Season 06 Episode 29: Mobius Stripped

watch them work. The boy's father, doctor Abe Schwartz, was an anesthesiologist and that morning, had been tasked with helping to put a teenage girl to sleep for a routine operation. His son, Stephan, was given the simple instructions to sit behind him, stay quiet, and not touch anything. It might seem a strange thing for a twelve year old boy to do on a Saturday morning, but Stephen was an unusual boy with an irreligious and analytical mind fostered by

his atheistic parents. All seemed to be going well when all of a sudden, the medical staff became gravely concerned and began to hurry around the girl. Her heart had stopped. Stephan stared widely as they quickly pulled off the girl's gown and began steadily administering c p R. Despite what we might see on film and TV, cardio pulmonary resuscitation is very rarely successful. Thankfully, however, this patient was one

of the lucky ones. Having come round, there was no chance of completing the operation, and so Stephan's father accompanied her as he was wheeled off to an adjoining room to recover, while Stephen was instructed to go and change. Later, having disrobed and showered, Stephen was waiting for his father in the staff room when Abe came out of the

shower with a strange look on his face. Soon after, as Stephen and his father drove into town for their regular post operation ritual, a get together with Abe's colleagues at the local delicatessen, it was clear that something was troubling his father. It was only when they were seated at the delicatessen that Abe finally began to unburden himself. As Abe explained to his colleagues, shortly after the girl had come round, she began to speak to him about

an unusual experience she just had. She claimed that while she was under sedation, she suddenly found herself floating above her body, which she could clearly see stretched out on the operating table below her. But when she tried to call out to the medical staff, nobody seemed to see or hear her. I'm sure what to do. She made herself drift out into the hallway, where she then claimed to have seen a doctor in a blue and white shirt with a loosened tie around his neck talking to

a nurse. The young girl went on to describe the nurse in great detail, including a very specific hairstyle that she wore, which the teenager had greatly admired. Then all of a sudden, the girl was back in her own body, staring at the ceiling and gasping for air as a team of doctors stared down at her from above. Abe, not want to believe even such things as near death experiences, paused for a moment, a little unsure of what he was about to say next, while the other doctors listened

with abated breath. Then Abe continued, Having dismissed the whole thing as some kind of fever dream, He politely said goodbye to the girl, then stepped into the hallway and stopped suddenly in his tracks. There standing before him was a junior male doctor in a blue and white striped shirt with a somewhat disheveled looking tie around his neck, while only meters away from him was a female nurse with a rather elaborate hairstyle, exact in every detail as

the teenage patient had described it incredibly. After hearing the story, the other doctors present, many of whom, like Abe were World War Two veterans, began to relate similar stories. Each had had a patient who'd clinically died or been on the point of death, only to be revived time and

time again. Some of the revived patients related how they believed they were able to see around them shortly after they'd lost bodily consciousness, with each of them saying it had felt as though they were very much still present and aware, as though they had been fully conscious. The twelve year old Stephen could only sit silently, soaking it all in. How could some one be dead, he thought, yet still be conscious. It didn't make any sense you're

listening to unexplained and Richard McClean smith. The surrounding desert was mostly featureless and scorching in the full heat of mid afternoon. As an Egyptian archeologist and his assistant watched on from the shade of some nearby trees. Two men were wandering seemingly aimlessly back and forth across the dusty terrain, as a camera crew followed close behind. On the ground, and all around them, the weathered walls of an ancient settlement could be seen jutting up through the sand, the

ruins of the ancient Egyptian port city of Maria. The city was located around forty kilometers southwest of modern day Alexandria on Egypt's north coast, and it's thought to have last been populated sometime in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. The two men were George McMullen, a middle aged Canadian who, with his wavy, graying hair, ordinarily spent his week days working at a Chrysler dealership in Canada, and the other

was Stephen Schwartz. Schwartz, who was by then thirty seven, had changed little from the twelve year old boy who liked nothing more than to accompany his anestatist father to work on Saturday mornings. He was still as bright and inquisitive as ever, but what he'd been privy to on that strange Saturday morning two decades before had never left him. It had also made him determined to one day unlock

