smith, the very well-renowned naked scientist from the United Kingdom, talking about a supercomputer that will go online this April.
	It is capable of something like 228 trillion operations each and every second.
	It's called Deep South.
	More about that.
	As item three on this edition of The Unexplained.
	And then the fourth item is Joe Papillado, a man who's written a lot for popular mechanics, knows a lot about aviation, talking about the controversial, well, controversial, maybe wrong word, highly secret X-37B remote plane.
	You may have read about this.
	It's unlikely you will have read very much about what it does.
	So we'll talk around it with Joe Pappillardo, item number four.
	Thank you very much for being part of this show.
	Thanks to Adam, my webmaster.
	Let's get to it right now.
	Item number one, this is Philip Mantle.
	Members of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, remember them?
	From earlier this year, last July?
	Oh, earlier last year, the House Oversight Committee will receive classified information concerning the UAP phenomenon this coming week.
	According to reports, the briefing which will take place Tuesday at the Office of House Security will be conducted by Thomas A. Monheim, Inspector General of the United States Intelligence Community.
	The move follows a request put forward in August by a bipartisan group of oversight committee members led by Tim Burchett, Republican, who wanted to know if the U.S. military was in possession of recovered UFOs or had been working to reverse engineer captured extraterrestrial technology.
	Sadly, though, according to this report, we won't get to find out exactly what information the group will be given at next week's briefing because the whole thing will be classified.
	But just before we get to Philip Mantle from Flying Disc Press, who knows all about these things, and we have something else that's big to talk about with him, let me just say these words, okay, because I think they're kind of, well, for me, they're kind of important.
	And these words are like so.
	Let's stop playing the cat and mouse game.
	What are you doing briefing these people in private?
	If you know something that they need to know, they are the public, I mean the United States public, and to an extent the world public, they are the representatives of the public.
	If they need to know something, then we need to know something.
	And if there isn't much to say about this, if it's, well, it's all inconclusive and we'll keep looking, for God's sake, tell us.
	Otherwise, all the people who are interested and have been on tenter hooks about this are just going to turn off.
	Is that what you want?
	That's what I say.
	Okay, let's get to, first of all, Philip Mantle from Flying Disc Press, man who is at the spear tip of the whole UAPSU publisher of many, many, many fine books, some of them about the Pascagoula case, of which we have news today.
	Philip, how are you?
	Good evening and a happy new year.
	Howard?
	Happy New Year, Philip, and nice to get your emails across the holiday period.
	My time was somewhat taken up with other matters over part of the holiday, but I was watching everything.
	What do you think about what we're entering into in this new year?
	Do you think we're going to be getting some enlightenment?
	Well, you know, these classified briefings...
	I think it's even doubtful we'll get to know what was on the agenda, you know, let alone the meet-and-tooth veg of the conversation, so to speak.
	So all it does, it fuels, you know, you know, that disbelief of elected officials.
	I mean, it could be a simple thing that it's not the information itself that they're keeping under wraps, but actually how they gather that information.
	So the intelligence network doesn't want to, of course, let out how they gather this information.
	But if that's the case, Howard, then they should be able to redact the ways that they've gathered this information and just print the rest of it, you know, because we're not really that concerned too much if it's been, you know, they were spying on somebody and they found out this or it's come through, you know, their intelligence agents in the field, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
	You know, we just want the meat on the bone, really.
	And we can argue about how, you know, where it's come from later.
	But, you know, I feel it will just cause more arguments, more speculation.
	And we'll have to wait and see.
	There's nothing else we can do.
	Because as you pointed out right at the very beginning, it is classified, you know, and I'm led to believe as well, some of those members of Congress that will be attending, they may have to either step out at some point because they don't have the necessary clearance.
	Well, what the hell is the point in inviting them in there in the first place if they don't have the clearance?
	Surely you should be able to get that clearance for them.
	I mean, the members of Congress, for God's sake.
	It's not just Fred off the street, is it?
