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Visit renterswearhouse.com to request a free rental price analysis that's renterswearhouse.com or call 303-974-9444 to speak to a rent estate advisor today. This summer, saddle up with the only sports book where you can bet on horse racing. FanDuel. Right now, new customers can get a no-swept first bet up to $500. Just download the app or go to fanduel.com/horses to score your no-swept bet up to $500. 21+ in present in Colorado. Offer valid on first real money, major of $5 or more. Verify empty racing account required. Bonus issued in non-withdrawable racing site credit that expires seven days after issuance. Max refund, $500. Restrictions apply. See terms at racing.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-Gambler. This is the Alien UFO Podcast, episode 133. And I'm your host Simon Bowne. My mission here at the Alien UFO Podcast is to investigate all things that are part of the wider UFO phenomena. I'm looking at UFO sightings, alien abduction, historic cases and other related events. And you can enjoy the extended version of this episode ad-free along with over 120 hours of extended episodes on Patreon. And if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review and be sure to subscribe. This week I'm talking to Andy Russell about his book Testimony Volume 1, Alien Abductions in the UK. Andy has been researching the UFO and abduction phenomena since the mid-1980s, and he also spends a lot of time utilizing FOIA legislation to push governments to reveal their knowledge of the UFO phenomena. Andy has appeared on the TV shows UFO Hunters and Ancient Aliens. Hi Andy, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast. So we're going to talk about your book, it's called Testimony Volume 1, Alien Abduction in the UK. And it's a fascinating book, I can't put it down. Thank you. I wanted to start off asking you about you were a member of a UK Alien Abduction Support Group, is that right? Yeah, so over time, due to my sort of interest in UFOs, I met a lot of abductees, quite a few actually, because I got into sort of once you meet one, I think you started me to a lot of others. And they invited me purely as an observer because they knew that I'd sort of done some training in hypnotherapy and psychotherapy in the past. They sort of invited me in as an observer, purely as an observer, to sort of see how their group worked. And I don't know whether they would expect to meet this or do anything with that group in terms of hypnosis or put some input in, I'm really not sure what their initial motivation was. But I spent about a year with that group turning up to the meetings and seeing discussions and the sort of the interplay between them all as characters and the sort of the stories that came forth from them of past experiences or experiences that they might have had happened to them. Sorry, that was my dog shaking his nose. So that might be experiences that sort of happened to them between meetings. So it was really interesting to sort of have that fly on the wall experience and see them bring forth all these extraordinary experiences. And so for a few of them, I talked to them purely in a sort of an interviewer sense about their experiences from when they started to happen and how it tracked through their lives and how it affected their lives and how they sort of viewed their experiences in retrospect from that point on. What was quite fascinating for me was we all kind of lock into the idea that alien abduction is a very cookie cutter experience that it's the same for everybody. And while this certainly elements of that, you know, this will happen and that will happen and this will happen, there were a lot of experiences that kind of didn't quite fit the mold. They were very similar, but there were some very, very quirky ones and very sort of what we would call high strangeness. And that was the interesting thing for me talking to these people and sort of interviewing at them and just seeing those little subtle differences that I think points to their phenomena being more complex than we might initially believe. And so you haven't had these experiences yourself? No, no, not Donna. How did you get into it? In the early 80s, I had a few UFO experiences. I've seen a couple of black triangular type craft. I've seen some very anomalous lights in the sky and that got me very interested in the whole phenomena. And I think if you travel down the UFO rabbit hole, you'll eventually come to alien abduction. And this was in the 80s, so it was very much coming to the forefront of people's perceptions, especially in the US. And I just got fascinated that they were this group of people who were having these very direct experiences. And I think that sort of fueled my interest. Over your time of studying this with UK experiences, do you see any differences between the UK and the rest of the world? Or is it seemed pretty much the same worldwide? I think it's very similar at its core, but I started to note some slightly quirky elements. So in the UK, for example, the grays didn't seem to be that much of a prevalent force up until the 80s. If you sort of track back a bit and go to the 50s, 60s and 70s, there's more of a variety of abductors, a lot of very humanoid creatures or a lot of very unusual creatures, the grays didn't really factor. But what I also found strange was there was quite a sort of a common use of very robotic entities, for one of the better phrase robots that seemed to do a lot of gathering of people or specimens. And I also noticed that sort of sexual assaults were quite prevalent more in the UK than the parts of the world. The Versace case in the UK, which is in the book, and it is quite known, that is quite a horrific sexual assault at the end of that experience. And it was just interesting teasing out those little things that didn't seem to get mentioned that frequently around the rest of the globe. But as time went on, the decades went on, the grays showed up more and more in the UK. Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. They sort of appeared periodically, but then all of a sudden it's almost like something changed and they were the only ones doing the sort of the abducting. Again, if you look back at the cases in the 60s and the 70s, it was pretty much human looking occupants doing the abduction. And then it's almost like something changed and it was grays all the way on in. You'll still see the odd humanoid within these encounters, but it just suddenly became that. And I'm still trying to sort of struggle to find an answer as to why that suddenly became the case. I suppose there's skeptics who might say, you know, people in the UK were reading these American books and hearing about the grays. So that's why it came in. It's like in people's minds. The whole sort of theory of contamination is, you know, it's a very valid sort of skeptical claim. But that had to start somewhere other than people reading things. Because if people were absorbing other people's experiences and making them their own, they wouldn't have the rich tapestry of detail. Because if you look at a lot of the sort of the films or a lot of the books, they will deal with detail at a certain level. But people would need to have got that extra detail from somewhere. And I can only assume that must have been from that experience, because there was nowhere else for them to sort of pick it up. It just didn't seem to, you know, it was these encounters didn't sound as if somebody was parroting somebody else's experience. The depth of detail was never available, if you see what I mean. I mean, if we go right back to the very first sort of really famous case in Brazil, that farmer whose name escapes me for the moment. Was it Villas Boas? That's it. Thank you, Simon. You know, he had that archetypal experience. He had nothing to draw on. So that had to have happened. And then if you go to Betty and Barney Hill, they really didn't know about his case. So that information had to come from a source of some sort. So I can get the idea that, you know, it's easy to label, okay, UK people started picking up on the grays before because of the US experiences. But the detail was just too good for them to be absorbing it, you know. And also there's this criticism that it's all media that's influencing it. Like people are seeing grays because they're on TV or in the movies. But then at the same thing, you think, well, people aren't seeing Chewbacca and Spock. It can't be the movies that's doing it. No, exactly. And I think, you know, if, I mean, you sort of hit its sort of square on there, millions and millions and millions of people have seen, got my mind today. What is the film? James Cameron. Avatar. Avatar, thank you Simon. Avatar. So so many people have seen that you would expect that now to filter into people's abduction experiences, but it hasn't. So the influence of the media, it's an interesting theory, but it just doesn't bear out. And there's sort of another aspect of that. People who have sleep paralysis experiences who don't believe in alien abduction, they don't have experiences where they see common film stars or soap stars that they would be interested in, because that would follow as a theory. Okay, you're interested in an alien and find why. So that's where your abduction experience comes from. Similarly, if you are having a sort of a sleep paralysis incident, but you're very interested in Tom Cruise, for example, you should therefore by theory see Tom Cruise in your experiences, but it doesn't pan out like that. So I think the skeptical ideas that this is all about absorption from external influences, it just doesn't sort of work out when you run it through logically. So can we talk about a couple of the earlier UK cases? Like there's Alan Godfrey, what happened to him? I mean, that's a fascinating case. You know, he was bizarrely looking for some lost cows one evening that had been reported. And he was driving through a housing estate when he come across a UFO. He basically had very little memory of anything happening until sort of later and through exploration with hypnosis. He uncovered this whole sort of abduction experience of which he wasn't really aware, where he was taken to this craft. And then the sort of the typical abduction experience starts there. That has some very unusual instances in it as well. Again, small robotic type creatures, there was even a dog in the corner of the craft, which is, you know, a very random sort of detail, if you were going to sort of fabricate this story. And again, it just totally transformed his life. He ended up having to leave the police service for a variety of factors, but it's like one of those very early archetypal experiences that didn't really involve a great type creature. You know, he involved the humanoid creature. He seemed to have some sort of skullcap. It was very, very mysterious. But again, it was like that early UK experience that sort of mimicked what we would call the sort of the typical abduction experience, but also had some unusual UK quirks were one of a better phrase. And there was Robert Taylor as well, wasn't there? That that was weird. There's stuff in that that I haven't really heard anywhere else. And also it's almost like a thing. If you were to make up this story of seeing a UFO, you'd want to make it believable. You wouldn't want to throw in a load of really strange stuff that would make it less believable. No, absolutely. And, you know, there's a lot of aspects to that. After the experience, Robert lost his voice for a while. The dog was clearly really upset by the damage to his clothing and sort of the indentations. Like you say, that's a lot of effort to go to to make up a story. That is like really, unusual. He saw these strange fears that looked like World War II mines. And they obviously came towards him. And we can assume they caused the damage on his clothing. Again, there's a lot of detail in there that if