the mysteries of human consciousness. In the intervening years, Schwartz had graduated high school, served a tour in the US Army, and graduated from the University of Virginia. Then in nineteen seventy one, he began working for the American government as a special assistant for Research and Analysis for the Chief of US Naval Operations, as well as being a consultant

to the oceanographer for the Secretary of Defense. All the while, his preoccupation with the nature of human consciousness had been growing. Throughout his college years and subsequent government jobs, Schwartz spent his spare time devouring parapsychology journals looking for answers, and became particularly fascinated with the work of apparent psychic Edgar Case back in nineteen thirty five. Case is believed to have predicted the coming of World War Two about the

same time. He is also said to have described what were then unknown details about an ancient sect of people that were later identified as the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Eleven years before the scrolls were discovered. Cases work inspired Schwartz to begin his own experiments to test what he had come to call distant or remote viewing, an ability he believed allowed some people to detect hidden or buried objects which they had no prior knowledge of.

For Schwartz's first experiment, he laid out a grid in his backyard with rope, and in each grid square he would bury mason jars containing various objects, such as a perfume bottle, a vegetable peeler, or a bathroom sponge, to name a few. Then he would send out a plan of the grid to people in different parts of the world and asked that they tell him where on the grid they sensed there was an object and what it was.

The study was initially double blind, neither the remote viewer nor the person analyzing the data at any prior information, to avoid any possibility of his knowledge of what was buried influencing what viewers saw. Schwartz later made the study triple blind, getting someone else entirely to choose the object and where to bury it on the grid. Either way, he found the results were the same over a period

of several years. Schwartz claimed that about twelve percent of the people who tried this were reliably able to locate and describe the hidden objects, perhaps Even more incredibly, Schwartz also claimed that the evidence from his experiments suggested that people could describe something that had been hidden for two thousand years just as easily as a teacup hidden that afternoon in the next room. Schwartz would go on to found the Mobious Society, a Los Angeles based private institution

committed to research in the field of human consciousness. As part of his remote viewing investigations, Schwartz also conducted an experiment known as Project Deep Quest, explored briefly in Unexplained Season six, episode sixteen, in which remote viewers were tasked with trying to make predictions while more than three hundred feet under water. This, according to Schwartz, also proved to

be possible. But Schwartz wasn't satisfied. He wanted even more rigorous tests of remote viewing, and eventually settled on the field of archaeology as the perfect discipline with which to put it all to the test, an area of study frequently beset by the problem of not knowing where to look for ancient things, but Schwartz new people who seemed to be able to do just that, and Canadian car parts sales manager George McMullen was just one such person,

and now here in the Egyptian desert. The pressure was on. In what was by far their most ambitious archeological mission up to that point. In nineteen seventy nine, Schwartz and his Mobia's team set out to find the long lost remains of key buildings from the ancient city of Alexandria, laid out by its namesake Alexander the Great in three hundred and thirty one BC. Alexandria was one of the

first planned cities in history. A confluence of Greek culture and the Ferronic East, it represented the pinnacle of sophisticated culture at that time. But how successive versions of the city were built up century upon century, the location of

many of the original buildings had become obscured. Incredibly, through the Schwartz led experiments, a team of eleven apparent psychic seers had supposedly pinpointed the location of legendary sites, including the palaces of both Cleopatra and mark Antony, and the Ferrest Lighthouse, otherwise known as the Fabled Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. But

there was a hitch. Stephen Schwartz and his team needed formal permissions to conduct the searches that would confirm their findings, which included several sites now under water in the modern day harbor of Alexandria. The Egyptian authorities and archeological community were understandably dubious and demanded proof that Schwartz's unorthodox methods worked before any permissions could be granted, and so they

set out to convince them. Fine arts photographer Hella Hammet had no prior knowledge of Alexandria, the region around it, or its history, but, like George McMullan, she was said to her repeatedly performed outstandingly well on Schwartz's remote viewing tests. Hammit, who believed her apparent skills were the result of simply being attuned to that other world that exists, as she put it, described her process as looking at a map not so much with her eyes, but just to get

a feeling of it. She would then sense what she described as a heaviness in certain areas, which suggested to her that she was on to something, seemingly putting her photographer's eye to good use. Hammit was also very precise when outlining the details of buried structures in target locations.

