The Scole Experiment Part 3: Endgame

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We appreciate your support of them and us. If you've been with us for the first two parts of this series, you might think you know the shape of it, that you've seen or heard it before. It's a ghost story about a cellar in a small village known as Skoll in the UK. The players are familiar. A group of earnest paranormal researchers and the skeptical scientists who tried to respectfully debunk what they were doing. It fits comfortably on the shelf next to the Fox Sisters or infamous medium DD home, both of which we hope to cover soon. Or even the story of the Bell Witch, which we did cover with an extensive series in October of 2017. It has all of the familiar elements of spiritualism. The levitating trumpets, the touches of the dark, the messages of love and life from whatever it is we think constitutes the afterlife. But as the Skoll experiment moved into its final year, the shape of the story began to warp. The furniture stopped moving and the machinery turned on. The messages stopped coming from deceased relatives and started coming from something that sounded more like tech support from a different reality altogether. By 1998, the Skoll Group had done the impossible. They'd produced film that developed itself in locked boxes. They'd recorded voices on tape decks with no microphones. They'd even built a receiver out of germanium crystal that allowed for two-way communication with the other side. They'd built the bridge. But the problem with building a bridge to the unknown is that you don't get to control who or what crosses it. In the final phase of the experiment, the group turned their attention to Instrumental Transcommunication, or ITC. An idea we've mentioned many times over the years on Astonishing Legends. It is, after all, the category that the infamous File 10 would capture to the Sally House falls into. They set up video cameras facing mirrors, creating optical feedback loops, trying to catch a glimpse of their spirit team. They expected to see the faces of the Victorian guides they had been talking to for years. They expected to see Patrick, the Irish priest, or Manu, the South American sage. But what appeared on the screen didn't look like a priest. And it didn't look like a sage at all. One night, amidst the swirling static of the feedback loop, a face resolved that sent a chill through the room. It was bald. It had a narrow, pointed chin. And it stared back at them with large, slanted, obsidian eyes. It was the face of the entity they would come to call Blue. To the modern eye, it was unmistakable. It wasn't a ghost. It was a gray. It wasn't extraterrestrial. And when the group asked for an explanation, the entities didn't tell them they were looking at a demon or a spirit. They told them they were looking at an interdimensional friend. They told them that there were time travelers using the bridge. And suddenly, the Skoll experiment wasn't about the past anymore. It wasn't about proving that our consciousness survives death. It was now about something far more terrifying and complex. It was about the fabric of our reality itself. Tonight, in the final chapter of our investigation, we're going to look at the endgame. We're going to share with you the impossible roster of historical figures, from Thomas Edison to Harry Houdini, who had all theoretically stopped by to send messages and ideas. We're going to discuss the ominous warning about a crystalline time probe that brought the experiment to a crashing halt. And finally, we're going to ask the question that has haunted this case for 30 years. Did four people in a Norfolk cellar really crack the code of the afterlife? Or did they accidentally open a door to something else? Something dark that was waiting for the right moment to step through? And if so, did they close it in time? Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. Nikola Tesla from Talking with the Planets, Collier's Weekly, Volume 26, Number 19, February 9th, 1901. Join us tonight for the conclusion of our special Astonishing Legends series on the Skull Experiment. We're back! It's not nearly as good. No, very nice, sir. Oh, God. Well, we are back, and tonight we're going to find out about what brought the Skull Experiment to a screeching halt, right? And I think we both felt it was a little unsettling. Yeah, like a mystery piece of glass showing up in your disposal. Yeah, okay. A lot of people have been talking about that on Patreon. I was asked to post some more pictures today, which I did online about that. You know what? I finally got the photos up on that on the website. It's a little weird. Look, even if a shot glass had fallen... I've got it right in front of me. Right. So this is my point about your whole experience. Yeah. You could say like, well, yeah, shot glass had fallen in there. And what I didn't express probably well enough with the apricot pit, I tried to... Folks don't know that. I don't think we talked about that on the air, just for the record. I did... Okay, yeah, that's right. The only thing that I can suppose is that a shot glass, a nondescript shot glass of ours, maybe fell in there at some point. But there's still... And this was a conversation I was having on Patreon with Michelle Cotermaz-Booth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because she was asking questions about it and how big it was. I took a picture of it with a ruler today. And even if that happened, it still somehow would have had to happen without us being involved because none of us in the house heard ever a shot glass being ground up in the disposal and we're the only three people that live here. Exactly. And then both me and my wife had used a disposal. She said earlier in the day, she thought, I know I used it the day before. Yeah. So that whatever happened, it would have had to... Because let's say with aportation, a lot of times it's just a household object. So even if it is a shot glass, I still don't know how it got in there and when it got destroyed. Right, right. It doesn't make sense. No, and this is the point I was going to make. I didn't probably express very well in the earlier parts here, but I lived in my first nice apartment. I put an apricot pit in the disposal. I was just like, yeah, let's see how well this thing does. For a few days afterwards, you could still hear it. Yeah. And it made a very disturbing... What's going on with ours? No, can you imagine the sound of crunching glass and how disturbing that would be for days after that before... And you wouldn't want to reach down there and start picking stuff out. It's just weird. It's just weird. But by the way, folks, also, if you don't make it to our website, I did post them online just on their own. If you go to tinyurl, T-I-N-Y-U-R-L dot com slash mystery glass, spelled just like it sounds. So tinyurl.com slash mystery glass. You can see the pictures of the piece of glass that we found in the disposal that we referred to in part two. Right, right. I have this rock at my desk. I keep waiting for it to disappear. I'm going to tie a string to it like they did to the tennis balls in the first Poltergeist movie. Right, right. And then maybe I can follow it if it goes. I keep expecting to come up and find it gone. All right. So let's move on to something equally as disturbing. At the end of part two, in that cold open just now, we also said... We dropped a pretty heavy visual on you, the face of blue, which sounds like possibly a country-western album. I don't know. Yeah. Well, the gray, or in the case of this video, they saw blue alien. Right. The interdimensional friend, in air quotes, blue changes the entire nature of this haunting experience from a ghost experiment to something completely different, as John Lewis would say. We thought this was a classic, if highly technical, spiritualist seance, an exercise brought back from the past to communicate with the dead. They were talking to Manu and Patrick. It felt very Victorian. And now suddenly, we're in the X-Files. Well, maybe. Okay. So, you know, for a lot of people, I don't know, would you consider this a jump the shark moment? Not with us. Okay. We've had enough of that. All right. But I'm talking about with this experiment. You're going a little over the top with what you find because you want to keep it interesting and keep people glued to the book, I guess, you're writing about it. So, if you're talking about the Skoll experiment and doing things to goose it for excitement purposes, is this where you go with it? It's an interesting thing of like, or do you just put a scary demon face in? Why do you go with this? It's an interesting choice. So, anyway, for the Skoll experiment, this is one of those moments that, you know, like we've mentioned in the past where people who were one paranormal camp believe, you know, they just walk away from this because something else from another paranormal belief camp, you could say, was messing up that Venn diagram. You cannot overlap Bigfoot and ghosts and UFOs. People don't like that. You know, in this case, the ghost hunters crowd, it's like, okay, we're done with this because now the UFO crowd is butting into their territory. What if it's all connected? Well, that's what we're saying. And this is where people ask, like, well, what have you learned over the years doing this? Is that there is some kind of universal spiritual element to all this, perhaps, and then that's connected to an interdimensionality. Interdimensionality. Oh, there you got it. Okay. So, but that's the idea is that when you get on that plane of existence or the many planes as the team from beyond the spirit team said, yeah, there are many levels. There are many levels of existence on this other side. And many of them, they haven't even figured out themselves as spirits. Yeah, that's true. It's like, that may be more advanced. All I can tell you is what we're trying to do here in ours on our level or wave of vibration. And so when you talk about the Skoll group, they didn't put themselves into those camps. They said, let's just accept or at least welcome whatever we're getting and try to figure out that later. Right. So let's take a look at exactly how Blue appeared because the details in this are not only freaky, but they're pretty specific. This was Monday, April 20th, 1998. The group's in the cellar, the Skull Hole. They're running what they called Project Alice. Yeah, which is a great name, by the way, because of course it's inspired by Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. So there's a lot of glass actually involved in this experiment. And you're looking through it. Oh my gosh, that's actually really weird considering what we were just talking about. Right. The thing at my disposal. Wow, that's an extra layer I hadn't thought about. Anyway, this setup for this was ingenious in its simplicity, but complex in its implication. They got a video camera set up in the dark, and it's not pointed at the sitters at the table. Well, it's not pointed at the table at all. In fact, it's pointed at a system of mirrors. Right. Now, I understood this better when I saw the graphic of it in the documentary here. So we're talking about two mirrors angled, each to reflect each other, creating that infinite tunnel. So what you have to do is picture in your mind here is that you have a camera pointed at one mirror that's at an angle. That beam of image is then reflecting to another mirror that's also at an angle, which is then coming back to the camera. So if you look at like- To the viewfinder. To the viewfinder, right. Not the front, but the back. That's right. Right. So if you picture it, it's basically the path of viewing, you could say, is a triangle. So imagine that bouncing off one mirror, going to another mirror, coming back to the camera. And it's a loop. Yeah, right. So you're creating kind of a feedback loop, which critics would say like, well, that's all you're seeing when it's that weird amorphous light. But that's not all they were seeing, as we've told you. But if you've ever stood between two mirrors in a bathroom, as I said, or that elevator kind of a thing, or if you want to see a great visual of that, the movie Inception, which Scott and I love, he's got a great case of that, where you're standing between two mirrors. And also that's how people have described time travel in some way, is that you're like at a hall of mirrors on each side and you see an infinite number or parallel timelines of yourself. And what you do in time travel, essentially, theoretically, is you step from one into the other. You're stepping into another timeline. So anyway, but that's the loop. That's the feedback loop in video. And so this signal image takes a journey. And so this is a loop where it doesn't really matter where you start, but let's say you start with whatever the view fighter is showing. That image bounces back into a mirror behind the camera and from that into a mirror in front of the camera, right? So, and then from that into the lens, which is receiving the image that's being bounced around. And in this case, the lens is receiving its own image from its own viewfinder. And this is pretty clever. What this creates is a bit of a video void. Yeah. And so that void, that's like what they're interested in. They're trying to create an optical feedback loop. The theory, which the spirit team had actually encouraged that the spirit team being the voices and beings on the other side, was that this visual chaos, this point of infinite reflection acted as a sort of soft spot in our reality, a place where an image could form that wasn't physically there. I love that idea as well, you know, thought up by the spirits in that you're looking for a medium. So what this imagery that they have showed, they recorded reminds me, you and I, Scott, were looking at, I think I'd sent a clip where people were kind of scrying in pools of oil on water. And it's that really kind of floaty, amorphous, bubbly kind of medium that they need to use to have things appear, the visual element. A little bit like white noise, as we talked about, used for some EVPs. You got that medium, you need the substance. And so when you provide the static and the entities provide the signal, that's pretty interesting. These are all analog concepts, which we've talked about how even though you can get strange results in a paranormal investigation with digital gear, for some reason, analog gear seems to work better, that might be that accessibility or that plasticity, that malleable quality of it for them to manipulate. So the camera's rolling, room's pitch black, except for the faint illumination needed for the camera to see the mirrors. And they are recording the static, the void between the reflections, and on this particular night, something forms in that void. Yeah. And this wasn't a static image. It wasn't holding still. It wasn't a flash frame or some kind of glitch in the tape. The Skoll report describes it as a, quote, very clear image of an interdimensional being, end quote, that was fully animated. So this thing was moving. And Robin Foy noted that the entity was blinking. It was moving its head slightly, looking around. It wasn't a