you were going to sit down and say, Oh, I'm going to make up an alien abduction story, those sort of details wouldn't be the things that come to mind. And in a funny sort of way, if you were going to make these things up, it puts you more in sort of line of being caught out. Because if you said, Oh, well, I saw this thing that's a little bit weird, you leave yourself out to being caught out because people will look into that. Okay, so you said this strange set of spheres came to you and damaged your clothing. Well, let's see your clothing. Oh, well, your clothing is actually damaged here. Let's go back to the site. Oh, wow, we can see the indentations that these objects made. So, you know, it really, you do put yourself in danger of getting caught out by putting these weird details in if that's really what you're attempting to do. So, like you say, it's not something that would spring to mind as an obvious thing to implant in the story. What do you think about this idea that this is a phenomenon that's been here for hundreds or thousands of years? And that perhaps hundreds of years ago, people didn't know how to interpret what was happening. So they would say this is fairies or elves. That is like a fascinating aspect to it, because you are so spot on that, you know, we didn't, we may not have had the language to explain what had happened to us. And, you know, yeah, there are so many similarities when people encounter fairies or sort of other realms, the missing time exists getting taken to a place they don't recognize, you know, it's there is a lot of, there is a lot of overlap between these stories. So while I don't want to sort of deny people who believe in fairies, their sort of belief system, yeah, I can totally see that these experiences from way back then would have been filtered through the language, or the understanding of paranormal at the time. And in the book, I sort of briefly mentioned, I met a farmer in Ireland who, and he's so when you get out of Dublin into the countryside, there's a big belief in the fairy folk. And, you know, there is a sort of healthy respect for the fairy folk. And, you know, I was talking to this farmer and he told me how he'd been varied on his own land. And he basically had a missing time experience that he interprets in terms of the fairy folk, you know, he was very sort of very disorientated after the experience. And you can look into lights, you can say, hey, this sounds like the typical fairy folk experience, but then he's had missing time, you know, this really shook him up. You could look at that in an abduction lens, and which one is right? That's the interesting aspect. You know, is he filtering this experience because he understands the fairy folk culture? It's a fascinating aspect of it. And it makes me wonder about what they look like, because if they look like something you call a fairy or an elf or maybe a leprechaun, and nowadays you're seeing the grays, and it's the same phenomena, it's like they're capable of changing their appearance for whoever's observing them. Yeah, absolutely. And there's a real sort of very good example of that in the book in one of the case studies that I feature. A person saw what he thought was his girlfriend coming down the stairs, but he knew it wasn't his girlfriend. He interpreted that as a other being. And that being transformed its appearance instantly based on his thoughts. And so it really points to them having some ability to influence or rather change their appearance based on how we perceive things and what we would expect those creatures to be like. So there is that sort of definite psychic mental interplay based on what we think and what we experience and how we feel and how we think. So fascinating. And that's that girlfriend was coming down the stairs, and he could interpret it and look at and think, no, that's not actually my girlfriend. And so it changed its appearance, whatever this being was. So it's almost like the being thought, oh, he's caught me out. OK, fair enough. I'll change into something else. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it changed in a way to keep him locked into the experience. That was what I really found quite interesting about it. It wasn't like, as you say, OK, busted. I'm out of here, got caught out. It changed to a form that kept him engaged in the experience, even though he knew he was encountering something otherworldly. The change still had him in transfer one of about phrasing the experience went on. So I think whatever this is has a very good grasp of how we operate as creatures and what it can present itself as on what it can't present itself as. And it's almost as if it works very, very hard to keep us engaged in that experience. We all have somewhere we're trying to get to. As the largest energy producer in Colorado, Chevron is working to responsibly meet rising energy demand. So everyone can get to where they want to be. You've arrived. That's energy and progress. Visit chevron.com slash tankless. What's next at Moss Adams? That question inspires us to help people and their businesses strategically define and claim their future. As one of America's leading accounting consulting and wealth management firms, our collaborative approach creates solutions for your unique business needs. We leverage industry focus insights with the collective technical resources of our firm to elevate your performance, uncover opportunity and move upward at Moss Adams.com. And some people view the ability to do that, perhaps as something that's negative and dangerous or much like, well, they can spy on us. But other people have these experiences and say it's all love and light and everything's fantastic. But why do you think there's this different viewpoints? I just wonder, I mean, I don't think it's for me to say things are negative experiences. These are positive experiences have forced out onto other people. That being said, I think there is a propensity for us as humans to see things in the