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Man. Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrie back with Dan Shreiver as we are talking about his strange book called The Theory of Everything Else. Dan, as you were compiling the stories, which ones were some of the strangest outlandish ones to you?
Ooh, there's many different kinds of that landish in the theory world. Interesting one I wonder if you'd heard about this is the inventor of PCR, Carry Mullis. Do you know about his story.
I don't know that story now.
So Carry Mullis single handedly invented PCR, which, certainly in the UK the PCR test during the pandemic is what everyone was taking to tell you if you had corona and would.
Keep you at home.
And so it's an invention that has changed the world both for forensic police use it for DNA testing now to give them an accuracy unlike any other time in history.
Archaeology uses it as.
Well for diagnosing whose bones might be the person. It's really a game changer in chemistry. And then it was used during this pandemic and the same year that he invented. The PCR test is the exact same year that he claimed that when he was going to the toilet one night to his outhouse, walking down in the dark of the flashlight, that he was confronted with a glowing English speaking raccoon who then abducts him, he believes, into a
spaceship and he went missing for four hours. He remembers waking up.
It was dawn.
He's on a completely different road. He hasn't got his flashlight, and he looks down. There's nothing on his body to suggest that he's fallen asleep into the There's no jew there's no mud on him whatsoever. And it's this mystery that sticks with him for the rest of his life.
And he was serious, right, yeah, and he and you know, it's the curiosity that made him continue to look for an English speaking raccoon that allowed for h him to invent PCR, because when he had the idea for PCR, everyone told him he was crazy.
They thought this is.
Not going to work at all, and he didn't listen to them, and he stuck to it and he eventually came to inventing it. But the raccoon thing is really interesting because years later he was in a bookshop and he saw Whitley Strieber's book Communion, and something spoke to him about it, and he brought it home and he thought the story was a bit similar because I think Whitley had a thing where some owls came to him. Yeah,
kind of similar animal based thing. And he's at home reading the book when he gets a call from his daughter. This is Carrie Molliss's daughter, and this is something like a decade later, I think from the incident.
And she says, Dad, you've got to read this book.
It's incredible. It's called Communion by Whitley Strieber. And he can't believe the coincidence of that. He's literally they're reading it in his house. He says, no, why you reading it? And she said, I haven't told you about this, but I had the weirdest experience at your house. I was at your house, this this country house, which is where he had the raccoon incident, and I was going to
the toilet at night and it just disappeared. And my fiance spent the like four to five hours looking for me, and he found me random road four or five hours later. He's got goosebumps. He's thinking, this is exactly the same story. So he says to it, did you buy any chance talk towards glowing raccoon? And she said, no, what are
you crazy? But the story is exactly the same. So that was one of the more interesting ones because this is a Nobel Prize winner who invented PCR yet absolutely had a moment that stuck with him for the rest of his life that he continued.
To look for what percent of the stories in the book, Dan, do you think are true? What percent or not you.
It's it's hard to tell the theories themselves. I've picked ones that we haven't been able to difit inenttively say whether or not they are true. If I'm talking about aliens, you know, there's the that's down to the reader to decide whether or not they believe that we're being visited
by aliens. What I'm more interested in is how his belief in aliens shape the world and in what ways have we sort of advanced as a result of people thinking and who who are the secret believers that I didn't know about?
Like I opened my.
Chapter on aliens with Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth's husband. Both them passed away now, but he was a huge believer and he basically ran an exiled unit in Buckingham Palace. He had monthly subscriptions to Flying Saucer Review. He had an equerry who's a right hand person who went out to look and meets up with someone who was supposedly
a humanoid extraterrestrial that was living in West London. He used to bring RAF pilots into Buckingham Palace who had seen UFOs while they were flying their planes and get them to give first hand accounts. So somewhere in Buckingham Palace there are pages of pages of first hand accounts of UFO encounters. So they're sitting in the Royal Archives that have not yet been released. And he had that because of his uncle, Lord mount Batson, who also wrote
UFO firsthand accounts. There was a farmer who was working or a bricklayer working on his land who claimed to have seen a UFO land and Lord mount Batson took this down as an account. He had his own serio
as to what UFOs were. He thought that UFOs didn't have sentient humans inside, but the UFOs of shelves were sentient, and that they would live on a planet of UFOs, and the way that they would have children was to bump into each other really sharply, knock off a chip of the ufo and that would grow into a new ufo. So there was all these theories going on within the royal family that I just had no idea about. And I found all that stuff quite fascinating.
