33.11 - MU Podcast - Alien Hauntings
01:15:44 Share

Membership means more with American Express Business Gold. Earn four times membership rewards points in your top two eligible spending categories every month, including eligible U.S. advertising purchases and select media and U.S. purchases at restaurants, including takeout and delivery. What are you waiting for? Get the card that flexes with your spending every month. Terms and points cap apply. Learn more at AmericanExpress.com slash business dash gold. MX Business Gold Card, built for business by American Express.

Welcome to Mysterious Universe, Season 33, Episode 11. Coming up on the show, we've got the alien haunting crossover, water that carries a curse, and how Benjamin Franklin was the ultimate troll.

I'm your host, Benjamin Grundy. Joining me is Aaron Wright. How is Benjamin Franklin a troll? I got into this from a new book from Tom Phillips today. It's called A Brief History of the End of the F-ing World. Now, I can't stand these books that have the curse words in the title. I mean, it's obviously just to drive more sales, right, by the shock factor. Are we still doing this? That was 2019. Yeah, we're still doing this. We've gone from that now. Uh,

But he came off a lot of success from an early one. This was from 2019, Humans, a brief history of how he effed it all up. So that did really well. So we probably thought, well, I've got to put the swear word in every book now. He followed up with a brief history of total BS. And yeah, the latest one is on the end of the world. So this is fun because he goes into all these predictions of...

the apocalypse and various versions of it. No disrespect to Bibu, but we're all still here. Well, that's why I was thinking about this. No, no, but Bibu... I'm just giving him a hard time. On that last show, I was saying it was March the 25th, even though we were recording on the 21st. It actually was the end of the Kali Yuga, as calculated by Bibu Dev Misra, was March the 21st. I was just super tired. So was I, don't worry about it. But remember, Bibu said there's a 300-year...

phase of ekpirosis, which was the Greek term for cleansing by fire. So we've still got that to look forward to. It's not like a sudden end. There's a 300... It's like a slow cooker, like a slow cleansing fire. I mean, he's right. Have you looked at the world recently? I mean, he's pretty much right. And that's what's actually mentioned by Phillips in this book is that the best prophets are

don't fall into the profit trap. Of giving a date? Yeah, the profit trap is you give a date that's too specific and all of a sudden you're hurtling towards this date with all these details and you can't escape it. But by making it fudgeable...

And also by making it way beyond your desk, you're fine. You've got nothing to worry about. But he goes into some really interesting cases, like going back to the 16th century, because obviously people have been calling for the end of the world. Forever. Forever. Yeah. But there was more on the line in the past. Like there's this Dutch baker who became a cult leader in the 16th century.

And he rode out of the city gates and said, the world's ending. When the world didn't end, they nailed his balls to the entry signpost of the city. After cutting his head off, by the way. So that's what was on the line. Now you can say whatever you want. Maybe we should bring... If that's 100% on the scale, maybe we should just bring it back a little bit. Let's go 50%. If you make an outrageous claim and it doesn't come to fruition, do you like...

I don't know, like put superglue in someone's hair for a week or something. I don't know if I agree with that, Darren. Maybe chop one ball off, not two. How about that? Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, I think that might be, that's 50%. But the whole Benjamin Franklin thing came from his second book, A Brief History of Total BS. Did he have the kite cord tied to his balls? No, nothing to do with that. You see, in the 1700s, there was a lot of money to be made because the printing press was getting cheaper and cheaper. There was a lot of money to be made from almanacs.

And almanacs were these kind of guidebooks that were put out by reputable publishers that gave, you know, farmers and people that needed information about the coming year, like, you know, the tides. Like astronomical stuff. When the moon cycles were going to be and when the exact time of the seasons and all this sort of stuff that they would need to know over the year. Stuff that we look up on our phone now. Yeah, stuff that you can't look up. You had to have a book for it. That's how you looked it up. You had the almanac. And so there was this really popular one that,

It really had a bunch of competitors, but it was by far away the most popular almanac. And the author of this almanac, the guy that published it, his name was Titus. And one day he woke up and he read in a small competing almanac his own obituary.

He read that he was dead. So what? The information clearly was wrong. And this came from... It was written under a pseudonym, but it was a competing almanac started by Benjamin Franklin, who started it by addressing it and saying, I've wanted to start this almanac for years, but my good friend Titus has led the industry, so I've withheld. But now that he has passed away, I can put forward my own almanac. And so Titus took the bait. And he was like...

this is outrageous. Like he wrote a letter in his next almanac. If it's annual, wouldn't that take like a year to respond to that? So it's like a Twitter back and forth, but it takes a year for every tweet. And so, yeah, he's, he takes the bait. He's like, this is outrageous. I'm clearly alive. And so Benjamin Franklin in the next one, he writes that, oh, whoever this is, has is sullying the name of our dear friend who passed away. Clearly this is an imposter. Yeah.

Who's impersonating dear Titus. They need to stop immediately. So this pissed him off even more. And this just went back and forth for years. This guy would constantly ride in his almanac. No, I'm alive. This is absurd. Stop doing this. But for Benjamin Franklin, it was just a joke.

He just kept on going with this joke until the guy actually died. This Titus guy actually passed away. Let me guess, somehow he didn't stop? And then, yeah, Benjamin Franklin doubled down and said that it's not true that he passed away because the original Titus passed away eight years ago. And so there's all these stories that kept on coming up in this book of some kind of, you know, some popular...

grassroots thing that spread to the French Revolution and changed minds in America. And it was some court document about a lady wanting to divorce her husband or something. It got really popular.

And it started to be recycled over 25 years. It ended up in this famous French historian's new book that he was very proud of. The whole thing was just made up by Benjamin Franklin. It's just like a fake story. Today, it's amazing how you see everything move. We're talking about, you know, yuga cycles, but it's like everything in human society seems to move in cycles. And the big thing at the moment is disinformation, misinformation, fake news. But we think that's a relatively new thing. It's clearly been going on for centuries.

Centuries. And I dare say that today it's probably because of the litigious society that we're in. It's much harder than doing what Benjamin Franklin was doing by claiming that the guy was dead over and over again. Well, nothing's changed. It's been going on forever, ever since the press was available. And I'll be going into the great moon hoax of the 1800s as well, which started in New York. Is that the bat people? Yeah, bat people having sex on the moon. And people believed it? Everyone believed it. Everyone? Even scientists of the time.

Like serious physicists believe that there was giant beavers on the moon and bat people. Well, that was around the time I think, because I've seen some of it. It's not a woodcut, but it's like that style of imagery that there was like, yeah, this is it. Yeah, this drawing. But that was around the same time with Mars, right? That they believed that there was water channels all over Mars and people living on Mars. But it was just simply ice. But at the time it was like, oh no, there's people living on Mars. Yeah, but wasn't that based on actual...

data, like they saw through the telescopes, they saw something. This is just purely based on fake news. It's probably Benjamin Franklin made it up. What have you got coming up? Well, actually, I've been digging through some old reports from Bufora, which of course is the British UFO Research Association, and

I don't think they're publishing their bulletins much anymore. Perhaps I could be wrong. But I went through their very old publications, and I happened to notice this really fascinating trend of not just simply high strangeness, but this odd connection between apparitions and other sections of paranormal phenomena that you wouldn't expect to

to be connected to it. Now, of course, if you've been listening to us for a while, you probably know where we're going with this, but if you're relatively new to the novel... I don't know where we're going with this. Oh, perfect. Okay, that's great. There's this strange connection. Now, as I was going through it as well, and I'll get straight into it, but basically I found that Malcolm Robinson is a significant contributor to much of the research that was put forward in the bulletin. And Malcolm Robinson has published a great number of books, but one of his most recent is Paranormal Case Files of Great Britain and

volume four. It's available in audio, um, audio book format at the moment in Australia. There's Kindle there. But, oh, there's a Kindle one. Oh, that's volume one. Oh, what are you looking at? Volume four. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, um,

I just went through that just to see, and there was a subsection of the book, this little chapter, that goes into underwater hauntings. So I'm going to talk about some of that stuff a little bit later on the show, but first I just want to jump into some of these reports from Bufora that really do hit the limits of high strangeness and just demonstrate that

How disturbing much of the encounters that people have are just normal people. They're just normal people that their entire reality is completely thrown into disarray when they have a very strange encounter like this. Now, Malcolm wrote up a report called the Halls of Residence Incident. He says, look, as a researcher, I received many weird and wonderful tales. And, you know, of course, that's true. You've got to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff.