best way possible. You will often hear somebody having a traumatic experience who finds the best in it. Oh, well, that happened to me. But now it's changed my outlook on life and I feel more positive, more philosophical, and that could be like a car crash, a plane crash, a near-death experience. So I think in these experiences as well, people come out the other side and think, oh my God, I've had this experience. I think I've been abducted by aliens and this happened and that happened. And I'm basically looking for the post-traumatic growth within that experience and that is informing me that A, it was a good experience or B, it was a negative experience. I think that's a very human thing for people to do. Your own viewpoint of the world kind of imprinting on the experience and perhaps the aliens aren't good, they aren't bad. There's just sound and neutral, they've got their own thing they're doing. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess if you look at sort of it maybe from a scientist doing some work in a Petri dish, the scientist is just looking at this and, well, I'm doing this as an experience to find out what happens next or I'm trying to sort of develop a new strain of bacteria from this. They approach this in a very sort of ambivalent fashion, I suppose. I wonder if the abductors are doing that in a similar way and whoever has those experiences is free to interpret this as a negative or a positive. It's a tough one to call. And do you feel that as time has passed over the decades, the phenomenon has got stranger and stranger? I think it has, I think it has become a lot more stranger. I think if you sort of look back to, again, the sort of the cases from the 80s and the 90s, especially what you would read in John Matt's books or Bud Hopkins book, we kind of get a sense of these experiences. But as time goes on, there's a lot of high strangeness seems to now come with these experiences. And I think the core phenomena stays pretty much the same with a few changes. But I think the high strangeness becomes even stranger as time goes on, why I have no idea. But it seems that the whole experience never stays the same in the long term. I think it changes and adapts. And it changes and adapts. And basically, we see that adoption as high strangeness. You know, a lot of people will talk about what's quite popular at the moment is the hitchhiker effect, where people will have these experiences and the experience seems to follow them home. And strange stuff starts to happen around the house. And that is just one aspect of the weirdness. And if you look back a lot further, that hitchhiker effect was maybe not as prevalent, or maybe we weren't as good at spotting it. But there is a definite change in the long term. And I think things are becoming even stranger. And do you have an example of high strangeness? Is there something that springs to mind that you thought now that was particularly strange? In one of the case studies in the book, the one that we've touched on with the creature changed appearance straight after that experience, literally within minutes, the experience and notice two figures outside the house walking away in a robotic fashion. And it was kind of like, really, why would they be there? Why would they just walk away casually? Why were they outside the house? Were they sort of trying to spy in? Were they aware that this was going on? You know, it just seemed very, very weird that there were two additional creatures who just decided now that this experience was over and they would walk away. It just seemed so alien, but so very human as well to just walk away from something. That's what really stuck in my mind. Yeah, that reminds me of a case study with Mike and how he was in the car. And it was like there was a man in black chasing him in a car. Yeah, yeah. Again, it's just these very high strangeness incidents. There's that incident but with the Mike case study, after that man in black experience, it was another similar one where he was followed to a train station and the people in black got out and asked him a very weird question, which he didn't really fully understand. So they said to them, you know, weird of the feds, obviously meaning some sort of police organization, he didn't know that respond to that. He walked to the train. Sorry, I was just interrupting there. It's like they're saying, where are the feds? But this is the UK. We don't have any feds. We'd never call law enforcement that. Yeah, you know, how weird and how weird to ask that as the opening gown bit to a conversation, you know, but as you point out, the feds, that's a very American thing to say. So Mike went to the train, got on the train as planned and they walked right up to the sort of the train and just stared at him. And it was kind of like, well, what was that about? What was that attempting to do? What was their aim in that experience? So there's just so many weird little encounters like that. And I think that's one of the troubles with a lot of the abduction literature is a lot of those things get built it out because it becomes so much about, oh, what did you recommend under hypnosis? Whereas when you sort of pull back a bit and look at a lot of experiences lives, there are all these high strangeness events that you just wouldn't make up if you were trying to concoct some alien abduction story. Yeah, and it's interesting with the investigators, like in the 1990s, there was John Mack and Bad Hopkins and David Jacobs. And they all seem to have a different viewpoint of what was going on. So it's like you say in the book, it's like the experiences voices were filtered through the researchers because David Jacobs had a very negative point of view, I think. Yeah, I mean, it's a question I raise because it requires some sort of investigation because John Mack, the experiences he worked with are very positive and they had a very philosophical viewpoint. As you say, David Jacobs was very dark and negative about things. But