mask, and it wasn't a drawing. Drawing. It had a fluidity of a living thing, much like the eyes looking back and forth that really creeped you out. Yeah. And the description is textbook. I mean, if you showed this to anyone on the street in 1998, they'd know exactly what you were describing. Large, dark, slanted eyes, small, pointed chin, no apparent mouth, bald, bulbous head. Robin Foy explicitly noted in his diary that it resembled the gray of UFO legend. Right. He didn't mince words. Now, for the record here, this is 11 or 12 years after Communion came out. Right, right. So he didn't try to make this thing sound like an angel or a demon or whatever. He was just like, this looks like a gray. It looks like a gray. Yeah, right. So at that point in our popular culture, history, and UFO knowledge and lore, it's obvious. But what I noticed in that the images that they show of it, at least the beginning one, it does have that very slanted almond eye kind of shape, much like Communion. And then the other images they show of it, at least in the documentary, it changed a little bit. So it looked a little bit different to me. And then it made me, it put me in a mind of, when it comes to Aleister Crowley, he, I think the story goes, he spent a night in one of the pyramids. And he, of course, he was doing his meditations and his incantations or whatnot. And he claims a being appeared to him that he sketched later, which he called Lamb. Now, weirdly in popular culture, years ago, when this case sadly happened, people were making a connection possibly to Elisa Lamb, the unfortunate young lady who drowned in the water tank in the downtown LA hotel. Yes, on the roof. Yeah. So there's some kind of weird connection there. And there's now an image floating around where somebody who's in the news right now was doing a video chat and there's some weird being in a bathroom doorway that looks like an alien or like Lamb. And is that connected? Is that what's coming through here? Do these things just kind of show up when it has these opportunities? So picture the scenario. You're sitting in a damp cellar in Norfolk. You've spent five years listening to Patrick, the dead Irish priest, tell jokes through a medium and you're watching lights dance around. And when you get touched, it feels like this indescribable feeling of love. You're expecting to see your dead grandmother or maybe a spirit guide in some exotic period garb. And instead, you're staring at one of the most feared beings in the contactee world, at least. Yeah. So the group is like, who is this? Because up until now, every entity has had a name. Manu, Patrick, Mrs. Bradshaw, they all have personalities. But this thing didn't speak. Yeah. And the spirit team, Manu and the others, didn't give it a name either. They just called him an interdimensional friend. The name Blue is actually a nickname the group gave him because the image had a bluish tint on the screen. But the most interesting detail about Blue, as we said, he didn't have a voice box, apparently, or at least he didn't use one. But when the group asked questions, the image on the screen would react. It would move its head inquisitively. It would blink like it was listening. Well, that's also a fascinating thing about what some people claim, the greys or advanced beings. Because I've heard numerous variations, but one said, oh, no, they have mouths. They can talk to you, but they can also do telepathy. And they know your thoughts. And then some people who claim to have had contacts said, oh, yeah, they can't really talk. It's entirely mental telepathy. And they know what you're thinking. And they can just enter your brain and know that you're kind of a simpleton and try to communicate with you that way. But this implies a live connection, a live feed. This wasn't a recording being played back. It was a real-time interaction with a non-human intelligence via a video link. So it's kind of like a Zoom with aliens 20 years before Zoom or Cisco or any of those others existed. But like we said, this is a game-changing moment thematically in terms of what they're thinking is happening here. Because once you admit that interdimensional friends are using the line, you've got to ask, where are they coming from? Are they ghosts? Are they extraterrestrials? Are they something else entirely? It's like you've gone way beyond, is there life after death here? But that's where Manu, the spirit guide, dropped the biggest bombshell of the entire five-year experiment. He said explicitly, and this is what Manu said, these were his words, this was due to time travelers from our future. The vortex of energies within this doorway also attracted experimenters from the future who were drawn to what we were doing. It was the interaction between their experiments and the gateway, which caused serious interference, end quote. So just to be clear here, this particular verbal message came through via the original method that the one of Manu just then, of a voice that came through Diana Bennett, the transmedia member of the group. So she's saying these words as Manu. Now, the Skull Diary entry for Friday the 15th of May, 1998, records specifically that Manu spoke for some time, offering a detailed explanation for the, quote, serious interference the group had been experiencing. This lengthy, structured explanation that's in their contrast with the shorter, often fragmented messages that would come through the germanium receptor or the germanium device. Right. Or the direct voice phenomenon. Right. So this is what we're talking about, a shift in tone here and messages. And then now you have people, uh, you ever, uh, especially on a date, Scott, in your early, early days, you ever invite somebody out and your date brings someone else along. Yeah. And it's like, oh, who's this? It's like, oh, this is my friend. I hope it's okay if they tag along, but you know, they called me earlier and like, they wanted it, they didn't have anything to do. So it's like, okay, now we have a third wheel. Thank you. So my college roommate went on my first date with my wife, so just was not reading the room at all, was not reading the room at all. I mean, we had been friends a while, but like we went to a movie and he like went with us. Yeah. So. He just invited himself. Yeah. Pretty much. Oh, I wanted to see that. And then I've been married 32 years, people. So just my wife and I met in college. Uh, we're almost high school sweethearts. My point being here is that you show up to a place and it's a surprise. And now you can't just say like, Hey dude, take a hike, man. You know, like. Right. It's just, okay. Who's the, it is. My phrase is like, who's this guy? That's kind of my. Yeah. Yeah. And then you find out like, okay, well, uh, they didn't think it was that special. So now you have people budding in basically time travelers from the future. Think about that for a second. It changes everything. Really? It reframes the entire experiment. And this is what's fascinating is that they sense the energy. So it was like screaming into the void and the void screen back because the void is watching, the void knows what you're doing. Other people are listening in, which is probably not why you should use a Ouija board. So if you're talking to the dead, you're looking into the past, trying to retrieve memories and personalities that have been lost that you, you may even know that might be loved ones. But now if you're talking to time travelers, you're looking forward, right? At least in this case, right? Right. So here's the other interesting paradox here. I mean, you, you were the past that they are looking at, right? But as the spirit team said, well, there's really your consciousness, this kind of floating in ether. You don't really have a concept of time. We're bound by our 3d world and we're not going to understand what's really going on the other side. It can't be explained. Dude, you're like totally blown to my mind right now. Whoa. Whoa. But no, it's like the skull experiment, turn the cellar into a fishbowl and, and we're the fish. I suppose. I just hope we don't get flushed. I think we should look into getting a crystalline time probe, you know, maybe save us some of those late nights we've been putting in, especially for this latest series. And I feel especially bad for you, sir, because you're three hours ahead of me. Well, you know, man, we we've managed all these years with the time difference. I do miss when we were in the same city. That was, that was nice. It's a lot of fun and the same room, but no doubt working late puts a kink in our schedules, especially when it comes to mealtimes and getting enough sleep. Yeah. Oh yeah, it does. You know, but that's where factor has really come in handy during these late night records because, you know, by the time we're ready to roll, either you're having a scarf to add a quick bite before we start, or it's dinnertime over here and I hate to keep mom waiting and then we have to resort to a fast food run. But several nights this week factor has saved the day or night, I guess, because in just about two minutes of microwaving, we're sitting down to a delicious hot meal that we can feel good about eating. And there ain't no sink full of dishes to wash afterwards. Exactly right, amigo. It's our perfect solution for a quick, healthy meal here, too, because when there's no time to cook, factor makes healthy eating easy with fully prepared meals designed by dietitians and crafted by chefs. So we can all eat well without the planning or cooking. Yeah. Factor is a winner all around, not only for the ease, but you get quality functional ingredients with lean proteins and colorful veggies, whole food ingredients and healthy fats. And I don't have to feel guilty about serving a meal high in refined sugars or artificial sweeteners and with no refined seed oils. And we've been trying to eat healthier around here, too, and trying to get in more protein while also managing calories. 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And now's a perfect time to refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to Quince.com slash A-L for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash A-L. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash A-L. Hi, I'm Sophie, and you're listening to Astonishing Legends with Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess. Now back to the show. Okay, but on May 15, 1998, Manu explained to this group in detail. He said that these goal groups work. All this energy that they had built up, the portal, as they called it, they had opened. Well, this had created a vortex or some kind of beacon. That's another thing in part one we said that I want people to keep in mind here is that what they, the humans, the live humans would say is that you did this in dark because it took a long time to build up this kind of energy. Sometimes in a spirit mediumship or even remote viewing, you have to beat a path, kind of a psychic path to whatever you're trying to communicate with. And it takes a long time. Like they said, it's like, well, you could do, the spirit team said, you could do this with the lights on. It would take a lot, lot longer because these are subtle energies we're talking about. Even infrared. They were, they were told them, you can't, don't even put infrared in here, which of course the skeptics were like, oh, they're just trying to do, hide their tricks, you know? But then they came and sat in there with them and couldn't find the tricks. Right. Well, yeah, that's kind of the point. And it wasn't total darkness because they had the glow in the dark stuff. And when the camera was on, there's a little light from that. Right. It's about the nature of energy and the type of energy that they said they were able to access on the other side and, and work with. It was different from our electromagnetic energy. So they said, don't think about it that way. That's not what it is. It's a different kind of energy, but whatever was happening in this tunnel, this vortex had attracted attention further on down the timeline. And what Manu described, uh, well, he described these visitors as experimenters from the future. So that's fascinating. They're now able to access that apparently in the future. And they were drawn to the energy the group was creating, as subtle as it was. And they were using it to look back into their past, which would be our present. So in a weird way, the Skoll group had become a tourist attraction for future scientists or maybe research subjects, or it's just like idiot nerds like us trying to use a, uh, chrono visor. Remember that? That's like, we gotta, we gotta cover that one day. Yeah. Come see the 20th century humans trying to build a radio out of a rock. Look, they're using magnets. Here's the thing. These things weren't just looking. Uh, it's kind of like when you're on a call and then someone else tries to pick up the line, you get interference, you get a clicking. Or, uh, nowadays, if you have VOIP, a voiceover internet protocol for your phone service. Yeah. But if you try to download a file where you're on the phone, you're using a band room. Yeah. Yeah. You're choking it. So in this case, you get static or except in this case, the interference is coming from the year 3000. I'm going to blame 3109. Is it 2109? No, it's 2109. That jerk from the future in the vertical plane series. Yes. Well, we're going to talk about that in our theories because I think it's all connected. Right. This brings up a massive question about the nature of the gray entity that they call blue. So if Manu's saying these are time travelers from the future and the image we see is a classic gray, does that mean the grays are us? That's the question. As we mentioned in part two, I think, you know, that's a theory that's been floating around ufology for decades that people think, uh, it was, you know, all the crafters saying it's just us way in the future and we figured out, uh, time travel or it's an accidental by-product. Right. It could be any part of this all together. I don't think it's one thing in the other, but the idea here is that the grays aren't from another world or from ours, tens of thousands, perhaps of years in the future. And they're what humans evolve into after maybe a hundred thousand years. So we don't need the hair anymore. You lose that. And, uh, we, we lose the muscle mass. I started early. Oh, I did. Oh, geez. Well, but you, you know what? You don't live in a ultra bright room where the, the lighting panels, like the, the whole wall and ceiling, and it's all illuminated as you see in the movies, which was like, you don't need hair anymore. You're not going outside, uh, because you can't in the future. Uh, it's all toxic, but we lose our muscle mass. Your heads get bigger as your brain expands, and then your eyes get bigger to absorb more light. Or as they say, like there's several layers or lenses over the eye to adjust for whatever condition you're in. It's kind of like a biological, uh, pair of Ray-Bans, uh, because I don't know, maybe you live underground, maybe you live in space, maybe all three. So what you're saying is when the skull group's looking at blue, maybe they're not looking at a stranger. Maybe they're