All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 4, 2024 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:01
Edition 789 - Guest Catchups
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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.
Hoping that everything is good with you at the moment.
The weather continues to behave really oddly here in London.
Another, well, it's cloudy, there's a little bit of sunshine behind that cloud, but it's incredibly mild and once again, I haven't got the heating on, which means I'm saving money, which I need to.
But it really shouldn't be like this at the very beginning of February.
So I'm not complaining.
I like it like this.
You know, I'm sitting here in a t-shirt rather than being swathed in a pullover or a sweatshirt and a scarf.
So, you know, nothing not to like.
But I think we're not out of the woods yet.
Spring is still about a month away.
Do you know, I was having a thought earlier on today about the 800th edition of The Unexplained, which is coming up, I think, in about seven weeks or so.
Now, if you would like me to do something different for The Unexplained, 800th edition, let me know.
Some people have suggested over the years that maybe I could do some of your stories, or maybe I could talk about my story, or maybe I could talk about both here.
I haven't really decided yet.
But you let me know.
Give me an email if you'd like to through my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link for emails and put in the subject bar, idea for 800, and then I'll see it.
And please know that I get to see every email that comes in.
And thank you very much for all of your reflections on me, my life, and my show.
I am still here.
Such a big part of my life has elapsed, has flashed by in those 18 years, and maybe I can talk about that too.
Thank you, as ever, to Adam, who's seen me through most of that time getting the shows out to you and done a great job.
Thank you, Adam, if you're hearing this now.
Guests on this show all come from a recent radio show, and I wanted to put them here as a kind of mile marker and to make sure they don't get lost, because you know that the radio station puts them out for a week or 10 days or so, and then they're erased, effectively, or they're kept somewhere, but I don't have access to them, so they're just lost after that.
And that's one of the main reasons that I put these things on the podcast, because some of them are worth hearing, worth hearing again.
Let's put it that way.
I'm hoping they're all worth hearing, but some of them are worth hearing again, so that's why I'm doing this.
So item number one, Nick Pope.
With an update as it stood about 10 days ago, nine days ago, on the state of ufology and the state of disclosure, debates in Washington, what is going to happen next, if anything.
So Nick Pope, item number one.
Item number two, my good friend, the astronomer and author Dr. David Whitehouse.
Kind enough to comment on some speculation that maybe you've seen too, that there is about to be, or maybe at some point fairly soon, it's as indistinct and unclear as that, some kind of announcement about some kind of discovery of life in space.
Now, I've in the last couple of days read people talking about signs of life on Mars in the past, maybe discovered quite soon, and they will tell us, but this is not specifically about that.
Dr. David Whitehouse, item number two.
Item number three, space questions from Andrew Lound.
You really enjoyed that segment, so I'm going to let you hear almost all of it on this edition of The Unexplained.
And then D.B. Cooper, an update from Eric Ullis, the man, of course, who's given a big portion of his life to investigating the case of this notorious skyjacker, who you will recall in the United States of 1971 leapt off the back steps of a Boeing 727 plane, one of the planes that had folding steps at the back so they could land at airports more easily that didn't have the facilities that modern airports have.
So he leapt off the back of the plane with a parachute and a bunch of cash that he'd extorted and then disappeared into the night, never to be seen again.
And the speculation has been over all of these years, did this man perish?
Increasingly signs that he did not.
And we're going to talk about the case and where it's at, some new developments.
Also, the involvement of a family member of one of the persons of interest, as Eric Ulis points out to me.
Not a suspect, although some papers have used that word, but a person of interest in the D.B. Cooper case.
So we'll include that as the last item.
So four people to get to, a lot to talk about here.
Your thoughts and suggestions and ideas about the unexplained, of course, always welcome.
So let's get to it then.
Item number one, the state of disclosure and UAPs and debate in Washington.
This is Nick Pope.
Daily Star and other newspapers, including The Guardian, got into this as well this week.
An ex-Pentagon UFO investigator has hit out, quotes, at Congress for believing baseless conspiracy theories in a farewell letter.
After he stepped down, he announced his departure.
This is Sean Kirkpatrick, in November at the back end of last year.
So Sean Kirkpatrick left that role, leading the U.S. team that looked into claims of unidentified anomalous phenomena at the end of last year.
And in what is quoted to be a scathing letter, printed, interestingly enough in Scientific American, he's now addressed his reasons for quitting, citing congressional leaders believing in conspiracy theories with absolutely no substantial proof.
Our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence, yet captured the attention of policymakers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative, says Sean Kirkpatrick.
I guess easy for him to say because he's out of the fray now.
But what does Nick Pope think about this, former MOD man independent investigator, now ensconced in New York City?
Nick, thank you for doing this.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thank you, Howard.
So Nick, Sean Kirkpatrick, has he dropped a bomb on the whole disclosure thing?
What is this all about?
Well, it's the Empire Strikes Back and not for the first Time.
Clearly, he was quite critical and bitter, I think.
We don't know the exact circumstances of his departure, but as you say, it was a fairly robust op-ed that he wrote in Scientific American.
And in parallel with that, he did a podcast in the room with Peter Bergen where, again, his skepticism and his criticism of some people in Congress shone through.
He said they were buying into too much conspiracy talk, and that was detracting from what he felt was his mission of looking at the defense and national security and flight safety implications of what he clearly now is saying are things like Chinese spy balloons and rogue drones and not alien spacecraft.
But in doing this, don't you think, Nick, Sean Kirkpatrick is undermining the role that he held for the period that he held it, and I know he left it at the end of last year.
Isn't he undermining a lot of people's work when he says things like this?
Or does he have a point, do you think?
No, I think you're right.
It makes it very difficult for Arrow, and in particular, I think for his successor, Timothy Phillips, who was his deputy, of course, because Arrow are supposed to be the sort of independent arbiters of all this, and they're supposed to be taking a very neutral point of view, data-led approach.
And basically, if Sean Kirkpatrick is saying, no, no, there's nothing to see, all this UFO stuff, it's just crazy talk, it casts aspersions on their role as independent arbiter.
What do you think happens now then, Nick?
Because I know that the ball, of course, is back in the court of legislators and members of the military, isn't it?
The Senate Intelligence Committee.
I think it's going to be next.
How is all of this progressing?
