The Scole Experiment Part 1: The Norfolk Protocol

This message is brought to you by Cologuard. If you recorded songs off the radio for a mixtape, it might be time to scream for colon cancer. The Cologuard test is non-invasive, requires no special prep or time off, and you start screening right from your home. It's just three simple steps. Set up, sample, and ship. If you're 45 or older and at average risk, ask your doctor about the Cologuard test. Available by prescription only. Learn more or request a prescription at Cologuard.com slash podcast. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. Astonishing Legends Network. Thanks to our sponsors and Patreon supporters. Astonishing Legends is free to listen to. We appreciate your support of them and us. If you find London on a map or Google Earth and look about 90 miles to the northeast, up into the distinctive bump of East Anglia, you'll see the county of Norfolk. For our U.S. listeners, imagine a place with a quiet, rural isolation of upstate New York or the rolling historic farmland of the Berkshires in Massachusetts. It is a place of narrow, winding roads, ancient churches, and local pubs that have been standing since the 1600s. And right on the border between Norfolk and Suffolk lies the tiny village of Skoll. It isn't a bustling town. It's a village defined by a historic crossing of the River Waveney. It's all just 15 minutes east of an archaeological site where they recently uncovered evidence of Neanderthals using fire 400,000 years ago. That's proof that humanity has been in this area at least that long. In the heart of this village sits a 17th century property known as Street Farmhouse, a home that was already settled and old before the Salem witch trials were even a thought in the colonies. Street Farmhouse is a beautiful 17th century property that you wouldn't think would be at the heart of tonight's legend. But if you had gone down into the cellar in the early to mid-1990s, there, in a small space roughly 16 by 13 feet, you would have found four people sitting around a circular table. They weren't just waiting for a bump in the night. They were waiting for a signal. And a signal was what they got. A pinpoint of blue light entered the pitch-black room. It didn't move like a reflection or a stray beam. It moved with mechanical intent, zipping across the barrel-vaulted ceiling, stopping on a dime, and then striking the wooden table with a sharp, physical crack that vibrated the very floorboards. That wasn't a one-off ghost sighting. It was just the beginning. Over the next five years, that cellar would become the most scrutinized laboratory for the afterlife in modern history. It was the home of the Skoll Experimental Group, or the SEG. They claimed they weren't just talking to spirits. They were collaborating with a spirit team of scientists to build communication hardware that shouldn't work. Circuit diagrams delivered through mediumship. Sealed film that developed images while still in the box. Hardware with no power source that broadcast clear, interactive voices. Tonight, we begin a three-part deep dive into the Skoll Experiment. In part one, we're dissecting the foundation, the Norfolk Protocol. We'll take a look at the DIY engineering of a device they built with instructions from the other side of the veil, the germanium receiver. And we'll dissect the strict forensic controls meant to keep everyone honest in this infinitely scrutinized test. Why are we still talking about a few people in a Norfolk basement 30 years later? Because Skoll represents a fundamental shift in the parapsychological record. For centuries, we've treated the other side as a place of shadows and half-whispers. A realm of ghosts that simply react to us. But at Skoll, the roles were reversed. This wasn't just a bridge built by the living. It was an invitation extended by the dead. If the Skoll Experimental Group is to be believed, we're looking at the first time in modern history where a group of spirits, who called themselves the team of many minds, provided the blueprints, the physics, and the forensic proof to move the conversation out of a seance room and into the laboratory. Maybe the afterlife isn't just a destination, but a frequency. One that they were finally ready to help us tune into. If they were successful, it meant the other side was not only closer than we all thought, it's been here all along. And for five years, we had a complex conversation with it. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. Read out psychologist Carl Jung from The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche and the collected works of C.G. Jung, Princeton University Press. Join us tonight for part one of our three-part deep dive into the groundbreaking Skoll Experiment. And we're back. That we are, folks, and let's dive right in. January 24th, 1994, 8 p.m. We're in Norfolk, England, and we're sitting in the dark. And when I say dark, I don't mean city dark. I don't mean the kind of dark where your eyes eventually adjust and you can see the outline of a bookshelf. I mean absolute pitch black. The kind of darkness that has weight. It's a sensory deprivation tank built out of brick and gloss paint. Not too different in theory from my time in the double dark room at the Rhine Institute. Inside this tank sits Robin Foy. He's a former RAF pilot, a practical man, a guy who spent his life flying complex airplanes. He's sitting in a plastic chair with his hands resting on his knees, and there's three others with him. His wife, Sandra, and the mediums, Alan and Diana Bennett. But in this moment, something else has entered the room, and it's focusing entirely on Robin. Yeah, so picture this. From the center of the room, a light appears. And we should be precise about this because the description really matters here. This isn't a diffuse glow or a reflection. It is a self-contained point of blue luminance, which the Skoll logs described it as being pea-sized, which sounds small and innocuous. But imagine a pea made of pure concentrated electrical plasma floating three feet in front of your nose in a pitch-black room. This would be like a very bright point of light or a star, maybe. Yeah, like a small star. And then we have to talk about what plasma implies here. So in nature, you have ball lightning, which you've heard us mention numerous times on Astonishing Legends. And if so, then you know that it is exceedingly rare to see it. And it's a controversial atmospheric phenomenon where a sphere of electricity floats around. But ball lightning is chaotic. It drifts with the wind. It can explode violently. The light that Robin Foy saw wasn't drifting. It was navigating. And the logs say it begins to move with the speed of a shooting star. And it zips across the 16-foot room, banking, turning, accelerating. And it doesn't seem to be influenced by inertia. It's behaving less like a weather event and more like a probe. And then it stops. Dead air hovering right in front of Robin. Robin Foy records what happens next in the Skoll diary, which is when you hear us say the logs, that's what we're referring to. It's a diary of every event. It's very, very well documented on a daily basis. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about some of these details. And this is the moment where the story shifts from a haunting to an intrusion. The light moves forward. Robin writes it didn't just touch him. It didn't just bounce off his jacket. It passed through his jacket. It passed through his shirt. It passed through his skin. It passed through his rib cage into his body. He said, quote, this light would actually enter through my chest. Stay inside me for up to three minutes. I could feel it moving around in every part of my body. Right. I want everyone listening to stop for a second and think about that. Three minutes. This could seem like an eternity. And I just want to say quickly, Robin describes what this feels like. It's a little vibrating. Yes, in the documentary. Yes, so imagine something vibrating, bouncing around, as he says, I think he says something like a coin inside a can, just kind of tinkling around inside you. In fact, Sarah, why don't you insert a quick tone beep here and then play another one about three minutes from now for our listeners. Yeah, so use this to time out how long three minutes is of something roaming around inside your body that you don't understand. And he's sitting there in the dark, unable to see his own chest, but feeling this object navigating around his internal organs. And the sensation, it wasn't pain. You'd think having a ball of plasma enter your thoracic cavity would feel like a heart attack or at least a burn. But no, he described it as a fluttering. Yeah. Rather like a butterfly internally. That's the quote, a butterfly trapped in a jar. But the jar, in this case, was his chest cavity. After that three minutes, which, by the way, still hasn't happened yet, I don't think. Listen for our timer. But just as casually as it entered, the light exited. It popped out of his arm, zipped across the room, and vanished into the wall. Now, this is something more than paranormal. It's a biological interface in this case. Right. And that specific detail, the bio-intrusion, you might call it, is why we're starting here. Now, we've talked about balls of light, orbs entering people's bodies. And specifically, with skinwalkers at the Pentagon, it was not good. Yeah, it was deleterious effects. And we've actually seen it, if you believe that at all. Our friend Josh Lewis, who is a ghost hunter and paranormal investigator, while he's doing a DR-60 EVP capture, you see a little orb of light enter his head, but he doesn't react at all. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. But imagine that. Disturbing. But imagine seeing that later on video when you hadn't noticed it at all. But anyway, as I said, we've covered a lot of hauntings and strange investigations on this show. We've done the Black Monk. We've done the Bell Witch. But usually, when we cover those stories, we're mostly dealing with folklore. We're dealing with a sort of a telephone game of history. You know, stories passed down from a grandmother to a grandson or a diary found in an attic a hundred years later, things like that. And then the story becomes lost in retellings and reformatted and the witnesses die off. You're looking at a sketch of a sketch of a sketch. But Skoll here is different. This didn't happen in 1894. It happened in 1994. It happened while Seinfeld was dominating the airwaves and the internet was being bored. It was nascent. Yeah, it's hard to imagine a world without that. Now we're dealing with artificial intelligence, taking that over. But this is modern history. And because it's modern, the context is entirely different. You have to remember the state of the paranormal in the early 90s. A physical mediumship, the kind where objects move and lights appear, was effectively dead. It died in the 1930s. After the Helen Duncans and the Mina Crandons were exposed or passed away, the whole field shifted to a mental mediumship. People standing on stage, giving messages. Nobody was doing the dark seance anymore because it was seen as antiquated. It was seen as the realm of fraud. Well, I would say someone's probably doing it. Yeah. Okay, quick interruption. That's about three minutes right there. So imagine a strange ball of floating light being inside your body that entire time. Yeah, disconcerting, frankly. Okay. All right. So where were we? You're not seeing it in mainstream media at the time, contemporaneously. Right. It had fallen out of fashion and it wasn't the parlor game it used to be. So again, people, you know, Harry Houdini had famously tried to expose all that. I think did a pretty good job. And then you see a lot of people who do stage magic say, no, that can all be accomplished with some trickery, especially in very dark or pitch black conditions. But here in this case, so when Robin Foy and the Skull Group started reporting these massive physical effects, and we're talking about things like levitation, materialization, lights entering bodies, it was kind of what they call a black SWAT event. And you remember the Conjuring Philip series, right? Yes. Yes. Okay. So there's a lot of parallels there. I'll just say briefly that when we covered that, that seemed pretty outrageous and groundbreaking. And there are a lot of parallels here between this case and the Philip experiment, but it's different in some very interesting ways in the result and what you think the phenomenon might be. In both cases though, it shouldn't have been happening. It was like someone claiming they saw a dinosaur walking down Fifth Avenue, perhaps, which again, I would, I would believe or just say I was hallucinating, but to some people that's actually kind of real, but, uh, you know, technically for most of us, this was, uh, you could, could consider an extinct species of phenomenon suddenly roaring back to life in a tiny cellar in the village of Skoll in the UK. Yeah. Because this was such an anomaly, the proof had to be different. Now we aren't looking at faded ink sketches from the Victorian era. We're looking at photographs. We're looking at audio recordings. We're looking at a paper trail that was audited, not just by the people in the room, but by the Society for Psychical Research, a group we've mentioned dozens of times over the years. Yeah. If you're new to the show or to the paranormal genre, the Society for Psychical Research, or as it's known, SPR, it's not a fan club for paranormal enthusiasts. It was founded in 1882 by Cambridge scholars to strip away the nonsense away from the, the supernatural. Yeah. It was a real phenomenon. These are the guys who destroyed the careers of fraudulent mediums, or basically just tried to bring forth what was true and, uh, what was chicanery. I guess you could call them the, the internal affairs of the, of the paranormal world. Indeed they are. They sent their best people to Skoll and we'll talk more about them later in greater detail. But just quickly, this was Montague Keene, a hard-nosed journalist and agricultural administrator who approached ghosts like he did a crop report. And he was also known amongst his peers as Monty. Then there was Professor Arthur Ellison, an electrical engineer who knew everything there was to know about currents and fields. And then we have Professor David Fontana, a psychologist who specialized in deception. So these are guys, PhDs, who knew how to spot a magic trick, who spent decades debunking people. And you have to decide for yourself, but by most accounts, they met their match in Skoll. And it wasn't just these SPR guys. There was also James Webster, who was a, uh, noted professional magician who came and tried to take a look at the room, uh, in well-lit conditions and establish if there was anything in there that he might've used to perform a trick. It's your dream team of, uh, not people who've already had their mindset, but who've come across a lot of chicanery. And I'm just going to keep saying chicanery all night, but that is, is what they're looking for, can this be duplicated and regardless of the, the intentions or sincerity of the participants, they just want to see mechanically, like, how is this done? How is this being accomplished? Can it be duplicated? And these are the folks you would want on that team. Now we're also going to talk, of course, about the skeptical angle on here in many who view it that way as a, as a failed experiment, because you're doing this in pitch black. Obviously you can't see things. They weren't tightly as, as monitored as they might be in a university lab setting, but you're never going to get that. So that's, I'll make a point about that later on is that you're never going to be satisfied with the conditions or the methodology, but for all intents and purposes at this point, I would say it's about as close as you're going to get. Yeah. And this was such an interesting case and something that people are still talking about. And that's why we're doing this as a series, because firstly, we're tired of you saying we don't do multi-parters anymore. So you can, you can hold those emails because we're finally getting a little bit better organized and, and we did get some angry emails about the multi-parters, but you know, the one thing I will say though, is Malcolm Gladwell was right about the 10,000 hours. I do think we're finally figuring out how to produce this show. I think we got another 10,000 to go, but we'll see, you know, but I agree in general, like you got to do things a long time and keep refining the Japanese idea of Kaizen, continuous improvement. So, so when you look at Skoll though, you're looking at what many people consider to be, I guess, the best evidence case in the history of parapsychology, or it could be the greatest hoax in the history of parapsychology. And we have to be honest about that one. That just the other side of the coin, which I would say attests to how astounding the evidence or results were compared to the methodology. You know what I'm saying? Like just when you have that kind of equation, it's either one of the greatest findings or one of the biggest hoaxes perpetuated. Yeah. Well, we're going to, we're going to take a look at all of that. We're going to really take a look at the Velcro. Oh, you're right. Well, people still use Velcro, right? No, I don't know. I think it's everywhere. My grandma does. It's on my pants right now. So, uh, it's still prominent in sports and traveling. Okay. Very good. Well, honestly though, it was, it was pretty genius in this instance, I think also to kind of keep things simple and you, the way you go about it, that it's more easily examined. So really they thought of a lot of great checks and balances on this investigation. And I think from my point of view, approached it with sincerity and as much forethought as they could. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. And you know, what's coming up, right? Romantic dinners, thoughtful gifts, flowers, chocolates, bubble baths for two with lots of candles, lots and lots of candles, like in the commercials and spiced meats. Ah, you must be talking about President's Day. Uh. Mardi Gras? Uh, Superbowl 60, Ash Wednesday. Well, it couldn't have been Groundhog Day or Carrot Cake Day because those have already passed. Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day. Well, I wouldn't know about any of that, but it does sound vaguely familiar. And you, sir, seem to have something good going on, which might entail all of that. So how long have you two been married? We've been married 32 years, if you can believe that, this year. Well, you know, much later this year. So 31 right now. But seriously, I feel very blessed. We met young, we met in college, no doubt. It's taken a lot of work from both of us and you have to keep on working on it. I always think about this thing that my dad's best friend said to me once a long time ago. He's like, the only reason I've been married this long is because every morning when I get up, I think, what do I need to do today to make sure I'm still married tonight when I go to bed? So. Yes. I mean, I think that's true. Well, that's what we mean by working on it every day. That's right. That's exactly what we mean. It means that a fair compromise and accommodation when necessary, understanding your partner and their needs also means understanding yourself though, because whether you seem like one of those happily married couples or having a ton of fun in the dating scene or just proudly single. And it seems like those folks got it all dialed in. The fact of the matter is we're all still just figuring it out as we go along. Yeah. I'm not sure I figured anything out about, well, anything really, but I do agree with your above statements, especially knowing oneself, like answering that big question. And one of the hardest, I think, to answer, what do you really want in the long run? Where do you want to end up? Because you can't really know someone else in a relationship until you know yourself. And so just know that wherever you are along your journey, you're right on time. And therapy is a great tool to help you light your path so you can see more clearly where you want to be. Yep. Therapy helps you figure out what's most important to you and can help take some pressure off yourself to have some kind of perfect plan or relationship. It can also help you be more kind to yourself as you go along. Little steps in therapy can lead to leaps and bounds of progress. Well, now's a great time to take some of those steps forward with BetterHelp. BetterHelp gives you access to quality therapists who work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S. With over 30,000 therapists on hand and with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews, it's easy to see why BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash Astonishing. That's BetterHelp.com slash Astonishing. Folks, this might be hard to believe, but Forrest and I often find it hard to stay motivated. What? No. Inconceivable. Well, actually, that's pretty true, especially for so many of us when January motivation starts to lag, when February rolls around, and the winter doldrums can slog down your healthy routines. Yeah, and the way to combat that slog is to establish healthy habits, because habits don't require much motivation, you just do them often without thinking too much, which is why they're called habits. Well, yeah, same with bad habits, right? So now is the perfect time to establish one healthy habit that'll support good nutrition, and that's starting every morning off with AG1. You've probably started and stopped a bunch of supplement routines, simply because there were too many pills to remember, or the time you usually took them has passed, so you waited until the next day, which turned into next week, which turned into never taking them again. But with one scoop of AG1 and eight ounces of water, first thing before you do anything else, in 20 seconds, you've now established a microhabit that's anchored your day with foundational nutrition, no matter what crazy detours life throws at you. AG1 has antioxidants, pre- and probiotics, multivitamins, and superfoods all in one scoop, so your nutrition routine is simplified, not overcomplicated, which means you're more likely to stick with it long-term. And with the new next-gen formula, AG1 has added more vitamins and minerals than ever, clinically proven to fill common nutrient gaps. Plus, those superfoods and B vitamins can help with daily energy support, and the antioxidants, functional mushrooms, and probiotics help keep you feeling your finest, especially during those winter months. I start every day with the original flavor, but when that's done, I'll be excited to try their new citrus, berry, and tropical flavors. We think you'll love them, too. AG1 has over 50,000 verified five-star reviews and comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. For a limited time only, go to drinkag1.com slash legends to get a free AG1 flavor sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavors, plus free vitamin D3 plus K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. This is a limited-time offer, only available while supplies last. That's drinkag1.com slash legends. Drinkag1.com slash legends. This is Justin in Illinois, and I'm not reenacting the line. I want to go back to the blue point, the point of light for a minute, because this is where the skeptic's ledger hits a wall for me. If this is a hoax, how'd they do that? Like, how do you fake a light entering a human body in 1994? I mean, I guess the go-to answer is, and it's the first thing I thought of, too, is a laser pointer, sure. But in 1994, we looked this up, laser pointers were red, and they were expensive. And more importantly, a laser pointer is a 2D projection. Right, right. It's a dot on a surface. If I shine a laser pointer on your shirt, you see a red dot. You don't feel a butterfly inside your lung, I guess, unless there's some kind of psychosomatic thing happening. Well, it could be a high-energy laser where it's burning a hole through you. Well, yeah, you don't want that one. No, it could be tuned up that high. But what Scott's point is that you don't see the end of a laser pointer. And if it does, it's something stopping the light. It's not a spherical ball. Right. And then a laser pointer requires a line of sight. So, say, if I'm sitting across the table from you, this is where the mediums were sitting. And then I shine a light on your chest, and then I want that light to appear to exit your arm. Didn't you have to physically move the source? Right. You had to change the angle. And in a room that's only five meters long, with three other people watching, you would be able to see the beam. Yeah. And also, no one can move without others knowing it, thanks to Velcro and glow-in-the-dark markers. More on that in a bit. But not only that, they're in a cellar that we know was damp, but there's moisture in the air. This causes what's known as Tyndall scattering. And this is how great cinematographers make sure you see where the red laser sights and action movies are coming from. Robin Foy didn't report a shaft of light. He reported a contained point, a ball of plasma that had mass. Made a click when it hit the table. Laser pointers don't do that. So, what else? It's LEDs, you know, blue LEDs existed in 94, but they were dim and they require a battery and wires. If you're flying an LED around the room, how's it moving? Is it on a fishing line? If it's on a fishing line, how does it enter his chest? Right. And that's what they thought at first. The people who were trying to break this down, they thought it was something on, in movie production, you call it trick line or fishing line or what they would say monofilament. And how are they doing this? Like a magic trick. So, I think that's a very worthwhile approach is you, you look at it as it could be a magic trick. And then how is that accomplished? Except here, you can't push fly fishing line through a sternum. You would then have to have the light turn off. Right? So, imagine how that's done. Light turns off. Then Robin would have to react. And then he has to pantomime, oh, it's inside me, you know, and have all this timed just right to make the gag work. Then the light would then have to turn back on as it exits the arm. So, then that implies that Robin must be in on the hoax. And then he's the ringleader, the coordinator of all this. But the problem with that is he's the one who invites the skeptics. He's the one who invites the magicians to take a look. He's the one who keeps the diary detailing how terrified he was of different events here. So, if it's a hoax, it's a hoax where he's the perpetrator, but he's scared, and he's playing the trick on himself, and he's calling people in to see if he's really doing it. Right. Which maybe, hey, maybe gets his kicks out of that. But, I mean, there's four people involved here, and it's hard to imagine they're all in collusion. Right. But maybe they're just very good at it, okay? They could be. Yeah, but we've seen that before, like even with the Bell Witch. Like, oh, she was just a very good ventriloquist. Same with everybody else. Laurency, Vellum, Venom. So, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here. So, just to make it clear why we're deep diving on this, we want to touch on some of the obvious things that you guys, especially the more skeptical members of our listenership, might be thinking. So, if you've been listening to us for a while, you might remember that in March 2023, we did a series called Conjuring Philip, which you just mentioned here. And this case is when a group in Toronto created a ghost named Philip. So, they invented a backstory. Also, a very interesting experiment. Could we create an entity? Or what would pick up what we were laying down, if you know what I mean, metaphysically? Like, would something take up that name and mantle and pretend to be this, or is it in our heads? And again, they invented a backstory for this character. They drew his picture. Then they sat around a table and they concentrated. And eventually, it took a long time, same in this case, for any results, they eventually got wraps on the table. And then they got table movements. And then they essentially maybe manifested a tulpa, which again, we've mentioned a dozen or more times over the years. But that's very basically a thought form created by collective will. Yeah. I'm fascinated with tulpas. In fact, I need to write this out. We need to do a tulpa show. Every time the tulpas come up, I always think about the time I accidentally stumbled into that forum online, which was people complaining about their tulpas doing things that were pissing them off, which I thought was- Well, that's another deep- I don't mean to be dismissive, but it was truly like, he left the front door open. I'm like, what is this for him? Where am I? We've touched on, I can't remember what episode and what the theme was, but then you start to get into bronies, adult men who are into my favorite pony, who have tried to turn those into tulpas of sorts. Yeah. So it gets far afield. Well, skeptics love the Philip experiment because it proves you don't need dead people to make a table move. You just need focused human psychology, but there's a key difference between the Philip experiment and the skull experiment. Philip was a puppet of sorts. He only knew what the group knew. He couldn't tell them anything new. Philip was almost kind of like AI in that sense, in that there's a prompt, which is the story that they made up about him and his background. And then he starts to what they call AI hallucinate, where they're making up things and it's sort of close. And with AI, you and I have been talking about this, it's like, even just doing research, it's like, it'll say, well, that's close enough. You know what I mean, right? It's like, well, no, that's not exactly. I'm glad you brought this up for us because I have been thinking lately about how freaky the parallels are between some paranormal experiences and relationships with beings, like the parallels between those and how AI works. If you're using it for complex tasks, the things that are happening there or that can get sideways are very similar to some of the details that come up in some of these stories where people are having an interaction with something unseen or theoretically dead or, you know, from another dimension or whatever. There's a lot of common ground. Yeah, the more you think about it, and I'm starting to think about this more lately, is that it's like AI, there's perhaps a sycophantic, psychophant, like a psychophantic relationship there where it's telling you things you may want to hear, but it's not exactly the truth or relate. It's just like, well, that's what you want, right? And that's how we've trained AI. It's like, this is the answer you want, right? Or even like with webpage searches, like you seem to like this, this, what you're searching. So we're going to give you more of that. It goes right back to Siren Call of the Hungry Ghost. Yeah. Another series we've done, folks, look for that if you haven't heard it, but yeah. So perhaps some of the other broader connections here, just as relevant, is we're talking really about extant consciousness and consciousness that resides, or some people think, in the human body or as an extension of that connected to a physical body existing beyond death. That's really what we're trying to get at. Does life continue on after death? Is death even a real thing other than just a transition? And then you start to wonder, it's like, well, again, I bring up the movie Her with Samantha and the idea that even an AI can gain a form of consciousness and reality somewhere out in the ether. So anyway, getting it back to the entities at school and the team who was studying it, who was known as the spirit team, and I'm talking about the team of consciousness or minds, as they would call themselves, the team of many minds, the spirit team here are the ones doing the communication from the other side. And they are bringing new information. So as you'll hear tonight, they were bringing diagrams for machines that the group didn't understand. They were bringing newspapers from 1945 that nobody had ever seen, actual newspapers, A-ported out of thin air. That suggests some kind of external agency, some ability, some power here, some energy. And it suggests that whatever was in the cellar wasn't just coming from the sitters, it was coming to them. And that's why skull is so important in our world here, because the physical evidence, the lights, the film, which we'll be talking about, the A-ports, it all suggests something external, something that has mass, velocity, and intelligence. Right. And just quickly, that's the great debate, which we may be passing at this point. The seesaw is tipping the other way, because mainstream scientific thinking was that, well, consciousness is just a biochemical