Hopkins was quite, you know, open. He seemed to sort of capture a lot of the things that went on and sort of almost warped the middle line. It was negative. It wasn't really negative. It wasn't super positive. It was just as it was. So are we seeing some sort of cognitive bias from the researchers? Because John Mack was very philosophically, he was very positive, he saw the best in humanity. And that is what his experiences seem to mirror back to him. So I think it's a really important question to raise from time to time, how much gets filtered through the researcher. And that's why I kind of wanted just to capture people's stories more in an interview form and let them speak for themselves rather than my interpretation of what I think has happened. Because I think we need to get back to that raw data of, oh, tell me what happened to you. And I wanted to talk just quickly about Emma Woods, because you mentioned her in the book. And I've got her book and she was a guest on the podcast. I talked to her for over an hour and she definitely seems to be genuine to me. But she had some weird stuff happening with David Jacobs, didn't she? Yeah, it's a fascinating, fascinating story. And it should be a case study, I think, in how not to do research into alien abduction. So the set, the scene, Emma Woods, I lives in New Zealand, I believe. David Jacobs obviously lives in the US. So everything that was being done in terms of regression and research was done via a phone line. Now, I don't see how that is the best platform for doing that sort of research, because at the base of it, Emma Woods obviously felt that something was happening to her and she was looking for help and some form of understanding. So doing this via a phone line is probably not the best way forward. I think we can all agree on that. But then David Jacobs was starting to ask some very strange questions and basically his behavior was becoming a little bit more unhinged. He was basically trying to implant ideas in her mind that she was suffering from multiple personality disorder. Now, that's quite a high-level diagnosis. And he's not from a therapeutic background to make that claim. So that's a huge alarm belt straight away. But then he's suggesting to her to buy some sort of chastity belt to stop some sort of interference. And it just comes across as a slightly creepy, but also just a really poor way to conduct any form of research. And this sort of opens the door for skeptics to say, you know what, this is all just nonsense. Look at the way this guy is behaving. This is not a sound scientific way to conduct some sort of research. So it's worth looking into and oh, my mind is going to blank again. This guy called Jack Brewer, who has a really good article which documents all the interactions with Emma Woods. And it is just a real classic case on how not to do research. So he was doing hypnosis over the phone. But yes, you've got a whole section in the book that's titled The Problem with Hypnosis. So what's that about? I think the danger is that a lot of people who come to a therapist wanting some regression or some assistance, there's far too many people who, because they feel they have the ability to put somebody into a trance state, that makes them a hypnotherapist. And that's not the case. Okay. So I think my issue is as if it's very easy to find a course that you can learn hypnosis in an afternoon. And if you've got people who are coming to these therapists who want assistance and we're dealing with people's minds here, there needs to be some sort of a greater rigor in terms of just who is doing hypnosis or who is setting themselves up as hypnotherapists. Now, I know you've got a certificate in clinical hypnotherapy. So if I was in that situation, I feel quite comfortable coming to you because okay, this person's done on a credited course. The danger is there's too many people who are doing hypnosis because they're just interested in getting a story at somebody and contributing to a book or writing a book or what have you. And I think that we need to have a serious discussion on the best way forward, not just in terms of dealing with accessing hypnosis as a therapy. But I think we need a proper model that basically says, okay, if we're dealing with somebody who's making these claims, there needs to be a really good model that we follow to help these people because that's the main reason they're coming to any therapist. I'm having these experiences, I need some help, even if it's just to get a grip on what is actually happening to me. So that therapeutic model still needs to be developed, I feel, because that is one going to help people who have these experiences. But secondly, it's going to guide a therapist to do the best that they can because it's quite interesting. When I did some research for the book, it was quite interesting looking at the sort of hypnotherapy landscape in the UK. And there's not a lot of people who put their hands up and say, oh, please come to me if you're an alien abductee. A lot of therapists don't want to deal with it. So I'm assuming that people who have these experiences are going to people maybe in a UFO group or some other sort of connection like that. And while well-meaning, I don't think it's the best approach for the abductee. I suppose there's a skeptical argument as well that skeptics might say, well, these UFO abduction memories, they only ever come up when people are hypnotized. That's not true, is it? People remember this stuff without hypnosis. Yeah, of course, of course. And I think that's one thing that I think collectively within the subject, we've kind of forgotten that maybe we should spend more time looking at other experiences before we dive into hypnosis. But yeah, there's a lot of people who are very rich memories of what happened to them who've never gone through hypnosis. And I think it's those people we need to talk to just as much as those who've gone through hypnosis because I think if we can meld the experiences