US Congressman Tim Burchett in Washington updates us on "disclosure". Also British investigator/author/broadcaster Alan Pearce looks into the amazing, dangerous and sometimes terrifying experiences reported by people who've been in a coma. His new book is "Coma and Near Death Experience."
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| My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained. | |
| Weather report? | |
| Reasonably fine. | |
| I'll take it. | |
| So I'm going to say really for this time of year, I think we're all right. | |
| Too much rain, too much wind at times, but let's move on from there. | |
| Thank you very much for all of your emails. | |
| Thank you to Adam, my webmaster. | |
| Please check out the website theunexplained.tv and the Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes. | |
| Two things on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| An exclusive interview with Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee. | |
| He will give us his thoughts on where we're at with disclosure, which I think you may find interesting. | |
| We've got about 20 minutes or thereabouts with him talking to this show from his office at Capitol Hill. | |
| And then after that, we're going to talk with Alan Pierce, who's investigated the phenomenon of near-death experiences. | |
| If you can call them that, connected with being in a coma. | |
| A lot of reports from people who've been in hospital, who've come out of comas, describing wondrous things and terrifying things that have happened to them when they've been in that state. | |
| Alan Pierce, ex-PBC man, has done some investigation of that. | |
| We'll be talking with him on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| First, though, let's get to Republican Congressman Tim Burchett and the UAP issue. | |
| Last July, as we will both recall, at the congressional hearing, you said, and I quote, whatever the truth may be, we are done with the cover-up. | |
| It was a very powerful thing to say. | |
| It made a great impact on a lot of people that I know. | |
| It made a great impact on me. | |
| How's it looking? | |
| It's looking well. | |
| You know, we've had a leadership shake-up over here, and the new leader has promised me all attention. | |
| We just got a lot of things in front of it. | |
| And I know the UFO-UAP community is very antsy. | |
| You got to remember, I mean, we've been asking for something, I mean, since, well, since 47, but I mean, a lot of folks have been for 10, 20 years. | |
| And we've gotten our first hearing, which has asked a lot of questions and opened a lot of doors. | |
| And hopefully we'll have some, it looks like we're going to have some more whistleblowers and maybe some people from the scientific community when we're allowed to have this second hearing. | |
| And so we're kind of moving and we are moving in that direction. | |
| We have a UAP caucus even now, a group of folks, bipartisan group that is going to take this issue on. | |
| So I hope we have some, we keep moving in the right direction. | |
| But again, it is a cover up. | |
| We're not being told. | |
| And I've told people, look, little green man or fine saucers or whatever, I just want to know what they're spending tens of millions of dollars on, on something they say does not exist. | |
| And, you know, you have these government officials that come out and say, this is, you know, we've all been had. | |
| This is all a circuitous, you know, it's one incident or something and it can be easily explained. | |
| And then I have a former admiral tell me about submarine objects. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| So, yeah. | |
| And then I have a pilot, top pilot, just in the last couple of months tell me that, you know, one of these objects was 14 feet away from his canopy. | |
| And so I just think that this is an issue that needs to be addressed and more people are aware of it. | |
| And more people, it brings, it widens the net a little bit when I say, let's just find out what the money, even the doubters, even the people who aren't believers, are now saying, yeah, what are we spending all this money? | |
| If they tell us they don't exist and yet we spent tens of millions of dollars and the reports are just a big redacted piece of Swiss cheese, what is that? | |
| And what's going on? | |
| So I think we've, we've, I hate to say this, but I think we've, we've got more questions now than we did before. | |
| But I think that's a good thing, don't you? | |
| I think in a democracy, that probably is. | |
| We will see how that plays out. | |
| You said that there were some new whistleblowers, including people from the scientific community. | |
| How did they come forward? | |
| Were they part of the process last year of the DOD appealing for people to come forward if they knew anything? | |
| Were they people who said, yeah, I know something. | |
| I'd love to tell you. | |
| Or were they waiting in the wings before David Grush spoke? | |
| Some were, but we've had some since then that have approached other members of the committee. | |
| And I purposefully have, when they will tell me that, I just tell them to stop. | |
| We don't need any more. | |
| I don't want to cross-pollinate. | |
| And I don't want anything to get out by accident because you know what happened before? | |
| We had, I think we had 12 or 13, I think we, maybe 20, I'm not sure. | |
| We had a bunch of people we'd asked and they'd agreed to come. | |
| You know, we were going to have a cattle call and then we ended up with just three brave people because the others had, in my opinion, they were threatened. | |
| That's what they were. | |
| And with either their jobs, their security clearances or a blemish on their record. | |
| So we just keep these quiet until the day, until time of, and then we'll go about it. | |
| Right. | |
| So you're doing this on a kind of need-to-know basis, not even you know. | |
| How do you know that these people won't ultimately be deterred from going forward? | |
| Well, I don't know that, but I do know the last time we released the names and or that we didn't keep them close to the vest. | |
| And then we ended up, we still had a pretty, it was pretty much bombshell after bombshell. | |
| All three of our witnesses were pretty good, if you remember. | |
| I do. | |
| And even if you took Grush out of the picture, we still had a couple of pilots that were pretty, that had some pretty damning information on the topic. | |