looking at an ancestor. Yeah. So that is one theory, but like I said, We're Otsi, we're the Iceman. We're like, they're coming back to see. You could be, look, there's all kinds of fascinating theories about this. If you look at the movie AI by Spielberg at the, I'm not giving any, I don't want to hear you yelling at me, giving things away. Look, in the future. Yeah. It's been out a minute. It's AI. So in the future, you know what's going to happen. Robots are going to evolve. And then in the future, there's some, basically they're like us, super smart, except now they are a mechanical being that has a form of consciousness. And why wouldn't that happen? So what you're seeing is that- Elon Musk has taken two cars out of production to start building those robots. Oh, there you go. He killed two models. Yeah. And is focusing on humanoid robots, which of course will have AI in them because everything does right now. Look, it's one of those things I think you can't avoid it. That's where it's heading. So get ahead of it, or at least start, put your toes in the water on that one. And this is more of a, possibly a biological or a singularity where you're, you're merged with a brain machine interface. And so we're talking about very distant cousins, because here's the idea that what we're looking at now is that it's not just cavemen for another 200,000 years, and now you're just really good looking in 100,000 years from now, and you live to be 200, and there's very few physical problems. We're talking about something that evolves into something that we would not consider attractive, you could say. And these folks, though, they're experimenters. They're possibly scientists from the future. And you think like, oh, I would hope by then you'd have some scientific ethical knowledge here, not to mess with stuff, but they're using the skull experiment as their own little window. And then the huge question for our theories tonight is if this is the case, then why are they here? Do they know something that happens a long time ago? And now we're talking about John Titor and needing that machine. That's the story there. He's a time traveler, needs to go back. Things are screwed up, has to come back to the past for a specific computer part. I also read a theory today, by the way, that maybe if this is a story, because this is not just exclusive, obviously, to this skull experiment. This is a very broad NHI, UAP, UFO theory. But this possibility that if they are time travelers from the future and they're coming back, they're coming back also to try to repair their own DNA or get something that they lost along the way on the path to the future. So now they have a chronovisor here. Yeah. So yeah, it's like, is this something darker? But do they know if blue is friendly or not? There's no way to tell. Yeah, but there's no verbal communication. So that doesn't make sense. Right. So this is my go-to when people say, well, how do you know if a spirit, a ghost you're seeing or something, a doppelganger or some kind of entity is not good? It's like, well, we don't really know, do we? Other than you got to go by your gut feeling because that's knowledge that's deep down in your DNA, speaking of. Yeah. The only meter we have to go to, and most people, like I said, when they get in troubles, they ignore those red flags and the gut feelings. Right. And you're talking about time travelers, they're trying to push too hard into our world, widening the aperture. The Skull Group had spent five years learning how to open this door, build this bridge. They become experts at it. They could open it with film, with tape, with crystals, with mirrors, but they'd never really thought about how to close it. That's right. Or more importantly, lock it once you did, like saying goodbye on the Ouija board. Exactly. And now something's on the other side, it's trying to push its way in. Okay. Right. And that brings us to the concept of the crystalline time probe, which sounds like science fiction. But in the context of Skull, it was a very real, very specific threat that would become the beginning of the end for this experiment. Yeah. As I said in part two, with the germanium receptor sounding like a James Bond prop, now we have the crystalline, or is it crystalline, crystalline time probe, which is a half step above sharks with frigging lasers on their heads. Right. Well, however you pronounce it, I would bet that the UK folks pronounce it differently than we do. Yes. With their aluminium. Well, it does sound like science fiction, but in the context of Skull, this wasn't a prop or some kind of story. It was presented as an existential threat to the safety of the group. But remember, you can go all over the world and that phenomenon can find you because it was working wherever they went. And it wasn't just a sudden message out of the blue. Pun intended. Pun intended. There was a buildup. Okay. So now we're talking about this buildup of energy, which I mentioned just moments ago. We've gone from years of slow, steady progress, building this energy, beating that pathway, getting the lights and the voices. And then suddenly you got kind of a frantic warning here. But before the final plug was pulled, the equipment started acting up in ways that weren't just ghostly. That's right. In the weeks leading up to November of that year, the group had been noticing severe distortions in their recordings. And I want to be specific about what distortion means here because it wasn't just static. The Skull report mentions that the audio was being swamped by bursts of white noise, like aggressive, rhythmic static that would drown out the voices. Mm, that's, yeah, disturbing, unsettling to say the least. But I love the idea also because this sounds like sci-fi. A couple of movies or series, remember Dark, the German production having to do about time travel. And what I, the idea I liked about that is that it's not scot-free. You go back in time enough and it physically changes you. Right. You end up being scarred in a way. And there was another independent movie which was, handled the concept of time travel pretty well done, I think. In that, that side effect is if you time traveled too much, your handwriting got shaky. Oh, interesting. Like it just, you would have some residue from doing that. Some pretty bad crap goes down in Looper too. Exactly. You haven't seen that. Right. You know, that's a, that's a great one. No spoilers, but. Now we're talking still about getting video evidence and it's getting stranger. Now we talked about the clear faces they were getting in the mirrors earlier. Some being kind of static, some smiling. Yeah. Some attractive folks and some just kind of regular. Some places, like some that were obviously recognizable and others, they literally, it was clearly a face, a clear face of a person. They had no idea who it was. To this day, people didn't know. Well, they're just, I mean, I mean, go walk down the street, you're meeting strangers all the time. Exactly. But here's the thing, Scott, they don't start to morph and melt because one of the things that's most disturbing, I think, to people is seeing a human face that's altered and morphing and melting because usually I think in your DNA, you know that something's wrong. Yeah. Because if you see that nature, that person isn't doing well. And so the diary describes the images, they're breaking up into like jelly-like distortions like we mentioned earlier, that kind of weird morphing oil on water distortion here, jelly-like was described. So imagine a video signal that isn't just, it's not just pixelating, but it's physically warping. So like that signal is becoming that plastic nature, that malleableness, but it's not for better communication. Right. So initially they thought, well, maybe the batteries are dying, battery being the label for the system that they built, or maybe the atmospheric conditions are wrong. But Manu, their spirit guide told them, nope, this isn't a glitch. This is interference. Yeah. It's from a action that was not invited. So that begs the question, was it intentional? And then how was it being caused? It's like when you're driving and you listen to a radio station. And as we all know, because we've talked about entities and ghosts coming in, you know, the further you get away, another station starts bleeding in. If you and I have traveled north on the, on the five, which we have, and you dip down in a little valley, the station goes out and you come back over the rise, it comes back in again, but they're blending. And at some point you hear two songs at once when they start to overlap. Manu explained that the Skoll group was the radio station. And then someone else, someone with a much stronger transmitter was bleeding into their frequency. And what does that remind you of, Scott? The max headroom pirate TV signal interruption. And there's a little bit of maxi headroom, visual weirdness too, that was coming through. Just in that kind of unsettling way that we saw with max headroom. So we covered that not too long ago, folks, if you haven't heard it, check the back catalog. But this, by the way, it's a very earthly idea of sorts. It's literally terrestrial broadcast science. But the pivot point is Monday, November 23rd, 1998, the group receives the final order to shut down. And we need to pause here for a second on the logistics of that shutdown. It's at this point, they send what our research calls a fax to subscribers. And we don't want people to take this as some kind of revenue generation screen when you hear subscribers. No, boy, am I tired of subscribing the stuff. So when we say subscribers, we're not talking about subscriptions as you might think of it today. The Skoll Group operated under the name, the New Spiritual Science Foundation, and they published a quarterly newsletter called The Spiritual Scientist. Yeah. And the fee for this was not a lot. It was initially three pounds a year, later raised to five, barely enough to cover the stamps and the Xerox paper. They had about 300 people on the mailing list, mostly other spiritualists or paranormal enthusiasts who just wanted updates on the phenomenon. There was a time in the 90s would about be it that if you wanted to get instant feedback from folks, there might be faxes. And I don't know if you know what a fax is, everyone who's listening, but it was a machine that was basically a printer that you put a piece of paper in and it converted it into something that could travel over a phone line and come out on a piece of paper on the other end, as long as there's fax machines at both ends. And so it makes sense that at this time, this is like something that Stan Gordon would have had to do as he was building his organization. It's like, we need to send a fax alert to everyone and let them know a UFO flap is happening right now in Western Pennsylvania or whatever. So it's that kind of situation. And they're like, they need to send a notice out to everybody that is part of their group. They want to let them know what's going on. Right. And like Scott and I, if you've been dealing with the medical community, you would know that a fax is still relevant. It's on every piece of documentation. They still give a fax number because it's still useful in that scenario and legally accepted by a lot of your health insurance, people who don't play around. That's right. In any case, it's a bit of a, I don't know, it's interesting parallel to communication in general. In this case though, James Webster, who is the professional magician and associate of the Inner Magic Circle, very famous group here in, based in London of magicians who investigated the group. He made a very pointed observation about this. He said that if this were a trick, the Skoll group could be, quote, could be earning a million dollars out there on the stage, end quote. But instead they were sitting in a damp cellar in Norfolk for nothing, not making any money on it. Yeah, so when the order to stop came down from the other side, Robin Foy didn't have to refund millions of dollars and just sent a fax to this small circle of enthusiasts. But the message wasn't, we're stopping the newsletter. No, it was not. This was much more serious. And by the way, we were in LA, I think, when they had their sessions there. And I wish we'd known about that. We could have gone. Oh, I know, I know, God. Again, well, all kinds of interesting things are happening in the background. We weren't as plugged in back then. No, and or as- I feel like we would have heard about it. Possibly, yeah. I mean, but here's the thing. This is a small group. And this message announced to the group that due to interdimensional interference that we just discussed, they had been ordered to cease all experimental sessions immediately. Yeah. This wasn't a publishing decision. It was a safety protocol. Yeah, so interdimensional interference, we've alluded to it, but the entities describe the cause as an interdimensional time wave pattern coming from the future. And that's a quote. An interdimensional time wave pattern coming from the future. Is that a thing? Whatever the case, the source of this wave wasn't natural, right? So it's not a solar flare, a cosmic radiation, or movement of the planets. The message specified that this interference is, quote, is being generated by a crystalline time probe. Yeah, here we go again. Pausing on, I'm pausing on crystalline for a second. Right. Because in ufology and esoteric circles, crystals are often cited as storage devices- Right. ...or resonance chambers. Just look at the Fortress of Solitude. But if you think about the Germanian receptor, the group built, that was a crystal. Germanium is a semiconductor. Right. And also, if you know about quantum computing, I think they're looking into crystalline structures as like almost near limitless storage capacity for data. That's right. I just read that. I forgot. That's an interesting- Yeah, I just read that like a couple weeks ago. So it's all about the crystals, folks. You may make fun of them. You may scoff at them as you drive by the crystal shop. They may appear suddenly in your disposal. We're talking about crystals having planetary pertinence here. And, you know, that's what the Skoll group was using. Basically, a primitive crystal radio set to talk to the dead. It's a radio, Mr. Jones, for talking to God. Yes. That's not a great belloc, but you know what I'm talking about here is that, yeah, you've got, you have a device in your hands that's, and a means that is beyond what we're maybe supposed to be fooling with. So if this future experimenter from the future is using a highly advanced crystalline probe to talk to them, that's going to be a problem here. It's the same technology just evolved by like a thousand years over this germanium radio set here. We're using the Model T version of the technology. They're using the Ferrari or that old computer, ABC computer, and again, the vertical plane. And so here's the part that gives me chills about that, though. They didn't just say it was a machine. Robin Foy reported that the message they received about this, quote, future experimenter contained a very specific warning. Yeah. He is experimenting with a crystalline time probe