of both those sort of groups of people, we might get a better picture. The people that I sort of used as case studies in the book, they've never gone through hypnosis. They have very rich, detailed memories, which I think we need to sort of look at because there's very raw material that we can utilize to get some idea on what this phenomena is about. And also, there are physical marks on the body. Sometimes it's like pinpricks and they'll go away as normal, but other times there are scoop marks and that's a little bit of evidence in a way, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, again, it sort of all adds to the complexity of it because no one's going to inflict that scoop mark. It's really hard to do a scoop mark. You can cut yourself, but as you say, that will heal in time. But a scoop mark is a good chunk of flesh out and it never seems to heal in the same way. So it is a really fascinating piece of evidence. Because there's, is it one of your case studies? There's the guy has this really nagging feeling that he's got to go into the back garden. Yeah, that's Mike again. And he's sort of home alone, his parents are away and he's got this feeling, you know, come on out, come on out to the garden, come on out to the garden. So he steps out onto the garden. He, you know, he sort of comes face to face with these two entities and there's a stereotypical gray and a stereotypical Nordic. They grab his wrist and basically they implant this very small implant in his wrist and it kind of has left a very small scar. It's almost like perfectly square and shaped. It's kind of like pink and puffy. And it's that type of evidence that is just impossible to sort of manufacture yourself. And there's also that idea of having the nagging feeling to go somewhere. And I'm sure I've heard that from other people who have these experiences. Yeah, it's, it's quite, it seems to be quite a common thing that people feel the need to travel somewhere. You know, I'm just jumping in the car to go for a drive. And then sort of that leads to some experience almost as if they've been subconsciously summoned by something to be at a certain place in a time. So again, this sort of really points back to how these adductors can basically interact from extreme distances to motivators to do something. And I think Mike says that he moved from Yorkshire to London to kind of try and escape it. But the thing is that they can pick you up anywhere they want, can't they? They know where you are. Yeah. And I think it was, I can understand his sort of point of view. You know, if you have been in an area that you've had a lot of experiences and, you know, it's all seemed linked that place, there is that need to sort of run away. But as he said himself, you can run, but you can't hide. These things seem to follow and they certainly followed him to his life in London. Because there's another skeptical argument. I keep mentioning these things, but I think there's some kind of skip to argument. Like you mentioned sleep paralysis where people say, why is it people are only ever picked up out of their bedroom? But you could be picked up out of the office, couldn't you? Or the shops? Yeah, absolutely. And I think if we looked at a lot of the early abduction experiences that people are driving around when they see something and the car will come to a stop and then the abduction experience will happen, it happens out in the physical environment. So I think the idea that it only takes place in the bedroom at night as sort of being a side effect of how these encounters are often portrayed in the media and the skepticism of this just takes place in the bedroom. Because, you know, that's how it was presented. But there is a raft of experiences that just point to this not being sleep paralysis. And I think the other sort of aspect of this is that sleep paralysis is a relatively new phenomena. We really low very little about it. In fact, I think it was only in 2011, did scientists fully understand the chemicals and the receptors in the brain that make this experience happen? So we don't know a lot about sleep paralysis, but I'm pretty confident it's not connected to abduction because it just happens everywhere outside of the bedroom. What if you could have a career where the opportunities are as fast as our nation, where it's not about mission statements, but a shared mission? At US Customs and Border Protection, we go beyond to protect more than borders from ship to shore, air to ground, cities to local communities. CBP agents and officers are keeping people safe. Join US Customs and Border Protection and go beyond for something far greater than yourself. Learn more at CBP.gov/careers. And do you ever get the impression that these ETs make mistakes? Or do you think everything is how it should be? And if you think it's a mistake, it's not. I wanted you to see that thing. I really don't know because there's a lot of experiences where people have claimed that the clothes were put on wrong. And I guess you could see that in both ways. It was kind of, well, was that a genuine mistake? Or was that deliberate to make you kind of wake up to the experiences that are happening to you? Hang on a second. My pyjamas are on backwards. What happened yesterday? Oh, my God. Yeah, I have that experience. So I'm on the fence. I don't know whether it is a mistake or whether it is a little sort of calling card from one of the better phrase. I've heard of people waking up outside the house at 3am and they're locked out. And it's that I wanted to ask what you make of the ilkley more thing there. What do you think of the photo? I mean, again, the photo has not been debunked to my knowledge. I think it's a fascinating case. Again, if somebody has said, "Oh, I've had this experience up on the moor and this and that and the other happened," but to sort of go to the trouble of photographing it, again, you put yourself in a position where you could get caught out. I don't think a lot of people really