| But in this instance, we've actually got scientists now that are being backed by outside groups that want some answers. | |
| And so that makes me feel a little better. | |
| I need people that are independent of the government and that can get out from under their thumb, so to speak. | |
| These scientists, are they people, as far As you are aware, and I know that you didn't want to know the specifics of what they are saying. | |
| You're going to wait for that in case any of it gets out. | |
| But are they people who, to your understanding, have worked on reverse engineering projects, secret projects in this field? | |
| I've been told that there are. | |
| Yes, sir. | |
| I've been told that there are. | |
| So, but again, until we get them here and can get them under oath, because a lot of times people will say things and then they get under oath and you have to kind of separate the wheat from the chaff, you know, you got to and get the facts out of them. | |
| So, but I think we're well on our way to another bombshell hearing. | |
| Who do you think is driving the fact that this process is slow now? | |
| I hear what you say about it all bubbling under the surface, but a lot of people are saying they're impatient. | |
| They wanted more. | |
| They were expecting more. | |
| If this is a manifestation of the ongoing cover-up, who's driving it and what are they afraid of? | |
| Well, first of all, you got to realize that government, at least this government, moves like a glacier. | |
| Matter of fact, I believe a glacier would probably pass us up. | |
| We are historically slow, and it's not my, not my beliefs and not the way I operate. | |
| I want to get it out there, but it does allow us more time to formulate something, and it won't be something just thrown together because we know we've got, we've got to, this, we've got to sell it on this one. | |
| We've really got to sell it and we've got to get the proof out there because I don't know how many more of these things we'll be able to get. | |
| And I know people are frustrated with me every time something on my Twitter account. | |
| Somebody, where are the hearings? | |
| Where are you lying to us? | |
| You've been bought out and all this crazy stuff. | |
| And I'm like, no, dude, I just, you know, I'm one person. | |
| And I'm until, you know, and our little, our UFO or UAP caucus is small. | |
| There's not, there's not 20 or 30 people. | |
| There's like a dozen, you know, 10 or so of us that are on this thing. | |
| And so, but, you know, we've got to just move along. | |
| And it's all I've got. | |
| I don't have a staff that I can designate to this. | |
| I'm on three committees already. | |
| I have people that are designated for those other committees. | |
| And it's just the way things move. | |
| So I apologize to people. | |
| But I do, you know, I hear you asking about who's pushing it. | |
| I suspect the defense industry because we've had staffers in the past that have tried to stonewall us and block us. | |
| And that's just a fact. | |
| And, you know, they didn't want to do this thing. | |
| They didn't want to have this hearing. | |
| It was ridiculous. | |
| And, you know, here's how it works. | |
| And I'm not saying any specifics, but say this, just say this could possibly happen. | |
| You got a staffer up here, cocky, you know, going to set the world on their ear. | |
| And they're meeting with the lobbyist from some big group that doesn't want this stuff out and doesn't want any more investigation into it, or would rather divert it another direction. | |
| And, you know, they have drinks with them. | |
| They might illegally go somewhere with them. | |
| And then they got them under their thumb. | |
| They basically own them. | |
| And that's the way it's done. | |
| And, you know, I'm not naming any specifics. | |
| I can't name any specifics, but when you're talking billions and billions of dollars, that's how this stuff happens. | |
| You can send somebody to a condo for a weekend and lock this issue up. | |
| Don't you think they'd do it? | |
| I want to ask you quickly about the RO interim report that came out a month or so, six weeks or so ago, because this was reported, as you know, around the world, including here in Europe. | |
| And I'm going to quote from one of the news agencies that covered it. | |
| Officials had approached the report in an open-minded way, but had simply found no evidence of extraterrestrial visitors. | |
| Now, this report, this segment of the report, looked on, as we both know, cases from the 60s and 70s, historical stuff, stuff decades ago. | |
| But they said there was nothing much in any of it particularly. | |
| And a lot of these things, especially when we're talking about back engineering and scientific projects and stuff, are circular stories that go round and round and round among and between the same bunch of people. | |
| So they get amplified and they just feed on themselves. | |
| What did you make of that? | |
| I don't believe it. | |
| I think that that was well placed by another bureaucrat that doesn't want either one of two things. | |
| Either they are corrupted or compromised, I guess I should say, or they actually believe that because they have been so compartmentalized in their little silo that anything's not available. | |
| You know, when that came out, that was about the time that I was talking to a pilot, a military pilot, again, something 12 to 14 feet from their cockpit as they're flying. | |
| It's not every few months I hear about something. | |
| It's on a regular dadgum basis. | |
| And to say that is just, to me, is the ultimate display of arrogance. | |
| You've got people coming out, sworn testimony saying this. | |
| I mean, we had three people that swore it, and they're just right there in Congress. | |
| Did they perjure themselves? | |
| If they did, why isn't somebody bringing charges against them? | |
| That's a very good question that I've tried to ask a few people, and nobody has the answer for that, Tim. | |
| Where is David Grush now? | |
| Well, I hope he's safe. | |
| I haven't talked to him in the last few days or communicated with him, I guess I should say. | |
| I haven't been with him lately, but I suspect he's doing all right. | |
| I mean, he's, you know, we ran through that deal about getting him through a, you know, in the skiff. | |
| And then we got the basically department told us that, you know, he's legit. | |
| You know, he doesn't have, there's nothing to indicate that he'd be lying to us. | |