	Exactly.
	You know, like I said, they are representatives not only of the American public, but to an extent the public of the world.
	And we have been led a merry dance about all of this since Dave Grush came out in June, back end of June.
	Then there was a hearing on the 26th of July.
	Then there was another hearing, and all kinds of people have had their two cents worth since then.
	I think this is 2024.
	I think we need to grow a pair.
	And I think we need to get real about this.
	I'm talking, if there's anybody in the decision-making community in Washington, D.C. listening to this, it is time to deal with it.
	And Jeff.
	What we should remember as well, Howard, if we go back in time, I mean, President Jimmy Carter, you know, wanted an investigation into UFOs because of his own sighting.
	That didn't happen.
	Bill Clinton, I think, was of the same ilk.
	That didn't happen.
	So even if the man at the top can't make this happen, you know, unless there's something changed since Clinton was in office, then, you know, how are members of the Senate going to do that?
	I mean, these guys were as far up the political chain as you could go.
	But that will then fuel the secret government, you know, black projects that not even, you know, the president knows about it.
	And on we'll go like a hamster on a wheel, Howard, you know, going round and round and round and getting absolutely nowhere.
	So personally, I wouldn't expect too much.
	I'd keep my ear to the ground and just let's see what happened because it's only January.
	So there's the rest of the year to come.
	It's election year as well.
	So you never know if it might not come up in the debate at some point along the line.
	Who knows?
	And somebody might want to use it on some corner of the political, in some corner of the political firmament as a diversion from all the other stuff that may come out in that election.
	But who knows?
	It is too early.
	Now, you've got something that we're going to talk about for the first time, I think, in the world tonight.
	You have some new recordings that have come into your possession to do with the Pascagoula incident.
	It'll be 51 years this year.
	Of course, Charlie Hickson, Calvin Parker both say, and there is much supporting evidence, more coming out even now, that they were abducted by aliens, probed about, and then put back.
	Essentially, that's the story.
	You have some new material, yeah?
	Yeah, what happened was we've got two lots.
	One is back end of last year, excuse me, David Marler of the National UFO Historical Records Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, quite literally out of the blue, acquired the so-called lost files of APRO.
	APRO were one of the pioneering UFO groups in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, run by man and wife, Jim and Coral Lorenzen.
	And they were involved in a lot of the classic cases of the times, Howard.
	Of course, they died.
	Cutting a long story short, the files ended up with a couple and they ended up in limbo.
	They were in Arizona.
	We knew where they were, but nobody could get access to them for decades.
	And out of the blue, one of the owners had passed away.
	And the last owner of them contacted David and handed them over free of charge, all legal and above board.
	Now, when it comes to Pascagoula, when it happened on the 11th of October 1973, two of the main investigators were Dr. Alan Hynek and Dr. James, excuse me, Dr. James Harder.
	And Harder was part of APRO.
	In fact, it was APRO that sent him down to Pascagoula and paid for his trip.
	So we were hoping that in these APRO files, of which there was approximately 15 filing cabinets full of stuff, Howard, boxes of tapes and various other items.
	And within no time at all, David Marla contacted me and said, got two tapes.
	And on these two tapes are five different recordings.
	And these are the old cassette tapes, you know.
	So we have five recordings.
	The first one is actually Dr. Harder putting Calvin Parker under hypnosis on the 14th of October 1973.
	So three days after their encounter.
	It's only a short recording.
	It lasts for about 11 minutes.
	We knew this existed.
	You know, we knew it had existed because Calvin told me.
	And now we have it.
	And I have transcribed it.
	And some of it's quite, I would say, scary.
	I mean, Harda's asking Calvin about these creatures, and Calvin says, I'm scared.
	I'm scared.
	I'm scared.
	And he says, What do they look like?
	And he says, They have the face of a ghost.
	And I know I don't sound with my Yorkshire accent particularly scary, but when you listen to it and you know Calvin as I did, it sent a shiver down your spine, you know?