like to go to that length. Just by the story, the person's never really come forward. I've written the book about it to my knowledge, at least. And I just think it's a very compelling case. And that photo, like I said, it's never really been debunked. And again, it carries the classic hallmarks of an encounter, but with that sort of high strangeness attached to it. So it's one of the more fascinating ones that I am inclined to believe that it sort of happened as it was portrayed. Because that was the 1970s, wasn't it? Was it far back or was it a bit? What it was was he was crossing ilkley more. Is it on the way to work? And it was dawn and he had his camera, but it was a film camera because people didn't have phones with them in those days. There were no phones with cameras in them. But I think the type of film was good for low light. Yeah. And again, the other thing that sort of sets this in the scene is you can still walk up to a place and get your film developed in an hour. It's 1987 was when this allegedly happened. So thanks to the internet for that. So yeah, I mean, it was fortunate. And like you say, people did carry cameras back then. And if I remember rightly, he'd gone out for a morning walk on the moors. Obviously, he was planning to do some photography and had this experience. Took the photo and then sort of then had some regression afterwards to sort of come up with the richness of what happened. And again, a lot of people were very, very skeptical of the case to start because it does sound a little too good to be true. But yeah, I think it's a really solid case. And it kind of just points to the fact that ordinary people have extraordinary experiences in very unusual settings or in very ordinary settings. Someone's gone for a walk on the moors and the next thing. And again, what really sort of sticks in my mind with this case is it's never been an ongoing saga. It was kind of like a one-off thing. And this person has sort of reported it. They haven't tried to milk it, they're not on the conference circuit. There's no books about it, you know, what I learned from the aliens type of thing. So, you know, it's a very fascinating case. And it's a picture of an alien, isn't it? It's not like a picture of a disc. But it's quite a grainy photo, but you can pick it out. Yeah, yeah, you can sort of make out there's something there. And again, has sort of times gone on, you know, and our ability to analyze photos becomes better and better. It still doesn't appear to have been debunked in any way. Where do you think we are now with this phenomenon? Because it seems to have changed over time, particularly with this thing of the hybrids. And has that started to disappear now? I don't think it has. I just wonder if when people have these experiences, they just notice other things as well as, and maybe we just have the discussion around the new thing that they've noticed. So, I think it does progress, but I think it progresses very, very slowly. I think the hybrid thing is still very present. And I just think slowly we become more aware of other things in the experience. And maybe we focus on that and think that it's progressing. But maybe those things are always there. I'm not sure. But I think it's a slow progression. That's what I'll go for. It's a slow progression of us seeing something developing, maybe. Do you come across many people who say that it looked like the consciousness was taken out of their body? I've seen that or heard that in a few cases where they seem to have sort of been taken outside of themselves and have seen their body. A really good case that's not in the book. There's some mention of it online. It's a really lovely woman who's sadly not with us anymore, a woman called Diane Shepherd. And she was abducted, went on a craft. And when she was on the craft, she had an out of body experience. So she was outside of herself looking at herself on the craft. So this raises a lot of interesting things about the nature of consciousness. Was that her soul and his types sort of comes into the whole sort of thing that with these striper often talks about, you know, that we are just the containers for souls. And that aspect is what really interests the grays more than just the biological aspects of the front on a phenomena trying to understand our essence as a being, I suppose. So yeah, there's quite a few interesting cases like that. And you said they're trying to understand our essence. And I think in one of the case studies, the person talks about being a child and going to a space with his other children and the ETs are showing them films of these different things. But they got the impression that the ETs were monitoring them almost to watch what their emotional reaction was. Yeah. And that's something that seems to be quite common throughout the phenomena is that situations are deliberately created. So the grays can watch our sort of reaction to it or, you know, how we respond to it or how it makes us feel and how it's impacting on us on a deeper level. So, you know, I think that so much of these experiences is deliberately done in that fashion for them to learn something from how we as humans react to it is almost as if they have a great lack of any understanding of human emotions and the interplay of emotions. So I think that's a really powerful aspect of the phenomena. And wasn't there a thing where Mike was a big business meeting in London and this odd woman came over to him and said something. Yeah. And this sort of again points to the high strangeness. He's an event connected with work. It's not something that you can just walk into. And this woman, I mean, I won't spoil the whole story, but this woman basically came up to him, said something that basically intimated that she was involved in his abductions and then walks away. And he's obviously absolutely shocked by this because one, the fact that she knows who he is and what his experiences are. But the fact she was able to get into this event