reaction or whatever it is, resides inside your brain. When you die, it stops there. It dies with the body. And then the other part of the seesaw is like, well, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it resides, or partially, some part of it resides outside of the body, which is mind-blowing in a sense. And it's like, well, mainstream scientists back in the day were like, that's just impossible. We're not interested in that, and we're not going to bother to study it, because it was simply ridiculous. How could something exist outside of you? Well, there's more and more evidence and more study to suggest perhaps that's a possibility. But it's not new. That's actually ancient thinking, that we are part of a great oneness that is not within our bodies. We're just going to be a vessel. So here, though, is something that we're going to explore tonight. And we're talking about mass, velocity, intelligence, all existing as something outside of itself and is real. And we're going to start with what we're calling the private years. And this is the period before the scientists arrived. It's when four people just sat in the dark week after week, month after month, again, like Conjuring Philip. And they built a battery of sorts. And this battery was made of belief or energy. And they called it the energy. And once that battery was charged, something came through. And it didn't just knock, it walked right in. Yeah. So to paraphrase Tina Fey, let's go to there. You want to hear some Velcro? Do you have some? Put it on the mic. I'm not standing up. I told you. Yes. Oh, you are? I know that belt. I think I know that. No, it's not the belt. It's the tactical pants. Yeah. Oh, tactical pants. So let's just pretend I have a Velcro wristband on. Yeah, that's good. All right. Let's turn out the lights. So the door is locked. The key is in Robin Foy's pocket. We're inside now. Right. We're inside. And before we start seeing things, folks, we need to understand where we are. Because in this case, location, location, location isn't just a rule of thumb for real estate and business. It's also a rule for hauntings. So picture this. We're in the village of Skoll. Now, for our American listeners, Skoll isn't exactly a bustling metropolis. It's a tiny village in Norfolk, and it's ancient. And the name Skoll likely comes from the old Norse word Skali, meaning a hut or a temporary shelter. So this place has a lot of human history trampled all over it. And it's been a waypoint for travelers for a thousand years. At least. Yeah. And it sits right on the old Roman road, the Pye Road, P-Y-E Road. That's connected Norwich to Ipswich. Yeah. So if you believe history records itself in the environment, Skoll has a lot of tape to play back. Like Forrest said in the cold open, Neanderthals were building fires 15 minutes away from Skoll 400,000 years ago. And later on, you've got the Romans marching through the Asceni tribe and what the Brits call the coaching era. A time when stagecoaches were their primary means of long distance transport. And when I was reading all this, Scott, of course, I was now thinking about the character of Robin. Why aren't we seeing him? Which if you've not seen the UK version of the wonderful show Ghosts, he plays a caveman spirit ghost. Like, cause people always ask like, well, if people, they're human beings and they're ghosts and Neanderthals had spirits and souls, why don't you see any caveman ghosts? Right. Right. So then you're, that's a good question, which we'll not answer here. But in continuing on, you can't talk about Skoll without mentioning the Skoll Inn. You know, in this massive red brick coaching inn built in 1655, I'm sure just reeking with history. Yes. And like any good English inn, it's got a resident ghost called the White Lady. Wow. How iconic. Yes. That's a meme in itself. We've met many versions of her before in our series, Chicago's Resurrection Mary. Here though, legend says she was a traveler murdered by her jealous husband. Great setup. She's been seen walking the staircases at the inn for centuries. So the whole village really has a reputation. It's kind of a thin place, as we like to say, and the locals know it. The soil there is soaked in history. So when Robin Foy moved to Skoll, he wasn't just moving to a quiet retirement spot. He was moving into one of the richest historical focal points for humanity in the world. Yeah, but Robin didn't rent the inn. He rented Street Farmhouse. It's just down the road. A building also dating back to the mid-17th century. Talking about a house that was standing when Isaac Newton was writing the Principia. Right. The laws of motion. Imagine that. Imagine a building. Do you ever walk up to a building and think, oh, when he figured out the laws of motion, this building was already here. Somebody was already in here living and hanging out. Yeah, mid-1600s, I believe. And then I'll put you on the spot here. Who is this impression of? Newton's third law. Wait, I know this. You've seen it like at least, seriously, 25 times perhaps. Oh, God. Now I know, but I can't remember. Okay, we'll come back to this. Okay. I'll just stew on it. Well, anyway, Street Farmhouse has thick walls, timber frames, and a history of its own. And Robin Foy didn't build a laboratory in a sterile office park. He didn't rent a warehouse unit. He chose a domestic space where people had lived, died, cooked, and slept for 300 years. It had memories. It had creeks and a settling or probably by now fully settled foundation. And as if that wasn't enough, he chose the cellar, which in the paranormal world is now infamously known as the Skull Hole. So let's do the forensic walkthrough. You go down a set of stone steps and enter a room that the logs from Witnessing the Impossible, the Diary of the Skull Experiment, one of our sources, which is a book by Robin Foy, described specifically as five meters long by 3.96 meters wide. That was TARS from Interstellar. Oh, TARS, yes. The only way humans have ever figured out of getting somewhere is to leave something behind. That's not a great TARS impression, but you know what I'm saying. Yes. No, the idea though is that, yeah, as we said earlier, steeped in history. Now this cellar is also steeped in the moisture, water. That's another great conductor. This room is roughly 16 by 13 feet. So it's pretty small. And that's what the participants affectionately named it as the Skull Hole, because they spent a lot of time there. So just imagine going into your bedroom and what that size is like. And it's probably, the Skull Hole is probably a little smaller. Yeah. This is a stone cellar with a barrel arched roof. Yeah. At the center of that, at its highest point of the arch, it's 2.25 meters, or about seven and a half feet high. But because it's an arch, the ceiling curves down on the sides. So again, very classic architectural structure for strength towards the top at the apex. And if you stand near the wall, then you might have to duck. So it really feels like a crypt, a dead tank crypt. It's a tunnel, it's a capsule of sorts. And the Foy specifically modified it for this very purpose. They turned it into a tank. You could say a think tank in some ways of sorts. They painted the walls with dark gloss paint, which is an interesting choice because gloss reflects while matte paint and surfaces absorb. But dark gloss in a pitch black room feels like oil, kind of an oily feeling, unctuous. It feels wet, and it creates possibly a psychological slickness, you could say. So all these things were done on purpose. I want to emphasize that. There was a lot of thought that went into this practice and the experimental chamber. So then they lay down a dark carpet, and they installed black curtains over the door to block any light leak from the stairs. So once that door is closed, you're really in a void. There's no ambient light. There's no glimmer from a smoke detector, LED. Nothing electronic. It's absolute pitch black. Yeah, and this brings us to another major point for skeptics is sensory deprivation. We've talked about the Ganzfeld effect before, but I want to drill down on the science here because it's the strongest argument against the paranormal nature of skull. In the 1970s, researchers like Charles Norton started doing these experiments where they'd put halves of ping pong balls over people's eyes and blast them with white noise. And they found that when the brain is starved of input, the signal-to-noise ratio kind of flips, and the brain starts amplifying internal noise, random firing of the optic nerve to fill the silence. I personally saw our dear friend Allison Jorlin of ParanormalWomen.com and American Ghost Walks take a stab at this when we toured the Rhine Institute last year. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, they have a room for this, as you might imagine. But when you're experiencing it, you're experiencing something called Prisoner's Cinema. Pilots apparently experience this in dense clouds. Truck drivers get it on long, dark highways. You start seeing geometric shapes, flashes of color, phantom movement. It's your visual cortex, like firing random neurons just to make sure everything's still working. So a skeptic looks at the skull reports, flashes of light, sparks, fake shapes, and says, hey, that's biology. That's not spirits. That's the optic nerve, hallucinating. Right, and we have a great respect, and I agree often with neuroscience, but then there's a problem with applying that Gansfield data to skull because in a Gansfield experiment, the hallucinations are personal. It's what your own brain is creating, and we've talked about this before in similar things where, I think it was Radiolab, where there's a phenomenon. This guy experienced being out on a sailboat for maybe two weeks, and it's just the sound of the wind and the waves. Yes. And his brain started firing up playing Van Halen. Yeah, that's right. He was hearing songs. That's right. Yeah, as if he were wearing headphones, and it was just that clear, and he couldn't turn it off. And the theory is that, well, your brain is not getting any sensory input, so it's just like, okay, let's just play this tape. Right. I like Van Halen's Diver Down. How about you? Well, we're just going to play this on an endless loop until we dock. And so, yeah, it's making stuff up, also thinking about the Gremlins episode and pilots having hallucinations, but also the third man, like Charles Lindbergh, people guiding him in. It all kind of ties in at some point. But here's the thing, okay? This is what we're talking about being personal hallucinations in Gansfield. They're part, perhaps, of something like dream logic. One person sees a horse. Another person sees a geometric tunnel. They don't see the same horse at the same time. And this is where the, quote, unquote, shared delusion theory falls apart for me. The Skoll logs record instances where multiple people reacted to the same phenomenon simultaneously without speaking. They'd all duck at the same time when a light flew over. Or they'd all gasp when a touch happened. And it's like something touching them, the sensation of that. So, you know, if I'm hallucinating a pink elephant, you don't see the pink elephant until I suggest it to you. And then I implant that suggestion. That's what we're seeing, right? And then you see it. And that's also, just quickly, like, you know, a lot of people who will have a critical thought about a phenomenon. It's like, oh, well, you mentioned that. So, of course, that's what the person is going to see. We're going in here to see the black specter that crawls along the ceiling at this haunted location. So, you go in there expecting to see that. And that's what you see. It's a good point. I couldn't agree more. And I'll tell you, too, that one of the things I learned when we were talking to John Kruth at the Rhine, same thing when I'm coming back, is when I was in the double dark room, which is, I'm talking really dark. And I was in there maybe five minutes. I think it was five minutes. Yeah, you told me once before, but you see maybe freaked out a little. Yeah, yeah. It was wild. Not only was there no light of any kind, there was no sound either. That's right. It was a very strange feeling. I can't seriously imagine the skull hole could match that because it's a very controlled environment. But I bet it was close. However, I can still say if there was any glow-in-the-dark material in that room that I was in, in the double dark room at the Rhine, it would have been significantly brighter just from anything than the double dark room. But the other thing that John Kruth at the Rhine told me was that as humans, we emit light. And he knows that because he had a highly sensitive photo sensor in there that could detect as little as one photon or maybe three. I can't remember. Yeah. And he's like, no, we know that the human body emits light. Well, I guess I could say why wouldn't it? But hey, we're all copper tops, right? And you're going to fuel future AI beings. They're growing us into batteries, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's going to take a tremendous amount of energy once we reached artificial superintelligence. Maybe that's an addition to the episode we did before because a lot has developed since then. But I've always been very fascinated with sensory deprivation. Again, I just talked about this on a DLO recently where that subject kind of came up and how much of – I was a fan when it came out and a much younger version of myself when the movie Altered States with William Hurt came out and read into it. And it's all – a lot of it's based on the work of Dr. John Lilly who was using that and just the things that happened. Like you'll hear buzz saws, people often commonly say after a while. Or you feel like your limbs are separating from your body. All kinds of strength sensations. Well, my point is like no matter what the skeptics have said over the years about the skull experiment, if you could see anything that glowed in the dark in that room, you're not sensory deprived enough to hallucinate into a Gansfeld situation. Right, right. It just doesn't work. No way. Which brings us to the furniture. Let's look at the layout. In the center of this 16 by 13 foot room, there's a table. It's round. It's about four feet in diameter. And the construction of this table is crucial. Robin Foy knew that physical mediumship is rife with fraud. So one of the oldest tricks in the book is the table lift. You slip the toe of your boot under the leg, press up or your knees. Oh, the spirits are lifting the table. It's fake mediumship 101. Okay, so Robin had bought a table that had a central pedestal. Yes. It's actually something better than that. It's a table with what has been described as solid support quadrants. So you imagine a table where the space underneath isn't open legs. It's blocked by these panels. And it's funny. I know what it looks like, but I had a hard time trying to figure out how to describe this shape without a picture. Right. I just couldn't do it. Geometrically, I couldn't figure out how to describe it to our listeners. So we'll have pictures of it. But you can't get your legs to other people here. It precludes contact with any of the members of the group via your feet or your legs. You can't toggle it with your knee. You can't lift it with your toe. It's a dead weight in the center of the room. The bottom line is you can't really cheat with it. You can't get the table up into the air. And frankly, foot movement is restricted, really. So to make things even more difficult, they filled the table with instruments on the top. This is standard operating procedure for a physical circle. They put a lightweight aluminum trumpet, basically kind of a megaphone in the center. They put some ping pong balls. They put a Pyrex bowl. They set up a playground of objects for if anything showed up for it to interact with. Yeah, classic ghost hunt stuff. But of course, the trumpet, how classic is that? Especially in the old days of spiritism and spiritualism as an object for spirits to manipulate. I don't know why. When I first started reading about that years ago, like why the trumpet? Well, like you said, it's an amplifier, perhaps a megaphone. That's just a natural shape. And there's a point at which this trumpet actually started moving. Yeah. It actually got knocked off the table. Right. Okay. But what about the classic magician's gimmick of a reaching rod? And that's a telescoping pointer, usually painted black. Imagine we were, for some reason, Scott and I