But he said recently in May, and this was published in 1999, he received the story from a young chap who had previously gotten in contact with Bufora's Gloria Dixon. And she put this witness in contact with Malcolm to talk about what had happened to him. So David, this witness, he's 24 years of age. He's fit and athletic and is a law student in his fourth year at the London University.

And he said, what happened to me occurred on the 18th or 19th of June in the very early hours of the morning. This is back in 1996. And he said, look, it was a warm evening. So I was laying on my bed naked and I was on my side. Never a good idea when dealing with paranormal phenomena. It's almost like it's inviting it in.

But he said, I became aware that something was opening or moving the fridge door in his dorm room. Now, of course, being in a dorm room, maybe his door was unlocked, but you wouldn't feel that there was an invader. You wouldn't feel very uncomfortable. He says, I opened my eyes and glanced around the room. And he said, my perception started to change dramatically. The room itself appeared not to be the right dimensions. The entire room was wavering.

It was like ripples on a steel mill pond, just kind of moving. When you throw a stone into it, everything was just shimmering. He says, of course, at this point, I began to get very, very scared. And just then, his fear factor kicked in. Once it just suddenly escalated, this tremendous bright white flash just filled the entire room. And there was this rush of wind that came flying through the room. And he said, as soon as he was hit by this wind, he couldn't move a muscle.

So it was like, it sounds like this is sleep paralysis, but there's more to it than that. Because with sleep paralysis, it's not often that people wake up and are able to move and then see some distortion in the room and then are hit by something. It's normally with sleep paralysis, you wake up and you can't move. That's the realization. He's not out of body or anything? He's not out of body. No, he's just lying there on bed. He said, but I couldn't move anything. I couldn't cry out. All I could move was my eyes.

And he claims in reporting to Markham that suddenly he became aware of three or four beings standing at the side of his bed. He described them as being about one meter tall and they were wearing what could be described as something similar to that of a monk's habit with cows over their heads. It's like these little dwarf beings wearing these hooded robes.

Now, Malcolm said, look, can you discern what these things were? Could you see? And he's like, not really, apart from the fact they were brown in color, although the room was fairly dark and I couldn't make out any of their features. And he said, well, look, could you see their faces? He said, yes, I could. They looked very evil. They were brown in color, but were also scrunched up.

You mean wrinkly? Yeah, wrinkly, which you hear in other UFO reports of the bedroom invaders, of people seeing these wrinkly kind of beings. He said they had dark oval eyes. He could clearly see the three beings, but he wasn't entirely sure if there was something else just outside his line of vision, suggesting that maybe there were others in the room. But he experienced this very bizarre sensation.

And he says his life suddenly started flashing before his eyes. So like a near-death experience, there were scenes from his childhood that would come and go. And then all of a sudden, everything just stopped. And he had a vision of his half-sister, Claire. And he said it was at that point...

that he saw a large silver metallic object in the hands of one of the beings. He's not entirely sure what this thing is, but he said it was a device and this being pointed the device at him and started moving towards his body. Now he was in complete terror, but still paralyzed, so unable to move. And he says, I've never experienced any kind of pain like this and I was utterly powerless to stop it.

Whatever this thing was, he said the device was inserted just below his rib cage and it had a long needle-like thing sticking from it. He said he was screaming in this indescribable, intense, horrible pain and all he wanted to do was to make it stop. And he said these beasts, these entities, they had no compassion. They inserted it deeper and deeper until just as he was about to pass out, the thing retracted the device. It's like, I don't know if it pressed a button or something, the thing...

pulled straight out of him. He said the pain completely subsided. Now, seconds later, he witnessed these beings walking backwards, but he said they walked through the bedroom wall. It's like as if there was nothing there. They just simply walked through it. He said once they walked through it,

The room was followed by an explosion of white light and a rush of wind. So it's like, is that... And he's not paralyzed anymore. He's not paralyzed. Obviously, the next line is he found that he could move. He quickly jumped out of bed, turned on all the lights to check to see what was going on, if there was something in his room, something lurking. But of course, there was nothing. But he looked at his body and just below his rib cage was a small red spot where a needle-like device had been. Now, he continued to look at it and monitor it until it eventually faded. Now...

He wondered if one of these things could have been outside his room. So he ran around the other side to see if it had gone through the wall. There was nothing. There was nothing at all. He did find it strange that there was no one else around. He said, this was like a hall of residence. Like even though it's, you know, like one o'clock in the morning or just after one o'clock in the morning,

People are still around. People are coming back from the pub or the club. Some people are coming back from the library if they're studying for an exam. It just didn't make any sense that there was absolutely no one around. Now, we went back to his bed and, of course, found that he couldn't sleep. He couldn't sleep at all. Pretty standard alien abduction encounter apart from the description of the being. That's right. But the way that they entered, the way that they left, that's all a little bit unusual. It's a little bit more exotic than these standard cases that we hear about.

But the reason why I mentioned this case and why I thought it was intriguing is because Gloria Dixon, who he initially got in contact with, well, Gloria was collecting reports just incidentally from other people that would contact the organization saying, look, I think I've had some type of encounter with aliens.

And they cross-referenced it with a case who had been a first-year law student, a girl called Alex, who had trouble sleeping in that very hall of residence. This is prior to this experience because she was convinced that she was being harassed by aliens.

But no other details are included. She shortly left after this. And isn't that weird? That's what you would expect for a haunting or something, but not aliens. That's right. Do you see this weird factor? It's got like, it's very alien. Like it's got all the hallmarks of it being an alien report, but then it's got this kind of weird subtext of it being a haunting of some kind.

And this is something that was repeatedly coming up in these reports from... It would be way worse than a haunted house. Like, I can't sell my haunted house because it's haunted versus I can't sell my house because people keep getting alien abductions in there. Yeah, you're totally right. Incidentally, though, it happens that with the first eyewitness, he claims that...

If he looks into his history, he's like, oh, I do seem to have vague recollections of being around 11 years old and finding that there was a man dressed in black that would come and get me and take me outside my house. I would find myself, I would come to, in my pajamas about half a mile away from my home.

This is at 11 years old. So that goes back to the UFO kind of thing of often when you talk to abductees or claim to abductees, if you dig a little bit into their history, you usually find that they've got some type of childhood experience with this. But it is strange that it does have this kind of weird hallmark of it being a haunting-like case. So that brings me to this other report.

This particular report was collected by Norman Oliver. And of course, all of these I'll link to in the show notes so you can go and read them for yourself. But he says, look, this story goes back some 45 years to the mid 1950s. And it's about Larry. Larry was a schoolboy in his early teens. He lived in East London. And midday one Saturday, he was crossing the road heading towards church. And as he did so, he said that he got this impression that everything around him was slowing up.