	And so there are other recordings.
	There's Dr. Alan Hynek.
	He interviews Sheriff Fred Diamond.
	It was at the Sheriff's Office that Charlie and Calvin went that night in October 1970.
	That's never been heard before.
	What's funny about that little recording, Howard?
	And it goes on for an hour.
	So I know what Hynek sounds like because I've seen him on the TV.
	I've listened to him before.
	And I know what Fred Diamond sounds like.
	And then there's an Englishman.
	A real bona fide Englishman pictures him with a bit of information.
	And we have no idea who that was.
	Not a clue.
	But, you know, he's there.
	So it's a little mystery.
	And we also have the full tape of their interview, the secret tape.
	And it's just a little piece of UFO history in the making, Howard.
	It really is.
	I called the lost aprophiles like finding the holy grail.
	Well, if you fancy at some point, Philip, coming on and we'll play some more of that if you want to.
	I mean, it's entirely up to you.
	Absolutely.
	We're working on them as we speak, Howard.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	The Englishman is interesting.
	There's no possibility that it could be somebody like Timothy Good.
	No, because I know Tim and I know what his voice sounds like.
	This is a well-spoken Englishman.
	He's got no accent.
	It's certainly not Tim.
	Who the hell it could be?
	Your guess is as good as mine.
	So I've just put in brackets, you know, unknown Englishman.
	Well, I've put, you know, that's it.
	I don't know what else to put.
	How utterly, well, we need to do a little bit of digging about that.
	So let's do that.
	But for the moment, Maria Blair, you kindly put me in touch with Maria Blair last year, about October or so.
	And I did an interview with her after doing an interview with you.
	I think it was the first time she'd spoken, whatever it was.
	Maria Blair, new witness with her late, I think, husband at the time.
	On these tapes is a little bit of Maria Blair.
	Well, it's not from these tapes.
	What happened, Maria and her husband, Jerry, were on the opposite side of the Pascagoula River that night.
	He was waiting to catch a boat to take him out to the oil fields, and his boss was late.
	They witnessed the events in question.
	They had their own encounter and Jerry has since passed away.
	Now, I've never managed to get Maria sat down in front of a camera, but I managed to do this at the end of October last year.
	And a friend of ours out in the States, Chelsea Norton Prince, she was filming it for me.
	So I sent the questions and these were very specific questions because Maria's not one for answering texts and emails, Howard.
	It's just not her forte.
	And she says quite openly on, it's an hour-long interview.
	We have it on video and audio that not only did they have their own encounter, she absolutely could see from her vantage point Charlie and Calvin being abducted.
	As she says, taken away and brought back again.
	And she approximates it was about half an hour, which is what Charlie and Calvin had said.
	They didn't really know, but they assumed it was around about half an hour.
	And she said, you know, she was just bedazzled by it.
	She didn't know what it was, you know, she didn't know what she was looking at.
	She couldn't make any sense of it, Howard, you know.
	And of course, she told her husband, Jerry, when he came back from being offshore, and he said, you know, keep quiet and don't tell anybody.
	They'll think we're nuts.
	And of course, you know, the next day, Charlie and Calvin's story was splashed across the news media.
	And she thought, hell fire.
	It must have, that's what I saw last night, these two fellas.
	So we have a little recording, a little brief piece.
	I don't know if we've got it to play.
	We've got it now.
	So let's play it.
	This is Maria Blair.
	We didn't find out until comparatively late in this story, until very late in this story, that Maria Blair was also involved at Pascagoula.
	Listen to this.
	The door opened.
	How did it open?
	It just side to side.
	Yeah, like that.
	Okay, like an elevator opened, but two openings.
	It opened up.
	The bright light come through.
	The bright white light come through.
	It's very bright.
	And I've seen the three UFO guys come out.
	Whatever they are.
	But see, at the time, I didn't know that's what that was.