Where is the train now?
Well, the timing is very interesting because, of course, just literally a couple of days ago, the unclassified version of the Department of Defense Inspector General report dropped.
And the classified version, of course, came out last August, but the unclassified version dropped.
But the big thing on the horizon is probably early next week, we will see volume one of Arrow's Historic Records Review.
This is where they're supposed to go back, investigate all these claims of crash retrievals, programs, legacy programs, reverse engineering, Roswell, and all the rest of it.
And Sean Kirkpatrick has basically let the cat out of the bag because he pretty much wrote this before he left and said, look, this is going to say we've found nothing, and pretty much the implication will be there's nothing to see.
So there is going to be absolute mayhem and pandemonium next week because this is going to drop and people will say this is just skepticism and debunking.
Right.
And all those people who've been expecting disclosure, looks like they're going to have to wait some more.
They're going to have to wait some more, but Congress is going to push back, of course.
So it will continue.
But next week, I think if this Volume 1 drops, which I expect it to do, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, maybe, you know, hold on to your hat because it's going to be one heck of a ride this week.
Very quickly, people are still emailing me about whatever it was that hung over a U.S. military base in Iraq from time to time that looked like a sort of chandelier or jellyfish hanging in the air.
You, I think, in some interviews that you did were quite skeptical about this, but you were not alone in your skepticism about it.
Do you know any more about that, Nick?
I don't.
I mean, the theories range from somebody flying a drone and draping a ghillie suit over it to somebody with a jetpack draping a ghillie suit over it, or maybe even dust between the lens and the lens cover.
But we don't know.
The Pentagon's position is that they're not going to comment on it because it's leaked footage.
Right.
I know that your working year is well and truly cranked into gear.
I think it might be a little time before we can speak again, Nick, but I wish you all the best with all the things that you're undertaking.
Thank you very much.
Nick Pope, in New York, former MOD UFO man and now independent investigator, and we've got to watch what happens at the beginning of next week.
But it's getting interesting because there seems to be a faction that will now have fuel for what it says that says there's nothing to see here very much.
And there will be pushback, the word that Nick used.
There will be pushback from Congress from people who say, come on, you know what you're keeping under wraps here.
Now is the time to get telling it.
My thanks to Nick Pope from his base in New York City for commenting there.
We will follow the story, of course, with interest, as we always do.
Item number two on this edition of The Unexplained is all about recent speculation, and that is all it is that you may have seen.
That there is about to be some kind of announcement about some kind of life being discovered in the cosmos.
This is Dr. David Whitehouse, author, astronomer, and my good friend.
There's a very important space bit of scuttlebutt that is going around at the moment, if that word is still being used.
Finding alien life is something that we've dealt with many times here and questioned many important aspects of that conundrum.
There's a lot of talk that there might be some kind of announcement coming down the track, that there might have been some kind of discovery, maybe from the Hubble or the James Webb telescopes.
That's all it is.
But there's a lot of it, and it's not the lunatic fringe who seem to be doing it.
So I thought it was one of those things that would be worth running past somebody of maximum credibility in this field, the author of fine books like A Great One on Apollo and Space 2069.
David Whitehouse, author and astronomer, is here.
David, thank you for doing this.
Good evening, Kurt.
So, David, what are you hearing, if anything?
There are two lines of two places rumours are coming from, one of which hasn't yet reached the public's ears.
But you're right.
Over the last six months or so, there have been lots of rumours that interesting biomolecules have been found in the atmospheres of exoplanets, planets around other stars.
And this started last year with a planet called K218b, which is roughly 10 times the mass of the Earth.
It's about 120 light years away.
In fact, the whole argument has been called by astronomers K218b or not K218B, because it was thought initially from the observations made by James Webb, which are observations that could never have been made before, of detecting key molecules in the atmosphere of this planet.
And James Webb has made the first detection of molecules like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane, silicon dioxide in the atmospheres of planets.
It was thought that this had found dimethyl sulfide, which is an interesting, staggering biomolecule.
But it was controversial because this life molecule, as it's been called, wasn't detected very well.
And people have gone away to try and see if they can firm up this detection.
They are still doing that and they are still hopeful, although I don't think we can expect an announcement from them soon.
But if they can convince themselves it is dimethyl sulfide, that is a very big thing indeed.
However, there's been a couple of papers out about K218B, literally in the last couple of days, which I don't think have got into the media yet, which show that it's not the type of planet we thought it was.
We thought it was an ocean world with microbial life possibly in the ocean, producing this dimethyl sulfide.
But it now seems from detailed observations that it's more like a super mini Neptune, and therefore it has got no surface.
And that really means if it's not an ocean world, then that throws the whole thing up in the air.
But as I said, one line of evidence, and this is continued and people are very excited by it.
And a lot of people think that this is where the discovery will come from eventually, is in interesting biomolecules, particularly something like dimethyl sulfide in one of these planets.
And that's a hot topic at the moment.
This is as cutting edge as it gets.
Does your gut tell you that within our lifetimes, and we're a similar kind of age, David, and we've both had interesting careers in different spheres, haven't we?
You know, we've both got some miles on the clock and it's all been interesting.
Does your gut tell you that before you and I have to make our final exit stage left, that we're going to get an announcement, be it of something like us or probably of something that's small and microbial?
Well, there's another aspect I haven't got into yet.
But yes, I think that there is a part of the reason this rumor is there's a great optimism based on the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope to make these observations that nobody's ever been able to make before.
And a lot of people have said it's a question of when rather than if.
I wouldn't quite go to say, go as far as to say that, because it is a stupendous discovery.
And until you've made the discovery, it doesn't matter whether there are supportive evidence or showstoppers, you do not know until you've made the discovery.
So it may well be we'll find something very interesting, possibly by Amarcus, but we'll have to wait for the follow-up telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, after James Webb to really make the discovery.
And that's 10, 15 years away at least.
So I hope that we will be around for that.
So eventually that could come Trump's.
But I must add, there is something coming in from left field in the gossip mill among astronomers.
And that is the Chinese radio telescope called FAST, which is the world's largest radio telescope.
It's built into the topography of China.
It cannot tilt or observe any particular point.
It can only observe a swath of sky that goes above it.