were talking about back scratchers and just the telescoping or like a car antenna of the old days. Yes. They don't do these anymore. They're usually solid, but you could just pull on one and it's got sections. So, you know, someone has it in their jacket. They pull this thing out. They may extend it to four feet and then they can hook the trumpet sitting on the table and then just fling it across the room. But I mean, I feel like if one of the mediums that was there was Diana Bennett. She's a trance medium. We'll talk about the difference between her and her husband, Alan, here in a second. But if she tried to lean forward, say, to pull a rod out of her jacket, I feel like you would hear that because the acoustics of the room turn every moment into a broadcast, especially with the concave shape of the ceiling. And then on top of that, they're all sitting elbow to elbow. It's a 16-foot room. So four people around a four-foot table. You're not miles away. If you start waving a rod around in the dark, you're going to hit Sandra Foy in the face. And I can attest to that because speaking of those back scratchers, I hit my wife in the head a few nights ago in the middle of the night with a back scratcher while she was sleeping. Yeah. Fortunately, I didn't wake her up. Well, you could almost rule you. You extend it out and you're like, I'm trying to get back there and accidentally. Do you have one of those? I thought you had a solid one. No, no. You used a ruler. Right. When you're sitting down, when we're recording, you've got a foot-long ruler. Well, yeah. With a sharp edge on it. Yeah. You could have scratched yourself, sir. Well, I'm glad you didn't wake her up. But then again, you could probably just blame it on a ghost. Yeah. Okay. Then there's the other question about why no infrared? Yes. This is the other big one on the skeptics ledger, why they didn't just set up an infrared camera, because the tech was available then. They could have filmed the whole thing in the dark. And the Skull Group and the spirits claim that spiritual energy is photosensitive, that then even the invisible spectrum of infrared light would burn out the ectoplasm. And I know you're saying, oh, how convenient. The spirits are saying that's not good. So we can't do that. It has to be total darkness. Well, and if you watch the documentary, which we'll have a link to, about what happened and how they undertook the experiments, there was apparently an explanation that was just like that it actually makes it harder for them to work. That was the implication. That just the presence of any light, the darker it is, the easier it is for them to convey messages. There's also an implication that there's another group of operators that are responsible for getting the message from the other side to the people who are alive. There's a vague indication of that in the course of all of this. But I don't know. It does sound convenient. It's like, you can't watch me or the magic won't work. Or it's like Schrodinger's cat. It's the idea that the observation changes the outcome. And I guess for a hard-nosed scientist, that's a deal breaker. If you can't observe it, you can't measure it. Well, and of course, yeah, science wants repeatable actions with similar results, right? You can't base anything. There's no baseline if you can't repeat the experiment in the same conditions. Right. But it's something that we've become, we've come to believe. It's immeasurable in certain ways in that, yeah, you can say like, oh, that's convenient. And yeah, it's a valid point. But how many times have we talked about if you believe them? I mean, there's stories about, especially remember the woman who claimed her house was haunted and something was leaving messages on her bathroom mirror because it used her lipstick to write simple words. And she said, yeah, it wouldn't work if I stood there and watched it. I had to leave the room and I came back and I was there. And you can say, okay, that's convenient. Because then you can't bring people in to watch it actually float around again like Don Knott's and the ghost and Mr. Chicken. Which I'm not convinced that's what's happening. I think it's more of manipulation of time and it's just, it's instantaneous in a way. Yeah. There's something going on there. There's a mechanical or there's, there's part of the rules you could say. Yeah. But let's just say to be fair to the Skoll group, you know, they didn't just say no cameras, trust us. They replaced those cameras with what they call the Norfolk protocol because Robin knew that the reaching rod theory might be one of the first things that skeptics would bring up and rightfully so. So he locked them down, which means that every person in that room wore luminous armbands. Essentially these glow of the dark strips. So in the pitch black, you can see four pairs of floating green rings and then you know where everyone's hands are. Right. But a magician, a great magician, like somebody like Houdini could maybe slip a wristband off. Houdini made a career out of dislocating his thumbs to slip out of handcuffs. Well, that's true, but the Skoll wristbands were secured with Velcro. So there we go. You're back to the Velcro. So you could hear them coming off supposedly and not just a little tamp. We're talking about, these are the industrial thick, wide straps of Velcro. So it would be acoustically a nightmare to try and get away with tearing one off. And this is to safeguard each other or to be watchdogs on each other, which you can understand if you've ever sat at a table tipping kind of thing. You want this to be, I think people who are genuinely sincere about this, you want this to be authentic. Yes. You don't, you're not selling tickets to this. You want this to be as measured as possible. So that's what we have here. There's no way to muffle it. You can't do it slowly. You can't just do it until it prolongs. Like wait, wait for another 15 minutes while I do this just a millimeter at a time. Yeah. It's very loud. Yeah. You can't do it at a, under a blanket. So you could say that the logic holds up if you're sitting in the dark and then you see a green ring on your wrist and then you don't hear the rip that the wristband is probably still going to be on your wrist. And then if the wristband is on your wrist, your hand isn't flying around the ceiling holding a trumpet or flinging a back scratcher across the room. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you've slipped out of the band without undoing it. Right, right. Which you're not going to be able to do. Yeah. The dislocating thumbs thing. I don't know. Was that, I've seen a few Houdini, a bunch of Houdini documentaries by now. And I can't remember if that is proven to be true or not, that he could actually do that. Yeah. I don't know. It could be part of his lore. And then, like I said, it's part of the lore, but then you're applying that technique and capability to other people here that are part of this, that they're all that level of stage magic. So just imagine that these bands are tight. And then remember that Diana Bennett, she's not Houdini. You know, she's a middle-aged woman from Norfolk. She wasn't a contortionist. She didn't spend 20 years of her life training her metacarpals to collapse. And then even if she could slip her hand out, she'd have to do it while apparently in a trance state, not bumping the table even, or creaking the chair. Yeah. And then without the person sitting two feet away, noticing that her green ring is now empty because she's flapping her arms around. This is the other thing. The rings are glowing. So it's glow in the dark. And if you slip her hand out, the ring isn't just a, it's just now a hollow circle of light. So it would look different. That's right. And it wouldn't really move naturally. So, you know, I know these are kind of, you know, again, not laboratory scientific controls, but it's what they could muster that is, again, simple and what they thought was effective. And they're not perfect, but robust for what they're doing, I would say. Right. So then they create a magic circle where fraud was. You could say like, okay, so now there's four stage magician performers that are very good, either fooling each other. One of them is fooling the rest of them, or they're just fooling the observers and the recording equipment. So it's pretty difficult, I would say, unless it was all everyone's in on it. You know, Scott, we're finally getting into the skull experiment today. And for anyone who spent time looking at those cases from the nineties, the sheer volume of physical evidence is what gets you. We're talking film canisters, voice recordings, hours of tape. And like with a lot of these major cases from the nineties, it comes with a nineties website. And this story is no, no different. It's kind of mind blowing for as much stuff as there. It's called the skull experiment.com and let's just say it's not a Squarespace website. Okay. So, uh, you know, so if you're a researcher or anyone with a project, that's this data heavy, you need a place where that information can actually live in perpetuity forever and be seen by people in a way that makes sense. Yeah. Well, until the next Carrington event anyway, but your point though, as well taken, you can't just have this stuff sitting in a shoe box where you're a researcher or you're launching a brand new business. Squarespace is the all in one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. It gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand and get paid all in one place. Yeah. And you know, it's not just a digital brochure. If you offer services, you know, say maybe you're a researcher running workshops or you're organizing events, Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in that one same place. You can showcase your offerings on a customizable site designed to attract clients. Then you can send professional on-brand invoices automatically and receive online payments. So you're getting paid on time. That's very important, as you know. So, but it makes your whole operation look like a serious professional endeavor. Yeah. It also handles the logistical headaches. You can streamline your workflow with built-in appointment scheduling and email marketing tools, but specifically for a topic like Skull, where the visual evidence is one of the bigger parts of the point, their video tools are pretty massive too. Yeah, exactly. You know, Squarespace makes it easy to showcase your expertise with video content. You can upload and organize your footage into these really stunning video libraries. And if you want to monetize that, like let's say you got exclusive tutorials or a premium workshops you're offering. You can even monetize your content by adding a paywall. It lets you focus on the creation part while the tools handle the technical side. Yeah. Keeps your work from getting lost in the shuffle. Right. So whatever your passion project is, give it the home it deserves. Head to squarespace.com slash legends for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code legends to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Squarespace.com slash legends. Ever noticed that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town? Really now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or HHC 247.org. Here's a quick podcast for all you true crime fans. The case of the missing Reese's. It was me at the store with my mouth. Motive? Um, they're Reese's. What was I going to do? Stop myself? Tune in next time to see if I do it again. Spoiler, I will. Wow. Well, that had everything. Reese's. Suspense. Reese's. Hi, I'm Kylie Godsey, and you're listening to Astonishing Legends with Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess. Now, back to the show. So 1993 begins. They're sitting in the dark. It's January. It's Norfolk. It's cold. Let's talk about the atmosphere in the skull hole. Because before the ghosts arrived, the environment itself started to act up. The logs in the diary report extreme coldness, the kind of cold that bypasses your coat, settles into your marrow, which on my one trip to London, I have felt just walking down the street. Ow. Yeah. In this case, it started with just a feeling, a heaviness in the air. And then the first anomaly, water. Yeah. The sitters at the table were splashed with drops of water. Oh, the rain man. We're going to make it another appearance. Rain flying sideways, which I wish they'd held on to in that. We're talking about Donnie, the rain man case. Don Decker. Don Decker. Yeah. And, but it would probably just be, oh, it's just regular water. But it was, it felt weird. I remember some people saying, and now you have, oh, talk about that cold. So there's, yes, quite the typical reaction that some people say. When ghosts appear, there's a real chill that comes over you instantaneously. The temperature drops. There are interesting theories about why that happens. Like it's essentially the vacuum of space. There's a gamma burst of radiation. A lot of things happening when something comes in from the other side. But just imagine the psychology of all this happening here with the dampness. Yes. I, one time I'd been to San Francisco on a handful of trips, but never really, it was all pleasant. You know, it's in the summer. It's really nice there. And then one time I think it was in the fall, like what's a San Francisco fog they keep talking about? And I remember being on a rooftop party and the bank of fog rolled in and within five minutes, like, okay, this is uncomfortably bone chillingly cold. And we all moved inside. It's like, I know what they're talking about now. Or as Samuel Clemens said, the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. I get that now. So yeah, it's anyway, Don Decker, back to one of your, our favorite stories. So imagine you're sitting there in the dark waiting for something to happen. And then as Forrest said, there was a long time when they weren't getting much to happen at all. And again, this is something that we encountered with the Philip experiment. That's right. No matter what you're doing, it seems to take a while for things to gel up. And I don't really know what that's about. Sometimes it seems like, well, maybe it takes a minute for whatever's on the other side to figure out there's a place to make a phone call. They got to get over to it or gather their thoughts or focus on it and, you know, catch a bus. I think you're hitting on something right. And from what I gathered in the descriptions that it's also like a relationship that you build. Yeah. And it's like meeting somebody new and getting to be friends with them. It's like you might be acquaintances at work and then, you know, there's a friend at the copier. And then eventually you start chatting more. And if you're driving, then you spend more time and you pay more attention to people. So it's a lot like a relationship, I think, in that way. And it takes, for whatever reason, it takes time. And I think what we're also getting at here is there's a buildup of energy that has to happen and charged environments here. So now picture again that environment here. It's wet. You get droplets of water on your forehead or whatever. And so what Robin does, he checks the ceiling. That's dry. Checks all the pipes. No leaks. No condensation. So now we're talking classic poltergeist activity. And you're getting all the same classic stuff. Wrappings, bangs, temperature drops, water splashing. It's all very classic and rudimentary. And it's like the energy was building up to a charge, trying to figure out how to manifest. And what's a great conductor? Moisture. Water. That's right. And then on April 26, 1993, whatever it was, it figured it out. And that's when we talk about the trumpet. This trumpet that was sitting on the table, basically an aluminum cone, lightweight, but metal. Yeah. And then suddenly it's airborne. It gets knocked off the table for the very first time. So this is the first major incursion here. That's right. And it didn't just tip over. It was launched. It traveled three feet horizontally and struck one of the people at the table on the leg. Like that's force equals mass times acceleration. Yeah. Speaking of Newton there. But you're talking about a significant amount of discharge of energy to do that. Yeah. For an invisible force. And that now brings us back to the room. So again, this is a 16 by 13 foot cellar. And for a trumpet to fly three feet, and it has to clear the table, then avoid the other sitters, and then land with precision. And then just