	I'm watching from a distance, not really knowing what I'm seeing.
	Yeah, so did it look more just like shadows almost?
	No, it looked like people.
	I mean, from where I was at, and I'm looking at people.
	People coming out of this craft.
	Yeah, well, anyway, they come out, they come out, and they went down to where they were at, and Calvin and Charlie was at.
	And I've seen when they brought them back, and Calvin had Calvin by the arm and had Charlie by the arm.
	And Calvin's slumped over.
	He looks like he's passed out.
	And he's kind of like hanging on there.
	He's not as scared as what Calvin was.
	Anyway, they took him up into the space aircraft.
	And it was like 30 minutes later.
	Like I said, I don't know, didn't know exactly what was happening over there.
	I'm just watching from afar until later on.
	And then they come back out.
	They brought them out and took them back down to the waterfront, set them down where they were at before.
	And that's when they got back in the craft and it took off straight up.
	only thing to say about that, Philip, is we both know the amount of baggage that goes with talking about these things traditionally, okay?
	And the same thing applies to Maria that applied to Calvin, who we lost last year.
	And that is the simple question of why would anybody want to make that up?
	Well, exactly.
	I mean, you have to understand as well, you know, Maria and her husband, Jerry, didn't step forward.
	There was a little video of Calvin online, and one of the comments underneath it was, my mum and dad were on the opposite side of the river that night, and they saw the UFO.
	And I saw that and actioned it and found the person who made that comment.
	And it was actually Mr. and Mrs. Blair's daughter, her youngest daughter.
	And I said, can we speak to your mum and dad, please?
	And she said, well, I'll ask.
	And they agreed.
	So they didn't voluntarily come out of the woodwork.
	And again, their story slowly but surely came out.
	Mr. Blair didn't like talking about it until he got ill and he was seriously ill.
	And we have a little video of him as well.
	And he was literally in the hospital about to have an operation and he wasn't sure if he was going to survive.
	And he made Maria phone me from the hospital on her mobile.
	And he said to me, Philip, I saw the same thing as Maria, you know, the UFO and the creatures.
	And then he made, then Maria says, I'm going to film you.
	Say that again.
	So we have that little mobile film as well.
	And he did.
	This is becoming, sorry, you were saying he did?
	He survived the operation and continued telling the story until he died some time later.
	Right.
	Well, this is fast turning out, gradually turning out to be perhaps the most documented case of its kind, and one certainly that has a longevity and that has continual revelations appearing about it.
	So we've got to talk again, Philip.
	Thank you very much indeed for doing this.
	Just very quickly, what is the next book that is due out from Flying Disc Press?
	You've caught me there, Howard.
	I can't remember off the top of my head.
	Well, there's some real good ones, like Chris Evers' book about the shape of things to come, the shape of craft.
	Of course, there's the Pascagoula book, the definitive book, your own book about that that is available.
	That'll do for starters, won't it?
	It will.
	I mean, we've got lots.
	We've got lots, Howard.
	A full raft of books for this year on Flying Disc Press.
	There you are.
	There's no finer publicity in the world.
	Philip, thank you very much for helping me.
	Philip Mantle from Flying Disc with a K Press.
	Check them out online.
	And my thanks as ever to the great Philip Mantle.
	More great books from him coming up.
	And also, we'll be discussing the contents of those recordings.
	You bet we will.
	Now, as promised, Douglas Vakoch, astrobiologist, talking about the alien dictionary.
	Daily Star reported Boffins have compiled the first ever, quotes, alien dictionary.
	To help us chat to ETs, a group of 25 academics have come up with a guide to prepare us for our first encounter.
	The book, Xenolinguistics Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language, will help decipher and respond to any signals from outer space.
	Experts say it's vital that our initial communications with other beings lead to friendship rather than devastating war.
	They believe centuries of studies into ancient human language and animal calls and grunts can be used to, quote, decode intentional communication from another world.