And part of the reason FAST was built was to look for alien life, look for radio signatures, techno signatures from civilizations.
And it's looked with incredible accuracy at many of the nearby stars.
And it's not found anything so far.
But they are developing amazing techniques, world state-of-the-art techniques using artificial intelligence, machine learning, to mine this data, to look in new ways.
And actually, there are as many rumors coming out of FAST and China about finding interesting signals as there are coming out of the JEMS Webb Space Telescope.
So who knows where this is going?
They're not going to like that at NASA if a Chinese initiative finds something that they've been trying to find for decades first.
They won't be very much at all.
They won't like it at all.
David, thank you very much indeed.
Dr. David Whitehouse, check him out online.
You will see a whole range, a melange of excellent books on space-related topics.
Very well recommended and guaranteed to delight whoever might receive them as a gift.
Thank you, David Whitehouse, for being involved in the show.
Now something that you really enjoyed on the last edition of The Unexplained as I'm recording these words.
We had a section of space questions in the 11 o'clock hour.
We got through an awful lot of material and I couldn't have done it without you for some great questions.
So these are your space questions and this is the conversation generally with Andrew Lound.
Where should we start?
The Northern Lights.
I've read a lot this week about the Northern Lights coming down very far south, Aurora Borealis.
What do you know of that?
Yeah, what we have is solar activity on the Sun has been quite aggressive and what's interesting of recent months has been that the solar flare activity and the bursts have actually been towards the Earth, which sometimes are to the sides.
But we've been getting some quite large ones blowing towards the Earth at the moment.
And so therefore, we're getting a lot more interesting auroral activities.
And some of the most powerful bursts we've had in many a year have actually been coming towards us.
And therefore, we're going to get some fantastic sights, hopefully.
You can't predict these things, but we Have been getting them, and they have been going down quite far south.
So, the chances are that other parts of Britain rather than the far north will actually be getting to view them.
Right, I think it got as far south as Newcastle.
That's quite good.
I mean, in the past, we've had them down to Portsmouth, so yeah, it could be quite remarkable, really.
But, yes, that's really good.
And no doubt, people in Newcastle did manage to see them in the cold weather out there with their t-shirts on, having a good look at the aurora.
But yes, I mean, we're getting reports from various people who've been photographing them right in further south than Newcastle.
So, yes, it has been a very exciting period of time for auroral activity.
Space technology is full of stories of things that outlast their planned lifespan and things that crash spectacularly, as one thing did on the moon very recently, nose down.
Yes.
The helicopter on Mars.
Yes.
Everybody was captivated by the plucky little helicopter and the fact that it was able to take videos that we could see that actually made it appear three-dimensional and real to us.
It's finally kissed goodbye to existence, hasn't it?
It has.
It's done far more than anyone's ever anticipated.
It's lasting far longer than they expected.
It rotates about, its blades are about 2,400 revolutions per minute.
It's a very, very fast, because it's a very thin atmosphere.
And I think the rotor is about four feet across.
So it's actually quite a hefty-looking drone, really.
But it has, in fact, done extremely well.
And eventually, it had a bit of a tipsy-turvy and actually chipped some of the edge of its rotor blades, which means it's now inefficient at flying.
And they don't want to risk using it, really, because it won't be able either, A, to catch up with the rover or B, hold the rover up, which you don't really want it to do.
But this has been a fantastic demon.
I mean, it was only there for a demonstration piece to see if the technology would actually work.
And it's worked far better than they thought.
It's been able to carry scientific instruments on board, taking photographs, doing some LIDAR experiments, putting laser beams down on the ground to actually measure the surface, where you can get your three-dimensional imagery and things.
And it has been far more successful than they'd anticipated.
So the technology really works.
The initial plans are for much larger drones to be used with bigger blades.
And yet this one was very, very successful.
So I think on future missions, they'll be certainly looking at the possibility of a drone or more than one drone to be taken to Mars to operate firstly with the rover and then secondly fully independently.
And of course, this is setting a great scene for the drone they actually want to send to Saturn's moon Titan in a few years time.
Exploring Mars doesn't really make the headlines quite as much, does it at the moment?
It was the only thing we talked about five years ago when I was doing this show on the radio.
There was a Dutch guy who had a plan to go to Mars, a private company.
It was looking like it might happen.
Remember that guy?
I've forgotten his name.
I was very suspicious of that whole project.
I listened to an interview from a person who was at Birmingham University who was actually signed up to go.
And I was just saying, oh, this would be great.
Listen to the science she talks about.
And she was talking about some science things.
I thought, wait a minute, none of that actually makes any sense.
So I'm never certain how serious that was.
If you looked at the publicity material, though, I'm sure you did.
It was quite amazing.
Mars was the thing.
Five years ago, Mars was the thing that everybody was talking about.
We all thought that it would be within a couple of years that we were able to actually set foot on Mars.
And that's not looking like anything like realistic at the moment, is it?
No, the real science is very different.
And the real engineering and physics of it has to be taken into place here.
And the people in the real world know full well that they're a large, it's a lot larger leap than actually going to the moon.
At the moon, you've still got the ability to come back quite quickly or send emergencies or supplies.
You're not going to be able to do that for Mars because you only have a window of about two years or so, and actually a little bit over two years, a window to get things to and from Mars.
So if you go there, you go there.
You're going to have to stop for a bit.
So the technologies need to be developed.
And those technologies are being developed now at quite a rapid rate.
And I think the overall plan, which is the Elon Musk idea, which is quite an important one, is, in fact, let's take us going to the moon with Apollo.
And then we'd scrap all that.
And then we think of something else.
And then we're going to go to the moon with it, which has been NASA's plan so far.
He took a totally different view.
So, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
Why aren't we, don't we develop a launching system that is quite universal, therefore it's adaptable.
So it could actually go and take you to the moon, or perhaps if you refueled it, the same type of system could then take you to Mars and use the same sort of system, which is his development plan.
So, I mean, the people watching his Starship, which is being developed at the moment, which is going to go for its third launch probably in a few weeks' time.
Once that is fully up and running, that vehicle then could be refueled, go to the moon, refuel again, head to Mars.
You can use the same piece of technology.
That is the way to go.
And of course, it's not going to carry three people.
When it goes to Mars, it could carry about 50 people with it with a load of equipment.