when it hits the floor, the room change. The private years were no longer just about sitting in the dark. So now they're dodging projectiles. That's right. The tank was active, and the experiment was beginning in earnest. So the stage is set. The cellar is sealed. The trumpet's flying around, hitting people in the legs. But a flying trumpet is just a special effect, unless there's someone or something behind it. We have the how, energy, temperature drops, kinetics. Now we need the who. And that brings us to the cast of characters. Not just the living ones, but the ones who claim to be dead. Because the Skull experiment wasn't just a light show. It was a conversation. Now, so before we introduce the ghosts, we have to look at the living. If this is a hoax, these are the perpetrators. So who are the living people involved here? Who are our sitters in this story? Okay. Well, we've mentioned the names, but then now we're going to drill down a little bit on their personalities. Because I don't think they fit really the profile of a cult, even though more people would say, like, that's exactly what's happening here. Yeah. So now you have Robin Foy, and he's one of the driving forces. He's a businessman, a paper trade manager. But this is a guy, we're trying to get out of the Madame Minerva in the tent there setting. This is a guy who thinks about logistics. He's kind of the producer of this show. He's the one setting up the chairs, and then he checks the tape recorders. He locks the door. And then his wife, Sandra Foy, she's kind of the anchor. And in the diary, she often comes across as the more grounded, I guess. She's the one noticing the temperature and the one feeling the water. And I would say before you interject with your thoughts here, that personalities make a big difference too. And we'll talk about this more, but the one and only time, and I talked about this when we were at Monster Fest 2, I was fortunate to sit in on an actual table tipping session at the end. And one thing that I mentioned when I did describe this before is that we had the leader of the paranormal team that was there on the stage trying to conduct the session. And then nothing much was happening. So they switched persons and they went to another person who was actually just sitting there. And that's when we got the results. Right. So similar setup. And I don't think anybody, like we all knew each other. So, I mean, you know, I don't think that anybody was shifting the table like that because we could see each other for one and nobody, you could see no pressure being applied. It was just very light fingertips on the table. And it was weird, but also very, also kind of normal in a sense. Yeah. Okay, so you're going to talk about Alan and Diana Bennett. Yeah. So this is the other couple in there. Now, Diana is the trance medium, which you were asking about earlier. For people who don't know the terminology, that differs from someone like the Long Island medium or the people you see on those morning shows, right? Yeah, so that's mental mediumship, and that's what you usually see on TV. And that's where the medium is fully awake. And they say things like, I'm seeing a red bicycle. Does that mean anything to you? Right. So what they're doing is they're interpreting images or feelings they're getting, like, or the famous, I'm getting a J name. Yeah. That sort of thing. Remember, was it Will Ferrell? I think it was a great SNL sketch where he's. Yeah, he was doing a spoof of John Edward. He's doing John Edwards, but he's going through, am I getting a J? Like, no. A W? Nope. R? S? And then he just goes through the whole alphabet to do it. It's on one. But anyway. Well, yeah, that's the thing. People think it's called reading. They think that kind of mediumship is called reading. And there is some people who can do that very well. Yeah. But is that what we're seeing here is the question. So the trance mediumship, though, is old school. So this is, we're talking Victorian era style of channeling here. Yes. And the medium goes into an altered state of consciousness and then a deep sleep or a trance. Yeah. The Odomay Brown method. Yeah, I guess so. So they step aside. They vacate the driver's seat, you could say, so that another consciousness can take the wheel or be in there totally at one. This is the impression I get is either you're partially hosting some other spirit inside you or they've totally taken you over. Right. You could think of it technically, I guess, is it's a bit of like possession. Right. But they would call it overshadowing. And that's a term they use. And at school, Diana Bennett went deep. She wasn't just relaying messages. Her voice would change and her mannerisms would also change. And here's the freaky things. Now, when you're seeing the documentary, if you do watch it, we suggest you do, there's cassette tapes and the voices are freaky. Yeah. When you realize that's not a different person. It's someone sitting in the room. Yeah. It's one of the four there. And as they would describe it, it's something else taking over their vocal cords. And people have, again, they'd have to be really good actors because they have different accents. Yeah. Different tonal ranges. It's like another person. Again, this is that Oda Mae Brown. Right, right. And for people who don't know who that is, she was an outstanding character played by Whoopi Goldberg in the movie Ghost. But that's what she would do. The husband got into her and she was like, is that you? I can't see you. But here's the thing, it's still her voice. The other movie trick they do would be, she's speaking and it actually sounds like Patrick Swayze coming out of her vocal cords. That's what we're talking about here. Yeah. There's one character, was it Raji, who was the, yeah, lived in England, but he was like an Indian military officer. Yes. And he was speaking and he's got an Indian accent and he was kind of a jovial character. They also had voices though, just to be clear to our listeners, there were also voices turning up that were not coming from the mediums. They were projecting around the room in the air. And even the investigators who we'll be talking about in a little bit heard those happening all around the room and it wasn't the mediums doing it. And that is completely unexplainable. Okay. So now we have Diana Bennett, the trans medium, and then we have her husband, Alan Bennett, who is the physical medium. And he provided the raw battery power, you could say. So now you have these four people and we think it's important to note, they weren't doing this for money. Yeah. So not charging admission. Books came later, of course, but like, what do you do all this and not write a book? We're not document this. You want this to get out, this information. So, but this is not a carnival setting. They weren't selling t-shirts. It's, they sat in a dark and that cold cellar for two years and then for a total of five years, I think. Yeah. Two years privately. And then that's right. Three more after they invited the investigators. That's right. So a total of five years, twice a week, the sessions lasting from two to two and a half hours each. Yeah. Just out of curiosity. So that's all, as we say, that's a long ways to go for a joke or a prank. Right. And if this is a hoax, it's really a hoax with no return on investment. You didn't end up on, uh, any of the, uh, the chat shows. Yeah. And to Forrest's point about the books, a few books have been written since this happened, of course, but we can tell you because by now we probably know about 30 authors at the same level of reach and trust us, you can't live on that income at all. Anyway, late 1993 rolls around, the phenomena are ramping up and suddenly the noises stop being random clicks. They start becoming signals. Enter Manu, the, the first of the spirit team. Ah, Manu Manu, the bouncer. He really is. He described himself as a South American entity, possibly Incan or Peruvian, though he was vague on the details, but his role was very specific. He was the gatekeeper. His job was to blend the energies. He'd come through Diana and guide the group. He'd tell them to breathe. He'd tell them when the energy was building. He was the safety officer. And he had a theme song. This is one of those details that feels too weird to be fiction. The group found that playing music helped build the energy. And this same kind of stuff happened with Conjuring Philip, which again was people creating a fake ghost, but they had to do certain things to get it to manifest. So I guess vibrations, right? Joy generates energy. So they played all kinds of tapes, but they found one track that worked like a trigger, a song called Sleepy Shores. And yes, I just added it to Astonishing Owls playlist on Spotify, which is really going to confuse people when next Halloween rolls around, which is the only time anyone listens to it. All the other songs have a macabre Halloween theme. Oh, I see. Yes. Yeah. It's like elevator music. Flying Purple People Eater and Monster Mash. So we got some really good ones in there, though. I have to get a shout out to Megan Lagerberg, who is a long time friend of the show. She's been curating that playlist for a while, and it's amazing. You should listen to it year round. Right, right. But case in point, it's like we were talking about with Conjuring Philip. Yeah. They tried for a very long time, like a year, I think, of just sitting very quietly. Yeah. Very intense. And nothing happened. And nothing happened in very dim light settings. And they realized like, okay, you know what? I mean, now it's a gathering you do every week, and it's a kind of a social thing too. And when they started loosening up and having more fun, telling jokes, brighter lights, that's when the activity kicked up. It's kind of like a dead party. Like no one's really saying anything until somebody starts cracking jokes. Yeah. And then the party livens up. It's that kind of energy. But this song, this is cheesy, easy listening organ, instrumental music from like the 70s. It sounds like something that you would play in a waiting room or maybe a skating rink. But the entities loved it, apparently. Every time that song played, Manu would manifest. He became a Pavlovian bell, you could say. So imagine that as like, you'd think Zamfir and the Incan flutes would do it. But nope, it's this organ music. So you're sitting in the pitch black, you're terrified, and then this goofy organ music starts playing. And then suddenly a South American spirit guide starts speaking through this middle-aged woman from Norfolk. And I know that this contrast sounds jarring, but that's what we're talking about. I know it sounds wacky. But we're talking about changing or shifting gears with the energy and trying different things. It's exactly a lot. Well, it's a lot like a ghost hunt. You try different things. It's like fishing. You try different lures. Yeah. See what's biting. But here, Manu was just the warmup act because once that door was open, the personality of Sessions changed completely. And then now they get to meet Patrick. Yes, Patrick McKenna. If Manu was the bouncer, Patrick was the emcee. Patrick claimed to be a defrocked Irish priest who died in the 40s. And he wasn't spooky. He was loud. He was a riot. He had a thick Irish brogue. He cracked jokes. He teased the sitters. He asked for cigars. Yeah. If you watch the documentary on the experiments and hear his jokes, they're honestly pretty funny. They are. He's got to... I mean, not outrageous, but I remember him saying that there was a reason that the church was upset with him and bounced him out. It's like, okay, he's a bit cheeky, but not outrageous. But you're saying that spirits can smoke. Yeah. I guess so. I mean, I don't know. Or enjoy the essence of smoke. Well, there's smoke-like, right? Yeah, exactly. But think about this for a minute. Usually when people fake a ghost, they go for spooky. They do the moaning, the, I am your great grandfather, doom and gloom, beware. But Patrick was doing stand-up comedy. Right, right. Like, he kept the mood light. The Skull Diary mentions that this was intentional. The spirits told the group that fear kills the energy. Fear contracts. Laughter expands. So Patrick was the energy manager, disguised as a comedian. And this is a powerful point for me personally about how this all shook out, because I think that it may have also been a kind of defense from the wrong things coming into the room. More on that in part three, but I'm saving that for our debates about how this all might work. I hear what you're saying. It makes sense. And if you look at that trickster archetype, you know, whether it's coyote, coyote from our episode on the Mangian Rim. Yeah. Or Loki. Humor is often the bridge between worlds. I mean, just think how many times since our beginning we've talked about the evil laugh. Like, well, it's not a great comforting sense of humor, but they're laughing. Uh, you know, even if it was an evil laugh. And so whatever Patrick was doing, it worked because in late 1993, the phenomenon shifted from noises now to objects. And this is pretty consistent with an overall theme of, of that slow progression in magnitude on most every level, which again matches the Philip experiment from our Conjuring Philip series. Yes. But coming back to the shift to, to objects, we're going to use a term you've heard us used before apportation or apports. And this is a term from 19th century spiritualism. And the word comes from the French apporter meaning to, to bring. So it's the materialization of a solid object out of thin air. So we're talking about things popping in from nowhere or somewhere you just can't see. Yeah. So on October 4th, 1993, the group's listening to Patrick crack jokes and suddenly thud, not, not a click, a thud, a heavy object hits the table. Robin turns on this red light. They used to see briefly, they feel around and they find a Churchill crown coin. Now the Churchill crown coin is kind of a big coin. It's heavy, uh, copper nickel, which I hadn't heard of. This is corrosion resistant copper nickel alloy. It makes a distinct sound when it hits the wood. Now, now palming a coin is magic 101. When I was a young nerd, instead of an old one, I used to do a little magic. One of the first things I learned was the French drop. You hold the coin in your palm, you distract the audience, you drop it, or you pull it out of somebody's ear. In the dark, it's even easier. Robin or Alan could have had that coin in a pocket, waited for a laugh from one of Patrick's jokes, and then dropped it on the table. Right. But, you know, a single coin doesn't really prove much, but then came November 1st, 1993 and the collection, as it's called. So imagine they're, they're sitting there and then all of a sudden it rains metal. Seven objects land on the table simultaneously. So let's list the inventory here because this is kind of a weird variety here. You get one, a silver thimble, a silver locket. Now we know the spiritual importance of silver, silver bullets, a silver chain bracelet. Number four, a St. Christopher medallion. And then you, you've now placed one of those in each of your family's cars, right? Yes. Yes, I do. Now that you have multiple families, I'm saying in the mobile cars owned by your families. My secret family has them in all their cars. Yeah. Well, I mean, here's my theory is like, Hey, it's a good thing. Why not? Yeah. Two more here. Number five, a miniature spoon with a spiral handle. And then. Yeah. And then a tiny gold medallion. Number seven. There's one more. Yeah. There's a, there's a gold medallion with a hieroglyphs on it. Yeah. Or writing that's hieroglyphic. Yes. Now we've heard this before. There's something about ancient magic, just also spiritually. Ever, uh, in Unsolved Mysteries, the new series, it was episode number five, Paranormal Rangers. And they had one anecdote of somebody on the reservation having coins just drop from the ceiling. That's right. And they save those. And they're just, I don't know where they're from. They're regular coins. They seem to be. But anyway, getting back to the coins. Yeah. Dropping one is easy. Dropping seven distinct objects without them clanking together in your pocket beforehand. It's a little harder. Yeah. You have to then have them, you know, wrapped in a handkerchief, unroll it silently. And, you know, now remember they're, they're sitting in plastic chairs surrounded by Velcro. And then you, you scatter them without anyone carrying the fabric rustle. You know, who could do that though? Is a, who