	Dr. Douglas Fakoch, the book's editor and an astrobiologist, he is astrobiologist and president of METI International, is one of the people behind this.
	He's online to us now.
	Douglas, thank you so much for coming on.
	It's my pleasure.
	Thanks for having me, Howard.
	This is a hugely important issue.
	And isn't it strange, don't you think, that with all of the talk of so-called disclosure and possibly imminent discovery that we are not alone in the universe, we haven't actually given a lot of consideration to the lexicon of words that we would use were we to make communication with alien species?
	I think so, because if you think about the sort of language we're used to seeing in the portrayals, you know, watch Star Trek, they all speak English, right?
	So, I mean, we often think language is not going to be an issue.
	But the flip side is actually also the case that when scientists think about sending a message out by radio and it takes years to get there and a reply back, you know, no alien is really going to speak English or French or Swahili.
	And so the usual idea is send them something that they will know as well as we do, something like math or science, because that's what they need to know in order to build the radio to hear our signal.
	I mean, if you can't do something like add one plus one equals two, you're not going to be a good engineer.
	So that's the usual language people have said.
	But what happens if we actually think about the languages we use to communicate with one another?
	So that's what this new book is about, xenolinguistics, is to ask the question, could we actually use language?
	The father of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky, has long said, if the aliens come to Earth and listen to our languages, they're going to think we all just speak many dialects of the same language.
	Because underneath all of the differences, the structure, sort of how words are strung together is the same.
	The underlying architecture is the same.
	But what he asks in this new book is, might the aliens have something similar?
	So could a study of our languages actually help us understand theirs?
	And if we were to use words to communicate with them, which is the tool that most of us know, we have to be very careful about how we would use the words, don't we?
	Because if I communicate with you and I say, you're a genius, or I can say, Douglas, you're a genius.
	Now, I've just said the same words, but I've said them two different ways.
	One of them is ironic and one of them is a statement of fact.
	So we have to be enormously careful, not only with the words, but the way we use them.
	We have to be enormously careful.
	But then, you know, when you're saying that to me, even though we're far apart from one another, I can hear you and I can hear in your voice, oh, you're being sarcastic.
	And I can respond in turn.
	Or if there's a misunderstanding, you're Trying to be sarcastic, and I take it seriously.
	You can correct that.
	We don't have that luxury with the aliens we're searching because, unfortunately, they're not landing in Miami, they're sticking around their own star system.
	So, the best case scenario, it's going to take as long as your radio show has been in existence, eight years, to send a signal to the nearest star to get a reply back.
	So, we have to really make sure that those messages are understandable because what happens if we get it all mixed up?
	And we need to be doing this like yesterday, don't we?
	You know, we're talking so much.
	There is a meeting in Washington.
	There will be a confidential briefing about unidentified aerial phenomena, UAPs, supposedly happening, I think, on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. You know, we really do need to be doing this.
	What work scientifically do you believe is being done on this?
	Well, as you say, we're really behind schedule because in earnest, astronomers have been listening for signals from the stars for 60 years now.
	And maybe that's exactly what the other astronomers are doing out there too around other stars.
	But if that's what everyone is doing, we're all just listening and no one is sending an intentional signal, it's going to be a really quiet universe.
	So, again, you know, I hope these stories that people say about the aliens coming to Earth are true.
	The problem is, as credible as that sounds as a first-person report, a testimony from a person, for scientists, that just isn't the kind of evidence.
	We need the kind of evidence that we can look at our instruments and we see a signal and we can call up our buddies and we call up our skeptics and they can all see it and they say, this is incontrovertible proof.
	So there's a lot of ways you can make claims about aliens, but the kind of claims we're making are ones that need to be tested and retested.
	And then finally, we have concrete evidence that we're not alone.
	In 2024, this is all important, though, just finally, Douglas, isn't it?
	Because in the Pacific coastal area of the United States and other places, they prefer for tsunamis and other events that may not happen, but might.
	You've got to be ready.