So it's a proper, fully fledged expedition.
And I think people should, if they're looking at exploration of Mars, look at the way we explored Antarctica in the early days.
We went with very large ships full of people with their equipment and landed on Antarctica and spent perhaps a couple of seasons there and then came back again before eventually having permanent bases there, which then have crews which rotate.
That's the sort of system we're actually operating for Mars.
So it's going to be a bit of a buildup, but the technology now is getting there.
And probably by 2030, we're going to start to see the infrastructure for the first outpost on Mars being set up.
Very exciting.
What about the news that I think I read this week, if I understood it properly, of more water than anticipated being discovered around the equator of Mars?
Did you read that?
Yes, I did.
This is quite an interesting piece of research.
It was thought that water was mainly contained in the polar regions, which have been discovered, have been examined and had a look at quite well.
But now research has been a lot from the Chinese Mars vehicle was quite important, as actually seems to suggest there is actually more trapped water or tied up water in the soil and below the surface in the equatorial regions, which is really quite an important discovery.
Because we know Mars had a lot of water at one time.
Let's rephrase that.
Mars still has a lot of water.
where has it gone is the issue.
It was a liquid water on the surface.
It can't just all go into space.
Where did it all go?
It was taken up by the rock structure.
It was taken up into water vapor and some of it has gone underground.
So that interaction is quite important.
And it seems there was a great deal of it in the equatorial regions, more than expected.
That bodes well for future missions there if that water could be exploited.
And that's going to be really critical in the future.
So it's a very important discovery and very much an eye-opener for everybody.
I'm going to start getting into listener questions now because very kindly, quite a few listeners sent me questions and they were good questions.
The first one is from Scott, who's listening right now in Dallas, Texas.
Scott, thank you very much for supporting the show as you do.
It's quite a long question.
For a long time, says Scott in Dallas, I was told that in seven billion years or so, our sun, our star, will transform into a red giant and at some point become so enlarged that its diameter will exceed the Earth's orbital path and the Earth will be consumed.
But recently, says Scott, I heard about the scientific view that says that as the sun expands, it will push out the Earth's orbit, enlarging it.
This ongoing process will destroy the Earth or destroy life on Earth before the complete red giant limit is reached.
But the Earth itself will remain intact and orbit the red giant.
That's a lot to unpack there.
We need to explain what a red giant is.
But Scott wonders if you can speak to these differing views of what will happen in seven billion years from now.
What we're seeing here is a developing view, Scott, and that's what's really quite important.
The sun will actually use up the majority of its hydrogen fuel.
And when it does that, things start to change very rapidly.
It's a battle between pressure and gravity on the star itself.
And this is the big issue that you have.
And it starts to lose that battle.
The star begins to expand.
It actually, therefore, when it starts to expand, its atmosphere will swell out a great deal, probably not quite reach the Earth in its early phases.
And we're looking at a period of about 3 billion years from now when it does that.
But the heat will be extreme and will boil off all the oceans and will probably strip us of our atmosphere as well.
So that will be the end of life on this planet in 3 billion years anyway.
Although don't to worry about it, life on Earth is likely to have been extinguished before then by changes on our own planet anyway.
So don't worry about it too much.
Having said that, once it's done that, the sun then will become quite large and it starts to expand into a red giant.
And this is just the life sequence of a star.
Once it's burned up its fuel, it starts to expand outwards.
And eventually the gravity of the star actually is reduced because it's losing all this mass.
Now, when that happens, the Earth, which is being tied into its present orbit, is likely to shift.
It's likely to move further away.
And he's absolutely right on that.
And although this has been discovered through observations of other stars through the use of a Hubble telescope and now with the Webb telescope, we're starting to see how these systems seem to operate.
But this will affect all the planets.
All the planets will actually be tied and pushed away a little bit.
So there'll actually be a shifting of the orbits of the planets themselves, which is quite an exciting phase for this expansion.
Now, this will stay fairly stable, I say fairly stable for a period of time.
And then suddenly it will push its planetary atmosphere out where it'll become what's called the new red giant.
And the temperatures will reach about 100 million degrees centigrade.
And that will ignite the helium inside.
And once it starts to doing that, it converts the hydrogen to carbon and oxygen, which is the last stages of this.
And it'll actually blast this atmosphere out and eventually form a planetary nebula.
Now, all that gas and material will engulf planets.
I mean, there's nothing you can do about that.
So the Earth will eventually be engulfed.
Although it may be more like a cinder at the end of the day, the Earth will.
So the Earth will still be destroyed.
And therefore, eventually the Sun will actually collapse into what's called a white dwarf, a very small, dense star at temperatures of about 100,000 degrees.
And then eventually that will just eventually fizzle out.
And in fact, it'll take a long time for that to happen and become what's called a black dwarf.
And the universe currently is about 13.8 billion years old.
So in theory, we don't actually have any black dwarfs in existence now because there hasn't been enough time for one of these to actually form yet, would you believe?
But yes, he's right in the sense what we're seeing here is a combination of events here.
Yes, the atmosphere will swell up and initially will engulf the Earth and blow off the Earth's atmosphere and fry us and we'll be in a right state.
But as the Sun loses a great deal, it loses a lot of its mass through this expansion, the Earth will actually pull away with the other planets and move further out into the solar system, but will eventually be engulfed by the planetary nebula once that explodes.
But as a species, we well, we can't say for definite, can we?
You know, we're very resourceful, but we probably won't exist then anyway.
Interesting.
And I followed every word of that.
Yeah, 230 million years' time, the Earth will be extremely hot because all the continents will have come together, and that's probably our cut-off point.
Oh, God.
But nothing to worry about, Elon.
Nothing to worry.
Don't cancel your holiday.
Now, I'm going to compress two questions into one here.
This is from Delberto, aka Derek, regular listener.
He says, can you please ask Andrew, with Elon Musk's long-term plan to inhabit Mars, how long would it take to terraform the planet?
How could this be done with only the tiny amount of stores that we can take there?
And Mark says, how long does he think it will be until possible colonization of the moon or Mars or both?
So two questions there.
First of all, Delberto asking about terraforming Mars and how could you do that if you can't take very much there?
And the other one from Mark being, when are we going to colonize the moon and Mars?
Okay, let's do the colonization first.