and his motives are not entirely benevolent. Oof. Not entirely benevolent. What a polite British way of saying this guy's dangerous. Well, no, I just, that's even more chilling when you put it like that, I think. Yeah. It's like the, the crop circle with the alien. Beware of bears bringing false gifts or something like that. Just don't trust who's on the other end that looks like that, perhaps. It implies in this case that whoever or whatever was hacking into the skull experiment from the future and they didn't care about the safety of the people in that cellar or maybe even the past population, they're intruders. But on the other hand, something on the other side did care, if you believe any of this at all, something cared enough to warn them that it was time to end this thing. And again, this keeps coming back to the vertical plane, which we're going to talk about later, I know, but just in the message, like who's messing around with it, you know, get off the line here. And so, yeah, but also not entirely benevolent. Are they changing something? Well, you know, again, it's similar to the chronovisor and of course the Deglaca, the Nazi bell, in that this is another crazy theory that there is a device that enabled people to see into the past, at least, and it was passed around to world leaders so they could approve their futures of their respective countries. But too many people were goofing around with it and it started to alter things. And that's why we're seeing such weird stuff now. That is one theory that's out there. Well, whatever this thing or being was, it was apparently trying to force its way in. The spirit team told the group that this wasn't just a technical glitch, it's a violation. And they said continuing the work was a, quote, violation of the cosmic and interdimensional laws of time and space. Wow. That sounds like a hefty fine right there. Yeah. The message went on to say that while the future holds many more discoveries, which can help mankind to develop beyond your present limitations, the current interference was too dangerous to continue. They couldn't filter out the time probe. This signal was too strong. What if the Max Headroom interruption was actually just an alien, like messing with us, pretending to be human? I don't doubt that. I don't know what's going on these days. My feeds are just off the chain, off the line, off the hook, crazy with so many of these possible theories that, look, I do believe in existential threats and other outside influence because why not? You know, we're here to, we're easy to mess with. It's that little brother you love to pick on and play pranks with. But just quickly, this, what we're talking about here is this breaking of laws. Just quickly, there's a, again, there's a recorded astral projection hypnosis. It's about an hour long or so by Dr. Steve G. Jones, who is a hypnotherapist. I love it more so for the fascinating things he says about the astral plane and different dimensions and traveling astrally. One thing he says, he makes it very clear. He's like, do not interfere with other people or other beings that you'll see. And there are some that are doing their own thing on the astral plane. Yeah. Well, look, it's just, it's just, look, it's the, the golden rule, right? Like don't, don't, and you know, that should apply to everyone on social media nowadays. Don't know. People won't need to hear your BS. Don't mess with them. Just leave them alone. Okay. And that's the same thing that goes in the, on the astral plane is that where he says, you'll see beings there that, uh, some just live there or they're just doing their own things and they'll ignore you. Uh, some are friendly and they want to help you and they'll interact with you. Right. And they'll guide you how to, how to grow further in your spiritual metaphysical journey. And then some, this is what reminded me of that is he says, do not have your best interests at hand. Yeah. He said, look, it's like walking down the street in a big city. Okay. Is that there's nice people and then some will want to rob you or worse. And you got to be careful. You have to protect yourself. And so he does the whole metaphysical thing. I know it sounds woo woo, but having that white sphere of, uh, protective light around you and we're back to light. Yeah. But anyway, in this case though, he says, uh, don't you do anything bad either. Don't impose upon people. Do not harm them on this other astrophysical plane because, uh, he says there are entities there and forces that are like the time cops. Right. They're there to make sure that nobody's violating the rules and being a jerk. Yeah. Because there are consequences. So the team was devastated. Dr. John Beloff, B-E-L-O-F-F, who was the editor of the Skull Report, which is one of our primary sources for tonight, even tried to argue. He asked if they could hold just one more sitting at a place of the Society for Psychical Research is choosing. He tried to negotiate. He basically said, look, we're scientists. Let us verify this one last time before you shut it down. And Beloff is interesting because he, uh, I guess he attended Sitting 28 alongside Monty Keene and Professor Robert Morris. He apparently seemed to think that he had a psi negative influence. And he mentioned that at Sitting 28, the one he was at, less happened on that occasion than at any other sitting, which led him to confirm his own reputation as a, so basically he's the cooler. He's the cooler. Well, no, you know what he is. He's part of our little group, the Fortean Buzzkills. Yeah, the Fortean Buzzkills, that's exactly what he is. Which was what we are. Yeah, he was pretty bummed because, you know, he's working on the report and he had to decide whether to like veto the report or to publish it under SPR, despite the lack of final controls. And he decided to publish it anyway as it stood, because I guess he felt it was important enough to do that. So. Yeah. But in this case here, no, the answer is no. Yeah. Someone has. Can't do it again. Someone has ruined your, your party line. Yes. When you picked up the phone, it was an open line between you and maybe your whole, your farmer neighborhood there, you know, it was a party line. And so, I mean, these are other households I'm talking about because that was the way it worked. Not everybody had an individual private line you dialed out of. So you would pick up the, that's what's called a party line. You pick that up and there's other people on it. And sometimes you'd hear their conversations and you just have to be courteous enough not to be eavesdropping. Right. And so, yeah, it's an open, that's the problem with open lines here. And in this case, on the evening of November 23rd, 1998, Robin Foy got on the phone and imagine the, the weight of that call. Not just like, Hey, where should we go for pizza? We're talking about like, we could be ripping up the fabric of space time and the future of the world. If you believe that. But, but in a personal level, this was his life's work, you know, five years of sitting in the dark. I know there's a social aspect, but just imagine five years of defending yourself against skeptics that gets tiresome. Trust us. Yeah. And then he has to make the call to kill it all. He didn't say, well, we're widening those down. He didn't say, you know what? Let's just get through the holidays. Then we'll stop. He said, the team has told us we have to shut down operations with immediate effect. Yeah. Throughout this series, we've talked about the Skoll Group, the four mediums and the investigators, the SPR scientists almost interchangeably. But on that final night, November 23rd, 1998, Monty Keene and the other scientists were not in the cellar. The time probe warning came through during a private sitting of the core group, Robin, Sandra, Alan, and Diana, which is a detail skeptics will jump on. The most dramatic sci-fi element of the entire story, the time travel warning happened with scientists when the scientists weren't looking. That is true. You know, the investigators were at home. Robin Foy had to call them on the telephone to break the news. And as we said, you know, everyone's devastated. They felt they were on the cusp of proving life after death. And then someone says, well, if you don't disconnect the call, the universe is going to implode. You're going to melt the entirety of existence here. And I would just say, imagine if they were able to keep this line open and it was all good and sunshine and, and, and rainbows, it would have been phenomenal because then you could bring in any skeptical main body scientist if they were willing to go through with that and say, look, you, you keep wanting proof and a repeatable experiment. Here you are. Yeah, it's a good point. So I guess, well, after five years, after hundreds of sittings, after the films, the voices, the lights, the skull experiment was over, plug was pulled, not by the skeptics, not by the media, but by the spirit team, the entities, whatever was on the other side themselves. They were the ones that said, uh, this is finito. And every, like every other good thing, someone's going to come along and ruin it. So that's right. But luckily they had mountains of evidence. And when you sift through that evidence, uh, you know, when you look at the names attached to the messages, all the signatures on films, the strips of film. The voices on the tapes, you realize something impossible. This wasn't just a random assortment of ghosts, at least if we were to believe, uh, who had showed up over the years. These are some notables. It was truly the all-star team. I, we mentioned the, the funny ones, you know, Manu, Patrick McKenna, who told it I'm under the rug. He did jokes like that. Mrs. Bradshaw. But looking back at the skull report, the roster of the more famous names who claim to be involved is staggering. It's like a who's who of the 19th and 20th centuries. Well, and why wouldn't they be? Because like I said, you can't listen. You're, you're never going to win with people who just aren't buying this. It's like, oh, how come it's nobody famous we've ever heard of? And it's like, well, here's, here's Thomas Edison. Here's a, here's some famous people. Like, of course it's famous people. You know? It's like, oh yeah. How convenient. It's somebody we all know. Right. Okay. Why is it just a regular guy we never heard of? Well, we had that, but you didn't, you didn't like that. Like, okay, nevermind. I'm just not going to believe it anyway. So, but that's exactly where we're going to go next. It's a strange function of human nature that it's like people's love and some worship of celebrity. We all latch on to famous names because we think we know them in some way, but we're going to go there next. We're going to talk about them before we get into the theories of whatever this thing was, you know, whether it was a trick, a hungry, hungry hippo ghost, or some kind of genuine breakthrough. We need to look at who claimed to be pulling the strings. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. 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Other days you just need something quick and tasty. Marley's Spoon adapts to your schedule and your cravings, so you always have a good meal ready. Go to marleyspoon.com slash offer slash pod45 for 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's right, 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's marleyspoon.com slash offer slash pod45. 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, 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? 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. From Sedona, and when I'm not having my aura buffed or wrangling a vortex, I'm listening to Astonishing Legends. Now, back to Scott and Forrest. So we have the crystalline time probe warning. We have the interdimensional friend. But we also have something else that makes this case difficult to dismiss. We have a guest list of sorts. Yeah. And this is where the Skoll experiment separates itself from, I don't know, your standard haunting, maybe, because, you know, usually you go to a seance and you get Aunt Edna or like a generic spirit guide. Yes. Although I do like the name. And I like Manu. I've grown fond of Manu, the spirit guide. Yes. And you know what's funny about it, and the reason that makes me laugh, is this movie that Sally Field and James Conran a long time ago, where he comes back as a ghost, her dead husband that she really loved. He was very charming and charismatic. And so she's seeing him, but now she's with a new husband. And I can't remember. Oh, I vaguely. But there's a funny scene in it where she's talking to him as a ghost. Right. And her new husband is there, and he's like, you know, you have beautiful breasts or something. And she's answering a question to the other guy, and she goes, thank you. They're my Aunt Edna's. And then it's like, confusion ensues. It's a very- Yeah, oh, I get you. Kind of joke. Right, right. And I just looked it up. It's called Kiss Me Goodbye. It came out in 1982. So folks, if you want to see a ghost movie that is not ghost, watch Kiss Me Goodbye with James God and Sophie, and I don't know why I remember that. Aunt Edna, anyway. But back to Skoll, the spirits who showed up claim to be the absolute titans of their respective fields. So you're getting an all-star cast. Because again, you know, we mentioned this a little while ago. It's the photo's too blurry. The photo's not blurry enough to be believable. Right. It's like, I don't know who this person is, could be anybody, so I don't believe this. But now the person's too famous. And like, that can't possibly be them. What would they be doing here bothering with us from the other side? So- Yeah. But in any case, this could be all considered odd. The thing is, with these folks, it's almost too perfect. And that's one of the things that makes people uncomfortable. I mean, honestly, both skeptics, believers, or at least me, because there's so many ways this cast of characters feels engineered to me. My gut reaction to that is like, all is not what it seems. Or I'm coming to that from a point of view of believing something supernatural or paranormal could be happening here. Yeah. You have to go back to a distinction we've made on the show many times before. But here, it's absolutely critical for Skoll. And that's the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural. And it's funny, the side note, it's just a, I mean, yeah, you know, people use those words interchangeably, but they mean two very different things. And what's funny, I remember he was a listener and, you know, dedicated listening to the show early on, but a bit of a gadfly. And he would kind of rib us a lot about stuff. And I said, you know, what you're talking about is more paranormal as opposed to supernatural. He was like, there's no difference. Like, what's the difference in that? Like, well, you should look that up. I think you should enlighten us. I mean, I know we've talked about it a few times on the show before, but why don't you tell our listeners what the difference is between these two things? Well, from that exchange on what used to be Twitter, I started reading up more of that because I