He said he had this feeling that time was dragging on more and more as he crossed the road. He was moving more and more slowly, unable to force himself to speed up. And after what seemed like a long, a

a long period of time, he reached the pavement. And as soon as he reached the pavement, he said, for some reason, he looked around to his left. Now, this, that weird effect, that dimensional or time effect that's going on, it's rare that we hear that kind of stuff. We do hear a lot of time distortions in UFO cases and alien entity contact cases, but not this particular way. But it has a hallmark of what was described by the previous eyewitness in his bed.

But this is different. As he said, when he came around the corner, he found himself staring directly at his twin looking back at him. It was like there was some weird copy of him.

standing on the road. And he said this other self was smiling, but kind of out of it. They're always so cocky, the doppelgangers. Very cocky. They always smirk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're never scared. They never run away. No, it doesn't. He said, look, he turned back to the right and this thing started moving at speed and he tried to chase after it. But as he came around a corner, he ran into a lady carrying a bunch of shopping and she dropped everything and started yelling, telling him off for being, you know, the

how, you know, the younger generation is. And of course, once he stood up and had helped this woman and he tried to speed up and catch his twin and he couldn't, this figure had disappeared. Now he retraced his steps to a few minutes earlier and met up with some friends who was going to meet and they all thought this was hilarious. It is hilarious. Well, it is, right? But this is, as I said, you know, 45 years ago from this point, you know, this 2001 when this was published, but this is the 1950s.

But then, of course, we have to jump ahead 25 years. So it's like just, it's a weird out there outlier kind of report. It's the perfect opening scene to like a Tom Cruise action movie where he just turns a corner, sees himself, and then it's just this crazy chase with motorcycles and speedboats. Very much so. Little cars going through European streets. But we're left asking ourselves like,

why? That's just, is it just a one-off thing? And usually with these cases, it's not. That's why it's ridiculous. Why would you, why would you try and chase down your doppelganger? Wouldn't you? No, I would. If I came across, if I had a weird experience of feeling like time had significantly slowed down and then I found myself standing in front of me smiling, I'd be like, what are you fussing about? I'd be like, get out of here. Yeah, like,

What do you want? Don't come back. So we jump ahead to around 1980. Larry was married with three children, the youngest being aged four. He was living in the county of Kent. And he says in his household, right, over a period of weeks, he would suddenly hear a baby crying. Now, this is important. This is why he said that his youngest child was four.

because there was no baby in the house and there was no baby in the houses on either side. In fact, there was no one else in the family or any of the adjoining houses that also could hear this baby, but he could.

And he said he always heard the crying when he was in the lounge. And he said the sound would kind of fill out the room and then it would seem to come from upstairs. So he would make his way upstairs. And as soon as he made his way up the stairs, it become fainter and fainter and then disappear. He said he would hear it for about five minutes before it would cease. And he said that he couldn't think of any logical explanation as to why this was occurring. It's not like it's tinnitus or something. It's like he genuinely heard this baby crying, but also he

It was obviously enough to get him to go and ask neighbors and people around him, you know, is there a baby? But sounds can travel a vast distance, right? That can happen. So maybe he's just misinterpreting. How many times have we heard the baby lure effect? Sounds like something Joshua Kutchman would write a book on. That's right. Yeah, you're right. The baby lure phenomenon. Yeah, the baby lure, which we hear with Sasquatch accounts. We often hear it in Australia with Bigfoot encounters or not Bigfoot.

encounters. Just with hauntings and any kind of weird paranormal. Yeah. Yowie encounters, that kind of stuff. It does come up. So we skip, so that ended, right? But then we go ahead to March of 2000. And by now, Larry was living in Thailand with his wife and he'd been there for around four years. Now he said until around 2000, he couldn't recall any other experiences of a psychic or alien nature.

But then in January of 2000, he heard that same cry of a baby that he'd heard 20 years before. It's like, is this a neurological thing? Why are you hearing this? But then why would it stop for two decades? Now, his wife was asleep, so he got up and opened the bedroom door. Now, as he went outside of his bedroom, the crying just immediately ceased. That noise was only audible to him when he was in the bedroom. So when he stepped back in, he could hear it again. It's like,

That's odd. Yeah, it's strange. Because it would suggest that the noise is coming from within the bedroom, but you know it's not coming from within the bedroom. It doesn't make any sense. So he says that this went on for four or five nights over the next two weeks. And of course, he went and inspected the local houses. And much like what had occurred two decades prior, there's nothing. No one had a baby. So on the fifth or sixth time, he didn't log this, obviously. He's not diarizing it. But he said on the fifth or sixth time this happened, it was actually midday.

It's the middle of the day. It didn't happen at night. So yeah, you could think, well, maybe when he's waking up in the night, then he's disoriented and it could be a hypnagogic effect. But he's like, no, this time I was fully awake and I heard it as soon as I entered the bedroom. Now he said, I tried to follow the strength of the crying. So he started moving around the room and he said, as he followed the intensity of the sound, he actually reached a central spot in

in the room where he felt a tingling sensation. What? There was this weird tingling. It's the ghost baby portal. Well, he said the crying faded into the background and a face appeared in his mind. This face started to manifest.

as he touched this tingling effect just moving through his body. And he said that he's not entirely sure what happened, but this thing, whatever it was, took full mental control of him. What did the face look like? He doesn't give details of the face. He said it's just an anthropomorphic face and it's projected into him from an outside source, some type. And he said the crying stopped. But then he starts engaging in these telepathic communications with...

with the entity that was in the bedroom. Oh boy. And he said he would receive these communications when he was in that bedroom. And it would always be projected from a particular spot where he'd first found that tingling feeling. His wife was completely unaware of anything unusual taking place, except for one small confirmation, which we're told later on. So the investigator said, okay, like you asked before,

Can you now, you've spoken to this thing more and it's giving you information. Can you try and pull any details out of it? You know, what's the information you're getting? Yeah, what is he being told? Well, he says, yeah, I'm trying to pull that out. But really, he said the head and face that was shown to me, it was pointed. It was like three angles that he could see it from. He could see it from the front side or from the back. And he said the frontal shape was kind of like a gray border.

But it wasn't a grey. And much like you just mentioned, Ben, remember those faces of the long eyes and the pointed... It's the same kind of entity. It's like this weird... Do you mean like the Aramanic forces? Yeah, the Aramanic forces. These entities that are hell-bent on destroying humanity.

It's the same kind of description. It's not identical, but it's very similar. Now, he said the only thing that really stood out about this, though, was that there was a series of dots or holes on the face and the eyes were green, but they had dual pupils, like two in each eye. And the researcher says, this is something I've never come across before in reports of alien contact. And subsequently, I've never heard of it either. But this face had a light purple color to it.

And he said that as he continued to engage further with this entity that was projecting stuff into his mind, guess what? It was beaming into his head. What?

equations and formulas. It's giving him this information. Much like last week, what we were describing, we're talking about there's a bit of channeling going on here. There's kind of dodgy science coming through. This appears to be what's occurring to Larry. Larry is getting this information that he has no understanding of. He doesn't know what these equations mean. He doesn't know what they're for. Well, there's the sculpture of Aramon by Rudolf Steiner. Very close to this. Not identical, but

But very close. And yeah, as Steiner pointed out, these things are extreme or have extreme hatred for humanity. So yeah, that's what we were talking about on the last show, the Aramonic forces, according to Steiner. Well, obviously this is after he died, but others that followed claimed a portal opened up in 1940 that flooded in the Aramonic forces. And what's happening to this guy?