The current plan is to start dropping equipment onto the surface of Mars ready for the first human outputs about 2030.
And that will be uncrewed spacecraft dropping equipment onto the surface of Mars, followed then by a number of starships, each with about 12 astronauts each, as thought.
And it's called Mars Base Alpha.
And that's the plan to drop people on the planet.
That will be followed by constellations of Starlink satellites.
Now, you see, they're launching Starlink satellites around the Earth.
Well, they'll be launching them around Mars as a communication hub for anything on the base itself.
And therefore, the permanent habitation on Mars on the current plan is about 2032, where you'll have crews going backwards and forwards, having missions of 26 months, maybe longer on the surface of Mars.
So certainly looking into the 2030s for the colonization of Mars.
For the moon itself, that will probably be the precursor to it.
And although we're running a little bit behind schedule now, it was likely that a moon base of sorts will be set up before 2030.
I think America is already looking at something like 2028-29 for some sort of moon sort of facility there.
But as I said before, the Elon Musk rocket system would be used on both.
So you're actually using the same systems to actually do it.
Now, those are habitations where you live in buildings and things like that.
Now, to terraform Mars, to turn Mars into, to have a world where you could have a proper atmosphere, we have not the technology to even consider doing that at the moment.
There are a number of issues that has to be done.
One, you're going to have to protect the environment by Mars has no magnetic field.
There was an ancient field there, but it's not there now.
It's not generating a magnetic field.
You would need that if you're going to have an atmosphere in order to protect the atmosphere from radiation from the sun.
You also have to generate that atmosphere.
And of course, you can't bring those materials with you.
You would have to free up the materials that once formed its atmosphere, which is now bound up internally on the planet or with the soil.
So releasing the carbon dioxide, the oxygen, nitrogen, which is actually on the planet itself.
We don't have the technology to be able to do that at all.
We really do not, which is one of the real problems.
The other problem with this is we actually have low gravity on Mars anyway.
It's much less than the Earth.
And the reason why it's lost its atmosphere is because one, its gravity can't hold on to it.
Two, its internal activities of its core haven't started.
The ultimate thing will be to get its core rotating violently again and get some internal activity going on.
And then it would be able to generate enough fields to actually hold on to an atmosphere to a certain degree.
Earth, for instance, can't hold onto its atmosphere, but we have lots of internal activity, volcanoes and things like that, which replenish our atmosphere.
That's not going to be possible on Mars.
So those people who've seen the Schwarzenegger film about him being on Mars, his name has suddenly escaped me, sadly.
Total recall.
Total recall.
If you look at that, there were Mars generators they discovered on there, which could generate the atmosphere to pump it up based on the internal activity of the planet.
That's the only way you could really do that.
That's a technology that's at least a thousand years away from what we know at the moment.
It really is.
We have no way we could actually terraform a planet at this moment in time.
Bearing in mind the issues we've got with our own planet and green tech, we can't do it properly here, let alone go to another one and make the attempt.
So I'm afraid terraforming is still very much in the realms of science fiction and is probably at least a millennium away before we could even think of what type of technology we could use to actually do it.
So it's going to be a hostile environment for humans who go there.
It is.
And perhaps not the...
I watched a fascinating documentary on YouTube.
A guy who's based at the station, the international station in Antarctica, and he was showing us around.
He broke down the entire mechanics of the place and the way that it's laid out.
It's huge.
You know, we exist in environments like that.
I'm presuming that the existence of humans who go to Mars is going to be on a par with that kind of thing, but with many more risks.
Yes, it is.
And you get further away.
And of course, they go underground, of course, there as well.
They can actually go down.
And that's what you would do on Mars as well.
You would actually go down as well.
I mean, they're looking for existence of natural caves and facilities on Mars, which it must be because there was volcanoes there.
So there's probably some lava tubes.
And you can, those people who have been on their holidays at Canary Islands know there are restaurants in old lava tubes there.
And you could live in those and you could create a subterranean environment for people to live in.
It would actually be warmer, of course, on the surface, because you're going further down.
And there's likelihoods you would find more access to for materials that you would need, including water.
So that is the environment you would give in.
So you would actually have a base on the top and probably go down to survive more or less underground to a certain degree, where you could control the environment a lot more easily than you would.
Of course, on the surface, you always still have the risk of the violent radiation from the sun.
So you'd have to shield that.
Whereas if you go underground, that's going to be a lot better because you've got Mars's natural protection, which is its soil, which is very good at protecting everything underneath it from that radiation.
So yes, Antarctica is the model, I think, for living on Mars.
And, you know, I recommend that documentary.
Just search Antarctic Station.
And it's a guy.
He's a young scientist.
It's in two parts.
And I watched it about a week or so ago, and I was utterly, utterly transfixed by it.
And the Martian experience, as we've just said, is likely to be very similar.
One more question before some commercials.
Raymond in 4-Far asks, with all of the satellites in low and high Earth orbits and more planned to be launched in the future, and all of the junk that we've already got there of all kinds of sizes, how can manned spaceflights to the moon and beyond be kept safe for the astronauts with all that garbage up there, says Raymond.
Absolutely right.
There's a number of projects at the moment, including by British companies who are developing technologies to actually remove satellites from orbit, the old ones.
All new satellites which are launched and have been for several years now have to have the ability to be brought back to Earth so that they can be de-orbited and out of the way.
I'm afraid there's a lot of older satellites out there, which that's not possible.
But they are looking at plans now of bringing satellites back.
There's already been an experiment carried out where an old satellite was brought back to Earth, burned up at the atmosphere and dropped in the Pacific quite successfully.
So there is a plan to try and clean up space and that is going to be a major issue over the next 10 years.
Again, for this reason, absolutely right.
If you're sending people to the moon and Mars and you're going to have regular flights there, and especially if you start doing sort of flights where you actually leave the Atmosphere to drop into Australia, say from New York, there is a chance you could hit low Earth orbit satellites.
So you need to clean that area of space up as well.
So, yes, there is a big plan at the moment to try and clean up satellites and to make this space a lot easier.
And of course, you've got things like Elon Musk's Starlink satellites, but they are also designed to come back down there once their lifetime is used to bring them back.
And as they're in low Earth orbit, their orbits are decaying anyway.