knew the general broad strokes. And in the case of celebrities showing up, I mean, okay, just a side note where it gets really weird and you got to consider this, what prevents them from being a spirit, if that's possible at all. And the way, even more woo, add another woo to the two woos is that, well, if aliens exist and they're here on this earth and this plane and realm and they pass away because they're not a mortal, then they must have spirits, right? Well, people have talked about that. So again, now you're dealing with aliens and is that paranormal or is that supernatural? Okay. Well, here's the definition. Paranormal comes from the Greek prefix para, meaning beside or alongside. So something that is paranormal is alongside the normal. It exists with our reality and within the laws of physics, but it's also just part of the spectrum we don't understand yet. Okay. So think of it in terms of x-rays or germ theory in the 1800s. You can't see that stuff. I also like to think about it in terms of electronic fog. Okay. And that could be just a really strange and very rare weather phenomenon that happens. But is it spirits? I don't think so. I think it's just one of the strange things that can happen that on a planetary scale, but think about this to a person, you know, back then, and we're talking about the 1800s, invisible beams seeing straight through your skin would seem like magic, right? How could you possibly do that? Unless you're Superman who didn't arrive until the thirties, but eventually science caught up and it moved from the paranormal to just normal or paranormal. Remember that animated, that was pretty good. I do. I love paranormal. I did like that a lot. So what you're saying here, I guess, is that paranormal is basically just science in the waiting room. Yeah. If you want to think about that, as one of our quotes says, it's that science and our measurement tools are always evolving. It's not a set standard like, okay, that's it. We've got the set of tools to figure everything out. And beyond that, if we can't understand it, it's a hoax. So you're kind of right about that. It's a phenomenon waiting for a textbook or to be measured by our primitive tools yet. But supernatural is different. Super means above. It's above nature. It's outside of it. Extent. If something is supernatural, it doesn't just play by hidden rules. It seems to break those rules entirely. It seems to transcend the laws of physics. It's the realm of the divine, the mystical, the miraculous, the higher self, the divine. You're right. It's something beyond, but still real. And no amount of time or technology will ever explain it because it isn't of this system. And maybe we're not meant to figure it out. Well, and what's interesting about skull is it tries to be both of these things. It does in a way. You know, they use crystals. Now I think about crystals. Look, it's like when we were a kid, they weren't woo-woo. It's just that somehow you get radio signals out of it. That's kind of cool. Or we went rock hunting and rock hounding and trying to find thunder eggs and those kind of things. And now, of course, when you say that, like, ooh, crystals. Well, the other things, radios they were using, chemistry, and all that is to suggest that this is somehow paranormal. They think it's just advanced physics. But then you have the angel lights, quote-unquote, A-ports, and the interdimensional laws, and that part feels connected to the supernatural. Yeah, see, that's part of what makes what happened in skull so hard to nail down for me. And the other thing is I'm not convinced those two definitions aren't intertwined somehow or maybe really only one thing. Like supernatural normal or something. I don't know. Both divine and paranormal, changing to adapt to what we're capable of perceiving. Like when a pawn on a chessboard makes it all the way to the other side, and it can choose to be any piece it wants. Now you have to understand it in its new shell. Right. I'll go with that. So imagine, like, to me, it's like you have electronic fog, right? And you can fly into it. It's very rare. But under these specific conditions, it can bend space-time. And then supernatural will be like you have this mystic figure who, from his outstretched hands, can issue forth electronic fog under your being. Right. And transport, it's like, okay, now that seems like extra. That's the super part where it's like, yeah, it's religious, it's divine, it's spiritual, it's metaphysical. And then it's now peeling back the clockwork on how this all runs that we never, you know, we see the clock face and we see the hands moving. We imagine that there's gears behind that face turning, but we don't know exactly how they work and can't recreate it. But we do have a good idea that there's some mechanism there. Now, what that is, we don't know. But like I said, that's not magic. Here, it's just like you look behind the watch face and there's no gears. Yeah. Ooh. Well, anyway, all right. So let's get back to these dead folks that showed up. We've mentioned Madhu and also I love Patrick. Those are the two guides. Yes. But eventually the group made contact with a communicator who dropped heavy hints about his identity. And he claimed to be a pioneer of electricity or the discovery thereof. He claimed to have worked on a machine to talk to the dead while he was alive. And eventually on January 11th, 1997, a strip of Kodachrome film appeared in a locked box with a very specific electrical diagram and a monogram at the bottom with the initials T-A-E. Yeah, Thomas Alva Edison is theoretically the man providing them with the schematic for the germanium receptor, which we have to point out worked. Now, skeptics will say, of course it's Edison. Who else would it be? But the entity claiming to be Edison didn't just show up to say hello. He showed up to work. The diagram was labeled with instructions. You know, A represents the germanium, B and C coils. This could help reception. That's a quote, by the way. Right. It's not like. Through the medium. It's pretty much what an engineer or a scientist, you know, getting right to the point. Like, try this. Yeah. Hook this up. You should understand how this works. And I'm just giving you a pointer here. And I think we should start offering AL branded germanium receptors in the store. I've already found a forum where people were trying to build them. And their posts are like four or five years old. But there was a guy on there who said he built one. I was going to try and reach out to him. But I didn't have a chance to do it before we recorded. We'll get our good friend Roger on the case. Oh, yeah. He could build one. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think he could. If anybody could that we know of. He did build a device that measures non-randomness in ghost hunting situations. And that. Yeah. That's. Anything that's not random generated numbers. So, yeah. He's on. He'll be on the case. But anyway. The signature here. It wasn't just a scribble or something, you know, it's like, okay, I guess it's pareidolia where you could say like, you're, you're getting TAL out of that or TAE and it's not really there. You just kind of seeing it. Monty Keene, though, who is the senior for the Society for Psychical Research Investigator, he sent a tracing of those initials of it to the Edison National Historic Site in New Jersey. And the archivist there found a letter from 1925 where Edison initialed a comment with a squiggle that was, quote, virtually identical with the film squiggle, end quote. So there you have the most famous inventor in history acting as tech support. And he wasn't the only one. During the photography experiments, they received a film strip containing the question, quote, can you see behind the moon, end quote, followed by the signature Louis Daguerre. Wow. The inventor of the Daguerreotype. If you say photography, big name. Yeah. And great question, by the way. Thank you for posing that, Louis. You know, for those who aren't photography buffs, though, you have to understand the magnitude of that name. Louis Daguerre didn't just take pictures. He essentially invented the medium as we know it. Now, when you see a lot of old images, if you're paying attention, you see the captions, you might notice it says Daguerreotype. So in 1839, he introduced the world to the Daguerreotype. So that's 1839. It's pretty early for that kind of technology. Yeah. Right. So before him, we had the camera obscura. We could project an image onto a wall or something, but we couldn't keep it. It was just light. And now, Forrest, I know you studied film at USC and our listeners, I think, no, I did too in North Carolina at a far less prestigious school. I learned about Daguerre working on my radio, television, film, and communication degree. Fascinating stuff. That and Mybridge, who famously set up the cameras along the racetrack with strings that when the horse ran by, would make them take a photo all to settle a bet about whether or not a horse, when a horse was running, all four of its feet would leave the ground at once. You know, some of the greatest inventions and discoveries come from silly bets. Yes, from a silly bet. Will this work or will this happen or will you die from it? Yes. Oh, and by the way, they do for folks who haven't seen that film or don't know about horses. They do all leave the ground at once. That's right. Yes. From your studies. Unless they're trotting. I think the trot is two and two. Yeah, there is a caveat or asterisk with that, but I won't get into, because the other murkier one, but also no less fascinating, is who really invented television? Was it Philo Farnsworth? Oh, a couple people at the same time. Yeah. Simultaneous invention theory. Yeah. But anyway, Edward Muybridge, that experiment came around 40 years later. And you can draw a direct line from that one to the invention of the motion picture, which you know who. Yes, Thomas Alva Edison. That's right. Well, he took credit for it. But getting back to Daguerre, before the Daguerreotype, camera obscura images were just images you could see projected on something, but not saved. Unless, of course, it was at, you know, you've probably seen if you studied a little art history or seen an article, there's a giant box and you need a small hole. And what they would do is there would be paper on the other side of this box and you'd be inside it and you could trace down the image. Right, right. But it's not really recording it other than somebody tracing down what they saw projected on the opposite wall. Right. But in Louis' case, he figured out how to fix that image permanently onto silver-plated copper sheeting using iodine and mercury vapor, which is really dangerous. I don't recommend it and why a lot of early photographers got very sick. But it was a chemical miracle at this point, though. And it was the first time in human history that we could truly freeze time in an image way. So finding his signature on a roll of film, which is the direct descendant of his invention, is a very specific and very poetic kind of calling card. Which, again, feels a bit contrived in the case of the skull screen. But historically speaking, though, having both Daguerre and Edison on the spirit team is significant. They were not contemporaries. That's true. Daguerre died when Edison was just a toddler. But together, they represent the entire evolution of recorded media, really. Yeah, exactly. Also, there's a great trick. Salvador Dali would do the same thing, but you want to get into that. I love that he, even though he was an inventor and an engineer and a scientist in many ways, they like to poke into, I guess, the supernatural in a way, in that your metaphysical consciousness and to get great ideas. You know, he was famous for napping in his laboratory. And then I think he either, both he and Dali, I know that Salvador Dali would hold a spoon and try to nap sitting up in a chair. And when the spoon fell, that's when he wanted to record whatever dream, you're kind of in that half dream state. And he would record images that way. And I think Edison would try to come up with ideas the same way. So here, though, you know, Daguerre is giving us the ability to freeze a moment in time, which is what the film experiments were doing. And Edison gave us the ability to capture sound and motion, which is what the audio tapes and the video experiments were doing. So in theory, the Skoll Group wasn't just contacting random famous people. They were assembling the founding fathers of the very technology they were using to document the haunting. Yeah. So again, to me, this feels like a greatest hits album. The photographer shows up for the photography experiment. The inventor shows up for the machine invention experiment. But the most baffling piece of evidence here might be the Ruth films. We talked about this in, I guess it was part one or part two, but in November 1996, the group received rolls of film containing stanzas from a poem titled Ruth, originally written by William Wordsworth. But when the investigators analyzed the handwriting of the film, they didn't match it to William Wordsworth. But they found it bore a strong resemblance to Dorothy Wordsworth, his sister. Yeah, specifically it matched a page of amendments she wrote for William in preparation for an 1802 edition of his book. So we aren't just getting a famous poem, we're getting a specific obscure draft of it written in the hand of his own sister who edited it, which is a magic trick that truly defies explanation. It's right up there with David Blaine if it is a magic trick. It's such an obscure way of proving something to us mere mortals, a deep cut, really. And finally, we have the dragon film, which we also teased in part two. On January 17th, 1997, a roll of film appeared covered in hermetic symbols, a dragon, a serpent, and alchemical icons. It looked ancient, but it also looked very organic. It does. Yeah. It's kind of cool looking. If you watch the documentary that we have a link to in the page, but all together, it's a lot of evidence. I know it's a lot of famous names, but before we move into our final discussions here, I want to go back to one tiny slip up that happened near the very end, and it was during that final warning about the time probe. Yeah. It's important to note here who delivered this warning. It wasn't Patrick McKenna, the jovial Irish priest. It wasn't Manu the sage. It was an entity known as John Waugh, which I don't think we've talked about yet. Wasn't he a Star Wars character? I know. It doesn't. John Benoit. He's a Jedi. He was presented as a scientist, a specialist rather, and he didn't come through to tell jokes or give comfort. He usually showed up to explain the technicals. He was kind of like the server admin who told them the system was being hacked. Yeah, and because he was speaking technically, his words were usually very precise, but on this night in particular, he seemed to struggle with the description of the device that was supposedly attacking them. He said, and I quote, it is being generated by a crystalline bone, no, crystalline time probe. A crystalline bone, which is also a great band name, but what a bizarre slip of the tongue for