There's a portal essentially opening in his bedroom that's projecting a face into his mind, giving him math equations. Yeah, and they said that they're trying to...

cut human beings off from their spiritual nature by enforcing a materialist way of thinking that's purely based on logic and materialism. Well, that's what these equations seem to be about. Kind of Aramonic utopia where we're cut off from the divine. So he said, Larry claims that he'd been practicing Taekwondo. And I'm not familiar with this, but I'm sure someone will tell us. Apparently as part of Taekwondo, there's like a meditation technique practice that's connected to it.

And so he said using this technique, he would actually try to put himself into a trance to continue to communicate with this being. Great. That'll end well. That's a great idea. That's a really great idea. Now he said he would always do this meditating in the bedroom at the spot where he'd been so this entity would show up.

And he said he didn't understand the answers that he received, but he did understand that the being was called me, M-double-E or M-I. And he asked, well, are you human? And the answer simply was no. He said, well, what's your origin? And it simply replied with this very cryptic response, can everywhere to 24. Okay.

Doesn't mean anything, right? Now, what's even more unusual with this is that when he started meditating and communicating with this thing, it would give him certain numbers. Like these numbers would be pushed in, not just equations, but important numbers, like going back to the prime number stuff maybe. But he said, I'm able to revisit these numbers a few times, but then the answers would be deleted.

It's like it's deleted from his memory by this entity. And he said it would leave him with this very weird feeling. The entity had no intention of offering direct information itself. It was just waiting for him, for Larry, to ask the appropriate questions where it would provide an appropriate reply.

Now, ultimately, it got to this point where he was being pulled so much into this entity that it was telling him about the concept of magnetic time. Obviously, it was warning him about what's happening to humanity. It was giving him details that were explaining Einstein's general relativity theory, all that classic stuff that comes up in entertaining these beings. Yes, Adobe the house elf.

That's right. Giving you the big equations. That's right. But every time Larry tried to ask him about, no, come on, where are you from? What's your species? Who are you? The being would just disappear. He said it was... And ultimately, as he kept on doing this, the being itself just disappeared from his meditations and he was no longer able to access...

this thing. I was no longer able to get a hold of it. That's a pretty benign end to the way these stories usually go. No, it continued. He did get pushed off a cliff. Well, no, he bought an airport and found woolly mammoths at the end of it through a portal and then disappeared. No, not that extreme. But he said that there was physical manifestations that continued to be experienced by Larry in the months after this. He said there was something that was very physical about

So up until this point, it had been very, apart from the tingling effect, very much in his mind. But that's the true nature of these entities. They feed off the attention. That's right. And so that makes perfect sense. For it to manifest physically. It starts off as just this thought form, this wavering idea that something's there. But once he starts to connect with it and focus on it, lo and behold, it starts to manifest physically. Yeah.

Campfire season's back, and that means s'mores. But when you're at home treating yourself, take them over ice with Dunkin' S'mores Cold Brew Concentrate. And suddenly you're always treating yourself. The home with Dunkin' is where you want to be. Click or tap the banner to shop now.

It's tourney time. And with FanDuel's dog of the day, you can get a daily profit boost during the college conference championships to bet on any underdog. So get ready to celebrate some upsets. No one saw that coming. Except for me, baby. 21 plus and present in select states. Opt-in required. Minimum plus 100 odds required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable profit boost tokens. Restrictions apply, including token expiration and max wage or amount. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

And this is exactly what happens because the physical manifestation became clear in January of this year. So this is 2001. Larry was taking a taekwondo class at his local school where he teaches. He glanced around and saw a woman sitting on the side of the gym. He thought that she was in her thirties with long black hair, medium dark skin. And he assumed that she was one of the parents. He turned his head to give more instructions to his class. And upon looking around, the lady had vanished.

There was no way for her to leave this hall. Yeah, like there was just no way. And of course he asked other parents who had been, they said, no, what lady? There's no one there. He said, this thing came back the following week.

It was just there. He got a glimpse of it and the thing disappeared once again. It's like Alexandra David-Neal's tulpa. Very much so. Fung tulpa now just showing up. Just showing up. Are other people seeing her? No one saw her. Okay. No one saw her. And of course it is. There's a bunch of parents that are sitting around waiting for their kid to finish the Taekwondo class and no one saw it. It's a hall. There's only one way in and out. No one saw it. But then a further week after this, he was going out to his midday teaching when he was about to lock up when he saw his sister-in-law

who was renting a room in their house, was still in the house. So he decided to leave the door open. So he leaves the door open. He's gone for a few hours. He comes home and finds that the house is still unlocked. And he turns around, his sister-in-law is walking up to him.

She's been out all day. And he's like, but I left the house unlocked because you were inside. She's like, you left the house unlocked? What do you think? He's like, you were inside. She's like, I left first thing this morning. I haven't been here. And yet this thing was there. Now he's like, well, he described it. He said, this lady had been sitting there with this knee length skirt and had her legs crossed and a bag. And it's like, hang on a second.

His sister-in-law never wears that. So it's like it copied her form, but not her clothing sense. It's a very weird way this thing is manifesting. And he says, look, this thing, this mysterious lady, she turned up again. She disappeared for a while, but she turned up again. I found her lying beside me one night in my bed. Oh.

He said, I got out of the bedroom to make sure that I was still in my actual house. I found that I was. I turned around, but the lady was gone. I saw my wife there sleeping soundly. The next night, she told me that she had a dream. And he's like, okay, well, what was the dream? She said, oh, I'd somehow woken up, but I couldn't have. Well, there was a long-haired lady lying between us. I thought it was just a dream and rolled over and went back to sleep. What the hell?

You just go back to sleep? Yeah. Well, she, because she thought it was a, like a hypnagogic kind of thing. Like she just thought it was a dream. Didn't pay any attention. So this is a whole series of very strange events where this thing kicked off when he was a schoolboy seeing his twin. But then I'm like that, I was thinking about it. And we talk about like the initiator, that particular experience all those decades ago, that was the initiation experience to get him. And you even said, Ben, like, oh, you wouldn't chase your doppelganger. He did.

But he paid attention to it. He followed it. But it wasn't enough energy for it to be able to manifest so readily. Sounds like one of these succubus. Very close to it. Very, very close to it. So,

strange stuff going on there. So I continue... So no resolution to the story? There's no resolution. Okay. And the problem is, unfortunately, with these particular publications is that they're 25 years old now. And it's like they were ongoing reports of people contacting the investigators before us saying that this is the latest report. And of course, since I can't find any further up... You look him up, he started to get skinnier and unhealthier and his complexion got pale and he lost his energy. He's been drained.

He's diagnosed with some disease and he passed away. It's all very... It has this...

It's disturbing in itself, but it'll also, it's, we just, we know what's going to happen. Well, it's like a progression of the form that receives more energy. The first form was just getting that little bit of attention so we could focus on it. Yeah. And once it can start manifesting physically, it's now on him. But what I don't understand, but I think there's something to this, right? Because how often do we hear of alleged contactees? And it's usually more in a positive sense, even though

I wouldn't say that this is what it is negative, but I don't think it would have felt entirely negative at the time. But I wonder if this whole giving people equations and all this kind of nonsense for them, it's actually just to get them to think about it.

because they're thought forms. Like they need to manifest in our reality, utilizing the energy of the mind. Getting them to ponder a riddle. That's right. They can't solve. That's right. And so what does it do? It provides fuel for them to manifest. And that's where it went from the woman showing up at his taekwondo classes to

to it showing up in his bed, which again has this succubus. Yeah. Because if it was real, true information, it would be easily understood, easily digestible. Correct. And you wouldn't spend all this brain power focusing on it. But it's not. It's always cryptic and nonsensical. Well, in a way, it's to trick you into providing it with energy.

That's what's going on here. So I continued. I continued digging through their archives, and I came across another outlying case that was actually reported by Gloria Dixon herself. And there is a collection of strange events that are connected to it, but there's this one that really stood out. And this case was investigated initially, actually, by Judy Jafar and the late Ken Phillips.