| And so, you know, and I think that they thought we were just, we were going to hammer him and they didn't. | |
| And now I guess, you know, the media's moved on and the public's moved on. | |
| And I get that. | |
| That's, that's part of the delay tactic. | |
| We meet about it weekly up here. | |
| Our little group does, and we talk about it on a regular basis. | |
| Is Donald Trump on side with this? | |
| Do you believe that he will be on board with this issue? | |
| Let's put it that way. | |
| I don't want to cause him any harm, but yes, I do, 100%. | |
| I think he has some people that are close to him, me included, that this issue is very important, and some that would surprise you that are very close to him, that this is an issue that I've talked about off the record with. | |
| So I'm 100% convinced that he would be there. | |
| I think before he just, it was just so much going on and too many people around him that didn't have his best interests at heart. | |
| I think he's a disclosure kind of gal. | |
| He's tired of the deep state. | |
| Do you ever feel at any risk, Tim, with all of this? | |
| Because you mentioned the word intimidation. | |
| Dave Grush used the word intimidation. | |
| I think it shocked last July. | |
| A lot of people, it certainly shocked me for somebody to talk so openly about that, even though he couldn't go into details. | |
| Are there times when you, your family, feel at any risk because of the areas that you're going into and the people that you might antagonize? | |
| Of course. | |
| Of course I do. | |
| I've had those conversations with other congressmen that have, I felt like, were delivering me a message from somebody that I needed to be careful, that I wasn't, that I was, you know, bringing something out that didn't need to be out. | |
| And, you know, the mass hysteria, those same old arguments, brother. | |
| I just, but to me, I just, let me decide what I can handle and what I can't handle. | |
| And I think it plays right into the right into their hand. | |
| Right into our hands when they pull those kind of stunts. | |
| I just don't think they're and I just don't think they're thinking very, very much into the future. | |
| All they're doing is ticking off a bunch of very well-positioned legislators. | |
| Do you think we will get a form of disclosure sometime soon? | |
| And what form of disclosure might that be if we do? | |
| I think if it gets out, it's going to be by accident or it's going to have to be by executive order of a president. | |
| I just think it's too deep and it's got too many layers until a president with the guts stands up and says, we need to release this stuff. | |
| And do you think that honestly with all of the stuff that goes on in politics? | |
| Look, you know, we've got tough political times in the UK. | |
| You've got interesting political times there. | |
| With all of the stuff that goes on, this is an election year. | |
| Do you think that a president, whoever it might be, any president, would have the intestinal fortitude to do this? | |
| I think Trump has it just because he's so ticked off at the Uniparty and all that surrounds it, the Pentagon, the justice system, all of it. | |
| I think if he gets that opportunity, he will make that happen. | |
| Have you anything to say to the people? | |
| And you know that my audience is an audience because with electronic media these days, it's all on the internet. | |
| So I have people hearing my words all over the world, you know, in your country, in my country, everywhere. | |
| And some of them are saying to me, this is never going to happen. | |
| Why don't you get on board with the program, Howard, and realize that this is just something that ain't going to happen because either there's nothing to reveal or those who've been keeping it quiet are going to successfully maintain their so-called truth embargo on it all. | |
| Have you anything to say to those people who contact me? | |
| I think if you keep, if we just stop pushing, then we'll never get it. | |
| I just, I think that's part of the plan. | |
| And they did not, in their wildest dreams, think this thing would take off and this community is as large as it is. | |
| Are there times when you get tired, when you get exhausted with all of this, where you think, I'm not sure whether I've got enough gas in the tank to be able to go the extra miles here? | |
| No, I'm in it for the long haul, brother. | |
| My mama, you know, she, my parents were Depression era people, and you probably heard me say this before, but you're going to hear me say it again. | |
| My mama lost her brother fighting the Nazis in the Second World War. | |
| He died in the hedgerow shortly after D-Day, and mama actually flew an airplane. | |
| She didn't have electricity until she's a senior in high school. | |
| And daddy was off fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, United States Marine Corps. | |
| And then after the war, he went to China and fought the communists over there. | |
| And, you know, their whole lives were struggles. | |
| You know, and this, I'm getting paid a crazy salary to sit up here and pontificate all this stuff. | |
| So, you know, yeah, I get run down with it, but it just, but I think back on them and what they've done, what they did. | |
| They're both in heaven now, but what they did in their lives, and they never gave up. | |
| They never gave up on this system and they never gave up on the people. | |
| So I got that in the back of my mind at all times. | |
| And so I get down and I'm worn out and I'm worn out right now, honestly. | |
| But I just, you know, I live to fight another day. | |
| I used to pray and say, Lord, help me get through this week. | |
| And every morning I just pray, Lord, help me get through this day. | |
| So, and he gets me through it. | |
| So I'm good. | |
| Thank you, though, for asking. | |
| Last question. | |
| We all have people who don't like us. | |
| And if you're in politics, it's a rough old game. | |
| There are some people going to hate you. | |
| Some people are going to love you. | |
| That's how it is. | |
| There are some people who email me and say, what are you talking to Tim Burchett for? | |
| This is all politicking. | |
| And this is not what it appears to be. | |
| Have you anything to say? | |
| Here I am setting up straw men, but have you anything to say to those people? | |
| I can assure them that this does not help me politically. | |
| This hurts me. | |