Not long after the Mobius team arrived in Alexandria, Hammit, as one of its supposedly better psychic performers, was selected by Schwartz as the best person to help provide evidence to the Egyptian authorities that they should be taken seriously. A few days of intensive work later, Hammid was certain she'd identified a lost ancient site of profound significance at

the behest of Hella. Hammid, Schwartz, and the rest of the team squashed into a Pergo sedan and headed off to trawl the city's backstreets in search of what Hammid had spent the last few days repeatedly sketching, described as a narrowing street or alleyway with high walls on either side.

For the most part, the team traveled at speeds of five to fifteen miles an hour on streets with no lanes and no signals, and interweaving animal carts, while the constant blowing of car horns, music blaring from radios, and overlapping calls to prayer broadcast from the city's many minarets

were a never ending distraction. After hours of searching. With nothing substantial to show for their efforts, the hot and frazzled team were on the point of giving up when late in the afternoon Hammid yelled for them to stop. Relieved for any excuse to be exiting the stuffy car, the team swiftly piled out. Although barely visible from the street through a rusting wrawtie fence. Some fifteen feet below was a narrow alleyway just as Hammid had sketched, that

appeared to be an abandoned archeological site. It backed onto the El Nabbey Daniel Mosque, just to the south of the city's downtown district. Standing opposite, Hamid appeared suddenly to be lost in thought, as though she was somehow being drawn back into the second century BC. She reached for a pen and began what was now her ninth supposedly

remotely viewed drawing of the site. Her sketch showed the semi buried site as if seen from above, which included a cupola with three levels, each with arches for bodies to be placed in. Hammit said it was a large dungeon or tomb, around twenty to thirty feet below street level. The feeling in that moment, she said later, was like sliding through time and seeing a speeded up view of the entire tomb's history. The next day, Schwartz was back in the same general area with George McMullen, who was

apparently told nothing of the previous day's events. Like Hammid, McMullen also became consumed in thought the moment he arrived at the site, McMullan pointed to an area of broken marble and rubble, telling Schwartz that it was Greek workmanship. When Schwartz asked him what he thought it had been originally, McMullan replied that it was a tomb, but one without a body. The next thing he said was electrifying. I've never been more sure of anything in my life, said McMullen,

This is Alexander's tomb. The precise location of Alexander the Great's tomb has never been ascertained, and is considered by many to be among the most sought after prizes in archeology. Had George McMullan just identified it as it transpired, this wasn't the first time that the area in question had been pronounced as the location of Alexander the Great's tomb. Since the mid eighteen hundreds, several scholars had placed it

in roughly the same area. One even claimed to have discovered not only the tomb but also Alexander's supposed mummy inside the Al Nabby Daniel Mosque, but permission to excavate was never granted, and so it proved the same for the Mobius team. Even an exploratory excavation inside the mosque, one of the oldest in Alexandria, would cause an unacceptable level of disturbance to public access. Not only that there was understandably extreme resistance to foreigners touching even a tablespoon

of earth on the same acred site. Professor Fauzi Fakarani, an Egyptian archeologist in the Department of Classical Civilizations at the University of Alexandria, who the Mobius team had been consulting with, told them investigations were not going to be

possible at the site. But while Facarani doubted the existence of psychic windows into the ancient past, he was enthusiastic about the Mobius team's goals and keen to dive with them in the city's eastern harbor in growing desperation, Schwartz suggested that Fakarani give him another chance to demonstrate his team's psychic techniques really did work at an unpopulated site where excavations would be possible. Thankfully, Facarani agreed, but only

subject to certain conditions. The professor would be the one to specify the type of target, which had to be located near the surface to make excavation easy. He would also choose the site, and settled eventually on Maria, the abandoned ancient sister city to Alexandria. Maria had once been a freshwater port on the shores of a beautiful lake, but the river Nile had shifted its course in the