	Similarly, we need to be ready for this.
	Well, we need to be ready because the search is accelerating.
	So when I say it's been going on for 60 years, that was a couple of stars and then a few more stars.
	But the same changes we see in computing, in artificial intelligence, it's accelerating every year.
	So now we're in the midst of a project to look at signals from a million stars, from 100 galaxies, each of those galaxies containing billions of stars.
	So the ability to find someone, if they're out there and they're trying to make themselves known, is better than it ever has been.
	So you're absolutely right.
	We could get a signal tonight that lets us know we're not alone.
	And if that's the case, we need to answer these really hard questions.
	Should we simply reply back?
	If we do, what should we say?
	And how do we say it in a way that'll be understandable?
	Beautifully put.
	Thank you so much, Douglas.
	Douglas Dakoch, astrobiologist and president of an organization called Meti International.
	If we'd had a bit more time, we could have talked about what exactly this is.
	He's currently in Bern, apparently, Switzerland, for a meeting about humanity's cosmic footprint, where he'll be talking about the radio messages we are sending to extraterrestrials, which we've kind of discussed.
	But I think we need to talk with him a lot more because he's a fascinating man.
	What an interesting man.
	Douglas Vakoch from the 7th of January show here, kept for posterity, talking about how you would talk to the aliens.
	Almost sounds a little bit like Dr. Doolittle.
	You know, how would you talk to the aliens?
	Serious subject, though, and something that we really should have been giving more thought to, I think.
	Next up, the naked scientist from the United Kingdom, the famous Dr. Chris Smith, talking about a supercomputer that they're set to unveil in April of this year.
	Have a listen to this.
	This is from the conversation website and MSN News this week, and other sources.
	A supercomputer scheduled to go online in April 2024 will rival the estimated rate of operations in the human brain.
	According to researchers in Australia, the machine which is called Deep South is capable of performing 228 trillion operations per second.
	It's the world's first supercomputer capable of simulating networks of neurons and synapses, which are key structures in your head that make up the nervous system at the scale of the human brain.
	Deep South belongs to an approach known as neuromorphic computing, which aims to mimic the biological processes of the human brain.
	Fascinating?
	Amazing?
	Scary?
	Dr. Chris Smith, the naked scientist, is on to us.
	Chris, happy new year.
	Happy New Year.
	So when computers get to the stage that they can mimic the way our brains work, do we need to start worrying?
	Well, really, the attraction of this is if you look at the world's most powerful computer, which is the HP Enterprise Frontier Computer in America, the energy that that uses, and it is fast, I mean, it runs at about a quintillion operations a second.
	That's sort of human brain level of performance, actually.
	But it burns through in the region of about 22 megawatts.
	That's how much it's using in terms of energy.
	Now, if I was plugging that into my home supply and buying electricity at the rate that I do, I'd be paying 10,000 quid an hour to run that thing.
	And admittedly, I'll probably do Facebook and play chess on it as well as send a few emails.
	But people with higher questions to answer that need the power of a supercomputer really need to love their science in order to use that kind of electricity bill and that kind of computing power, most of it probably cooling.
	Now, the human brain is achieving something similar in performance terms, but it's doing it on little more energy than the light bulb in your fridge.
	The human body runs at about two watts per kilogram.
	Your brain accounts for about 20% of your oxygen and therefore energy production and demand.
	And so your brain is about 20 watts.
	And we're achieving what it takes a 22 megawatt computer to do with something that gets into a liter and a half inside your head.
	That's its volume and weighs about a kilo and a half, not about 680 square meters of footprint, which this supercomputer does.
	Right.
	But if you think back, you know, you and I are too young to actually have been there, but if you think back to the first computers, 1950s, wasn't it?
	You missed the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.
	You know, they were huge.
	They were room-filling things, those first computers, and they get smaller, they get more efficient.
	So it's a race, and we don't have the capacity to exceed the technology, but the technology has the capacity maybe to exceed us.