| This gives the beautiful people a reason to snipe at me and other members of Congress to take shots at me. | |
| And it hurts me. | |
| They tried to use that against me in the campaign. | |
| My numbers were too strong, and they didn't run in the primary. | |
| There's somebody running the general. | |
| But anyway, they've tried to use that against me and they've, you know, and it's cost me. | |
| And I get it. | |
| I've made a lot of enemies with this issue, but it's the right thing to do. | |
| I just think, again, disclosure, transparency, those are things we should stand for. | |
| Even if we can't agree politically on anything, those are two issues that I think that people agree that we need more of in government. | |
| Thank you very much for giving me your time. | |
| I realize I've probably taken up more of your time than I should. | |
| And I hope that one of these days, when you get the time, we will talk again. | |
| Please take care. | |
| Thank you, brother. | |
| See you. | |
| Congressman Tim Burchett, and the one question that I think a lot of us would like to answer and can't is: where is David Grush? | |
| And are there more whistleblowers waiting in the wings? | |
| Are we going to hear something explosive sometime soon? | |
| Who knows? | |
| It could be another summer of UAPs, or it may just resolve into the electoral cycle, both sides of the Atlantic, and we won't hear any more for now. | |
| I suspect that's what might happen, but I might well be wrong. | |
| I've been wrong before. | |
| Alan Pierce, we had on the show, a former BBC man, researcher who's written a new book, co-written a new book, about comas. | |
| Now, I don't know anything about the state of coma, how sometimes people are put into medically induced comas so that they can recover themselves, and then hopefully they're brought out of them, and they improve, or they receive further treatment. | |
| It is a twilight world, and it is a disturbing one. | |
| Some people report after comas that they've lived entire alternative lives, not bad things have happened to them, but they've just lived as another person in a coma, in a very real way. | |
| Some people talk about incredible terrors. | |
| So I think it's worth exploring. | |
| Alan Pierce has done a fine job on this, and we'll tell you at the end about his book and what it is. | |
| This is my conversation from the radio show with Alan Pierce about people who've been in a coma. | |
| In my career as a broadcaster, I've had to read news bulletins that have talked about people who've been in a coma, and I've always assumed it's a kind of sleep. | |
| But that's not the entire story. | |
| And certainly not part of that story are the experiences extraordinary that some people report when they have been in them and they come out of them. | |
| This all relates to a book, Coma and Near Death Experience, the beautiful, disturbing and dangerous world of the unconscious. | |
| Alan Pierce is co-author of this. | |
| He's a journalist, broadcaster, former BBC correspondent, author of a number of books, contributed to numerous publications, from Times magazine to the Sunday Times. | |
| And he is a man who's done extensive research about this. | |
| Just so happens he's online to us now. | |
| Alan Pierce, thank you for coming on. | |
| Howard, thank you so much for having me. | |
| So I guess the question that I need to start with, bearing in mind my complete lack of knowledge on this, is what is a coma? | |
| It's more I understand by looking at a couple of things online today. | |
| It's more than just going to sleep. | |
| Well, first of all, you're not going to sleep. | |
| You know, you say that you don't really understand coma. | |
| Nobody understands coma, not even the doctors. | |
| The word coma itself comes from an ancient Greek word meaning deep sleep. | |
| So from the get-go, everybody's thinking that you are asleep. | |
| But look at it this way. | |
| Your brain is switched off. | |
| It does not go through its circadian rhythms. | |
| It does not experience REM sleep. | |
| Therefore, you cannot dream. | |
| You are not sleeping. | |
| And within days, within three days, you become seriously sleep deprived. | |
| And that can lead to acute brain failure. | |
| And that leads to all sorts of problems, both whilst you're in the hospital and further down the line. | |
| And people within coma are told, or people are told, that there is nothing to be remembered from within a coma because the experience itself should be an utter blank. | |
| But the thing is, it is rarely a blank. | |
| In some cases, it is. | |
| But for many people, they're experiencing a range of events within a coma. | |
| And when I say experiencing, because the first thought would be that these are like dreams or nightmares, but they're nothing like that. | |
| They're as real as the reality we're living in now. | |
| People can experience the classic near-death experience with all the beautiful elements that one would expect in meeting dead relatives, being in a beautiful countryside, etc. | |
| But there's also a flip side to that, where people experience abject horror, so atrocious, so strange, so off the scale that it's hard to believe that the human mind can even come up with the things that people tell you that they experience within coma. | |
| And there's also another thing that people experience, which is alternate lives. | |
| These can take many forms, but in some cases, they can span decades. | |
| You may be in a coma, in a hospital for two weeks, but during that time, you might be living an entire life, say 20 years, with all the usual things one would expect in a life, holding down jobs, getting married, going on vacation, having kids, and then waking up back in this world and not knowing that this world is supposed to be the real one. | |
| And the one you've left behind, you're told, is a false memory. | |
| These things are happening to people in coma and doctors cannot explain it because they cannot explain this current level of consciousness we're experiencing now. | |
| So they haven't a hope when they put people in the greatest depths of consciousness. | |
| And how can it be that if somebody's brain activity is recessed or reduced to that extent, how can it be that they are having what appear to be such vivid experiences? | |
| Yeah, this is the wonder of it all. | |
| When the human mind, the human brain, when it's placed into a coma, it's effectively flatlining if you were to connect it to an EEG brain scanner. | |
| And yet, the mind can be incredibly active. | |