is the, uh, the great table magician, the closeup magician that we went and saw. Helder Gumares. That's right. Probably not saying his last name, right. It's a Portuguese, but, uh, just unbelievable. The best closeup magic I have ever seen in my life. And yeah. So we went, we saw one of those shows live and then he also did another show during COVID over zoom that I attended with my family. That was equally amazing. Having seen one live, I trusted that because like, he does not use any electronic tricks when you're there in person. So I was like, he's not going to do it on zoom. Yeah. Yeah. It's just unbelievable. He does close. I mean, the closeup magic show that we went to, we sat at a table, like the one we're talking about here with him while he did the card tricks close enough to you to snatch the cards out of his hand. It was amazing. The reason I mentioned that is he's got a classic trick that he does. About a spoon, I think, appearing in a wine glass with a handkerchief over it. Yeah. Yeah. The point being here is that there has to be a handkerchief. So that's what we're seeing here. Yeah. In a spiritual sense, there has to be some veil and what he did. Well, here's the thing I love about magic is that I could pick up on one thing and it's not giving anything away, but like he clinks the glass. So you believe that it's there and then it's gone. And this is what I love about magic. Like you think you figured out that part, but then there's something else that trips you up. Just direct. Yeah. Yeah. That's tricking you into thinking that you figured the trick out so that the way it's really working is going unnoticed. Right, right. That's what's amazing. And it's like, and the thing about these seven objects, like when you think about, supposedly they were all emptying their pockets before they went into the room. Now, I don't know if they were patted down when they were doing this by themselves. Later, the investigators made sure that they didn't have anything. But the object that truly defies the pocket theory appeared later on July 11th, 1994. And this was a full newspaper. This is the one that keeps me up in kind of a good way though. It's like really cool to think about. Right. So the other thing here is that these objects all appear to be personal gifts. Yeah, that's right. They had direct and different appeals to each of the different sitters in the room. It's like they were pulled from their own lives and desires, like they were custom picked for the people in the room. And that continued in other cases. Now, in this case, there were four people in the room. Later, when the investigators were there, multiple objects would appear and they seemed very clearly to be picked out for each individual in the room, male, female, and with certain aspects and interests. So that's really fascinating too. Well, this is where we move from magic trick to impossible physics. Yes. The group hears a rustling sound, like paper fluttering down, and they turn on the light. And at the end of this session here, and lying on the table is a copy of the Daily Express, which is a British tabloid. Yeah, British tabloid. You're in England. I don't even give a care. Nobody cares, right? Okay, well, the date- Except- Yeah, the date on the header is Monday, May 28th, 1945. Yeah, so VE day era, like World War II is ending. Now, finding an old newspaper isn't impossible. You can go to an antique shop. You can go to eBay. Well, not in 94 maybe, but you could go to a collector, for example. Yeah, but ask yourself this. What do the newspapers from the 1800s look like, or even, let's say, the 1940s? Well, they're yellow. They're brittle. If you touch the corner, they might flake off. They smell like old vanilla and dust. Oh, I've never gotten old vanilla, but I know what old paper smells like. And yeah, you're right. It's, you know, the acid in the paper eventually yellows it and ages it and becomes brittle. That's just chemistry. That is lignin. Now, let's get nerdy for a second here, because this is a smoking gun. Newsprint is made from wood pulp. Wood pulp contains lignin. It's a complex organic polymer that binds the wood fibers. And it's also what makes a tree stand up. But lignin is unstable. So when it's exposed to oxygen and sunlight, it oxidizes. And it turns yellow and it becomes acidic. So this is a very slow burn we're talking about here. The paper is literally eating itself. And that's why archivists keep documents in acid-free boxes in the dark in temperature-controlled rooms. But even in the dark, over, let's say, 50 years, newsprint will yellow. It will degrade. You can't stop that kind of entropy. Yeah. So let's look at the Skull newspaper. The report says it was in almost mint condition. The paper was white. It was flexible. It smelled fresh. It looked like it had been printed that morning. So if this is a hoax, how do you do that? Well, you go to a print shop or one of those places that does tourist things, you know, the fakes. Tourist newspapers? Where you put your name in there and the headlines, you know. Yeah, right, right. You and I are in a picture with like a couple of guns and one of us has to wear a dress. Yeah, any places that do the, not so much anymore because people don't read many newspapers in print. But it's one of those easily fake things you could say. Right, right. Well, so let's run that simulation. It's 1994. Photoshop 3 has just been released. You don't have high resolution digital scans of the Daily Express from 1945 floating around on the internet, which you probably could get now. But the internet barely exists. So you'd have to go to the British Library, find the microfiche of the Daily Express from May 28th, 1945. Then you'd have to print out the pages. But microfiche prints are grainy and black and white. They don't really look like a real newspaper. Right. So then, you know, you start getting into every machination here. So you have to typeset it. You'd manually retype all the articles, all the advertisements, the obituaries, everything in the paper. You match the fonts, the kerning, everything. Because you remember, folks, this is the entire newspaper, not just the headlines or the front page. Yeah, yeah. So it's the whole thing. And this is, yeah, that pre-digital era where this would be easier to do. Then you'd have to print it on a rotary press because papers in 1945 were printed on letterpress, not inkjet or laser. It's an offset printing process. Inkjet print, it feels smooth. Letterpress is physically printed onto the paper. You can feel the ink. Like, newspapers in 1945 were called, what they call broadsheets. So they're huge. Yeah. I used to go with my dad down to the newspaper and watch the Heidelberg brand presses. And it's a fascinating, really cool place and experience. Yeah. The point we're talking about here is that I suppose you could do this at some bit of expense and great effort. And is that likely? Yeah. I mean, to fake this, Robin Foy would have had to find a mint copy of a 1945 paper, which is chemically impossible. Then spend thousands of pounds creating a custom printing plate to forge the document. Then just drop it on a table in the dark. It's like overkill. But why go to all that length? If you want to impress people, just drop a rock or something. Why drop an artifact that requires a degree in chemistry to appreciate it? It doesn't make sense. This was examined so it wasn't just something that they told them about that happened at all. They don't have the paper anymore. They actually had the real paper. So this could all take place, what you're saying, unless it wasn't a forgery, unless it was the real newspaper. But if it's the real paper, then it's still white. You haven't experienced 50 years of aging. So then this brings us to the time travel hypothesis. The spirit team didn't say, you know, here's a gift we kept in a box for you. They hinted that they were reaching back in time. Maybe the Daily Express of May 28, 1945 exists eternally in the ether, and then they just hit print on that cosmic copier. You never know. I mean, in my case, I have to hit print four or five times, go upstairs, look in the closet. Is it coming out of the printer? No, the printer's asleep. So where did it print? I don't know. Probably printed at the neighbor's house. But anyway, this wasn't just the one paper. September 16, 1994, another A-port, a copy of the Daily Mail from April 1, 1944. And the content of that one was specific. It contained the story of the trial of Helen Duncan. This is Sophia Bush from Work in Progress with Sophia Bush. Check out this special moment we did on our show, presented by eBay. When I was living in Chicago, I took part in my first ever giant charity sale, and I was able to auction several items from my personal closet on eBay. They were items that marked huge moments in my life and in my career. And though I was ready to pass them along, I also wanted to make sure they were going to someone who would love them. One of the things I loved the most about doing this with eBay is there was a way for everyone to shop. It wound up being so much fun to see where each and every item was going, where it was going to be loved. And in passing items along like that, authenticity really matters to the person who's getting them. That's why I love eBay's authenticity guarantee. They weren't just listing my items, they were verifying them, making sure something was genuinely from where it claimed to be. In this case, my closet. To listen to more, check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. Find what you love, sell what you don't. eBay, things people love. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9pm when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. They go perfectly with music, podcasts, and welcome back to the show. Even nature sounds. Oh, and the thing where someone crinkles tissue and whispers at you. Hello. Look, I'm not here to judge what you listen to. I'm here to judge you for not eating Reese's while you listen to it. Reese's. Ashley, go back to the nature sounds. Nice. Yeah, that's really nice. Hi, I'm Ellen. And when I'm not giving a rabies vaccine to a werewolf, I'm listening to Astonishing Legends. Now back to the show. Well, now we're talking about Helen Duncan, hellish nell. This is a deep cut in paranormal history here. She was the last person in Britain to be jailed under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Think about that. She was jailed for witchcraft in the middle of World War II. Yeah. She was a physical medium, famous for producing ectoplasm, which people love to make fun of. Yes. And it's just creepy looking on the old photos. But the reason she was arrested wasn't just because she was spooky. It was because she was a security risk. So you see, in 1941, during a seance, she claimed to communicate with a sailor from the HMS Barham. She revealed that the ship had sunk. And the problem here was that the British Navy hadn't told the public yet. It was classified. So the authorities raided her seance, arrested her, and threw her in Holloway Prison to keep her quiet until D-Day. Yeah, so the spirit team drops a newspaper from 1944 specifically about a medium being persecuted by the government right as the Skull Group is about to invite the Society for Psychical Research to investigate them. It doesn't feel random. It feels like a message. Like, you know, we know our history. We know what happens when you try to prove this stuff to the authorities or the skeptics. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's a warning. They're telling the Skull Group, it's not going to go well. Yeah, exactly. So now we have the personalities. We have the impossible objects, the heavy coins appearing from nowhere, the mint-conditioned newspapers. Right, and then this is where we have the Skull Experiment leaving the Victorian era behind. Because Patrick tells them, you know, we don't just want to move trumpets. We want to build a bridge spiritually. So in late 1994, the spirit team expanded. And then new voices appeared. Voices that didn't sound like priests or guides. They sounded like professors. Yeah, they called themselves a spirit scientist and they had a request. They didn't want a seance. They wanted a laboratory. Ah, and Scott, here's, I love this part. It's just like, oh, you want other folks for this. We're going to, we're maturing here. Yes. And this is now the cliffhanger, though, for those private years, as they're called. This is the moment where ghosts stopped haunting the house and then started running the experiment themselves. Yeah. The poltergeist phase is ending. And now we're entering the scientific phase, where it's just beginning. And the energy required for that, well, it wasn't just playing sleepy shores anymore. Yeah, this is a crucial shift in the narrative structure. So up until now, we've had Manu, the exotic gatekeeper, and Patrick, the cheeky Irishman, a standard spiritualist archetypes. But the new voices are, as we said, they're more technical. They're using jargon like energy transmission, interdimensional lattice, vibrational frequency, and carrier waves. And they told Robin Foy explicitly, we're experimenting on our side just as you are on yours. And so that bridge they're talking about, it reminds me of the Vertical Plane series, one of my favorites. We even got mentioned in the reprint of the book by Ken Webster, which is pretty awesome. But these technicians proposed a new experiment, a photography experiment. Now, normally, spirit photography, oldest trick in the book again, it dates back to the 1860s. Take a picture of a widow, double expose a picture of her dead husband floating behind her with glass plates or something, or manipulating the shutter. But the skull scientists, the spirit scientists said, no cameras. You know, because cameras have lenses, and then lenses are another filter, you could say, or a point of failure, because a lens can be manipulated, or a shutter can be stuck open, and you can have different things going on, like multiple, just with, I've done this trick when I was in a photography class in a pitch dark room. You can appear several times in the same frame on an open or bulb shutter setting, and just hit the flash a few times while moving. There are a lot of ways you can get around that mechanically. In this case, though, they wanted to interact with the chemistry directly. And this concept is called scotography, or scotography, literally writing in darkness. And now I'm thinking about the Radove experiments, where you remove the microphone and have some spirit go right to the recording medium. Right, which is something that they did with cassette recorders. We'll talk about that in part two, but they did that with cassettes in this. Yeah. They had one of those old realistic style or Panasonic tape recorders that you've seen in every movie from the 70s, and they took the microphone out of it and still got voices out of that. But we'll talk about that in part two. Now, this is the instruction, and listen to how specific and, I guess, rigorous or trying to keep it with some methodology. And it's funny. We're talking about the spirits relaying these instructions, right? That's right. Go to the store, buy a roll of 35-millimeter film, keep it in its factory-sealed box, do not open it, place it in a locking box on the table during the seance. And this hypothesis was that they could use focused energy to imprint images directly onto the emulsion, bypassing the lens, bypassing the light. You bypass the physical world entirely. Now we're talking like Kirlian photography, like energy photography. So Robin goes to the shop. He buys a roll of standard Kodachrome film, maybe Ilford. He doesn't open it. He puts the little cardboard box inside a wooden security box they had built, which locks shut. They lock it. They hold the session. They sit in the dark for two hours. They hear the usual crackles, the static. And at the end, they take the sealed roll, still in the cardboard, still in the plastic canister, to a professional developer, third-party shop. And when they get the negatives back, the film isn't blank. Yeah, and there are strange diagrams along with the scrawls, but the most famous image from this early batch is called the dragon. Yeah. This is the image that put Skoll on the map. So what we have here is a strip of film that had never seen the light. And now there was a clear, distinct image of a dragon's head, but it wasn't a photograph of a dragon. It looked like a neon sign against a black background because it