So once their lifetime is over, then their aim is to bring, they come back and burn up in the atmosphere harmlessly.
Just very quickly before we take those commercials, we were talking earlier about a defense technology, a super duper laser that can hit like a 50 pence piece from a kilometer away and blast it into nothing.
I presume, I assume, and you should never assume as we both know, that scientists are looking at using technology like that to blast and obliterate things in near-earth orbit.
Is that a possibility?
Ah, what you do is you don't want to blow it to too many smithereens.
What you do is you, yes, you fire a laser at it to vaporize the surface.
This material then comes out and operates, if you like, like a rocket and slows the satellite down, in which case, once it reaches below 17,500 miles per hour, it starts to de-orbit.
So the idea is to fire the laser in front of it.
And as it's been, as the material vaporizes, it slows it down, access if you like as a retro rocket, essentially, retro vapor.
And then it slows it down and it comes back.
And that is a technique which is going to be tested and being used as well.
It's sort of China has already done this, interestingly enough.
And that's how, I mean, when they talk about, for instance, anti-satellite technology, what you try to do is you don't need to blow the satellite to pieces.
All you need to do is slow it down in its orbit.
Once you've slowed it down, it'll fall down.
It'll do it naturally.
So you can do that by firing lasers at it to vaporize parts of the surface.
You are sending us video at the moment.
And as my listener knows, I am on the radio right now, which is rather sad because the background that you've got and the space suit that you're wearing are just amazing.
I mean, it looks perfect.
I have to say that Mark, my producer, sent me a still on WhatsApp of it.
Would you be up for me putting that picture of you as you are right now up on my Facebook page?
Cushy can, Kushikan, yes.
I'm on an imaginary base on Mars with my Mars suit on.
It's fantastic.
It's straight out of, you know, I keep expecting to see Sigourney Weaver in the background.
That would be nice.
Well, it would be more than nice for many of us, but, you know, it's that good.
Okay, I'm going to post it.
While the commercials are playing, I'm going to post this picture.
I'm just cropping it now, and I'm going to give it a little bit more contrast on my phone.
And then I'm going to put it on my official Facebook page.
This is Andy Lound as he looks right now as he answers your space questions and more of those coming right up.
Back to the questions, and I know you love ones like this.
Omar asks, does the Oort cloud exist?
And if it does exist, how would we detect it?
Good question, that.
Yes, the Oort cloud, we believe it's sometimes called the Erpic Oort cloud because the scientist Erpic also was interested in it.
But the dust astronomer Jan Oort, very famous man, very interesting man, suggested there would be a cloud of debris, which is essentially the leftover bits for the formation of the solar system.
If you look at the images, which some of them are genuine images, but when they stylise, when the artist gets hold of them, you see that when a star forms, there's a huge dust doughnut shape around it, which is full of dust and gas.
From the inner part of this, the major planets form, which we've got where we are at the moment, and then icy bodies form further out.
But the question is, what happens to the rest of this dust and gas?
And much of it gets, of course, dispersed.
But it is thought that there are bits of material that coalesced out into mainly icy pieces further out.
And now would be what's called the Oort cloud.
It's still trapped in the sun's gravitational field.
Very weak there it is.
Although it could actually stretch, this is mind-blowing, to 3.2 light years away from the sun, yet it's still gravitationally tied to the sun, which is quite interesting.
Now, one of the reasons it's speculated they are there is because we of the comets, and we have cometary bodies which fly into us, but the comets have to come from somewhere.
They can't just appear from nowhere.
They must reside somewhere.
And it's thought that comets or the basic parts of comets actually reside in this huge cloud of material.
It's mainly in the plane of the ecliptic, but there is thought to be a bit of a dome shape of this, which was the original formation of the sun itself in its area.
And when gravitational effects of passing stars, I mean, considering it's 3.2 light years away, then yes, stars 4.9 years away is gravitational, is going to have an effect.
It actually slows them, in the same way we talked about those satellites, down in its orbit a bit.
And it then starts to fall in towards the sun.
And when it falls in towards the sun, they become the comets and then their orbits are changed.
And their orbits continually change then when they go past things like Saturn and Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune.
And their orbits become refined to the low period comet orbits.
And this is where we have some comets whose orbits, orbital periods are somewhere like 50, 60 or 100,000 years because they actually have to fly all the way back out into that region of the Oort cloud.
Objects similar have, we say detected, it's thought that there are some Oort cloud type objects already being detected with some equipment.
Hopefully the Webb Telescope will be able to take a look at this.
And the Web Telescope might even, with its mid-infrared technology, be able to actually spot some of these objects.
And if it does, that would actually sort of seal the deal for us that these objects are out there.
The fact that when we fly out into deep space, especially with New Horizons and Hubble and the web has spotted these, has spotted the icy bodies beyond the orbit of Pluto, it's thought we'll start slowly getting into these, these are the trans-Neptunian objects.
It's thought that the theory is correct.
You've got these serious bodies of objects beyond Neptune and beyond there is likely to be the Oort cloud.
So yes, we are likely possibly to start detecting them.
I think the mid-infrared wavelengths are probably where we're going to have to go with this, maybe near-infrared, to try and detect these bodies.
But they're certainly very much inferred.
And I think they have to be inferred because of the quantity of comets that exist and their orbits, which suggest there have to be planetary bodies out there, which are in this Vast orbit.
Omar, superb question.
Andrew's superb answer.
Steve in Finland asks this: I like this one.
Steve says, Recently, I saw a segment on astronauts, cosmonauts trying to sleep in space.
Without gravity, they have to make special arrangements.
I'd be interested in how Andrew views the adaptations that will have to be made on long space trips and living on future space stations and camps on the moon or other planets.
In other words, how are we going to adapt, and this is not Steve saying this, this is me trying to summarize it.
How are we going to adapt our cycles and routines and methods of sleeping, resting, which is essential to being on a long spaceflight or indeed on the surface of a hostile planet?
Yeah, I mean, people have talked about we went to the moon and we've sort of done very little by going further back to the moon.
Well, one of the reasons for that is because we need to learn how to live in these environments.
And I think Richard Nixon, who cancelled the future Apollo projects to concentrate on near-Earth orbit activity, oddly enough, was a very sensible decision because we need to learn how to live in work in space.