| This clearly demonstrates that the brain and the mind are not the same thing. | |
| No one, if you ask a doctor or a scientist, you know, where is your mind, they're likely to point to their forehead. | |
| But when they look inside, they can't find it. | |
| No one knows where the human mind is. | |
| There's all sorts of theories. | |
| There are theories that say that the human mind is external to the body and that the brain is like a radio receiver receiving our consciousness. | |
| And it would certainly be borne out by the experiences people have with encomas, particularly the alternate lives that are so rich in every detail that, and when they come back, that doctors will say this is a false memory. | |
| But there's no way that anyone's mind would make up an alternate life spanning decades just to make up for, say, the missing time you've spent in a hospital bed. | |
| But that's what doctors will tell the patient. | |
| How come we're only hearing about this now? | |
| You've done a lot of research into this, and that's why you've written the book. | |
| But if it was such a vivid thing and a common thing, how come we haven't been hearing more about these experiences? | |
| Because they have not been taken seriously. | |
| What happened was COVID. | |
| And if you were living in the Western world and you found yourself in an intensive care unit with COVID, you had an 80, 80% chance of being placed into a medically induced coma. | |
| Because of the sheer scale of this worldwide, it was possible to see the problems where they were slipping through the net before. | |
| If you work in an intensive care unit, it's almost become a conveyor belt of care where everyone's so busy, no one gets the chance to look over their shoulder at the product coming off the other end. | |
| So the person who's had the experience within a coma, when they come out of it, they're unable to speak invariably if they've been on a mechanical ventilator because of damage to vocal cords, sometimes for weeks. | |
| They're moved down the line to different care facilities. | |
| Oftentimes, they are in a terrible physical condition because of the coma. | |
| And I want to be clear about this, not because of whatever put them in the hospital in the first place. | |
| Well, of course, neither of us are doctors, and I hear what you say, but that's your view. | |
| No, it's not just my view. | |
| It's the view of current medical literature. | |
| We have done a deep dive into this. | |
| Believe this or not, there is no scientific or medical literature of any kind that advocates prolonged deep sedation, i.e. | |
| coma. | |
| We spoke to the editors of the medical journal The Lancet, and we said to them, can you point us to any articles you've run advocating prolonged deep sedation in intensive care? | |
| Took them a few days, came back to us and said, no, we can't find any. | |
| Okay, well, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of debating the rights and wrongs of that. | |
| I've read some articles online where, for example, Health Trust, for example, have talked about why that is used. | |
| And obviously we have to say to people who are listening to this. | |
| Can you tell me why it's used, Howard? | |
| Well, to protect... | |
| You're not a doctor or a clinician. | |
| But what I read was the line that it was to protect the brain, was the line that I read. | |
| Now, I am not qualified to know that, and we have to say to people, obviously, to remain compliant with broadcast regulations, that if they're in a situation where that might be used or might be something that is considered, they need to take advice from a qualified clinician. | |
| As long as we say that. | |
| Okay, let's say an example. | |
| It's extremely rare that people who've been in comas are followed up. | |
| Extremely rare. | |
| It's hard to believe as that is. | |
| One of the doctors who've been helping us with this book, Dr. Wes Ely, he's professor of medicine of Vanderbilt Medical School. | |
| Some time ago, he was becoming concerned about what was happening to his patients. | |
| He had one that came back that he was following up, and she'd been a mathematical whiz. | |
| She was about 35 years old. | |
| When Dr. Ely saw her after the coma, she couldn't even add up her checking account. | |
| He had another IQ test taken on her. | |
| Originally, her IQ was 140. | |
| After the coma, it fell to 100. | |
| They put her into an MRI scanner. | |
| This 35-year-old woman had the brain of a very old woman with dementia. | |
| Parts of her brain are shrivelled. | |
| And I realize that story came from a qualified person. | |
| But we don't know how common. | |
| You know, I need to balance this by saying we don't know how common that experience is. | |
| We don't want to be scaring people that if they have a relative who might have to be in that situation, that they're going to come out like that. | |
| We simply don't know that. | |
| That's the only point that I would make. | |
| You can make that point, but the fact remains is people who are coming out of coma are coming up seriously damaged. | |
| They've got enormous problems. | |
| Again, I hear what you say. | |
| You've done some research and that is your view. | |
| No, I've not done some research. | |
| A lot of research. | |
| A vast amount of research. | |
| We've spoken to leading experts in the world of critical care. | |
| We have read every possible paper that has been published in the last 50 years that talks about coma or deep sedation. | |
| We have found none that advocate deep sedation, and yet it is being done universally around the world. | |
| And yet people are doing it without being able to point to any scientific or medical literature explaining why they're doing it. | |
| There are a handful of things. | |
| Well, I hear what you're saying. | |
| And again, I haven't done the deep dive into it that you have done. | |
| So what I want to get into, Alan, are the stories that people come out with, because you say that there hasn't been as much of an opportunity as there should have been to follow up on the stories that people come back with, that they return with, the stories of other lives, the stories of people that they've met, whether they've met religious figures or whatever, you know, things which are, in some cases, more palpable than near-death experiences that we read about in the Daily Express and other newspapers all the time. | |
| So if you're happy to do that, then we can pick this up straight after commercials. | |