anyway, which saw light sort of taps into this thing that they just seem to be very enmeshed in people's lives in many, many ways. And even in one of the other sort of case studies in the book, a woman sees one of her abductors in the street after an event and is so shocked by it. She suddenly finds herself flat on the floor, face down as if she's been knocked over. They just seem to be constantly enmeshed in people's lives. I just wonder whether people are more aware of it as they go on or not, but they're definitely there. They're definitely enmeshed, it seems. And I always have this kind of mental image of grays of being identical, but do you come across these people having these experiences who recognize them? It's almost like, yeah, that one's always been with me when this happened. Yeah, there's a couple of instances, sort of in my book, and in other people's books where it's almost as if they recognize the grays, even though they all look again, even though they all seem identical, people seem to recognize them in some way, and I don't know if they recognize it on some sort of energetic level. It must be because they do look very, very similar, but there's people who are recognizing him from before, or he's always here, or he's the one that collects me. And a couple sort of experiences, I know, often say, you can recognize him by the job role. This is the person who escorts me to a room. This is the doctor type. This is the technician type. So there seems to be some sort of weird recognition somehow. And you get the impression this is happening on an industrial scale, that they're constantly in the job of picking up humans, doing the thing, putting them back right onto the next one. It certainly points in that direction. I think it's hard to get enough data to sort of categorically say, for sure, but I think the more you look into it, the more people seem to have some sort of experience that certainly chimes with them being an abductee or an experiencer. So there must be more going on that we would think. And that's what I thought is borne up by a lot of other researchers who are obviously chatted to a lot more abductees than me. So I think it's more common than we would dare think. What about this thing of missing time? I find this fascinating. People, they seem to say that there's a chunk of missing time, but it's so undetectable in a way that you don't even notice if there's a jump in time. It is a fascinating thing. And in a funny sort of way, we experience it, but I don't think we link it to missing time per se. So for experience, sorry, for example, we've all had that experience where time flies by, you're having a really good time, you're with friends, you're enjoying yourself. And three hours has just gone by and you think, oh my God, yeah, I've got to go that we did that three hours ago. I think time is a very flexible thing. There's a lot of interest in research, in time, dilation. So maybe somebody somewhere has developed the ability that we can pluck somebody out of a scene or a situation and take them away, insert them back in. They've lost three hours, but to the rest of the world, they've lost no time at all. I think time is a very flexible thing that we're only just waking up to that flexibility. Well, it's been great talking to you. The book's called testimony volume one, alien abduction in the UK. So is there going to be a testimony volume two? There is and what that is going to capture is that 12 month period of being the fly on the wall in that support session and basically to hear the message direct from the people having the experiences. Well, okay. Is that a year away or is it closer then? No, that'll be quite soon. I'm hopefully maybe in about three months. Oh, excellent. Well, you'll have to come back on the podcast and we'll talk about it. I'd love to. I'd love to. Great. And thanks again for coming on. Oh, thank you Simon. It's been an absolute pleasure. And that was an interview with Andy Russell about his book testimony volume one, alien abduction in the UK and a great way to support the podcast is to sign up on Patreon where you can get exclusive access to the extended version of this episode. Just go to patreon.com forward slash alien UFO podcast. When you sign up, you get access to the episodes in the back catalog and they are ad free and are released two days before the free versions. And if you want to try out the extended episodes, you can now get a seven day free trial. There are two tiers. In the three dollars a month tier, you get an extended episode every month. And in the six dollars a month tier, you get an extended episode every week. And please check out my other podcast. It's called our paranormal afterlife. And there are over 300 episodes. And my website is pass lives hypnosis.co.uk. And the links are in the show notes. And if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts. Spotify will be your favourite podcast app to make sure that you don't miss out on any episodes. And thanks for listening. [Music] Could we talk about is it the man family and the beings from Janos? Yes, that is a fascinating case again. And again, for a lot really interesting reasons. When it comes to renting out your property, the uncertainty of finding reliable tenants can feel like a real guessing game, responsible renter or perpetual party animal. Enter renters warehouse. The pros who turn the uncertainty of finding great tenants into peace of mind. Renters warehouse offers top-notch leasing and tenant placement services, ensuring you get trustworthy renters without the hassles and headaches. With no upfront fees, renters warehouse works for you, not the other way around. From marketing and showing your property, to screening tenants and preparing the lease, their team of experts handles it all so you can sit back and watch the rent roll in. 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This week I'm talking to Andy Russell about his book 'Testimony Volume 1: Alien Abduction in the UK'.