	What do you think?
	Well, the attraction of doing this is if we can harness what the human brain does, instead of having to spend £10,000 an hour on electricity, we'll be running at 20 watts and achieving that kind of computing power.
	Now, they're not really comparable.
	What a brain does and what the computer that I'm talking to you using, about 150 watts, does, they work in totally different ways.
	Computers as we know them, our desktops and so on, they are serial processors that work in binary.
	In other words, they make very complicated calculations involving bits of information that are either naughts or ones, and enormous effort goes into safeguarding the integrity of the calculations they do.
	So they are extremely accurate with what they do.
	They make very, very few mistakes.
	The odd neutron flies in from space and knocks a bit out here and there, but very, very rare indeed.
	And there are lots of error corrections built in.
	Human brains, on the other hand, work in parallel.
	So rather than an operation comes along, you do a sum, and then you do the next sum, and then you do the next sum, like a long-term domino effect, the human brain is doing all these things all at once, all in parallel.
	And the things, the instruments, the neurons that are making those calculations are doing it via the connections between them, the synapses.
	And rather than having one part of the computer that does memory, another part that does processing, and it's continually going and getting some information from the memory and then returning some information to the memory, all takes time, all very inefficient, all using energy, the human brain does it by having memory and processing in these synapses everywhere all at once and therefore all accessible all at once.
	And that's the attraction of these sorts of computing architectures.
	It's a completely different design and approach to doing computing.
	And if we can unlock how our brains do it and mimic that with computer modelling, we have efficiencies.
	But we also have the ability to access some of the amazing things our brains do, which is very hard for computers to do at the moment.
	But we're not there yet.
	No, we're not there yet.
	But I mean, we have, this is one of a generation of computers.
	Europe had another project, which was called the Human Brain Project, appropriately enough, which ran for 10 years in Germany.
	It was in Heidelberg, actually.
	It just wound up.
	It was between 2013 and 2023.
	And they were producing very good models of the sort of spiking activity and the collective mass action activity that goes on in the human brain.
	So there is a platform and a foundation on which to build.
	And that's what Deep South hopefully will begin to do from April of this year.
	I've got a feeling that come April, when the rest of the media starts reporting on this stuff, you're going to have to explain this quite a few times, Chris.
	We'll see.
	I mean, these things are long-term projects.
	So this is not going to switch on in April.
	And then scientists in May 2024 will say, good day, and we've solved the problem of consciousness with a slightly less dodgy, more authentic Australian accent than that.
	And in the meantime, you and I watch and we wait.
	Chris, thank you so much.
	Dr. Chris Smith, the naked scientist here on The Unexplained.
	Chris Smith, talking about something that's no secret, a supercomputer, but now we talk about something that is quite secret.
	The X-37B plane.
	It last took off, according to Reuters News Agency, December 28th.
	What does it do, this remote plane?
	What's it for?
	As far as we can know.
	Joe Papillado, regular friend of this show, has some thoughts about it.
	And from the radio show of January the 7th, here are those thoughts.
	This story was from the last few days of 2023.
	Cape Canaveral, Florida, dateline December 28th, Reuters.
	The U.S. military's secret X-37B robot space plane blasted off from Florida on its seventh mission, the first launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, capable of delivering it to a higher orbit than ever before.
	What is the X-37B?
	What's it for?
	I mean, if you're in America, you're paying for it.
	What's the point?
	Let's find out.
	Let's talk with an old friend of this show who hasn't been on for months, Joe Papillado, writer and author.
	Joe, thanks so much for doing this.
	How are you?
	My pleasure.
	Everything's great here in Texas.
	And Happy New Year.
	YouTube.
	X-37B, there are periodic, cryptic stories about the X-37B and the fact that it's super, super secret.
	Can you talk me through it?
	Yeah, sure.
	I've written a couple of those and edited a few more.
	So we've been tracking this.
	We in the aerospace media have been tracking this thing for a long time.