| Is that okay with you? | |
| That's great. | |
| That's a very interesting story. | |
| Alan Pierce is the co-author of Coma and Near-Death Experience, the Beautiful, Disturbing, and Dangerous World of the Unconscious. | |
| Those words in the title, Alan, the experiences that people come out with and come back with, embrace all of those words, disturbing, beautiful, dangerous. | |
| It seems to be all of those things, a kaleidoscope. | |
| It can be the entire kaleidoscope for some individuals. | |
| For some, it's just one of multiple things that might happen. | |
| Let me tell you the story of Isabel. | |
| Isabel is a medical professional. | |
| She works at one of the best hospitals in Cape Town, South Africa. | |
| Very early on in the pandemic, she got COVID. | |
| She got it very bad, and it started to turn to sepsis, which can lead to organ failure. | |
| She was with her colleagues in intensive care, the people she works with, and they all decided, yes, we're going to have to put you into a medically induced coma. | |
| She couldn't wait. | |
| Send me down, she says. | |
| Within her coma, she woke up. | |
| And it's worth pointing out that many people with recounting events within coma say they woke up within their coma and found themselves with clear consciousness. | |
| Isabel wakes up and finds herself in an organ harvesting facility. | |
| They had found a way to regrow her organs over and over again and keep harvesting them. | |
| She could recount the various operations that she'd had on her without anesthetic. | |
| She'd had her uterus removed seven times. | |
| All of this went on for four years, she says, and she was kept in a coffin. | |
| She had a range of other lives, but more likely other deaths, really, because one after another, like a catalogue, she was able just to rattle off different deaths that she'd had. | |
| She'd been fighting apartheid in Simonstown and got murdered on a railway track. | |
| She'd been kidnapped and was being held in Arizona, and she was being raped and finally murdered there. | |
| She'd been kidnapped in the Victorian era, judging by the clothes, and she'd been tortured to death. | |
| And this went on and on and on. | |
| And for Isabel, she's just desperate to die and stay dead. | |
| And she finds herself in the most exquisitely beautiful field, tall green grass, gentle breeze, perfect summer's day. | |
| There's a horse somewhere. | |
| She can hear the horse neighing. | |
| And she starts to walk. | |
| She comes across a beautiful lake and there's trees overhanging the lake. | |
| And then she sees a stairway, an old, gnarled wooden stairway going up into the sky. | |
| She knows that at the bottom, instinctively knows that at the bottom is life, but at the top is death. | |
| And she wants to die. | |
| And she climbs those stairs. | |
| She got four steps from the top. | |
| And she heard her name called, Isabel. | |
| Isabel, you cannot go. | |
| You have to come back. | |
| She says she was so hacked off and she just stomped down those stairs, so angry. | |
| After her coma, when she's on the slow road to partial recovery, she manages to go back to the hospital and speak to her colleagues from intensive care. | |
| And she tries to tell them of these events within coma when nothing should have happened. | |
| And they're like, oh yeah, no, really? | |
| That's weird. | |
| And they're just like not even remotely interested. | |
| And for me, this is indicative of what's happening. | |
| Here are doctors and nurses who won't take one of their colleagues who's experienced coma themselves, won't take her seriously. | |
| There's no hope that they're going to take other people seriously because they are immediately quick to dismiss these as hallucinations or delirium, incidentally, both of which are conscious states. | |
| To hallucinate, invariably your eyes need to be opened. | |
| Or they say that these are false memories. | |
| But as an explanation, it's a really, really flimsy theory because why would the brain make up something so ghastly, so appalling that Isabel experienced as a false memory? | |
| But of course, many of us have had vivid dreams. | |
| Sorry to jump in. | |
| No, these are nothing like vids. | |
| I have three-dimensional vivid dreams where I meet people I've never met before. | |
| They're tactile. | |
| I smell things. | |
| I hear things. | |
| I see things that I couldn't. | |
| But I mean, look, I understand that Isabel's experience is of an order multiply hugely different from my experience. | |
| Have they traumatized her in this world, in her life now? | |
| Does she carry with her a trauma from those things that she can't rationalize? | |
| She's not so bad because being a medical professional, she wants to wake people up. | |
| So she's on a mission. | |
| She's different. | |
| Many people who experience the horrendous events with ENCOMA, for one thing, they come out with post-traumatic stress disorder. | |
| About 80% of people who survive an intensive care experience will have that anyway. | |
| They are reclusive. | |
| Because of the PTSD, they're constantly expecting things to happen again. | |
| They're getting flashbacks. | |
| Oftentimes, they don't want to sleep because when they sleep now, the sleep is really vivid, really intense, and they never had that before. | |
| So they need to stay awake, they feel. | |
| As a consequence, they become sleep-deprived. | |
| They lose balance, they lose appetite, and they're just not the same people. | |
| So do people suffer this? | |
| Yes. | |
| People who have the beautiful experiences within coma, particularly if they only have the beautiful experiences, rather like a typical near-death experience, people many a time, if they can understand what they've been through, will come away with a positive experience that's changed their outlook for life. | |
| But people who've had the horrifying experiences honestly believe that they've been to hell. | |
| And if they don't believe that, they honestly believe that they've gone mad. | |
| And I can't tell you how many times coma survivors have told me that they felt they had gone insane, particularly because no one would listen to them. | |
| And those people, can psychologists, psychiatrists, hypnotherapists, can they help those people? | |
| Have they? | |
| Not until they understand consciousness, because no one does. | |
| We're sending people off to the deepest recesses of the mind. | |
| And they're coming back with stories that would literally blow your mind. | |