Middle Ages. The lake dried up and the city died, leaving formerly teeming commercial districts and pleasure palaces across an area fifteen miles squared abandoned to wind and sand. Not only had none of the Mobius team ever been there, but they were given only the crudest of maps and

no other information to go on. Fakarani wanted them to find a nice, important building with some significant remains, mosaics, frescoes, or statues to tell him the depth to walls and the floor, and describe artifacts that would be found at the sight and the culture which produced the building. What Fakarani may have omitted to mention was that Egyptian archeologists had carried out electronic surveys in the years previously, along with a few trial excavations, and they'd found nothing of

major significance. George McMullan seemed oblivious to the hot wind that tugged at his sweat stained shirt as he limped across Maria's unimposing and mostly buried ruins. Stephen Schwartz had noticed something about mc mullan from previous remote viewing sight work. He'd seen that when the apparent psychic was on to something,

that slight limp disappeared. Three hours after they'd begun, As the two men climbed yet another low desert hill, Schwartz realized with a start that his companion's limp had gone. Neither the hundred degree temperature or the persistent black flies seemed to be bothering mc mullan any more, as he suddenly stopped, turned and said, let's get that professor. With that.

The apparent psychic sunk to his knees and began to sketch a crude map with his finger in the sand, which included the outline of a small hump of land near by. Walking over that same hump moments later, he declared that within it was the buried wall of a structure of some import, as well as buried fire pits and more cryptically, a flaw that he said was there but also wasn't there. Dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt with her short, dark hair crammed under a sun hat,

Ella Hammered was tired and crabby. She was feeling unwell after a day of sitting around and waiting in the hot and dry conditions. After finally being called into action, she was unaware of what McMullan claimed to have found. A schwartz took her to the location that McMullan had just identified in the apparent grip of intense concentration. Hammid honed in immediately on the same exact spot that McMullan had found. Hammid then started to breathe heavily and slowly

began to describe what lay beneath them. The building was from the Byzantine era, she said, pinpointing the location of its northwest corner wall, as well as some kind of freestanding circular pillar or statue which had long since been broken. Convinced that only Roman era structures were present at the site, Professor Fakarani nonetheless put his excavation team to work the very next day, Estimating that the dig would take six weeks.

He predicted it would end in failure. Six days into the dig, however, the excavation team uncovered the top corner of a wall at the exact same depth that Hammitt had predicted. Two days later, the strange broken column structure, which she'd also supposedly seen, was found. Detailed inspection showed it to be a chimney like oven built by Bedouins after the settlement had been largely abandoned, of a type never seen in the area before. Then the fire pits

mc mullen had predicted were found. Some symbols were also uncovered on some of the walls, revealing that the building was unequivocally by Zantyne, not Roman after all. It was a few days later when the building's chalk sub floor was revealed, apparently all that was left after the original floor had been removed when the building was abandoned centuries earlier.

Here the excavation crew found some small, heavy marble objects, smooth on one side and rough on the other, which appeared to be anchoring elements of a mosaic floor that had once been there, evidence, it seemed, for the floor that George McMullan described as being there but not there.

With this demonstrable and resounding success, a delighted Stephen and his Mobius team were then given permission to explore the seabed under Alexandria's Eastern Harbor, the location where the so called remote viewers had almost unanimously indicated significant sites from the ancient city would be found. The team first attempted to use a kind of sonar, but the murky, sediment laden waters made it difficult to get clear readings, so divers were brought in to do close searches in the

churning and turbid harbor waters. Working with direction given every day by the remote viewers, they began in an area where it was predicted that Timonium would be found the Grand Palace of mark Antony. There, through the dark waters, the divers found a line of fallen pillars along what appeared to have been the facade of an imposing building, and in an adjacent area where Cleopatra's palace complex had supposedly been located, the team found indications of the uppermost

remains of a large and impressive structure. Unfortunately, however, most of the structure lay buried beneath the seabed, preventing further investigation. Then came a more conclusive discovery at a third site ear marked by the remote viewers. The team's divers discovered

a series of massive granite blocks. The blocks had obviously been cut with great precision and are now believed to be ones from which the towering Lighthouse of Alexandria, the tallest building known in antiquity, was constructed Euphoric with success, Schwartz and the Mobius team said goodbye to Professor Fakhrani, along with George McMullen and HeLa Hammad, who both headed home. But before they left Egypt, the team had one more