	Basically, it looks like a mini space shuttle, uncrewed.
	It has a payload bay that can open up so it can release satellites or can carry instruments and expose it to those instruments to space, maybe optical telescopes or something to spy on other satellites.
	We don't know what they're doing with it is the short answer.
	There is one NASA payload that carrying a bunch of seeds to see how seeds grow in space because these things, the last mission was up there for two years.
	So these are long duration missions.
	So they don't tell us what they're doing.
	So, but there are things that we can glean from what it launched on and the previous things that are important in terms of space conflict and space warfare.
	So I can go through a couple of things.
	I can unpack the mission a little bit if you'd like to rattle on.
	So yeah, so the Falcon Heavy, it's the first time it launched on a Falcon Heavy.
	That's the biggest rocket that you can hire to take you from the United States into higher orbits.
	And that's a really big deal because, well, for a lot of reasons, but one reason is the higher you go, the more things you can see.
	So if it goes to what they call geosynchronous orbit for the first time, that would enable the space plane to see the entire planet, basically.
	It can hover over one hover as relative turn, it'll rotate the same speed as the target beneath it, so it can park over, say, Tehran or Beijing for the entire time it's up there.
	So it's persistent surveillance from geosynchronous orbit.
	But what I think is really interesting is that it could be going into an elliptical orbit, and that's an irregular shaped orbit where it goes really far out on one end and really close to the Earth on the other.
	So if you want to loop around the moon, that's the kind of orbit you would do, right?
	So yeah, that's interesting.
	It could drop off payloads to spy on China's activities around the moon if it wanted to.
	That's pretty cool.
	But what I think is the most interesting thing about elliptical orbits, when you're in orbit, whoever is watching you, albeit people like me or other militaries, really, they know what you're doing because you show up at a particular time when you're rotating around the Earth.
	It's a predictable path.
	If you're on an elliptical orbit, when you get close to Earth, it's a lot easier to jump orbits.
	It's a lot easier to do something unexpected and not be where people are expecting you to.
	So you're hidden.
	So you can release satellites.
	You can do secret things.
	It's kind of hard to hide activities in space, especially in low Earth orbit, right?
	I mean, the Chinese have a space plane that's in orbit and low Earth orbit.
	We all know when it's going to pass overhead.
	And when it released, you know, a half dozen small satellites, the United States and the world media, everyone knew it happened.
	If you're in elliptical orbit, you can do secret stuff because you're not going to be where they're expecting it for an orbit or two.
	They have to find you.
	So you can hide in space a lot more easily with an elliptical orbit.
	And that's the kind of thing that this secret space plane is now going to be tested doing, things like that, going deeper into space, being more tactically, you know, nimble, able to basically fight against China in space.
	Because it is a race, isn't it?
	And China has its own divine dragon, it calls it.
	And it is constant vying with China on surveillance and other capabilities.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, Russia is not too far behind, but that really is the main competitor.
	And that's, I mean, Russia does have a lot of good satellite killing technologies, which are worrisome.
	But when you're really looking at future conflict and with a peer like China, you need to know what they're doing in space.
	Are they doing something offensive against yours, blinding your satellites or targeting them?
	Are they releasing, you know, they have the capability of putting up a space plane and releasing satellites with very short notice, which is a big capability.
	Being able to track all those things in space in a very dynamic environment is extremely difficult.
	But it's a lot easier when you have things like this X37B up there to keep an eye on things and be reactive, be responsive to things that are happening geopolitically or things that are happening in space.
	So it's a very interesting world that we're entering in.
	And we have dueling space planes in orbit right now with U.S. and China.
	It's amazing.
	And my thanks to all the people who've contributed for this edition of The Unexplained.
	Joe Papillado.
	Before that, Dr. Chris Smith, the naked scientist, astrobiologist Douglas Vakoch, and the redoubtable, remarkable Philip Mantle from Flying Disc Press.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at 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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