How did you find these stories?
Well, they're all out there. They're just as I say, like in the footnotes or there. Because you know, when you're reading a biography on Prince Philip, you don't really come across that story much. Again, everyone wants to sweep this stuff under the carpet, but everyone has it. It's all there, And I sometimes think the theory is, as you say, it's kind of just a great dinner party chat. Marconi, who invented the radio, or at least has a great
claim to inventing radio. So the very fact you and I can talk across the planet right now is down to this guy.
Oh, I was with him when he invented it.
By the way, Oh well there you go.
Okay, that's how far back I go. Danny.
He had this wonderful idea, which is he had a theory that sound never dies, never goes away. Once I've said these words, They're going to hang here on Earth forever. They just get softer and softer and softer and softer until the point that we can't hear them. So his big dream before he passed away was to invent a machine that could detect sound so sensitive that he could find Jesus' soman on the mount.
Wow.
I just love that.
All sound is still here, that we could find everything. So it's things like that. All these theories, they're more outlandish because they're attached to someone who you wouldn't expect to have these ideas.
And some of them are kind of strange and wacky, like the raccoon person.
Exactly, or or like John C.
Lilly. Do you know about John C. Lily?
Tell me about that one.
John C.
Lily was a scientist who was attempting to cross the species barrier with communication and try to teach Doltans to speak English. In fact, he was so respected within the scientific community at the very beginning of his career that he was given funding by NASA as part of this project, where his dream was to create a language adulten who could speak English. So fluently that it could be given a chair at the United Nations to speak on behalf of all marine mammals. That was his was his plan,
and that's what they were funding. And he built this house on the coast of America which he had flooded, where he had lots of dolphin experiments. And in the house you would have the dining room where the water would be flooded up to the seat of a chair if you were having your dinner, so dolphins could brush past you and you could have communal.
Dinners and lunches and breakfasts.
He tried to invent a car that was a flooded car, so that dolphins could be driving next to you on the street in a water filled car, going to work or wherever they were going. And these ideas were taken so seriously that at the very first ever meeting of what became SETI Exterterrestrial Intelligence, where Carl Sagan was and Frank Drake and all these other sciences, he was part of the group of twelve people that were invited to this and gave the opening lecture because they believed he
was the closest person to having contact with aliens. Because if dolphins were another intelligence that had risen on Earth independent of us. Then if we could communicate with them, maybe that would teach us about communicating with the universe. So and then he kind of went off into psychedelics and became very much part of the counterculture with Timothy Leary and all that sort of stuff. In his career.
No longer was taken serious after that point, But to begin with, this guy looked like he was going to change the world.
What were some of your favorite stories in the book.
Dan, Wow, God, there are so many.
I really love the fact that the Beatles basically have their drumming style, down to the fact that Ringo Starr when he was a kid, had received multiple exorcisms from his grandmother because she believed he was possessed by the devil. And so how that plays out is she was known as the Voodoo Queen of Liverpool. She was this lady who would go around giving all sorts of different medicines that she'd created, and she thought Ringo, because he was left handed, must have the devil in him, and a
lot of people believed it was. Back in the day, if you were left handed, schools here used to beat kids into becoming right handed, and so she did all these exorcisms on him as a child to get rid of it, and it worked and he became right handed. And to this day, Ringo still writes with his right hand. And when he started learning to drum, he was a right handed drummer, so he had a right handed drum kit.