job to do. They'd been hired by a film company to shoot a documentary unrelated to the other Mobius project work. The location for the film was the Coptic Monastery of Saint Macarius, one of the oldest Christian communities in Egypt,

found midway between Alexandria and Cairo. As the team drove to the monastery, Schwartz gazed out at the desert and at the clouds of roadside dust that kicked up from behind them, lulled into a meditative reverie, A memory sprang into Schwartz's mind from the days before they came across the possible tomb site of Alexander the Great. Shortly after the team first arrived in Egypt, Stephen and George McMullan were traveling from Cairo to Alexandria. When McMullen began to

speak at length about Alexander the Great. As he described his perception of the man, it seemed to Stephen as though his words were coming from a direct memory. McMullan declared that Alexander was a funny person who, despite being a great statesman and leader, could join in with the ordinary soldier and get drunk, act silly. He had no fear of dying or anything else. He Schwartz wondered how

this man could have such insights. Although at odds with how most academics viewed Alexander, the description almost exactly mirrored the views of the British historian Professor Peter Fraser, whom Schwartz happened to be in agreement with. Had McMullen simply read about Fraser's theories before Schwartz wandered, or was he reading his mind or was he somehow simply reporting what

he perceived when he focused on Alexander. Continuing on their journey, McMullan went on to talk about the postmortem care of the body after Alexander had died of a fever in Babylon in three hundred and twenty three BC. McMullan said that it was Persians who'd taken care of the corpse, although when preserving it they hadn't used the more thorough

techniques practiced by the Egyptians. As the body began to decay, according to McMullen, die leaching from the clothing underneath Alexander's burial armor had stained the corpse a weird sort of reddish color. He also believed Alexander's body had been removed from the tomb in which it had been interred in Alexandria.

When Schwartz asked him what he thought had happened to the remains, McMullin without missing a beat, said that they'd been taken out into the desert several centuries after Alexander's death by people who he described as not being Islamic. The only group which could fit George McMullen's description of not being Islamic at the time of Alexander the Great was one of the Christian sects that had dominated Alexandrian

life for several centuries before the Islamic takeover. When pressed on where Alexander's bones were now, however, McMullan said he didn't know. Intrigued as Schwartz was by mcmullan's information, at the time, the team didn't even have a fix on the possible tomb location, and if the tomb was indeed empty, as McMullan had claimed, then there wasn't any possibility of ever checking this curious fact out. But the oddity now played on Schwartz's mind as the Mobius film crew began

shooting at the Saint Maccarius monastery. Over the next few days, when he could, Schwartz chatted with the monks. They told him that for over eighty generations their order had passed down the tradition that the bones of Saint John the Baptist had been brought there from the Holy Land, but the root of these relics had not been a direct one. They'd been placed for a while in Alexandria before being transported to the monastery, where it was said they were buried,

although no one knew where exactly. Then in nineteen seventy six, a chapel at the monastery had been restored and a wall had accidentally been broken through, revealing a hidden crypt on the other side. It contained the bones of numerous people. Some of the monks had begun researching where in Alexandria

the bones might have come. From pouring over ancient texts, they'd learned that the remains of John the Baptist were said to have been buried for many years beneath an ancient Christian church, the ruins of which were now buried underneath the site of none other than the El Nabby Daniel Mosque. The hares began to rise on the back

of Schwartz's neck. This was the mosque next to the site where both George McMullen and Hella Hammet had placed Alexander the Great's empty tomb, and Schwartz was remembering once again how McMullen had insisted Alexander's remains had been taken out into the desert by people who were not Muslims. Schwartz was then ushered by one of the monks into a cool, yellow stuccoed room, completely empty save for a

large carved wooden chest in the middle of it. We found the bones of twelve bodies in total, said the monk, as he lifted the lid of the chest to reveal a cloth sack trimmed with gold thread, in which the bones were now contained. Schwartz paused for a moment before asking his next question. Was there he said, anything special or remarkable about the bones, not really, replied the monk, except he added that some of them appeared to have been stained an unusual shade of red in color. This

episode was written by Diane Hope. All other elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClane Smith. Unexplained. The book and audio book, featuring stories that have never before been featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes, and Noble Waterstones,

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