| And we've no way of explaining it. | |
| If someone has a near-death experience within a coma and they get to talk to someone about it, which is oftentimes rare, they're very likely be given antipsychotics. | |
| Medication is not going to help somebody come to terms with a near-death experience. | |
| In the same way, it's not going to help them come to terms with an alternate life. | |
| And those people that have had alternate lives, within their coma, they've had partners, They've had other children. | |
| And when they come back from those lives, they're just riddled with utter grief that they can't feel that this life is real. | |
| They feel that they've left their real life and they're now trapped in some kind of half-world. | |
| And this speaks, as you said, to the whole idea, the whole notion of consciousness that we can't explain. | |
| People are trying to, and we're hoping for a scientific breakthrough, but it's going to take time, isn't it? | |
| So if you tap into another realm or zone of consciousness, how can that be? | |
| And the things that you experience there, how real are they? | |
| Could they be real? | |
| Could those people who go through this be temporarily existing in either another plane of their own reality or existence or someone else's? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| In terms of the quantum realms, the things we're discovering now, it is more than likely that there are other realities, other dimensions, multiple other dimensions. | |
| When people take the Amazonian mystic brew, just to take one example, ayahuasca, the key ingredient of which is DMT, they clearly travel to other realities. | |
| If two people take the medicine at the same time, many a time they will experience the same events together, meet different entities within that world. | |
| It is a curious fact that the human body produces its own DMT, its own psychedelic compound. | |
| No doctor or scientist can tell you where in the body we produce it. | |
| The main theory holds that it's in the pineal gland. | |
| And they can't tell us why we produce it, but they can find it in our systems. | |
| It is very, very likely that when a person experiences the near-death experience, they're having a DMT release in their system. | |
| They are effectively having a trip. | |
| That's not to deride this as a spiritual experience. | |
| What the medication there is doing and what the DMT in our human systems is doing is a key to a door. | |
| And maybe it's to help ease our passing, or maybe it's to open a doorway to what lies beyond. | |
| So there are more and more people who have stories to tell. | |
| You tell the story early on in the book of a guy called Nick, young guy. | |
| And to quote, it feels like my consciousness, spirit, or soul packed and went to another world, just like this one, and picked up a life there. | |
| It still blows my mind to recall that place. | |
| I was in a world just like this, but just slightly different. | |
| The atmosphere was slightly orange instead of ours, which is blue. | |
| There were still a lot of the same places, but they were not the same or in the same location as they are here. | |
| It was like the United States, but not like the United States on the map. | |
| It was mixed up. | |
| That's extraordinary. | |
| That's beyond extraordinary. | |
| Nick was seemingly living in the American Midwest in the 1960s and 70s. | |
| He got called up. | |
| He heard his number called on the radio. | |
| He got called up and did a tour of duty in an alternate Southeast Asian war. | |
| When I talked to him about it, the things that sticks in his mind were the fact that his fingers and toes were always wrinkly because he was either in a wet trench or patrolling in the rain or something. | |
| This level of detail. | |
| And Nick within that life had remarkable skills. | |
| He could turn his hand to any mechanical skill, for example. | |
| His father in that world was a big-time motorcycle mechanic. | |
| The Nick in this world couldn't even change a light bulb. | |
| When Nick comes out of his coma and he didn't do too badly, he was only in it for two weeks. | |
| When he came back, he found that his girlfriend's heating and ventilation system had broken and automatically realized, well, it was, that it was a fuse, changed the fuse. | |
| He would never have done that before. | |
| He had paid someone to do that. | |
| Within no time, he's fixing his car. | |
| He's fixing his neighbor's lawnmower and he's repaired a walk-in freezer at his pizza parlor that he operates. | |
| Now, he can't account for, he hasn't got the skills per se, but he's got the ability to go in, look at it, figure it out, and fix it. | |
| No, he never had that before. | |
| That's well, that's like the near-death experience of somebody coming back with a different take on the world or a different philosophy. | |
| But on steroids, isn't it? | |
| I mean, literally, you know, metaphorically, I'm saying here, it's a much bigger experience. | |
| Is that common? | |
| Have you heard that from anybody else other than Nick? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| This other gentleman who's desperate to tell me he'd left a wife and I think three children. | |
| He had a job as an architect and he wanted to tell me. | |
| And every time we, well, we only did it twice. | |
| We tried to Zoom and he just couldn't stop crying. | |
| He was just so torn with grief. | |
| And he was being given antipsychotics to deal with that. | |
| And he's got a wife who he doesn't really feel he loves. | |
| He feels he has to pretend he loves her. | |
| He can't even tell her that. | |
| And yeah, it is so common for people to experience these things. | |
| Sometimes, though, it's not a full life, as it were. | |
| It's just the tail end of a life. | |
| Or people get stuck in loops. | |
| This is really shocking. | |
| James, for example, found he was there in the room witnessing his wife dying in childbirth. | |
| He's not married in this world, not once, over and over and over and over again, like it's a complete loop. | |
| And when somebody's experiencing an event like that within coma, the doctors and nurses in this world eventually want to bring people around. | |
| And more often than not, when they try and bring somebody around, they turn the medication off. | |
| These people come out kicking and biting, and they're ripping the tubes from their chest and from their face. | |