But then as he grew older and left his grandmother, he slowly started favoring the left hand again and would lead with his left hand, but he never changed to drum kit. He always stayed on a right handed drum kit. But what it means is that when he needs to get to all the drums are on the right side of him. Instead of his easy path with the right hand that leads the way, his left hand needs to go underneath his right hand and lead the way that way.
And that little microsecond that it takes for him to get to the drums gives the Beatles what is known as the kind of the sloppy sound of the Beatles, this really impossibly.
Hard drum beat to replicate.
Peele like Dave Grohl will be in the studio with Foo Fighters Go give me more Ringo when they're doing the drums, which means loosen up and give it a bit more feel to it. And that's all because of the voodoo Queen of Liverpool gave the Beatles their sound.
What's the story about office plants investigating a murder case?
Well this is This is also a really fascinating period because it's sort of you know, King Charles of England talked to his plants. You know, any time he goes to a plant ceremony where a new tree has been planted, he'll always shake a leaf and say have a good life before leaving.
Like shaking somebody's hand.
Exactly, he's good on you, well done, have a good life. You know that's he shakes their head, but it's the leaf and he does it most sincerely and it's all rarely down to this guy in the nineteen sixties seventies in New York called Cleeve Baxter, Remember those in that book The Secret Life of Plants was a massive book New York Times stuff sell were back in the day. Cleeve Baxter was a polygraph experts for the CIA, and he had his own unit in America when My Detectors
first became a thing. He was the guy who was sort of leading the way in teaching it and getting the message out there. And one night in his office he attaches one of the polygraph pieces to a plant and discovers that it gives a reaction, and it started giving reactions whenever he was thinking thoughts like threats, I might burn this plant, and suddenly the reaction on the polygraph goes as if it's as if the human has been attached to it, and he thinks, my goodness, it
can understand me. So he starts experimenting in really interesting ways to try and work out what the application is of this, if it is true that plants and humans can communicate. And one test that he does is he gets six random students from his life detecting unit to come into a room and pick a name out of the hat and all the pieces of paper blank except one, and one piece of paper that does have words on it says murderer. And the job then of that person
is to go into a room. And all of them had to individually go into this room, but no one knew who had this murderer card. And inside that room were two pop plants, office plants, and he had to go in, rip out one of the plants and stamp on it and murder.
It basically in front of the other plant.
In front of the other plant. So then what then happens is effectively a police lineup.
All six are brought into the room and the job of.
The plant is to pick out who the murderer is.
And according to clean.
Acxer, it successfully did it picked out who the murderer was. So he thinks, oh my goodness, I've got a whole new police unit potential here because plants are everywhere.
He was called in to do it.
Into New Jersey there was a murder and a factory and the police were there and they.
Needed him to come in to do my detecting.
And so he came in and he said to them, were there any witnesses to the crime. They said, no, no, we've got no one. And he looked around the room where the murder happened and he said, well, I think you'll find there was a witness to the murder because look in the corner, you've got a pop plant there. And so he had everyone from the factory come and parade past the plant to see if they were the murder murderer. That gave a reaction and it didn't give
a reaction. But then later it was discovered that the murderer was not a worker at the factory, so it was never a person was never presented in front.
Of the plant.
But his dream that he kind of did throughout his career was he he thought, why send astronauts into space if we can have this kind of telekinesis thing with plants. We can send plants, We can send mimosas into space, and they can do our deep space travel for us and report back to us if we've got fights going on in jungles. We've got agents all over the jungle. We can get reports back from oak trees and all
sorts of other plants. And so he's this guy who had this big vision for how we could communicate with plants, and again nothing came to it, except for the fact that when you talk to your trees these days, or your plants at home, it's largely down to Cleave Baxter.
He was onto something there too, I think, Dan, well, look.
At the whole thing that's going on now with the wood Wide Web as they call it, the Secret Internet that turns out the mic helium networks and playing with I mean the fact that it's Basically, it's a functioning Internet almost down there. They do online shopping, basically, they
do cyber bullying. The amount of odd intelligence that's been going on underneath that we're only just discovering is a real eye opener, and I agree it sort of suggests that maybe Cleve was onto something more than he's been given credit for.
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