a scientist, unless there are other things going on, which affect your lost in translation, shall we say, from one side to the other. Yes, exactly. It's both technological, but also biological, the bone part, both a machine and a living thing. And that one weird detail might be the key to understanding what was really waiting in the dark for them. Yeah, it flat out freaks me out, honestly. Like how in the hell did this being accidentally use the word bone in place of a word rooted in the idea of a crystal? I agree with your observation. Right, right, right. But it's, I don't know, it's kind of spooky. It's kind of spooky. Well, it's like, well, yeah, it's like the crystal skull, which a lot of people have pooh-poohed. Yeah. But there is something odd about that as well. And if you don't believe the Mitchell Hedges story, the legend of that, but there's something very mythical and mystical and metaphorical about the bone, you know, being part of the human, it's kind of like the crossed bones that you see and the symbolism there with the Masons and that it represents being born again. It's not like poison, but that's what we've come to think about it. Or the pirate flag, there's deeper meaning to it. So when you say crystalline bone, yeah, does it have something to do with our very existence? But could it imply that the technology is biological or somehow connected to the two and that the time probe isn't just a device of some kind, it may be a living thing, an entity. Folks, if you've been following the hot goss on UAP, UFOs, and NHI, more than a few researchers have suggested that the UAP we see in the sky may be living things or even purpose-built for each mission they undertake. I just saw a thing this week, Forrest. I don't know if you saw it. I can't remember if it was. I think I must have seen it on Reddit, which is the kind of only platform I'm even visiting anymore, but it suggested that maybe the grays are 3D printed. Yep, I've heard that. Yeah. So just like, I mean, I've heard that they were robots, but maybe they're printed and they're drones. They don't represent whatever intelligence is actually sending a mirror. Like it's not a direct relationship. Yeah, yeah. It's a drone itself, which makes all of this a particularly interesting slip up, the crystalline bone thing in the grand scheme of things. So we have the crystalline time probe warning. We have the interdimensional friend. But before we get completely lost in the sci-fi weeds of time travelers and alien faces, we have to do what we always do here on Astonishing Legends. We need to address the skeptical elephant in the room, which is an elephant that doesn't believe you have a peanut until it can actually see it. Well, yeah, because as much as we love the mystery, we always like to start out with the mundane explanations and the skeptical point of view on an Astonishing Legend like this one, and then go from there. So for option one of our possible explanations, let's start by looking at the mechanics of the investigation itself. And being perfectly candid here, the controls at Skoll have drawn a lot of heavy criticism from skeptics over the years. We read a great breakdown of this by Brian Dunning over at Skeptoid, whom we reference frequently because not only is he very measured in his assessments, he's also prolific as a result, kind of like Troy Taylor, who we always find good research from. Dunning has touched on a lot of the things we cover here. For him, this case has some massive red flags. Oh, really? First and foremost, though, I mean, that's his job is to find the red flags. So for him, the first flag was who was actually in charge of the experiment. The SPR scientists thought they were, but he felt in reality they ceded almost total control to the mediums. Well, yeah, because the mediums dictated that it had to be in total darkness. That's one. I get it. It sounds, I know it sounds, it's too perfect. Of course, it's a, it's an eye roll. I know, but those are the conditions you have to work within that timeframe of the, the rules. Well, like I said, I think this is an interesting explanation by the spirit team is like, yeah, you could ignore all that. You could do it in daylight. You could have a lot of machines running this and that, but you're not going to get results for maybe years and you're going to have to keep, it's going to take a lot longer. You have to keep, you're going to have to try harder to beat that path to the other side. So, uh, they said like, if you want results now and better results, uh, this is what you do. Yeah. But yeah. So I get that point of view who's really in control. But like I said, it's like, you're not going to get the, uh, the voices like you need the human element and those mediums, they also dictated that infrared cameras would harm the spirits. So no video gear was allowed. And remember those glowing Velcro wristbands we talked about in parts one and two. Yeah. We mentioned that the SPR brought their own to a few of those sessions or tried to tighten the ones the mediums were wearing. Yeah, they did. But Dunning points out, and then this is also backed up by investigator Alan Gould's critique in the actual Skoll report that the primary luminous armbands they relied on to track movement in the dark were designed, manufactured, and provided by the mediums themselves. And they were never subjected to independent testing, slipping out of restraints is essentially stage magic one-on-one, but that they'd have to do that in a way that none of the other four sitters noticed it happening. Couldn't hear it. Couldn't sense it, which seems unlikely, unless again, they were all in on it. And then here's the other thing I would say quickly. It's like, that's all you got. See, it's a minimal experiment. So you have to pick apart the elements you're dealt with. So you have a problem with the wristbands not being qualified. Yeah, and I guess it's possible all four of them perpetrated this hoax. But Dunning also pointed out a huge issue with the padlocked wooden box that Walter Schnitger used for the film experiments. And of course, I actually, at this point, I need to issue a correction here in part two. Oh, yeah, what is that? Well, in part two, I said that Schnitger built the special tamper-proof wooden box, but he didn't. According to the Skoll report, it was not provided by an independent scientific supplier. It was actually built by the medium, Alan Bennett, or his son. It was literally called the Allen box, and Schnitger just used it and put his own padlock on it. Okay, well, for any skeptic, that's a big red flag there, and that's understandable. You're essentially, I guess, letting the mediums build the trap you're supposed to be using to catch them. Yeah, and investigator Dr. Alan Gould later examined that box at the University of Nottingham and figured out exactly how it could be bypassed without ever picking Schnitger's padlock. The vulnerability was in the metal hasp attached to the lid. Okay, so explain how that would work. Okay, so this is a bit hard to visualize, folks, but we have links to books that have images of the box in them on our website and in the show notes, and I think you can see it in the documentary, too, that we have a link to, Dan Drazen's documentary. But long story short, Gould figured out that if you squeeze the hasp, you can push its right hand arm deeper into the right hand socket, which creates just enough clearance to swivel the left arm completely out, and then you can just pull the right one out, too. So the whole hasp detaches, the lid opens, you swap the film, and the padlock the whole time stays perfectly locked. Okay. So you're kind of opening it from the other side. Right, right, right. Another investigator timed this exploit. It took about 10 seconds to open and close it that way. Yes, but my question is, was it totally silent when you did that so that nobody could hear you fiddling around, right? So is that a planned design flaw to perpetuate a hoax or just an engineering mistake by novices? Well, the authors of the Skoll Report, Akeen, Allison, and Fontana, pointed out that proving it works in a well-lit lab in Nottingham is very different from pulling it off during a live seance in the skull hole, which is what they had personally endured or experienced. So here we have a classic case of this part of the experiment being debunked with the scientific examination happening under a completely different set of controls. And then when something new is discovered, insisting that it must have applied in the other environment of the skull hole as well, which is just as logically weak, I think, as the idea of the original miracle in the first place. Right. You can't reliably say X cancels out Y if X was undertaken under completely different conditions. Right, right, right. And remember, too, there were paint seals on the screw heads to prevent tampering. Though, to be fair, Gould noted his squeezing X point didn't actually fracture those paint seals initially. So again, it's something that they would have had to do over and over. Yeah. He's saying it didn't, the first time they were able to open it this secret way and it didn't mess those up, but over multiple times it did. Well, again, you're, it's a long ways to go for a gag. Yeah. Yeah. And if so, to what point? But, you know, even so here, you have to execute this two-handed maneuver, as I said, in pitch blackness, totally silent, making sure a dangling metal padlock doesn't clank against the wood. So imagine this in your head, you know, because then you have to put the hash back into its tight sockets, which the SPR authors noted is a very tricky maneuver to do, even in broad daylight. Yeah. They'd have to do all that without the investigators who are sitting inches away, seeing their luminous Velcro wristbands. So here we go. You have an additional trick now. You got to remove those wristbands with the Velcro silently. Ultimately, you got to do a 10 second box exploit or hacking, basically doing a magician substitution trick with a film that they snuck in, which you then, you know, previously had to manufacture somehow. And you have to keep in mind that they emptied their pockets before these sessions, right? And then you got to put it all back together perfectly in the dark. So a good trickster could still hide something, but it's not a walk in the park. Do you concur, sir? I concur. But let's look at what happened when the barriers were absolutely foolproof. Psychologist Richard Wiseman, a noted skeptic and specialist in the psychology of deception, actually provided the SPR investigators with his own highly secure fraud-proof bags made of opaque, triple-layered polytheor. Right. The Wiseman bags. Now, Brian Dunning over at Skeptoid claims that nothing ever appeared on the films in those bags, but to be totally fair and accurate to the Skoll report, that's not strictly true. They did get a couple of minor anomalies on the film, some star-like scanners and a small cog-shaped light. Yes, but the investigators themselves called those results unimpressive. So they said that themselves, but there was something there. And more importantly, the spirits suddenly started complaining. The entities, including Albert and Emily Bradshaw, claimed the three layers of plastic on those bags were a major obstacle and said, quote, this is why we had a negative result when faced with another layer. There you go. Okay. It's awfully convenient, right? Complaining Thomas A. Edison from the other side, griping about your bags. Well, look at it this way. I understand the feeling because let me put it this way. It's unimpressive and I've certainly produced, I think I've even showed you. And like when you don't, if we get an email or text and you send Scott or if it's Jill and Roger getting a response, like, yeah, it's unimpressive. I really have nothing to say to that. Or it's so weird. Nobody has any response to that. But generally, just quickly as an anecdote, the first time I think I went to Waverly with Jill, Roger, or I think James Willis was there and I was by myself in the death tunnel. And mind you, no electricity is operating in that area. Totally pitch black. I had my camera going and I took a bunch of iPhone photos and I was using the flash. I was using infrared and I took quite a few just pitch black to see if anything would illuminate. I couldn't see with my eyes, but I wondered if it could show up on the camera. Now, I didn't get anything unimpressive indeed, except for one still, one frame that was taken in pitch blackness and it's very tiny, but it caught my eye. And if you zoom in on it, it looks like a small red square that's illuminated. Now, that could be a glitch with the camera, right? That could be a pixel and, you know, it's like, it's going to be an impressive, right? It's just like a small dot. My point being is that that should not be there for a functioning camera. Yeah, yeah. Much is what I'm saying. Yeah, it's the stars and the, you know, the little, the cog shaped light, unimpressive, but should not be there. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Ever feel like your daily routine is a bit of a mystery? Kind of like the strange glass in the garbage disposal from today's episode? 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Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. Wow. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say, you can leverage what we did. We're happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process, because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things. To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com slash Smart Talks. Hi, I'm Jasmine, and when I'm not out hunting the beast up on me more, I'm listening to Astonishing Legends with Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess. And now let's get back to the show. I guess Wiseman himself was completely unswayed about all this. He summed up the whole experiment to Dunning in six words. It was a load of rubbish. Oh, dear. So if you look at it from that angle, maybe the SPR investigators are essentially, they're sitting in a stage show, blinded by the dark, experiencing intense confirmation bias because they wanted it to be real. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if I believe that with the investigators, but that's maybe. Here's where I see an irony that often pops up in that, it's my old saying, when you really try to force the rational explanation and it becomes so irrational that the irrational explanation seems more rational. Right, right. Jumble that how you will. But you know what I'm saying? It's just like you're really trying to force it to make sense. It's hard to jumble that. Yeah, and so the idea is that you're wanting it to be real so much, you actually create some kind of phenomena that also shouldn't happen, right? Yeah, because here's the counterpoint again. As we said earlier, they were investigated by a magician, James Webster, a member of the magic circle. He sat in on their sessions. He was adamant. He went on the record saying he couldn't see any magic props or anything that made him suspect hoaxing. And that as a professional magician, he couldn't replicate the phenomena himself. You know, Webster knows how illusions work. If Robin Foy was sneaking around the dark with the laser pointers, Webster should have caught him. Okay, that's, you can assume that. But more importantly, why do it? You know, this is my, what I was mentioning earlier. They didn't make any money. You weren't doing a magic show where you could sell tickets to. That would have been, if they could do that, that would have been time well spent. And in a real, like years of practicing this chicanery, there's no fame in it, really. I mean, how many people here? So a few people. And by the way, a shout out to the person in our Facebook group who was talking about the Skoll experiment, possibly as a suggestion for an upcoming topic. But I opened a tab, but this is a long time ago. So Scott will make fun of me. But it's been one of those tabs opened for a year and a half, two years. So finally we get to it. I can't do that. Trust me, it does with me too. But I just, I can't, I got to read these things. So think about it. It's a long ways to go for a gag with very little public notoriety. Is it James Patterson? No. It just doesn't fit the profile of a con to me. I agree. There is one thing I want to bring back up though. Yeah, I was wondering when we're going to talk about this. We have to circle back to Robin Foy's former profession, right? Yeah. There's one detail about Robin's background that we kind of glossed over, but in the context of a hoax, it definitely makes you think, or to me anyway. When you look at the four sitters, Alan Bennett was a carpenter. Diana Bennett and Sandra Foy were regular folks with no background in stage illusion. But Robin Foy, as we mentioned earlier in the series, former RAF pilot, which that establishes him as a credible technical guy, but his full-time career until 1992 was in the paper and printing trade. Specifically, he was a manager for an agency that sold paper from Finnish paper mills, Finnish the country, not Finnish as in Finnish line, to merchants and printers across the UK. Well, you could see, I guess, that changes the analysis of the most famous paper-apporting incident, dropping out of nowhere from the ceiling, this newspaper, in perfect condition. Yeah. Believers in the high strangeness of the Skoll experiment have spent a lot of time marveling at that pristine copy of the Daily Mail from 1944. We even said, how could anyone find a 50-year-old newsprint that hasn't yellowed? It's chemically impossible. Well, is it if you represent Finnish paper mills? Well, exactly. If you know how paper is made, you know about chemical brighteners, you know which mills produce uncoated mechanical wood pulp paper that mimics the wartime utility stock. And more importantly, you have the contacts to order a sample or maybe just get it surreptitiously printed. I suppose you have to recreate the entire paper of that day because that's in record, right? Yeah. Well, that's what this all says. Yeah, yeah. So, again, the miracle of the non-yellowed paper might be some kind of time travel miracle. It might be just a matter of knowing the right supplier, maybe. Maybe it's just a guy calling it about a favor with his industry connections to create the ultimate prop. But then other people would know about it, wouldn't they? That's right. You know, it was about more than just the paper stock, which everyone here needs to remember. It was also described as a fully accurate, complete recreation of a known issue of the papers, I was saying, right? You have to, you just can't, it's not one of the, remember those old novelty papers you could have yourself as the headline? Yes. And it had a fake copy. And then I do this, I'm that kind of a film nerd. I'll freeze frame a shot of a newspaper in a film I liked to read the other columns. Yes. Because somebody had to come up with that. Oh, yeah, I do that too. I do that too. It's so nerdy. I do that too. I was trying to see what the prop department came up with. Most of the time I know, because my wife worked in television, most of the time it's names of writers on the show or the movie or somebody's kids or whatever, you know. Just quickly, and I'll put this out to the AL Army, there was a weird thing that happened. And I thought it was somebody who worked on the props for a very old AT&T commercial from the 90s, let's say the mid-90s. And it was their new caller ID. I was assistant editor on a bunch of those. Okay, I think I've asked you about this because it, and I would have thought I was imagining things. A ton of them. But this comes up in an old AT&T commercial, and it was advertising their new caller ID feature, which you could pay for, and came with some of their phones. And, you know, in the commercial, when they're demonstrating it, the name that comes up in the caller ID, I swear, said Forrest Burgess. Oh, yeah, that's right. I think we've talked about that on the show before. I know Forrest Burgess is a hugely popular name these days, and there's so many people with it. But back then in the mid-90s, it was like, okay, that's a little specific. And then I thought, again, I thought it was, I saw it a bunch of times, like, yeah, I think I did see that. And then my dad, with the same name, said, hey, son, did you see that commercial? They're like, yous ought to. Anyway, it's just like, so somebody who worked on the commercial, either it's just totally random, or somebody knows you. Now, those things can happen. So in the case of this newspaper, the point we're making here is that you can't just make something up. It has to be completely accurate. And maybe you could say, oh, there's some kind of photocopying thing. Yeah, the whole paper, but maybe there's some typesetting thing, a trick you could do at a great expense and time and effort. But remember, they verified that themselves, okay? So even if you had the paper, as well as the printers, you're re-typesetting and printing the entire thing in some method that could fool everybody. Probably in equipment designed to create thousands of copies, like a Heidelberg press. And again, we mentioned it earlier. They're phenomenal. But like, you'd have to have some kind of offset printing machine like that or access to one. But you're just trying to make one paper, right? So you don't need thousands of copies. I don't know if you've ever tried to do a small mechanical job on gear made to work in vast quantities, but it's not easy. Yeah, and even if you argue the paper was a hoax, just a custom print job pulled off by a paper expert pulling some strings, that still doesn't explain the lights entering the bodies or the voices recording on the tape deck with no microphone. There were a lot of things going on here. And the physical evidence takes a little bit of a hit, but the phenomena itself overall remains unexplained, in my opinion. Right, it's a compelling argument, but if it wasn't a conscious hoax, then what was it? This brings us to option two, group mind, super ESP and tulpas. We've talked about the Philip experiment from the 1970s, which we did a two-part series on in March of 2023. Now, that Toronto group invented a ghost. They gave them a backstory and then successfully got a table to levitate and wrap out answers to their questions. They seemingly prove that a focused group of people can generate physical phenomena just through belief and expectation. And there's a highly controversial scientific theory that takes this idea even further. It's called morphic resonance. And this was proposed by the biologist, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Now, we have to state up front, mainstream science hates this theory. So does Wikipedia, apparently, yes. Yeah, yeah. John Maddox, the former editor of the journal Nature, famously wrote that Sheldrake's book was a, quote, book for burning. Oh, now who wants to burn books, okay? Yeah. Magic instead of science and heresy. So a grain of salt here. But Sheldrake proposes that nature is habitual. All right. So he suggests that there are morphic fields, Dr. Sheldrake. Invisible organizing structures and that the self-organizing systems inherit a collective memory from similar systems in the past. We were just talking about that, the memory that's in the DNA. That's right. Right? And it's just like if a cell can have that kind of memory. I think that was on a dead letter office. Oh, that's right. Yes, that's right. It's all bled together. But yeah, we were talking about that. And essentially, okay, so the idea is basically if a bunch of people do something a certain way for a long time, it becomes easier for people in the future to do that exact same thing, even without direct communication. It's a wild talent, as Charles Hoy Ford might say. Yes, our supernatural godfather. Yeah. So apply that to Skull. You have a group of people sitting in a dark cellar recreating the exact same Victorian seance conditions that thousands of spiritualists used over a century ago. Well, according to Sheldrake's theory, the Skull group might have tapped into the morphic field of the classic sayings. They weren't talking to Thomas Edison or Louis Daguerre. Their collective subconscious was drawing on the habit of spiritualism to generate these physical anomalies. It's kind of a fascinating concept, actually. The phenomena is real. Right. But the source of the phenomena is us. It's the living, echoing the past. Oh, yeah. That's also shouldn't happen, right? I mean, that sounds way out. It's still pretty wild. Yeah, no, you're getting, again, we're talking about the Watsika Wonder and Laurency Venom. And that, again, this is also just fascinating. But she's not actually channeling a spirit from the past. She's reading people's minds and creating this dialogue that's kind of made up. But she's also reading minds. That shouldn't happen. Yeah. So, you know what I'm saying? Like, that's also way out there. But what if the source is external? What if it's option three? The trickster element. We see this everywhere, including two series we've already covered on the show before. The Vertical Plane, which we mentioned. Ken Webster here thinks he's talking to a 16th century man. But then this entity, person, spirit, or group called 2109-2109 shows up to manipulate the whole thing. In Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, Joe Fisher's soulmate turns out to be a deceptive entity feeding on his emotional energy. Yeah, maybe the Skull spirit team feels almost too perfectly tailored. The SPR investigates, so the founder of the SPR shows up, Frederick Myers. They do photography, so the inventor of the daguerreotype shows up. But you know who I couldn't believe didn't show up, Forrest? Harry Houdini. Exactly. That might have been a joke. But, I mean, think about it. Houdini spent his life debunking mediums. He promised his wife, Bess, he'd send a code word from the other side if it was possible. If any spirit had the ego and the drive to push through the Skull portal, it was Houdini. But he was no show in this situation. So, here we are again. Magicians always show up for this stuff. And to be clear, I love, love, love, love magic. You and I both do it. Oh, sure. But I also think when magicians figure out how to trick people, a lot of them, they think that almost anything that is unbelievable must be a trick. Yeah, it goes with a Freud quote, which I loved. And so, if it can't be believed, and this is also what I love too, is that people changing their tune once they've gone to the other side. Just quickly, we talked about this before, about performing tricks and messages from the other side. And Houdini makes me think of, speaking of other famous Forrests, how many folks out there remember Forrest Ackerman? He was a science fiction pioneer, but also a staunch atheist. But he had a lot to do with special effects in early sci-fi movies and stop motion and all that. He was terrific. But there is documentation of him coming back from the afterlife to leave a message or communicate in the documentary, The Life After Death Project. And an atheist in heaven, because he was a staunch atheist. But he said, if I can do it, I'll come back. Oh, that's right. I forgot. Yeah. So, Ackerman, he promised his friends he would try to send a message if he was wrong about what it's like life after death. Right. And so, researcher Paul Davids did get some interesting phenomenon that they attribute to possibly Forrest J. Ackerman. Things like, you know, physical phenomenon, weird synchronicities like a capture code, YouTube, like a voice on a disconnected computer. Right. So, he's generating capture code, YouTube voice, just things involving spiders and as signs. So, that just reminded me of Houdini. Like somebody said, I don't believe any of this stuff, but if it's true, I'll come back and I'll let you know. So, anyway, getting back, all this stuff here about, you know, if it's unbelievable, it's got to be a trick. Like, this precludes the idea of paranormal, right, or anything supernatural happening ever existing. Yeah, which I think is short-sighted as a worldview. I mean, there's been no shortage of hoaxes throughout history, for sure, in the paranormal and every other kind of realm. Right. But does that mean that every single thing we can't figure out is just a human trick? A stupid human trick. That we don't know the secret to yet. Because there is a variation of this trickster theory that flips the script entirely. And this is me. You've got to bear with me here. Work with me here. What if the spirits are the magicians? I like that idea. But what do you mean exactly? You know, they're putting on some kind of show. Yeah. Think about it. If you're a consciousness in another dimension trying to prove you exist to a bunch of 20th century humans, you have to create miracles. But you have to do it while being constrained, theoretically, by the physical rules of the reality on our side of the equation. You need a dark room. Right. You need the electrical energy of the mediums as your battery. So they use this classic seance setup as their stage and they perform tricks. But here's one of the bigger tricks in the bag. How do you pull off the aportation? Because if it's a trick, how do they get a pristine 1944 edition newspaper to drop from the ceiling without a human co-conspirator sneaking it into the room? See, now we're talking about you actually printing it. They're snagging it from somewhere. Yeah, they're snagging it from somewhere. Well, I would posit that's because their magic isn't sleight of hand. It's just a higher dimensional physics. We don't understand it. Right, right. So to us, pulling a 1944 newspaper out of the ether looks like a magic trick. To them, it might just be reaching into a different file cabinet in the timeline and pulling it out. But still, what I'm saying is there's a rule maybe. Maybe they're constrained by the language of magic that works in our realm, even if there's parts of it we don't understand, to get our attention. They can't show you all the beauty and amazing things of the other side, if that's where they are, because we're not there. We can't perceive that. We're not there. They can perceive downward to us. And this goes back to my favorite book of all time, which is the most expensive, rarest book that I have in