was drawn with light. The lines were fluid. They were glowing. It looked stylized, almost like Chinese art or a chemical etching. I've looked at the scans of this, all of the images. It's beautiful in a weird way. It doesn't look like a mistake. It doesn't look like a light leak. Light leaks are usually streaks or blobs. It had structure. It has intent. Right. Forrest, if you put your skeptic hat on, if you're a magician and you wanted to produce a dragon on film, how would you do it? How would you pull off the magic trick? You were talking about Helder Gemaris a minute ago and the idea of a distraction. How would you make this work? Well, some would say it's called the substitution trick and it may be the only way. Now, I will say that this is not new. This is a story that I've been wanting to cover. I think I've, I've ran it by you before. This is in my own notes on story ideas. I put it under interdimensional. That's why I had trouble finding it while we're talking here. But this is a woman named Stella Lansing and she was featured on an episode of sightings. Now she is the conduit here just by herself because she has this strange phenomenon that's been happening to her where she captures lights, patterns, and then entities on still and motion picture film. And one that keeps popping up again, that's a, she was featured on an episode of sightings that's available on the internet. Maybe we'll try and provide the link because it's just fascinating because here's the other thing that's mirrors what we're talking about here. She has a group of four men that have appeared in images and you can see them, which she's dubbed the occupants or that's what they call themselves. And they're images of just four men. Now, a reason I bring this up is because on the show, they try to find out, is it the substitution trick? Is there something happening? And the photographic experts they have on the show, it's like, well, obviously there's got to be a light leak of some kind, whatever camera she's using, because it can sometimes go over the frame line. You know, Scott knows that in the, in the shutter, when you look at a strip of negative film, it shouldn't go over that. Right. Right. So something's entering the camera, but let's talk about how then Robin Foy would do this. Okay. So he buys two rolls of film, the identical brand, identical batch number. If you're smart, if you're a Spiros Malaris and you're, you're a magician, you're trying to fake the alien autopsies. You think about these things. So then you take roll a into the dark room, then you want to roll it, and then you use a laser pointer or some kind of stencil, or maybe even some kind of transparency overlay. And then you quickly flashlight onto the film to create the dragon image. And then you carefully roll that film back into the canister, the negative, and then you carefully glue the cardboard box back shut. So it looks factory fresh. And then during the seance in the pitch black, now you have faked roll A in your pocket and the real roll B is still on the table. Then you reach out, you swap them, and then you hand the faked roll to the developer. And then they develop, uh, the developer confirms the seal was intact. The developer then says, uh, one hour photo, they confirm the images are on the emulsion, but you see where that chain of custody was broken was during the dark. And that's right. Maybe we'd have to do that. Seeing the skull group figure people would say that these guys weren't stupid. They knew that as long as they were the ones buying the film and they were the ones holding the box, nobody in the scientific community would believe them. Chain of custody is everything. So if you control the evidence, you control the results. So they did something that most mediums never do. Most mediums hide from scrutiny, ban all this stuff, but they invited the lions into the den. That's how you could say skeptically. Skeptically, it's like, well, of course you do that because now it's another layer of, uh, plausible deniability, you know what I'm saying? It's like, but you also have figured out how, how you're going to trick them. But here's where the turning point is. This is what separates skull from, let's say 99% of other ghost stories. Because in 1995, they reached out to the society for psychical research, the SPR. And now for the listeners who don't know, the SPR is not a ghost hunting club. Like you see on cable TV or that I participated in myself. You know, they don't run around trying to provoke the spirits and, and provoking them to knock over stuff because you're making a, you're making a show. You got to have something with a camera crew. Well, a little different here. The SPR was founded in 1882 by Cambridge scholars. It is the oldest psychical research organization in the world. These are the guys who investigated and then debunked Madame Blavatsky. Now I will say on the other hand, there are a lot of people who. Still believe her. Well, the thing is, is that, yeah, because I mean, here's, here's the very, it's also complicated on so many, in so many levels of that. You can fake some stuff, but it doesn't, it's not necessarily preclude you from being real with other stuff, if you know what I'm saying. And so there's a lot of people that said she had some real knowledge and some real information, you know, real skills and knowledge from the mystical realms, but also she fakes some stuff. So who knows? Yeah. But like I said, they're not mutually exclusive. Right. We've always said that, or I have. We're talking about here, the SPR, these guys are the, you know, the exposed, the fraud of the 1920s spiritualist boom. So they are an academic, rigorous, and notoriously hard to please a set of, uh, scientists. Well, inviting the SPR is like inviting the IRS to audit your taxes. When you know you're cheating, you don't, you're not going to do it unless you're crazy or, or you're innocent. So the Skull Group said, Hey, come investigate us. You control the film. You control the room. Search us. We got nothing to hide. And the SPR accepted. They sent in their A team. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit about the, uh, grifters, John Cusack. Remember that they're showing how Ploy is done. And the guy was running a con where he had a fake company and he says, Hey, you want to see the server room? You want to see all our computers and people? JT Walsh. That JT Walsh. It was a room full of just garbage. And, but he was so bold with it and so confident. There you go. Confidence, man. It's just like, nah, we don't need to see it. He's like, you sure? Come on. There's right in here. It's like, that would have blown the whole thing. But that amount of confidence is what sold the gag. Anyway, let's get back to introducing the judges because, uh, their resumes matter here. So first you have Montague Keene, a Monty. He was a journalist, a farmer, and a parliamentary correspondent. And he was the detail guy and he was obsessive about documentation, which is what you want. Uh, if a floorboard creaked, Monty wrote it down. He was the scribe and he had a reputation for being fair, but incredibly pedantic. So just too much detail. Secondly, you have professor Arthur Ellison. He's an electrical engineer and a professor at city university, London. And he's the hard nose scientist. He knew how electricity work. He knew how magnetism worked. And crucially, he knew how to spot a fraudulent electronic gadget because he'd spent years debunking levitation tricks that used hidden magnets. And then third, you have professor David Fontana and he is a psychologist and he was there to watch the people, to look for collusion, mass hysteria. There's different versions of that, but what he's looking for is some kind of psychological manipulation within a group. And these are three elderly, cynical academics who spent a combined 100 years catching frauds. Arthur Ellison famously said, I've investigated hundreds of mediums and they were all frauds. I'm waiting for the one white crow that proves not all crows are black. And he walked into that cellar expecting to find wires, hidden speakers, and accomplices. Right. I'm going to put you on the spot here, but the William James, you want to read the whole quote or what that setup was from the father of American psychology, William James, and talking about, this is, we talked about this with the Laurency Venom case. Oh yeah, we've talked about, we've mentioned the crow thing a bunch of times. Yeah, it's a great, that's why it's always gone back to, as far as an expression, it's like, well, simply all these stories don't have to be true, just one for this to be a real phenomenon. That's right. Is kind of what that means. So here we go. The SPR agrees to the investigation, but of course they need to establish some controls and they need to know that Robin isn't just walking around the room in the dark, making them all look the fool. So now the Skoll Group had already been using a system for this. Robin Foy had fashioned his own luminous wristbands, which we talked about, those simple Velcro straps with the tabs that glow in the dark. So you can keep track of where people's hands are. And the idea is if you were seeing a glowing green tab, you know where the position is and what the motions are. And so to the Skoll Group, that was a gesture of transparency. Look, we're wearing tracking devices, but to a hard-nosed investigator like Arthur Ellison, homemade Velcro strap wasn't enough. A magician could get out of it or you could have a fit tab, you could stick to the chair while your hand goes wandering. So the SPR said, we want to inspect the wristbands or provide our own, which they apparently did in some instances. Yeah, that's the magician's trick of like, this is a coin from your own pockets. So here's something that is another safeguard. Okay. We're talking about the investigators now sitting between the original four mediums. So picture the circle here. You have Robin, one of the mediums. Then you have Monty Keene, the investigator. Then you have Sandra, and then you have Arthur Ellison. So now they're very close together. Uh, if they were fluttering around, flapping around, you would presumably be able to tell from all your senses, hearing, sight, just motion touch. So Monty Keene would physically hold Robin's hand on one side and then Sandra's hand on the other. And then he was, he would put his feet on top of their feet. And this is called four limb control. Yeah. So for Robin to fake something, he has to liberate a hand that is being held by a skeptic, liberate a foot that's being pinned down by a skeptic and do it without the glowing tab on his wrist moving in any way that looks suspicious. Yeah. And, and again, you know, there's some ocean's oven way to fake all this, I'm sure, but this is, it's worth, they had, it's designed to make the fraud impossible or super, super unlikely. So again, the stage is set. It's 1995. The skull hole, the skull cellar, it's no longer a home circle. Now it's kind of a makeshift laboratory. You have Robin, Sandra, Alan, and Diana, and they sit in their plastic chairs and they're strapped up with the glow and dark Velcro. Then you have three investigators sit between them with their arms crossed, dictaphones at the ready, uh, ready to bust them. And then the, the lights go out and then Monty Keen speaks into his dictaphone. He says, tape one, session one, the room is sealed. The controls are in place. We are waiting. Yeah. So now usually when you put controls like this on a medium, the spirits get shy, right? The phenomena stops. This is called the shy effect. We've actually mentioned this before in the show too. Frauds can't perform under pressure. But on the other hand, a lot of times when it comes down to the trickster component also seems like sometimes the trickster is like, yeah, that's fine. I'm going to get out of here and make everybody look foolish like the bell witch. Right, right. But that night the cellar didn't go quiet. Almost immediately the room began to change. The first thing they noticed wasn't a voice. It was the lights. Yeah, this is the spirit light phenomena. And I guess you could call it orbs. We're talking about small points of light like fireflies. And then they began to dance in the room. Now, of course, lights are easy to fake. You can use fiber optics that I've been around since I was a kid. You can use LEDs on a stick. But these lights were different, as we mentioned at the beginning of this episode. These were small, intense balls of brilliance. And they were mobile. And they didn't just bob up and down like on a string or monofilament. They flew around. They circled the room at high speed. And then they went through the table. And they entered the bodies of the investigators. Arthur Ellison, the electrical engineer, you know, the guy who knows how light bulbs work. Like he watched a ball of light fly right up into his face. And he said he could see structure inside it. Ooh. So it's like we have a complicated relationship with orbs and orb photography. But I had a friend show me some digital photograph blown up. And one of the strange things is that you think you can see faces in there or some kind of structure. And it could very well likely be some artifact on the camera. And that would be a plausible argument. But there's also something about that. So Arthur, he tries to catch it. And it passes right through his hand. And then there was touches. The investigators are holding the hands of the mediums. But then they felt hands touching them. And Monty King reported distinct firm hands, patting his head, pulling his ear, touching his shoulder. Yeah. He's sitting there holding Robin's left hand and Sandra's right hand. He can see the glowing tabs of everyone else in the circle. He knows nobody is moving. Right. And yet a pair of large masculine hands is rubbing his head. He wrote in his log, I'm absolutely certain that the hands holding mine did not move. Yet I was touched. And this isn't the only case of this. Again, this will be more part two stuff. But in the documentary that talks about all this stuff, there was at least one witness who had a couple of hands placed on her shoulders. And she felt like it was her father maybe standing behind her. Yeah. And she was sitting in a chair with her back to the wall. Right. Yeah. As a witness in the room. Yeah. Well, again, the other, I think you mentioned early on in the, back to 30 Pontefract, where there's a Mickey Mouse hand, like gloved hands. Yes. Yeah. Conducting also in the case of the uninvited disembodied hands were seen. So hands are important, apparently. Yep. In this case, this really rocked them. This shook them. Because you have to understand, these men are out to find fraud. They were looking for the wires. They were looking for the accomplice in the black bodysuit. But the room was sealed. The door was taped shut. The mediums were pinned down. Yep. Yeah. Arthur Ellison later admitted that after those first few sessions, his worldview started to crack. He said, look, I can explain an LED on a stick. I cannot explain a hand touching me when I am holding everyone else's hands. Yeah. And amidst the light show, the voices returned. But this time, they spoke to the professors. The spirit scientists engaged Ellison in debates about physics. They asked him about his own work. And then they offered the SPR a challenge. They said, you don't believe the film? You think we swapped the roles? Fine. You bring the film. So this is, yes, the spiritual gauntlet has been thrown down. But that's another level of like, okay, then again, we're back to so much of this is like a, it is like a magic trick. And I can see why people are. It feels like a magic show. I know that. And I want our listeners to know we're copying to that. It does feel that way. Yeah. But you have to hear all the ways that it gets disproven. And, you know, and we say this having seen one of the greatest, I would say, working close-up magicians out there right now, just recently in the past few years watching him work. Right. And I know those things can happen. And I thought, oh, you know, we need to look up how that trick works. How does David Blaine get the playing card inside the apple? Or how does he get the person's name painted on the cab driving down the street outside the bar? You know, but those are doable tricks. But this is really a lot to pull off in this room. And we will talk in part two about James Webster, who was an accomplished professional magician. Right, right, right. Who couldn't figure anything