But she writes that this is a very significant study into the relation of alien abductions, odd mists, and missing time experiences. And I thought about the mists because that's something we were talking about also in the last PLUS extension about how UFOs are... And there's scattered reports, but enough, of UFOs collecting water. And one of the theories that was put forward is that, well, they collect water so that they can utilize it to create camouflage, mirages, mists, this kind of stuff.

And myths do seemingly come up in a lot of these reports. This particular report relates to the Bellamy family. They were traveling by car from Dunstable to Milton Keynes. This was Saturday, the 8th of August in 1992. It was roughly around 10.30 a.m. in the morning, but the weather was dull, cloudy, but not raining.

The family were in good spirits. Apparently, the children were in the back of the car. They were singing. But just prior to this, Mr. B, Mr. Bellamy, had swerved to avoid a car driving straight towards them on the wrong side of the road. Now, Dixon says that both parents, both Mr. and Mrs. B reported this, and she thought that was odd. Perhaps there's an underlying significance to them both mentioning this. But as the case continues, she wrote that they continued up the hill towards Hotcliffe

but found themselves in a sudden torrential downpour. Now, you'd think that you would see this. I mean, it can happen, but this was a thick downpour of water that was almost like driving into a wall. It was this bank of mist and fog that had appeared out of nowhere, and the husband had no option but to depart.

but to drive straight into it. Now, this is where it has this weird possible cloaking effect that's going on because Mr. B said that he hadn't seen the mist from any distance. It just suddenly appeared and it had extended all around them, almost enveloping them, in fact, and everything went quiet to the point where there was no other traffic around.

This is unusual for 10.30 on a Saturday. There should be other cars around. There's this weird Oz factor that's coming through. And it's also like this weird metaphor, like a visual metaphor, that they're driving into this fog, like this fog of confusion,

That seems to be what's going on with their minds and their memories because their next memory was actually driving through the woods on the outskirts of a local town. They had no recollection out of how they had gotten there. His wife turns to him and makes reference to the line, the witch in the wardrobe of being flung into another dimension. That was just how surreal it was. And they continue driving. And what is kind of typical with many of these cases when people have these odd ufological experiences is that they go,

especially when there's two people in the car, they don't talk about it.

And this is exactly what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Beaton. Neither of them spoke about it, but they've got kids in the backseat. Now, what their memory is, apparently when they drove on for about a mile or so, they both remarked on seeing a road worker in bright yellow doing something with a manhole cover. There were two white cars pointed at them in the road. And at the time, they didn't think that there was anything unusual about this. But later on, they realized that this wasn't normal.

This wasn't just a scene of a road worker. This seems to be some type of cover memory that something else had taken place. So they continue for about eight miles. And when they finally reach their destination, they realize that it's only a small period of time, but it's a period of missing time nonetheless.

They've arrived at their destination with 15 minutes of missing time. So they stopped to fill up with petrol. And this is where Mr. B remarked that he seemed to come to. It's like he'd been kind of on autopilot and same with the wife. She kind of came out of it as well when they realized that they were driving the car, but she turns and she looks at her husband. She's like, oh my God. He says, what? He said, she says to him,

you weren't driving. Like you were driving, your hands were on the steering wheel, but you weren't there. And the, pardon me, the kids backed this up. The kids were like, yeah, we were going over bumps and humps in the road, but the car wasn't moving over them. It was like, it was floating over them. It was like he was on autopilot and immediately both adults, when they came to, they said they experienced this icy cold tingling in their heads, necks and shoulders. It was extremely unpleasant and uncomfortable. So,

Is this some type of physical effect of what's just occurred to them? Is there some memory blocking going on here? But what was controlling the car? Exactly. If he wasn't, what was controlling it? What was controlling it? So now that they're back too, they put the cap back on the fuel tank and they climb back, obviously pay for their gas and start driving on. And they start talking about what was going on. And on the way back, the mother thinks, okay, look, we're trying to rationalize it, but

Okay. I'll ask the children. So I ask you more questions. And one of the children says, yeah, you were both completely silent. You did nothing. You drove into a bank of water. Then we came out, there was another shower on the way back and then nothing. So I'm like, okay, this is a little bit odd. Like it's got the fact that the children don't have any recollection of what's going on. This is just more than someone having some type of medical event.

And it's because it fits in with many of the reports that we cover on it. No missing time? Well, only that 15 minutes when they're heading out. Nothing when they're coming back.

But the following day, they retraced their steps because they were so perturbed by what had taken place. And they found nothing. They were just trying to make sense of what had occurred, but they found nothing. Apart from the fact that Mrs. B noticed that there was a red mark, like a burn, just on the back of her neck. So this was her mother. I'm sorry, it's Mrs. B. Her mother noticed this burn. It was painless, but

It remained visible for about a week. Also, Mr. B, the father who was driving the vehicle, he noticed a large square-shaped red area on his abdomen. But rather than being a filled-in space, it was like an outline. The mark remained visible for about a week, but eventually faded. So what is it that these people are experiencing? Both parties had that peculiar feeling that they shouldn't be talking about what had taken place because it could upset the whole thing. Now,

I'm not entirely sure what that is. I don't know if that's connected into this mind control that happens with these cases. But of course, you know, and these are why they're great investigators, why Dixon's a great investigator. And this is Judy that was, you know, came through with Dixon. She was like, look, have you ever had anything unusual happen to you in your life? And Mrs. B says, oh yeah, actually I have.

Here's a photograph that was taken in 1983 outside a holiday home. And she looks at the photograph and in the photograph, right, you can see Mrs. B standing there, but next to her is this face in the photograph. And it seems to depict a feline humanoid face in the foliage of the tree.

Do you have the photograph? No, the photograph's not included, unfortunately, because that would have been great for it to be included, but it wasn't included in this report. But of course, they try to rationalize and say, well, look, this could be a trick of the light. It could be some type of pareidolia that's going on. But you can't really...

rule it out given that they've had this weird experience of this time slip. Now, at this point, Judy didn't go any further with conducting any type of hypnosis. One thing I do like actually about many of the reports that I've read in here is that they recognize the fallibility of

of hypnosis about, you know, trying to pull stuff out and what are you going to get out of this? So, you know, not entirely sure what happened there, but it does set this scene of there being something strange occurring. It does seem to be connected to cars as well. So let's continue.

There's this one report I want to mention to you, again, reported by Gloria Dixon. And she says, look, this particular case relates to extraordinary events that occurred to Kate Walker and her family in September of 1977. This is at Wind Whistle Hill. And immediately I'm like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, Wind Whistle Hill. That's in Somerset.

or near Somerset. And of course, this is an area which is connected with a whole range of strange activity, whether it's ghostly, ufological, cryptozoological, exactly. So this particular witness, it's a pseudonym for Kate Walker, but she wanted to talk to someone about this strange case. And as I pointed out, there is a lot of background, there's a lot of history here. In fact, I think this, that,

you've just pulled up, Ben, on the site here. The spooky Somerset Road that is a hotbed of supernatural sighting. This was by Thomas Mallory, but I think he drew upon the research here. Yeah, it talks about Dixon. Right, yeah, okay. So, yeah, this particular location, the geographical location where this took place, is at the southern tip of Somerset,

at this particular hill is 700 feet above sea level where the two coastlines could be seen from the summit. You know, it's like one of these power locations. So it's not surprising that there's some type of weird energy connected to it. It's made of sandstone and limestone, which, you know, in light of what we've just been talking about, Ben, that might be something that, you know, allows the energy to travel through it. I'm not entirely sure, but look, it's sparsely populated and very lonely and remote, especially on dark nights, almost a perfect cliche location for abductions to take place.