my puny collection compared to Richard Haddam. But it is Flatland, which I haven't heard from the first edition of. And that's the whole thing, when all the beings are living on the flat plane, and there's a flat triangle or a flat square on the plane, in the plane, everybody looks like a line. Above the plane, where a sphere is floating, it can see the triangle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when it passes through the plane, it too becomes a line. It can never be a sphere on the plane, because the plane is one-dimensional. So it's that same kind of thing. Yes. If the sphere wants to teach the thing, the triangle and the square living on the plane, a magic trick, or prove something to them, it still is constrained by the fact that they live in a plane. And I mean, a flat, not a plane. Right, right, right, right. Like a piece of paper. But that's what is explained to the Skull team during the sessions, is that we're constrained by our 3D world, as we mentioned earlier. Yes, exactly. And you will not see it. Not only will you not see it, you will not understand it or be able to. Because our minds don't work in the fourth dimension, kind of like contact. It's like Venusians or Vesuvians, whatever. Yes. They think in a multidimensional level, where we're thinking 2D pencil on paper, they're thinking in a cube. And so things are moving, because that's the elegant, clever way to do that. Ideas are moving on several different levels at once. It's Francis Bacon's code. There's two layers to the code of meaning. That's the genius of it. But I will say, if we ever cover this one day, I do want to cover Dr. Alexander Cannon. And what he claimed is that there are people who are alive on this earth who can do that, who can A-port materials. And famously, I think just quickly, he and a traveling companion were in the Himalayas, and they came across a yogi just sitting on the road on a blanket. And he invited them to lunch. And it's like, well, he doesn't look like he has any food. And they sat with him, and he says, I like you guys. And he managed to pull fruit or manifest fruit out of thin air. And they were astonished. And it's just like, look, if this guy can learn how to do that, you can too. It's just you need the right teacher, and you need to practice. These things must be practiced. There you go. Okay. So anyway, getting back to what we're talking about, skeptics did not solve this case. And ultimately, it wasn't the SPR or the magicians that shut the Skoll experiment down. It was the phenomenon itself. Which brings us to the end. The crystalline time probe. The interdimensional intruder. Whether you believe Skoll was a brilliant paper salesman's hoax, a morphic resonance feedback loop, or a genuine bridge to the unknown, it ended with a terrifying warning. And that brings us to the part of the story that I think is the most chilling. The warning itself. Whatever this thing is, that's meddling with the communication bridge they've built in the Skoll hole. And remember this quote, his motives are not entirely benevolent. Yeah, well, I mean, first thing, his motives, in quotes. So theoretically, this always fascinates me, too. We're dealing with not only some type of binary presence, in the way that we use that word today, but a male one. Right. And this whole, like, not entirely benevolent thing changes the whole vibe. We went from love and night to intruder alert, like, in a heartbeat. Yeah, it actually reminds me a little of a concept from science fiction called the dark forest theory. And it comes from, now, I don't, not real versed in this, but I just know it comes from the novels by the legendary Chinese science fiction novelist, Lo Cixin, which I'm mangling. I know that I apologize. I said it better than I could. Okay, yeah. I've been reading his name forever because he wrote the three-body problem. Like, I've seen his name a thousand times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never tried to say it out loud. You did a very good job. Oh, okay. Anyway, he won a Hugo Award. That's pretty big. So, his dark forest theory idea is that the universe is a dark forest full of silent predators. Getting to what I'm talking about earlier about astral travel, there's good intended people, some beings, and there's some that are neutral, and then some that they want to hurt you. And the reason we haven't heard from them isn't because they aren't there, it's because they're staying quiet to avoid getting eaten. Yeah, I was actually talking to Emily about this as we were researching this episode, and she was like, well, it makes sense. I mean, we hardly ever see coyotes, but they're everywhere. Unless you've got your ring cam, which, by the way, a ring cam in my neighborhood caught some coyotes just the other night. Yeah, you lived in the valley away from the park. Yeah, in California, too. Right, so the San Fernando Valley. They're everywhere, though, but now I'm in North Carolina. They're here, and when I'm down at the beach, they're down there, too. I know. But you don't see them that much. Well, you did in my neighborhood, in Los Feliz, you think you wouldn't, but I've seen as much wildlife there, weirdly, in the urban L.A. setting as I've seen out in the woods anywhere. And the thing is, they're running down the street. Well, that's because in L.A., they don't have anywhere to hide. It's all concrete. Well, they're coming down out of Griffith Park, for one. Also, people, it's like folks don't interact with them the way they should. As wildlife biologists would have them, like this one lady was leaving out pans of lasagna for coyotes. And it's like, don't do that. That's not good for them. I know you're trying to help, but that is not good for them. And so here, we're having something from the other side messing with it, and also the idea about it. And when you talk about not having the best of intentions, again, I go back to The Vertical Plane, the book by Ken Webster, and that entity in 2109, where, again, the theory was that this is a part of a time experiment conducted by 2109 or their compatriots. Right. It's some kind of special purpose. It's the same thing. Where they had to be fulfilled, and then they were arguing with each other, which is, I thought, hilarious and maybe dangerous. But this is something that came from, you know, I don't know if 2109 is one big time nerd from the future, or, again, it sounded like computer nerds arguing with each other. But they were bickering, and what was relayed to the humans in this timeline was, quote, you have your goodly purpose, and we have our goodly purpose. So you're not going to get what we're about. So butt out. You know what it begs the question is if there's, like, huge quantities of these things waiting around for somebody on our end to open a door, to open a window. Yeah, exactly. And, like, they're just waiting and looking all the time, and that's maybe what happened here, because in this analogy, the Skull experiment was a bunch of people standing in the middle of that dark forest, lighting a massive bonfire and screaming, hey, come on over. Let's play Twister. You're going to, yes, new Twister, and you're going to get chafed. Oh, Lord. Okay, so let's- Children listen to this show, Forrest. So after five years, hundreds of sittings, and hours of tape, we end exactly where we began, in the dark. I suppose we do. And looking back at the entirety of the Skull experiment, it feels like we witnessed something that pushed the boundaries of what we consider possible. We started out with Victorian ghosts and ended up looking at extraterrestrial faces and time probes, which sounds like it's like a worm, like a computer worm, or something you set to go, and it has its own purpose. It's like AI. It has its own purpose and figures out its own way to do that. Yeah. But you let it loose, and it can cause havoc. Yeah. Or like the crawlers in Minority Report. They just, they go seek, and they destroy or find or whatever. Yes. But all this really highlights something we've been circling for years on this show, the Grand Unified Theory of the Paranormal. Oh, the gut pee. It's back. Wait, you came up with that name, right? Or did you get it from someone else, the Grand Unified Theory? No. Well, I started thinking about the concept, and then I, you know, you see it somewhere. It's like, look, it's every quote we mention. When you really get, like, quote investigator involved. Yeah. Or you really start researching, it's like, well, they didn't exactly say it this way. Yeah, yeah. There was something, the idea was mentioned in this very ancient text. Yeah. And then somebody rephrased it, and then someone's version of it stuck. Yes. So I will not take credit for it. But I was thinking, early on when we were like, well, what's, again, I always say this. What are the patterns here? What are the mechanics? What can we glean from this that makes sense to us? Yeah. And it's like, is this all, again, is this all connected? Well, the overarching idea here is that everything we experience as paranormal or supernatural, whether it's cryptids, walking through the woods, UFOs in the sky, or ghosts wrapping on a table in the cellar in Norfolk, maybe it's all coming from the exact same place. Right. That was at the end of the Sopranos series, which was great, where he's talking to a, I think it was a physicist or engineer, and he was saying like, you know, everything is everything. We're all made of the same stuff. We just happen to take these shapes. Yeah. It's all manifestations of one single unknown source. And we label them ghosts or aliens based on our own cultural expectations, but the source is the same. It's the universal oneness, the source. Yeah. We just don't have the sensory equipment or the physics to understand what it actually is yet. Yeah. And it's interesting because usually when we cover these phenomena on the show, whether it's the Patterson-Gimlin film or the Bat Sphere or the Somerton Man, we're left with a cold case where the trail actually goes cold. The evidence disappears. Right. But with Skoll, the evidence is still here. The Society published the Skoll Report. We have the films. We have the audio of the germanium receptor. We have firsthand accounts of the investigators. The bridge may be closed, but the blueprints are still out there. Which begs the question, will someone else try to build it again? And if they do, will they get Manu and Patrick McKenna or will they get the interdimensional intruder? Yeah. Maybe there's a reason the paranormal is so elusive. You have to earn the answer. Yeah. And we always want clear pictures. We want clear voices and undeniable proof and repeatable experiments. But maybe there is a safety mechanism built into the universe. Whenever we get too close to the truth, something pulls the plug. The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself. Heraclitus. I like that. Yes. The ancient Greek philosopher. He's the guy famous for saying you can never step in the same river twice. Also quite a pondering, a navel gazing. You know, he believed that the universe is in a constant state of flux and that its true underlying reality is intentionally hidden from our ordinary senses. Oh, that's very cool. That's very cool. It is. And Skoll might be the ultimate example of that. It's the phenomenon revealing itself just enough to hook us, just enough to make us look. And then it pulls the rug out from under us. The concealing itself aspect right before we can catch it. Yeah, like pretty much every damn astonishing legend we've ever covered or- That is true. Yeah. Maybe it conceals itself because the mystery is the point. I mean, if the Skoll experiment gave us definitive, undeniable, global proof of life after death or of interdimensional time travelers, it wouldn't just change science. It would break the human experience. If we know exactly what comes next, what happens to the meaning of the life we're living right now? Maybe we're supposed to sit in the dark and wonder. Maybe we need the mystery to keep searching. Well, whether Robin Foy and the Skoll group truly reached across the void or whether they just created an incredibly elaborate illusion is ultimately up to you to decide. But either way, they proved one thing. The human desire to connect with what lies beyond is powerful enough to make the impossible feel real. That's going to wrap up episode 324 of Astonishing Legends. The main show is off next week, but we'll be back on March 7th with a new episode. In the meanwhile, 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. Okay. Astonishing Legends. Hi, I'm Sophie. Hi, I'm Jasmine. B-O-B-W-A-L-L-A-S-S. And I give permission to Astonishing Legends to use my voice however they see fit. Galaxy-wide in perpetuity. I'm listening to Astonishing Legends. Until death do we part. Salud. 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. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. 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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. Quantum. 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's always there. Download the app at your app store or hhc247.org. Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, our programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Ever feel like your daily routine is a bit of a mystery? Kind of like the strange glass in the garbage disposal from today's episode? Life can get weird, and meal planning doesn't have to add to the confusion. Marley Spoon makes it simple to eat well, no matter how busy things get. With over 100 recipes each week, you can pick comforting classics or try something new. All made with fresh, quality ingredients. Some days you want to cook from scratch. Other days you just need something quick and tasty. Marley Spoon adapts to your schedule and your cravings, so you always have a good meal ready. Go to MarleySpoon.com slash offer slash pod45 for 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's right, 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's MarleySpoon.com slash offer slash P-O-D-4-5. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna, and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business? My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today, with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. Wow. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say, you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process, because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things. To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com slash Smart Talks. 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. Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, our programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. 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. Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, our programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. By the time I hit my 50s, I'd learned a few things. Like how family is precious. Work can always wait. And 99% of people over 50 already have the virus that causes shingles. Not everyone at risk will develop it, but I did. 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