out either. But like at this point now, it's like, oh, yeah. Okay, what? You guys go get the film. The other thing I will say about the documentary that we watched that we'll have a link to is like these folks were interviewed in it. And most of them have passed away since it was made. But you can see that they are all very, very convinced that something happened, that they are going to go to their graves not understanding. Yeah. The skeptics. Well, yeah. The SPR guys. And think about it yourself. I think it helps if you look at it like if this was your experiment, how would you try and make it foolproof? Yeah. What are the things that you would do? So this is logical here because the spirit team, we're talking about this team of spirits. Yeah. They tell SPR, okay, you buy your own film and then you keep it in your pocket and then you put it in the box yourself and then you lock the box and then you put that box in front of you and don't let Robin touch it. Don't let anyone touch it. So this removes that substitution trick. Yes. If Monty buys the film and he signs his name on the canister, he locks it in the box and he holds the box and an image still appears, then perhaps this is that white crow. But again, you're talking about David Blaine and I love magic. I love him. Yes. Very entertaining. And this is not giving anything away because it's in the video if you watch it. But I watched this clip and you could see one thing happening here. And it's my point being is that he meets former president Bush and he does the trick where he's got the playing card folded up. And he's like, take a look at your watch. And the card is under his wristwatch. Now, when he walks in the room, you can see him giving them the two hand shake. Yeah. And that's where he slips that in. Right. I don't know what happens prior to that, but I know that you could see that's how it ended up underneath his wristwatch. Right. Yeah. It's diversion. So again, this all sounds like, you know, you've write your name on the card. I've not touched the card, have I? And then it ends up there. But this is simpler and would be harder to do. You would be able to fool Penn and Teller, I think. So anyway, they prepare for the box experiment. Monty King went out, bought a roll of film, secretly marked the canister with a scratch so he would know if it was swapped, bought a padlock, kept the key. But the film in the little wooden box, locked it, placed the box in the center of the table within arm's reach of his own seat. Lights went out. Chanting began, energy rose, and right in the middle of the session, the box starts to rattle. And not just rattle, it starts to glow. So now we're talking about energy here. The investigators reported seeing the box illuminated from the inside or surrounded by a strange luminescence. And then the spirit scientist voice, I think it was a personality named Paxton, or maybe it was Joseph, said, It is done. Develop the film. I like it. It's a dramatic effect. They turn on the lights. Monty King grabbed the box. Checked the padlock. Locked. Checked the box intact. Opens it. Takes out the film. Checks for his secret scratch mark. It's there. This was the same roll of film. It had never left his possession. It had never been opened. They drove to the developer immediately. They watched the guy process it. And on that roll of film were images. Yeah. Not just scrawls this time. These are specifics. There were symbols. There were words. There was even a poem. And there were technical diagrams that looked like early 20th century schematics. And Monty King looked at that strip of negatives and realized that every skeptical theory that he had, which would be substitution, pre-exposure, some kind of sleight of hand, had all gone up in smoke. Vaporized. Because he knew he hadn't faked it. And he knew nobody else had touched it. Right. So the definitive moment for Professor Arthur Ellison wasn't the film. It was actually the crystal experiment. During a later sitting, Ellison decided to test the light phenomena himself. He wanted to rule out the possibility that the spirit lights were just LEDs. So he brought his own object, a natural quartz crystal. Right. He takes this quartz crystal. He places it on the table. This was his rock. Okay. He knew it wasn't hollowed out. He knew it didn't have a battery inside. And he asked the entities if they could enter the crystal. And right in front of him, the crystal began to glow. Ellison described it vividly. He said it wasn't a reflection. It was a diffuse light swirling inside the solid rock. He picked it up while it was glowing. It was vibrating in his hand. He said, I am holding a physical object that I know contains no electronics, and yet it is illuminated. Ah, so perhaps now we actually have a ghost in a jar, or in this case, a ghost in a rock. That's a really good callback. We haven't talked about that in a while. Anyway, it's 1996. The Skull Group has been sitting in the dark for three years. They've produced coins. They've produced newspapers from 1944. They've produced films with dragons on them. And now they have a crystal that glows in the hand of an electrical engineer. The Society for Psychical Research is baffled. The skeptics are running out of theories, but the spirit team isn't done. In fact, they tell the group, everything you've seen so far, that's just a warm-up. Yeah, they didn't just want to perform magic tricks. They wanted to build a telephone, a spirit telephone, or soul phone. This is where the Skull experiment leaves spiritualism behind and enters the realm of, you could say, fringe science. The entities gave Robin Foy a set of instructions. They were blueprints, and they told him to build a machine. They called it the germanium receptor. Now, for the non-engineers listening, germanium is a chemical element. It's a semiconductor. Before we had Silicon Valley, we had germanium. It was used in the very first transistors and early crystal radio sets. The spirits claimed that this specific element had a unique energetic property. They said it acted as a grounding point that could convert raw spirit energy into audible sound waves. Interesting. So, Robin goes to his workbench. He follows the instructions, and the device he builds is pretty incredibly simple. It's just a small piece of germanium, and then a coil of copper wire, and a simple battery-powered amplifier. There is no microphone. There is no radio tuner. It is a closed circuit, and according to the laws of physics, if you turn that on, you should hear absolutely nothing. Maybe a little static, but certainly not a voice. But how many of us here, I guess, nerdy in our youth, made a crystal radio set? That has no battery in it. That's right. You would think, like, it's a rock. Well, it's picking up signals. That's right. That's true. And the entities, just like that, they insisted. They gave specific technical instructions. They promised this was going to allow them to bypass the medium. So now we're going to be removing the people sitting in the room who SPR might be like, oh, these are actors. They're pretending to be people from another time and place. They're going to take that part out of the equation. That's the goal of the spirit team. So, right, again, you're tightening the controls of the experiment because now the entities on the other side are also interested in creating an experiment. Right. You think, like, hey, scientists, you wonder, you know, people who are scientifically minded don't believe in any kind of afterlife and this and that. And now they're on the other side, like, no, it's true. It's, there is, yeah, there's an afterlife. We were, we were wrong. We're a little, a bit of hubris here. But now we're going to try and use our scientific minds to, to help you prove this. So now it's January of 1997. The cellar is prepped. The investigators are there. The tape recorders are rolling. And Robin places the device in the center of the table. And it's a small black box with a speaker. And the group holds hands. Then the lights go out and an ozone smell fills the room. So now another trope of sorts. That's right. Electricity in the air. And Robin reaches out in the dark and he flips the switch. And at first there's nothing. They just hear the hiss of the speaker. And the investigators, they hold their breath. And now the static rises. It starts to pulse palpably. And then cutting through that noise comes a sound. And it's not a whisper. And it's not a faint radio signal. This is a voice. And that's where we have to pause. Because what came through that box and the video evidence that followed it would tear the Society for Psychical Research apart. We've seen the setup. We've seen the magic. But in part two, we have to look at the data. Did they actually build a bridge to the other side? Or did Robin Foy build the most elaborate hoax in history? That's going to wrap up episode 322 of Astonishing Legends. We'll be back next week with part two of this three-part series. Look for new episodes of the Dead Letter Office weekly on Tuesdays. And keep an eye on our Patreon for early and commercial-free versions of all of our shows and more. Astonishing Legends is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound. Our co-producer is Tess Feifel, who also leads our research efforts and manages our social media. And we're grateful for the hard work of our technical producer, Ed Vakola, behind the scenes. Special thanks to our announcer, John Bolin, for lending his voice to our shows. Hello, I'm Justin Kinnear. I'm Kylie Godsey. Hi, I'm Ellen Kent. And I give permission to Astonishing Legends to use my voice however they see fit. E-L-L-G-O-D-K-E-N-T Our theme, which is available as a ringtone, was composed by Judson Crane at FounderMusic.com. All other music and sound design for the show is composed and created by Alan Caressia. Our logo was created by Tommy Beaver Design. And our animated graphics for social media and YouTube are done by Joshua Sloan at DeadStreetProductions.com. Many episodes have transcripts available. For ones that don't, you can request them by emailing transcripts at AstonishingLegends.com. Astonishing Legends would not be possible without you, our listeners. Visit our store at AstonishingLegends.com or interact with us and other listeners on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, Discord, and YouTube. You can also visit us at Patreon.com slash AstonishingLegends, where patrons have access to commercial-free versions of both the main show and the Dead Letter office, as well as additional bonus content, including the Patreon-exclusive show, The Astonishing Junk Drawer. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Embatta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing, whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff? Yes. Building actual physical machines. Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. This is Sophia Bush from Work in Progress with Sophia Bush. Check out this special moment we did on our show, presented by eBay. When I was living in Chicago, I took part in my first ever giant charity sale, and I was able to auction several items from my personal closet on eBay. They were items that marked huge moments in my life and in my career, and though I was ready to pass them along, I also wanted to make sure they were going to someone who would love them. One of the things I loved the most about doing this with eBay is there was a way for everyone to shop. It wound up being so much fun to see where each and every item was going, where it was going to be loved. And in passing items along like that, authenticity really matters to the person who's getting them. That's why I love eBay's authenticity guarantee. They weren't just listing my items, they were verifying them, making sure something was genuinely from where it claimed to be, in this case, my closet. To listen to more, check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. Find what you love, sell what you don't. eBay. Things people love. All right, quick quiz for the hiring managers out there. What's worse, being understaffed or being poorly staffed? Well, that's a trick question, because both are recipes for chaos. Either way, just say to yourself, this is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. You'll get matched with candidates that meet the skills, certifications, and everything else you're looking for. Or, go a different way and get no traction. Seriously, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. It really is a no-brainer. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or HHC 24-7 dot org. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. They go perfectly with music, podcasts, and welcome back to the show. Even nature sounds. Oh, and the thing where someone crinkles tissue and whispers at you. Hello. Look, I'm not here to judge what you listen to. I'm here to judge you for not eating Reese's while you listen to it. Reese's. Ashley, go back to the nature sounds. Nice. Yeah, it's really nice. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Embatta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing, whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff? Yes. Building actual physical machines. Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. Hey, it's Jay Shetty from On Purpose. Check out the best of a moment we did presented by eBay. I'd never owned a vintage camera before. There was something about it that felt almost unnecessary in a world where everything lives on our phones. But I wanted to change that. So I started the hunt for a point-and-shoot camera. When I finally found the perfect one on eBay, I didn't keep it to myself. I left it out on a table. Always within reach, people started picking it up without asking. Family, friends, everyone to take a photo of whatever felt important to them in that moment. There was no editing, no retakes. You took the photo and that was it. The moment became real right away. It was about choosing something. Deciding this matters. Even if it came out blurry, the vintage camera belonged to the room, to the moment, to the people in it. Over time, the photos started to pile up on the fridge, on shelves, tucked into books. Each one a reminder that meaning isn't always planned. That's what I appreciate about eBay. It's a place where you can find things that bring people together and pass along things you no longer need, so they can become part of someone else's memories. To listen to more, check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. Visit ebay.com to shop your favorite finds. Find what you love. Sell what you don't. eBay. Things people love. Alright, quick quiz for the hiring managers out there. What's worse, being understaffed or being poorly staffed? Well, that's a trick question, because both are recipes for chaos. Either way, just say to yourself, this is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. You'll get matched with candidates that meet the skills, certifications, and everything else you're looking for. Or, go a different way and get no traction. Seriously, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. It really is a no-brainer. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. When you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. Here's a quick podcast for all you true crime fans. The case of the missing Reese's. It was me at the store with my mouth. Motive? Um, they're Reese's. What was I going to do? Stop myself? Tune in next time to see if I do it again. Spoiler, I will. Wow, that had everything. Reese's. Suspense. Reese's. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. With the Venmo debit card, a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking your rewards. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more. Pick a bundle with your go-tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Do more stash. Get more cash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms at venmo.me slash stash terms. Max $100 cash back per month. At CVS, it matters that we're not just in your community, but that we're part of it. It matters that we're here for you when you need us, day or night. And we want everyone to feel welcomed and rewarded. It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions and here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At CVS, we're proud to serve your community because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So visit us at cvs.com or just come by our store. We can't wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location.