Well, apparently...

In September of 1977, Kate Walker and her husband and two young sons, they were aged seven and six, were returning from visiting relatives. Now it was around 9.30 in the evening, they were driving along the A30, now of course the A30 as well, as Malcolm Robinson has reported on abductions connected to that place, so there's already another connection there. But they were heading along this very isolated section of the road, and they came to the top of the hill where Kate and her family all observed a large orange light that was diffused from

by none other than a cloud. This was on the left side of their car heading over Wind Whistle Hill, but it seemed to be moving right towards the road and not very high up. Now, of course, because it was obscured, they're trying to work out what it was because it was definitely out of place and something that shouldn't have been there. But she said this thing was totally static. It was very low and bright. It was cigar shaped, but it was vast in size, maybe two to 300 feet and possibly 800 feet above them. But she said as they got closer,

She noticed that the pub on the right-hand side of the road was in total darkness. This is kind of odd. Yes, it was later, but this pub was never closed. So what's going on there? Maybe nothing, but maybe something. So she said, look, it's 1010. She's looking around. This light seems to be pacing their car. They were clearly aware that there was something happening. Now, the next thing they realize, they see this cyclist's headlamp coming towards them, but then it just disappears.

disappeared. It was gone. And they come home, right? Like seeing a weird light in the sky, nothing that strange. I mean, it's odd, but nothing that strange. But upon arriving home, Kate discovered that it was now actually 10.50. So she checked her watch when she drove past that pub. So this is the thing. It was 10.10. So it's 40 minutes there. She's like, well, hang on a second. It should only take 10, maximum 15 minutes to get home.

What happened in that 25 to 30 minutes? Like it's completely unaccounted for. So a few days after this very puzzling incident, Kate and her family, once again, making the journey back to visit the relatives. And as they were coming over the bow of the same hill, though around, you know, 200 to 300 yards from the scene of the first incident, they saw in front of them on the left-hand verge of the road, two people.

She said that one appeared to be lying down and the other standing up. And her initial thoughts were that, well, maybe someone had been injured. So they slowed down. But as they slowed down to their complete and utter astonishment. And if you bring up that image, though, I think it's the second image there, Ben.

They said the person took a step out in front of them and one foot remained on the side of the road while the other foot stepped across the center of the road. And so this isn't a photo. This is a graphic impression. I'm sorry, not a photo. It's a graphic impression. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I say photo because that's what we call the images we include. You know, this is an artist impression of this weird, huge, humanoid, dark shape.

that stepped across the road. Like a giant ectoplasm Gumby. Yeah. Yeah, that's the best way to describe it. Her husband actually swerved to avoid this figure. They look behind them and there's nothing there. Why is there a pirate on the right-hand side? The pirate has nothing. I think the pirate, I think why that's included is because this particular section of road has been known for...

other app was like strange apparitions. So I don't know if that's what the, uh, who is Paul Cabby is the impressionist here. So maybe he's picked up that. So look, this story though, becomes more significant 18 years later. Do you see this weird connection about how it's like, it's these strange high strangeness reports, but it takes a long period for the phenomena to kind of start to manifest in their lives. 18 years later,

pardon me, Kate is now remarried. Her sons are now 25, 26. And she was talking to her kids, like grown up kids now about the events of that evening. And, you know, it just happened to be chatting about it when her eldest son, Jeff is like, yeah, I do remember that happening. And I remember dad putting his foot down, trying to get out of there.

but the car engine died. And she's like, what? I don't remember that. He's like, yeah, the car engine died. The headlights went out. Dad started to panic. He tried to restart the car, but nothing happened. And he went on to say that at that point, things became very strange and everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. So like the first report that I told you about, you know, the guy coming around the corner to see this doppelganger,

Jeff is saying here that everything went in slow motion. And he said he recalls his father slowly, but obviously in a frantic kind of way, but in the slow motion, leaping or lunging across the front of the car to try and lock the door where his wife was sitting.

He's watching as everything is moving so slowly, and it's got this dreamlike effect going on, but he realized that there were things, there were entities up against the side of the car. He said something was looking in. He said his other brother was pointing at something and screaming and shouting. His father was looking over his back. He was absolutely terrified. He says his last memory is

is of seeing a dark shape outside the car but beside the window. He said it was extremely tall and bending down towards the window, much like this figure that they saw step across the road.

it was up against the car. And he said, I got the impression that the shape was human, but this thing wasn't human. And that headlamp that they saw that was coming towards them, that was connected to this particular event. He said it was orange. It's like this light that was connected to it, but it wasn't a headlamp of a cyclist. It was something else. Now,

His recollection was that his mother was actually outside the car. He doesn't know where she was, but he was trying to see where she was. But looking out, he said there were five black figures, all just, and he says, this is only how it feels, but all of them

had looked inside the vehicle as well. Like they were trying to, and he said they came up to the vehicle and he got the impression that it was his turn to go. Oh boy. But to go where is, you know, is the question. Did you, do you have the case from 1991 with the farm window? No. She mentions this in the Somerset article and it just came up because of what you're describing, but it was a husband, grandson and herself, 1991, tall, strange figure they claim was looking into the farm window. But then a few days later they,

claimed they observed a saucer-shaped object nearby in their farmyard. Really? So a bunch of those and a third witness in 1976 was driving a truck on that same road and claims that something took control of it and his truck was like hovering above the road for a period of a stretch of the road and then he got control again. Well, isn't that funny? Because that is like one of those cases we were describing before. It's like he's out of it. None of this stuff...

is ever... Again, it's like... It's not consistent. But it's the whole theme of your segment where it's these weird... They're like abduction style alien encounters, but haunting this section of road. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really strange. So there was one report here and I've messed up my notes once again. I don't know how I've done this, but there was a really fascinating report as well of where

family after undergoing these ongoing experiences, these strange kind of experiences that started on the road. And it kind of has a hitchhiker effect feel to it, but essentially they were involved in having a weird light in the sky, a little bit of missing time, a little bit of fog, all that kind of pulled in. But they go home and when they go home, there's apparitions of ghosts inside their house.

But the ghosts, strangely enough, start to mimic what is like alien-like activity because then they start to see lights outside their house. There's little being like gray type beings looking in their windows. As soon as they kind of go, oh, you know, there's no such thing as ghosts, very rapidly it kind of transforms itself into this alien life. So there's this crossover like you find in many of these reports that already it's strange and unusual, right?

But it's more than that. There's some type of, and I don't know if this ties in with the whole shape-shifting idea that the phenomenon is always the same, but it just kind of morphs itself to match. I don't know. But these cases, like they just stand out for me. So I'll link to the Bufora website, which contains all of these reports. I might dig through more of their archives to see what I can pull up. Don't you have like a hundred videos for us? I do have a number of videos. Oh, look at the time too. Okay, now we'll go into it anyway.

We're going to do it anyway because I want to include some of these. These are a little bit old. You will be familiar with some of these particular reports, but I wanted to include them because what I was going through before, and as I pointed out, Malcolm Robinson is a significant contributor to these bulletins and their investigations, and he has this book, Paranormal Case Files of Great Britain. And in it, he starts going into this subcategory of reports, which is underwater ghosts. I thought, oh, okay, this underwater ghost thing.

These sorts of reports have been, there's numerous reports of this in Australia. And one of them, which is really well known, of course, is the wreck of the Alkimos. The Alkimos is this vessel that sits, it's no longer there anymore because it's been reclaimed by the sea, but it sits off the coast of Western Australia, not too far from Fremantle. And some people believe that this is a cursed ship vessel.