| One Italian girl told me that when she was coming out of this, she was desperate to cling on to anything of this world. | |
| And when she made the blood come out of her chest, when she rips all the tubes out, she was thrilled because she was proving to herself that she was in this world. | |
| Now, there are so many Questions this throws up about consciousness, other realms, a life beyond this life, other dimensions, you know, it's all in there. | |
| It's so all-embracing. | |
| I suppose what it suggests, and I don't know how you would research this, is that there are perhaps realms within the brain that we simply don't understand and we're a long way from understanding. | |
| Or another possibility, we've all read these stories of people having transplants of particular organs from other people and taking on board some of the characteristics of that person. | |
| Maybe there's a DNA aspect to this that we don't understand. | |
| I mean, look, I'm not qualified. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's just a suggestion, but I think it's worth tossing into the research. | |
| Oh, indeed. | |
| And you see, there are many theories and yours, those are just as valid as any other, except that they can't be proven. | |
| You know, we're seeing here within coma that the brain is effectively flatlining, and yet the mind can be incredibly active. | |
| And doctors would like to tell you that the brain produces consciousness, but they don't know how. | |
| They haven't got the first clue. | |
| It's just a theory. | |
| And as I said at the beginning, many people believe consciousness, and I'm not saying this is true because I don't know, consciousness is external to the body and it's received like radio waves. | |
| And that would make an awful lot of sense. | |
| You mentioned the transplant patients. | |
| We look at this within the book. | |
| There are people, there was one woman who had a liver transplant from a U.S. Marshall and developed an overwhelming craving for hamburgers and has suddenly become an adept at doing DIY. | |
| Well, the agent that died was halfway through renovating the bathroom when he died. | |
| And she can do DIY projects with some considerable skills and surprises herself. | |
| So that doesn't explain that memories are in the brain, which is what they teach in almost every Western medical school. | |
| Gee, I think we have a lot to learn. | |
| Finally, I guess in my small brain, my thought about you and this research is the best thing that you could do, and maybe you're doing this already, but it's a gargantuan task is to put together, compile, research, find as many stories and cross-reference them from around the world. | |
| And I think you would have something even more astonishing than this book that you've just produced, which is astonishing in itself. | |
| What do you think? | |
| Well, since the book came out, which has only been a matter of weeks, we've had a number of coma survivors wanting to tell their stories. | |
| And I'd really like to encourage them to do so because it's therapy. | |
| It purely is therapy. | |
| Many of the people that helped us with the book, I wouldn't say did it reluctantly, but they just didn't find it easy. | |
| It's a bit like talking to a torture victim and that you have to go very, very gentle. | |
| And over time, people would tell me their stories, such as Isabel. | |
| There are people who are approaching us now saying, yes, we would like to tell our story. | |
| I don't think that's for us. | |
| I think what we've done, we've done the research, we've shown this is happening. | |
| At the beginning, you talked of studies into consciousness and artificial intelligence. | |
| I think if we need to understand consciousness, we could do very well by debriefing people that have come out of coma because they've been to all sorts of very strange realities. | |
| And when they come back with skills such as Nick's, and there's other stories in the book, one woman gives birth to a particular baby within her coma and then gives birth to that baby again in this real life. | |
| And mothers will tell you that they know their babies and some very, very strange things that just beyond just looking at consciousness or whatever, something is happening. | |
| There are other dimensions and people within coma are going there. | |
| And as I betrayed at the beginning of this, and as many people who would speak to you would probably also betray the fact that we just don't know anything about coma, never think about it. | |
| For me, it was just a term in those news bulletins, a word. | |
| I think I understand a lot more now and I want to read more. | |
| So I think you've done a good thing with that, Alan. | |
| Just give me the title of the book and how people can get it, would you? | |
| Coma and Near-Death Experience, the beautiful, disturbing, and dangerous world of the unconscious, is available from all good bookstores, absolutely anywhere. | |
| If you've got a bricks and mortar store, I vote you go there. | |
| If they don't have it in stock, first of all, complain and they get it within two days, which is the same as using Amazon. | |
| It's everywhere. | |
| And there's an audio book coming soon. | |
| You said just very quickly, your work is done on this. | |
| Are you going to be working on anything else? | |
| No, absolutely not. | |
| What we will do, it's not done on this. | |
| What I want to do is to target doctors and nurses next. | |
| Well, obviously, that is a difficult topic to talk about on broadcast radio because there are regulations and we have to be compliant is the word that they use with them. | |
| But I found that a fascinating conversation and I liked Alan Pierce a lot. | |
| Alan and Beverly Pierce wrote the book, Coma and Near-Death Experiences, The Beautiful, Disturbing and Dangerous World of the Unconscious. | |
| And it is out now, I think, around the world. | |
| It's published, I think, by Sacred Planet. | |
| Coma and Near-Death Experience, The Beautiful, Disturbing, and Dangerous World of the Unconscious. | |
| And before that, you heard Congressman Tim Burchett, Republican, Tennessee, talking about the UAP issue. | |
| We bring you variety here on The Unexplained. | |
| More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained. | |
| So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This has been The Unexplained Online. | |
| Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm. | |
| And above all, please stay in touch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Take care. |