And hence we've got the International Space Station.
We had the Russian Salyut space stations and China has its own space station.
And if you're going to go to the moon and Mars, you're going to have to learn how to live and survive in space because we don't really fully understand all the biological issues that have been going on.
And the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station have been a big help to us for that.
Astronauts have pointed out that they get the best sleep ever in a weightless environment.
We call it weightless.
They are in a gravity field.
It's just that the orbit of the spacecraft counteracts the pull and therefore you float.
And therefore, you actually are able to float and have quite a nice sleep and you doze off.
People generally, of course, are strapped to the wall and things like that.
I think Sally Ride slept, technically speaking, upside down, upside down to the lighting equipment at the top of the module.
And she did that simply because there was a ventilator, which was a nuisance.
And they just sleep and you just, eventually when you drop off to sleep, you're strapped to the wall and your arms just float around.
So you have a relaxing sleep.
Adaptation for long duration could be an issue.
That's why a lot of the experiments have undergone medical experiments to see how astronauts can adapt.
One of them is, of course, the big famous one is, of course, is the decay of bone material and muscle material.
So astronauts must exercise every day with a device that physically straps you onto a treadmill by force.
And therefore, you actually have to run against a treadmill.
And you have these straps which are pushing you down on it.
The body needs that in order to continually supply materials to support the muscles and bone structure.
That's going to have to be done.
It's going to be interesting when we get to the moon because moon, of course, is 16 Earth gravity.
So you do have a gravitational field to walk in, but of course it's a lot lighter.
So again, you're going to have to have the same exercises.
Mars's gravity, again, isn't the same that as the Earth.
It's less again, but it's stronger than that on the moon.
But again, it's going to be a lot about exercising regularly on a daily basis to make sure you keep those muscles and things developed.
At some point in the future, someone is going to be born on the moon and Mars and they'll be physically born in that environment.
The question will be, will they allow that to happen in the short term?
Or if somebody gets pregnant, will they simply say, you're coming back home and we'll sort it out here, then you can continue your space career.
And if somebody is born there, Andrew, how will they begin to adapt?
What a fascinating thing to analyse.
Yeah, that's the big question.
How will the body evolve?
How can a baby just state in a weightless environment or a low gravity environment?
Will it change?
What changes will it cover with it?
These are all questions we've yet to face and to attack.
And within the next century, we will have to face those questions.
You know, you've got that picture of you that I posted, of you in your space uniform, in your space suit, with your background straight out of an alien movie.
It's got, you're probably looking at my official Facebook page now, so many people commenting and so many people liking in just a couple of minutes.
It is astonishing, Andrew.
Do take a look at it.
And for those people who've commented, I can't read them all out now, but Andrew, you will see them.
And it's quite amazing, as are you.
And on that theme, Keith and Allison, big fans of the show, Keith and Allison asked, can you ask Andrew Lound where you get the jumpers and jackets that you're famous for?
I'm not sure whether they are talking about your zippers that you wear on the 39 bus to Sellyoke or whether he's talking about the stuff that you're wearing at the moment.
But just generally, how do you obtain these things?
There is a company that produces trade names.
Yes, there is a company that produces them.
They do them commercially.
They're not specially made for me.
I do not work for that company.
And interesting enough, I do not advertise that company on my website.
But if people go on my website and wish to email me, I will tell them where I obtain them from.
They are generally commercially available.
So I just bought because I thought they were really great.
And then I sort of wore them on here one night for a bit of fun.
And people said, oh, that's really good.
We like that.
And then the producer said, oh, you're going to wear a top again.
So, okay.
So then I had to buy a selection of them to make sure everybody sees the tops.
And they are really good.
And they're actually very comfortable.
And they could be used for their jogging tops, sweater tops and sweatshirts.
And there's also One Pieces as well.
I do a one.
There's a One Piece they make for about the Apollo suit, which is great, which is a nice one to.
You can do a deal and actually market your own, as long as I get a percentage.
And maybe a tiny percentage for Mark, my producer, just for being there.
Any agent out there, I am available.
Me too.
I keep saying that and nothing happens.
People like Mark, Mark Davis says, my favorite guest.
Mark Jones, Andrew is a legend.
Brilliant says Karen.
Mucker and wife are listening to you right now in Canada.
Interesting says Gary.
Colin says you look like you're sitting inside the Millennium Falcon.
I think you'll take that as a compliment, I would say.
I do, yes, yes.
It's a similar window formation there for the Millennium.
Yes, it is.
I don't doubt it for a second.
Louisa, regular listener, just says very nice.
And you'll see all these comments, but just to address my listener now, thank you very much for your response.
And Andrew is as grateful as I am.
And thank you, Andrew Lound, for being involved in the show once again and for having all the answers to all the questions, which is a very, very impressive feat.
D.B. Cooper, the enigma, the mystery of this man who leapt off the back of a Boeing 727 in 1971 and disappeared into the night, nobody had any idea where he or any of the money that he'd extorted in U.S. dollars had gone.
There are increasing amounts of evidence coming out, and some of it centers around possible DNA found on a tie that was left on the plane, but we'll speak about that and other recent developments in the D.B. Cooper case now with a man who investigates this on television a lot, Eric Ulis.
D.B. Cooper latest.
This is a story that, well, you never tire of hearing about, and it never tires of exciting and interesting.
So, two stories.
This from the Sun this week.
D.B. Cooper was no master criminal, but instead an unprepared thief with an ill-conceived plan who almost certainly died on the night of his 1971 skyjacking.
Who says that?
A former lead investigator on the case, retired FBI agent Larry Carr, who was in charge of the investigation between 2007 and 2010, told the U.S. Sun the crook made a series of amateur mistakes and probably died among Cooper's apparent mistakes.
Carr said that he failed to specify the kind of parachutes he wanted from authorities, failed to dictate a specific flight path he wanted pilots to take, and didn't have appropriate clothing or equipment to protect him with his daring jump.
Remember, he extorted a vast amount of US dollars and then jumped off the back of the rear steps of a 727 jet into the darkness and disappeared.
And they've only discovered, I think, some fragments of, I think clothing, but certainly some notes were found quite recently, but not in a place they expected to find them, some banknotes.