So it started, it was manufactured around the time of the second world war. It was 1943 where it was commissioned. It was built very rapidly, obviously because of dwindling resources and supply crunches, that kind of stuff. Um, but,

There's this funny history to it where people believe that it was cursed from the very beginning because it's changed its name multitudes of times. But there was this one particular mission where it was in a convoy. Two other vessels it was traveling with were destroyed by German U-boat torpedoes. But for whatever reason, it managed to avoid the torpedoes, but became stranded for six hours on an unmapped reef. It sat there for a while before it was finally able to break free.

That was the first case, which you think, oh, this thing's lucky, right? It's got this kind of lucky connotation to it. But there was a menacing incident that occurred in August of 1944, where the ship became the scene of a brutal murder-suicide. While the ship was in port in Naples, it was unloading ammunition, and apparently a female Canadian radio operator was shot by another crew member, who then proceeded to kill himself. So this horrible murder-suicide. But I mention this because it becomes important when you hear about

some of the reports coming out from people later on. So there's a lot of tragedy connected to this thing. In 1963, after two decades of service, it was purchased by a Greek company. It was renamed Alkimos, but it ran aground in a reef just off the coast of Western Australia. It was towed to Fremantle, which they had the intentions of repairing it. But for whatever reason,

This thing randomly caught fire. They're going to give a temporary repair. Then they thought, well, they'll tow it to Hong Kong to repair it. As they were towing it to Hong Kong, the tow line snapped and this thing ended up beaching itself, running itself aground just north of Fremantle. Because it was run aground north of Fremantle, they decided that they could mount salvage operations. It was still valuable to the owners. So this is where the curse really seemed to take off. They had to put caretakers

caretakers aboard to monitor this thing. So let me just give you a little introduction. If you just play video number one, Ben, this sets the scene and we'll go into some of the experiences of what people have had. To find another, we must travel more than 2,000 kilometers to where the hulk of a 7,300 ton freighter, the Alkimos, sits abandoned off the Western Australian coast.

The old steamer is trapped on rocks and sand just offshore with the wind singing eerily in her rigging and waves lapping at gaping rents in her side. When the tide is high she shifts restlessly as if yearning to head out to sea and local cray fishermen always give her a wide berth. With the superstition common to all seagoing folk they believe the alchemist is cursed.

Many of them testify to having seen a dark figure in oil skins. A ghost they call Henry, stalking the deck at night. The Alchemist seems to scream as its rusted metal structure is slowly torn apart by the sea. Many people believe the Alchemist was a cursed ship even before the ghost appeared. The old wreck has an almost incredible history of ill fortune. She ran aground 250 kilometres north of Perth and later caught fire in the dock.

She was ordered to Hong Kong for repairs, but the tow rope snapped.

And she was driven onto a... Yeah, you just explained all this. Yeah, I did. I just realized that I didn't include it. It doesn't matter. It's fine. So let's skip forward, though, to some of the people that have been aboard. Now, one of the main people that's been reporting on this, he sadly passed away now, is Jack Su. Jack Su is a very well-revered skin diver. And he was brought in to do some recovery operations aboard this particular vessel. And he himself was actually drawn in by the curse that was connected to the Alkimos.

To the people trying to dismantle her, Alkimos seems to be fighting back stubbornly, injuring and harming those people that are trying to destroy her. One of Western Australia's top skin divers and salvage operators, Jack Sue, has written a book about the shipwreck and firmly believes he too has been touched by the Alkimos curse. Jack swears that while on board, he heard moaning coming from an empty bunk.

and his wife was tragically killed in a car accident during the same period. And after my own personal experience, and the loss of my former wife,

Nobody would ever convince me otherwise than that there is something wrong with that ship. Jack can't be certain, but he estimates that in the last 30 years or so, more than 20 people directly or indirectly involved with this twisted wreck have met untimely deaths. My advice is don't go, whether it be divers or photographers or whatever. It's not really worth...

Now look, this could be coincidence and you know, strange things do happen and strange coincidences do line up, but he's right. It seems like anyone who has been on board that vessel associated with that vessel, uh,

possibly before, but certainly since it's beached itself, has been affected deeply by it. There's a great example from 1969 where they were beginning the salvage process. There was a Navy submariner by the name of Ted Snyder. He was called in to take measurements of the propeller and the rudders, right? This was to determine the amount of explosives that would be needed to disassemble them to start the operation.

Shortly after, Snyder and three others were mysteriously killed in a freak plane crash while on their way to another unrelated project immediately after taking the measurements. So that's

That can happen. Things like that can happen. But then Jack Sue, and you heard it there himself, he reckons that the curse of the Archimedes was connected to the death of his wife. After he was doing research and wanted to publish a book, and his book is called Ghost of the Archimedes, he became suddenly and inexplicably ill with an extremely rare respiratory illness that almost killed him. It took him 10 months to recover from it. And at one point, they believed that he wasn't going to make it after being exposed to the ship. Now, people have gone,

I've heard them say, "He's a diver, so that's why it's a respiratory illness. He's over the years been exposed to different gases." I'm like, "No, it doesn't work that way." Other arguments is that there's asbestos or something aboard the vessel. I'm like, "No, it doesn't work that way either." There are multitudes of people that have reported similar things. You heard there in the audio that there's been people that have gone aboard. Jack later on reported that he heard a strange noise

Well, there was a caretaker. Where this all kicked off? There was a young American man who was aboard the vessel by himself performing caretaker duties who kicked off some of these reports of these ghostly phenomena. 14th of July, 63. 10.15pm. Been down to the engine room, but never again. The eeriest place on the ship. From the time I left my cabin, I could hear footsteps following.

I was scared out of my wits. The noises went on and on. The young American became more and more frantic. Finally, he could take no more. He left this cursed ship and was admitted to hospital, a psychiatric hospital. Henry the Ghost had claimed his first caretaker.

And this continued. Indeed, he was the first, but there was a young backpacking couple who were also aboard. Sadly, the wife was heavily pregnant and she fell, unfortunately,

just out of nowhere. I don't know if she was pushed, but there was some horrible event that took place and sadly she lost a baby. So there's a lot of death and misery connected to this, but some people never really believed it. But if we go to number five, Ben, this is Eric Buchanan. Hang on, where am I? I just missed up my, what have we got here? Number five. Yeah, Ray Krakar. So Ray Krakar has also been on this vessel. And you'll note that I pointed out before that there was a murder-suicide in, you know, of the communications room.

Maybe that's got something to do with what Ray experienced. I spent weeks on it, days on it. I heard talking many times, many, many times. You hear this gutful talking. Now, the wireless cabin was sealed up with a lock on the door. I heard the Morse key sending out a message. He did it, he did it, he did it, he did it, he did it, he did it.

So that's strange. They did seal it up for whatever reason. I think it was customs requirements or whatever some silly law or regulation was. They did. They sealed up that room. It was actually welded shut. And yet the Morse code was continuing to make this noise. Now, maybe it was picking up something coming through. That's a possibility, but I wouldn't have thought so. I don't know. And maybe there's a connection to it, right? But you can go, look, it's just being alone on a supposedly haunted ship. It's his mind playing tricks upon him.

That was, of course, until, and if you play number six for me, Ben, he actually saw the source of this thing. While working in the number three hatch, removing some degaussing apparatus, out of the darkness, an apparition appeared, almost like a fluorescent light. It was the shape of a person. I picked up a piece of three by two, and I was going for it.

And then the junk that was lying around was in my way. And I thought, well, there's going to be an accident one way or another. So I just turned and went off the ladder. So he noped out of there. What happened? I couldn't really hear what he was saying. So when he was, yeah, I know he's got this older accent, but basically he was on the vessel and it manifested, some type of ghostly apparition manifested. And rather than running away from it at first, he picked up a piece of timber and was going to go running at it. Good on him.

But then he realized that there was a whole heap of junk around the vessel, so he noped out of there. He got out of there. But it's funny because so much of this continued that they brought in investigators. They brought in a recording engineer. In fact, if you play number four band, you've got Graham Greenwood. He was brought in as a sound recordist to see if he could pick up the source of this stuff. When we eliminated things like the sea and noises like that, there were almost yells and screams everywhere.

And that particular night, the sea was like a mill pond, so it wasn't the sea. I wasn't a superstitious man, but when I heard the tape the next day, I was very, very glad to get off that Alkimos. It was...

I just don't want to go back on it again. Where's the tape? Because obviously that wasn't the recording. No, that wasn't the recording. No, that's a good question. I wasn't able to find that. But the funny thing is, is that they then went, okay, there's obviously something going on. There's been a lot of bad luck connected to this. There's been many deaths. It's bringing about such terrible things for people. Perhaps we should bring in a priest.

to exercise the vessel. So they did. They brought in a priest. But when they brought in the priest, well, before he performed his Catholic explosion to sink the vessel, he thought he'd do a spot of fly fishing or fishing off the side. Well, I don't know why, but he did. Jack Sue describes what happened to him. The sinker came straight back to him as though someone had caught it at the other end and hurled it back and it hit him right in the middle of the furrow.

and he had to be carted off to hospital to have stitches inserted and

Wasn't a very, very well man. So he never got the opportunity to, I don't think he made any attempt to exorcise the ghost. And it remained like that until it eventually... Right in the forehead. Right in the forehead. Yep. Sinker and all. Remained like that until eventually it was consumed by the sea. Now, in the following years, there have been dive forums and other similar sites. One of them is now gone. I found one through, it's a way back machine, a web archive of people describing...

very unusual things that have taken place, uh, that they themselves have experienced. I did find other reports of people saying that much like the reports of what Malcolm Robinson was describing, that there's strange lights seen bobbing just below the surface of the water in that particular area. So it seems like there's something to do with, uh,

It doesn't really matter what the medium is. Hauntings and ghost-like activity, paranormal activity can occur in any kind of medium. And that was really emphasized when we were talking about USOs. It's like just because we expect it to occur in a particular location doesn't mean it can't occur elsewhere. And so there's this really classic case that I just want to leave you with.

on this episode of where there was a diver by the name of Eric Buchanan. Eric Buchanan was a hardhat diver who was based out of the Sydney Harbor. He would go down there and perform welding duties and other duties that you'd have to. But it's like, it's a dangerous profession as well. There's sharks, like very dangerous sharks in that area. But he experienced something that at first just seemed to be another diver.

But it turned out to be nothing else. It all turned out to be something else. Just play number eight for me, please, Ben. That day, he was working about 40 feet below the surface on the bottom of Sydney Harbour. New cables were being laid and Eric's job was to inspect them to make certain everything was going according to plan. He was decked out in a cumbersome hard hat and a bulky diving suit. He was alone down there.

but he did have voice contact with a boat above. It was a frightening experience. Anyhow I felt a thump, thump, thump on the cable I was standing on and I said who's down here with me and they said nobody. I said there must be somebody down there because I can feel them walking up the cable and they said no there's no one down there with you. By this time the object had got off the cables, walked across the cables and was going up the western side of the trench.

The sun was shining brightly in the water and there was a perfect silhouette of a hard-hat diver climbing up out of the trench into the sun and just kept going. So I got out and everyone had a great laugh about it, said I'd been down there too long and I was seeing things and I said, well, you know, he was there. Initially, Eric Buchanan thought there just had to be another diver down below, a real one, flesh and blood.

But from all his experience, Eric knew if there had been another hardhat diver working the harbour, that diver would definitely have needed a backup boat. But there was no boat and no chance of a diver being down there. There was no mud cloud. If I'd walked across there, there'd be a great cloud of mud. But there was no mud cloud. There was no hose to the surface and there was no air bubbles. A hardhat diver has a constant stream of air bubbles. But that wasn't the end of the mystery.

The day after Eric Buchanan saw the phantom diver, one of his colleagues working in the same place saw the same thing and it scared the wits out of him. The diver down there came rushing to the top and he said, "I just saw a diver walk past, a hard-hat diver walk past." A diver who couldn't possibly have been there. Who or what was it?

According to Eric Buchanan, perhaps the answer lies back in the 1920s and 30s when the magnificent Sydney Harbour Bridge was under construction. I found out that a diver, a hard-out diver, had been killed building the bridge. Now, I don't know whether they ever recovered the body or not, but as far as I'm concerned, he's still down there walking around. Still down there to this day. Just, it's an incredible case. And you could go, well, look...

Again, like the guy is a hardhat diver. So maybe it was to do with being underwater for too long, as he says there himself. Maybe it was a hypoxia issue. Is it his doppelganger? Well, that, yeah, or maybe. But the fact that another diver the following day saw the same thing. But with hardhat divers, it's not like a scuba diver in the sense that they're, you know, individual or they don't have any support. Hardhat divers, they've got to have like the cable going up and boats around. There was none of that. So the fact that a hardhat diver had passed away there, obviously, tragically, is it

Almost like the ghosts have kind of stuck in that medium and it doesn't leave. I was just thinking about how beautiful Sydney looks in the 90s. Yeah. That's the 30-year-old video now. That's glorious. Yeah. I want to go back. Yeah. I want to go back in time. Yeah. Back in time, not back to Sydney. Complete mess today. But yeah, look, I'll link to those videos and of course the Bufora website and those bulletin articles in the show notes at mysteriousuniverse.org. Make sure you check it out.

Good stuff. We've got a lot more coming up on this show. We're going to be going into the work of Benjamin Franklin and being... Oh, we've still got this guy coming. I'll come back to him. Who's this weird orange bird man you've been sitting on? No, this is the electric man. I've used a Scooby-Doo drawing as an impression of it. I will describe that story later on, but it didn't fit into what I was talking about. Okay, coming up in class, we're going to be looking at Tom Phillips' new work, A Brief History of the End of the F-ing World.

along with a brief history of total BS and just some of the weird apocalypse claims that have appeared over the centuries. And what happened to people that got it wrong? Did they own up? Apart from having their balls nailed to a post somewhere. Well, apart from that, but there's this really interesting question about human psychology is once it's clear that you're wrong, once it's clear that the nuclear bombs didn't strike your bunker and obliterate the earth, what do you do about it?

Do you own up and say, well, we got it wrong? Or do you double down?

Well, if AOC and Greta Thunberg had anything to go by, they doubled in. You reckon people will double down? Yeah. Yeah, we'll find out after the break. If you want to get access, head to mysteriousuniverse.org forward slash plus. Sign up today, you get access to the big extensions we do every single Friday. And of course, we do an exclusive show that comes out on Tuesday. You're getting more than double the content if you sign up for Plus. Plus members also get a high quality audio version of the show, totally ad free. And if you sign up for the Emmy Max tier, you get access to our entire back catalogue going back

17 plus years. Again, check it out, mysteriousuniverse.org forward slash plus. That's a wrap for the free edition of the show. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. If you're on Plus, stick around for the great stuff after the break. For everyone else, we'll catch you next week. Welcome back to your Plus extensions. Great to have you with us.

This episode is brought to you by Universal Pictures. Today's the day. From Universal Pictures and Blumhouse come a storm of terror from the director of The Shallows, the woman in the yard. Don't let in. Where does she come from? What does she want? When will she leave? The woman in the yard. In theaters.