This comes after last week's story that a relative of one of the lead D.B. Cooper suspects has joined investigator Eric Ullis' push to get the FBI to release the crook's clip-on tie for DNA testing and solve the case.
The suspect, of course, we've talked about him is engineer Vince Stevenson, who worked in the aircraft industry.
And the family member is his daughter, Julie Dunbar.
So a lot happening, a great mix of things.
Eric Ulis, who is the king of the investigators, certainly on television, is online to us now again.
Eric, thank you very much for doing this.
First of all, Eric, what do you make of what has been said and what was carried by the Sun, the U.S. version of it?
Larry Carr, this retired FBI agent, basically saying that this man botched his plan and couldn't possibly have survived.
What do you think about that?
Well, I don't think it's accurate.
I know Larry Carr quite well.
We've discussed this at great length, and I can't say that I agree with him because actually I'm 100% convinced that D.B. Cooper actually survived and walked away.
After all, we've never found anything related to the guy.
No parachute, no body, no attache case, anything of that nature.
What we did find was about $6,000 about eight years later in a place where we wouldn't have expected to find it.
So I think the evidence is very clear that D.B. Cooper did indeed walk away.
And one thing that's very important to note is there were several copycats after D.B. Cooper did the same exact thing.
Every single one of them survived.
There was never a fatality.
And what about the notion, I think I know what you're going to say about this, that he didn't have the right equipment, and he certainly wasn't properly clothed to be able to withstand that kind of force?
Well, as far as the equipment is concerned, I actually have talked extensively with an expert, a parachuting expert, something north of 1500 jumps, and he actually disagrees.
He says that the parachute that D.B. Cooper took, the canopy, specific canopy, which is called a C9 canopy, is actually the pit bull of canopies, and it's actually ideal for that type of jump because it's specifically built for high-speed jumps.
Now, with respect to jumping in a suit and raincoat and so forth, I don't think it was certainly desirable in the conditions, but it wasn't a death-the fying jump.
The conditions, it was a little drizzly and rainy that night, but it really wasn't that big of an ordeal.
So assuming the man landed safely, which I believe he did, it would have been very easy for him to walk out alive.
The best piece of still existing evidence is a tie, of course, a J.C. Penny tie that was left behind.
And the suspect connected with that most closely, I think you've thought most generally, is a man called Vince Stevenson.
He worked in the aircraft industry and would have had specific knowledge of many, many things.
His daughter, Julie Dunbar, is assisting you.
Why is that?
First of all, his name was Vince Peterson.
Peterson, sorry.
Yes, yes, and he did work for a major Boeing subcontractor that dealt with specialty metals, titanium and stainless steel.
His daughter is assisting me.
His daughter is absolutely convinced that her father was not, D.B. Cooper was not involved with this.
So she has supplied me an envelope that her father wrote in 1961 that is still stamped.
It still has the back flap sealed as well.
This is back in the days before we had to lick the envelope and lick the stamp.
So we can sequence Mr. Peterson's DNA and then compare that to what we have as far as D.B. Cooper's DNA.
And she's convinced that not only will it show that her father wasn't D.B. Cooper, but we're both convinced that ultimately that DNA profile is going to help us identify precisely who the real man was.
So is this matching going to happen?
And how and when are you going to do it?
Well, as you know and you alluded to, I have tried to get access to the clip on tie for the purpose of trying to pull off a DNA sample from a very specific part of the tie.
The FBI has denied me.
However, the breaking news just this last week was I actually did manage to procure a DNA sample from D.B. Cooper.
This was by way of another scientist named Tom Kaye who actually did get access to D.B. Cooper's tie on two separate occasions, once in 2009, once in 2011.
And he actually vacuumed part Of the tie and captured those particulates, which would have included epithelial cells in a filter, which have been hermetically sealed for the last 13 years.
So, Tom and I are taking that filter and going to be working with a DNA lab for the purpose of applying metagenomic DNA analysis to the DNA, to the particulates in the filter, for the purpose of sequencing D.B. Cooper's DNA.
So, the tall and short of it is we do have D.B. Cooper's DNA.
It's simply a matter of working with the metagenomic DNA analysis lab and sequencing this, which will obviously take some time, several months, but we should be able to identify D.B. Cooper after all that's said and done.
You must be really excited about that.
What a breakthrough.
So, you now have the kit of parts to either exonerate or implicate Vince Peterson.
That's correct.
And anybody else that's been mentioned as a suspect all the way along, and I want to be clear, Mr. Peterson's not a suspect.
He's a person of interest that someone I've been personally have been interested in.
But there are also some official FBI suspects that some people have said they would like to have a DNA comparison done to.
So we will see.
We will see what they're, you know, we'll let the DNA speak to the truth of the matter.
Great.
And it's great to make that, and it's good to make that distinction that a lot of fingers have been pointed at a lot of what newspapers sometimes call potential suspects or other things, but he is a person of interest.
And clearly, his daughter, as any daughter would, wants to be involved in this so that she can remove the, not the finger of suspicion, but the light of scrutiny from her father.
I quite understand that, and I guess you do too.
Absolutely.
I understand that 100%, and I'm very gracious and grateful that she's been willing to assist in this matter because I'm convinced that her father, one way or the other, is going to help us determine who the real man was.
Do you think we'll get some further answers by the next anniversary in November of this case?
I think it is possible.
The real challenge relates to the metagenomic DNA analysis, which is very sophisticated.
It's not your standard type of analysis.
And we're probably dealing with multiple DNA profiles, all of which will be individually sequenced.
So that's really the time-consuming part of it.
But yes, to answer your question, that's certainly the goal by the November of 2024 to have some answers.
Thank you to Eric Ulis.
Thank you to Andrew Lownd.
Thank you to Dr. David Whitehouse and Nick Pope.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
Don't forget, of course, check out my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
And don't forget also to give me your thoughts and ideas and suggestions for anything within reason that you might like to hear on the 800th edition of The Unexplained.
I can't believe that I've been doing this for 18 years, sitting on this same seat, which somehow has withstead or withstood the test of time, made in the 1980s, used for years by my dear departed dad to watch Liverpool Football Club on TV, and used by me for all of these years with tape and patches on it to sit here and record these podcasts.
Dad, I'm remembering you as I speak these words.
All right.
More great guests in the pipeline.
Like I say, till next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection